MNTN Q2 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

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Provided by Quartr
August 4, 2026

Key Takeaways

  • Positive Sentiment: Strong Q2 results: Revenue rose 21% year over year to $82.5 million, while adjusted EBITDA increased 48% to $21.5 million, both at the high end of guidance. Gross margin expanded to 80% and adjusted EBITDA margin reached 26.1%.
  • Positive Sentiment: MNTN ended the quarter with 4,225 active Performance TV customers, up approximately 40% year over year, while customer expansion remained above 115%, indicating continued budget growth among existing customers.
  • Positive Sentiment: Early adoption of new growth products is encouraging, with more than 7,000 MNTN Express signups and over 73,000 year-to-date QuickFrame AI signups. Management expects Express and Premium to become more meaningful revenue contributors in 2027, while QuickFrame may also create a funnel for the core Performance TV business.
  • Positive Sentiment: Management reiterated full-year 2026 revenue guidance of $347 million to $357 million and adjusted EBITDA guidance of $96 million to $101 million, while forecasting third-quarter revenue growth of 25% at the midpoint.
  • Positive Sentiment: The board authorized a stock repurchase program of up to $100 million through August 2027, supported by a balance sheet with $237 million in cash and no borrowings outstanding.
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Earnings Conference Call
MNTN Q2 2026
00:00 / 00:00

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Operator

Hello. Welcome to the MNTN second quarter 2026 results webcast. After today's prepared remarks, we will host a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please raise your hand. If you have dialed into today's call, please press star nine to raise your hand and star six to unmute. I will now hand the conference over to Brinlea Johnson. Please go ahead.

Brinlea Johnson
Brinlea Johnson
Investor Relations at MNTN

Good afternoon. Thank you for joining us for MNTN's second quarter 2026 earnings call. With me today is Mark Douglas, Chief Executive Officer, and Patrick Pohlen, Chief Financial Officer. To remind everyone, today's call includes forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results could materially differ from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements. For the risks and uncertainties that may affect future results, please see our most recently filed periodic report, which is also available on our website. We will also discuss Non-GAAP financial measures on today's call. Reconciliations of these measures are available in our earnings materials on our website. With that, I'll turn the call over to Mark. Please go ahead.

Mark Douglas
Mark Douglas
President and CEO at MNTN

Thank you for joining us today. MNTN delivered a strong second quarter with revenue of $82.5 million, representing 21% year-over-year growth. Adjusted EBITDA of $21.5 million, representing 48% year-over-year growth. Both of these metrics finished at the high end of our guidance. Before I get into the details, I want to talk about our strategy. Performance TV is about giving businesses that historically haven't had access to television a way to reach specific consumers across premium streaming inventory. Measure whether that advertising is driving revenue. MNTN created this category. Now we're seeing performance TV move from an early adopter market toward a mainstream part of the marketing mix. To capture that move, MNTN began expanding our sales organization in Q4 2025, strengthening our leadership in sales and increasing our investment in marketing.

Mark Douglas
Mark Douglas
President and CEO at MNTN

For the next stage of growth, MNTN is focused on three main priorities: expanding our products and continuing to invest in AI, broadening access to premium television, and strengthening our go-to-market organization. This isn't a change in strategy or a new story from MNTN. It's the same opportunity we've been building towards over the past year, now with products and go-to-market structure ready to execute at greater scale. Turning to our product suite, I've said many times that half of the company's headcount is in engineering. They've been building products. We released new versions of MNTN's Performance TV platform that create distinct versions for small business, mid-market, and upper mid-market. We found that different sized businesses need different levels of features and complexity, so we've divided the platform into three main tiers: Express, Pro, and Premium. MNTN Express was launched on April 1st.

Mark Douglas
Mark Douglas
President and CEO at MNTN

Express is specifically built for small business distinct from midsize advertisers. Brands can get live in minutes and do so from any device. We've had over 7,000 signups for Express in the first 120 days since we launched. Importantly, hundreds of those signups have become paying customers, and momentum continues. The revenue contribution from Express is small today in comparison to MNTN's overall business, but it's growing quickly and I believe will be a meaningful contributor to growth as we enter 2027. For our midsize customers, we've added significant agentic AI technology into the platform that gives our customers even more automation and more performance. We surround them with AI tech to give our customers control of the daily decision-making. We're leveraging AI across the organization, especially within engineering, where we're AI native, using AI to build faster while embedding AI throughout our product suite.

Mark Douglas
Mark Douglas
President and CEO at MNTN

We've talked about QuickFrame AI a number of times and its importance for enabling the SMB opportunity in connected TV. QuickFrame AI is doing exactly what we planned: lowering creative barriers, increasing launch rates, and making it easier for businesses to create television-ready advertising. We've had over 37,000 QuickFrame AI signups in Q2, bringing us to over 73,000 signups year to date. We're seeing an incredibly diverse set of businesses across retail, financial services, healthcare, technology, education, and many other industries successfully leverage the technology to create their ads. There's broad interest in AI creative, and it's critical for Performance TV. We've always believed that MNTN customers should have access to and the ability to specify ad placement alongside the same premium television inventory as the world's largest brands. In January this year, we doubled down on premium inventory as part of our platform.

Mark Douglas
Mark Douglas
President and CEO at MNTN

Today, our customers have the ability to insert their ads alongside nearly every major sports league, in addition to the premium streaming shows on our network of partners. As a result of that focus on super premium content, we have many customers who advertise during the FIFA World Cup games, March Madness, and on MLB, NBA, NHL, and soon the NFL. For the first time, any size business can consistently get guaranteed access to television's biggest moments and make that part of their ad strategy. To fuel the growth of new customers, we are strengthening our go-to-market organization. The first half of this year has been focused on construction with additional leadership added in sales, marketing, and business development. We built vertical teams that understand the economics, objectives, creative needs, and customer acquisition dynamics of specific industries. That knowledge makes our sales process and the customer experience more effective.

Mark Douglas
Mark Douglas
President and CEO at MNTN

In summary, we expect the benefits of our strategic investments to contribute to stronger growth in the second half of the year and meaningfully in 2027 as the core business accelerates, complemented by new revenue streams from Express and Premium. Our focus remains simple: help more businesses advertise on television than ever before while continuing to grow efficiently, profitably, and strengthen the category we created. Now I'll turn it over to Patrick.

Patrick Pohlen
Patrick Pohlen
CFO at MNTN

Thank you, Mark. We reported strong second quarter results exceeding the midpoint of both our revenue and adjusted EBITDA guidance. Our solid performance reflects continued customer adoption of Performance TV, particularly by companies that had not previously advertised on television. Our second quarter revenue increased to $82.5 million, up 21% year-over-year. Second quarter gross margins improved to 80%, up 350 basis points over the prior year period. As you can see from the table in our earnings release, at the end of the second quarter, we had 4,225 active PTV customers when measured over their trailing 12 months. On a year-over-year basis, this represents growth of approximately 40%. As a reminder, the number of active PTV customers we add to the platform is largely within our control and is primarily driven by how aggressively we choose to invest in sales and marketing.

Patrick Pohlen
Patrick Pohlen
CFO at MNTN

We continually assess and calibrate that approach to ensure that we are onboarding customers with a strong product-market fit and a high probability of succeeding on our platform. As we adjust the pace of that expansion over time, the number of customers added is expected to fluctuate from quarter to quarter. Our expansion rate, which measures the spend of our current customers as compared to those same customers' spend a year ago, remains quite healthy and is still well north of 115%, further demonstrating that when our customers achieve their desired returns on advertising spend, they continue to increase their budgets with us. Total operating expenses for the second quarter were $59.2 million. For the second quarter, we achieved positive net income of $6.7 million, for a GAAP EPS of $0.09.

Patrick Pohlen
Patrick Pohlen
CFO at MNTN

Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter increased to $21.5 million, up from $14.5 million in Q2 of 2025, an increase of 48%. The company's adjusted EBITDA margin grew to 26.1%, up 490 basis points compared to 21.2% in Q2 of 2025. The improvement reflects the combination of higher revenue and expanding gross margins, further underscoring the operating leverage built into our business model. While we remain focused on steadily improving profitability over time, our top priority continues to be investing behind growth rather than optimizing near-term adjusted EBITDA margins. To capitalize on this significant opportunity in this early-stage market, we plan on continuing to make disciplined but aggressive investments in sales and marketing to drive broader customer adoption. Our balance sheet remains strong, and we ended the quarter at $237 million in cash and cash equivalents with no borrowings outstanding. We ended the quarter with 74.2 million shares outstanding.

Patrick Pohlen
Patrick Pohlen
CFO at MNTN

As of August 3rd, 2026, MNTN's Board of Directors has authorized a stock repurchase program of up to $100 million worth of its Class A common stock through August 5th, 2027. We think the stock represents a compelling value. We believe this action signals our confidence in the company's long-term trajectory and further solidifies our commitment to providing value to our shareholders. Looking ahead, we remain confident in our momentum and the underlying health of our business as we progress through 2026 and beyond. For Q3 2026, we expect revenue to be between $86 million-$89 million, representing 25% year-over-year growth at the midpoint of $87.5 million. We expect adjusted EBITDA to be between $22million-$25 million, reflecting continued leverage as we scale the business while continuing to remain disciplined in our investments.

Patrick Pohlen
Patrick Pohlen
CFO at MNTN

For the full year 2026, we are reiterating our revenue guidance range of $347 million-$357 million, representing over 24% year-over-year growth at the midpoint of $352 million, excluding the impact of the Maximum Effort divestiture. We also continue to expect adjusted EBITDA to be between $96 million-$101 million. To wrap up, we delivered another solid quarter and believe MNTN will continue to gain market share in the massive performance television market. We are confident that our future growth initiatives and the strength of our operating model will position MNTN to drive continued growth and profitability. With that, we'll open the line for questions.

Operator

We will now begin the question-and-answer session. Please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. If you would like to ask a question, please raise your hand. If you have dialed in to today's call, please press star nine to raise your hand, star six to unmute. Please stand by as we compile the question-and-answer roster. Your first question comes from the line of Shyam Patil with Susquehanna. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Shyam Patil
Shyam Patil
Analyst at Susquehanna

Hey, guys. Nice job on the quarter. I had a couple of questions for you, Mark. In your prepared remarks, you talked about the go-to-market investments, you talked about Express and Premium and the impact that you expect to see. Wondering if you could just talk a little bit more about this and just how you think about the impact to revenue growth over the course of this year and next year. Second question, there's been some consolidation in the industry recently. Was wondering if you could just talk about this and perhaps what kind of impact it could be having on the PTV opportunity and just any opportunities that it may be creating for you guys. Thank you.

Mark Douglas
Mark Douglas
President and CEO at MNTN

Thanks, Shyam. I'll take both of those questions. I think the first one is about Express and Premium and the impact this year and next year. As I said in the opening remarks, we really felt that we needed to create versions of our product that would, just like we were purpose-built for the overall SMB market, were purpose-built for the different segments or the different tiers. And that each tier, meaning small business, midsize and larger, they had unique, similar needs in the overall need for Performance TV, but unique needs in terms of usability. We are really confident and really happy with where we've delivered on that, especially with small business. That's something we've been focused on for a while, and we're happy to see the adoption. In terms of the impact this year and next year, they're definitely contributing.

Mark Douglas
Mark Douglas
President and CEO at MNTN

I think for next year we see a really big opportunity because they're small now, but growing very quickly. I think you should look to 2027 to really start to see the larger impact coming from these two segments of the overall SMB opportunity. In terms of your question about the consolidation in the industry impact on the CTV opportunity, obviously we're seeing that too. We're purpose-built for the SMB portion of that market. We believe we're very differentiated. We can essentially establish that created the concept of Performance TV and using streaming for small mid-sized business. The validation that it's providing us, we think that some of the consolidation you're seeing is providing, we think has real validated the opportunity.

Mark Douglas
Mark Douglas
President and CEO at MNTN

In terms of specific impact for us, it's just making the market even more aware of the opportunity here, and I think creating even more green space for MNTN to execute. We're pretty pleased with, essentially the consolidation that's occurring and the larger opportunity and the greater green space that creates for the company.

Shyam Patil
Shyam Patil
Analyst at Susquehanna

Thanks, Mark.

Mark Douglas
Mark Douglas
President and CEO at MNTN

Thank you. Sure.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Andrew Boone with Citizens JMP Securities. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Andrew Boone
Managing Director at Citizens JMP Securities

Thanks.

Mark Douglas
Mark Douglas
President and CEO at MNTN

Andrew, we can't hear you. You might be muted.

Andrew Boone
Managing Director at Citizens JMP Securities

All right, let's try that again. Can you guys hear me?

Mark Douglas
Mark Douglas
President and CEO at MNTN

Sure.

Operator

Now we can. Yeah.

Andrew Boone
Managing Director at Citizens JMP Securities

All right, great. Well, thank you for taking the question. I wanted to also ask on SMB, if we think about the go-to-market strategy for SMB and the difference of that versus a mid-market customer, is there any change that we should expect for sales marketing or any other aspects of the organization strategy or cost structure that we should be thinking about with this change? Mark, just a big picture question. You mentioned sports in your prepared remarks. Can you just talk about the benefit of the World Cup? What did that bring for you guys in the quarter? And then talk about the sports opportunity more largely. Understood that's always been a draw, but how has that changed the conversation? Thank you.

Mark Douglas
Mark Douglas
President and CEO at MNTN

In terms of go-to-market for SMB, we've been very focused since we talked about, in Q4 of last year, the expansion of the sales team. I think last quarter we talked about continued investment in marketing. I talked today about those things. We think the opportunity here, the key thing is that we created an early adopter market. That market is now becoming mainstream. I mean by that more and more companies who previously had no access to television as a medium, and remember, television is the biggest entertainment medium in the world, meaning more people watch TV a day than use social media, than essentially do any other activity. And that was entirely cut off from the SMB market.

Mark Douglas
Mark Douglas
President and CEO at MNTN

As we're seeing more companies know that they can be on TV and almost start to expect to be on TV, we wanted to invest more in sales and marketing in order to make sure we capture more of that opportunity. We did that by strengthening our leadership, by investing more in marketing, and in terms of our own marketing, we've traditionally leveraged the MNTN platform for a lot of our marketing, meaning we stream TV ads in the homes of our future customers. We also use social media, and so there's an interesting dynamic in performance marketing that everyone uses each other's platforms, so they can then cover customers at wherever they are. We're doing the same. For Express customers, meaning our smallest customers, we again lean on our own platform. We lean on social. For mid-market, it's pretty much the same.

Mark Douglas
Mark Douglas
President and CEO at MNTN

The investment's a little different, but the techniques are the same. We're really pleased with how that's going, and we expect to continue to expand our investment there. In terms of sports, the reason sports, it's not just sports, it's like reality television, it's home improvement. We want to give our customers. When you think of sports, the advertisers have to, like for something like the World Cup, they have to be named and approved by the World Cup. To start to be able to get small mid-sized businesses into those level, that level of sporting events took a lot of partnership conversations with some of the biggest media companies in the world to get the sports rights for these leagues and for these major events, and we were able to do that. The benefit to our customers is that inventory performs really well.

Mark Douglas
Mark Douglas
President and CEO at MNTN

There's often more than one person in front of the TV. There could be many people watching, like a World Cup game or an NFL game or something like that. You have an interesting dynamic in terms of performance, and I also think it validates MNTN as the market leader in this space. That we're not just putting our customers on remnant inventory. They're going on the best content in television to get the best performance in performance television. That's why it's so important to us, and I think our customers are seeing as a differentiator, and we're really pleased with that. Thank you. Thank you.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Robert Coolbrith with Evercore ISI. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Robert Coolbrith
Robert Coolbrith
Analyst at Evercore ISI

Great. Thank you for taking my question. Can you hear me all right?

Mark Douglas
Mark Douglas
President and CEO at MNTN

Yeah.

Robert Coolbrith
Robert Coolbrith
Analyst at Evercore ISI

Great. Thank you. Just wanted to ask on QuickFrame AI, we had sort of formerly thought of that as just enabling technology. Just given the very strong early traction that you're seeing, wanted to ask you on a couple of three topics related to that. Number one, if you could talk about are you thinking about this now as a standalone opportunity? We've certainly seen some other entrants in this space grow very large businesses very quickly, really just within the past few months. Is that part of the ambition here, given what you're seeing early? Secondly, wanted to ask a little bit about the gross margin profile of that product, anything you could tell us there. Third, maybe also the funnel that QuickFrame AI can create for the core PTV business, given the amount of signups that are coming in.

Robert Coolbrith
Robert Coolbrith
Analyst at Evercore ISI

Are you seeing an ability to sort of cross-sell or attach PTV once people have their creatives up and running? Thank you very much.

Mark Douglas
Mark Douglas
President and CEO at MNTN

Sure. I'll take those on one at a time. In terms of standalone opportunity, it was always my belief that we had to build QuickFrame AI not just to be a feature of the MNTN Performance TV platform, but to be successful in its own right. The importance of that is unless you do that, at some point, you wouldn't be keeping up in terms of feature functionality if we didn't build it so that people saw value in it, separate from Performance TV. The QuickFrame product supports MNTN Performance TV, it supports YouTube ads, it supports social ads, all of those. It's certainly a standalone opportunity in terms of usage of the product. In terms of monetization of the product, we're looking at that. There's obviously some opportunity there, at this moment, we're making it available at no charge.

Mark Douglas
Mark Douglas
President and CEO at MNTN

We are closely looking at usage and essentially engagement on the product to make sure people are really actively using it and essentially getting value from it. Stay tuned on that. In terms of gross margin, there are some gross margin costs, the overall effect to the business is pretty neutral because we're able to continue to get basically gross margin improvement efficiency in our overall hosting environment in particular, which makes room for our use of all of the AI models that QuickFrame AI orchestrates in order to create TV quality and YouTube quality and social quality ads. It's essentially gross margin neutral. Then the funnel for core PTV, the answer is yes. The people we're bringing in on QuickFrame, that creates an opportunity for them to learn about Performance TV.

Mark Douglas
Mark Douglas
President and CEO at MNTN

One thing to keep in mind, though, is that a lot of the QuickFrame users are creators. They're not necessarily the marketers. It creates a cross-sell opportunity to make so that if that creator is using QuickFrame, and maybe they were creating something for social, they're now aware that, "Wait, I can create this asset for TV also." I think often it's fun for them because they haven't ever created a TV ad. There's definitely cross-sell opportunities. All of that is being closely looked at and kind of pursued as part of the growth of the QuickFrame AI product.

Robert Coolbrith
Robert Coolbrith
Analyst at Evercore ISI

Great. Thank you.

Mark Douglas
Mark Douglas
President and CEO at MNTN

Sure.

Operator

Your next question comes from Matt Weber with Canaccord Genuity. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Matt Weber
Matt Weber
Analyst at Canaccord Genuity

Hi. Thanks so much for taking the question, just one from me. On the strength and measurement and activation ecosystem that now features partnerships with HubSpot, Northbeam, Upwave, could you just update us on if those are Premium add-ons that advertisers pay for, if they're still part of the core platform? How do the economics of those partnerships work? Is there any impact to gross margin or other areas of the P&L as adoption scales? Thanks so much.

Mark Douglas
Mark Douglas
President and CEO at MNTN

It depends on the partnership, in terms of the answer to your question. For something like HubSpot, or some of our partnerships, I'm not 100% specifically sure on HubSpot, but some of our partnerships we integrate in at no cost to our customers. We use our buying power in the same way we use our buying power with the networks to secure advantageous pricing for our customers. We do that with some of our partnerships where that partnership is very broadly used across our entire customer base. Then other partnerships where something like attribution, where the customer is deciding which third-party attribution partner they want to use, then we build partnerships with that company, like Northbeam, as an example, and make sure that our customers get the best possible experience in MNTN's platform, but also the best possible data and experience in Northbeam's platform.

Mark Douglas
Mark Douglas
President and CEO at MNTN

The customer has a separate direct relation with Northbeam. It depends on the partnership. In all those cases, again, we get so much leverage in our gross margins as we scale our business from our revenue growth that we're able, when it's appropriate, to absorb the cost rather than adding additional cost. We want our customers to have an experience where there is one cost to using MNTN, which is the cost of media, and they're not getting nickeled and dimed for little charges here and there, which is more of the experience in the enterprise market. We believe in the SMB market, you should pay one price and get everything you need to be successful.

Matt Weber
Matt Weber
Analyst at Canaccord Genuity

Very helpful. Thank you.

Mark Douglas
Mark Douglas
President and CEO at MNTN

Sure.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Andrew Marok with Raymond James. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Andrew Marok
Andrew Marok
Director, Equity Research of Online Advertising and Digital Media at Raymond James

Hi. Thanks for taking my questions. Maybe two for me, please. Can you talk a bit about what to maybe expect in the second half from the flood of political spend that's coming down the pipe? Not for MNTN specifically directly, but maybe more in terms of effect on the volatility of CPMs in the space and what that leads into the ROAS calculations for your customers. Second, on QuickFrame, with it now in market for a full quarter now in 3.0, how's that feedback been and maybe what sort of features might be on the roadmap as a result of that feedback? Thank you.

Mark Douglas
Mark Douglas
President and CEO at MNTN

In terms of second half political spending, traditionally, remember, MNTN is pretty purpose-built for the SMB market, we traditionally have not participated in any significant way in political spending. We see that is dominated by some big agencies that we consider to be more enterprise clients. It doesn't have much of a direct impact on MNTN. In terms of the volatility on CPMs, that volatility tends to affect what we refer to as the open market. MNTN, we have direct deals with nearly, if not all, kind of media companies in America that are ad-supported. Those deals are bought, executed programmatically, but they have kind of commitments in the form of prenegotiated pricing for us to continue to spend on that platform.

Mark Douglas
Mark Douglas
President and CEO at MNTN

When you get these Q4 spikes or political spikes, they don't affect our pricing because that has already been negotiated with the network for the continued volume we continue to bring through the SMB market. The inventory that's left over might get affected, and that's referred to as open market, and that has more volatility in price and more volatility in margin. Neither of those will affect us. They may have some effect on anyone who's much more dependent on the open market, which we are not. I think we're over 99% private marketplace deals, meaning direct deals with the networks. In terms of QuickFrame 3.0 features, we essentially are doing releases every single week, if not multiple times a week. What you can expect is we have a team dedicated on QuickFrame, just to all of the iteration on the AI models themselves.

Mark Douglas
Mark Douglas
President and CEO at MNTN

The product orchestrates multiple models scene by scene in order to deliver the creative you get. We're getting feedback from our customers. We're watching their usage. We have our own vision. Another thing that we're putting a lot of emphasis on is having really fast use cases. I'll give you an example. You want to essentially take an existing ad and you want to reinvent it as a new ad, but with the same characters in it or something like that. Just really fast paths to executing really specific use cases with the product. We find when someone comes in the product and they have an idea what they want to do, and we have something that exactly matches their needs, they're even happier with the use of the product and we see more engagement. There's a lot of features coming.

Mark Douglas
Mark Douglas
President and CEO at MNTN

There's a pretty decent sized team on QuickFrame, and they are iterating literally at AI speed. Releases multiple times a week.

Andrew Marok
Andrew Marok
Director, Equity Research of Online Advertising and Digital Media at Raymond James

Great. Thank you.

Mark Douglas
Mark Douglas
President and CEO at MNTN

Sure.

Operator

Just a reminder, if you'd like to ask a question, please raise your hand. If you are dialed in, press star nine to raise your hand, star six to unmute. I see no further questions at this time. I'll now turn the call back to management for closing remarks.

Mark Douglas
Mark Douglas
President and CEO at MNTN

I just want to say thanks for everyone's time, and we're looking forward to Q3 in the second half of the year, and we'll, I'm sure, talk further before then and on our next earnings call. Thank you.

Operator

This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.

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