David Kostman
Analyst · Laura Martin with Needham. Please go ahead
Thanks, Jason, and thank you all for joining us. In Q1, we delivered against the guidance we provided. At the same time, we are seeing, like many companies in our industry, softness in demand, especially in Europe, which accounts for around 40% of our business, and to a lesser extent, in the U.S. where some of our advertisers are impacted by supply chain and macro issues. As a result, we are lowering our guidance for the year. We continued to be very bullish on our positioning and the market opportunity. We are continuing to expand our media supply network and gained market share and are thrilled to announce the development of a new initiative to greatly increase strategic value to media owners, while generating an entirely new fast-like revenue stream for Outbrain. It's called Keystone. And Yaron will be elaborating on this shortly. Let's turn to Q1 results. Lapping a very strong Q1 last year, our Ex-TAC gross profit was up 5% or 8% on a constant currency basis to $63.5 million, in line with our guidance, and our adjusted EBITDA of $11.6 million exceeded the guidance we provided. On the media owner side, Q1 was an exceptionally exciting quarter for us. At the end of March, one of Europe's largest publishers, Axel Springer, announced the results of the RFP for the recommendations partner across the flagship properties BILT and WELT, as well as several other properties reaching hundreds of millions of unique users. They chose to return to Outbrain after several years of trying a competitive solution, signing a multi-year, multi-hundred million dollar deal with us. Continuing along this trend, Sankei Digital, one of Japan's largest digital publishers, chose Outbrain to exclusively power recommendations on Sankei's major news site and sports site. We had been working with Sankei on several of their properties for several years and we were honored to take on the major show of the business, again, replacing a competitive solution. On top of this announcement, we renewed and expanded several of our top-20 partners in the last two quarters and added several hundred new media properties. This momentum of supply wins comes from our relentless focus on delivering results for our media partners and partnerships that they can count on. At the end of March, we also started benefiting from the shift in the Microsoft Open Exchange marketplace. With Microsoft moving other partners that up to this point had exclusive and preferential access to some inventory to become real-time bidders. We believe this shift will continue to benefit us relative to other players in view of our multi-year experience in Microsoft's Open Exchange environment and the strategic nature of our partnership with Microsoft. On the product front, we continued to deploy SmartLogic on mobile and now also rolling it out to desktop and continued the wins of our header-bidding integrations for in-article placements across tens of partners, adding even more supply to the expansion of existing partnerships. While these exciting wins tell the story of great momentum, this growth in new supply comes combined with slower demand and some blocking of all ads on certain war-related pages in Europe. Let me move to the demand side. Due to a volatile macro environment, supply chain challenges and the war in Ukraine, we are experiencing headwinds, especially in Europe. We saw demand softness across the board, but particularly from brand advertisers in Europe, resulting in lower RPMs. We anticipate these external factors to continue to have a negative impact on advertiser budgets and the shifting our focus away from segments such as automotive and CPG to segments less impacted or that are recovering such as health, financial, and entertainment, leveraging the nature of our diversified advertiser base. I want to take a moment to focus on a key aspect of our business. Outbrain is a two-sided marketplace. And like all two-sided marketplaces, for example, Uber, Google, Airbnb, it's paramount to constantly balance supply and demand. In our business, the supply usually adds up in step changes when we add big new partners and then over time, the advertisers add incremental budgets. It's a dynamic we know very well from a decade plus of running our marketplace and it has behaved this way in the past, sometimes faster, sometimes lower. Our growth on the supply side is solid. The demand side, however, especially in the EU, where we grew a lot of supply, is being impacted by the macro environment causing the demand to not grow in regular sync with the size of our growing supply. This dynamic is impacting our yield in the short term as the demand is being stretched over this expanded supply, but is expected to turn into a strong growth driver when more demand will be unlocked. For example, recently, we observed similar dynamics that contributed to growth in the second half of 2020 post-COVID. Turning to the acquisition of video intelligence, we closed the acquisition of vi in January and in Q1, we were mainly focused on integration and started introducing the contextual video solution to Outbrain's publishers. Since the acquisition closed, we brought the vi solution to more than 15 Outbrain publishers. I am extremely proud of the team's work in face of the tough challenges since some of the vi entrepreneuring team is based in Kyiv. I am happy to update that our whole team is safe and engaged, mostly working from remote locations and very appreciative of the outpouring of support from their colleagues. We wish for our colleagues an imminent conclusion to the fighting. I would like to refer to the revised guidance Elise will be providing. We are taking a cautious approach in view of the uncertainty in the market and the negative short-term trends we are experiencing, which are impacting runrate, driving our models. Therefore, we are reducing our extra guidance by around 15%. These are volatile times, but we view them as temporary phenomena and have successfully navigated through such turmoil before. We are investing in our key growth drivers and winning market share. We believe that our algorithmic improvements, the growth of supply won in Q1 and the rollout of SmartLogic will be key drivers of future growth. We believe in the long-term growth of the category, in general, especially in a more privacy conscious and regulated environment that favors native and contextual advertising solutions such as ours. We remain committed to profitable growth. We've made significant investments in people. For example, we grew our product and engineering team by more than 25% year-over-year. We've taken some efficiency measures once we identified the weakness towards the end of Q1 and we'll continue to monitor the progress of the year to decide on how to best balance high-confidence investments with profitability. As you will see in Yaron's comments, we are also strategically broadening our solutions for media owners and are very excited about the new platform and business model we've been investing in. We believe this investment, combined with smart management of our strong balance sheet will serve our shareholders well. Yaron?