Vivek R. Shah
Analyst · Susquehanna
Thank you, Bret, and good morning, everyone. We're very pleased with our second quarter results, which exceeded expectations, with revenues growing nearly 10% and adjusted EBITDA growing nearly 12% year-over-year. This was our strongest quarter of revenue growth since 2021, and in that sense, we delivered truly breakthrough results and it also represents the fourth consecutive quarter of revenue growth for Ziff Davis. While we continue to execute on our operating plans, we remain committed to repurchasing our shares and have successfully completed 5 tuck-in acquisitions in the first half of the year. Our healthy balance sheet continues to support ample opportunities for capital allocation. As was the case last quarter, 4 of our 5 reportable segments grew in revenues in Q2. These 4 segments, which historically were combined into the Digital Media segment grew nearly 13%. As importantly, our fifth segment, Cybersecurity & Martech declined less than 1% in the quarter and is poised to return to growth in Q3. Having the Cybersecurity & Martech segment contributing to overall growth would be an important milestone for the company. Let me share some observations about each of our 5 segments. As a reminder, this new reporting structure was implemented earlier in the year to provide greater transparency and a clear appreciation of the intrinsic value of our key businesses. Tech & Shopping's revenues grew by over 11%, with adjusted EBITDA growth of over 5%, supported by the CNET acquisition and some improving trends in our B2B business. In fact, in Q2, Spiceworks launched a successful paid subscription version of its cloud help desk software, which helps IT administrators manage help requests from employees. SaaS offering already has over 20,000 paying business customers. CNET Group also renewed its partnership with Best Buy which allows both Best Buy and CNET Group sales teams to sell media inventory across each other's properties, while CNET content is also featured in Best Buy's retail touch points. Gaming & Entertainment grew nearly 8% in revenues, with adjusted EBITDA growth of almost 24%. IGN hosted its second annual fan facing event, IGN Live, in Los Angeles in June, which has now ostensibly replaced the long-standing E3 conference. We had over 8,000 attendees in person, with over 27 hours of live programming and over 200 partners in games, film, TV, streaming, toys, comics, consumer packaged goods and more. In addition to the in-person event, content was streamed on over 35 platforms over the course of IGN's 2-week Summer of Gaming June programming. The event reached over 300 million fans around the world, up 91% year-over-year and video views were 202 million, up 26% year-over-year. Social impressions were up 42% year-over-year at 367 million, while Instagram views were up 191% and TikTok views were up 300% year-over-year. The diversity of engagement and significant growth highlights the reach and depth of the global IGN community. Health & Wellness had a blockbuster quarter, with revenues up nearly 16% and adjusted EBITDA up 11%. Both first and second quarter set records for the segment as our pharma commercialization services and Health & Wellness offerings both continue to be very strong. Our ability to deliver positive tangible results for pharma with both patients and providers continues to place us in a competitively strong position. Our continuing medical education business, PRIME Education, had a record quarter led by its quality improvement offering, which helps health systems address key challenges in healthcare delivery and generates real world data to demonstrate ROI to pharma customers. And in our pregnancy and parenting business, we are reaping the benefit of the investment we made to build out our clinical studies business. Clinical studies include both pregnancy exposure registries and clinical trials, which play a crucial role in providing safety information for researchers and healthcare providers to understand the potential effects of drugs on pregnancies. With our unique market reach, we have been successful in supporting enrollment, which can be particularly challenging in this cohort. At the same time, our consumer Health & Wellness businesses, especially Lose It!, have strong momentum, and we have seized the opportunity to sell Lose It! subscriptions directly to consumers via the web instead of exclusively through the App Store, which is expected to have positive implications for the margin profile of the business. Connectivity also posted a tremendous quarter, with revenues up over 14% and adjusted EBITDA up over 12%. It's fantastic to see this segment returning to double-digit organic growth which when combined with its nearly 50% adjusted EBITDA margins qualifies it as a Rule of 60 business. Connectivity's growth reflects strong demand for a number of its key products and services. Speedtest revenue in Q2 reflects demand from service providers who are seeking greater visibility and competitive network insights by using quality of service and network performance benchmarking data to differentiate their services from their competitors. Another key driver of Q2 revenue was expansion in emerging markets, particularly in EMEA and APAC regions, and demand from new customers who licensed the Speedtest Award to support their marketing efforts. In addition, RootMetrics benefited from service growth from existing clients who purchased more comprehensive testing packages to validate new 5G network upgrades and better understand their network performance against competitors. Downdetector also received strong interest from large enterprise clients and service providers to improve real-time observability of online services as an early warning system to improve their responsiveness to outages and customer service degradation. All of this, coupled with revenue growth from Ekahau, resulted in a terrific quarter for the business. Cybersecurity & Martech was close to delivering flat revenues in the quarter and posted over 5% adjusted EBITDA growth. And as I mentioned earlier, we are optimistic about the segment returning to revenue growth starting in Q3. Momentum in our VPN business accelerated in Q2, driven by a combination of direct customer acquisition, new partnerships and product enhancements that support customer retention and ARPA growth. In Q2, we launched VIPRE Integrated Email Security, a significant leap forward in our enterprise-grade cloud-based e-mail security designed for small and medium businesses. VIPRE IES was designed to integrate seamlessly with Microsoft 365 and is powered by an AI engine leveraging natural language processing, semantic analysis and machine learning to identify and block threats that often bypass traditional e-mail filters. It's one of several examples as to how we're leveraging AI to deliver both product innovations and operational efficiencies across our portfolio. At RetailMeNot, we've deployed an AI customer service chatbot that has achieved a roughly 50% case deflection rate for inbound chats. This means that half of the customers who initiate a chat with our customer support bot are able to get their issue resolved without needing to be transferred to a live human agent. This is a great example of using AI to automate and scale our support while enhancing the customer experience. In our Health & Wellness segment, the Lose It! app has harnessed AI in an effort to deliver real, measurable health outcomes for its consumers. By introducing AI-powered voice and photo meal logging, the team has not only made tracking meals easier and more intuitive, but has directly helped users achieve their goals. Members are logging meals 3.5x faster and tracking twice as many foods, making the habit of daily food journaling stick. This increased engagement translates directly to success, with users achieving 6% more weight loss on average. We're also leveraging AI to refine how we serve our advertisers. For instance, we've created an AI platform that creates precise audience segments. This platform is powered by hundreds of millions of data signals we collect real-time from across our diverse portfolio of properties and translate this proprietary privacy-protected data into what we call moment of influence solutions. These audience segments can be seamlessly activated across individual Ziff Davis properties, the broader Ziff Davis network and the open web and social media. The initial response from ad clients has been very favorable. Our healthy balance sheet with substantial cash and leverage capacity serves as the foundation for our capital allocation strategy. We continue to adhere to a patient and disciplined approach to identifying and integrating durable, high-quality assets, while consistently buying back our stock. Of the 3 acquisitions we consummated in Q2, I was particularly pleased to see 2 tuck-in acquisitions in our Cybersecurity & Martech segment, one that strengthens our e-mail deliverability services and the other enhances our e-mail archiving offering. The third was an acquisition of the Well+Good brand and content library for our Health & Wellness segment, which we've already migrated onto theSkimm platform, which itself was acquired earlier in the year and is performing ahead of expectations. Our acquisition program continues to focus on strong and enduring brands in high-value verticals, businesses in which we can unlock value through platforms, people and know-how and transacting at reasonable valuations and generating attractive cash-on-cash returns. With that, let me hand the call back to Bret.