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Inuvo, Inc. (INUV)

Q4 2013 Earnings Call· Mon, Mar 10, 2014

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Inuvo Incorporated Year End 2013 Conference Call. During today's presentation all parties will be in a listen-only mode. Following the presentation the conference will be open for questions. (Operator Instructions) I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Alan Sheinwald of Alliance Advisors. Please go ahead.

Alan

Management

Thank you, operator and good afternoon. I'd like to thank everyone for joining us today for the Inuvo Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2013 Shareholder Update Conference Call. I have with us today Mr. Richard Howe, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Board and Mr. Wally Ruiz, Chief Financial Officer of Inuvo, as your presenters today on the call today. Before we begin, I'm going to review the company's Safe Harbor statement. The statements in this conference call that are not descriptions of historical facts are forward-looking statements relating to future events and as such, all forward-looking statements are made pursuant to the Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, and actual results may differ materially. When used in this call, the words anticipate, could, enable, estimate, intend, expect, believe, potential, will, should, project and similar expressions as they relate to Inuvo, Inc., are as such, a forward-looking statement. Investors are cautioned that all forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, which may cause actual results to differ from those anticipated by Inuvo at this time. In addition, other risks are more fully described in Inuvo's public filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which can be reviewed at www.sec.gov. Well, with that out of the way now, I'd now like to congratulate management on the tremendous progress they’ve made in 2013, and introduce Mr. Richard Howe, Chairman and CEO of Inuvo. Rich, the floor is yours.

Sheinwald

Management

Thank you, operator and good afternoon. I'd like to thank everyone for joining us today for the Inuvo Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2013 Shareholder Update Conference Call. I have with us today Mr. Richard Howe, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Board and Mr. Wally Ruiz, Chief Financial Officer of Inuvo, as your presenters today on the call today. Before we begin, I'm going to review the company's Safe Harbor statement. The statements in this conference call that are not descriptions of historical facts are forward-looking statements relating to future events and as such, all forward-looking statements are made pursuant to the Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, and actual results may differ materially. When used in this call, the words anticipate, could, enable, estimate, intend, expect, believe, potential, will, should, project and similar expressions as they relate to Inuvo, Inc., are as such, a forward-looking statement. Investors are cautioned that all forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, which may cause actual results to differ from those anticipated by Inuvo at this time. In addition, other risks are more fully described in Inuvo's public filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which can be reviewed at www.sec.gov. Well, with that out of the way now, I'd now like to congratulate management on the tremendous progress they’ve made in 2013, and introduce Mr. Richard Howe, Chairman and CEO of Inuvo. Rich, the floor is yours.

Richard Howe

Management

Thank you, Alan, and thanks, everyone, for joining us today. A year ago we were entering 2013 with a number of key issues that needed to be addressed if we were going to continue to be successful at building Inuvo into the kind of company we would all want to own. Among those issues, with the need to lower operating expenses and produce a profit within the business, the need to transition away from the toolbar product and the desire to expand our partner segment into mobile. We had a plan to address each of these issues. And I am pleased to report that the plan has worked very well. I would like to start discussion today by providing you with more detail about those plans and the results which we've seen associated with them. Later on in the discussion I will give you a sense of what we will be focused on in 2014. Firstly, we all know it was time to build a scalable foundation for our business, one the was supported by profitability. This was really the only way we thought we could put ourselves in a position to make that kinds of investments required to expand into higher value, higher growth lines of business that we're aligned more closely with the future of the internet. Now as you know quiet while from our previous conference calls, we addressed this issue very early in the year by making a conscious and calculated decision to move the company, and I suppose if we had moved down the street from our original location, the story might have ended there. But that’s not what we did. Rather, we decided to take advantage of certain relationships we had in the State of Arkansas where we could secure a grant to fund…

Wallace Ruiz

Management

Thank you, Rich. Good afternoon everyone. Thank you for joining us today to discuss the Company’s financial results for the fourth quarter of 2013 and for the full year. My comments will refer to the press release and the 10-K filed earlier today. Inuvo reported net revenue of $11.4 million in the fourth quarter of 2013, a $4.8 million decrease from the fourth quarter of last year. For the year ended December 31, 2013, the company reported overall net revenue of $55 million, a 3% increase compared to the prior year. The Partner segment which delivers advertisements to our partners' websites and applications and represents 65% of the company’s total revenue in 2013 reported net revenue of $7.6 million in the current quarter, a $1.8 million decrease from the same quarter last year. The decrease within the Partner segment in the fourth quarter 2013 of the last year is due to an uncharacteristically high quarter last year and to our efforts to transition away from publisher that focus heavily on marketing models with non-standard traffic sources, the result of which the company is shutting down a number of such publishers in the quarter and establishing a reserve of approximately $263,000 from revenue. For the year ended December 31, 2013, the Partner segment revenue was up from $25.9 million in 2012 to $35.9 million in 2013, a 39% growth rate. The Owned and Operated segment delivers advertisements to websites and applications that Inuvo designs, builds and markets under the ALOT brand. The Owned and Operated segment reported $3.8 million of revenue in the fourth quarter of 2013, a $3 million decrease from the same quarter last year. As Rich mentioned, our decision to transition away from the toolbar product was the primary reason for this decline. The toolbar revenue was $1.2…

Richard Howe

Management

Thanks Wally. We had a very successful 2013, it was a year in which we moved the company to a new state at no cost to our shareholders. We reduced operating expenses $8 million, we delivered $0.5 million of net income coming off a year where we lost 7 million, we grew a brand new business to its current $15 million run rate and we reduced our debt from $7.8 million to $6.1 million. As we look ahead towards 2014 we have two primary objectives for the year and they are respectively; to focus on growing our owned and operating network of sites and mobile applications. We recently announced yet another expansion of the Inuvo business with the launch of our travel site, the expansion of our finance site and the redesign of the local site. Please see our press release for more details. And the focus on the expansion of the partner network into the mobile space. We entered this vertical last year with a number of tests and this year we plan to dedicate resources and capital to aggressively build out our mobile presence. This business grew 35% year-over-year in 2013. In conclusion, we expect 2014 to be more profitable than 2013. We expect our O&O business to continue to grow aggressively. We expect to be transitioned away from the toolbar business entirely within the first quarter, typically our lowest quarter in any year. And we expect to have a greater percentage of our overall revenue be from mobile. With that, I would like to now turn the call back over the operator for questions and answers. Operator?

Operator

Operator

Thank you, sir. (Operator Instructions). Our first question is from the line of Matthew Paul with Sidoti & Company. Please go ahead. Matthew Paul - Sidoti & Company: Hi guys. Thanks for having me and taking my question. First question is for Wally, I want to ask what the effect of your effort to increase your mobile development will have on margins for 2014 and moving forward?

Wally Ruiz

Analyst

Yes. We’re expecting increase in our mobile business in both the Partner segment and the Owned and Operated segment both. And typically we’re seeing higher margins in Owned and Operated right now. So, we would expect it to have a favourable impact going forward and as Rich mentioned that’s a growing area for us in 2014. Matthew Paul - Sidoti & Company: Sure. For favorable impact on the revenue you planned you know from the mobile portfolio but how about I guess in the cost effect?

Wally Ruiz

Analyst

We’re delving into it and in the margins in the first few months of this year have been very favourable in the mobile -- on our mobile business right now. We’re very encouraged by it. Matthew Paul - Sidoti & Company: Thank you. Moving forward, I know applications have sort of grown as of late over the last few quarter but do you have a number in terms of number of web sites and applications you’re looking to roll out in 2014 or by the quarter, has that changed at all?

Richard Howe

Management

It really hasn’t and we’re cautious about trying to put a number out purposely so that we don’t set an expectation we can’t deliver on but you’ve seen the history here over the last, we call it six or nine months right in and we’re running at least one if not more new web properties a quarter and I think that will probably be the case as we look out for the year. Matthew Paul - Sidoti & Company: Okay. And last question as the O&O portfolio grows, can you just I guess set a little color on your strategy to review clicks, number of clicks, I guess just share absolute numbers of traffic, what I’m trying to ask is, is your strategy to grow clicks per site visit or just to keep funnelling additional traffic in there or somewhat or both?

Richard Howe

Management

Well, there is a bunch of metrics that we track as it relates to O&O. So, it’s not any one. So, do we track clicks yes, we may get paid at least in part based on individuals who click on ads after we give a presentment of them along with the content that we’re delivering that’s one. But we also are keenly watching pages because we have other monetization techniques on the site banner ads and the like. So, that’s an important aspect of the design of the web properties. And, can’t remember what the third thing you asked. Matthew Paul - Sidoti & Company: So I was just trying I guess to get possibility if the primary strategy was to just gain incremental traffic with each website you’re launching.

Richard Howe

Management

Yes, both inorganic and organic, right. So, I think everybody understands, everybody launches web properties, spends marketing dollars to try to get traffic to come to the websites and the margins in the business improve as people repeat visit, right because you do not have to pay for them when they repeat. So, we also track that quite carefully because the intent is to try to get as many people return again as we can. Matthew Paul - Sidoti & Company: So I just want to make sure is it safe, am I thinking about this correctly that it's just -- from the strategy side, bigger part of your business is just driving incremental traffic burst trying to increase click per user, per visitor or something like that.

Richard Howe

Management

It's all of that. No, but there is not any one. I mean we’re trying to design high quality, excellent content that appeal to users regardless of the device that they’re entering the property through and of course what we want to do is to get them to stay as long as they feel they need to and the longer they stay the more likely they are to either see a banner ad or display ad that we're showing them or to click on some other ad that we've got located somewhere in the property.

Operator

Operator

(Operator Instructions). And I’m no further questions at this time; pardon me we did have a person queue up for a question. We have John Gilliam with Point Clear Strategic, please go ahead.

John Gilliam - Point Clear Strategic

Analyst

Have you guys -- I apologize if you addressed this early in the call, I missed about the first 10 minutes of the call, but on the transition away from the toolbar business, have you had any feedback from Google who's of course been one of our main partners in terms of monetization, have you had any feedback from them on the transition away from the toolbar business and the corresponding increase in the business on the O&O side?

Richard Howe

Management

Nothing specific John, clearly they’re aware of the strategy that we’ve had here and in fact we presented that strategy to them I guess a year ago. So in that regard they’re fully aware of what it is that we’re trying to do and why we’re doing it and how we’re doing it, as our partner and there’s no issue if that’s what you’re trying to get at.

John Gilliam - Point Clear Strategic

Analyst

Well I was just curious to know in fact, what I understand that’s not a business they’ve been really high on in the past; one of the largest players had actually just about been shut down by Google from what I understood. So, that’s a positive I think and just curious feedback that you had and wondered even if there had been any potential for better rev share as a result of the higher quality traffic I think that there’s been perceived with move away from the toolbox side.

Richard Howe

Management

There’s always the possibility for higher rev shared in our business model and in the context of our contracts with our suppliers. It’s almost always associated with hitting new tiers and we’re getting close there with the sites business now. As it relates to -- again, just to talk about the toolbar business, I don’t think it’s any surprise to anybody that the toolbar business model is a business model has been in decline. And I said earlier John, you weren’t on the call, but that’s the result of people making it harder to market, they try to get people to download the browser developers making it more difficult to integrate into the browsers. So we knew this a year ago and we put a plan in place to make sure that we -- that we could change the mix of products in that part of our business and we did that, very successfully in 2013.

John Gilliam - Point Clear Strategic

Analyst

Yes, you guys, you definitely moved the bar forward on that, great job and can you give, me what would be the best example of one that Inuvo Owned and Operated mobile sites, because I’m super familiar with all the web properties and I've seen some of the apps, but I’ve not gotten familiar with the mobile sites that we have.

Richard Howe

Management

All of the sites are mobile ready, so anyone them helps.alot.com, finance.alot.com, travel.alot.com, anyone of the sites that we have, local.alot.com, every single one of them is mobile accessible.

John Gilliam - Point Clear Strategic

Analyst

Okay, okay, I followed you and I think I’d misunderstood that. You mentioned I believe that there was close to a 100 apps that we’ve developed in house that are currently, I may have printed that wrong, I apologize if, do we have around…

Richard Howe

Management

Yes, so let me help you out here John. So we have -- as part of our strategy we’ve always had a desire with our, call it web site strategy, it’s not really a web site strategy, it’s a web site and application strategy, but we’ve always had the desire with this strategy to not only launch web properties but to launch synergistic mobile applications that align with those web properties, and we started working on that, in concert with the web site launches that we had and the 100,000 you’re referring to is really our first foray into that with a couple of applications, one’s a weather application, the other one’s actually a photo application, and that’s why I threw it out there just to let people know that we do expect to be both developing and promoting multiple applications alongside our web site.

John Gilliam - Point Clear Strategic

Analyst

Yes thank you I’ve seen that, I’m sorry I got the number, right, it’s just that we had a 100,000 active users of our internally developed apps and that’s amazing that we’ve gotten to that level just through organic growth due to Google app store, because if you’re a user of Google app store you know there’s so many different things to attract your attention and that we’ve grown it organically at that level is pretty impressive.

Operator

Operator

And I’m showing no further questions at this time, I’d now like to turn the call back over to management for closing remarks.

Richard Howe

Management

Thanks, Camille. I’d like to thank everyone who joined us on today’s call, we appreciate your continued interest in Inuvo and we look forward to reporting our progress over the coming quarters.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude our conference call for today. Thank you for your participation, you may now disconnect.