MediaAlpha, Inc. (MAX) Q1 2026 Earnings Report, Transcript and Summary

Thank you for standing by, and welcome to MediaAlpha, Inc. First Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. I'd like to remind everyone that this call is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the call over to Investor Relations. You may begin.

Thanks, Angela. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us. With me are Co-Founder and CEO, Steve Yi; and CFO, Pat Thompson. On today's call, we'll make forward-looking statements relating to our business and outlook for future financial results, including our financial guidance for the second quarter of 2026. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Please refer to our SEC filings, including our annual report on Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q for a fuller explanation of those risks and uncertainties. All the forward-looking statements we make on this call reflect our assumptions and beliefs as of today, and we disclaim any obligation to update such statements, except as required by law. Today's discussion will include non-GAAP financial measures, which are not a substitute for GAAP results. Reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to the corresponding GAAP measures can be found in our press release and shareholder letter issued today, which are available on the Investor Relations section of our website. I'll now turn the call over to Steve.

Thanks, Alex. Hi, everyone. Thank you for joining us. We're off to a strong start in 2026, delivering record results across all of our key financial metrics. First quarter transaction value came in above the midpoint of our guidance range, reflecting continued strength in auto insurance carrier spend and further broadening of carrier participation on our platform. These dynamics drove a favorable mix shift to our open marketplace, pushing both revenue and adjusted EBITDA above the high end of our guidance. Within P&C, we've seen a number of carriers that were previously punching under the weight in our marketplace take meaningful steps over the last several quarters to increase their spend. As anticipated, this is resulting in a mix shift towards our higher-margin open marketplace, where our estimated 3x scale advantage and unmatched proprietary data fuel highly differentiated predictive AI optimizations that drive better outcomes for our partners. Moving forward, I'm encouraged by the productive conversations we're having with a growing number of leading carriers about further leveraging our trusted infrastructure and AI targeting capabilities to maximize the return on ad spend and gain market share. The underlying auto insurance industry remains healthy. Carriers are strongly profitable and are competing more aggressively by lowering their rates and increasing their advertising spend as they prioritize policy growth. While underwriting margins have begun to decline from record levels, they remain robust by historical standards. We believe these conditions support further growth in our P&C vertical, which continues to benefit from the secular shift in carrier distribution spend from agent commissions and off-line advertising to a direct-to-consumer model supported by online performance marketing. While not yet material to our results, our strong first quarter P&C traffic growth suggests that consumers who are starting their insurance shopping experience on LLMs are driving incremental referrals to our marketplace. During the quarter, we were pleased to see a significant strategic shift by a leading LLM to place greater emphasis on advertising monetization to support the consumer product. We view this as a favorable development that could meaningfully accelerate LLM referral traffic and revenue growth for us and our partners. We remain confident that carriers will stay central to the quoting and binding experience regardless of how the consumer shopping experience evolves, reinforcing our highly defensible position as the core infrastructure layer connecting carriers with insurance shoppers. As a trusted partner to carriers and a leader in AI-powered insurance distribution, we recently launched autoinsurance.net, a ChatGPT-powered shopping experience that simplifies the consumer journey while keeping carriers in full control of their brand, compliance standards and quoting processes. This is an early proof-of-concept product, and we're excited about what comes next as we continue to build out this capability to better support our partners. On the health insurance side, our under 65 business continues to represent a diminishing portion of our overall mix, which is in alignment with our plans. We continue to believe that Medicare Advantage is the long-term growth opportunity for this vertical. Importantly, we remain focused on utilizing our significant free cash flow to maximize shareholder value. We are executing aggressively on our outstanding share repurchase authorization and have returned over $25 million of capital to shareholders already this year. As we look ahead, we're energized by the opportunities in front of us. Carrier and agent participation in our marketplace continues to expand and the innovations we're bringing to market are opening new doors for consumers to discover and connect with both carriers and agents. Overall, we believe we're well positioned to deliver both sustained profitable growth and long-term shareholder value. Before turning the call over to Pat, I'm proud to share that MediaAlpha has earned a Great Place to Work certification for the 10th consecutive year with 95% of our team members affirming that our company is indeed a great place to work. This recognition reflects the strength of our culture and our exceptional team, which underpins everything that we do.

Great. Thank you, Steve. I'll start by walking through the key drivers of our Q1 results and then cover our Q2 outlook. As Steve mentioned, transaction value came in above the midpoint of our guidance range. Revenue was $310 million, above the high end of our guidance range, reflecting a favorable open marketplace mix shift driven by broader carrier participation in our marketplace. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $31.4 million, up 7% year-over-year. Our efficient operating model and disciplined expense management allowed us to convert 64% of contribution to adjusted EBITDA. Excluding under 65 Health, our core business performance was very strong with year-over-year revenue and adjusted EBITDA each growing 28%. Turning to the balance sheet. We completed the refinancing of our credit facilities during the quarter. As detailed in the Form 8-K we filed with the SEC, we put in place a new $150 million senior secured term loan and a $60 million revolving credit facility, both maturing in March of 2031. The refinancing replaces our prior arrangements, extends our debt maturity profile meaningfully and provides enhanced financial flexibility. We drew modestly on the revolver in connection with closing, and we ended the quarter with $26.1 million in cash and $45 million undrawn on the revolver. On capital allocation, since the beginning of the year, we have repurchased approximately 2.6 million shares for $25 million, representing approximately 4% of the company. We remain committed and on track to complete the vast majority of the remaining $60 million of our $100 million authorization in 2026. Turning to Q2. We will be changing how we present guidance. We will be guiding to contribution and we will no longer report transaction values as we think contribution is a more relevant metric for investors evaluating the company's performance relative to our publicly traded peers. For Q2, we expect revenue of $290 million to $310 million, up approximately 19% year-over-year at the midpoint. Contribution of $45.5 million to $48.5 million, up approximately 18% year-over-year at the midpoint. Adjusted EBITDA of $28 million to $30.5 million, up approximately 19% year-over-year at the midpoint, including an approximately $2 million year-over-year decline in contribution from under 65 Health. Excluding under 65 Health, we expect contribution to increase by 25% and adjusted EBITDA to increase by 31% year-over-year. For Q2, we expect the health vertical to be approximately 1% of total revenue, as we made a strategic decision to limit under 65 Health open marketplace participation to carriers only, simplifying our operations. Looking at the remainder of 2026, we are entering a more normalized growth environment in P&C. Accordingly, we expect growth rates to moderate in the back half of 2026 as we lap increasingly strong prior year comparisons. For the year, we expect to generate $90 million to $100 million in free cash flow. Overall, we remain confident in the strength of our position and the long-term opportunity ahead. With that, operator, we are ready to take the first question.

[Operator Instructions] And your first question comes from the line of Tommy McJoynt with KBW.

Steve, could you go into a bit more detail and specifics about the LLM comments that you made? You seem to suggest a strategy shift in LLM that's monetizing advertising leads. Could you add some more details and specifics around that?

Yes. So what I was referring to was OpenAI's announcement that ChatGPT was going to increase, I guess, reliance on advertising monetization. And I think the number that they threw out was that by 2030, they wanted to generate about $100 billion in ad revenue by then, which is about 4x the previous forecast for ad revenue that they had released, I think, earlier this year. And so, for us, that was a really clear sign that OpenAI and ChatGPT, at least with the consumer-facing product, we're going to monetize primarily using an advertising model. I mean, certainly, I think with Gemini being owned by Google, you can expect Gemini to do something similar. And so, what we really was saying was that with the adoption of this advertising model as opposed to a closed commerce model as some people had expected, I think that means a good thing for our overall industry because what I have full confidence in is our supply partners to be able to adapt to this new upstream traffic acquisition source and really be able to tap into the incremental demand and shopping behavior that the LLMs are going to generate. And we think ultimately, over the next 2 to 3 years, this is going to be a significant tailwind to our business, both on the publisher side and for us as a whole.

And then switching gears, we often talk about the carriers being stratified into those leading players that were first to reengage in advertising spend and then more carriers catching up. Have you seen any of the leading carriers start to pull back on advertising spend as they seem to maybe notice that the underwriting cycle is nearing its peak?

No. No, we haven't. I think what we're seeing is really accelerating growth from the non-leading carriers more than any pullback from the leading carriers. I think they were obviously the first ones to come back and really lean into growth mode by acquiring customers. And really the spending came back very quickly within our marketplace from a couple of the leading carriers. I think they're maintaining the levels of spend, we continue to see growth there. But really, what you're seeing, and you're seeing that coming out in our numbers with the higher growth rate that we're seeing from our open marketplace is really just the growth that we're seeing from a lot of the other top 15, top 20 carriers as they continue to -- or they increasingly start to lean into growth marketing. And so, we're obviously very encouraged by that. It's really the broadening of the demand that we have been expecting for the last couple of years. It represents both, I think, really the strong cyclical tailwinds that you're seeing, as carriers start to lower rates and really pour money into advertising to grow their policy counts. And then in addition to that, really the cyclical tailwind really fueling the secular shift that we're starting to see again from an increasing number of carriers as they pivot from being primarily reliant on agent-based distribution to really building a strong direct-to-consumer channel as well, which effectively means that a lot of the distribution costs that a lot of these agent-based carriers were incurring really is starting to shift from agent commissions into advertising dollars, which is a net positive for our industry and clearly a net positive for us.

Your next question comes from the line of Cory Carpenter with JPMorgan.

I just wanted to ask, last quarter, you talked about an expectation for carriers to enter the year kind of with a more prudent start and then kind of save some, if you will, for later in the year should the opportunity present itself. Maybe could you just give an update on kind of that? And has any of the macro uncertainty that we've seen unfold over the last couple of months changed kind of your expectations for how you expect spend to trend through the year?

Yes, sure. I think that what I said in the last comment, I think, really holds for this one, which is that they may have started the year a little bit conservatively. Certainly, the big ones have continued to grow organically, but it's really the body of the demand for carriers who are, again, top 15, top 20 carriers, but weren't big spenders in the past within our marketplace. And we've been really pleasantly surprised to see the level of growth that we're seeing from them. Now the -- I'll say a couple of things there, right, which is, we still think that, that broadening of demand has a ways to go because all of those outside of the top carriers that you're referring to are still only allocating, let's say, 2% to 3% of their overall advertising budget to our marketplace. If you look at benchmarks and really where we expect them to be, it's really somewhere between 10% to 20%. So they have somewhere between 5 to 10x to go in terms of the level of spend that they could support with us, right, once they eventually get to a point where the industry leaders are. And so, even though we're seeing really strong demand, robust growth in our open marketplace by the broadening of demand, we think that there's still a ways to go there. To answer the last part of your question, are we seeing any slowdown with some of the macro effects? I'm guessing that you're referring to the war and rising gas prices and then fears of increasing inflation. I mean, certainly, those things could have an impact on loss ratios. We're not seeing the carriers really taking any action right now based on any fears of inflation. I think it's going to cut both ways because gas prices going up means that people are going to drive less, that's going to reduce frequency. But certainly, higher gas prices or higher oil prices is likely to result in inflation of car prices, which could have a negative effect on severity.

Your next question comes from the line of Mike Zaremski with BMO Capital.

Just a couple of numbers questions. On the -- I heard loud and clear about reiterating the free cash flow. Did you mention why the cash flow didn't come through this quarter? And then just another numbers question. Did you specify the new terms on the debt so we can calculate the potential savings?

Sorry, on mute. Mike, on the cash flow side, the -- a couple of things happened in Q1. So first off, we had an $11.5 million payment to the FTC. That was our second and final payment to the FTC. So that was obviously a use of cash. And Q1 is a quarter where we have a couple of kind of annual payments that go out the door. So we've got annual bonuses to employees, which is kind of -- it's a mid-, high single-digit million number, and we've got annual payments that go out the door on our tax receivable agreement. And I would say that Q1 had those kind of 3 one-timers or once annual items. The rest of the year should not have those. And so, the adjusted EBITDA to free cash flow conversion should be very strong for the balance of the year. And moving to the debt side of the house. The refinance had essentially very minimal changes to the overall interest profile of the debt. Probably the most meaningful change to cash flow is that the amortization is going to be slightly lower. We have $7.5 million annually of amortization, kind of paid 1/4 of that every quarter. So there's a little bit less paydown that occurs naturally on the debt. But I would say otherwise, the economics of the debt are largely unchanged from the prior agreement to this one.

Got it. And probably for Steve, on the removing transaction value, I'd say investors did find that helpful. Are you saying you feel like it's proprietary and some of your competitors don't disclose it, so you'd rather not disclose it?

Yes. And Mike, this is Pat. I'll take that one. I would say that for us, transaction value was something we originally disclosed at the time of the IPO to show our scale, and it's something we've shown since to show our scale. And as Steve said in his scripted remarks, we estimate from a transaction value standpoint, we're close to 3x the size of our nearest competitor. And so, we think we've kind of probably pretty clearly proven that point and investors understand it. And as we think about the most important metrics for understanding the business, those really are revenue contribution and adjusted EBITDA. And those are the exact metrics that all of our public peers show. And so, we're just in a spot where we thought from a simplicity standpoint and a conformity standpoint that it made sense to focus on the same things that everybody else does.

That concludes our question-and-answer session and as well as today's call. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect.