Destiny Media Technologies Inc.

everyone thank you for joining us on today's webinar before we begin i would like to announce that we will be referring to today's earnings release which was sent to the news wires earlier this afternoon i'd also like to remind you that the conference call could contain forward-looking statements about destiny media technologies within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such forward-looking statements are based upon current beliefs and expectations of management and are subject to risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ materially from those forward-looking statements. Such risks are fully discussed in the company's filing with the SEC and CEDAR. The company does not assume any obligation to update information contained in this call. During the webinar, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. The non-GAAP financial measures are presented in the supplemental disclosures and should not be considered in isolation of or as a substitute of or superior to the financial information prepared in accordance with GAAP and should be read in conjunction with the company's financial statements filed with the SEC and CEDAR. The non-GAAP financial measures used in the company's presentation may differ from similarly titled measures presented by other companies. A reconciliation of the non-GAAP financial measures to the most comparable GAAP financial measures can be found in the earnings press release. Also, I'd like to mention that following the presentation, there will be a questions and answers session during which you can submit questions by selecting the raise hand icon at the bottom of your screen. Your questions will be pulled in the order that they are received, and at which point you'll be prompted to unmute your microphone before speaking. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to your host, Fred Vandenberg, Chief Executive Officer.

Thanks, Rebecca. Thanks to everyone joining the call. I'll just get into the quarterly results. Year-to-date revenue is up 2.5% still. There was a slight decline in Q3 of 1.9%. Total year-to-date customers have increased by 4.9%. And there's a... sorry, there's a 4.9% increase in new customers. There's a 1.4% increase in total customers. The decrease really in Q3 is a result really of a small decline in US independent spending per release rather than the total number of customers. Expenditures increased by 21%. About half of this increase is non-repeating litigation costs and about half of it is non-cash amortization. There's also a 3.5% increase associated with R&D infrastructure that isn't currently revenue producing. It's associated with some of the investigations that we're doing, some of the analytics that we're doing and I'll talk about. These costs are not necessary for the core business as it stands and are really undertaken to have a longer term revenue increase. EBITDA is just about, it's a little bit positive, 37K, and we're really operating at positive cash flow, slightly positive cash flow at the current time, given our spending on the litigation and capital investments. We continue to invest for scalable growth. If we break our target markets down, we really break them down into new markets and established markets, and then we separate those markets into larger business development-focused clients that we invest in the platform to address, and then the smaller clients that have more programmatic sales. We're very close to providing an fully automated release preparation and payment process for the smaller clients where we'll just support those with localized websites, local ads, local recipient lists. and it combined with some platform investments. I think one of the things that we're really quite excited about is during the quarter, we, we, We've launched a new product called MTR, and that's really the radio tracking service. We've begun during the quarter to combine the data that is received within MTR and the data that we have with Plan P. And we've got some... really good insights. There's a bit of challenge in doing that because PlanPE is recipient focused in contrast to MTR, which is station focused. PlanPE distributes to many more people than just radio. And these people at radio represent different stations, maybe more than one station, or maybe there's more than one person per station. But we're connecting that data. We've created some really interesting analytics that we want to use in two different ways. Things like we'll know what time a release is made and its impact on whether it's successful or relationships to success. There's some inferential analytics that show how PlayMPE impacts a release. So you'll see some greater success with announcements within PlayMPE. Each PlayMPE release has approximately three and a half Social media links. We also implemented during the quarter a tracking of the clicks on those links. So we'll be able to report on that and then demonstrate relationships between that announcement and social media impact. We're not aware of anyone else that does this or can do this. Same thing with meter. There's not a promotional platform that also tracks the airplay data. At least we're not aware of one. And so I think this is really valuable information to our customers that we think will play a part in our revenue growth going forward. At least that's the hope. We're talking with our clients to see what information they would really find useful or valuable. And it's potentially something that will grow. So we're addressing those larger critical clients that, you know, the Walmarts and the mall kind of clients. And also, I think we can package it up as a saleable product. But we're just building up these case studies and, you know, MTR connected data with Plan P is, I think, a very valuable source of information. MTR itself is growing, but the revenue is immaterial at this stage. It's potentially a very disruptive technology. We have larger clients that provide charting type services that have a smaller coverage base, like they provide reporting on fewer stations. But what they do is they provide charting stuff, charting information that shows a relative performance, how your track is doing relative to other tracks. tracks out in the market. So you'll see like the billboard top 100 kind of information. We don't have that at this stage. We don't have the content to do that. But MTR could do that and could do that on a global basis. It's just, it would be a matter of investing in that to do that. And that's really our plan to grow at this stage. We're reinvestigating what it takes to grow. And so we're going to be critically looking at investments going forward and whether we pursue these things. So with that, I will turn over to questions.

Great, thank you, Fred. So yeah, now we'll begin our question and answer session. If you have a question, please use the raise hand option at the bottom of your screen and your question will be pulled in the order that they are received. If you raise your hand, please ensure that you do have access to your microphone. And if you wish to retract your question, please just click that raise hand icon again to lower your hand. Your camera will remain off. Once prompted, you can unmute your microphone before asking your question. There is a question from Thomas. If you want to go ahead and unmute your microphone.