Richard K. Howe
Analyst · Lake Street Markets
Thank you, Alan, and thanks, everyone, for joining us today. We are pleased to report that revenue for the first quarter of 2013 was $15.9 million, a significant increase over the $8.8 million reported in the first quarter of 2012. We are equally encouraged by the improvement in our adjusted EBITDA for the quarter, which at $1.4 million, was meaningfully better than the comparable period in 2012 where adjusted EBITDA was $212,000. On today's call, I'd like to provide a brief overview of the first quarter, discuss where we are headed for the year and offer some updates on information communicated recently on the March 13 year-end call. Following my opening statements, I will turn the call over to Wally for a more detailed accounting of our financial results, after which, I will have some closing remarks for us. As a reminder for those of you who are new to the company, we organize our business and report along 2 segments. Our Network segment, which includes all the revenue from the delivery of ads into our partners, ad mobile and desktop websites and applications, as well as the revenue from our owned and operated websites. And the Applications segment, which includes the revenue from the company-owned applications, which are marketed directly to consumers through various online marketing methods. The growth year-over-year was driven principally from within the Network segment, which now makes up roughly 68% of overall revenue and contributed $10.8 million in the quarter. The Applications segment delivered $5.1 million or 32% of overall revenue in the quarter. The increase in contribution to overall revenue from the Network segment reflects our focus on this part of the business and the opportunity we see within the mobile space. More on that later. On our year-end call, we had anticipated revenue for Q1 would be somewhere between $16.2 million and $16.5 million and while revenue in the quarter was slightly lower than we had thought, it represents, nonetheless, a very strong first quarter, given the more typical seasonality issues we've experienced between January and April. The reason why revenue was lower than expected was because we experienced the marketplace pricing change in mid-March that was unexpected. This is not an uncommon event in our business and typically occurs when the marketplace owners, which in this case are Microsoft and Yahoo!, modify their pricing algorithms so as to optimize performance for themselves and their advertisers. Now since we do not typically receive forewarning of these changes, the challenge for us is not the change itself, but rather adapting to the change, which often takes between 30 and 90 days. We do not view this as a long-term issue and, in fact, we see revenue improving well leading into May, based on the changes we made in late March, and we expect to see continuing improvement throughout the remainder of the second quarter. Quality, subsequent to the changes, is as high as it's ever been, which for us is a strong indication that we have adapted quickly and correctly. Based on our internal reporting, revenue for the first 7 days of May was approximately $155,000 per day and has been headed upwards since the end of March and is already trending higher year-over-year. Our largest revenue day so far this quarter was $170,000. Within the first quarter, revenue, gross profit, operating margins, the net loss and debt were all improved materially relative to the last year. And as we exit the first quarter, we expect to see ongoing benefits to operations from this trend into Q3 and Q4, particularly, now that we have executed on our office consolidations, a move designed to improve cash flow within the business. Managing cash remains a very important part of operating our business and we have been cash flow positive since August of last year and the $1.4 million of adjusted EBITDA delivered within the quarter reflects the progress the team has made here. That being said, we remain determined to implement efficiencies wherever possible and in our business. And it maybe worth noting that on a revenue per headcount basis, Inuvo is significantly more efficient than its peer group. In March, we had announced that we are expecting to realize approximately $120,000 of monthly expense benefits from the move. As discussed on that call, the 3 largest components of that savings were the Tampa lease, which we exited in March; the New York lease, which I am pleased to report we sublet in April at cost; and the New York data centers, which we are on track to exit by the end of June. We have already secured 75% of this benefit and we expect ongoing cost benefits associated with the move as a result of the lower cost basis in our new location in Conway, Arkansas. The new office in Arkansas has been up and running since April 1 and we now have over 19 full-time employees in that office out of the 36 total employees we have across the company, currently. I remain pleased with the quality of talent we have recruited in Arkansas and while we have experienced some disruption associated with the move, we feel confident that we have and are managing through that transition judiciously. We have leased shared office space in New York, for our New York-based employees, and moved our key Florida-based employees to home-based offices. I'd like to now briefly talk about the 2 segments of the business and where we are headed, starting first with the Network segment. This segment of the business has been the principal driver of our growth over the last 12 months. Our expansion into mobile and the development of owned and operated Web Properties both rely on the ad services from this segment to be successful. With this in perspective, roughly 12% of our overall revenue in the first quarter was from owned and operated websites and we are already trending towards 18% in the second quarter. As it relates to mobile traffic, 15% of all traffic within the network originated through a mobile device in the first quarter and this too has been headed higher in the second quarter, already trending towards 20%. We are currently working either directly or indirectly with over 150 mobile applications that are in various stages of their implementation of our ad services. Consumer web activity is still growing robustly at 6% a year, but mobile web traffic is increasing at an astonishing 55% per year. We are extremely well-positioned both as a result of our technology and our relationships to take advantage of this opportunity for market expansion. Now we recently announced the launch of our local search web property into Europe. We see attractive growth potential in the local search part of the business over the next 18 months and expect to continue the expansion of our domestic and internationally owned websites across a number of high-interest consumer categories. You should expect to hear about launches of new web properties throughout the remainder of the year and as has been discussed in the past, each new web property will typically be followed by the launch of a companion application, increasingly, a mobile-based application. Additionally, within this segment of our business, we have also been very encouraged by many of the new growth initiatives coming out of Yahoo! and we were working together with them on some exciting new ways to package search results for the display markets. More on that in the ensuing months. The Applications segment of the business continues to improve following a number of recent changes we discussed on our year-end call in March. Our application business should be viewed in many respects in a manner similar to which we view our expansion into owned and operated websites. Not only do we want to serve ads into the applications of others, which we, in fact, do today, but we also, where possible and when it makes sense to do so, want to effectively control that distribution by owning the application itself. The ALOT Appbar is a perfect example of this controlled distribution strategy, where we have approximately 4.7 million worldwide users of an application whose income is derived from advertising. View this as one of many channels where Inuvo drives profitable revenue from advertising, each and every one of them competing internally for marketing dollars and resources based on their respective contributions to the overall business. While this is perhaps not commonly known, we already provide advertising and coupon services to a number of toolbar companies, so this concept of both partnering and owning is already well proven at Inuvo from both a website and application perspective. This segment of the business has contracted over the last 6 months. However, this only means that we are optimizing this channel for profitability. And while we could grow this part of the business more aggressively through our marketing spend, currently, the economics associated with other opportunities offer a more immediate return on investment. This does not mean we are not taking steps to position this segment for growth. On the product development front, we recently reported the launch of a chrome version of the ALOT Appbar, which opens us up to a growing market that we had previously not served and we are also preparing development perspectives strategically, we have focused our attention towards mobile-deployed applications. As mentioned earlier, each of the websites we launch is expected to have its companion application and we expect to launch our first mobile application with BargainMatch in late second quarter. I would like to now turn the call over to Wally for a more detailed analysis of the financials. Wally?