Welcome to ACCESS Newswire Inc.'s fourth quarter and year ended 2025 earnings conference call.

My name is Charlie Torenzio, and I lead product in our PR Optimizer team here at ACCESS Newswire Inc. I joined in 2019 from the Newswire.com business. I have led the PR Optimizer team along with marketing, brand, and product strategy, and I am fortunate that many of the talented people I worked alongside then are still building with us today. Their passion and commitment have been a driving force behind everything we have accomplished. From day one, the ACCESS Newswire Inc. team welcomed us as partners, and bringing our teams together has made us a stronger, more innovative company. This past year has been transformational, from our rebrand to the product advancements we have brought to market, and I can tell you we are just getting started. Our focus is clear: give the world’s largest brands the tools they need to lead in public relations storytelling and investor relations communications. And we are building that future right now. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that statements made in this conference call concerning future revenues, results from operations, financial position, markets, economic conditions, product releases, partnerships, and any other statements that may be construed as predictions of future performance or events are forward-looking statements. These statements involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such statements. We will also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures which are provided for informational purposes and should be considered in addition to, not as a substitute for, GAAP results. With that said, I will turn the call over to our Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Brian Balbirnie, and our Chief Financial Officer, Steve Knerr.

Thank you, Charlie. Not only has it been a pleasure getting to know you since the Newswire acquisition, but having you as part of the team in a product leadership capacity has ignited so many things that we wanted to do here for years. For those of you that do not know, along with our development team, Charlie is leading the transformation of our subscription product innovation, putting us in an amazing place not only to compete for wallet share, but also to have a seat at the table in first-to-market innovation. Morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today to review ACCESS Newswire Inc.'s fourth quarter and full year 2025 results. Steve and I are grateful for your continued engagement and support as we close out what has been a truly transformational year for this company. Our fourth quarter results cap off a year defined by strategic focus, operational improvement, and meaningful progress in building a subscription-first business, delivering consistent year-over-year revenue, meaningful expansion in profitability, and continued operational discipline, all while investing in the platform innovations that position us for an exciting 2026. Revenue for the quarter came in at $5,800,000, up approximately $100,000 sequentially and essentially flat year over year. Adjusted EBITDA increased slightly to $881,000 from $871,000, representing 15% of revenue. Gross margin continued to be strong at 77%, up from 75% in the same quarter of last year. Before I hand it to Steve, I wanted to highlight a few metrics that demonstrate the continued health of our business. Total active customers grew to 12,802, up 4% year over year, from 12,004 in Q3. Average recurring revenue per subscription customer also increased year over year from $10,008.44 to $12,005.34, up 16% year over year, reflecting continued upsell success and platform adoption. Looking at the prior quarter, we saw an 8% increase in ARR sequentially. Steve will now discuss the fourth quarter and year end in 2025 for you. Then I would like to come back on and discuss what we have been up to in Q4 and what we have been doing here in Q1, about our product enhancements and what is in store for our customers into 2026. Steve, I will hand it over to you, sir.

Thank you, Brian, and good morning, everyone. As Brian mentioned, this has been a transformational year for us. And Q4 was another quarter of generating solid operating margins and cash flow. I will now discuss some of the details which led to these results. Total revenue for Q4 2025 was $5,800,000, a decrease of $27,000 compared to the same period of 2024, making revenue for the full year of 2025 $22,600,000, a decrease of $438,000, or 2%, from $23,100,000 in 2024. Core press release revenue is up approximately 2% from the same quarter of the prior year, and 1% for the full year of 2025 compared to 2024. The increase for the quarter is due to higher volume; however, volume was slightly lower on a full-year basis compared to the prior year. The increase in press release volume was more than offset by a decrease in Pro Plan revenue, webcasting, and IR website revenue. Overall revenue from subscriptions increased to 53% during the quarter, compared to 45% during the same quarter of the prior year. Gross margin percentages improved during the fourth quarter and full year of 2025, increasing to 77% for both periods compared to 75% and 76% for the fourth quarter and full year of 2024, respectively. The increase in gross margin percentage is primarily due to lower headcount due to increased efficiency within our operational teams and systems, partially offset by increased distribution costs as we continue to expand our distribution footprint. Gross margin for Q4 2025 increased $107,000, or 2%, to $4,500,000, and gross margin for the full year decreased $126,000, or 1%, to $17,300,000, primarily due to the decline in revenue for the year. Moving down the income statement to operating loss, we posted an operating loss of $761,000 for Q4 2025, and $1,900,000 for…

Thanks, Steve. Q4 capped off a year that I believe will define ACCESS Newswire Inc.'s future. We did virtually everything that we said we would do. We transformed the business, redefined the core offerings, and moved the business to majority recurring subscriptions, emerging leaner, more profitable, and a more innovative company. Now it is time to grow. For the full year 2025, as most of you know, we accomplished the following: completed the strategic rebrand to ACCESS Newswire Inc.; divested our legacy compliance business, sharpening our focus; reduced debt by over 83%; reduced OpEx, something we will continue to do into 2026; retooled our entire back-office systems and processes end to end; grew subscription revenue to approximately 53% of total revenue in 2025; increased ARR per subscriber by 16% year over year as we talked about previously; deployed our AI editorial validation internally, saving 5% of editorial time per release; launched our ACCESS EDU and Bateman Study competition; launched a sister brand, PressRelease.com, with single-circuit distribution that began marketing efforts here in Q1. This, coupled with the following updates here in Q1, have us hitting on virtually all cylinders: launching our AI validation that we previously released to our editors in a customer-facing environment now called ACCESS Verified; social monitoring, a key new component of our subscription set that has set forth the path to see ARR increases at the beginning of Q2. This was initially released to thousands of EDU subscribers in 2025. ARR increases of approximately 25% will be seen beginning Q2; Marketplace, the beginning of several partnerships we believe will drive further awareness to our brand with companies like Hootsuite and many others to follow here in the coming quarters; and another one that I am a big fan of is “Kill the Report.” Our first version…

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, at this time, we will be conducting our question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press 1 on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press 2 if you would like to remove your question from the queue. Please lift your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment, please, while we poll for questions. Thank you. Our first question is coming from Mike Grondahl with Northland Securities. Your line is live.

Hey, Brian. The press release notes that you anticipate generating incremental revenue through premium subscription tiers and per-release pricing. Could you give a couple examples of those?

Yeah, absolutely, Mike. Thank you for the question. We will break it up into a couple of different parts. The first part: today, customers are purchasing both a fixed-fee subscription model, which includes their news distribution, media monitoring, database, analytics, and pitching. Those subscribing customers that have upgraded to a, call it, a Plus/Pro version of their subscription will now include their social media monitoring as well. So the lift in ARR is $200 additional per month for those customers. That is the incremental. So when we talked earlier in the call about adding additional products throughout the year, we are confident and believe that the same model will hold throughout the year as we continue to add on vital components to them that they will continue to upgrade to take advantage. On a single press release, the second part of the customer that cannot commit to a complete subscription for the year has the option to license or buy or use any one of our products in a singular form. They are now given the option to add social monitoring and add a distribution report on a per-product basis. This gives them the option to try, test, and use the solution without the commitment, and then gives us the opportunity to build the pipeline to convert them to subscription customers later. The “Kill the Report” that we have been using for the last couple quarters will be one of those marquee products here beginning in a couple of weeks. Customers will get their traditional distribution report because that is what the industry is used to, and we will guide them down the path of the more interactive report that we will be showing on our website here by the end of the week. Folks will be able to upgrade to that again on a pay-per-use basis or a subscription basis as well.

Got it. And then could you talk a little bit about volume trends and pricing trends that you are seeing on the newswire side? I think you said volumes were still down 1% year over year. And maybe that was revenue. But just talk about those two trends a little bit.

Yeah. We are holding price. We have actually done very well. We continue to do renewals and new deals at higher per-press-release prices than the prior year. I think that is a maturity and a branding exercise. We went through a number of years, like everybody else did when they started in this industry. You have to build brand. You have to build trust, credibility, and follow-through execution, and we are long past that now. So we have a seat at the table to take meaningful price and share. Good news for us is, because of some of the AI advancements we have done, because of the fixed distribution costs for the most part that we have, volume indicates significant expansion in gross margin and EBITDA margin for us. So now the focus is back on volume growth—storytelling for our customers—that is aided by several different things in the market. One, and not to continually use the words AI or LLM, but every natural language processing system needs more content to ingest, and that content needs to come in different mediums: press releases, blogs, posts, and white papers. So the more content customers are doing, the more chances that they are going to see their citations and their web content and their press releases appear at LLM searches. We are advocating to our customers that the more content is better, so we are going to begin to see volume increases as a result of this. We are testing with a partner our product at the end of the year that will give our customers the ability to make their website and their newsrooms LLM-ready so that they become indexed like they were on Google and how they have been on Google for years. That dynamic and world is changing. So there is a lot that is going to happen there. We see volumes increasing rather than being flat or single-digit in the market. To be fair to all of us, as much as it is for us, that is for everybody—that is the industry as a whole—and that is one of the reasons why we released PressRelease.com, to give those early customers beginning to tell their stories and understand what public relations is the ability to buy a single circuit for a least cost to get involved and then grow there. We saw a good percentage of those customers—40-plus percent of our new PressRelease.com customers in Q4—come back and repurchase. Those are good indicators for us, and again, we continue to increase those prices over the period, which is a strong indicator that the market is there.

Got it. And then lastly, just how should we think about OpEx in 2026 relative to 2025?

Yeah. Look, I think that there is further optimization that we can do. As Steve mentioned in some of his prepared remarks, we were fortunate enough to exit a lease that we had two years left on. There are some incremental savings there. It is about $320,000 a year in savings. We will get there. We have some additional G&A and other OpEx savings that we are going to monetize throughout the year by efficiencies in technology, efficiencies in workflow automation, and systems that we are streamlining. Steve and I and the management team continue to look at it, and we will be at it again today trying to find the next layer of savings. So we expect them to hold to what they were or be below what they were in 2025.

Thank you, guys.

Thank you, Mike.

Thank you. Our next question is coming from Jacob Stephan with Lake Street Capital Markets.

Hey, guys. Nice quarter. I guess just to start out, maybe I am wondering if you could break down the KPIs and give a little bit more detail here. I know you guys had 47 new customers; you noted 45 came from EDU customers. In the slideshow, you had 974 subs, and I understand the math—you know, 974 plus 45—but I am wondering if you could break that down on the EDU customer side a little bit. Are those actual universities, or are these students? Help me think through that.

Yeah. Those are actual universities. Our objective with the EDU program is that we felt strongly that, if you think about the typical school that you went to, there is a degree-focused public relations and communications department within every school. The PRSSA teams are very involved in that school at the university. But we looked at it beyond that. So those numbers are just those schools within the universities that have deployed our programs and a teaching exercise to their senior students to be able to use media monitoring, pitching database, and how to write a press release and a story. When we look beyond that, the opportunity for us is, if you go down the hall or across the university campus to the engineering department or the nursing program or any other degree program, they also have their own public relations teams there doing their work. By research, we have been able to identify that there are at least eight schools within each university that have a public relations department that do not know about us and are now being introduced to us from the public relations professors at that part of the school. So the opportunity is significant for us. We are going to invest sales and marketing there. As we round out the Bateman program here in the next couple of weeks and select a winner, we are going to expand that. The second part is these students—the 4,300 and change—they are registered in our platform as EDU students. They are free. We do not account for them in our customer numbers or our subscription numbers. They are using the product on behalf of the university, and they will be converted at the end of the year at graduation to an individual plan with the option for a monitoring component to take with them into their career-focused areas. Our hope is we are going to get a percentage of those to convert into customers. They will go into private practice, public relations firms, go into enterprises in the public relations or marketing departments, and bring our tools with them as their certifications will illustrate. We think it is a long investment into something that we will start to see incremental growth. But you are right, you did the math on the numbers from the press release to the prepared slides today. That number is those EDU customers.

Okay. And then maybe just on the ARR front, you guys said that the ARR does not include EDU. Obviously, nice improvement there. But are these customers higher ARR or lower?

Yeah. The EDU customers through the Bateman program are a $0 ARR model. We agreed with PRSSA, as a method of the program, to provide those subscriptions to them during the period at no cost. When Bateman is over, they convert. We have already converted a couple of them in the last couple of weeks. We have several proposals out for others. We have closed two PR firms this quarter as a result of some of the efforts that the Bateman program has done. So we will see the monetary side of this happening in this quarter.

Got it. That is helpful. And then I just wanted to touch on the gross margin improvements year over year. I am wondering if you could break down the 200 bps-plus improvement year over year. I know AI has been a huge focus for you guys. How much of that is AI-driven? How much do you feel like is more scale and kind of the ARR expansion?

Yeah. I think ARR expansion is a contributor. I think AI is a contributor. I would say that I do not know that scale yet is the contributor to the influence of that. I would say it is fifty-fifty. I think our ARR increasing is helping. I think efficiency gains and distribution fixed costs are contributing. We have been negotiating those contracts for years to get us to a position that, when scale does happen, the flowback to gross margin contribution is even more. As we talked about earlier in the call, in a question from Mike, as we see the industry wanting to tell stories more, utilize press releases as a foundation to have LLM indexing, and volume starts to increase, we are doing that from a fixed AI cost. We are doing that from fixed distribution cost. We are doing that from a fixed editorial cost. So the more volume that comes, the incremental gross margins will illustrate themselves and show. That is one of the reasons why we put AI to work both in a customer and in a back-office usage pattern. But I think it is important from a customer perspective to know that our editorial human eyes will always be there. This is curation and quality content, and we want to be sure that we uphold that responsibility to our customers and the market—how we keep our distribution. AI is a great efficiency gain for us, and we are beginning to see even more and more improvements there, but it will never replace the human curation portion of that.

Got it. And then maybe just one last one for me, kind of a broader picture question. What aspects of the overall product strategy are changing—the go-to-market strategy? What do you feel like is going to be the biggest contributor to hitting that 1,500-subscriber number at the end of the year?

I think there are a couple. This industry is moving very rapidly. Not only is it moving rapidly from an economic perspective that we can talk about, it also is moving from an innovation perspective. A lot of companies are left behind because their technology stacks are in a position that they cannot innovate at the pace of which a good many of us can, and us being the predominant one. We spent the last year after divestiture of our compliance business retooling our stacks, building to be very agile, and building an automation management system on top of that so we can pivot and change our applications and customer outputs for deliverables within seconds rather than months or quarters like the competition does. We see that as a big innovation for us that we are going to be able to do more in our platform than most can in this industry. What I will lead you down the path to, Jacob, really is that, at the end of the day, the storytelling process is more than just a press release. It is a message. It is a snippet on social media. It is a podcast. It is a blog post. It is an LLM citation and a trusted article that somebody from ChatGPT or Perplexity picks up. There needs to be a curation platform for that. Today, when we look at our network of our competitors, everybody does a really good job of doing one or two of these elements, and that is not to discredit them or take anything away from our competition. But we also do that, and we do it in a way that gives our customers the ability to create a story, share it on social, pitch media, and do everything from one single interface.…

Great. Very helpful. I will leave it there. Thanks, guys.

Thank you, Jacob. Next question is coming from Brock Irwin with Clever Investing. Your line is live.

Hello. I am afraid you could not hear me. Sorry, I was on mute. Hey, guys. I hope you are doing well. I can really sense the excitement from what you guys are working on and the building for the future, so I think this is an interesting transformational time for the company to be sure. Just a couple of questions from me. The first is it looks like you guys repurchased a small number of shares in Q4. Is it possible you can disclose if you continued repurchasing in Q1? Also, how do you think about the pace of repurchases relative to other investments you might be making?

Yeah, it is a great question, Brock. Nice to hear from you. Yes, we did purchase a small amount of shares during Q4 under the previously announced repurchase plan of $1,000,000. There is a good portion of that plan that is still left that will be resuming here shortly. The commitment for the repurchase is still consistent. We have not wavered from that. There is still three-quarters of that amount still sitting there that is earmarked for us to execute against, and we have every intent to continue to do that. When that plan is filled and completed, as you know, the board will look at other options for part of our capital allocation strategy. If additional repurchase plans will be needed and/or advantageous for us to do so, we will make that decision at that point. The 10-K will illustrate to you today when it is filed this afternoon there were 18,000 shares—or 20,000 shares—that were repurchased during the fourth quarter, and you should expect the remaining of those to be repurchased here in the first half of the year.

Awesome. Okay, cool. Another thing you touched on in your prepared remarks was the churn and customers falling off of those subscriptions. Can you just talk a little bit about what you are doing to address that? What are you learning from your customers, and what are maybe some improvements you can make to improve those metrics?

Yeah. In November of last year, we reset our customer experience teams. We put a new manager on top of the team, rebuilt some of the processes internally to ensure what we call internally “time to value” is measured more accurately—meaning the customer is trained, supported, and made sure they are using the platform to begin to feel the value of it sooner than later. I will tell you this: like everybody else, we are going to give you the facts as they are and not have excuses. The true reality is that 70% of the churned customers in our subscription business is due to credit card failures and payments. It is not due to application use or application problems. When we looked at just our meaningful churn, it is a fraction of what it is in printed form. But look, to be honest with you, churn is churn, and we report it as such. There are mechanisms that you can do from a payment perspective. As you know, we are a B2B business, not an e-commerce business. We are finding out that the majority of subscriptions are purchased much more in an e-commerce way than any other way. So we are retooling some of our Magento front-end systems and credit card intel/knowledge to be able to be predictive and understand the risks of taking credit cards, what kinds of credit cards they are, and how those payments work. Our sales team, beginning in Q1, began removing monthly options to customers and going to quarterly or annual payments. That will help further reduce the credit card issues that we have had in the past. Make no mistake, that is what those are. We are doing a lot here at the end of Q4 and into Q1 to help change some of that. Steve and I meet with our director of operations that runs CX and our sales leaders every week to discuss customer usage, customer training, and customer feedback loops to be sure that we are being reactive and doing everything that we can do to reduce that churn. We are confident that we are going to do that, but we have had some issues there in the past three or four months. There is no doubt.

Okay. Great. I appreciate the answers. Thanks.

Thanks, Brock. As we have no further questions in the queue at this time, I would like to turn the call back over to Mr. Balbirnie for any closing remarks.

Ali, thank you as well. As always, thank you again to everyone else for joining us today. We are energized by the fourth quarter milestones and the progress made throughout 2025. The product momentum we are bringing into 2026. ACCESS Newswire Inc. is positioned well for the future, with a scalable platform, expanding recurring revenue, innovation and new products, and a focused team dedicated to execution and growth. We appreciate our shareholders, partners, and customers for the continued trust and support in 2025. With a year of transformation, 2026 will be a year of growth, and we look forward to updating you next quarter. Thank you.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today’s call. You may disconnect your lines at this time, and we thank you for your participation.