Good afternoon and welcome to the Audioboom Group PLC investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted anytime by the Q&A tab situated in the right-hand corner of your screen. 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 the questions submitted today and publish responses where it is appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. Let me now like to hand you over to Stuart Last, CEO. Good afternoon to you, sir.
Thanks, Alessandro. Hi everyone. It's great to be with you again. I hope you will have a chance to see our trading update for Q1 that we released this morning. Lots of questions already kind of coming in about that, and pleased to be able to tell you more today. As Alessandro said, get those questions in. We'll try and get through as many as we can towards the end of the presentation. Already, I have questions about YouTube, about AI, about the share price, about AIM. So we'll get to all of those towards the end of the session. You can drop those questions into the dashboard now. But let's move forward and start to tell you more about the business, I think. First thing here, before we get started, is just to say hi and introduce ourselves to anyone that may be new to Audioboom.
Many of you will already know Brad and myself, but for those that don't, I'm Stuart Last. I'm CEO of Audioboom. I've been with the business around 10 years, the last 4 as CEO. Based out here in New York, as you know, much of our business comes from the U.S., and I'm here with the team in New York City. Before Audioboom, I worked at another podcast company in New York, and previous to that, worked at the BBC on their digital audio products. So I am 10, 12 years deep in podcasting, and still continue to be super excited about the future of podcasting and about the future of Audioboom. It's just fantastic to lead this really great business and the team at Audioboom forward.
Thanks, Joe. Hi everyone. I'm Brad Clarke, CFO here at Audioboom, based in London. Just through 6 years here at the company, having started in March 2018. Chartered accountant, 15 years of experience within media-related companies and their finance departments, companies including Brave Bison, News UK, Grant Thornton. I'll be back a little later on to take you through revenue, cash, and OpEx within the business. Thank you, Stuart.
Thanks, Brad. We'll kick off today by looking at the podcast market and our business model, and just giving you some updates on what's happening in the space right now. Then we'll dive a little deeper on that Q1 update and what's driving that performance. The final section, before we get to those questions, will just be about the future and what we're focused on and what we are currently working on. I think just to kick things off, let's talk and update a little about the podcast market. Podcast market continues to thrive. We all know that last year was a tough year in the advertising space. But the podcast industry, that is predominantly fueled by advertising revenue, continues to grow strongly and has a quadrupling impact over the next seven years.
So between now and 2030, the total addressable market is expected to quadruple, going from $4 billion of global revenue up to $16 billion of global revenue by 2030. So structural growth happening, the industry building, and 22% compounded growth over that time. And really, what's driving that structural growth is audience and listening growth, and the number of new listeners that are coming into podcasting, and also the amount of listening that the audience is doing. So these stats here at the bottom are taken from the Edison Research U.S. study. So it's studying everything, all listening and all consumption of audio that's happening in the U.S. And really, what you're seeing here on the chart on the left-hand side is the number of podcast listeners has grown significantly over the last four years.
So from 2019 to 2023, the number of podcast listeners in the U.S. grew by 47%. And then the amount of time that those people spent listening has also grown significantly. So the amount of time listening has grown from six hours a week to nine hours a week in that same time span. So compounded, the effect of both of those upticks has meant that total podcast consumption in that last four years has grown by more than 120%, with more than 1 billion hours of podcast content consumed in the U.S. every single week. And obviously, where audience and people come, the money starts to follow. And Audioboom is one of those companies that are figuring out how to continue to monetize podcasting and monetize podcasting in a more effective way.
So we are perfectly positioned to start to take advantage and to take the opportunity that is ahead of us as this industry quadruples over the next six years. Our model is Audioboom, that will make the most of that opportunity. It is based around connecting audience, advertisers, and creators. So there's three parts to this marketplace that are essential for establishing value in podcasting. Our platform does this at scale and very, very efficiently. We work with creators, and we take their content. And on one side, we connect it to audience through our distribution, and we distribute with one click out to Spotify and YouTube and Apple Podcasts and many other listening destinations. And we also connect that content with brands and advertisers. And linking those three things up allows us and allows our creator partners to extract real value from podcasting.
Without Audioboom in the middle, doing this through technology, doing this at scale for our creators, there really is no value. You break one side of this connection, and there's very little value there. The Audioboom business model is based around the connecting of these 3 very important areas. It works. We've proven that this model works. Over the last 7 years, we've consistently delivered revenue growth, 1,200% revenue growth since 2017. That's 44.1% compounded average growth rate over that period. We've continued to step things forward on the revenue growth side of things. You can see the opportunity here, right? If the industry grows 22% CAGR over the next 6 years, we can see what that opportunity looks like for Audioboom over that time, even if we just maintain our share of market. The model works. It's consistently worked in the past.
We believe in that model. And as podcasting continues to grow, as that structural growth continues in podcasting, we think there's a fantastic opportunity ahead for the business. So we'll move into looking at the Audioboom trading update that was released this morning for Q1 of 2024. And I think that the headline and the key thing that I want to get across is that we are exactly where we thought we would be at this stage of the year, and exactly where we need to be as well to deliver on our 2024 goals. And what that means and what you saw this morning is $17.1 million of revenue in Q1. And that's continued growth following our return to growth mode in the final quarter of last year. So we are continuing to grow after that ad market downturn across the second part of 2022 and early 2023.
Audioboom is back. We're growing again. That growth rate was 11%. So $17.1 million up 11% on a year ago. The Q4 growth rate was 5%. We are starting to accelerate that growth rate. We expect that growth rate to continue to accelerate across this year as we build up. Also, we know that Q1 is always the low point for revenue. There's a lot of seasonality in the ad market. We know that Q1 is always the low point for revenue. We expect to kind of continue to accelerate that growth rate across the year. Yeah, that revenue number, exactly where we need it to be for 2024. We had $100,000 of Adjusted EBITDA profit in Q1 2024. Again, that's the second successive quarter of Adjusted EBITDA profit after we moved back into a profitable place at the end of last year.
Now, I think the one thing that does gear and drive forward is this EBITDA number. As you know, and as Brad will talk you through later in the presentation, we have a very kind of fixed cost base. We have a cost base. Our operating costs just haven't really changed over the past few years because of all of the automation that we build in, because of the efficient technology that we have in the business. So that cost base stays pretty flat. So as we grow the revenue number across upcoming quarters, we do expect a gearing effect on that adjusted EBITDA number across 2024. And then cash, we ended the quarter on $3.1 million of cash. That's down slightly from the $3.7 million at the end of last year. Now, that was fully expected. We expected that cash burn to happen.
Again, the seasonality here means that we were paying content creators for their Q4 revenue, which is higher. We also have some seasonality in some of our other payments around commissions and staff bonuses incentivization for staff there, too. So fully expected just to drop slightly on that cash number. I think one key point is that we continue to have a $1.8 million overdraft facility available to us on top of that cash number. So we have around $5 million of cash available to us. We've never used that overdraft. That remains undrawn. So we're in a place that we're comfortable with on the cash side of the business. I think the next few slides we'll look in more detail at our three KPIs that we release every quarter. These really do show off the business, and they really show what is driving that financial performance.
We'll start with brand count. This is a KPI that highlights the number of advertisers that we have working with us on a monthly basis. You'll see on the chart on the left-hand side, we've just continued to see good growth on that brand count number over the past three years. You see a slight dip at the top there from the $8,400 in Q4 of last year down to $8,100 in this most recent quarter. Again, that's just seasonality. We know that Q4 is by far the strongest demand part of the year. But when you look at it on an annual basis, the brand count increased by 23% in this most recent quarter versus Q1 of last year. Brands continue to put money into podcasting.
Showcase our ad tech product really does allow brands, particularly over this last year when the ad market has been weaker. Showcase really does allow them an easy access route into podcasts, and they can do it efficiently with low levels of spend. We get them inside the platform, inside Audioboom. And then we really show off exactly what we can do for those brands. So that brand count number continues to grow. As I've talked about before, we've really launched a new initiative last year to widen our customer base, to widen the number, and really not the number, but the type of brands that we work with at Audioboom. So podcasting had traditionally been built on performance brands. These are smaller, direct-to-consumer brands. They're disruptors in their fields.
Brands that you can see here on this chart, SimpliSafe, BetterHelp, HelloFresh, those are those performance or direct response brands. They have always been a majority part of the Audioboom and the wider podcast industry business. They are more vulnerable to those macroeconomic headwinds. They are smaller brands. They are less robust. Certainly, over the past 18 months, we did see them being impacted more by global economics. Mid-last year, we launched a new unit within Audioboom to grow our position and to grow our customer base with what we call awareness brands. These are generally much bigger, global, blue-chip brands. They're more robust. They are advertising to consumers based around growing awareness of their products, rather than needing direct sales attached to that advertising. They're handled often by the big advertising agencies, the historic holding companies.
And to this point, until recently, it's been a very small part of the Audioboom business and a small part of podcasting in general has been driven by these awareness brands. So we launched a brand unit in the middle of last year. And we've seen some really good success from that awareness brand unit. We're now doing business with eight of the top 15 agencies in the US for digital advertising. Now, there are a lot of barriers to entry here. We have to get inside these big agencies and show off what Audioboom can do and test the platform with their brands. And we're making very good progress there. And I'm really pleased that we're welcoming two very experienced new executives to Audioboom. Molly Harvey and Shaun Wilson, they both joined the company today. So fantastic timing to have them on board.
Shaun Wilson, formerly of Spotify and Sony, is coming in as Vice President of U.K. Sales. Molly Harvey, a very experienced sales executive in the U.S., most previously at SiriusXM, will join us as Vice President of Brand Sales, based out of the Midwest here in the U.S. So those two, alongside Danny Farman, who joined us at the end of last year, will really focus on getting further into those agencies, doing more work with the brands. And that will open up a much wider and more robust customer base for us as we go forward. The second KPI that we report on every quarter is downloads. Downloads is really kind of a proxy for consumption of podcast content.
It allows us to not just show you the trends in our business and the growth of our network, but also to compare our business against competitive podcast networks as well. I'll talk you through the numbers there, and we'll look at that in a little more detail. The monthly download number, the average monthly download number in Q1 of 2024, was $110 million. In line with the last quarter of last year, but down from the record number at the start of last year. We'll go into a little more depth on that. But that's linked to a change on the Apple Podcasts app that I'll talk to you about more in just a moment. Audioboom, across this time, has grown versus our competitors. In this last quarter, we've moved up the podcast publisher rankings.
We're now the fourth largest podcast publisher in the U.S., just behind Wondery, which is effectively Amazon's podcast arm, NPR, which is the BBC of the U.S., and then SiriusXM, which, as you may know, is just a giant radio and audio business here in the U.S. So really great achievement for us to move up to fourth place. We now have our sights set on third place. We've done that by signing new top-tier podcasts to the network. We recently announced a group of new podcasts that are joining the Audioboom Creator Network. Those podcasts, we expect them to add somewhere around 4 million monthly downloads now that they are on the platform going forward. So we'll continue to focus on the growth of that network. That's been a real driver to push us up those podcast publisher rankings.
We also have a global presence in those rankings with the fourth largest publisher in Australia, the fourth largest in Canada, second in New Zealand. So a really strong global footprint. But here in the U.S., based around this table here, that's where we're seeing some fantastic results. But as I've kind of shown you here, there has been a challenge over this last 3-4 months around that global download number. We have seen some erosion of those downloads down to 110 million. That is connected to a change that Apple have made in their podcast app when they released iOS 17 back in September. I'll give you the basics on that. I won't give you the full detail. But effectively, the Apple Podcasts app was responsible for around 40%-ish of all podcast consumption.
They made a change that stopped the automatic downloading of episodes to a user's phone. What that has meant is that, well, when episodes would previously have been just auto-downloaded, they would have counted as a download. Now the user, if they want to go back and find archived episodes or restart listening to a show and get those new episodes, they have to manually do that download. That has impacted that consumption metric, that downloads metric. When I last talked to you around three months ago, we talked a little about this. I think across the industry, we were seeing somewhere around 10%-15% erosion of that download number. But that has progressed. Across the industry, that number now stands at an average of 32% reduction. You'll see that on the chart on the top right here.
So industry-wide, that change that Apple made has eroded that download number by around 32%. Audioboom, I'm pleased to say, has been much more resilient. You can see it here in the numbers on the right-hand side, in that change column. Audioboom is down 12% year-on-year versus that 32% average. So we've been much more resilient to those pressures than our competitors. We've done that by signing new podcasts to the network. We are a go-to platform for podcasters, new shows, are signing to the Audioboom Creator Network. And that has offset some of that download decrease, whereas competitors have not been as successful as doing that. And we also know that several of our competitors have taken revenue reductions linked to that decrease in consumption. But Audioboom has been resilient to that due to some of the initiatives that we have in the business.
While you're seeing that happen in the background and that erosion of downloads, I think the key message here is that we are way more resilient than our competitors. We've moved up the publisher rankings. We are less impacted by anyone else in the space. I think what you're going to see is that a leveling out of that impact. iOS 17 has now been adopted by more than 78% of iPhone users. Generally, the new iOS releases are not adopted by many more than that. You're not going to see too much further impact there because of iOS 17. It's certainly been a challenge, I think, for everyone in the space and on Audioboom as well over the past few months. Final KPI is our eCPM, our effective CPM KPI.
This measures how much value we extract from every 1,000 downloads across the network. And I think what you've seen over time, over the past 4 years, is us continuing to be more productive, to be more efficient, for us to extract more value out of the downloads that are happening across Audioboom. This quarter, it was a record Q1 eCPM. We kind of look at this on a Q1 versus last Q1 basis because of that seasonality that we know of in the ad market. And you can see on the chart, right, we were at 59 in Q4, down to 52. But 52 is a record. The 59 is because of that high-demand Q4 season. So 52 is very much a record that we're proud of for Q1.
We continue to extract more value from our network, up 27% on Q1 of last year, which is a strong improvement. The growth of that eCPM is directly linked to Showcase, our advertising marketplace that we launched a few years ago and has made fantastic progress ever since. Showcase is a very efficient marketplace. It's ad tech-based. We push our supply billion-plus impressions now through that marketplace from 8,000 podcasts. We connect that to the demand side, the buy- side, through advertising technology. We do that very efficiently. Record revenue from Showcase in Q1, $3.8 million, up 21% on last year's Q1. Showcase continues to grow, continues to be a bigger part of Audioboom's revenue. It's fantastic because it has that efficiency built into it as well. It allows us to optimize.
But I think one part that I really want to show off today, and it speaks to that download number and how we have been resilient to that erosion of downloads, is the inventory supply and what we are able to extract from those downloads. So this is a chart here that highlights the number of advertising impressions that we make available to ad buyers on a monthly basis. A year ago, that number was $860 million. That number in March of this year was $1.1 billion. So in a year, we've grown the number of available advertising impressions by 28%. While in the background, the number of downloads, the amount of consumption, fell away. So that's a fantastic effort, I think. And that has really been key to us being more resilient than the wider industry against that iOS update.
We are now creating more than 10 available impressions per download versus 6.6 a year ago. So it's a really fantastic effort that comes from working with our partners to educate them about advertising, to restructure contracts around better advertising placements. A big piece of work, which started last year and is continuing now. So we're really extracting a lot of value out of each download now. And that record, $1.1 billion, came in March. And that was a 10% jump on October, where we went through that $1 billion milestone. So continued strong growth on the available advertising impressions number in order for us to grow that eCPM and keep that eCPM heading upwards. A number in the 50s is the healthy place for that eCPM to be. When we're in the 50s, we know we're doing a good job. And the ad market is supporting us.
I do believe over the coming quarters, we can push that into the upper 50s and may even touch 60, I think, in the coming quarters. But very happy with where our KPIs are. And I think with the detail that I've given you around those KPIs, I think you can see exactly how that drives our performance in this most recent period. And I'll let Brad jump in now. He's going to go into some more detail on the finances.
Thanks, Stuart. Hi, everyone, again. Thanks for the questions that have been coming in. Keep those coming in. There's been a couple that I can address directly as we talk through the next couple of slides. Thanks, Daniel, for those questions on OpEx, EBITDA, and cash. So we'll get to those as we go through. But let's start with, obviously, revenue. Stuart's given you a headline for Q1. It's great to see the company follow up on Q4 of last year with a second successive quarter where revenue generated was higher than the comparative quarter one year ago. Obviously, we expect Q1 to be lower than Q4 due to seasonality of advertising spend. But as Stuart said earlier, we're exactly where we expected to be at this point of 2024. Q1, there's really strong performance from Sonic Integrated Marketing, our podcast advertising agency subsidiary, in the quarter. Showcase, again, very strong performance as we've reiterated that message over the last 18 months or so. That revenue was up 21%. And both Sonic and Showcase recorded record Q1s, which is really encouraging.
This contributed to March revenue of $6.7 million, being the largest revenue month recognized since May 2022. So as a reminder, Q4 2023 was the best quarter since the Q2 of 2022. It was really encouraging that March had a higher revenue number than any month last year, including the seasonally stronger months in the Q4 . Advertising markets were challenging in 2023. But as Stuart said, the operational work we've done and continue to do so enabled us to recognize that continued increase in performance over the last couple of quarters. That's got to be viewed as a real positive about this company, that despite any macro headwinds, we're still able to drive that increase in performance and deliver increasing revenue numbers when we look back a year ago. The information we've put into the market over the last three months as well via RNS Reach has also given those interested in the company a greater insight than usual into the work going on to drive that increased performance.
New show signings, increase in ad inventory, investment into new hires that will drive growth. So today's Q1 update is really, very pleasing to be able to formalize some of the results of that work. If we look at OpEx, it's very pleasing, again, to be able to report another quarter of well-controlled OpEx at $2.7 million. That's comparable to OpEx incurred over the last couple of years. That's in line with the Q1 of last year. How do we do that? Well, in the Q1 of this year, staff costs have increased by 5% overall when we look at Q1 versus Q1. Our commission costs for sales staff were higher because of the higher revenue number. And we also implemented cost of living salary increases starting January 1st as well. So that side of the business, that cost bucket, that increased this year versus last year.
We ended the quarter on 40 staff versus 39 a year ago. Headcount now is at 42, with the 2 new sales hires recently announced. But there's no major headcount changes planned for the rest of this year. If you look at us on an average revenue per employee basis, we're very, very competitive versus peers in the space as well. There's an increase there of 8% Q1 this year versus last, $430K versus $400K. The increase in staff costs largely offset with a reduction in our technology costs, which reduced 9% year-on-year. So that's the second biggest cost category that we incur on a monthly basis. That decrease is mainly due to the impact of the changes in iOS 17, as Stuart referred to, static and dynamic bandwidth costs, which we incur to serve advertising. That actually reduced by $60K.
So yes, while we look at download numbers having decreased year-over-year, remember as well, from a cost perspective, that has a positive impact on our OpEx. We're paying less for that because there's less downloads incurred. I always say this, but it's worth reiterating for our new viewers today. We remain an extremely lean business, primed for further growth, pride ourselves on automation and efficiency. We don't need to take on significant numbers of additional staff to grow further. I think that addresses your question, Daniel. We don't need to incur significant amounts of new OpEx to grow. What we would see is an increase in technology costs because you'd assume with revenue growth, you'd be incurring more bandwidth and ad impression costs. But no real material increase in OpEx to drive that revenue growth. And that would have a gearing impact down onto EBITDA.
One other question that we've received today is on the Adjusted EBITDA figures for last year. Obviously, we're talking to Q1 at the moment. We've also released our 2023 results today as well. That Adjusted EBITDA figure for last year reduced from $1.5 million Adjusted EBITDA loss to a $0.4 million Adjusted EBITDA loss. The reason for that is because we've completed our audit, gone through the review of last year, and we have classified a second contract as being onerous last year. The classification process that we have for those contracts is to separate the loss made from those contracts and the provision created from the rest of the business so that they're isolated. The second contract recorded a $1 million loss in last year.
So when we separate that out from the rest of the business, that has reduced our Adjusted EBITDA loss from $1.5 down to $0.4. So there's an improvement there on that metric. And hopefully, that addresses that question. Another question from Daniel was on onerous contracts. So just to give a bit more context on those, two affected contracts were signed in the first part of 2022 when ad market conditions were more buoyant. Terms agreed at that point forecasted higher ad rates and are currently being achieved. So we've gone into 2024 with a $7.5 million provision on our balance sheet to offset the anticipated losses going forward. The loss provision created in 2023 means that the future net losses will unwind against that provision on the balance sheet rather than go through the income statement. That's a one-off cost there.
This comes with a caveat that provisions created are an estimate. Actual performance could be better or worse than estimated. It's important for reads of the accounts to understand that $7.5 million of the loss incurred last year is due to the creation of a provision, which will be unwound in 2024 and 2025. If anyone has any further questions on that, feel free to email me. I can talk you through the accounting treatment on those. Happy to do that. Let's go to the next slide. This one looks at our working capital cycle. Our cash balance reduced by $0.6 million between the end of December and the end of March. That drop was expected. In the Q1, we settled all partner revenue share payments for the higher revenue quarter in Q4. We settled non-sales staff bonuses.
And we also paid $0.1 million of advances in the quarter. So we expected our cash balance would reduce in the Q1 of this year. And I said as much in our January Investor Meet session as well to highlight those expected cash requirements in the Q1. If you look back at the last three quarters, our cash balance was relatively stable between Q3 of last year and Q1 of this year, around $3 million. The cash balance reduced through 2023 due to the reduced revenue recognized, ad market conditions, and the fact we honored all contractual minimum guarantees during that period. So that reduced that cash balance during last year. The invoicing and cash collection process we have here is first class. We collected 95% of revenue books in the Q1. That's bang in line with our four-year average of 94%.
As of today, we've collected another $3.5 million since the end of the quarter. Our days payable is 75. That's 6 lower than the 81 we reported for the full year last year. So that cycle still continues to work really, very well. For advances, we paid $0.1 million of advances in the Q1 of this year. We have another $1.3 million of contractual advances required for the rest of the year, $1.4 million total for this year. That will be $0.9 million less than the $2.3 we paid last year. So further evidence of the contract restructuring we're implementing to reduce cash required for podcast talent contracts. As Stuart mentioned, we still have that $1.8 million overdraft, which hasn't been drawn. That's to assist our working capital if we need it.
As I said at the last update in January, in relation to our cash balance, the processes we have to support the working capital cycle are excellent. We've reduced our exposure on MGs through contract restructuring. And today, we've confirmed that restructuring has reduced our exposure by $5 million, which is good. What we need to do now is deliver on what we have promised regarding revenue, with a focus, obviously, being on shows where we have a minimum guarantee. Delivery on the target set will ensure that cash reserves will ultimately increase. So that gives you a bit of a flavor in terms of the areas of revenue, OpEx, cash. I think I've addressed a few questions which have come in during the session. But keep those coming in. We'll address any more at the end of this session. But for now, back to you, Stuart.
Thank you, Brad. Just in this final section, we'll look a little ahead of us at what we're focusing on in the rest of this year. Probably 5 minutes or so on this. This is really probably the last chance to get questions in. Submit any questions that you have over the next few minutes. Then we'll come to those soon. I don't think anything too new here in this future focus section. We really have recognized everything that we need to do to continue to be resilient to the ad market downturn, to continue to be resilient to the Apple podcast app changes. We know everything that we need to do here to get to our goals for the year. I will talk you through them in some detail. I think the first one being network growth.
We will continue to sign top-tier shows. We have a good new business pipeline. More and more independent shows are looking to transition to stable networks. Brad touched on it just then. But we continue to be very stable when it comes to kind of working with our creator partners, paying our creator partners, versus a number of networks over the last year that have not been able to honor those agreements with creators. We can do that. We have done that. And that means that we get brought new shows through the Hollywood talent agents who work with those shows. They bring us new opportunity. We know that those Q1 signings that we announced a couple of weeks back will deliver significant numbers to our network every single month. And we will sign more and more of those top-tier shows, grow the network.
We have our eyes firmly on third place on that publisher rankings. But alongside that network growth, we really are focused on inventory creation from within that. That will be the second part that offsets that Apple change. You've seen today how we've moved from 6 ad slots per episode up to more than 10 over the past year. So we will continue to create more and more ad inventory per download across that time. And as I said before, I don't see too much further disruption through the Apple podcast app changes because the majority of users now have adopted iOS 17. We don't expect that to go too much deeper. So I think the first part of our focus going forward is to grow that network through new signings and then new inventory creation from the podcast that we work with.
Second part of focus is just our continued work around Showcase, that global automated ad marketplace that we have built out. The increased inventory levels that we're creating really does fuel Showcase. So we're pushing millions of available ad impressions into Showcase every single day, connecting them up with the buy- side, with the demand side. And advertisers are buying more and more of those impressions in Showcase. Showcase is also driven by the work that our new team are doing around those bigger blue-chip brands. So that's Molly and Sean, who joined us today. They'll be focused very much so on driving that customer base, expanding that customer base with the blue-chip brands. And then again, that advertising revenue flows through Showcase and keeps building that part of our business. So Showcase, we see a great future for.
We've talked about it a lot, I think, over the past two years. But we really do think and really are confident in what Showcase will bring us over the coming years. We're in a good place with revenue. We talked, I think, earlier that in terms of our Q1 revenue number, it's exactly where we wanted to be, exactly where we were expecting to be. And the same can be said with our bookings number at this moment. So as of this point, we have more than $55 million of advertising revenue on the books. That's up from $11 million in the January trading update, maybe slightly lower than that. I'll correct that number. But it's up significantly from the January trading update.
But it's at $55 million, which is, again, right where we need to be to reach our goals for the year, $55 million of bookings right now. But I think I said this three months ago when we did this. If you compare that to previous years at this point, we're actually, especially last year, we're actually, in relative terms, further ahead than that, right? Because last year, between April and July, as the ad market declined, we saw a huge number of cancellations across the business. So last year's book number, which was around $50 million, actually went backwards for a while because of that downturn in the ad market. Obviously, we're not expecting that this year. The ad market is more stable. And so in relative terms, we're further ahead, even further ahead than last year. So again, that number is right where we want it to be.
And then I think the final point of continued focus, Brad touched on one or two of the points here, is just our work with our creators, both in restructuring and renewing partnership contracts with those creators and then the new contracts that we make with creators going forward. I think, again, three months ago, we talked about us getting to the point where we had reduced our minimum guarantee obligations by around $2 million. We've had great traction in this Q1. We're now reducing that number by around $5 million versus last year. So the more of a decrease we can put on that minimum guarantee obligation, the more we de-risk this business, particularly in weak advertising times. We know that that's a flow through to the bottom line. So we continue to work to restructure and create more favorable deal terms for Audioboom.
And then the same on the revenue share side of things. During 2021 and 2022, this was very much a seller's market. And those podcasts were signed on less favorable terms to Audioboom. We now are correcting that with each renewal or each new signing that comes through. We're signing those shows on more favorable revenue share terms. And as we do that and that rolls forward, again, more cash will flow through the business in that way too. So we're making good progress on the creator deals and revenue exactly where we want it to be for the year. And that really does come together and gives us a lot of confidence around achieving our goals for the year. So just to talk through it again, it's that network expansion, growing the creator network, adding that inventory, those ad slots per episode, and extracting more value.
That goes through to that eCPM number, extracting more value from each one of those downloads, added to the work we're doing around Showcase and growing Showcase and expanding that out to more buyers, plus the work of our new team to bringing those blue-chip customers, those major ad agencies, getting inside of those to create new partnerships. Those things come together, gives us good confidence around our forecasted revenue number for the year. And then the work we're doing on those creator contracts, the improved revenue shares that we're putting into those and the restructuring that we're doing there, combined with that $5 million decrease in minimum guarantee obligation, again, that gives us confidence around our projections for EBITDA profit.
We're very confident about that return to the full-year EBITDA profit. I hope you can really see, again, how each of those items that we're focused on, they come together to give us confidence around the revenue and that EBITDA number for the year. We continue, as I said, to just be confident about achieving our goals. That's it for me. Give me a few minutes to look through some of the questions. We'll be right back to you with the Q&A.
Perfect, Stuart, Brad. Thank you very much for your presentation. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions just by using the Q&A tab, which is situated on the top right-hand corner of your screen. But just while the company takes a few moments to review those questions that have been submitted today, I'd 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. As you can see, we have received a number of questions throughout today's presentation. And Stuart, Brad, if I could just hand back to you just to read out the questions and give responses where it is appropriate to do so. And then I'll pick up from you both at the end.
Thanks, Alessandro. Yeah, we have some really good questions today, I think. So we'll get through a bunch here. First one says, "Your analysts have stated that improvements in the ad market would lead to upside for 2024. What is the state of the ad market currently?" Yeah, I think I touched on it during the presentation. But to give you more information, I'd say right now, it's stable. It's not strong. But it is stable. It has come up slightly since the bottom. Last summer was really the bottom. It was very weak. And it has come up from there. And it's now more stable, but still weaker compared to the last five years. It's not getting worse right now, which is great after 18 months of that happening. So we can work with that. We can plan for that. Stability, I think, is key.
We have a new normal, I would say, in the advertising market. The pricing is stable. Demand is pretty stable month-to-month. But improvements are going to be slow and steady. So yes, stability, it's not getting worse. But it will be some time, I think, before we can call it a healthy advertising market. Next question is from Marius about YouTube. We've mentioned YouTube in two recent press releases. It's becoming a more popular platform. Can you tell us more about that? Yeah, I mean, we've actually been monetizing YouTube for several years now. Many of the podcasts that we have exclusive advertising sales rights to, they also distribute a video version of the podcast.
So when we sell an ad for that show, we're selling it across both the audio version and the video version, monetizing the full distribution and the full audience that is connected to that content. And if you ever watch a podcast on YouTube, you'll probably see a note in the top corner of the screen or the video element saying something like, "This video includes paid promotion." Well, that's our paid promotion. That's Audioboom selling that paid promotion. And Audioboom already monetizing that YouTube part. But we are definitely focusing more on it because previously, shows just had a small YouTube element compared to the audio version. The visual version was really just a small extension of their audience. But YouTube really is gaining popularity when it comes to podcasting.
It's probably, I think, just about the second most popular consumption platform for podcasting now, particularly with the younger element of podcast audiences. And as that gains popularity, we believe that that audience, that YouTube part of the audience, can actually be more valuable than the audio part. So that's increasing our focus. That YouTube element of the audience is just as engaged. But now we can get products and brands in front of the audience visually. So we can do product placements. We can do deeper brand integrations. Those hold more value. We can sell them at higher pricing. They're more valuable to the brands and the advertisers. And we'll continue to grow that element of the business. And I expect YouTube to continue to be an even stronger part of the podcast audience going forward. This question is coming a lot.
I've seen it on message boards kind of recently as well. But it says, "We've seen several publicly traded companies delist in the U.K. recently because it hasn't valued them properly. Is that something Audioboom should do?" I mean, I think we've spoke at previous presentations. We had questions about whether we should list in the U.S. And we've said, "Look, we're not doing that right now. But we've done the work behind the scenes to understand what that looks like and what that could be." We are aware of companies leaving AIM to a tough environment to raise money in. Others are doing it because they continue to feel undervalued. You know that we think we are grossly undervalued. I think, actually, right now, relative to our performance, we are more undervalued than ever before, which is very, very frustrating.
We don't see a direct correlation between the valuation of the business and the work that we're doing. I'm not sure how much longer we can wait and hope that our valuation picks up or tracks performance. It's been like this for years at this point. It is very frustrating. At some point, things do have to change when we're that frustrated. So yeah, thank you for the question. We kind of see it happening across the market. We're certainly not kind of blind to that. Next question is about AI. In the trading update, you talked about using AI for the first time. What is the opportunity for AI in the business? It's a good question. We're kind of learning, I think, every day. It's very early days. Our first steps have been using AI to do two things.
The first one is we've been using it to create advertising creatives. So what we can do is we can plug in a short script for the ad. We throw that text into the system. And then the AI can create that 30-second audio ad with a range of voices and a range of different treatments and productions within seconds. So super fast process. And then the second way we've been kind of experimenting with AI is to use it to translate content into Spanish. So we can take the English version of that podcast. We push that into the AI system. And in a matter of minutes, it will spit out a Spanish version of that content, very accurate, very professionally produced. So I think, to this point, it's really yeah, the ad creation part is really about efficiency.
It enables us to give brands and advertisers a wider group of options at a lower cost to get the ads that they want. So there's a lot of efficiency built into that. And then on the translation side, I think that one's very interesting as it has the potential to open up new markets for distribution and monetization, but at a very low cost. So previously, the resource needed to translate and produce episodes in other languages was very, very high. AI will allow us to do that at a very low cost. So we're at the very, very early days, I would say, using AI to explore new markets for distribution and monetization. Yeah, I think we're learning every day about how we can use AI in audio and really what the value proposition is. Two more questions here.
Next one says, "Recently, you've announced technology launches like AdRip and AdVet. What's coming next?" Yeah, those two products have done a fantastic job of empowering our creator partners to make more of their content, to make it more valuable, to grow their revenue through increased advertising. And they've been very kind of creator-focused tools and products. We don't announce or give names to all of our tech developments, really only the ones that are creator-facing. Or we feel are game-changing products that no one else in the industry has, like AdRip. No one has that. We are the only platform, the only network that enables our podcasters to do that. AdRip is a real game-changer, I think, in the space. But even though we're not necessarily announcing everything or giving everything every product a name, we are continuing to develop all the time.
Much of what we develop is geared towards making this business highly efficient and automated so we can maintain that very low headcount that Brad mentioned earlier versus our competitors. For businesses of a similar size to Audioboom's, our competitors have many, many, many more people involved with them. As Brad said, we're at 42. We really don't need to grow much further than that in the near term. Just as a couple of examples, I think, right now, we're building a new inventory management platform that will allow us to manage the 1 billion-plus impressions that we have to sell each month. It allows us to manage those impressions in a very efficient way, understand those impressions, how we can sell them, where we can sell them, how they're targeted, that kind of idea. That's a piece of work we're doing right now.
Another piece of work, or kind of just launched, actually, a few weeks ago, is a tool that speeds up how we report ad revenue payment and pay ad revenue payments across 8,000 different podcasts. It was a piece of work that used to take our team more than a day. The first time we used this tool, it took less than an hour. So I think that's a really great example of how we're building tools that are not just for creators, but also internal tools that just make this business super efficient. Right now, we're working on an automated distribution tool to YouTube. I spoke earlier about how YouTube is just becoming this very popular consumption point. And so making sure that our podcast can be distributed there easier and in the easiest form is very important right now.
So we're building a tool that allows one-click distribution from Audioboom out to YouTube Music, the listening app that they have. And that's what we're working on there now. So yeah, lots of new tech development. Audioboom, some you'll hear about, some that you won't. It will just be making this business more and more efficient. And then I think the last one we'll get to now. I think we had this question from Gavin and a couple of others as well, actually. It's about M&A. This one says, "In the last presentation in January, you said that you expect M&A to restart in the podcast space in 2024. Do you have any more insight on that?" Well, yeah, I think it's certainly happening. I know of at least six podcast companies that are up for sale right now.
But I think the key there is that it's being driven by the sell- side. There are companies there that have suffered due to recent economic conditions. So that's not a great place to be in when M&A, I think, is being driven by the sell- side. You either sell or you get bought. And those things are very, very different and have very different outcomes. So right now, yeah, it's being driven by the sell- side. At this point, I'm not really seeing any major buyers, no huge players actively looking to buy podcast businesses right at this point. But there's no doubt, as companies like Audioboom start to report stronger financial performance across the year, that the buy- side will start to stir. And maybe the work that these businesses that are selling and doing will also stir the buy- side a little.
It will put podcast businesses back on the radar of big media, big tech organizations. And yeah, I still believe that the M&A window from the buy- side will reopen later this year. And as I've always said, we're just fantastically placed to take any opportunity that that brings. We are the biggest independent podcast company in the U.S., biggest pure-play podcast company in the U.S. in particular. But we do also have that global footprint. So yeah, well-positioned when it does reopen, I think, to take full advantage of that. OK, so just a couple of minutes to go. So I'll throw it back to you, Alessandro. Thank you.
Perfect, Stuart. Brad, thank you very much for answering all those questions from investors. And of course, the company can review all the questions submitted today. And we'll publish those responses out on the Investor Meet Company platform. But just before redirecting investors, I'd like to hear their feedback, which I know is particularly important to the company. Stuart, I was just wondering if you had any closing comments.
Yeah, I mean, I think just to say thank you again for joining us today. Thank you for continuing to learn and support this business that we love. Headlines from today and the trading update really are, we're exactly where we expect it to be, exactly where we want to be, very confident in delivering our goals for the year. Audioboom is a great business, growing faster than our competitive set in an industry that will grow quickly over the next seven years. So perfectly placed to take full advantage of all of that opportunity. And in terms of where we are from a valuation perspective, we feel we're grossly undervalued. Now is a great opportunity relative to our financial position to support a business that is continuing to move forward very quickly and continues to be undervalued.
Perfect. Stuart, Brad, thank you once again for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close this session? As you know, it will be automatically redirected. Provide your feedback in order that the management team can better understand your views and expectations. This will take a few moments to complete, but I'm sure it will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of Audioboom Group PLC, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation. Good afternoon to you all.