Outbrain Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
May 9, 2024

There are 9 speakers on the call.

Operator

As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I'd like to turn the call over to Outbrain's Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Speaker 1

Good morning, and thank you for joining us on today's conference call to discuss Outbrain's Q1 2024 results. Joining me on the call today, we have Outbrain's CEO, David Kauffman and CFO, Jason Kiviat. During this conference call, management will make forward looking statements based on current expectations and assumptions. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from our forward looking statements. These risk factors are discussed in detail in our Form 10 ks filed for the year ended December 31, 2023, and updated in our subsequent reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Speaker 1

Forward looking statements speak only as of the call's original date, and we do not undertake any duty to update any such statements. Today's presentation also includes references to non GAAP financial measures. You should refer to the information contained in the company's first quarter earnings release for definitional information and reconciliations of non GAAP measures to the comparable GAAP financial measures. Our earnings release can be found on our IR website, investors. Outbrain.com, under News and Events.

Speaker 1

With that, let me turn the call over to David.

Speaker 2

Thank you, Lane. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today for our Q1 2024 earnings call. I'm pleased to share with you our progress and achievements over the past quarter, as well as our strategic direction moving forward. On the financial front, I'm pleased that we delivered gross profit of $52,200,000 towards the higher end of our guidance and that we exceeded our adjusted EBITDA guidance reporting $1,400,000 We generated positive free cash flow of $4,600,000 Strategically, Algon is on a journey to become one of the largest gateways to the open Internet for advertisers. We believe we are uniquely positioned on the open Internet to offer a cross funnel platform that enables advertisers to build their brands, drive consideration and deliver conversions.

Speaker 2

The open Internet is estimated to be the $100,000,000,000 advertising opportunity, providing advertisers with access to incremental audiences across highly relevant professionally produced editorial content. As we look to the future, we believe the industry's focus on consumer privacy, premium quality, transparency and outcomes aligns favorably with our strength. Now more than ever, we are seeing all buyer types from brands to performance focus on measurable outcomes. We believe that we possess a competitive edge in driving these outcomes from relevant audiences. Despite Google's announcement to further delay 3rd party cookie deprecation on Chrome, we believe advertisers remain focused on finding more advanced solutions to drive brand outcomes from relevant audiences.

Speaker 2

Our foundational code on page and engagement data signals continue to enable us to leverage our proprietary data and AI to innovate these solutions for advertisers. Next, I want to provide a quick update on how we're progressing on our growth drivers for 2024. As you may recall from our last call, these revolve around 3 key pillars. Our first pillar focuses on expanding our share of wallet with advertisers, brands and agencies and performance advertisers. First, our business with brands and agencies.

Speaker 2

In Q1, overall direct spend from our brand and agency clients was over $100,000,000 globally. This number represents spend from direct advertisers of all sizes, from mid market to enterprise brands and independent agencies to holding companies. We are seeing good progress with Onex, our brand building offering focused on enterprise clients, with revenues in Q1 exceeding $7,000,000 We launched Onex in the Japanese market in Q1, which we believe represents a strong agency growth opportunity and plan to make On X available in additional markets in Q2. Speaking of Onyx, I'm excited to share the success story of 1 of our most recent enterprise clients, Leica. Leica chose to partner with Onyx for the launch of the new home cinema.

Speaker 2

Leica leveraged the Onyx brand studio to create a custom high impact format that enabled audiences to experience the immersive moments of the Laker home cinema. Onyx enabled Laker to outperform attention benchmarks by 65% and sparked 550,000 audience interactions. This case study exemplifies Onex's ability to deliver beautiful brand experiences that deliver measurable outcomes. In addition, we announced Onex's partnership with Scope 3, enabling us to launch Onex Green in early April. Onyx Green provides buyers with access to curated deals that reduce carbon emissions by up to 30% compared to open exchange video and display.

Speaker 2

As we said in the past, we are focused and will continue to invest in this flywheel of demand and supply. Premium global publishers like the ones on the Outbrain platform are looking for better quality advertising and brand advertisers are attracted to our premium publisher base for the cross funnel objectives. The second pillar, growing our share wallet from advertisers across our core performance offerings. We are invested in enabling growth of large scale advertisers on our performance DSP, ZEMANTA. As part of those efforts, we saw increased total spend through ZEMANTA by approximately 40% in Q1 2024 compared to Q1 of last year.

Speaker 2

We look forward to leveraging our DSP as a strategic enabler for SABIC clients to drive strong performance across the open Internet. In addition, our ad manager, Amplify, remains our core offering for advertisers of all sizes to drive scalable performance. Our focus has been on enabling greater automation of workloads and bidding strategies through AI. Growth in adoption of our AI creative tools nearly doubled from Q4 2023 to Q1 with 14% of our customers utilizing creative AI tools. This suite of tools empowers our teams to deliver innovative creative solutions that enable advertisers of all sizes to scale.

Speaker 2

AI also sits at the core of our prediction engine and corresponding automated bidding technology. Continued investment in the performance of this technology has led to high adoption with 89% of advertiser spend now leveraging one of our automated bidding modes. Moving on to our next pillar, we've continued to expand our supply footprint, enabling advertisers to reach consumers across the entirety of the open Internet. We've accelerated the expansion of partnerships beyond our core publisher inventory, which drove over 25% of total advertiser spend in Q1 on our platform. Bringing our prediction technology and performance capability beyond traditional web publishing is a major focus in 2024 that we believe will enable advertisers to reach wider audiences across diverse media times.

Speaker 2

The next pillar focuses on growing our differentiated premium publisher partnerships. Publisher logo retention remained strong in Q1 at 98%. This achievement reflects the enduring nature of our publisher partnerships, which remain core to our future success. Exclusive column page inventory continues to be a differentiator for our demand business, both through access to proprietary supply and corresponding page level and engagement data. We are focused on expanding the breadth of services we offer to these premium publishers in an effort to expand monetization opportunities and access viewable brand suitable placements.

Speaker 2

Our premium publisher base is also continuing to expand. In Q1, we added new supply partnerships including News Corp Australia and WebIDIA Spain, both of them moving from a competitor. In addition, we signed the Telegraph, which is working with us on the Keystone platform, showcasing Keystone's ability to bring incremental partnerships and margin opportunities to our portfolio. On the AI front, in addition to our AI efforts on the product side, our team has also been exploring the use of AI to drive business efficiency and operational effectiveness, seeing real success thus far. We've been able to automate the handing in resolution percent of account management support cases with our small and medium publisher team by leveraging AI and robotics process automation.

Speaker 2

We've applied the same approach to our demand operation team support cases and plan to expand the capabilities to more teams. In conclusion, our Q1 results underscore our commitment to broadening our relevance to more advertiser segments with the objective of becoming one of the leading gateways to the open Internet. We are confident that with continued execution on our growth drivers, we will be able to deliver on the growth and profitability targets for this year 2025. With that, I'll turn it over to Jason to cover the financials.

Speaker 3

Thanks, David. As David mentioned, we achieved our Q1 guidance for Exact gross profit and exceeded our Q1 guidance for adjusted EBITDA. Revenue in Q1 was approximately $217,000,000 reflecting a decrease of 6% year over year. New media partners in the quarter contributed 5 percentage points or approximately $11,000,000 of revenue growth year over year. Net revenue retention of our publishers was 89%, which reflects a continued headwind from the impact of the demand environment on pricing, which remains the consistent factor driving pressure on our revenue and on our net revenue retention.

Speaker 3

I'll touch on the demand trends in a moment. As noted in the prior quarter, we also experienced the decline year over year contributing to the retention being below 100%. Again, this was driven largely by page view volatility from certain supply sources as opposed to churn. Consistent with recent quarters, churn has remained at similarly low levels with logo retention of 98% for all partners that generated at least $10,000 and our 5 largest churns amounted to only 2 combined points of year over year headwind on NRR in Q1. Turning to advertising demand.

Speaker 3

Following a seasonal step down in January, CPC remained fairly stable throughout February March that remains down significantly versus the prior year. Despite the lower pricing, we experienced RPM or yield growth for the 2nd consecutive quarter, thanks to ongoing click through rate expansion, which continues to exceed our previous highs. Extech gross profit was $52,200,000 flat year over year, outpacing revenue growth for the Q4 in a row, driven primarily by improved deal performance on certain media partners and the net impact of revenue mix. As noted previously, the investing areas we are focused on are largely areas that we expect will drive a higher ex tech take rate. We experienced supply volatility from a key partner, which negatively impacted year over year ex TAC gross profit by mid to high single digit percentage.

Speaker 3

Our ex TAC would have grown year over year by this percentage excluding this one key partner. This impact was primarily a result of this partner's transitioning from their legacy bidding platform. Our tech migration to the new platform was completed last week. However, the optimization and rescaling of our demand is ongoing. And while we see an impact in Q2 results more than we anticipated, we expect to see sequential growth over the coming months.

Speaker 3

Moving to expenses. Operating expenses decreased by approximately 5% year over year to $48,200,000 in the quarter as we continue to balance investments in our strategic priorities with continued cost discipline. We began 2024 with a headcount of approximately 8 70 FT feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet feet Es, which is down 11% from January 2023 as we have focused our attention on driving greater efficiencies in our operations and now on redeploying resources towards higher confidence growth areas. That decline year over year was partially offset by a prior year one time benefit around variable compensation that did not repeat in the current year. Of note, we saw reduced bad debt expenses in Q1, down nearly $1,000,000 year over year as we continue to focus on collection efforts and we expect to see lower levels over the remainder of the year.

Speaker 3

As a result, we doubled our adjusted EBITDA year over year to 1,400,000 dollars Moving to liquidity. Free cash flow, which as a reminder, we define as cash from operating activities, less CapEx and capitalized software costs is approximately $5,000,000 in the Q1. This was driven largely by working capital benefits coming from seasonality, timing of payables around period end and focused improvements in DSO. As a result, we ended the quarter with $232,000,000 of cash, cash equivalents and investments in marketable securities on the balance sheet and $118,000,000 of long term convertible debt. In December 2022, the company's Board of Directors authorized a $30,000,000 share repurchase program and in 2023, we purchased approximately 3,700,000 shares for $17,800,000 We continue share repurchases in 2024.

Speaker 3

In Q1, we repurchased approximately 1,000,000 shares for $3,900,000 So as of March 31, we have $8,600,000 remaining under our current authorization and we continue to believe it's an attractive way to enhance shareholder value under current market conditions. Now turning to our outlook. In our guidance, we assume that current macro conditions persist with no material deterioration or improvement, regular seasonality, and as noted in the prior quarter, continued execution of our growth drivers. Additionally, to add color, we expect to start to lap a softer comparison period as the year progresses in H2 and particularly in Q4. With that context, we have provided the following guidance.

Speaker 3

For Q2, we expect ex TEC gross profit of $53,000,000 to $57,000,000 and we expect adjusted EBITDA of $1,000,000 to $4,000,000 We maintain our previous full year 2024 guidance provided at the beginning of the year of $238,000,000 to $248,000,000 of ex debt gross profit and $30,000,000 to $35,000,000 of adjusted EBITDA. Now, I'll turn it back to the operator for Q and

Operator

A. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, the floor is now open for questions. And we'll take our first question from Andrew Boone from JMP Securities. Please go ahead, Andrew.

Speaker 4

Good morning and thanks so much for taking my questions. Dickie, I have a big picture question and then Jason will go a little bit more tactical for the second. But Dickie, can you just talk about the key growth drivers in terms of returning revenue to growth for Outbrain? What do you view as kind of the key 1, 2, 3 things that you guys can do to drive better top line growth? And then Jason tactically on take rates, how should we be thinking about that for the remainder of the year?

Speaker 4

And can you talk about the drivers that you saw in 1Q? Thank you so much.

Speaker 2

Hey, Andrew. Good morning. Thanks for the question. So I think the biggest growth driver, if I had to rank them, is really our move to full funnel. I think this is very unique in terms of participation on the open Internet, and we have a unique opportunity here to link brand and performance and to offer advertisers a full funnel solution on the open Internet.

Speaker 2

The opportunity is very large. It requires formats like video and high impact display. It requires you to have placements on-site. So we're very confident that that's a great opportunity for us and pretty unique in terms of the ability to combine upper funnel, mid funnel and lower funnel. The second one is just growing our share of wallet with advertisers, including our performance advertisers, which is the biggest base of our advertisers.

Speaker 2

So we're investing a lot in two directions there. 1 is moving some of those large advertisers to Zementa, our DSP platform that delivers performance across the entire open Internet, not just on our publisher base and continuously improving Amplify, which is our own direct access platform. We've seen record CTRs in the last couple of quarters. So we feel very good about the ability to drive ROAS there. So I think these are the 2 main ones.

Speaker 3

Andrew, it's Jason for the second question. So yes, so the take rates have been up a few quarters in a row, I mentioned about 1.5 year over year this quarter in Q1. Less about new part of it is obviously mix and some of that new deals or just different weighting of deals. Of course, mix kind of works both ways. But really the optimizations and performance is something that we're just always working on.

Speaker 3

I mean, David included it in his 3rd pillar of growth, which is improving yields, improving click through rates and optimizations to drive better performance. We added a ton of supply a couple of years ago and we kind of preached we are we see ourselves as land and expand, right. We see our AI learning the users and ourselves learning the users and driving better performance in time. And that's certainly part of what's happening here. And beyond that and going forward, we are focused on areas of these investments that we see as all things that should drive higher take rates.

Speaker 3

So whether it's supply beyond the feed where we think we have our bidding technology can help us drive higher take rates and On X and video, those tend to drive higher take rates, additional margin opportunities from getting more share of wallet for DSP and of course more optimization of yields, right. So they're all things that we're focused on kind of a more efficient growth and so that's what we expect going forward.

Speaker 2

Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. And we'll take our next question from Laura Martin from Needham. Please go ahead Laura.

Speaker 5

Hi. So I have 3. One is, Outbrain has traditionally been a performance oriented ad tech company. But what we're seeing in connected television is that with the rise of RMM, they're closing the loop and they're making CTV more performance oriented and it feels like that segment is growing the fastest, DTV. So I'm wondering if you think the competitive landscape is worsening for your piece of the market, which is performance as connected television does more performance oriented tasks?

Speaker 5

My second one is that you in your commentary, you said that you are adding supply that is non traditional. I'm interested in learning more about that. What kind of supply that's non traditional are you adding? And then 3rd, when you mentioned cookies, I would have guessed that you don't actually have a lot of cookies risk because you have an end to end platform. Could you just remind us in the Q1, how much of your ad placement was targeted by using cookies?

Speaker 5

Thanks.

Speaker 2

Hey, Laura. Thanks for the question. So I'll take the first one on CTV. We are today a relatively small player, but we if you recall, we made an acquisition couple of years ago of Account Control Video Intelligence that has capabilities that have brought us into CTV. And we believe that video as a format is a very large opportunity.

Speaker 2

We've made a deposition. We're seeing good growth in the deployment of VI players on our base of digital publishers. And we need to find a way to grow our CTV business, but we believe that definitely it's a combination also branding and performance that we see there. And it is becoming a more significant share of market of performance advertisers. We believe we in the future need to find a way to play there in a bigger way.

Speaker 2

When you talk about non traditional, it's what we call platforms, it's 3rd parties, it's gaming platform, news apps, it's lock screens and other such environments where users today consume content. So we're growing that. It's part of our strategy of becoming the gateway to the open Internet, again, full funnel, brand building, consideration and performance, but also getting way beyond our publisher traditional publisher base. So that's one of our big efforts. It's today about 25% of our business is done outside of our traditional publisher base, which we think is an important lever for growth.

Speaker 2

Again, leveraging the core capabilities we have on those premium publishers, which are anchors for those brands who want to spend. So we're not giving up on that. We're growing that. We mentioned Newscope Australia, but we're also expanding beyond that. And the last point on cookies, I mean, we've said it from the beginning, we are based on contextually driven algos primarily.

Speaker 2

We have first party data on our publishers that we leverage. So we don't see a risk from the cookie application on a relative basis on the open Internet, we think we actually have a big advantage versus other companies that are very focused on retargeting and need to track users across 3rd party sites. So for us, it's a relatively minimal impact on our algos when cookies go away. We tested it when Firefox deprecated it and it had minimal impact.

Operator

Thank you very much. Thank you. And we'll take our next question from Zach Cummins from B. Riley. Please go ahead, Zach.

Speaker 6

Yes. Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking my questions and congrats on the strong start to the year. I really wanted to dig in a little bit more on On X. I appreciate the disclosure with the $7,000,000 of revenue here in Q1.

Speaker 6

But can you just talk about which customer side is this really resonating with? And kind of what's the strategy to continue to drive adoption on that side since it appears to be a pretty meaningful growth driver in the overall scheme?

Speaker 2

Thanks, Zach, for the question. So our mix is targeting enterprise brands and agencies who are looking for to launch campaigns that build brands. So this is we've been very, very focused since our start on performance, but we see a huge opportunity to, a, leverage a lot of our prediction capabilities and our unique supply to drive much better value also for brand building campaigns. I mean, there's a good positive trend on the Internet generally that also for brand building, advertisers are looking for measurable outcomes. We've been very focused on adding attention as the key metric and that leverage our heritage of prediction.

Speaker 2

And this we launched it in the second half of last year. We had about $15,000,000 in the second half of last year. We see good growth getting into Q1 and Q2 of this year. And we believe that this will also position us in a very unique way on the open Internet being able to provide a full cross funnel. If you think about just an example, take BMW.

Speaker 2

I mean, they could do with us a campaign that would promote a new engine with a super cool video. And then we understanding the interaction of the user with that campaign could drive performance or consideration of a new car. And then on the bottom really drive a lead to their dealership. So being able to combine that is pretty unique and we're leveraging a, our existing base of enterprise brands and advertisers to leverage them from driving performance also to brand building. And it's opening new doors for us at the holding companies and the very large enterprise brands that have not worked with us before.

Speaker 2

So it's a great opportunity to really that's why we emphasize it as one of the most important growth drivers and uniquely positions us on the open Internet.

Speaker 6

Understood. That's helpful. And just one more financial related question. In terms of the reaffirmed guidance that you've given this year, I mean, Jason, can you parse out how should we be thinking about just expansion of the take rate versus overall growth in terms of gross revenue? And kind of what's the right way to think about seasonality and progression especially into the second half of the year?

Speaker 3

Yes, of course. So yes, maybe just a reminder on our forecast methodology. So we do is we take current trends that we're seeing kind of right up until the timing here and we build seasonality on top of that based on our history that we know month to month and quarter to quarter what to expect over our 15 year history or so. And of course layer on other known items or growth driver assumptions, etcetera. And it does come out altogether as a slightly higher percentage of ex TAC in H2 relative to H1.

Speaker 3

If you compare it to 2023, we're at 56% this year versus 53% was the actuals last year, 56% if you're using the midpoint of the guidance. And so maybe breaking that down to a couple of pieces, if you're using the mid point of the guidance, close to half of that H2 growth is coming from easier comps. And what I mean by that is, last year Q4 really started with October and the attacks on October 7 and the onset of the war, we saw just a smaller increase from Q3 to Q4 as a whole than we historically have seen. We talked in prior quarters about the impact obviously on our local business in Israel, but also on our global business where much of the page views of our largest partners were temporarily showing lots of news about the war, which were monetizing lower than they typically would due to rent safety concerns and things like that, right? So we did see a softer Q4 last year, which sets us up for a little bit of an easier comp this year.

Speaker 3

And the other thing is, I mentioned on the call about supply volatility from a key tech partner. We started to see changes from that partner over the course of 'twenty three, but really Q4 was the first meaningful period of impact. And so again, as we kind of play out this year, I mentioned on the call that we had a mid to high single digit growth excluding this one partner on X Tek this year in Q1 and we expect similar in Q2. As we make our way into Q4, that year over year headwind subsides. And so obviously also expecting some modest sequential growth in the coming months in that partner also aids as well.

Speaker 3

And the other things are just things that are in our model. Obviously, we talked about our growth drivers. Onex is one where we expect it to be more seasonally Q4 focused than our core business has been historically. And then other things flowing through, click through rates we said and yield growth for the last two quarters continuing to flow through. We've seen strength in Europe, which we have flowing through and then global events like the U.

Speaker 3

S. Election, of course, will be a little bit of a lift in the second half of the year. So hope that

Speaker 6

helps. Yes, very, very helpful. So thank you so much for all the detail and congrats again on solid results.

Speaker 3

Sure.

Operator

Thank you. And we'll take our next question from Yigal Aronian from Citi. Please go ahead, Yigal.

Speaker 7

Hey, guys. Good morning. It's Max on for Yigal. Maybe first, if you could just give us some color on what you're seeing in the ad macro. It seems like we've seen a better start to 1Q.

Speaker 7

So just wondering what you're seeing there with ad budgets, maybe if there's any geographical or vertical strength and weaknesses to call out? And then maybe more of like a capital allocation question, but you mentioned the $232,000,000 of kind of cash and investments on the balance sheet. I'm just wondering how you guys think about the cash position and understand you have the buyback authorization, but if there's anything else you guys are thinking about on how to deploy that capital, whether that's M and A or some other uses?

Speaker 3

Sure. So maybe I'll start on the demand trend that we've seen. So it's been kind of more of the same. I'd say we haven't seen a material increase or decrease really for a couple of quarters now. We did drive yield or RPM growth over year for the Q2 in a row.

Speaker 3

So there is some strength there. Now a lot of that's coming, as I said, from breaking our previous highs on click through rates, which comes obviously from improvements in our tech and our ability to predict what to show to different users. And on the contrary, we've seen pricing or CPC remaining down year over year. So part of that is because we're optimizing not for pricing, but for yields. Obviously, that's what makes us and our partners money.

Speaker 3

And so driving higher click through rates at the cost of pricing might be something that we're that's inherent in our model here. So it's hard to say that pricing down is a sign of anything deteriorating versus we're able to drive higher yields from it. And as far as geographically, in Europe, we've seen stronger trends, Spain, Italy and Germany, Germany is our 2nd largest market, have have been showing really positive metrics over Q1 into Q2 relative to U. S, which has been flatter. And then verticals, we don't really overly kind of rely on any verticals.

Speaker 3

I mean, just for color, we've seen strength in entertainment and health, while CPG, retail and tech probably have been in weaker verticals for us. But again, not overly meaningful to our results of those verticals.

Speaker 2

And maybe in terms of I'll take the allocation question. So we have a very strong balance sheet. We are continuously looking to use some of this cash for acquisitions. And we think buyback is still an attractive opportunity. So we have an authorization and we still have around, I think, dollars 8,000,000 on that authorization.

Speaker 3

Okay, great. Thanks guys. Appreciate the color.

Operator

Thank you. And we'll take our next question from James Heaney from Jefferies. Please go ahead, James.

Speaker 8

Great. Good morning and thanks for the question. So you saw 40% growth in ad spend on the ZEMANTA DSP. So curious if you could just talk about what's driving the success from that channel and also just how you're balancing spend coming from 3rd party DSPs? Thank you.

Speaker 2

Hi, James. I didn't get the second part, but I'll start with the first part on Zimiente. It's really we strategically shifting some certain types of performance advertisers that have very large elastic budgets into their platform. So given numerical example, if they spend without buying $100,000 now they will shift it to Zimeta and since they can also buy a lot of third party supply as effectively and delivering raw ash, they will spend the same 100, hopefully or close to that on our brand and will now spend in total 150. We will also get a service fee on that like DSP and we will see increased and very effective spend in RAS for that advertiser.

Speaker 2

So there's certain types of segments, it's very technical that where the ZEMENTA platform fits better and they give us better ROAS. So we're shifting some of those and that's been very successful for us and for these advertisers. And I think that's a great growth opportunity. James, can you repeat your second question on the DSP part?

Speaker 8

Yes. Sorry, the second part of the question was just about just overall trends that you're seeing from spend that's coming from 3rd party DSPs?

Speaker 2

Okay. So we see, I mean, on the brand side of the business, good spend on that front from our programmatic partners. It's about it's a little less than 20% of our total business comes from DSPs into our network, but we've seen stable positive trends overall.

Speaker 8

Great. And then maybe if I could just ask one more quick question on you talked about your AI creative tool that you're giving customers. Just any sense for what some of these tools are? And then just any case studies of clients seeing success or improved return on investment from implementing these tools?

Speaker 2

The use of these tools are very exciting when you see it allows customers to much faster test with different types of images and text and in real time understand what's working, what's not working on which placement and iterate on it in a way that prior would require a lot of manual intervention. So I think the models are learning it and automatically updating. It allows you to test thousands of variations, which you couldn't do before. We've seen increased adoption of it. And right now, it's still early.

Speaker 2

We're measuring ROAS It's definitely improving the ROAS for advertisers because it optimizes their campaigns. We see right now, we're really focused on adoption and working and analyzing that. So again, that's we mentioned that on the call. It's a big part of our investments generally are now on AI, on text and images and also on internal tools, leveraging AI to optimize our business.

Speaker 8

Great. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. And that concludes our question and answer session. I'd like to turn the floor back to management for closing remarks.

Speaker 2

Thank you very much everyone for attending the call today. We are very excited about the growth opportunities we highlighted today. We think the open Internet is a great opportunity. Being a player that can provide the full funnel solution is where we're very, very focused on, again, driving brand building, consideration and performance and look forward to updating you on our progress on our next call.

Operator

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's teleconference. We thank you for your participation. You may disconnect your lines at this time and have a

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Key Takeaways

  • Outbrain delivered Q1 gross profit of $52.2 million (at the high end of guidance), adjusted EBITDA of $1.4 million, and generated positive free cash flow of $4.6 million.
  • The new Onex brand offering generated over $7 million in Q1 revenue, expanded into Japan, and launched Onex Green to reduce carbon emissions by up to 30% versus open exchange video and display.
  • Performance advertiser spend on the ZEMANTA DSP grew by approximately 40% year-over-year, with 89% of spend leveraging automated bidding and 14% of customers adopting AI-powered creative tools.
  • Supply expansion into non-traditional channels accounted for 25% of Q1 spend, while premium publisher retention remained at 98% and new partnerships were signed with News Corp Australia, Webedia Spain, and The Telegraph.
  • Outbrain reaffirmed full-year 2024 guidance of $238 million to $248 million in ex-TAC gross profit and $30 million to $35 million in adjusted EBITDA, and set Q2 targets of $53 million to $57 million gross profit and $1 million to $4 million adjusted EBITDA.
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Earnings Conference Call
Outbrain Q1 2024
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