Douglas Valenti
Analyst · Bank of America
Sure, Nat. What we have historically seen in our leading click businesses is, on average, about a 5% drop from the first calendar quarter to the second calendar quarter or, of course, our fiscal Q3 to Q4. And that is in years, of course, where we were growing. The guidance, the kind of middle of the guidance range you'll see is about at that point. Coming up with a range is -- we have a range because we still would acknowledge that there are -- there is volatility. There are still challenges. There are still a lot of dynamics in the marketplace that aren't 100% settled out and stabilized. But we have seen those -- the main reason in performance marketing that you typically see a dip from the fourth quarter calendar to first quarter calendar versus, say, a display business, which usually peaks or often peaks in the fourth quarter, has to do with client capacity to handle particularly lead volumes because leads are usually followed up by an agent or a call center rep. In the fourth quarter, when you have Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year's, you have a lower capacity of -- or fewer people available to follow up because they're taking a holiday. And the other dynamic is in the fourth quarter calendar year, because of the demand for display or for marketing generally in display and performance formats, many of our programs get squeezed out by holiday spend. And then when you hit the first quarter, everybody's back at work, and the holiday advertising spend is gone. So those are the dynamics that we see in pretty much all of our performance marketing-driven verticals, which is, of course, all of our verticals. And we have a little bit of display in our B2B business, which has a little bit of the -- it gets bigger in the fourth quarter dynamic, which is, again, more typical for display. But it's such a small -- display is generally such a small piece of our business, the pattern of fourth quarter to first quarter jump, first quarter to second quarter dip has held in pretty much all of our performance businesses.