Earnings Call: Q4 2023

Jan 17, 2024

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Audioboom Group PLC investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged. They can be submitted at any time via the Q&A tab that is just situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Please just simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and will publish those responses where it is appropriate to do so on the Investor Meet Company platform. Before we begin, I would like to submit the following poll, which will just appear on your screens now, and if you could give that your kind attention, I am sure the company would be most grateful. I would now like to hand you over to CEO Stuart Last. Stuart, good afternoon, sir. Thank you, Jake. Good afternoon. Good morning, actually, from a snowy New York City. I am here in the Audioboom U.S. office, just a block or two from the Empire State Building. It is really great to be back with you all. Happy New Year. I hope that you have enjoyed our recent trading update that we put out on Monday, and I hope you agree that it was a positive trading update with an exciting year ahead that we will reflect on in this presentation over the next hour. We will jump right into it. We have a lot of new names, I think, on the attendee list today. We will kick off just by introducing ourselves and talking a little bit about our business model and the podcast industry. Then we will look back at the most recent quarter and talk about our performance and our results that you know a little about and go into some more detail there. We will look ahead to 2024 and what our focus is for the upcoming year. Then we will end the presentation today with a Q&A. As Jake said at the top, get those questions in and we will pick as many as we can and get through as many as we can towards the end of the presentation. As I said, just to kind of kick things off for people that are new to the company, new investors, new shareholders, my name is Stuart Last. I am the CEO of Audioboom. I have been the CEO for the last few years, the last four years, but have been at Audioboom for around 10 years now. Launched the U.S. business back in 2015. Before Audioboom, I was an executive at another podcast ad tech company here in New York. Prior to coming to America, ran digital audio and podcasting at Radio 2 and Radio 1, part of the BBC in the U.S. So many years deep in podcasting. I believe that podcasting has an incredible future ahead of it and pleased to be leading Audioboom into that future. Hi, everyone. I'm Brad Clarke, CFO here at Audioboom. Been here since March 2018, so I believe that's coming up to six years. I have over 15 years experience of working in various different media companies in various different financial roles based in London. I look forward to speaking to you a bit later on about various financial things that we focus on OpEx working capital and cash within the section later. So speak to you later on. Thank you, Brad. As I said, we'll kick off with a look at the industry that we work in and the Audioboom business model and the role we play within podcasting. I think the first thing here that I'm just really keen to highlight, particularly after 2022 and 2023, is the positivity around the industry and the growing industry that it is. There is structural growth happening in podcasting, and you may not know that, and you may not understand that if you've been reading headlines about the industry over the past year. Yes, the industry has been at the mercy of an ad market recession that's been happening and those macroeconomic headwinds, and you've probably been hearing about big companies like Spotify, who have spent a lot of money in podcasting but haven't seen the returns on their investment. They've had to lay off staff. They have had to restructure their podcast businesses. A lot of negative headlines, I think, over the last year and a half. That's not the reality of this industry. This industry is growing. Companies like Audioboom are pushing this industry forward, and the industry is set to grow, and it's set to quadruple over the next seven years. Right now, the total addressable market in podcasting is around $4 billion globally, and that's set to get to $16 billion by 2030. So strong revenue growth within podcasting projected over the next seven years. That's being driven by audience growth. People love podcasting. People are coming to podcasting very quickly, and it's becoming a key part of their media consumption. Just to break that down, in the last three years, the number of podcast listeners in the U.S. has grown by 25%. I think more importantly, the amount of time that those podcast listeners spend listening to podcasting has doubled. We have 25% more podcast listeners, and everyone is listening to double the number of podcasts or double the amount of time spent listening to podcasts that they did 3 years ago. That total consumption has increased by 150% in 3 years. That is leading to brands and advertisers wanting to be in this space, and then that, in turn, is leading to that quadrupling of podcast revenue over the next 7 years. A great industry to be part of. A very fast-growing part of the media. Let us move on from the negative headlines, I think, of the past year and a half. Podcasting is in a good place. The structural growth continues. I think Audioboom is positioned to take maximum advantage of that structural growth over the coming years. This is really highlighting the position that Audioboom takes in the podcast industry. We are a creator-led business. We are focused on bringing value to creators, independent podcast producers. What the Audioboom platform does is pull together three key elements that create value. We connect through our platform at scale in a very efficient way, the creators and the content that they are making. We connect them with their audience, and then we connect them with advertisers. Bringing those three elements together really creates that value. We are the heartbeat of that creator sector of the podcast space. Without us bringing those three elements together, there really is no value. Creators can have a big audience, but if they cannot find brands and advertisers to monetize that audience, then there is no value there. Creators can access advertising, but if they do not have a large audience, the value of that advertising is diminished. By bringing those three key elements together, doing it at scale, doing it very efficiently and very well, Audioboom brings a lot of value to the podcast space. That model has been proven out over the recent years, since 2017. That model has delivered very strong revenue growth, 65% average annual growth over the years between 2017 and 2022. That model is proven. We took the business from $6 million of revenue to $75 million of revenue in 2022, moved into a profitable space in 2022. That model works. It is a strong model. It will continue to be strong as we refine it and build it. As I said here, the model is proven and brings a lot of value to podcasting, and will continue to do so in the future as we look to take market share, and we are kind of primed to capture as much of that quadrupling of podcast revenue globally as we possibly can. Hopefully that just gives anyone that is new to the Audioboom business a quick overview of what we do, where we are placed in the industry, and what opportunity there is ahead of us. I think very quickly I want to get into a performance update to look back at the numbers that we provided on Monday in our Q4 trading update, to reflect on those a little bit, to give you some more detail into that performance. I think the messaging that I was keen to put across, and many of you will have seen that on X, is that we are back. We are back into a place of revenue growth. We are back into a place of EBITDA positivity for the quarter, and we are generating cash again. The way we have done that is to improve the business, to push on through the weak advertising market over the last 18 months, make those improvements, really drive the company forward, and that will also set us up for a very strong 2024. Let us break down those numbers a little bit. Firstly, that revenue number. In Q4 of 2023, we delivered $19.2 million of revenue. As I said before, this was a return to revenue growth. We were up 5% on Q4 2022 revenue. That year-on-year quarterly growth was a 5% improvement on 2022. A big jump from Q3. Q3 was really the bottom of that advertising market. We grew revenue in Q4 by 37% over that summer period in 2023. This was our strongest revenue quarter for 18 months, since Q2 of 2022, so pre-ad market recession. The improvements that we have made in the business are working, combined with some improving sentiment in the ad market, took us to that $19.2 million of revenue in Q4. At the same time, Q4 delivered EBITDA profitability, $200,000 of profitability in Q4, and that is from being in a loss-making position earlier on in 2023. That higher revenue, combined again with the operational improvements, drives us into that position of profitability in Q4. That EBITDA is impacted, as we know, by the ad market impact on revenue. As I said, higher revenue has delivered that profitability again. Then it is also reduced by our minimum guarantee payments that we have to make to podcasters on our platform. We will get into that a little bit later. We are making improvements to those minimum guarantees. We are restructuring deals to remove some of those obligations, and that higher revenue and the removal of those minimum guarantee obligations is helping us to get back to that place of profitability. Then the final number here, $3.7 million of cash. That is up $700,000 from our position at the 30th of September 2023. So during the quarter, we generated $700,000 of cash after burning cash earlier in the year. That return to cash generation is fantastic for this business. I think as we all say here, we are in a good position going forward with that money in the bank. We also have access to another $1.8 million as an overdraft facility, something that we have never needed to touch, but it is there in the background if we need that. We are well positioned in terms of cash. For me, it was a super pleasing trading update that we put out on Monday. It really was the result of, I think, some early recognition of the weakening ad market and then the changes that we made to the business that we will go into some detail on in the coming slides. Really the recognition of that weakening ad market and then the changes that we made to get through that came together to deliver a very strong Q4 2023. This is a slide I show you sometimes, I do not show this to you every quarter, but I think it is a good one to show you today. This breaks down our three main revenue streams in the business, but also highlights a couple of changes that are really taking place with Audioboom. The top section here is highlighting the contribution of each of those revenue sources to our overall group revenue. The bottom section is highlighting the revenue share, how much revenue Audioboom keeps of the gross monetization that we have. We revenue share with the content creators and then we keep a percentage. The two key changes I think I want to highlight here really is just the growth of Showcase. We will talk more about Showcase in detail as we go. Showcase is our marketplace, our ad tech-driven advertising product. That has been growing fast, and we have been building that product very quickly over the last two years. That has moved from contributing around 15% of our revenue in 2022 to almost a quarter of our revenue last year, and we expect continued good growth from Showcase. As a result of that, we have seen our premium ad product, which is traditionally the highest contributor, drop from around 71% to 55% over that time just because of that growth in Showcase and some growth in Sonic as well. The balance of revenue is evening out across the business as we build our other products out. The second change that I really wanted to highlight, and this is one of our key operational improvements here, is the revenue share that we have in the business. Blending the revenue shares from the various revenue lines and sources that we have here, our group revenue share in 2023 was 24%, and that is a marked improvement from 20% in 2022. We have gone from 20% in 2022 up to 24% last year. The more of that revenue that we retain, the stronger our revenue share. Obviously, the more that flows through the P&L and puts us in a much stronger position. We have done a great job within the business of improving our contracts with our creators and our podcasters, and restructuring those deals to improve that revenue share. Also, obviously, the growth of Showcase, which has a higher revenue share on that Showcase revenue source has done that too. A vast improvement there on the group revenue share as Showcase becomes a bigger part of the Audioboom business. The key drivers for that strong Q4 performance, I just mentioned one of them there. It is the second point on here, and that is Showcase record monthly revenue in November of $1.5 million. We have really grown Showcase from maybe less than $100,000 a month a couple of years ago into a place where it is delivering $1.5 million of revenue per month. Very strong growth this year. Overall, Showcase grew 35% in terms of revenue in 2023 versus 2022, and we will continue to grow Showcase. But that was a key driver of that Q4 strong performance. The second key driver, the first one on the list here, is the growth of our inventory. You may have seen an RNS release that we put out in November highlighting this key milestone of 1 billion advertising impressions in October. In October, we created for sale, that we could sell to our brands and advertising customers, 1 billion advertising impressions. That's huge volume, huge scale. The key to generating that number, again, has been to create and expand how many advertising impressions we're able to get from each episode or from each download. In 2022, for every episode, maybe an episode is an hour long on average, we were able to create five ad slots for sale within that episode. By working with our content creators and our partners, we've been able to increase that number very quickly to eight ad slots per download. Even if we are not adding new downloads, which obviously we did during the time, but even if we were to not add new downloads to the network in that time, we're now generating way more available advertising impressions, eight versus five per episode from that content. A real case of some operational leverage there from the content that we operate. Third key driver was Sonic, our brand platform. Record monthly revenue in December for Sonic of $2 million. Again, strong growth from 2023. We really are delivering some great ROI for the brands that work with the Sonic platform. Highlights the strength of podcasting as a medium for advertisers and I think good sentiment on the brand and advertiser side going into 2024 is worth noting. Then finally, the expansion of our customer base. Earlier on in the year, we launched a new unit, and I'll go into more detail on this later in the presentation, but we launched a new unit that was tasked with expanding that customer base, going into the bigger advertising agencies in the U.S. and the U.K. and creating new relationships with blue-chip brands to bring those into podcasts. They haven't been traditionally podcast advertisers, but now we are in there and creating those relationships and those partnerships and bringing more customers into podcasting and into Audioboom. Very quickly, we're seeing some good traction there. We are now working with eight of the top 15 advertising agencies in the U.S. when it comes to digital spend. These are major advertising agencies that look after global blue-chip clients, and we are seeing some good traction there, as I said, and money coming in from those ad agencies since launching that new unit in the middle of last year. That performance is reflected again in our three KPIs that we put out each quarter and really kind of highlight the change and the growth in the business. The first one of those KPIs is something we call eCPM. It's our effective CPM. That's an optimization metric. It highlights how much money we make from every 1,000 downloads across the platform. We hit a new record number for that eCPM in Q4 of 2023, that record number of just under $59. You can see the dip on that chart on the left-hand side through that weaker advertising market over the past year. You see that number dip down to low 40s. We were only able to generate $40 per 1,000 downloads. We have moved back to a position of strong revenue generation there, $59 per 1,000 downloads in the final quarter. Again, Showcase being a key part of that. The marketplace and how that marketplace functions is highlighted on the right-hand side here. Showcase really sits in the middle and connects supply and demand of our advertising inventory. It is advertising tech-based. It does this efficiently at scale. It is very kind of low touch from the Audioboom side. It is seeing 35% year-over-year growth. We have very strong supply going into that marketplace. As I said before, we did a total of 1 billion available impressions in October. Much of that supply, 600 million or so of those impressions, were pushed into Showcase from our 8,000 podcasts on the platform. Once inside Showcase, all of that supply gets exposed to the demand side, so that is advertisers and brands on the demand side. We connect up the brands with the supply, and we monetize that way. Very strong growth of Showcase that has led and helped lead to that strong $59 record eCPM in Q4 of 2023. Our second KPI is our brand count. Here I can break down a little bit what I was talking about earlier around customer expansion. You will see on the left-hand side that brand count growth has been extraordinary over the past four years, going from 2,200 brands advertising with us four years ago, three years ago, to over 8,000 in the most recent quarter, and another record number of 8,400 per month in Q4 2023. That is reflective of our growth as a platform, the amount of inventory that we have to sell, the partnerships that we are creating on the revenue side of the business, and the ease of access that those brands have because of that Showcase marketplace. It is very easy for them to come in and test podcasting and spend low levels of money to make sure that the podcasting works for their brand. This KPI is not really just about the number of brands. It needs to be about the quality of brands, and this is something that we recognized very early on in the ad market recession. We very early on recognized that the brands that we were working with were very exposed to macroeconomic changes. The types of brand that we were working with are what we call performance brands or direct response brands. They are generally direct-to-consumer companies. They are disrupting the space that they work with. What they are looking for from podcast advertising is very measurable return on investment. You will have heard ads for this type of advertiser. They generally come with a special code that the consumer can use when they are purchasing products from that company that allows the company to see where that customer came from, so they can see which podcasts are delivering performance for them. But they are very exposed, as I said, to those macroeconomics. So once inflation got high, once consumers stopped spending, these brands cut back their advertising very quickly. We recognized that, and we made a pretty quick move to launch and then build a new brand that was targeting awareness brands. The difference here is that the brands that our new unit is targeting, these awareness brands, they are not looking for that direct ROI. They are more established brands, bigger names. You can see them here, Ford Motorcars, Nike, Pepsi. Those are examples of those bigger blue-chip awareness brands. Their advertising strategy is very different. They are less impacted by those economic headwinds. And we had very few of those as customers of Audioboom in 2022. And our new unit is building partnerships and bringing in money from those bigger blue-chip brands now. So we made great traction there, as I said earlier, working with eight of the top 15 U.S. digital advertising agencies and starting to capture some of that revenue from those more established brands. And that will help us not only widen our customer base and increase our revenue, but it will protect us from future weakness in the advertising market that we saw through those performance brands. Those performance brands will remain a strong part of podcasting, but by widening out that customer base, it just puts us in a much less risky and stronger position going forward. Our third KPI is our downloads count. And this represents the size of our network. The more downloads that we have within our network, generally, the bigger and stronger the shows are on the Audioboom network, the more inventory that we have to sell, the more monetization opportunity that we have. And this is an interesting number this quarter, and it is going to take a little explaining from me to kind of talk you through it. So you will see on that chart on the left-hand side, we have had strong download growth over the past four years. And we kind of doubled the size of our network and our monthly downloads between early 2020, and the middle of 2023, moving from 63 million a month up to 127 million a month downloads, which was great progress, and was really built by bringing new top-tier podcasts into the Audioboom network. What you have seen in Q4 is a dip. So we have gone from 127 million a month in Q3 to 110 million a month in Q4. And that on the surface may look like a strange change because we have told you about new podcasts that we have brought to the network, major podcasts that bring audience with them and should grow that downloads number. But in September of last year, Apple released the new iOS 17, and the podcast app within Apple that was responsible for around 50% of the industry's consumption, around 50% of consumption listeners comes through that Apple Podcasts app. That app changed the way that it downloads content. So previously, it would auto-download back catalog content. Even if you were not listening to recent episodes from a podcast, it would continue to download back catalog episodes, unlistened episodes of that podcast to your device, and that would count as a download. In the new iOS 17, it stopped doing that. So it no longer downloads those archive or back catalog episodes. That is impacting our overall download number, as you can see here. Across the industry, and this is an industry-wide impact. This is not just something that is happening to Audioboom. Across the industry, we are seeing anywhere between 10% and 12% interruption and impact to download numbers because of that iOS update. Audioboom is not impacted to that level as much. If you look year-on-year, we have gone from around 110 million a year ago, and we are still at 110 million now. So the overall growth of our network is really offsetting the changes and the impact that iOS update is making. We will keep you abreast of any further changes and any further impact of the iOS update as we go forward. One thing that I am keen to express, and I was in the trading update, is that the iOS change and the stopping of those back catalog episodes being downloaded doesn't impact our revenue. So our premium advertising product is really focused around that first window, the first 90 days of consumption. So the numbers that we can sell against for that premium advertising product are not impacted by the lack of back catalog downloading that's coming there. So on one hand, yes, you are going to see this number at a lower level, this downloads number at a lower level than you had previously, although that will come back up as we continue to add more shows into our network. But it's not going to impact our revenue significantly because the majority of our revenue is being attached to those front catalog or first window episodes and downloads. But that's a complex one. Please do drop me an email or let me know if you want any further information on that. As I said, we will keep you updated on it. Despite that little drop off because of the iOS update in the numbers, we are still maintaining our position as a leading podcast publisher in the U.S. when it comes to consumption and audience reach. You will see from the two podcast rankers on the right-hand side here that we are in fourth or fifth position when it comes to the largest podcast publishers in the U.S. So again, something I am most proud of when you look at the list of names on the right-hand side there above us, we are really only behind these giants of media and giants of tech in terms of Spotify, Sirius, iHeart, and Amazon. So to be fifth there is a fantastic achievement, and I think we should be very proud of the growth that we have seen to our network and our position there in those rankers. I will pass you over to Brad now for a few slides. Brad's going to go a little deeper on our finances, and I will come back to you in a couple of moments. Great. Thanks, Stuart. Let's go through a few financings, give you a full year view of OpEx, working capital, cash. As Stuart said, it's great to see that return to revenue growth in the final quarter of this year. We delivered exactly on what we said we would do in that final quarter when we updated you last in October. That's great to be able to report that. Q4, best quarter since Q2 of 2022, since that ad market downturn started, and there's lots of positive revenue metrics delivered in that quarter. There was actually a question earlier on in the session asked by S.A. relating to how much higher Q4 revenue is versus Q3, where we can see the answer here, S.A., in terms of the growth in 2021 was 21%, 2022 was 15%, 37% growth as we've shown this year. The average of those three years is 24%. It's higher this year because of that softer Q3 that we had this year, and our second highest Q4 ever behind 2021. Hopefully that answers your question there, but this slide deck will be online after the presentation, so you can take those quarterly figures from there. On the revenue rates, the standout revenue stats like Showcase. Showcase revenue increasing by 35% to Sonic, up 20% year-on-year, both Showcase and Sonic having record quarters in Q4. That sets us up well for 2024 and all that operational work that Stuart's been talking to throughout the last couple of sessions. We all view that in the company as a real positive. We're able to drive that significant increase in performance despite those softer conditions, macro conditions in 2023. Important point on this slide. We always talk about the control over the OpEx base, but we've got three years' worth of data there in terms of the OpEx, and it doesn't really move materially. It's very well controlled, very well disciplined. This year, 2023 average OpEx per quarter of $2.6 million. A monthly average of $0.9 million per month. That average of $0.9 million, if you roll back the last couple of years, that's the average OpEx over the last three years, $0.9 million. Again, that's showing that control and discipline within that OpEx base. Despite those inflationary macro pressures, the OpEx this year was 1% lower than last year. Again, when looking at this company, it's really important to consider that. Once that top-line revenue number starts to push on again, we'll see that gearing effect go through to EBITDA because the OpEx base is, as I say, very well controlled, and it's not forecast to increase overly significantly over the next couple of years. How have we done that this year despite those inflationary pressures? At the start of last year, in January, we took the difficult decision to reduce our headcount. The average headcount this year is 39 versus 45 in 2022. We reduced our exposure on original productions and focused on what we do best, which is selling advertising. That restructure was implemented at the start of the year. We've recognized full year savings on that. Again, at 39, it's a very lean company in terms of headcount. The reductions that we were able to implement, they were offset by increases, significantly so within technology costs. Technology cost is our second biggest cost expenditure behind salary and commissions. The material increase within technology was the higher volume of ad impressions and bandwidth this year. We actually recognized a 24% increase on that specific cost. That was around $3 million for this year. That cost was actually 9% lower than it could have been if we hadn't renegotiated the cost for that contract. We actually saved around $200k for that specific cost, which was good work from Lance and the team to renegotiate that. I always say and for the new viewers that are joining us today, as I've said already, it's an extremely lean business, primed for further growth. We pride ourselves on automation within the company. We don't need to take on significant numbers of additional staff or increase our salary costs. We need to increase that top-line performance, and we're focused, fully focused on delivering the growth this year. That should give you a good overview of the OpEx within the company. On to working capital. In cash, the headline for the fourth quarter is the cash increased by $0.7 million between the end of September and the end of December, which was very pleasing given the pressure that's been on that cash number this year. Year-on-year, that cash number did decrease from $8.2 million down to $3.7 million. Reasons for that, very straightforward in terms of the reduced revenue recognized this year, softer ad market conditions, no Morbid podcast, and the fact that we honoured all contractual minimum guarantees in the period. That's put that downward pressure on that cash number. But it's obviously very pleasing to be able to increase that in the fourth quarter. Lots of work went into ensuring that we did that. Invoicing and cash collection process continues to be first class within the company. We actually collected 99% of revenue recognized in 2023. Our four-year average is 94%. We're starting to build up a real good data set now in terms of our performance over the last few years. That should give confidence to investors in terms of that side of the business as well. January started well as well. We collected another $300k today. It's $2.5 million for the month, and we expect to collect significantly in the second half of this month as well. That cycle just continues to go, which is great. I think as well on the collection side, the invoicing side, we actually only provided for around $100,000 of potential bad debt and provisions within the year. That's less than 0.1% of revenue. Again, that should give everyone comfort. The processes that we have are very well entrenched, and it supported the business from a cash perspective very well during this year, and once we start to see any kind of improvement in macro conditions, we'll see that flow through on the top line, but also into cash as well, which happened in 2022. As is usual now, we did have a couple of material customers appearing to hold back payment over the year-end, and I do refer to that when we do these quarterly presentations. I refer to it because it's never consistently the same customer. If it was the same one, you could eliminate that from your analysis. But it does vary from quarter to quarter, so I do think that impacts the cash balance held, particularly referring to a half a million dollar payment we received in the first couple of days of this year. Other information on cash in the year, we serviced $2.3 million of advance payments in the year. That was half a million dollars up on the prior year. As I've said, we made full payment of all creator MGs as well, including the onerous contract, which we detailed at the half year on the last quarterly update. Got approximately $1.6 million for advances scheduled for this year, 2024. A reduction from $2.3 million. Further evidence of the improved contracts that we're signing. Good evidence of our good profile and standing within the industry to get that number reduced. In terms of cash, last time round we spoke about the softer July and August revenue months, which impact the collections through Q3. Obviously, that increase in cash in the final quarter, we've seen the stronger revenue months of September through to November improving that cash balance. I should also say, when I talk to you next time as part of the Q1 update, Q1, there are forecasted material payments which we make in the first quarter, including advances, commissions for the final quarter, and staff incentives. They're all settled in Q1, plus also settling all of the revenue shares for Q4 as well. We need to be, and we will be, on our game in terms of collections to offset that pressure. Debtor days, that increased to 81 versus 68 last year. That's to be expected given the volume of revenue booked in the final quarter. Our target is always to get that below 90. And I've always said that our write-offs and provisions were immaterial. So although an increase, we're still comfortable with that number internally, given the low level of any write-offs in terms of debtors in the year. We still have our overdraft available to us, $1.8 million if we need it. Good continuing endorsement from HSBC. As we've said now as we go into 2024, we've detailed the reduction in MG exposure, which will reduce any pressure on cash. But delivery of our revenue targets this year will ensure that cash reserves are maintained this year, and then significantly, looking towards 2025, when that MG pressure starts to unwind even further, those cash reserves start to increase again from that point onwards. I think that's covered all the main points there. I'll keep a lookout for any other questions that come in. Back to Stuart now for the final few slides. Thanks, Brad. I guess last chance to get any questions in, so drop those questions in there and we'll answer those in about 5 minutes. I think just before we get to that, really looking ahead, looking forward to 2024 and walking you through our focus for what is set to be a very positive year for the business. This is what we're looking at. This is what we're focused on building within the business. The first one is just that continued growth of the Audioboom creator network. You'll have seen a recent announcement that some of the signings, the show signings that we brought to the network in Q4 would provide or add another 5 million monthly downloads in 2024. So we're really focused on signing and partnering with real tier 1 podcast creators, the biggest and best in the business. You'll have seen one of those announcements was Matt and Shane's Secret Podcast starring an incredible comedian called Shane Gillis. He's really the star of the U.S. comedy scene right now. Has a Netflix special, has a really strong following, a big audience. It's just fantastic to bring that show to the Audioboom network. Our new business pipeline where we sign those shows and work with the talent agents, the Hollywood talent agents, to bring those shows to Audioboom. That pipeline is as strong as it's ever been. I think what we're seeing more than ever is opportunity to bring podcasts to Audioboom, where they are looking to work with a more stable network or a more robust network. Obviously, other Audioboom competitors have been hit hard, I think, by the weak ad market of the last 18 months. We've stayed strong within that. We've been resilient within that. The podcasts that were working with those other networks are looking to partner with a more robust company. So we're getting a lot of great opportunity there to continue to build that Audioboom creator network. The bigger that network gets, the more downloads we have, the more ad inventory we can create, the more monetization opportunity there is. Second point on here is the work that Sonic is doing on the brand platform. The great news there is that they have stronger budget commitments from their clients, their brand clients, for 2024 than they did last year. I think that's coming about because the U.S. is expecting consumer spending to increase, inflation is down. There's strong sentiment around the economic situation. A soft landing is coming probably in the U.S. Brands are committing to podcasting again, and they are through Sonic and those budget commitments that we have there are kind of mirroring that improved sentiment in the ad market as a whole. That third point here, that new brand awareness unit that launched last year, we brought a fantastic guy called Danny Farman in from SiriusXM, and he's really driving that unit forward. We're going to continue to focus on that brand awareness expansion, working with more and more blue-chip customers. We'll invest into that sales operation, and we'll expand the partnerships to even more of the top 15 U.S. advertising agencies. That's a great area of focus for us. Touched on it before, but the market is improving. It's been in a pretty troublesome place over the last 18 months, but the ad market is definitely improving. It's not roaring back, but it's improving. We are seeing good sentiment within the industry. That has really fueled a positive kind of upfront booking season between October and December. We work with our biggest customers to create really great campaigns for them across 2024. This year as of now, we have more than $47 million of revenue booked for 2024, with 11 months of the year to go. That's a strong position to be in. It really is a sign that brands and advertisers are feeling good about podcasting, but are good about life in general, I think. I touched on it earlier, but we continue to improve those revenue shares that we have with our podcasters and our partners. New partnerships that are coming in, we are creating those deals on stronger and improved revenue shares for Audioboom. The way we're able to do that is by ensuring that the other key services that Audioboom offers are part of those partnership agreements. I think previously during the fast-paced market of 2021, those partnerships, those agreements, were really based around the commercial aspect, purely a commercial aspect, and that led to those weaker revenue shares for Audioboom. Now we're able, I think, to bring many more of our services to that partnership. So it's the distribution part of what we do, the ad tech part of what we do, the marketing part that we do, our production services businesses, we can bring that to the partnership, and that gives us the ability to work with an improved, stronger revenue share for Audioboom. The last point, is something again, I touched on earlier, but didn't go into a great deal of detail on really, our EBITDA for 2023 was impacted significantly by our minimum guarantee obligations. We had to pay our content partners our obligated, guaranteed revenue. Whether we made that through advertising sales or not, we still had to pay that. So we would true up, that would hit our profit margin. We are reducing those minimum guarantee exposures very quickly. Through the restructuring and renewal of some of our top podcaster contracts, we take $2 million away from that minimum guarantee exposure from January 1st this year. So $2 million reduced from January 1st. I'm expecting to successfully restructure and renew further deals and partnerships across the year that will result in another half a million coming off that minimum guarantee exposure. Those improvements go straight to the bottom line, and they will help us be profitable in 2024. To sum up, I think, last slide from me before we do some Q&As. This is really what 2024 looks like. We're expecting strong network growth by signing top-tier podcasts, and we have that very strong pipeline of new business coming to the Audioboom creator network. We're expecting an ad market recovery. We know Showcase is growing strongly, and we continue to build Showcase, our marketplace. Adding to that, our new brand awareness unit is bringing in more and more blue-chip customers and creating strong partnerships with those major ad agencies. The brand budget commitments to Sonic are strong too. You add all of those key improvements and key positive areas together, and that's taking us to a place where we're forecasting record revenue for 2024 of just under $79 million. That's driving the revenue. Then the improved revenue shares that we've pulled together, and worked very hard to create, plus those decreases and removal of those minimum guarantee obligations, more than $2.5 million in total by the end of the year in minimum guarantee obligations. Those two things come together to improve that bottom line and will take us to a place where we are returning to full-year adjusted EBITDA profit. So a very positive year ahead, coming from those improvements that we've made to the business, then the upside from ad market recovery as well. I'm really excited about 2024. I hope you are too. The Audioboom team are working very hard to make this a record year for the business. Back to you, Jake. Perfect. Stuart, Brad, thank you very much indeed for your presentation this afternoon. Just before moving to questions, ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions just by using the Q&A tab that's situated on the top right-hand corner of your screen. But just while the team take a few moments to review those questions that were 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 dashboard. Brad Stewart, as you can see there in the Q&A tab, we have received a number of questions throughout your presentation this afternoon. And thank you to all of those on the call for taking the time to submit their questions. Sure, Brad, if I may just hand back to you just to read out those questions and give your responses where it's appropriate to do so, then I'll pick up from you at the end. Thank you. Thanks, Jake. First one. We have about 10 minutes for this, so we will fly through as many as we can. First one is from S.A, and just picks up on a point I made a second ago. It says, "You stated that you have $47 million of advertising bookings already in place for 2024. Last year at this time, you had $44 million booked. That doesn't look like a major increase on where you were at in 2023." Yes, those numbers are correct. $47 million booked so far this year, and at the same time last year, we had $44 million booked for 2023. But I don't think that really tells the entire story. What you have to remember is that last year, the advertising market deteriorated significantly between March and August, with brands pulling millions of dollars from their advertising budgets. Across Audioboom, we had around $7 million of advertising cancellations happening across that period, March through to August, as the ad market deteriorated. I don't think that the $47 million this year to $44 million last year comparison is not really apples to apples because the ad markets are in different places and we are definitely not expecting high-level budget cancellations this time around. In reality, we are much more than $3 million ahead of last year. You could probably look at the numbers that I just gave you and think we are somewhere around $10 million ahead of where we were at the same point last year. In reality, because of that deteriorating ad market in the middle of last year. Hope that kind of gives you some context and makes a bit of sense there. The next question simply just says, "Where will you invest in growth this year?" I think our investments will really be designed to just maximize the revenue we capture from our existing operation. We are not going to be doing anything too different this year. After the last 18 months, 2024 really has to be about proving that this model works once again. We won't be expanding into new territories, we won't be starting new business lines or new projects. We will be investing in really capturing as much value from our existing operation as we possibly can. We will invest in our sales and revenue operation in the U.S. and U.K., I think mostly around that brand awareness team and building out that part of the operation further so that we can accelerate that customer expansion and get into more of the major agencies and the blue-chip brands. As I said, really just optimize and capture that revenue from the model that we have built and improved. I think I have answered some of this already, but it was also a question I saw. I actually got an email a week or so ago from an investor. So I will answer this one, but it says, "Can you give us more of an understanding of the differences between premium advertising and Showcase?" And I think it is super important to understand both of them and how they complement each other. I was actually listening to a podcast this morning that was talking about the NFL and Major League Baseball here in the U.S., and it talked about NFL being the premium product built around high engagement but fewer events, whereas Major League Baseball that has 180 games per season is really an inventory and a volume play. Our two ad products are very similar. We do both the NFL model and the Major League Baseball offer model. The first product that we have is our premium product. That is really high pricing. We charge $25 per 1,000 impressions. We only sell that premium advertising on our top 200 shows. That is because of that high engagement that we are looking for. We need the ad to be voiced by the podcast host where they endorse the product. They are influencers, their audience responds to them by buying the product that they are endorsing. It is really great ROI for the brand that is spending that high amount of money on the ad. As I said before, we only sell that ad on a 90-day window. Which means that the ad runs from the moment the episode is published for the first 90 days so it is not impacted by the Apple iOS update. It is very exclusive. We only sell it in-house from our in-house sales team, so that helps to keep the price high. That is that premium product, that is our NFL product. Showcase is more of our inventory play, our volume play. It is an advertising marketplace. As I said before, it is automated through ad technology, so we can do it at scale. We are matching supply and demand at massive scale. It is high inventory, so it is 8,000 podcasts, 100 million plus downloads or hundreds of millions of advertising impressions we are supplying into that marketplace every single month. On the other side of that marketplace, the demand is an ecosystem of advertising buyers that we have partnered with. It is ad agencies, it is sales partners that we have in international regions. It is ad networks. A really great example of that demand side is exactly what the investors were asking me about last week in Amazon. Amazon runs an audio DSP, a demand-side platform, where Amazon advertisers can get access to audio advertising inventory. Through Showcase, we can expose our supply, our inventory to that Amazon DSP and sell our inventory and sell ads to those Amazon advertisers through their DSP. That is just one of the sources, Amazon. There are many more. Google is one. There are a bunch of others. There are tens of different DSPs on that side of things that we have partnered with. We are just exposing at scale, at volume, 8,000 shows all in Showcase. Then we can target for the advertisers. The pricing in there, it depends on how we target to different demographics, different audience locations, content keywords. Those two products, they work together very seamlessly. They do two very different jobs, and both will continue to grow over the coming years. This question is asking what our exposure level is to our biggest podcast. Obviously, Brad mentioned it in his part of the presentation. We used to work with a show called "Morbid." It was a huge show. It is a top five in the world show. When we lost that show, that show was doing around 20% of our monthly revenue at the time. So big exposure to one podcast. Great for our growth back then, but obviously hurts when and if a show moves on at that level. We are much less exposed now. We worked really hard. I think we focused a lot on reducing that exposure over the last few years. To break that down for you, I think in 2023, the top 5 shows that we worked with were responsible for 18% of the revenue. The top 10 were responsible for 31% of the revenue, and the top 20 podcasts are responsible for 41% of the revenue. So a big reduction in that exposure. Very diversified. Way more diversified than before. Our biggest show is 5% of our revenue. When you look at those numbers, I am pretty comfortable at this point with how diversified that revenue is. The other key point I think to make there, it is not really just about those exposure levels, it is about the contracts that we have. The top 10 shows have an average of 18 months left on their contracts with us. We are locked up with our major revenue providers for a good amount of time going forward, 18 months on average on those top revenue providers. Just to summarize, we have worked hard to reduce that exposure. We are much more diversified, plus we have strong contracts in place. We have got time perhaps for one more here, which is another question that just came in during the presentation. It says, "You have been in fourth or fifth position on the podcast rankers for some time. Can you move up those rankers this year?" It is a challenge, right? Because I think when the only publishers above us in those rankers are Spotify, iHeartMedia, SiriusXM, Amazon, and sometimes Audacy as well, which is another billion-dollar radio company here in the U.S. It makes that task much harder. They are huge publishers that we really do compete toe-to-toe with, but they are very well-funded, very well-resourced, big publishers. I do think we can move up this year. I think we can certainly move up to third place in the Triton ranker, to get above Audacy. If we go back 12 months, our weekly unique audience in that ranker was 3.5 million below Audacy. In the most recent ranker, we have closed that gap to just 400,000. So we have made up 3 million in the past 12 months. To me, that looks like there is a great opportunity to move above them in the ranker. Moving above them in the ranker is not just a marketing play, it runs deeper than that. It allows us to have more leverage with the talent agents to bring more partnerships to us. It allows us to have more leverage in the ad industry, too. We are at 11:00 P.M. here, 4:00 P.M. your time. We are going to have to come to an end right about now. Thanks for your questions. They will all be online. Jake, I will pass it back to you for a second. Perfect, Stuart. Thank you very much indeed for addressing all of those questions that came in from investors. Of course, if there are any further questions that do come through, we will make these available to you immediately after the presentation has ended, just for you to review, to then add any additional responses, of course, where it is appropriate to do so. But Stuart, perhaps before really just looking to redirect those on the call to provide their feedback, which I know is particularly important to yourself and the company, if I could please just ask you for a few closing comments to wrap up with, that would be great. Yeah, look, my key message is we are back. The improvements that we have made to this business, they showed in Q4, and it was a great Q4. But those improvements, you will really see the impact of those in 2024 as we head to a record year. Plus, there is upside as the advertising market improves. So, we are in a great place going into 2024. 2024 will be a really strong year for us. This is a great value stock right now. If you want exposure to an industry that is going to quadruple in the next few years with a company as strong as Audioboom, this is a great place for you to be. Stuart, that is great. Thank you once again for your time this afternoon. Could I please ask investors not to close this session, as you will now be automatically redirected for the opportunity to provide your feedback in order that the management team can really better understand your views and expectations. This 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 with Audioboom Group PLC, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That now concludes today's session, so good afternoon to you all.