Earnings call transcript: Outbrain Q4 2024 misses EPS forecast, stock dips

Outbrain Inc. reported its fourth-quarter 2024 earnings, revealing a significant discrepancy between actual and forecasted earnings per share (EPS) and revenue. The company posted an EPS of $0.07, falling short of the anticipated $0.13. Revenue also came in below expectations at $234.6 million, compared to the forecasted $260.61 million. Following the announcement, Outbrain’s stock price dropped by 1.19% in pre-market trading, contributing to a significant 16.8% decline over the past week. According to InvestingPro analysis, the stock appears undervalued compared to its Fair Value, suggesting potential upside opportunity despite recent challenges.

Key Takeaways

• Outbrain’s Q4 2024 EPS missed forecasts by 46%.
• Revenue saw a 5% year-over-year decrease.
• Stock price fell by 1.19% post-earnings announcement.
• Adjusted EBITDA grew by 21% year-over-year.
• The company anticipates returning to growth in the second half of 2025.

Company Performance

Outbrain’s overall performance in Q4 2024 highlighted both challenges and areas of growth. The company experienced a 5% decline in revenue compared to the same period last year, with current revenue at $903.5 million. However, it achieved a 7% increase in Ex-TAC Gross Profit and a 21% increase in Adjusted EBITDA, indicating improved operational efficiency. The acquisition of Teads and the launch of new products such as the "Moments" vertical video experience are expected to bolster future performance. The company maintains a healthy current ratio of 1.2, demonstrating solid short-term financial stability.

Financial Highlights

• Revenue: $235 million (5% YoY decrease)
• Ex-TAC Gross Profit: $68.3 million (7% YoY increase)
• Adjusted EBITDA: $17 million (21% YoY growth)
• Free Cash Flow: $38 million in Q4
• Cash and Equivalents: $166 million

Earnings vs. Forecast

Outbrain’s actual EPS of $0.07 was significantly below the forecasted $0.13, marking a 46% miss. Revenue also fell short by approximately $26 million, or 10%, compared to projections. This performance contrasts with previous quarters where the company has generally met or exceeded expectations.

Market Reaction

Following the earnings release, Outbrain’s stock price declined by 1.19% in pre-market trading, reflecting investor disappointment. The stock’s movement positions it closer to its 52-week low of $3.42, which may signal a cautious market sentiment towards the company’s near-term prospects.

Outlook & Guidance

Looking forward, Outbrain has set a Q1 2025 Ex-TAC Gross Profit guidance of $100-$105 million and an Adjusted EBITDA guidance of $8-$12 million. The company projects a full-year 2025 Adjusted EBITDA of at least $180 million, with expected synergies from recent mergers and acquisitions anticipated to contribute $65-$75 million annually. Analyst targets range from $6 to $10 per share, with two analysts recently revising their earnings estimates upward. For comprehensive analysis and detailed forecasts, explore Outbrain’s complete financial profile in the Pro Research Report, available exclusively on InvestingPro.

Executive Commentary

CEO David Kossman emphasized the potential of the Open Internet advertising market, stating, "There’s a huge opportunity to take advertising on the Open Internet to the next level." CFO Jason Kiviat highlighted the company’s financial strategy, noting, "The combined company’s financial profile is very attractive."

Risks and Challenges

• Continued revenue decline could impact financial stability.
• Integration risks from recent acquisitions may affect operational efficiency.
• Competitive pressures in the digital advertising space.
• Macroeconomic factors influencing advertising budgets.
• Potential regulatory changes affecting digital advertising practices.

Q&A

During the earnings call, analysts inquired about the performance potential of Connected TV (CTV) and the integration progress of the recent merger. Executives provided insights into revenue recognition differences and explored potential revenue and cost synergies, reinforcing confidence in future growth prospects.

Full transcript - Outbrain Inc (OB) Q4 2024:

Conference Operator: Good day, and welcome to Outbrain Incorporated Fourth Quarter and Full Year twenty twenty four Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. Question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I’d like to turn the call over to Outbrain’s Investor Relations.

Please go ahead.

Meg, Investor Relations, Outbrain: Good morning, and thank you for joining us on today’s conference call to discuss Outbrain’s fourth quarter and full year twenty twenty four results. Joining me on the call today, we have David Kossman and Jason Kiviat, the CEO and CFO of Outbrain, which will operate under the Teads brand. During this conference call, management will make forward looking statements based on current expectations and assumptions, including statements regarding our business outlooks and prospects and our recently complete acquisition of Tees. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from our forward looking statements. These risk factors are discussed in detail in our Form 10 ks filed for the year ended 12/31/2023, in our definitive proxy statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on 10/31/2024, and as updated in our subsequent reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Forward looking statements speak only as the call’s original date, and we do not undertake any duty to update any such statements.

Today’s presentation also includes references to non GAAP financial measures. You should refer to the information contained in the company’s fourth quarter earnings release for definition information and reconciliations of non GAAP measures to the comparable GAAP financial measures. Our earnings release can be found on our IR website, investors.outbrain.com under News and Events. With that, let me turn the call over to David.

David Kossman, CEO, Outbrain/Teads: Thank you, Meg. Good morning and thank you for joining us today. On February 3, we closed our acquisition of Teeth. This merger brings together two open Internet category leaders, combining the extensive expertise of Outbrain in Performance and of Teeth’s in video and branding into a single solution for omni channel outcomes across the marketing funnel. This new and expanded company will operate under the name Teeth.

There’s a huge opportunity to take advertising on the Open Internet to the next level. Today’s Open Internet platforms focus on scale and efficiency. Marketers have shown us they expect more from the advertising. They need a partner that can surface the meaningful moments in the consumer’s buying journey, using a deeper understanding of audience engagement and behavior to identify when they are ready to discover new products or services and evaluate purchase decisions. Our unique data set and AI driven prediction technology better positions us to provide these solutions.

The new teams will better serve enterprise brands and agencies as well as mid market advertisers and direct response advertisers by delivering elevated outcomes from branding to performance objectives. This foundation will enable us to derive new incremental value from the open Internet as a true brand format solution. Now let me provide an update on Outbrain’s standalone Q4 and full year results. For Q4, I’m pleased to report that Outbrain delivered both extra gross profit and adjusted EBITDA within our guidance range. We also generated record free cash flow.

This is part of our continued trajectory for several quarters. Q4 results were driven by strength in the same key pillars we presented to you over the last couple of years. These will continue to be important drivers of our business. The first pillar, expanding our share of wallet from advertisers. It is important to clarify that we serve enterprise brands and their agencies, both for branding and performance needs, as well as the segment of small and medium enterprises and direct response advertisers that are looking primarily for performance and ROAS.

So with brands and agencies, we’ve seen continued momentum in our performance solutions. Our direct response advertisers have embraced the use of our Outbrain DSP, which saw growth of 45% in advertiser spend in 2024 due to the continued delivery of superior performance, both on the Outbrain publisher base and third party properties across different formats, such as native, display and video. As a reminder, we have been doing this for several years, leveraging the performance DSP we acquired in 2017, which also provides a valuable bidding engine and DSP capabilities, expanding our platform’s reach. The second pillar, expanding beyond our traditional feed. Revenue generated from supply beyond our traditional feed represented approximately 30% of our revenue in Q4 twenty twenty four versus 26% in Q4 twenty twenty three.

We have continued to grow this metric quarterly for the last two years, demonstrating our focus on expanding our inventory diversity beyond our exclusive publisher base and expanding the reach for our advertisers to OEMs, apps and other platforms. One of the more exciting developments here was the launch as a beta in September of Moments, our vertical video experience that brings social media experiences to the open Internet. To date, we have more than 40 media owners using Moments, including New York Post (NYSE:POST), News Australia, RTL and Rolling Stone. Initial user engagement results are strong with swipe depth growing from about three videos on average to 7.2 and the percentage of people engaging with the experience growing from about 35% to over 47%. In addition, we’re encouraged by the interest that legacy TV advertisers have expressed in moments as it provides powerful video experiences for premium brands.

Another example of how this combination will provide meaningful synergy. And the third pillar is deepening our premium media owner partnerships. In Q4, we successfully renewed agreements with some of our important publishing partners, including Spiegel in Germany, Imessagera in Italy and GReIP in Japan. We also secured new business partnerships from competitors and launched new partners, including Panske Media in The U. S.

And Prensa Iberica in Spain. We believe this again demonstrates a significant value proposition we offer when it comes to strategic relationships with premium publishers globally. On the technology front, over 70% of our customer base has used our AI based Creative Automation Suite. As a reminder, the Creative Automation Suite uses our algorithms and predictive insights to fuel the product generative AI, delivering more relevant, highly targeted creatives optimized for consumer engagement. The strong foundation we built with the AI Creative Automation Suite informs how we think about some of the highest potential applications of AI at the new teams.

We plan to leverage AI to create a greater continuity of experience across the consumer journey, leveraging the exclusive inventory environments we own from CTB home screens to premium publishers, as well as in our in house creative studio that utilizes data and interactivity to deliver video and viewable display assets that deliver on advertisers KPIs. The new Teeth is one of the largest platforms on the open Internet that can curate meaningful audience moments across screens from mobile to CTV to apps and beyond. We believe that the combination of our unique core assets positions us extremely well to capture more and more share of wallet away from other platforms. First, the new Teeth combines best in class capabilities from our branding performance to deliver outcomes and superior ROAS. Teeth brings extensive expertise in branding and creative capabilities across screens.

Advertisers are looking for KPIs way beyond just reach, they want results. It’s also evident that the combined performance plus branding strategy can increase return on investment for advertisers with an independent study estimating a total revenue impact increased by 90%. That’s why in the future, brand performance is a huge opportunity. Second, the new Teeth has the most direct exclusive reply pass on the open Internet across the digital landscape. As you’ve heard over the last couple of years, including from many of our peers, this is becoming increasingly important as advertisers are looking for curated premium environments to limit the risk of open exchange buys on DSPs.

And we believe that also CTV is becoming a core part of the performance marketing mix. Our CTV presence from the feed side combined with the leadership with performance marketers that legacy Outbrain brings to the table positions us well for growth in this area, which is an important element of our combined product strategy. And third, we have exceptional global reach with more than 2,000,000,000 unique users and proprietary data signals to our exclusive common page with the most premium media properties. I want to underscore that these already has more than 50 joint business partnerships with the leading premium brands of the world, including Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), Visa (NYSE:V), Louis Vuitton, McDonald’s (NYSE:MCD), Nissan (OTC:NSANY) and many others. These partnerships generate an average of $5,000,000 per year and upwards of $20,000,000 per year.

It’s important to note that even before the combination with Outbrain, Teeth had a significant amount of performance budgets from these advertisers. These types of relationships are the privilege of only the largest players in the digital advertising space. Teeds has been growing these direct relationships with advertisers and their agencies for many years, having developed a winning multi touch strategy of working directly with advertisers and their agencies, which are primarily the largest agency holding companies. The response from these advertisers to the new teeth value proposition of branding and performance has been overwhelmingly positive, which bodes well for our cross sell synergy plan. If you combine these joint business partnerships with a strong focus on small medium enterprises of the legacy outbrain, we believe we have a great coverage of the market.

I want to spend a minute talking about the status of the post merger integration. As Jason will discuss, we are also well underway in the realization of the synergies of $65,000,000 to $75,000,000 we presented to you. We had the opportunity to plan the Postnoja integration in detail for over six months. And as a result, we first executed on the headcount reductions in our plan in the first week, which we expect to result in approximately $35,000,000 of just the compensation savings on an annualized basis. Second, we affected the reorganization and combination of the two organizations in the first two weeks, meaning that the merged new company structure with clear leaders and roles and responsibilities is in place.

Third, we already implemented certain synergies by connecting the demand and supply of the two platforms where feasible. And fourth, our global sales teams are working on the cross selling opportunities as one team with aligned incentives and books of business, already testing the water and actually have already sold the first campaigns with key elements of our combined performance and branding value proposition. We’ve seen strong enthusiasm and confidence in our new combined team since closing the deal, with many already seizing the new business opportunities this merger has unlocked. We expect this to begin positively impacting our Q2 results. Operating as we say it internally as one team and one dream is underway, which I believe will ensure we are ready to capture the large opportunity ahead despite some short term increased disruptions, which are natural consequences of such quick and decisive moves for merging two same size companies.

To sum it up, the early momentum is energizing and we’re just getting started. Now, I’ll turn it over to Jason for a more detailed financial update.

Jason Kiviat, CFO, Outbrain/Teads: Thanks, David. As David mentioned, we achieved our Q4 guidance for Exact gross profit and adjusted EBITDA, generating significant free cash flow in the quarter and through the year. As we saw solid profitability and cash generation, as we see continued benefits from the changes we’ve been making to our revenue mix and cost structure as noted on prior calls. Revenue in Q4 was approximately $235,000,000 reflecting a decrease of 5% year over year. So total ad spend was materially flat year over year than the quarter and increased year over year on a full year basis.

New Media Partners in the quarter contributed nine percentage points or approximately $21,000,000 of revenue growth year over year. And net revenue retention of our publishers was 86%, which reflects downward pressure of ad impressions, particularly from one key supply partner as noted in prior quarters. And logo retention remained high finishing for the full year at 98%. We saw CPCs remain stable to positive netting to a slight increase year over year for the quarter for the second quarter in a row. This along with continued improvements in click through rates drove further growth in RPMs, which have improved in each quarter of twenty twenty four.

Exact gross profit was $68,300,000 an increase of 7% year over year continuing the trend of acceleration and outpacing revenue for the seventh quarter in a row, driven primarily by net favorable change in our revenue mix and improved performance from certain deals. While ex TAC gross profit continued year over year growth in Q4 on the strength of our growth areas and positive momentum of RPMs, as noted in prior quarters, one of our key partners transitioned to new bidding technology and we completed the transition in early May twenty twenty four. Completed the transition in early May twenty twenty four. This volatility continued to impact our overall growth in Q4 by a high single digit percentage and our overall Q4 ex TEC gross profit would have grown in the mid teens percentage year over year, excluding this one isolated headwind. We remain focused on rescaling and optimizing the supply.

Operating expenses increased year over year, predominantly driven by one time costs of $5,500,000 related to our transaction with Keith. As a result, we grew our adjusted EBITDA 21% year over year to $17,000,000 which reflects another consecutive quarter of margin improvement. Moving to liquidity. Free cash flow, which as a reminder, we define as cash from operating activities less CapEx and capitalize software costs was approximately $38,000,000 in the fourth quarter and $51,000,000 for the year. This is a tremendous outcome and comes as a result of cash profitability, strong working capital performance and timing benefits.

As a result, we ended the quarter with $166,000,000 of cash, cash equivalents and investments in marketable securities on the balance sheet and no debt. While we maintain an authorized amount of $6,600,000 under our existing share repurchase program, there were no share repurchases in Q4. Given the finalized acquisition of Tees, we currently do not intend to repurchase shares in the near term as we have previously stated in August when we announced the Tees acquisition. We announced that we completed the acquisition of Teavs in February and subsequently completed the private offering of $637,500,000 in aggregate principal amount of 10% senior secured notes due in 02/1930. As I mentioned when we closed the transaction, we are very excited about the combined company’s transformative financial profile, including the significant expected impact of synergies on our top and bottom lines.

We estimate $65,000,000 dollars to $75,000,000 of an annual impact on adjusted EBITDA, including $60,000,000 from costs to be realized fully in 2026. As David covered, about half of the goal we set for ourselves in annual run rate was already secured in the first couple of weeks post closing, focusing initially on cost related synergies. Naturally, that will have a significantly greater impact on our bottom line as the year progresses. Now turning to our outlook. Given the short time elapsed since we closed the transaction, the fact that the transaction closed almost mid quarter and our focus on integration and synergy capture, while we are sharing our outlook for both expec gross profit and adjusted EBITDA for Q1, we are currently only sharing our full year outlook for adjusted EBITDA.

Also, I’ll provide some points of additional context to help frame how we see this year playing out, and we will plan to update more on our progress and outlook on upcoming calls. In our guidance, we factor in the closing date of the merger of February 3 and note that the company’s accounting is subject to further policy alignment analysis. With that context, we have provided the following guidance. For Q1, we expect ex tech gross profit of $100,000,000 to $105,000,000 and we expect adjusted EBITDA of $8,000,000 to $12,000,000 For full year 2025, we expect adjusted EBITDA of at least $180,000,000 Now a few points of additional context. On a pro form a basis, while we are still expecting an overall year over year decline in Extech gross profit in Q1, we have seen improvement in the year over year performance of legacy Tees in the first few months of the year relative to Q4 of last year.

On a pro form a basis, we expect to see improvement in year over year growth rates over the course of 2025 with H2 seeing single digit positive growth year over year. And note, to provide continued transparency, we have provided legacy Tees 2024 quarterly ex tech and adjusted EBITDA in our Q4 earnings release. Note that these are as legacy Tees presented them on a non IFRS basis and reconciled to IFRS measures and potentially subject to further U. S. GAAP and policy alignment.

With respect to expenses, we anticipate the synergy realization to increase over the course of 2025 from a few million dollars in Q1 up to Q4 reflecting the run rate of our 2026 estimated synergy amount. Lastly, on a personal note, I’m very excited about the future. The combined company’s financial profile is very attractive and the combined team’s excitement has never been higher. We look forward to keeping you updated while we continue along this exciting new chapter. Now, I’ll turn it back to the operator for Q and A.

David Kossman, CEO, Outbrain/Teads: Thank

Conference Operator: you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now be conducting a question and answer session. Our first question comes from Andrew Boone with Citizens JMP. Please go ahead.

Andrew Boone, Analyst, Citizens JMP: Good morning and thanks so much for taking my question. I wanted to ask about the transition of publishers and advertisers on to what is the Confined platform. Can you guys help us understand where we are in that transition, whether there is any concern around dis synergies from maybe potential leakage or anything else that you guys are seeing as we understand that 1Q ’twenty five guidance? And then a little bit of a bigger picture. Yesterday, you had a competitor talk about potential issues with the TAM of native advertising.

Dickie, it would be great if you can just address that. What are you guys seeing around demand for native advertising in that format more broadly? How do you guys think about the opportunity? Thanks so much.

David Kossman, CEO, Outbrain/Teads: Thanks, Andrew. So I’ll take that. So first on the transition, our focus right now was to sort of unify the team, start cross selling. We have a very clear roadmap around the integration of the platforms and a strategic roadmap that is focused both on the traditional publisher side and particularly on CTV and the ability to deliver performance on CTV. So that’s we’ve had six months of planning to do, so we have that in place.

Eventually, what we plan to do is really to deliver a lot of the performance capabilities from Outbrain into Teeth’s ad manager, which is the platform where we’re going to be serving primarily brands and agencies and SMEs, and we’re going to continue to invest in our DSP business for direct response advertisers. The tech transition and integration will take time, but our teams already sort of are cross selling with the back office supporting that. We already had, I think, three actually cross selling opportunities that we are answering, which is super exciting. And in terms of the sort of core legacy market, I think we’ve been talking for the last two, three years about three core growth drivers that actually and I repeat it today. One is expanding beyond the feed.

So we have already embarked on that journey a couple of years ago. Today, it’s about 30% of our businesses beyond traditional feed. We sort of saw the need to deliver to performance advertisers at larger scale around the whole open Internet. So we did that. The second is really shifting a lot of the performance buyers, the direct response buyers into the outgoing DSP, formerly known as Amentor.

So that has been another growth driver, which saw 45% growth in the revenue spend, in the ad spend on that platform. And third, if you look at our numbers, which we sort of deliver the organic numbers, we’ve been continuously growing our extra gross profit and accelerating it. So it’s still single digits, but growing nicely towards the higher single digits and we will continue to invest in these growth drivers.

Andrew Boone, Analyst, Citizens JMP: Thank you.

Conference Operator: Thank you. The next question comes from James Coney with Jefferies LLC. Please go ahead.

James Coney, Analyst, Jefferies LLC: Great. Thanks guys for the question. In your prepared remarks, you mentioned the impressive growth that you saw in Outbrain DSP. Can you just talk about some of the drivers of that growth and how we should think about the strategy for Outbrain DSP going forward under the combined company? And then I just had another one.

Thanks.

David Kossman, CEO, Outbrain/Teads: Thank you. Hi. So generally, I mean, we’ve been we bought ZEMENTA about seven years ago and we use the bidding technology and the ability to broaden the ability to get more share of wallet from performance advertisers by broadening the ability to bid not only on outbrain inventory, traditional outbid inventory that’s connected to Amplify, which is our exclusive publisher base, but to bid outside of that inventory into native, into display and video. So we’ve been doing that and that has been a close driver we identified. I mean, traditionally, we used to sell it when we bought the business as a sort of mid market performance DSP competing with other DSPs.

And we identified certain segments of buyers where the performance is so superior to sort of our direct connection, which allowed us to significantly grow the share of wallet with performance advertisers. And I think, again, we will continue, as I said earlier, we will continue to invest in that. We think it’s a great platform for performance and that will serve the segment of direct response advertisers. We will consolidate many of the capabilities of performance that we have from their platform into Teed’s ad managers. So that our brand and agency segment and SMEs will also be able to enjoy the ability to sort of launch campaigns and sort of in the future.

I talked about brand formats. I mean, that’s sort of a little bit futuristic, but the ability the unique ability to connect in sort of the same instance, the launch of a campaign for branding and performance. I mean, it has been proven many times that those two sort of really support each other. We’ve seen a lot of research also talk about growth in revenue when you combine these two and we will have the unique capability to really link a branding campaign with a performance campaign. But today, our focus is to sell branding and performance and bring a lot of the capabilities that legacy Algon has into the ATEED’s ad manager.

Jason Kiviat, CFO, Outbrain/Teads: And maybe quickly one oh, sorry, go ahead. Maybe one quick point. We’ve talked about the last couple of quarters, but for clarity, so when a customer is spending on the DSP, the accounting for it is a net revenue recognition as opposed to a gross revenue recognition on our core demand platform. That’s the biggest driver of the disparity between when I say gross revenue for as reported on our P and L is down a few points year over year, but our total ad spend is up year over year. That’s the big difference in that we’ve actually been growing ad spend overall.

It might not reflect on the face of the P and L and the biggest reason why is the shift to the DSP business.

James Coney, Analyst, Jefferies LLC: Okay. Yes, that’s helpful. And then just another one on the you mentioned the traditional supply outside of your traditional feed now 30% of revenue versus 26% last year. How do you envision that progressing over the next few years under the combined company? Is that does it ever get to a majority?

Or how do we think about that?

David Kossman, CEO, Outbrain/Teads: I think when we report this number, it’s sort of just over legacy outbursts. So as a percentage of the combined company, it’s going to get much lower, but we continue to invest we will continue to invest in that. We think it’s a great capability for performance buyers that are looking at buying sort of into display, into other formats. So we think that is a growth driver that will continue to support our overall growth.

James Coney, Analyst, Jefferies LLC: Great. Thank you, both.

Conference Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Waijal Aronian with Citi. Please go ahead.

Waijal Aronian, Analyst, Citi: Hey, good morning guys. Maybe just on the Teeth sales force factor sort of transitioning out and that impacts in 1Q, you talked about better performance in February. Just how is that trending? And as we look at the full year EBITDA guidance, maybe relative to the initial outlook you had when you proposed the merger. What are the factors there?

Is it a slower rollout of the cost synergies? Are there revenue synergies in 2025 at all? Just help us kind of bridge through the integration over the course of the year and into next year.

Jason Kiviat, CFO, Outbrain/Teads: Sure. So maybe I could take both of those, David. Certainly feel free to add. So as far as what we’ve seen with the legacy Tees business and maybe just quickly a disclaimer that the closing date of February 3, so our guidance forward and our reporting obviously in the future will be effective as of that day. For transparency, as I said on the call, we did share in the earnings release the legacy Teeth twenty twenty four results by quarter just for transparency, because we do plan going forward to talk about the combined business.

So obviously, right now, just based on the fact that we’re so recent to closing, I’ll give a little color on the two legacy businesses separately for Q1 and for how we see the year playing out to answer your two questions. So in terms of the Q4 legacy TV business, we talked at closing about the idiosyncratic drivers of French political instability and as you pointed out the sales force decline and just the merger kind of pending merger impact distraction overall that The U. S. And global team saw as a headwind. We’ve seen both of those really turn around in the last couple of months to a different extent.

So with respect to France, we saw the recovery very quickly in January, returning to year over year growth, which really proves that that was really a one time thing that’s quickly snapped back. In terms of the distraction, the global revenue and ex techs that we’re seeing from the legacy Teases has improved in January versus Q4 on a relative year over year basis, in February versus January on a relative year over year basis. And we feel good about obviously the March up pipeline based on where we are now entering March. So we’ve seen positives bringing the team together pretty quickly and energizing the combined team has been already showing up in the results is the good thing here. And what that nets to is we do expect a year over year decline in Q1 from the Extech from the legacy Teeth business, but to a lesser extent than we saw in Q4.

And again, it’s improved over the course of the quarter as well. And that’s despite actually an incremental FX headwind that we see in Q1 relative to Q4 as well. So net net positive, we see good trends and we obviously project that forward. As far as your question on the year, we do expect operating to the legacy operating side to continue the acceleration of growth that we’ve seen over the course of this past year through continuous growth of yields and contributions from the areas that we just talked about to James’ question, the DST and supply outside of feeds. So we entered the year with that momentum.

And then on the Teed side, like I said, we’ve seen the trends turning positive over the last couple of months. Obviously, we’re pretty early days still here. And to your question, we’ve gotten pipes connected on the cross selling and on the synergy capture on the top line, but we expect that to play out more over the course of the year. And we do expect to return to overall pro form a growth by the second half of the year. Maybe just the color on a couple other things with respect to the year.

Seasonality, obviously, our seasonality changes as a combined company. Maybe a couple of data points that could be helpful to modeling. We do expect the Extech and the EBITDA to be a little bit different pacing than what you might be used to with legacy Outbrain. If you look at the last few years, the average ex TAC by quarter 21% in Q1, ’20 ’3 percent to 24% in Q2, Q3 and 32% in Q4, while expenses are much more flat over the course of the year and what that means is the EBITDA two thirds of the EBITDA typically recognized in the second half of the year. So between that and the synergy realization ramping up, I said on the call, we do expect a few million dollars of synergy realization in Q1, but just based on the timing of close and the actions we’ve taken, we do expect it to ramp up over the course of the year and finish the year at that 2026 run rate that we’ve estimated for 2026.

So it’s early days. We’re obviously focused on the integration and we plan to keep you updated on our progress as we move forward.

David Kossman, CEO, Outbrain/Teads: I just want to add a couple of points. One is really there’s excitement on the sales teams around the cross selling and we’ve seen already some actually materializing and have been seeing many customers and the feedback is excellent. So I think that’s not something that sort of we’re baking into what you see here. And I will talk about CTV also has been it’s a business that last year for Tibbs, it’s close to tripled. It was 10% of Q4 and it’s going to be potentially a higher percentage in Q1.

So we see a lot of opportunity around that business too. And when CTV growth, it also helps Teeth particularly because of the omni channel capabilities. So that will also have a positive impact around the online video business, which we’ve, I think, talked about it when we announced the deal. What we see when advertisers spend both on CTV and on online video with TV, it’s normally 50% a higher total spend than when you just spend on one of the platforms. So the growth of CTV will also, we believe, continue to support growth in the online video.

Waijal Aronian, Analyst, Citi: Okay. That’s really helpful. Thank you. And maybe just a follow-up on the CTV opportunity, particularly given the strength that Teens is seeing there. And just kind of I think what you’re implying is shift from where CTV has been historically more upper funnel and brand and there seems to be a growing focus around performance.

Is that a learning change for advertisers? Are they kind of knocking on the door to be a little bit more performant? And maybe just what’s that whether it’s competitive conversations with advertisers, what’s that like maybe kind of broadly, that’d be helpful? Thank you.

David Kossman, CEO, Outbrain/Teads: So I would take that. So I think we’re very excited about CTV and the progress that it’s made over the last couple of years, which has been mostly focused around branding and sort of really leveraging the joint business partnerships that it’s had with more than sort of 50 of the most premium brands of the world that are sort of doing omni channel video with them. We believe that the performance is a huge, huge opportunity. We’ve had many of our SME buyers ask us for video and ability to deliver on CTV. We think it’s the early days.

I think CTV is a medium that will sort of drive a lot of value for performance, both for brands. I mean, when you talk about enterprise brands that want to drive not just brand awareness, but eventually want to convert the sales and for small medium enterprises that today video production with AI is in a different level than it was before. So you can generate those creative assets. Part of the strength of Teeth is the sort of studio, which is helping advertisers take those assets and make them sort of more interactive and trigger more of sort of either attention or performance. So we believe that the combination of Teeth’s capabilities there, the exclusive placements that Teeth has on CTV, the huge client base, customer base that Alburn has on the performance side, the combination of those is going to be something that is pretty unique in the market and it’s a significant part of our strategic product roadmap investments.

Thank

Conference Operator: you. Our next question comes from the line of Laura Martin with Needham and Company. Please go ahead.

Laura Martin, Analyst, Needham and Company: Hi there. So I appreciate the synergies. They go up every time we talk. So at the high end of that $60,000,000 to $75,000,000 of synergies, how much of that is costs and how much of that is revenue synergy at this point?

Jason Kiviat, CFO, Outbrain/Teads: Sure. So I can give some color to that, Laura. Thanks for the question. So yes, we estimate for 2026, an annual number in 2026 achieved of $65,000,000 to $75,000,000 of that $60,000,000 is costs. I could break that down further.

And then the remaining $5,000,000 to $15,000,000 is the EBITDA impact of revenue synergies. So we’re keeping that revenue synergies number fairly conservative for these first couple of years here. It is I think the biggest long term opportunity for sure and what makes us all very excited between the various drivers there cross selling and geographies and just the data combined data impact. So that one’s big, but we’re keeping it pretty small for our estimates right now. So the $60,000,000 of costs that we expect to achieve by next year, That is three quarters of that or $45,000,000 is personnel related.

And as David said, we’ve actioned the majority of that 70 plus percent of this already. So this will this is already secured. We have a limited impact in Q1 just based on the timing, but it should play out over the next couple of quarters and get there by year end pretty confidently. The other $15,000,000 of those of that $60,000,000 of cost is the combination of non compensation, which is things like headcount related items, software licenses, combining offices, etcetera, discretionary spend like on marketing and then of course professional fees and things that you just don’t need to have anymore. So that one will play out a little bit kind of in time.

Some of them are right away, some of them take time until you do your insurance policy or do your marketing events, etcetera. But we have pretty high confidence in that number as well with some upside. And then the third area there is traffic acquisition costs, which as you know is the largest cost here. This is the most exciting one for me personally. There’s just always a lot of room to optimize how we put our demand on supply to optimize our margins from a tax perspective.

We’ve already connected the pipes of supply to demand in both directions and we already have items flowing at a small scale right now, but we do believe that we’re able to capture several million dollar opportunity in the next couple of years from just better optimization of putting demand on supply where it makes more sense.

David Kossman, CEO, Outbrain/Teads: Just in context on the top line synergies, I mean, we’re talking here on what we sort of giving in these numbers, it’s less than 2% in total. So we believe there’s significant upside there.

Laura Martin, Analyst, Needham and Company: Okay. Second, in the press release, you said that your go to market is going to be Teed. Does that imply we’re changing the name of the company, we’re changing the ticker symbol? Can you expand on this comment in the press release that you’re going to market over Teeth going forward?

David Kossman, CEO, Outbrain/Teads: Yes, Laura. So when we announced the deal and when we announced the closing, we said, yes, we’re going to move forward and operate under the name Teeth, the name we made a decision to take that name. It’s we call it the new Teeth. I mean, if you look at the old Teeth with IMO logo and positioning, it’s a totally refreshed Teeth in the sense that it’s combining performance capabilities, with branding capabilities, many more formats. So we refreshed the whole branding and positioning of the company, and we’re going to be calling it Teeth, and that will be a name change and over time also a ticker change.

So we’re very excited about this sort of change. I think the market in sort of our industry has been very well received. I think Keith’s brand is associated with sort of quality premium brands, video, which are the areas where we’re going with CTV. So we felt that this is the right decision. And I think everyone also at legacy Alburn is very excited about it.

Laura Martin, Analyst, Needham and Company: Okay. And then staying with you, David, my last question is about news. So, the drumbeat of ad agencies talking about we need to fund news is really getting louder. My question is, do you see money coming back into news or do we still have entire agencies that are buying no news regardless of whether it’s political or war? Is there any money coming back into the new genre that you’re seeing?

David Kossman, CEO, Outbrain/Teads: So I would say, Lo, A, our mix of inventory is way beyond news, but I do see some positive trend. I think it’s early days. I think you and I talked about it. I mean, we’re in at CS. There’s a lot of effort going on between sort of the industry talking to CMOs and to the agencies about sort of the value actually and the fact that having brand advertising near to news is a positive impact.

So I think it’s happening. I think it’s small steps in the right direction.

Laura Martin, Analyst, Needham and Company: Okay. Thanks very much. Appreciate it.

David Kossman, CEO, Outbrain/Teads: Thank you.

Conference Operator: Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, that brings us to the end of the question and answer session. As there are no further questions, I would now like to hand the conference over to the management for closing comments.

David Kossman, CEO, Outbrain/Teads: So thank you all for joining us. As you can I hope you can see how excited we are about this combination, the new journey we’re embarking on? I think we are very excited about sort of the outgoing business and the growth drivers. We can see the benefits of the combination already materializing and we look forward to continuing to update you on the progress. Thank you.

Conference Operator: Thank you. This concludes today’s teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.

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