Outbrain Q1 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
May 9, 2025
Skip to Participants
Operator

Good day. Welcome to Outbrain Incorporated's First Quarter twenty twenty five Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded.

Operator

I would like to turn the call over to Outbrain's Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Executive

Good morning, and thank you for joining us on today's conference call to discuss Outbrain's now operating escape first quarter twenty twenty five results. Joining me on the call today, we have David Kaufman and Jason Kickap, the CEO and CFO of Teams. During this conference call, management will make forward looking statements based on current expectations and assumptions, including statements regarding our business outlook and prospects. 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 k filed for the year end 03/31/2024 as updated in our subsequent reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Executive

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

David Kostman
David Kostman
CEO at Outbrain

Thank you, Tiffany. Good morning and thank you for joining us today. I'm pleased to share that we had a strong start to the year. As a reminder, Outbrain and Teads merged on February 3 to form the new Teads. I'm glad to report that we achieved our Q1 guidance both in terms of extra gross profit and adjusted EBITDA, while achieving significant milestones in the integration.

David Kostman
David Kostman
CEO at Outbrain

Our vision for the new Teeth is clear, to create the open Internet advertising platform for elevated outcomes, from branding to performance. Our end to end platform empowers brands to connect the consumer journey from discovery to purchase, driving real business outcomes. The open Internet provides a different level of access to incremental scaled user moments, but we've lacked a solution that can connect the fragmented channels of the open Internet in order to drive real business outcomes across all stages of the marketing funnel. That's where the new TEADS comes in. We believe there are several key factors that will enable TEADS to become the platform of choice to drive outcomes from branding to performance on the open Internet.

David Kostman
David Kostman
CEO at Outbrain

First, we have direct exclusive media relationships that allow us to curate inventory at massive scale globally. This means that we have significant flexibility around the use of such supply, mimicking the control the walled gardens have of owned and operated inventory. The fact that we are an end to end platform provides advertisers with the optimized, transparent supply path that's essential for delivering outcomes, and we do this at a significant global scale across 50 markets and 2,000,000,000 users. Second, these unique media relationships also yield a wealth of proprietary data around how consumers engage and take action. We access over 1,000,000,000 data points each minute, which fuel our AI powered algorithm.

David Kostman
David Kostman
CEO at Outbrain

That algorithm tailors our inventory environment to drive the optimum outcome from every user, again in a very similar way to the algorithm of walled garden. Third, our creative studio is the key layer that enables our brand and agency partners to seamlessly connect with audiences across previously fragmented channels. We understand what's most likely to drive outcomes from a creative perspective for each of our partners' businesses, making us a deeply entrenched strategic partner. We believe that these capabilities will allow us to deliver dependable outcomes at scale on the open internet, similar to the walled garden, in a way that's not possible with the currently fragmented DSP or SSP point solutions on the market. Moving to execution, we see solid execution across the business and see momentum behind this strategy.

David Kostman
David Kostman
CEO at Outbrain

Our platform features a healthy, diverse balance of advertiser segment, verticals, and geography. I want to mention that in terms of the marketing campaign objectives, we are well balanced, with approximately twothree of spend on our platform on performance campaigns, and approximately onethree of the spend on our platform on branding campaigns. And the feedback from the hundreds of client meetings we've had since closing has been consistent. Offering an outcome based solution for objectives from branding to performance, and a combined brand format solutions across all screen is highly compelling. One segment of clients I'm excited by is our strategic joint business partner account.

David Kostman
David Kostman
CEO at Outbrain

We closed Q1 with more than 50 JBTs, including new commitments with Ferrero, Halion, Philip Morris International and Beiersdorf. We believe the structure of these strategic partnerships gives us a large opportunity for growth, servicing new product lines, geographies, and marketing objectives in each brand's portfolio. Legacy Teads has mostly serviced branding campaigns with a JVP partner, but practically all of them have significant performance objectives and budgets that would be available to us. We have already seen several successes with legacy Teeth branding customers, expanding with us now to performance. In addition to the JBPs, over the past few years, the combined company has consistently maintained approximately 500 advertisers spending at least half a million dollars on our platforms on a rolling twelve month basis.

David Kostman
David Kostman
CEO at Outbrain

On average, these customers have each spent in excess of $2,000,000 annually, which represents roughly 70% of total customer spend on our platform. Additionally, we have another approximately 1,000 advertisers spending between $100,000 and $500,000 annually, representing a great base to grow our share of wallet with these large customers. Moving to the supply side, where continued ownership of unique, exclusive media environments remains critical. We are seeing wins, not just from new business, but from long time customers who trust us to innovate and scale with them. Renewals have included WebVidya in France, Sunkei in Japan, and TMZ and Conde Nast in The US.

David Kostman
David Kostman
CEO at Outbrain

We are also innovating the experiences we can provide to consumers across these traditional web environments. Moments, our vertical video solution, provides the immersive experience of social media's scrollable format to traditional publishing environment, and consumers are showing high engagement, with users now consuming eight videos on average. Over 70 publishers have adopted Moment, and with examples delivering close to 80% viewability, with nearly double the engagement rate of other branding formats. Moments will be one of the cornerstones of an expanded vertical experiences suite at the new Teeds, where brands can scale social experiences beyond the walled garden. As we strive to drive outcomes for advertisers across all screens on the open Internet, expanding our access to unique CTV environment remains a key focus.

David Kostman
David Kostman
CEO at Outbrain

In Q1, CTV revenue grew over 100% year over year, now representing approximately 5% of our total ad spend. We also now have access to more than 300,000,000 TV screens for manufacturers globally, with about half of these coming to our exclusive partnerships with LG and Vida. In addition to our access to more than 7,000 CTV properties globally. And we believe the value of our unique CTV home screen inventory is clear. Since its launch in 2023, more than 1,500 CTV home screen campaigns have been run by premium brands globally, including Cartier, Nestle and Air France.

David Kostman
David Kostman
CEO at Outbrain

On the operational side, our focus remains on integration, efficiency and execution. Immediately post closing, we implemented the majority of headcount related synergies. At this point, we have actioned 90% of our annualized compensation related target. We are also making significant progress on other operating expense synergy opportunities such as office consolidation, licenses, professional services and others, and we remain on track to reach our total target of 60,000,000 in annualized cost savings in 2026 and to achieve this run rate by the end of twenty twenty five. In addition, we are focused on our AI everywhere effort, identifying opportunities and implementing AI across our engineering, algo product solutions and internal processes teams with great potential to serve our partners faster and better.

David Kostman
David Kostman
CEO at Outbrain

Just as one example, in our direct response performance business, we have already seen more than $1,000,000 of campaigns using our Image to Clip that enables short video creation for performance marketers based on an image. To sum it up, we are well underway in our strategic and financial transformation. I'm very excited that we are successfully executing with discipline on the merger synergies, and continue to be committed to our profitability targets, while also getting great traction for our market position and vision. We are deepening our relationships with advertisers and media owners alike, and seeing real validation for our strategy that we believe will lead to increasingly winning a larger share of wallet. Thank you again for joining us.

David Kostman
David Kostman
CEO at Outbrain

Now I will turn it over to Jason for a more detailed financial update.

Jason Kiviat
Jason Kiviat
CFO at Outbrain

Thanks, David. As David mentioned, we achieved our Q1 guidance for Ex Tech gross profit and adjusted EBITDA, following our completion of the acquisition of Teads in February. Though we closed the transaction in the middle of Q1, we are already starting to realize the benefits of this combination in our financials. We are very pleased with the progress of our integration, both from a financial standpoint and with respect to integration of people, processes and systems. Revenue in Q1 was approximately $286,000,000 reflecting an increase of 32% year over year on an as reported basis, driven primarily by the impact of the acquisition.

Jason Kiviat
Jason Kiviat
CFO at Outbrain

For context, given the timing of the closing of the transaction in February, we estimate approximately 7% on a pro form a basis for the full quarter. This is our best estimate of a like for like year over year comparison. As a reminder, this represents an improvement as compared with a pro form a 9% decline year over year in Q4. We attribute the improvement to several factors, including a reduction of the employee uncertainty and distraction that we saw in the period following the deal announcement prior to the deal closing and team restructuring. Notably, we saw in Q1, which continued into Q2, improvement in the trends of The U.

Jason Kiviat
Jason Kiviat
CFO at Outbrain

S. Business, which represents around 30% of our revenue. X TAC gross profit in the quarter was $103,100,000 an increase of 98% year over year on an as reported basis, driven primarily by the impact of the acquisition. Note that XTECHR's profit growth is outpacing revenue growth, which is driven primarily by a net favorable change in our revenue mix resulting from the acquisition as well as the continuation of improvements to revenue mix from the legacy Outbrain business. And as with revenue, while we're in the very early days, we're seeing a trend in a positive direction in terms of growth rates.

Jason Kiviat
Jason Kiviat
CFO at Outbrain

And that's before we've been able to influence the overall growth in terms of combining our offerings and realizing any real synergies from cross selling. Other cost of sales and operating expenses increased year over year, predominantly driven by the impact of the acquisition as well as several related one time expenses. Note, in the quarter we recognized $16,000,000 of acquisition related costs as well as $16,000,000 from the impairment of intangible assets for products determined to be discontinued as a result of the acquisition and $7,000,000 of restructuring charges. Note that we recorded a benefit from deal related cost synergies in Q1 of approximately $2,000,000 which we expect to increase in Q2 and beyond as we continue to capture savings across both compensation and non compensation areas. We continue to expect to achieve approximately $60,000,000 of cost synergies in 2026 and to approach this run rate in Q4 this year.

Jason Kiviat
Jason Kiviat
CFO at Outbrain

As a reminder, 45,000,000 of this amount relates to compensation expenses and as an update, we have now actioned on approximately 90% of this amount at this point in time. Accordingly, we have better visibility to the impact of synergies on full year 2025 and expect total cost synergy savings to amount to approximately $40,000,000 for the year, which represents an increase versus prior expectations. So there's a significantly higher amount of costs coming off the books in the coming quarters and we see opportunities beyond that as well to be more efficient. Overall, we're focused on our integration and plan to remain disciplined on cost with extremely targeted investments into areas that we see as high confidence ROI drivers are critical to driving growth and efficiency. Adjusted EBITDA for Q1 was $10,700,000 which on an as reported basis represents a greater than 7x increase year over year despite the synergy capture being extremely nascent given the timing of closing and our path to more fulsome realization of the synergy opportunities in the coming quarters.

Jason Kiviat
Jason Kiviat
CFO at Outbrain

Moving to liquidity, free cash flow which as a reminder we define as cash from operating activities plus CapEx and capitalized software costs was a use of cash of approximately $7,000,000 in the quarter. Note that this included cash outflows for acquisition related costs and restructuring charges of approximately $16,000,000 negatively impacting our free cash flow in the quarter. Excluding these amounts, the free cash flow generation for the quarter would have been a positive $10,000,000 As a result, we ended the quarter with $156,000,000 of cash, cash equivalents and investments in marketable securities on the balance sheet, as well as $16,000,000 in overdraft borrowings, which are classified on our balance sheet as short term debt. And we have 6 and $37,500,000 in principal amount of long term debt at 10% coupon due in 02/1930. The first of our semi annual interest payments is to be paid in August.

Jason Kiviat
Jason Kiviat
CFO at Outbrain

The long term debt is carried on our balance sheet net of discount and deferred financing fees and has a balance of $611,000,000 as of March 31 resulting in a net debt balance of $471,000,000 Now I'll turn to our outlook. Although we haven't seen any meaningful impact in our results to date we have seen some advertisers planning and buying cycle shortening, meaning they finalized their budget commitments with less advanced notice than typically seen. On the other hand, we see some positivity in our Q2 pipeline as well. We see continued improvements in the legacy Teeth business since the closing of the merger and better visibility into the cross sell opportunities. Also, we view the uncertainty of the environment as a longer term opportunity as we expect advertisers to scrutinize their ad spend and to expect greater accountability from their budgets, which we believe aligns well with our mission at the New Peak.

Jason Kiviat
Jason Kiviat
CFO at Outbrain

As we look forward in our guidance, considering the uncertainty of macro conditions, we are providing for a wider range of outcomes in our guidance. And with that context, we have provided the following guidance. For Q2, we expect Ex Tech gross profit of $141,000,000 to $150,000,000 and we expect adjusted EBITDA of $26,000,000 to $34,000,000 For full year 2025, we continue to expect adjusted EBITDA of at least $180,000,000 Now I'll turn it back to the operator for Q and A.

Operator

Thank Our first question is from Yugal Aruna with Citigroup. Please proceed.

Ygal Arounian
Ygal Arounian
Director - Internet Equity Research at Citigroup

Hey guys, good morning. Nice to see the results in light of the macro context. I guess, first, maybe, can we just expand on the macro a little bit more, what you're seeing, so the shortening of planning and buying cycles, but it doesn't sound like there's been any real pullback yet. Then on that opportunity, as advertisers scrutinize budgets, Can you talk a little bit more how you could capture that? And are you seeing any difference from advertisers on their focus between brand and performance?

Ygal Arounian
Ygal Arounian
Director - Internet Equity Research at Citigroup

Is performance holding up better than brands? Let me just start there. And then I have a follow-up. Thanks.

Jason Kiviat
Jason Kiviat
CFO at Outbrain

Sure. So thanks for the question, Yigal. Maybe I'll start. It's Jason. Yes, mean, what we saw in Q1 was really improvements in demand levels from January into February and March.

Jason Kiviat
Jason Kiviat
CFO at Outbrain

And as I said in prepared remarks, an overall continuation of that positive trend of the improving growth rates for the legacy Teeds business. Into Q2,

Jason Kiviat
Jason Kiviat
CFO at Outbrain

so

Jason Kiviat
Jason Kiviat
CFO at Outbrain

far so good. We haven't seen any meaningful impact in our results to date stemming from the uncertainty in the macro. Clarifying maybe what I said on the call, the shortened buying cycles maybe as an example if you typically might get a month or two months warning on a budget maybe it comes in a few weeks closer to the start date than typical. So to us that indicates obviously there is more scrutinization of the ad spend happening which obviously to the second part of your question we view as a good thing for us. But obviously there is a little bit of less visibility and obviously I think you have to factor that into when you're giving the outlook and the guidance.

Jason Kiviat
Jason Kiviat
CFO at Outbrain

Obviously verticals we look at there some stronger, weaker, but nothing unusual I would say. And as I said we're seeing really more positives than negatives at this point in terms of the legacy operating business continues growth and the same growth drivers, yields are up, The improvement as I said in the year over year growth rates for legacy Ts in U. S. In particular which is encouraging. Positivity we see and the team is eagerly starting the early days here of the cross sell.

Jason Kiviat
Jason Kiviat
CFO at Outbrain

We have our first wins there. So generally good things. Obviously we're being balanced in our guidance just given the uncertainty. But so far so good is how I would do it.

David Kostman
David Kostman
CEO at Outbrain

Maybe I would add, Hi it's David, to your last point So our breakdown, I would say, is generally 10% performance, 30% branding, but I think what we need to focus on is that we drive outcomes. And whether it's brand dollars or performance dollars, advertisers, it's direct to consumer or an enterprise brand are looking for measurable outcomes. And this is how we look at the future in terms of our position in the market as a platform that drives the best outcomes, both to branding and performance. So we are very strategically important for our partners, and we believe that as long as we can continue and deliver on those measurable outcomes, that's what's going to continue in the ability to increase share of wallet.

David Kostman
David Kostman
CEO at Outbrain

I want to make one comment on performance. I mean we've been Igor, you've been following us for a few years. So we before the merger we've been talking about the increase in growth of share of wallet we have from pure performance advertisers to our Samantha DSP that we rebranded as our brand DSP. So that trend continues, and there we help performance advertisers bid into third party environments, other SSPs, display advertising, and others. So something we've been doing already for a few years.

David Kostman
David Kostman
CEO at Outbrain

We merged it, the accountants for about 30% of our business was outside of the field. So we believe we are very well balanced in terms of the macro, and also in addition to the points that Jason highlighted.

Ygal Arounian
Ygal Arounian
Director - Internet Equity Research at Citigroup

Okay, great. And then the one on kind of fundamentals also, on integration, and you guys called out the strong JVP wins, that's nice to see it. How much of that is maybe a direct result of the new combination versus things that may have been in the pipeline? And I think if I'm understanding you correctly, you guys are saying that the cross selling opportunity hasn't really even started. I don't know if that was more of a 1Q thing and it started to play out in 2Q, but can just talk a little bit about what you're seeing there and

Ygal Arounian
Ygal Arounian
Director - Internet Equity Research at Citigroup

the opportunity from cross selling? Thank you.

David Kostman
David Kostman
CEO at Outbrain

I'll take that. So we're very excited about the JBTs, think. It's a huge asset that sort of we have today at T, which is relationships, and we highlighted the size of the companies we work with, whether it is enterprise brand, their agencies, even the SMEs, and we're working with large customers which have big budgets.

David Kostman
David Kostman
CEO at Outbrain

The growth in that is coming, I think, also from a combination of the two companies. There's tremendous excitement about this combined value proposition, sort of we have a weekly internal messaging in the company. Yesterday I posted a video, post a meeting with one large agency where we got more share of wallet, because we now are able to bring to a legacy team client performance capabilities. They all at the end have, they want to sell a product, they want to get a lead, they want to get someone to download an application or anything. So I think that is helping.

David Kostman
David Kostman
CEO at Outbrain

I mean I cannot pinpoint directly that the growth is coming just from that, but we've had hundreds of meetings, and the response is phenomenal to this value proposition of performance and branding combined, so I'm sure it will be a big growth driver.

Operator

Our next question is from Andrew Boone with Citizens. Please proceed.

Andrew Boone
Managing Director at Citizens JMP

Thanks so much for taking the question. You guys highlighted the improvement in Teach results in prepared remarks. Can you guys just speak through that and talk through kind of the trends that you guys are seeing and moving that business back into kind of a strong growth position? And then one of the striking things that you guys called out here is just the size of some of your larger clients. So can Dickie, can you just step back and talk about the opportunity, whether that be larger clients or smaller clients?

Andrew Boone
Managing Director at Citizens JMP

Or kind of how are you guys thinking about that? And just kind of explain why you guys wanted to highlight that disclosure. Thanks so much.

Jason Kiviat
Jason Kiviat
CFO at Outbrain

Sure. So maybe I could start. Thanks for the question, Andrew. In terms of the legacy Deeds business, obviously, it's something that we talked about the idiosyncratic headwinds on the business in Q4, '1 of which was region specific and we kind of updated on already last quarter. But I think the bigger kind of impact was about just the impact of the pending merger on the team.

Jason Kiviat
Jason Kiviat
CFO at Outbrain

And there was hiring freeze and lack of focus. And I think just a lot of concern of okay, when is this going to close? And is there a restructuring happening. We do feel that the overhang from that has really been relieved and we see it in the results really since we've gotten certainty of kind of the closing date which obviously we got in January. We have seen just kind of month over month improvement in those year over year trends.

Jason Kiviat
Jason Kiviat
CFO at Outbrain

So obviously the focused execution, just doing the restructuring very quickly and everyone kind of knows their role and the team and how everything fits in and the product roadmap, we really feel like it's kind of lifted and given everyone kind of the ability to just go do what they're good at and bring this back to growth. We feel good about it. We feel good about the trends we've seen and expecting to get to pro form a overall growth in the second half of the year still from there.

David Kostman
David Kostman
CEO at Outbrain

To the other part of the question, Andrew, thanks on that. So we are highlighting those customers. We believe that there is a huge opportunity to get more share of wallet from these customers. I mean a lot of the spend goes to point solutions, DSPs. We believe that our platform on the open Internet, by delivering better outcomes with elevated creatives, will allow us to get market share and gain more share of wallet from these very, very large customers where they enterprise brands.

David Kostman
David Kostman
CEO at Outbrain

Some of them are small and medium enterprises, but still with significant budget, and obviously direct response customers. So it is about growing our share of wallet from them both for their branding dollars and for their performance campaigns, and doing that sort of across the board on different screens. And I think that's the opportunity. I mean, it has a tremendous sales team today combined with the legacy Outbrain and legacy team with hundreds of people across the world organizing verticals. So we're very excited about the ability to drive a lot of more shared wallet through these capabilities.

Andrew Boone
Managing Director at Citizens JMP

Thank you.

Operator

Our next question is from Laura Martin with Needham and Company. Please proceed.

Laura Martin
Senior Analyst at Needham & Company

Hi there. Yes. So you guys had

Laura Martin
Senior Analyst at Needham & Company

a really, central activation at Possible, and you just said that you've had hundreds of meetings and customers being really delighted with this end to end strategy of the, you know, brand and performance. What remind us what the path is between meetings to getting sign ups. When would the revenue show up, assuming you get some kind of 20% conversion rate or something? When do we start seeing revenue from these positive meetings you're having?

David Kostman
David Kostman
CEO at Outbrain

Hey Lova, thank you. Yeah, Possible Sorry I wasn't there, but I know you had some good meetings there with our team. We are looking at returning back to growth, I mean, as teeds in the second half of the year. And it's a combination of some of the things Jason mentioned around just improvement in the performance of the legacy teed business. But a lot of it is also coming from cross selling, and selling performance solutions to teed advertisers, selling some branding solutions to the SME advertisers.

David Kostman
David Kostman
CEO at Outbrain

So that is reflected in our plans for the second half of the year. We have already seen some of these sales happening with certain customers, so I think it's going to ramp up in an exponential way into the second half of the year.

Laura Martin
Senior Analyst at Needham & Company

Okay, so there isn't a typical, you sign an MSA and then they experiment, there's not a typical path, it's just, you just have to wait. So but and you don't see a headwind of tariffs against people bringing new business to you?

David Kostman
David Kostman
CEO at Outbrain

At the moment, as Jason, we have not seen any meaningful impact of tariffs.

Laura Martin
Senior Analyst at Needham & Company

Okay. And that wouldn't affect all these means? Okay. That's interesting. Okay.

Laura Martin
Senior Analyst at Needham & Company

And then my other thing is, you know, one of the things that's been really threatening sort of the existence of the open Internet as an existential threat is ad agencies have cut off their funding of news sites. And so I'm wondering if you're and there's been a lot of pushback on that and really trying to get ad agencies to be more nuanced about the type of news that they are willing to advertise on. Have you seen any reversal or people advertising on news sites again?

David Kostman
David Kostman
CEO at Outbrain

Yeah. So I think actually we have seen more openness than I think there's better technology solutions that allow advertisers to be much more selective into what they're trying to block, so now doing sort of really large scale blocking of news pages, but actually being much more granular around specific things that they want to block. And I feel very positive about this topic actually that's very close to my heart, really the panel at CES, we're planning to talk about it at hand with some of our partners on the agency side, some of the CMOs and publisher side. I think there is a change of that, I think the ability of reaching incremental audiences at times where they are engaging with authentic content that is professionally produced, the value of that has been proven. There's tons of research out there that shows that there's no actually detriment, actually there's a positive impact of being associated with pages which have credible, authentic, journalistic, or other professionally created content.

David Kostman
David Kostman
CEO at Outbrain

And I think that is a big opportunity for us also to grow monetization within our base of supply partners.

Laura Martin
Senior Analyst at Needham & Company

Okay, great. Thanks very much. Thank you.

Operator

Our next question is from James Haynie with Jefferies. Please proceed.

James Heaney
James Heaney
SVP - Equity Research at Jefferies

Great. Thank you, guys. I'd love to hear your perspective just on the ruling in the DOJ Google lawsuit. Curious how you think TEAS would benefit if Google were to divest its ad serving and publisher side tech? And then I had a follow-up question.

David Kostman
David Kostman
CEO at Outbrain

Great. So I'll take that. Thank you. So the Google ruling of setting is a good thing for the overall ecosystem. It affects us probably directly less than others, because we are an end to end platform that has direct exclusive relationship on the supply, so we don't go for most of the business we have through GAM or through the Ad Exchange or DBT-sixty.

David Kostman
David Kostman
CEO at Outbrain

So we have exclusive supply, which is one of the differentiators why we can drive better outcomes by the way, when you look at other point solutions like DSPs. And so it's impacting us less, think overall on the SSP front, think it is a, could potentially provide a great headwind to SSPs, which could benefit us. I mentioned, say for example, on the performance side, on the direct response side of our business, we have been over the last years expanding significantly with third party supply, display, other SSDs. As this market becomes more open and more competitive, I think it allows us to even further grow the value we can bring to our performance marketers on this third party supply, so that's a direct positive. But overall, I think us being an end to end platform with direct code on page, first party data, this is less impactful on us directly.

James Heaney
James Heaney
SVP - Equity Research at Jefferies

Great. And then just one on your moments vertical video product. Would just love to hear what your strategy is for expanding that that product into new publishers, and how we should be thinking about that as a a growth driver for the business.

David Kostman
David Kostman
CEO at Outbrain

So we're looking at it as part of a broader suite of vertical video experiences, so Movitz is one type of format, I don't want to be too technical here, it's one type of format, but there's other vertical opportunities that we see where we can leverage our end of article placement to create a vertical experience that is very, very suitable for brand advertising, or for brands that want to drive performance. So overall we think vertical video is a big category. It increases engagement of audiences with content, and is a great canvas for advertisers that want to promote either performance or brand. We've been seeing great success with Moments, I mentioned on the call some of the data points, and we will continue to invest quite significantly into all vertical video opportunities.

James Heaney
James Heaney
SVP - Equity Research at Jefferies

Great, thank you.

Operator

Our next question is from Zach Cummins with B. Riley Securities. Please proceed.

Zach Cummins
Senior Research Analyst at B. Riley Securities

Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. I just wanted to get a little more context around your second half guidance. I think, David, you might have alluded to it. But just curious if you're still assuming kind of a return to low single digit growth in the second half of the year on a pro form a basis.

Zach Cummins
Senior Research Analyst at B. Riley Securities

And just from a modeling perspective, I know synergies are expected to ramp throughout the year. So just curious of how we should be thinking about kind of the adjusted EBITDA progression for the pro form a entity in the second half of this year?

Jason Kiviat
Jason Kiviat
CFO at Outbrain

Sure. Thanks for the question, Saks. I'll take that one. Yes, so obviously, as I said, we're factoring in a number of things, the continued improvement of the year over year growth rates that we've seen from the legacy Teeth business, continued growth obviously from the legacy operating business we've been talking about for about a year now, and obviously the early days of the revenue synergy capture. We are expecting something there, but we're obviously being fairly conservative in our model for that.

Jason Kiviat
Jason Kiviat
CFO at Outbrain

And of course acknowledging that the uncertainty in the world exists right now, we are accounting for that even though we haven't seen any meaningful impact so far considering all the positives. There are also anecdotally some easing of the comps for us particularly on the legacy teeds business as we get later in the year as we talked about the idiosyncratic headwinds from last year's Q4 as well. And so yes, all that kind of comes together and we still do expect as we said last quarter to get to the pro form a growth year over year in the second half of this year. And in terms of expenses and how that kind of relates to EBITDA, we've now shared that we expect to realize about 40,000,000 of cost synergies alone in 2025. And that's really ramping over the next few quarters.

Jason Kiviat
Jason Kiviat
CFO at Outbrain

We only had about $2,000,000 of benefit in Q1 just based on the timing of closing and actions being put in place. We expect that to step up in Q2, but even more so in Q3 and for Q4. And much of those actions are actually already done. It's really just a matter of time at this point before the accounting is able to recognize those savings. So we feel very confident about that in terms of the expenses getting lower over the course of the year.

Jason Kiviat
Jason Kiviat
CFO at Outbrain

Q2 also has some marketing events and just timing type issues making Q2 really the high watermark in terms of expenses for the year. So you put it all together, definitely we feel good about obviously maintaining our guidance. The historical seasonality is one that two thirds of the EBITDA has always been recognized in H2 if you put these two companies together. So between that and the synergies, we feel very good. Thank you.

David Kostman
David Kostman
CEO at Outbrain

Just on other things, it's a financially transformational year with this merger. So you can see, for example, the ramp up of, based on the guidance of EBITDA is 3x the EBITDA in Q2 from Q1. So we are seeing it, I mean it's really the timing of a lot of these efficiencies synergies coming in, the cross sell that is starting in five geographies now in Europe and in The US. So all of these things will come in and we'll have we expect a significant impact obviously going into the second half.

Zach Cummins
Senior Research Analyst at B. Riley Securities

Understood. And my one follow-up question is just around your CTV business and appreciate the disclosure there in terms of the growth rate and percentage of spend. Just curious of really how the combined entity has CTV offering? And where is kind of the near term opportunities that you see to continue that momentum here in the coming quarters?

David Kostman
David Kostman
CEO at Outbrain

So today the differentiation is in two aspects. One is we have for some TV manufacturers and operating system, LG, Vida in certain geographies of the world, exclusivity on a home screen placement that is a highly impactful sort of native placement when you look at different piles and you decide what to do. So you spend a lot of time there. So we have exclusivity on that. That helps us also increase in general our share of wallet with video advertisers.

David Kostman
David Kostman
CEO at Outbrain

Once they do displacement, we will also get some of the in stream regular, call it, video advertising from them. We're trying to grow them because these formats you know, you can buy them programmatically, they are unique, and they're really leveraging the tremendous power that we have at Teads with brand advertisers. These are the type of advertisers that CTV and applications want to have on their home screen. So that's a big differentiator to today. When we're looking into the future, we

David Kostman
David Kostman
CEO at Outbrain

see

David Kostman
David Kostman
CEO at Outbrain

a huge opportunity on performance CTV. I think it's early days for that. And when you combine the performance capabilities of legacy Outbrain, the SME base that we have, the ease of producing today video content for these type of advertisers, and the ability to target and deliver outcomes. We are spending a lot of time working on sort of the implementation and strategy for performance on CTV. We think we are uniquely positioned to capture significant share there.

Zach Cummins
Senior Research Analyst at B. Riley Securities

Understood. Well, thanks for taking my questions, and best of luck with the rest of the quarter.

David Kostman
David Kostman
CEO at Outbrain

Thank you.

Operator

We have reached the end of our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to management for closing remarks.

David Kostman
David Kostman
CEO at Outbrain

So thank you all for joining. I want to take this opportunity to thank our close to 2,000 employees across the world. It's been a great journey until now and I'm very excited to see sort of the one team, one dream coming together. It's also been great. I mean, if some of our partners are on the call, I mean, on the business side, I mean, they've been tremendous and the confidence and validation we got from them is really fueling the energy.

David Kostman
David Kostman
CEO at Outbrain

And thank you all for continuing to support us as shareholders, and we look forward to continuing the dialogue. Thank

Operator

conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time and thank you for your participation.

Executives
    • David Kostman
      David Kostman
      CEO
    • Jason Kiviat
      Jason Kiviat
      CFO
Analysts
Powered by Quartr

Key Takeaways

  • Outbrain and Teads merged on February 3 to form the new Teads, achieving Q1 guidance for XTech gross profit and adjusted EBITDA while executing 90% of headcount synergies and targeting $60 million of annualized cost savings by 2026.
  • Q1 revenue was ~$286 million (+32% year-over-year reported, ~7% pro forma), XTech gross profit reached $103.1 million (+98%), and adjusted EBITDA was $10.7 million (>7x year-over-year), with $156 million in cash at quarter-end.
  • The combined platform delivers an end-to-end open Internet advertising solution across branding (1/3 of spend) and performance (2/3), leveraging direct exclusive media relationships in 50 markets, 2 billion users and 1 billion data points per minute to power its AI algorithm and creative studio.
  • Customer momentum includes over 50 strategic joint business partnerships with brands like Ferrero and PMI, ~500 advertisers spending >$500 000 each (70% of total spend), plus 1 000 clients at $100 000–$500 000, while supply renewals with Condé Nast, Sunkei and others and the “Moments” vertical video format drive high engagement.
  • CTV revenue more than doubled year-over-year to ~5% of spend, accessing 300 million exclusive screens and 7 000 CTV properties, and management sees macro scrutiny of ad budgets as an opportunity to win share through measurable outcomes and cross-sell of its performance and branding offerings.
AI Generated. May Contain Errors.
Earnings Conference Call
Outbrain Q1 2025
00:00 / 00:00

Transcript Sections