Earnings Call: H1 2021

Jul 22, 2021

Quarterly report

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Audioboom Group PLC 2021 half-year trading update investor presentation. Throughout this presentation, investors will be on listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged, can be submitted at any time using the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Please just simply type in your question and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company will review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it is appropriate to do so. These will be available via your Investor Meet Company dashboard, and we will send you an email to notify you when they are ready for your review. I would also like to remind you that this presentation is being recorded. Before we begin, we would like to submit the following poll, and if you would give that your kind attention, we would be most grateful. I would now like to hand over to Brad Clarke, CFO, and Stuart Last, CEO from Audioboom. Good afternoon. Hi, everyone. Good morning from New York, and hope you are having a good afternoon over there. Really pleased that you could join us today to learn more about the company. Just really excited to tell you much more about the business off the back of some fantastic results that we announced just a couple of days ago. So, appreciate your support and appreciate you joining us today. Couple of items, I think, just to mention upfront. Firstly, just on the questions, we received some really great questions ahead of the presentation. We will not answer those at the end. We wove those into the presentation, so we should get to each of those points and each of those questions throughout the presentation today. Secondly, as Mark said, you can ask questions throughout the presentation. We will monitor those and answer as many as we can at the end of this. But I guess, to save you all from asking it, there is one thing that we are a little limited on today, a little limited on how we talk about that today. As you may be aware, an announcement was made on the 19th of July from All Active Asset Capital Limited regarding a possible offer for Audioboom. Audioboom announced the rejection of that possible offer this morning on the grounds of insufficient value, unattractive structure and lack of strategic rationale. As a result of that possible offer announcement by AAA, Audioboom is in an offer period under the Takeover Code. This places restrictions on what we can and we cannot say, particularly in relation to that offer and the future trading of Audioboom. So today's presentation, I think, is going to focus a little more on our results, our performance, and the opportunity that we are creating in the business. I just ask, I think that the questions that you do send over today are ones that we can focus on and that we can answer. With those notices out of the way, I am going to turn my camera off because that will make the deck a little bigger on your screens. Then we will dive right into the presentation. I think my first few slides today are really designed for anyone that may be new to the business. Anyone that has not been with us over the past few years, but also will just give you a little more detail about how we operate, what the business is built around and what our model is. This slide really looks at the value proposition of Audioboom, what makes us unique in the podcast space. For me, the first part of that value proposition is this combination that we have of platform and content. We spent the first few years of building Audioboom out by creating a platform, a very scalable platform, that we can then layer content on top of to monetize. When I talk about that platform, it is pretty wide-ranging. So it is a hosting and a distribution platform. It is the technology that allows podcasters to host their audio and then to distribute that out with one click out to Apple, out to Spotify, out to Google, out to Amazon Music. We just signed a deal with Samsung to push all of our podcasts into Samsung's mobile phone app. I mean, it is that hosting and it is that distribution platform. The next layer to our platform build was really the ad tech. It is the ability to serve dynamic advertising into podcasts, the ability to connect to programmatic ad exchanges and ad networks globally. It is a yield ops system that optimizes pricing. As you may have seen last week, it is a new tool that we have called AdRip that is designed to grow the amount of inventory that we have to sell through that ad tech and through that marketplace. So that is another layer to our platform. Then on top of that, we have a premium sales, in-house sales unit and platform and an inventory management system that just provides a lot of intelligence to the business, allows us to optimize our revenue around the advertising sales. So that is our platform. We still work hard on it. We still invest in it. We are very innovative around that platform, building that out to drive revenue for the business. As I said, that platform is extremely scalable. Right now, as of today, we run around 92 million downloads every single month through that platform. We reach 26 million unique users through that platform, and we house around 8,000 content channels. As I have said before, I think that the scalability is kind of proven there. We can move this up to 300, 400, 500 million downloads per month, hundreds of unique users through that platform. So it is very efficient and it is very scalable. These two things combined are pretty unique amongst our competitors. The only businesses that are combining content and tech and platform in this way are those major acquirers like Spotify, Amazon, and iHeartMedia, who are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to put these pieces together, to put tech together with content and together with sales. Audioboom has that built in, we have built that in from the start, that is allowing us right now to grow much quicker than the wider industry, much quicker than any of our competitors. The second part of our value proposition is really our content mix. As I said, our goal now, we have this great platform in place. Our focus now is building and expanding content on top of that platform in order to monetize it. So part 2 of our value proposition is really that content mix and how we are able to deliver value to podcasters, whether that be podcast productions that we create in-house ourselves or whether that be the independent podcasters that we work with. We can create value for those shows, at any size and at any level within the space. This is really a view on how we see content as we look to expand it within the business. At the top, the very kind of pinnacle of what we do, that is our Audioboom Originals. Those are shows that we either produce in-house or we co-produce with a production partner. They come with high advertising rates and much higher gross margins than much of our business. So the gross margin there is in and around 40%, because we are creating that content in-house, and we can flex those budgets and really drive a good strong margin on those originals. The second tier of content is our work that we do at the premium and professional end of the podcast space with independent producers and independent networks. That is our premium network. It is around 250 premium shows. These are shows that deliver more than 50,000 downloads per episode. At the very top end, these are shows that deliver 2 million downloads per episode. Much of that opportunity to grow out that premium network and scale that premium network comes through our relationships and the work that we do with the talent agencies, the Hollywood talent agencies like UTA, like WME, like CAA. We have proven over the past few years that we can deliver great value to their clients. They bring new show ideas, new opportunities for existing shows to work with us, and we partner with them to distribute and to monetize their content. Again, that is premium advertising. It is $40 CPMs. That advertising is embedded in the show for 90 days. It is really the voice of the host and the influence of the host that drives strong advertising performance for the advertisers there. The next content tier that we have is something that right now we kind of call our tier 2 network. This is a large group of mid-level shows. They do not get into our premium network. They are not big enough to kind of attract that premium advertising. But through our AdRip, we can monetize them at scale and at large volume, albeit with lower ad rates, somewhere around that $12 CPM as a target when we advertise on these shows. Plus, we also include the back catalog of our premium shows in there too. So we are advertising them at a tremendous scale. Just last month we sold more than 108 million impressions into that tier 2 network through our AdRip and our marketplace. Again, really building up scale there. But that is the value we drive for those second-tier podcasts. At the bottom of this pyramid, this is our creator network. These are the smaller shows. These are the enthusiast, creator-level shows. They pay us either $10 or $20 a month to use our tool set and our platform for distribution, and to get their podcast out there to fans. These are much smaller podcasts. But it's a nice revenue stream for us, upfront revenue, and it returns obviously monthly also. This, I think, again, is another key part of our value proposition. Again, competitors and our peers do not straddle the entire landscape of content in the way that Audioboom does. Generally, there will be a focus on either in-house production or working with premium podcasts or working only at that creator level as a hosting platform. Audioboom, due to that unique combination of platform, sales, and content, we're able to drive value for any podcast of any size. Again, another reason here why Audioboom is growing both in terms of consumption and also in terms of revenue, much faster than our competitors. Before we kind of get into the first half of the year results and break those down for you in more detail, I wanted to talk through two of the key ways that we monetize and drive revenue within Audioboom, both based around advertising. I touched on both on the last slide there. But really the first monetization model that we have, that's our premium model. This is how we monetize those top 250 shows plus Audioboom Originals. It's a key part of Audioboom's revenue. It's a major area of focus to expand our business in that area. Like I said, most of that opportunity to expand that business is coming out of our relationships with those talent agencies. Just this year in 2021, we've launched some major new shows into that premium network. The Fantasy Footballers, which is the second biggest, I believe, actually, sports show, in America. Dark History, which was an Audioboom Original, and that's receiving 2 million downloads per episode. That's a fantastic launch for us. Zane and Heath: Unfiltered is a show that we announced just last week through a partnership with UTA, a really strong U.S.-based podcast. Wafflin', a U.K. show, launched with us back in May. Hacks on Tap features CNN's David Axelrod, a big news broadcaster here in the U.S. The Curbsiders, RELAX!, all big shows that form part of that premium network. Renewing those partnerships that we already have is obviously a key part of continuing to grow this business. True Crime Obsessed, our second-biggest podcast, we renewed that deal earlier in the year, and we'll be working with those guys now for the next three years and launching other network shows around the True Crime Obsessed brand. Our partnership with Formula One extended for two years, just earlier on in 2021, and then a group of other major renewals. So we continue to build and to strengthen that premium network. Just, I think the one question that I'm keen to kind of answer is how we scale that piece of work that we do. We limit this network to 250 shows, primarily because selling and executing that premium advertising model is a heavy lift. We sell those ads in a very bespoke manner, and that's how we get those $40 or $50 CPM ad rates for the premium network. What that means is, we have to be very careful about how we scale. How we do scale it is basically through a one-in-one-out policy. Every time we sign a major new show into that premium network, and it comes in with a large audience and comes in towards the top of that premium network, we let another smaller show drift out of the bottom into one of our other monetization channels. That maintains that premium network somewhere around the 250 shows. What we're really doing there is we're adding audience and therefore adding revenue potential. At 250 shows, the monthly sellable ad units usually runs somewhere around 4,000 ad units. That's because each one of those 250 shows averages four ad slots per episode, and it averages four to five slots per episode, and it averages four episodes a month. So a basic breakdown of it. Around 4,000 ad units. As we maintain the size of that network, we still only have to sell 4,000 ad units each month, which we can do without having to expand the size of our team. The audience now attached to each one of those ad units, it grows, and it continues to grow as we maintain that one-in-one-out policy. You can see that in our average unit rate, our sold average unit rate over the last couple of years. For the first half of this year, we were selling each of those units, those 4,000 units that we do sell, somewhere just over $2,000 per unit. A year ago, that was only $1,500 per unit. You can see that we're adding scale simply by replacing smaller shows with much larger shows into that premium network. Again, that is enabling us to control our costs, but still to grow much faster than the wider industry. Obviously the growth there is also coming through demand for those bigger shows that we have. The bigger the show that we work with, the more demand for that inventory there is from the advertising community. In the first half of 2020 last year, our fill rate on those top 250 shows was 53%. That's still very strong. If you were to look at our top 10, our real revenue drivers, that fill rate would be over 90%. You can see a big jump into first half of this year, 77% for our fill rate across the entire 250 shows. I think that's a phenomenal performance and really, again, speaks to that high revenue growth that we're seeing right now within Audioboom. The second revenue model that I wanted to highlight was really the monetization that we see through advertising technology. This is the ability to insert and serve fresh, new advertising each time an episode is downloaded. That's dynamic ad insertion, and it happens all through our advertising technology. It's been a huge area of growth and focus for us over the past 18 months or so. If you look at the performance of revenue through the ad tech, we've increased revenue more than 260% year on year through H1 2020. As a contribution to our overall revenue, ad tech revenue now makes up 90% of our total group revenue, up from just 5% last year. We are making big strides forward with revenue from that ad tech. As I said earlier, we served 108 million impressions in June of 2021. Strong growth around that ad tech. That is what our recent launch of AdRip and our upcoming launch of our Audioboom Marketplace is designed to further fuel. AdRip, as a tool, launched in its first phase just one week ago. AdRip is designed to allow our premium podcasters who bake in and embed their premium advertising into their shows to automatically remove that advertising after 90 days, which is that first sales window, and then replace it with fresh, dynamically inserted advertising. AdRip, if we were to have 100% adoption of AdRip across the platform, which will drive towards through both a marketing campaign to our podcasters, but also by working AdRip into their daily workflow, we will see a huge increase in the number of monthly available impressions there are to sell. If you look at Audioboom's monthly consumption of 92 million downloads, around 50% of those are to back catalog content. That is content that is more than 90 days old. Previously, that content that is 90 days or more old has not been monetized very efficiently at all, and that is a problem across the entire podcast space. We believe AdRip will enable us to more efficiently monetize and more optimally monetize that content by allowing us to place ad markers within all of those old episodes done at scale through this new tool, and we can massively increase the amount of inventory that we have to sell through the ad tech. As that inventory increases, we need to do a lot of work to then sell that inventory, and that is the Audioboom Marketplace that we will launch in the second half of 2021. That marketplace does a few things. First of all, it is a place where podcasters can plug their content into and then have their content and their inventory exposed to multiple sales channels. Those multiple sales channels are our in-house sales through our team working with advertisers and agencies directly. It is exposure to our various international partnerships that we have created over the past year. That is Australian Radio Network in Australia, MAPP Media in the U.K., Rogers Media in Canada, and Ideabrew Studios in India. Those are our second, third, fourth, and fifth biggest markets for consumption in the world. Now we have partnerships in each of those to sell into that Audioboom Marketplace and can help to monetize more of that back catalog and tier 2 inventory. Thirdly, that content would also get exposed to our programmatic connections. We are plugging into programmatic marketplaces. Ads are served automatically, no work on our end. It is the lowest level of advertising sales and advertising fill that we have. That all combines those multiple channels combined to create this marketplace. For advertisers, the marketplace is we are looking to offer better scale, better targeting parameters, more choice around how and where they advertise. They will be able to geo-target their advertising in a much stronger way. They will be able to hit podcast genres with some really strong scale built into that. Scale has been a problem in the industry for a while, particularly around those blue-chip, big brand advertisers. With the added scale that we will now add through the marketplace and AdRip, it will allow advertisers to transact in a stronger way for them, and to really pick and choose how they advertise in podcasting. We believe AdRip creating the new inventory combined with that marketplace and those additional sales channels will really drive revenue forward from an ad tech perspective. We are really excited about that launch and that focus for the second half of the year. I guess finally then onto the incredible performance, I think for the first half of 2021, and I will just break that down for you here. As you know, it was a record revenue performance of $22.8 million. That is up 93% on the first half of last year. Just to put that into perspective, the wider U.S. podcast industry is only projected to grow around 60% year-on-year. So we are more than 50% outperforming the wider industry right now. We are, I believe, the fastest growing podcast company in the U.S., and we have been now for a number of years. I think this is the fourth year in a row that we have outperformed the wider industry when it comes to revenue growth. H1 adjusted EBITDA profit was just over $200,000. Again, we had our maiden profitable on an EBITDA basis quarter in Q1. We saw some kind of gearing effect in Q2, and we are at $200,000 just over. Again, breakeven was obviously the big goal for this year for Audioboom. We are well on our way to doing that. Brad will talk a little more about it in a moment to the fantastic cost control that we have within the business combined with that growth in revenue. Just to look at Q2 on its own, and you will see the chart here that breaks everything down by quarter. Q2 was just a huge step forward for us, $13.3 million in revenue. Obviously very strongly up on last year, which was COVID affected, 144% growth on the same period of last year. For me, the really important one here is that sequential growth, 39% growth from the first quarter. We were very happy with what we did in Q1, but then to go almost 40% above that in the second quarter, was a fantastic achievement. Really, I think spectacular results for me for both the second quarter and the first half as a whole. Just towards the end of the presentation, I will set up the second half of the year, which I think we have a fantastic opportunity just to continue that momentum, and to take this even further. With that, I think I will hand over to Brad for a few slides to go a little deeper on the finances of the business. Perfect. Thank you, Stuart. Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining us this afternoon. I'm Brad, CFO here at Audioboom. What we're going to go through now is just take a little bit of a look over the revenue, the cost within the business, and then the next slide, we're looking at the working capital cycle of the business and the balance sheet that we have and the strength of that balance sheet. This really does build on last quarter's presentation, really just to bring you right up to date in terms of where we are. This slide here, we've extended that view that Stuart was looking at on that previous slide. We can see the revenue growth and OpEx by quarter since Q1 2019, and we've recorded good quarter-on-quarter growth in 2019. As Stuart mentioned, we took that dip in Q2 last year because of COVID, but for me, that actually proved the resilience of the company and the industry in Q2 of last year. Since that point, it's been sequential quarter-on-quarter growth culminating in those great statistics of 144% revenue growth year-on-year, Q2 this year versus Q2 last, and then 39% growth quarter-on-quarter from Q1 this year to Q2, which really is fantastic growth. The company places a very high emphasis on cost control. Again, this graph really demonstrates that very well. We ensure that our resources are adequately deployed to achieve that maximum growth. When Stuart talks about that scaling effect, we can clearly see it on this graph here by maintaining strict control over those costs while driving that revenue growth higher. In terms of the OpEx base that we run here at Audioboom, it's quite a simple P&L. 65% of our cost is associated with salaries and commissions. We incentivize our excellent sales staff to continue that top-line growth. So they're on our sales incentivization schemes. That's 65% of the cost. Around 20% of our cost is what we term as technology costs, and that's hosting and bandwidth costs to host all of that great content that we have and distribute that out and just to keep that platform running. Around 10% of professional fees there in terms of the OpEx base. We're a quoted company, so we incur costs there as well. Over the last couple of years, the OpEx has been fairly stable at around $2 million a quarter. We held that close to that level. We have seen that tick up slightly in Q2 of this year, up to $2.5 million. The main reason for those increases are where there's a slightly higher hosting and bandwidth cost. We got more content on the platform, but also because we're paying higher commissions out to our great sales team to keep on continuing that growth. A small part of it, as well as we've also increased the headcount from 35 up to 37. So still a very lean and focused team, excellent team, very focused on continuing to deliver that growth curve that we've recorded over the last couple of years. If we look at the working capital side and the balance sheet, what we're really seeing here is the impact of growth on our balance sheet and impact of growth in the company. What we've actually seen is an increase in value of some of our assets as well. Let's go through a few of those points. Here at Audioboom, I believe we've got excellent market leading, in my view, internal processes, and we've also got good levels of automation within the business as well. We have to, specifically within finance, we've got a team of four, so we have to rely heavily on automation. What I'm going to go through here just demonstrates how well that's performing for us currently. I've spoken about this on a number of presentations, and I'm very proud of the fact that our cash collections process is excellent. That has to be so because we have to maximize the available resources that we have. In the first half of this year, we collected just over $19 million. That's an average of $3.2 million a month. That's $1 million higher than last year's full year average. To be fair, you'd expect that because we are invoicing a higher volume of revenue. You'd expect that to increase. In terms of the graph there, you can see that receivables line in orange, that has been increasing. That's our debtors. Again, you would expect that to increase because we're invoicing that higher volume. When myself, Sean, and James, when we assess the debtors that we have within the business, there's the three key aspects that we're looking at, debtor days, the aging of our book, and also whether there's any write-offs within the business. Just to go through those three key points, we can see here the debtor days have actually decreased since the end of Q4, so down from 87 down to 79. Remember, that's on an increasing volume of revenue. That's an impressive statistic on its own. In terms of the aging, the aging of our debtors is focused specifically in 0-90 days with very minimal debt over that 90-day figure, but really mainly concentrated on 0-60. Also as well within the business, there's very low level of write-offs, both in terms of an absolute value or as a percentage of revenue as well. When we look at our total debtors, December versus June, they've actually increased by $3.5 million up to $9.8 million from $6.4 million. Trade creditors have actually only increased by $1.2 million. The reason for that is that we pay our leading podcast partners on 30-day terms. With a debtor day of 79 at the end of June, you would expect to see that increase on a balance sheet. Again, we always refer back to those three key points of our debtor days, aging, and write-offs to ensure that nothing is out of line in terms of what we expect. In terms of cash held by the business, we held $1.5 million at the end of June. That did decrease by $1.8 million from the end of December, where we held $3.3 million. One of the main reasons for that is that we paid, in the first half of this year, we paid $1.5 million in recoupable advances to attract and retain those certain leading podcast talent. At the end of June, $1.1 million of those advances were sat on the balance sheet. Again, we can see those assets transferring from cash over to different areas of the balance sheet being advances and also the overall debtor book as well. Just a reminder that the company does have access to a further $3.3 million of that SPV Investments Limited loan facility. We didn't draw down on that in the first half of this year. Last year, we drew down $700,000 and repaid that in November of last year. Just to confirm, no further drawdowns in the first half of this year, and no uses of the content funding guarantee facility either in the first half of this year. But both of those tools are available to us as and when we need them. But specifically to the loan, that's something we try not to draw down on because it's an expensive facility at 8%, so we only draw down on that when we absolutely have to. And in the first half of this year, we didn't need to. Overall, what we're seeing there is a balance sheet that really reflects the impacts of growth that we're recording across the business at the end of June. I view that as a strong balance sheet. Got strong collections going through the group, strong processes. We could understand those debtor days. Remember, we're working in an advertising sector where agencies typically pay on 90 days, sometimes 90 days plus, so we understand where our debtor day is. There's also minimal write-offs in terms of debtors in the company, and creditors are all being paid in line with their contractual terms. So everything is working as I'd expect it to, displaying those signs of growth within the business. Back to you, Stuart, for some run through the KPIs. Thank you, Brad. I guess just a reminder, if you do have any questions, you can ask those now. We have probably around 15 minutes or so of the presentation left. So there's some time at the end to answer those. If you do have any questions, put those in now. I'm going to jump into our KPIs. We have three KPIs that we release every quarter to show progress in the business. And each one of those KPIs is really some insight into the core function of the business, which is that advertising sales function, and the part that I talked to earlier. The first one that you'll see here is our global downloads number. And this was a new KPI that we brought in at the start of this year. And this is an industry-standard data point. It gets measured using the Interactive Advertising Bureau's podcast measurement standard. It's verified by Triton Digital, who are a leader in audio measurement. And as well as highlighting the strength in the Audioboom business, it's also great for comparing us against our competitors, too, because of that industry-standard metric. And you'll see here just on the chart that we've seen very strong growth across the past 18 months, adding somewhere around 5 million or so downloads every single month. So that continues. We obviously saw a bit of an uptick in Q2 of 2020 because of COVID and the increase in consumption that that led to. But we're seeing no slowdown in that increase on the network. So ultimately, more downloads equals more advertising inventory for us to sell, which gives us more opportunity to continue to grow our revenue. Second KPI is our brand advertising count. These are advertisers that we work directly with through our in-house sales team. These are the premium advertisers, the advertisers that are spending good money in the podcast space. Again, good traction here with setting a new record of 326 in the second quarter. You will see the dip here across 2020 due to COVID. Advertisers stepped away from the medium, not as quickly as they stepped away from other parts of the media. Podcasting was still pretty robust during COVID, but nonetheless, we did see less advertisers wanting to spend money. We have rebounded pretty quickly here and set new records in the first part of this year. I think just to give you some color on those advertisers, I think this one is important. If you look at some of our advertisers in the first part of this year, on one hand, we continue to do work with advertisers like BetterHelp, as an example. Now they are an online disruptor brand, disrupting the industry that they operate in. Podcasting is a real core destination for these type of brands. It is performance marketing. They can measure how successfully podcasting turns listeners into customers through promotional codes or attribution. They continue to spend very heavily in the podcasting space. On the other hand, we have a company like MINI, for example, who are pretty new to podcasting but starting to understand the benefits of being in podcasting. The scale is there now for them to be in podcasting. We welcome more of those traditional brand advertisers, blue-chip businesses into podcasting as the whole industry grows quicker and quicker. For our third KPI, this is the one that I really love. This is our eCPM, which is our measure of optimization, I guess, of our content. This is how well we monetize each 1,000 listens on the network. Obviously, it is great to have that global downloads number going up and up and up, but if we are not monetizing those as well as previously, then it kind of means nothing. This eCPM number has grown super fast. Just between Q1 and Q2, you will see 25% growth on that eCPM number. Not only are we increasing the volume of content that we have and the amount of inventory that we have available to sell, we are selling it more optimally than ever before. That is higher fill rates, so we are selling more of it, and that is higher pricing. We are selling it at much higher prices than ever before, and that has grown that eCPM number pretty quickly. I think I have said it before, you may have heard me say this before, I think there is a ceiling on that eCPM number somewhere around the $125 to $150. That would be 100% sell out at the highest possible rate across the entire 8,000 or so podcasts that are on the Audioboom network. We have got plenty of headroom there, but we are moving quickly and growing that eCPM number very fast. All of these great results, the increase in consumption, the revenue results, they really are moving Audioboom along very quickly. I have talked about how we are outperforming the wider industry by more than 50% when it comes to revenue growth year-on-year. Well, this is a look at the Triton Digital ranker, which is the biggest ranker of podcast businesses in the U.S. They also have rankers in Australia, Europe, and Latin America, too. In the U.S. in particular, Audioboom has risen from sixth position to fourth position just over the past year. We are the fourth biggest podcast publisher in the U.S., which is an incredible feat, I think, when you look at the businesses around us. Stitcher at the top there is a company that is owned by Liberty Media and Sirius XM. They have very strong backing, and they have also been around much longer than Audioboom has. NPR is the BBC of America. Audacy is the second biggest radio group, a multibillion-dollar company in the U.S. Obviously, Wondery backed by Amazon. Westwood One is the third biggest radio group in the U.S. We are really kind of punching above our weight here. Again, it comes back to that value proposition that I showed you at the top. That combination of platform, tech, content, and the sales value that we can deliver for podcasters has really pushed us forward. We have seen that growth from sixth position to fourth position. I think third position is within sights, and we think we can get there in the coming months. Just a note on the kind of continued strategy. That strategy really is around expansion of content using the platform. The more content we bring in, the more we get to monetize and the faster we can grow. Our expansion strategy is focused on content, and there is three pillars to that expansion strategy. It is acquiring content, it is making content, and it is accessing content. When I talk about acquiring content, those are the partnerships that we create with top-tier or professional independent podcasts through UTA and WME and CAA. We strike deals to distribute their content, to monetize their content, and to market their content. It is a big area of Audioboom's revenue, and we will continue to acquire content through those relationships that we have. When I talk about making content, that is our production arm, that is Audioboom Originals, but it is also our in-house productions and co-productions, such as our work with Formula One, where we are producing the Formula One official podcasts that is developed and produced by our team. We will continue to invest in that area. We will launch a U.K. production arm in September of this year. Primarily, our production has been focused in the U.S. to this point, but we will launch that production arm in the U.K. in September. With the first shows really coming out of that team in early 2022. We think there is a great opportunity there in the U.K., which is much more underdeveloped than the U.S. industry. We think there is a great opportunity there to be a leading commercial producer of podcasts in the U.K. We obviously have the scale within our wider network to market and to grow audience very quickly for those shows. We will build out that podcast team and that production team over the coming months and years, too. That is making content. The third part is how we access content. This is the work that we do via Sonic Influencer Marketing, which is our in-house advertising agency based down in Austin, Texas. They operate, again, at that premium and professional end of the podcast space, and they are able to access advertising inventory in podcasts that don't belong to the Audioboom network. They work directly with the advertiser to go and place advertising within podcasts on other networks. They can monetize podcasts on the Stitcher network, on the iHeartMedia network, on the Audacy network, on the Spotify network. That gives us access to more than 50,000 other premium podcasts too. Sonic are able to provide some additional strong scale. Those three pillars come together to kind of form our expansion strategy, all based around content. Then final slide, I think from us, which is really just setting up the rest of this year and beyond. Obviously, we're in a great place. We've had a fantastic first half of the year, but we are set for continued growth. Let me just break down some of the very clear reasons why we expect good things to happen over the second part of this year. Just when it comes to that premium inventory, those high-value ad units, we're going to see a significant increase in the amount of that inventory that we get to sell during Q3 and Q4. As an example of that, the NFL season here in the U.S. runs between August and December. The Fantasy Footballers is one of our key signings. Almost all of the revenue attached to that show is available to us across August to December. Not too much revenue contribution from that show in the first half of the year. As I said, it is the second-biggest U.S. sport show, and all of that revenue is in the second half of the year. Dark History, one of our Audioboom Originals, that launched in June. Again, all of that revenue potential is in the second half of this year. That is a show that delivers more than 2 million downloads per episode. The rate for each ad unit is extremely strong, over $25,000 per ad unit. Again, that's all available to us to sell in the second half of this year and beyond. The new partnership with Zane and Heath: Unfiltered, very similar, very strong, and very high advertising rates for each unit. That show launched with us in mid-June. Most of that inventory, again, will show up in the second half of the year. Our second-biggest show, True Crime Obsessed, in our new partnership with them, in our three-year partnership with them, they will deliver additional episodes every fourth quarter. 10 new additional episodes for us to monetize in the fourth quarter of every year. As I said, significant high-value new inventory that will add to our performance in the second half of the year. On top of that, the amount of inventory that we get to sell, we also push pricing much higher through our sales strategy. As the podcast industry professionalizes, more and more buying and selling of podcast advertising happens before the year starts in the upfront process. That happens in the October and November of the year before. It allows the biggest spenders, the biggest advertisers in podcasting to commit to a full year of advertising, but at discounted rates. It is a great way for us to get money on the books early on, but obviously it does not push our pricing high. This year, in particular, more than ever before, we have held back from selling our top shows in that upfront process, and we have held back that inventory to sell nearer the time to allow the demand to grow for those shows, and therefore allows us to push pricing higher. At the end of June, the last week of June, we opened up our Q4 inventory on our top 25 shows, and we are seeing already great uptake from the advertisers, and at record pricing as well for those top 25 shows. Pricing will also increase over the second half of the year. I have spoken a little bit about the AdRip tool that launched last week, and that is going to create great potential on the back catalog and will grow inventory significantly through the ad tech. Then finally, again, just to touch on that point about the ad marketplace that will support all of this content work, that launches in the second half of this year. We are already putting those pieces together behind the scenes through our international sales partnerships, through our programmatic connections, and our in-house sales. But that all comes together to create this marketplace, to expose more of our content to various sales channels globally. It really helps to just back up all of that work we do to grow our content. We are in a great place, set for continued growth. The team here, as Brad said earlier, it is a small team, a quarter the size of some of our peers. They buy into the strategy, they understand what we are doing, and they deliver for the business every single day. So really proud of the team here at Audioboom. Really grateful to have a supportive group of investors and shareholders. So thank you for joining us today, and I will take a few seconds just to take a look at the questions that have come in, and then come back and see if I can answer any of those. Stuart, Brad, thank you very much indeed for your presentation and indeed for updating investors this afternoon. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions using the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. But just while the company take a few moments to review investor questions submitted already, I would like to remind you that a recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A, can be accessed via your Investor Meet Company dashboard, and we will send you an email to notify you when that is ready for your review. I would also like to remind you that your feedback is important to the company, and immediately after this presentation has ended, you will be redirected for the opportunity to provide your feedback in order that the company can better understand your views and expectations. Stuart, Brad, I know I haven't given you a lot of time regarding the Q&A, but suffice to say, obviously, you highlighted at the beginning the remits within which you are able to answer questions. Perhaps if I could just hand back to you, and firstly, perhaps thank the investors for the time that they've spent in sending in these questions, and we will review all questions submitted today as well. Perhaps if I could ask you to read out the question, give a response where it's appropriate to do so, and then I'll pick up from you at the end. Yeah, thanks, Mark. I think just looking at the questions here, there are many that I can't touch upon. As I said at the top, can't talk about the potential offer from AAA, and as a result of being in that offer period, can't talk too much about any forward-looking forecasts or projections. That is going to knock a bunch of these questions out. But we will review them, and if we can find a better way to answer them, we can do that afterwards. Just picking up on one question here from Neil, who says, "AdRip is proprietary software developed by Audioboom. Can this be sold as a pay-as-you-go to other podcast companies or similar types of industry, streaming films or TV?" Right now, I don't think we have plans to do that. It is proprietary. We don't believe that any other podcast business has a tool like this. And we received some really fantastic press last week when we announced it to the industry because I think it was seen as something new, something very innovative, and something that nobody has really kind of thought too hard about before. So, no, we're definitely aware of the uniqueness of it. Right now, it really is built into the Audioboom platform, so content would need to sit within the Audioboom platform in order to utilize the tool. But what I think we really see it as is obviously a way to create a lot of new inventory from our existing shows and our existing back catalog. But also really a way to attract new podcast partners to Audioboom of various sizes. So, podcasters who are maybe of a smaller size but don't have that ability to swap out ads on their current hosting platform that they use, I think we can definitely go ahead and bring those shows across. And really just with our it allows us probably to be a little more aggressive as well when we are making offers and trying to create partnerships with some of the bigger shows out there, knowing that we have this new ability to monetize their back catalogs when previously I think we've been creating offers for those top-tier shows based on that first window opportunity and the sales that we can deliver into that first window opportunity. Now that we know and we are confident that we can also monetize that back catalog, it will allow us to be a little more aggressive there around our offers, and therefore, hopefully, just bring in more of those top-tier professional-level podcasts into the company. I think that is really it on the Q&A. Like I said, a lot of those I could not get to. I think we will- Yeah, let me just jump in just to give you absolutely and thank you once again to all those investors that have submitted questions. Stuart, Brad, I know investor feedback is important, and I will shortly commence and redirect investors to provide you with their thoughts and expectations. I guess before doing so, perhaps I could ask you, Stuart, for a few closing comments, and then I will redirect investors. Yeah. I think, again, thank you everyone for joining us. I think that we have done a really incredible job over the past 18 months since Brad and I really took over the running of this business of being very transparent of telling the story of Audioboom, to giving you a lot of detail on how we operate, what our business goals are, what our strategy is. I think more than ever, our investors and shareholders understand it and really buy into it, just like our team within Audioboom does. So, we are committed to continuing to do this, and I hope presentations like this really help. I feel that everyone here should be confident about the growth of Audioboom and where this company is going, because we are in a good place, and we are really excited about the future. Stuart, Brad, thank you very much once again for updating investors. Could I please ask investors not to close this session, as we will now automatically redirect you for the opportunity to provide your feedback in order that the management team can really better understand your views and your expectations. It will only take a few moments to complete, but I am sure will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of Audioboom, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That now concludes today's session. Good morning to you, Stuart, in the U.S., and good afternoon to everyone in the U.K. Thank you.