System1 Q1 2025 Earnings Report

System1 EPS Results

• Actual EPS: -$2.10
• Consensus EPS: N/A
• Beat/Miss: N/A
• One Year Ago EPS: N/A

System1 Revenue Results

• Actual Revenue: $74.51 million
• Expected Revenue: N/A
• Beat/Miss: N/A
• YoY Revenue Growth: N/A

System1 Announcement Details

• Quarter: Q1 2025
• Date: 5/6/2025
• Time: After Market Closes
• Conference Call Date: Tuesday, May 6, 2025
• Conference Call Time: 5:00PM ET

System1 (NYSE:SST) (NYSE:SST) is a digital advertising technology company that specializes in performance marketing and consumer acquisition through proprietary data analytics and machine learning. The company operates an automated platform designed to match advertisers with targeted audiences across desktop and mobile channels. Leveraging a combination of predictive algorithms, user behavior modeling and real-time bidding, System1 aims to optimize return on ad spend and drive high-quality traffic for its clients.

System1’s core offerings include audience segmentation, ad placement, creative testing and end-to-end campaign management. Its suite of tools provides insights into consumer intent and engagement, enabling personalized ad experiences across a range of verticals such as home services, personal finance, insurance and travel. By continuously refining its machine-learning models, the company seeks to improve conversion rates and reduce acquisition costs for both direct-to-consumer brands and performance-driven agencies.

Founded in 2019 by entrepreneur Bill Gross, System1 is headquartered in Santa Monica, California, with additional offices in key markets including New York City and London. The firm completed its public listing via a special-purpose acquisition company in early 2021, positioning itself as a data-science leader in the growing digital ad ecosystem. Under the guidance of CEO Bill Gross and a senior leadership team of seasoned marketing and technology executives, System1 has expanded its capabilities through strategic acquisitions and internal development of advanced analytics tools.

Serving advertisers primarily in North America and Western Europe, System1 continues to invest in research and development to enhance its proprietary algorithms and user experience testing platforms. Its commitment to transparent reporting, privacy-compliant targeting and scalable infrastructure underpins ongoing partnerships with leading e-commerce and direct-response marketers. Through a focus on data-driven innovation, System1 strives to deliver measurable results while adapting to the evolving demands of the programmatic advertising landscape.

System1 Q1 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

Key Takeaways

• Financial Outperformance: Q1 revenue of $75 million, adjusted gross profit of $41.5 million, and adjusted EBITDA of $12.1 million all exceeded guidance, marking a significant year-over-year improvement.
• Owned & operated products revenue grew 51% year-over-year, led by Coupon Follow user sessions up over 60%, Startpage sessions up 11%, and MapQuest sessions up 30%.
• AI-Driven Productivity: Company-wide adoption of agentic coding has accelerated product development and business automation, boosting engineering productivity by an estimated 3–5×.
• Marketing-driven revenue declined 34% year-over-year due to Google-related product changes, and owned & operated advertising revenue fell 16% year-over-year despite improved margins.
• Ongoing volatility from Google’s shift from AdSense for Domains to RSOC and broader macro uncertainties led SystemOne to withhold Q2 financial guidance.

Presentation

[Kyle Ostgaard, Vice President of Finance at System1]

Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the first quarter twenty twenty five earnings conference call for SystemOne. Joining me today to discuss SystemOne's business and financial results are Co Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Michael Blend and Chief Financial Officer, Trudhavish Kadambi. A recording of this conference call will be available on our Investor Relations website shortly after this call has ended. I'd like to take this opportunity to remind you that during the call, we will be making certain forward looking statements. This includes statements relating to the operating performance of our business, future financial results and guidance, strategy, long term growth and overall future prospects.

[Kyle Ostgaard, Vice President of Finance at System1]

We may also make statements regarding regulatory or compliance matters. These statements are subject to known, unknown risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those projected or implied during this call, in particular, those described in our risk factors included in our annual report on Form 10 ks for fiscal year twenty twenty four filed on March 10, as well as the current uncertainty and unpredictability in our business, the markets and the global economy generally. You should not rely on our forward looking statements as predictions of future events. All forward looking statements that we make on this call are based on management's assumptions and beliefs as of the date hereof, and System one disclaims any obligation to update any forward looking statements except as required by law. Our discussion today will include non GAAP financial measures, including adjusted EBITDA and adjusted gross profit.

[Kyle Ostgaard, Vice President of Finance at System1]

These non GAAP measures should be considered in addition to and not as a substitute for or in isolation from our GAAP results. Historical performance and future estimates provided during this call exclude results from Total Security. Information regarding our non GAAP financial measures, including a reconciliation of our non GAAP financial measures to our most comparable historical GAAP financial measures may be found on our Investor Relations website. I would now like to turn the conference call over to SystemOne's Co Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Michael Blend.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and CEO at System1]

Thanks, Kyle. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining System One on our Q1 earnings call. I'm happy to share that our team executed really well in Q1 and delivered another solid quarter. Revenue as well as our key operating metrics, gross profit and EBITDA, were all above the high end of our guidance range. First quarter revenue was approximately $75,000,000 and adjusted gross profit was 41,500,000.0 which is a 33% year over year increase.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and CEO at System1]

Adjusted EBITDA came in at $12,100,000 up from just $400,000 in the prior year quarter. These year over year comps are good indicators of the progress we have made over the last year, driven by strong execution and a lot of very hard work by our team. Our owned and operated products continue to perform well with revenue increasing 51% year over year. As a reminder, our primary O and O products include Coupon Follow in the discount shopping vertical, Startpage in private search, and MapQuest in mapping. Each of these are among the leaders in their respective category, and we have good momentum across our entire portfolio.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and CEO at System1]

Our marketing driven businesses continue to be impacted by the Google related product changes we mentioned last quarter. Although so far, we have done a very good job navigating the ongoing volatility. While overall marketing driven revenue is down on an annual basis, margins are up significantly, and our network business in particular continues to do well. On the technology front at SystemOne, we continue to lean in heavily on AI powered automation driven by AgenTek coding. We are incorporating AgenTek coding across the entire company and are using it to increase scale, accelerate product development, and streamline many of our business operations.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and CEO at System1]

Overall, it's a really exciting time to be in technology if you're pushing heavily into agentic coding as SystemOne is. If you had asked me eighteen months ago what our biggest obstacle to growth was, I would have said the difficulty of finding enough engineering and product resources to develop our technology. Now with agentic coding, productivity is through the roof, and the biggest challenge is picking the right ideas to go after. Let's go into more detail on our owned and operated segment, which includes both our marketing driven businesses and our owned and operated products. Total owned and operated revenue came in at $58,000,000 reflecting a 16% year over year decline and a 10% decrease sequentially.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and CEO at System1]

This decline was driven by a 34% annual revenue decrease in our marketing businesses, which was primarily due to a decline in a noncore low gross margin business segment. The marketing decline was partially offset by a 51% increase in our owned and operated products line. Adjusted gross profit was $28,000,000 up 24% year over year and down 13% sequentially from Q4. The sequential decline primarily was driven by seasonality, coming off a seasonally strong fourth quarter for shopping. Sessions across our O and O properties totaled 1,300,000,000.0, down 32% from Q4, but up 6% year over year.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and CEO at System1]

Our year over year growth reflects increased scale of marketing campaigns running through our Ramp platform as well as growth in our owned and operated properties. International markets remain a key focus for us, with international revenue representing 30% of total owned and operated revenue, up slightly from 29% in Q1 of twenty twenty four. A bright spot in our marketing driven business is the increased scale of our marketing campaigns. In q one, we launched over 41,000 marketing campaigns, up five times year over year and up from 22,000 in q four. We continue to make large strides on advertising campaign automation, and we're focused on leveraging AI to dramatically increase the scale we operate on in the marketing side.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and CEO at System1]

Moving on to our O and O products, the group continues to perform well and is heavily focused on expanding the reach of our couponing, mapping, and private search services. Let's move on to some highlights in those products. I'll start with Coupon Follow, which continues to be a top couponing and promo code service in Google's organic rankings. In the first quarter, Coupon Follow's user sessions were up over a 60% year over year, driven by our best in class experience for both consumers and merchants. We have a great flywheel going on with coupon follow.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and CEO at System1]

As traffic ramps on coupon follow, we're able to capture more data on consumer demand. We then leverage that data into better merchant deals that in turn improve the overall consumer experience the next time our customers come back. Now let's turn to Startpage, which as a reminder is our privacy centric search engine that competes with DuckDuckGo. In q one, Startpage user sessions grew 11% year over year and 7% sequentially as we ride increased consumer demand for greater privacy. The private browser apps we launched in late two thousand twenty four continue traction as we integrate search widgets like mapping that improve the overall search experience.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and CEO at System1]

And lastly, let's talk about MapQuest, which is having a brand and business resurgence. MapQuest has had some really fun viral moments recently with mentions on CNN and the Stephen Colbert show, driven by our Gulf Of Mexico naming generator. MapQuest continues to grow user sessions with q one sessions up over 30% year over year. The MapQuest team has been focused on enhancing our mobile apps, adding new mapping functionality, and introducing new products. Now let's switch gears to our partner network.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and CEO at System1]

Partner network revenue was $17,000,000 up 4% year over year and 1% sequentially after adjusting for the out of period revenue adjustments made last quarter. Adjusted gross profit was $15,000,000.37 percent year over year and 4% sequentially. Partner network results were positively impacted by the in period recognition of some previously withheld Bing partner revenue related to invalid traffic that our partner sent to us. In Q1, total active partners decreased 14% from Q4 to around two sixty five partners. The total number of partners was partially offset by 7% quarter over quarter increase in average revenue per partner.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and CEO at System1]

In Q4, we had 54 scale partners, a 17% decrease from the fourth quarter. We consider a platform customer to be a scale partner when they are generating at least $550,000 of revenue per quarter on ramp. The sequential decrease in active partners was impacted by our push to move partners to Google's new RSOC product for monetization. And on this front, the team did a great job in q one, significantly increasing the number of partners monetizing with RSOC. Looking ahead to the rest of 2025, we remain cautiously optimistic.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and CEO at System1]

Our owned and operated products continue to show strong fundamentals. We've been making large strides on the AI technology front, and we're putting ourselves in position to capitalize on the marketing side as we begin to see a little more stability. Our biggest challenge over the next couple of quarters continues to be related to volatility with Google, which, as you know, is our biggest revenue partner. Last quarter, we announced that Google informed us of their plan to automatically opt out advertisers from AdSense for domains monetization, which is known as AFD. While this has created some uncertainty for us, we have not yet seen material impact to our performance or revenue from that policy change.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and CEO at System1]

That being said, we do anticipate Google's continued shift away from AFD to their newer RSOC product is going to continue to cause volatility that we'll have to manage and navigate over the next few quarters. As a result of this uncertainty as well as broader volatility in online advertising demand and the potential impact of evolving tariff policies, we do not plan to provide financial guidance for the second quarter of twenty twenty five. But most importantly, we remain well positioned regardless of how these shifts evolve. We're continuing to benefit from our longstanding AFD partnership while also leaning into the momentum behind RSOC. As RSOC continues to gain traction, we're seeing new opportunities to diversify and grow alongside Google with their evolving monetization strategy.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and CEO at System1]

Overall, I would say our System one team is executing very well across the board. We have quickly made the transition to become an AI first product and engineering organization, and we can see this paying off in faster execution that is also beginning to show up in our financials. As Tridi will detail below, we aren't yet prepared to give full year guidance as we plan to wait to see how the Google product transition shakes out. That being said, once we get through the Google volatility over the next couple of quarters, I believe we're really well positioned for the medium and long term here at SystemOne. To close, I want to reiterate as I always do.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and CEO at System1]

System one's leadership team remains fully aligned with our shareholders, and as a group, we remain one of the company's largest shareholder bases. As one example, I, through my family foundation, recently purchased 4,500,000.0 shares of SST, and I believe strongly in the company's future. As System One continues our transition back to growth mode, we appreciate your continued support, and we look forward to delivering long term value to our shareholders.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and CEO at System1]

With that, I'll hand things over to Tredi to go over our financials. Take it away, Tredi.

[Tridivesh Kidambi, CFO at System1]

Thanks, Michael. We are pleased with our first quarter financial results as we were above the high range of guidance on revenue, adjusted gross profit and adjusted EBITDA. The $12,100,000 of adjusted EBITDA in the first quarter represents significant year over year growth and highlights the high level of execution by our team across all of our businesses, which has resulted in both year over year gross profit growth and ongoing G and A efficiencies resulting in reductions to operating expenses.

[Tridivesh Kidambi, CFO at System1]

Let's get into the details. Q1 revenue was $74,500,000 representing a 12% year over year decrease and a sequential decline of 1%. Owned and operated advertising revenue was $57,900,000 down 16% year over year and 10% sequentially. The year over year decrease is driven by a 35% decrease in advertising spend, which is the result of a mix shift change between our marketing driven business lines and our owned and operated product lines. Owned and operated product revenue was $22,300,000 representing 38% of total owned and operated advertising revenue compared to 21% of total revenue in Q1 of twenty twenty four.

[Tridivesh Kidambi, CFO at System1]

The sequential decline was largely attributable to an expected decrease in owned and operated product revenue, as Q4 is a seasonally strong quarter for our owned and operated product businesses. Network revenue was $16,600,000 and was buttressed by the benefit of a contra revenue charge related to the reversal of certain prior period network partner rev share payments was related to invalid traffic sent by some of our network partners in Q2 of twenty twenty four. Revenue was up 1% sequentially, excluding the gross to net accounting revenue adjustment made in Q4. Adjusted gross profit was $41,500,000 up 33% year over year and down 7% sequentially, primarily due to typical Q4 to Q1 seasonality. Revenue less ad spend for our owned and operated advertising segment was $27,800,000 representing a 24% year over year increase and a 13% decline sequentially.

[Tridivesh Kidambi, CFO at System1]

Revenue less ad spend for our owned and operated products was 21,000,000, up 53% year over year and down 18% sequentially with a quarter over quarter decline driven by seasonality. Network revenue less agency fees was 15,000,000, up 37% year over year and up four percent sequentially. First quarter owned and operated advertising sessions were $1,300,000,000 up 6% year over year and down 32% sequentially. RPS was $0.45 an increase of 32% from the fourth quarter, and CPS was 2.3¢, up 36% sequentially, with the sequential increase resulting largely from a combination of mix shift changes in our percentage of international traffic and the networks we advertise on. The spread between RPS and CPS was 92% compared to 98% in q four and forty '8 percent in q one of twenty four.

[Tridivesh Kidambi, CFO at System1]

Network partner sessions were 1,700,000,000.0, up 11% year over year and down 8% sequentially. Partner network RPS decreased 6% year over year and increased 10% sequentially after adjusting for the out of period revenue adjustment in Q4. Total sessions processed by ramp in the most recent quarter was $3,000,000,000 up 9% year over year and down 20% sequentially. On to operating expenses and adjusted EBITDA. In Q1, OpEx net of add backs were $29,400,000 down five percent year over year and up 10% sequentially.

[Tridivesh Kidambi, CFO at System1]

The quarter over quarter increase was expected and was impacted by non wage related employee costs. Q1 of twenty twenty five marks the seventh straight quarter of year over year declines in OpEx, and we will continue to focus on reducing costs in order to create greater operating leverage. Adjusted EBITDA was $12,100,000 in Q1 versus just $400,000 in the same quarter last year. Q1 represented the fourth consecutive quarter of year over year increases in adjusted EBITDA. With respect to liquidity, we ended the quarter with $43,900,000 of unrestricted cash on our balance sheet.

[Tridivesh Kidambi, CFO at System1]

Our $20,000,000 use of cash in the quarter was primarily driven by a $13,000,000 cash payment related to the Coupon Follow acquisition earn out, as well as a 4,400,000 outflow related to the payment of our twenty twenty four annual bonuses, which were approved and paid in Q1 of this year. As of March 31, we had an outstanding balance of $275,000,000 of term loan debt under our credit agreement, and our net consolidated leverage at quarter end was approximately 4.6 times. We also have 50,000,000 of availability under our revolver as of the end of q one. As Michael mentioned, due to evolving dynamics and announced changes in Google's AdSense for Domains marketplace, along with the broader market uncertainty tied to advertising demand and other potential macro headwinds. We are currently not in a position to provide financial guidance for q two of twenty five or the balance of the year.

[Tridivesh Kidambi, CFO at System1]

We believe it is prudent at this time to wait for greater clarity on these items before offering financial projections. But in the interim, we remain focused on executing efficiently in this dynamic environment. We remain confident in the fundamentals of our overall business. Owner and operator products are performing well and provide a strong financial foundation. Our focus on cost reduction is evident in the numbers, and we remain focused on driving OpEx savings.

[Tridivesh Kidambi, CFO at System1]

The volatility in our marketing driven businesses has hindered our ability in the near term to sustainably grow those businesses. However, we are confident in the power of our Ramp platform and our ability to leverage new technologies such as AI and agentic coding to create a long term competitive advantage. Thanks for joining us today.

[Kyle Ostgaard, Vice President of Finance at System1]

Thank you, Tridi. We're now going to open the line for some questions. The first question comes from Tom Forte with Maxim Group. Tom, go ahead.

[Tom Forte, Managing Director & Senior Consumer Internet Analyst at Maxim Group]

Okay. Now I'm unmuted. Okay. So, Michael, Tridi, congrats on the quarter. I have two questions. So first off, can you hear me?

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and CEO at System1]

We can hear you fine. Questions. Good to good to hear you.

[Tom Forte, Managing Director & Senior Consumer Internet Analyst at Maxim Group]

Alright. So I recognize you're not providing guidance in the second quarter given the current uncertainty, but as longtime participants in the digital ad market, I'd appreciate your thoughts on the following. So it seems like digital advertising is holding up, including your own performance, and having a lot more resiliency in the current challenging micro when you compare with prior periods of weakness where digital advertising seemed to weaken first. So to what do you attribute the change?

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and CEO at System1]

Well, I would say first of all, you're right. We're not seeing any wonkiness yet in our numbers, which is nice. What I would say is that typically in a downturn, I think a leading indicator is gonna be more on the branded advertising side than performance marketing. We're much more performance marketers. So if there is gonna end up being any kind of macro downturn in really affecting digital marketing, I think we would be the last to see it.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and CEO at System1]

And as you know, Tom, from the past, sometimes when we do see some, some wackiness in performance marketing, it can benefit us as well, because it drives down our our buy side pricing. But but I would say that it's probably a little early in any cycle for us to see any any issues.

[Tom Forte, Managing Director & Senior Consumer Internet Analyst at Maxim Group]

Excellent. Alright. So the second and final question, can you discuss and compare what you're seeing in advertising verticals that are likely less directly impacted by tariffs such as health and finance and then how that compares with those that are much more impacted like autos?

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and CEO at System1]

Sure. You know, really, like I said, we we haven't we're just not seeing the big effects yet in in really any verticals that you would expect would be affected by tariffs. Some of those were not big players in, like some of the, you know, like, the the of the world and kind of the the the shopping of, for products that are coming directly from China. We just that's not a big vertical for us. But across our range of verticals, we're just not seeing any big movement yet.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and CEO at System1]

Now that's not to say it's not gonna come. That is one of the reasons why we're declining to provide guidance for the quarter is we're waiting to see how the economy plays out and what consumer demand and also, you know, advertisers look like. But but right but so far, we're just not seeing things shift around much. Sri, do wanna comment on that anymore?

[Tridivesh Kidambi, CFO at System1]

Yeah. No. I I think that's right. I mean and, you know, that's definitely was the lesson. You know, the last time there was a major disruption, both in, you know, '22 and February around COVID was, in in, you know, specifically ad formats where there's a very high measurable, return on ad spend.

[Tridivesh Kidambi, CFO at System1]

And, you know, specifically, how we partner, you know, for example, with Google, that tends to be the last, advertising channel that marketers will will pull because they can they can definitively track their ROI on that spend.

[Tom Forte, Managing Director & Senior Consumer Internet Analyst at Maxim Group]

Good. Thanks, Michael. Thanks, Trudy.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and CEO at System1]

Thanks, Tom. Thanks for joining.

[Kyle Ostgaard, Vice President of Finance at System1]

The next question is from Dan Kurnos with Benchmark. Dan?

[Daniel Kurnos, Managing Director, Internet & Media Equity Research at The Benchmark Company LLC]

Hi. In line sorry. Yeah.

[Daniel Kurnos, Managing Director, Internet & Media Equity Research at The Benchmark Company LLC]

Hi, guys. Sorry. Can you hear me? Also, like Tom, we'll start off with the Tom question. Michael.

[Daniel Kurnos, Managing Director, Internet & Media Equity Research at The Benchmark Company LLC]

Like, obviously, you know, I'm gonna ask you know, I'm gonna ask you about Google. So, you know, we've got remedies, plans, potential breakup of GAM. You know, you guys are super levered to the Google network. You know? It's probably gonna give you guys a a good opportunity because it's gonna cause some disruption, but just love to hear your thoughts on, you know, if it starts playing out, what it means for kinda you and the ecosystem.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and CEO at System1]

Well, there's a lot going on on the Google side as far as regulatory issues go. As you know, there's several trials, and they're starting to hit the damages phase. And I think as as probably most of the people listening in know as well, any major dramatic things that would be negative for Google are probably gonna be years in the future as appeals go through. What I would say is that we would welcome the the more that Google if Google does end up being split up in any way, what we would guess is that each of those businesses probably get a little bit more competitive. And and that most likely is gonna be good for us in terms of if we think that they Google, we're to lose any market share, for instance, then likely their search partner network that we are a major part of would be looking for more revenue.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and CEO at System1]

Google as a whole is gonna be looking for search revenue. So if you recall what our relationship with Google looks like is we're essentially manufacturing demand for them. You know, when someone goes to Google and types in, you know, something they're searching for, that's just their organic traffic. What we're doing is we're manufacturing very, very similar types of demand by going on to other networks, encouraging consumers to click on ads, and then ultimately expressing their their demand by clicking on Google Ads. So if that part of the business were to come under, you know, increasing regulatory pressure, we would expect that Google would become a little bit more dependent and hungry for revenue from its partner base, which would help us quite a bit.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and CEO at System1]

Probably similar things on the display side. A little bit hard to tell how the how that would play out in terms of pricing on the buy and sell side for, for instance, the Google Display inventory. I don't really feel like I can I can make a good judgment call if that would help us or hurt us? But if it helps us on the buy side, it's gonna it's gonna hurt us on the sell side and vice versa. If we get hurt on the sell side, it's gonna help on the buy side, because we play with Google on both sides of that market.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and CEO at System1]

So we don't really expect anything negative to come out of regulatory issues. And, you know, one thing to keep in mind is we do have a, independent search engine start page, which, you know, is competitive with the big players out there, with the Bings and the Googles of the world. And anything that would allow some of the independent search engines to gain a little bit of market share, we think, would directly flow through your start page. So all in all, we think it's probably a net positive for us. But, obviously, we don't welcome any regulatory issues related to Google at this point.

[Daniel Kurnos, Managing Director, Internet & Media Equity Research at The Benchmark Company LLC]

And, like, obviously, given the other kind of broader pressure that I think we're seeing on the market and perhaps from from the top down. You know, we've had Temu and Sheehan exit the market. I know you commented on that a second ago, but it's kinda left a vacuum, particularly in the social space, which is it's been plugged pretty well. We haven't seen any real challenges in PLA. It looks like ECPMs in general are been holding up in the programmatic space.

[Daniel Kurnos, Managing Director, Internet & Media Equity Research at The Benchmark Company LLC]

But, you know, is the disruption creating any opportunity for you to go after incremental market share domestically? And then internationally, the alternative is TikTok's been, you know after having kinda left The US, TikTok's been a great international opportunity. It's something you and I have talked about. It feels like a great platform over there. You guys have been growing international exposure.

[Daniel Kurnos, Managing Director, Internet & Media Equity Research at The Benchmark Company LLC]

So, you know, kinda just talk about the two different shots on goal, I think, that you have domestic versus international given some of the disruptions.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and CEO at System1]

Well, certainly, we welcome lower pricing on the on the buy side. So if you have some of the big Chinese app advertisers pulling out of market, you know, particularly in the social space, if I recall correctly, I think that just those two companies alone were, you know, north of 10% of the of the meta advertising revenue. So as there's more advertisers pulling out internationally, that should help us domestically. You know, we are seeing some, I would say, green shoes on social right now, which has been favorable. So we would, in many ways, welcome, fewer advertisers on, you know, on on the social side.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and CEO at System1]

Same thing internationally. You know, TikTok, as you mentioned, and, you know, they've got an audience network as well. It's been a really good source of traffic for us. We continue to lean in pretty heavily on that. We're seeing some good results internationally.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and CEO at System1]

I know that Treaty mentioned it's still a big part of our business and growing part of our business. And so we don't really see any issues on the any negatives in terms of both those areas that you talked about? And as we mentioned before, we're not really heavily leveraged on TikTok in The United States. You know, we would we're kind of agnostic as to whether TikTok remains in The US or not. I think at this point, you know, people are, I believe generally feeling that TikTok will remain an app that's available for usage in The US.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and CEO at System1]

If so, we'll be buying and, put more of an effort behind that. But if it's not, it's not really gonna help hurt us in any material way.

[Daniel Kurnos, Managing Director, Internet & Media Equity Research at The Benchmark Company LLC]

Yeah. No. Look. I mean, the question was definitely framed in a benefit to you, not as a disruptor to you, Michael, just given what's going on in the marketplace.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and CEO at System1]

Can you can you just double click a little bit? It's okay. Yep. Go ahead. Hey. Go ahead.

[Daniel Kurnos, Managing Director, Internet & Media Equity Research at The Benchmark Company LLC]

May maybe just maybe just double click a little bit on the, the productivity gain from shifting to agentic and, you know, look, obviously, you and I could have a lengthy conversation about that here, but we won't for the sake of everybody on this call. So maybe just, like, dumb it down for people and help people understand, you know, kind of what that means. Can you more shots on goal, cheaper to produce products, either, you know, or cheaper to produce creative? Anything that you wanna give more color on so that people can understand exactly what it means to, you know, kind of the the the platform.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and CEO at System1]

I mean, it's kind of a cliche at this point. I think everybody is talking about AI and using agentic coding to be more efficient in their business. I can tell you, we've been very fortunate given the size of our company and our engineering and product teams. You know, we've made some pretty aggressive moves to to move the entire company heavily into agentic coding in both on the on the business side and on the product and engineering side. So I'll start with the business side first.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and CEO at System1]

And it's it's pretty remarkable. Like like, I don't wanna it's hard to overstate the effects that that this is having on not only our company, but I think a lot of companies in the space that are, you know, really leaning heavily into agentic coding. On the business side, we're seeing things like, you know, business processes related to things like signing partners up to contracts and mocking up new product ideas that business leaders may have. In the past, you know, for something related to to putting together, like, an automated contract sign up form, for instance, you know, someone on the business side would have had to go to engineer, go to product designer, and actually have that built. And, and now at this point, what we're seeing are business people building that on their own.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and CEO at System1]

So they're going on and just using things like Claude, you know, to to build their own products that speed up their business processes. And it's pretty amazing. Like, if you walk around our company right now and you're looking at the screens of some of our business leaders, you're gonna see them actually developing products on their own. And and that that's something really amazing. I know Tree can talk to you about we're we're starting to lean in on the finance and and legal areas as well.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and CEO at System1]

But as far as the product and engineering teams go, you know, what we did is we made a decision it was really the about two generations ago of some of the agentic coding tools got to be good enough where we decided that we would take a lot of our engineers and just stop them developing on our core platform and really come up to speed very quickly on using these new coding tools. And what we're seeing is, in many cases, a three to five times increase in productivity on product development. And what's that's allowing us to do is move much more quickly in terms of getting products to market. It's allowing us to come up with I more ideas and get more products to market. So the productivity increase is real, you know, to the point where if people are not if companies are kind of not leaning into the into this new way of developing products, they're gonna be left behind quite quickly.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and CEO at System1]

And what's been nice at system one is we were fairly early in the process of of really, you know, moving to this new way of product development. You know, we're doing things like, you know, we're our headquarters in Los Angeles, we host, like, the kind of Southern California AI, you know, meetup, those kind of things where we've got kind of the leading the leading developers and leading product people that are that are kind of at the forefront of this of of agentic coding, and and these meetings are happening at our offices. And so I'm pretty amazed how quickly our company has transformed, and I think you're gonna see that only accelerating as more and more people, you know, company wide are are using these tools, but also the tools themselves are getting much better. You got anything to add to that, Trudy?

[Tridivesh Kidambi, CFO at System1]

Yeah. I mean, I I think just, you know, specifically our ability to to test new ideas and new initiatives, it's it's so much faster and not having to make an investment decision early. You know? Do we need to allocate three, four, five heads or design resources, engineering resources to test something? It just allows us to innovate much quicker too, which, you know, where I've I've definitely seen it just in the last, you know, quarter and a half, two quarters here. That

[Kyle Ostgaard, Vice President of Finance at System1]

ends our questions. Now we're gonna turn it over to Michael Blend for closing remarks.

[Michael Blend, Co-Founder and CEO at System1]

Alright. Well, thanks, everyone, for joining us on our on our q one earnings call. So we nice to have a little bit of momentum here. We're glad we put up a a, you know, nice q four followed up by a a good q one. Look forward to everybody joining next quarter where I hope we're gonna continue, continue the momentum. Thank you, everybody. Take care.

Participants

Executives

• Kyle Ostgaard, Vice President of Finance
• Michael Blend, Co-Founder and CEO
• Tridivesh Kidambi, CFO

Analysts

• Tom Forte, Managing Director & Senior Consumer Internet Analyst at Maxim Group
• Daniel Kurnos, Managing Director, Internet & Media Equity Research at The Benchmark Company LLC