Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Audioboom Group 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, more publicly addressed responses where it is appropriate to do so on the Investor Meet Company platform. Before we begin, as usual, we would just like to submit the following poll, 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 the executive management team from Audioboom Group. Stuart, good afternoon, sir.
Thank you, Jake. Welcome, everybody. Thanks for joining us today for a look back at Q1 2025. We're pleased to be here to talk you through some of the progress Audioboom has been making. Pleasing update for us, everything landing almost exactly where we expected it to be. I think that's been really good progress for the business. We'll dive into that in a moment. As Jake said, send your questions in. We have a few in already on things like YouTube and tariffs. We'll get to those at the end. We'll walk you through the business model first, talk a little bit about the background to the company, which we like to do each time for those that are new to Audioboom.
We'll go into detail on that Q1 performance and give you a deeper look at some of the numbers around that and the operational progress we're making there. Finally, we'll look ahead into the rest of 2025 before we get to those questions. Send in any more that you have. For those of you that don't know us, we'll do some introductions here. I'm Stuart Last, CEO of Audioboom. I've worked for Audioboom for the last 10 years, launching the business in the U.S. back in 2015, stepping up to CEO in 2019. I love what we do here. This company is focused on building value for creators and advertisers in the fast-growing podcast space. It's been an exciting time at the helm of this business over the last six years.
Hi everyone. Yeah, thanks for joining us today. I'm Brad Clarke, CFO here at Audioboom, chartered accountant here based in London. Been with the company just over seven years. I joined in March 2018. Mainly focused on media companies in my career. New U.K., Very Bison and now Audioboom. I'll be back a little bit later just taking you through a few financial-focused slides. For now, back to you, Stuart.
Thank you, Brad. Key points, I think, today, EBITDA 10 times what it was a year ago. We have talked a lot about the gearing of our business model and the focus on higher quality revenue, higher gross margin revenue. We will give you a little more detail on that. Having EBITDA 10 times the level of what it was a year ago is a real sign, I think, for us that that business model is working and is building nicely. Making good progress on the revenue front, $63 million of revenue booked for this year. Moving very quickly and very solidly towards our goal of $80 million of revenue for the year. That is very pleasing. I think you should be confident in the progress that we are showing there. I want to talk a little bit about Showcase. That is our automated ad tech-focused product.
We've added AI through a partnership to Showcase. We'll highlight some progress around Showcase. Audioboom leading the way when it comes to monetization in the podcast space. Our monetization engine is getting stronger and stronger. We'll take a look at that. Key points, I think, for the rest of 2025 will be the growth in the Audioboom Creator Network through renewals of our strongest podcasts and the signings of top-tier podcasts in the space. All of this coming together, as I said before, to deliver record revenue, record EBITDA, us hitting our 2025 goals as we get through the year. First of all, like I said at the top, we do this for anyone that's new to Audioboom.
I think it will help the rest of you also get a deeper understanding of what we do is to look at our business model and where we sit within the podcast space. As you know, podcasting is a fast-growing medium right now. We are really at the heart of it. What Audioboom does, and it does it at scale and very efficiently, is join three key parts of podcasting together. We connect through our platform creators and podcast hosts with audience and with advertisers. It is only when you bring those three elements together that you can create any value. Take one of those three elements out of this connection, and there is no value here. The Audioboom platform does this at scale, 100 million downloads or listens from the audience every single month to some of the best podcasts in the world.
We work to bring in advertisers into that mix to really create value across the podcast space. Audioboom is a vital part of podcasting. As I said, without us, there is no value in podcasting for these creators and for these advertisers. We will continue to platform more and more content and bring in a wider group of advertisers and build audience. Our model, our business model is proven, and it's proven to deliver growth. We've done that consistently over the last 10 years. On the chart here, you'll see over the last eight years, we've delivered 38% CAGR over that time, 1,200% growth since 2017 in our revenue. Going from $6.1 million of revenue back in 2017 to this year's goal of $80 million of revenue. It is a very consistent revenue growth there.
Obviously, back in 2023, you'll see a little dip there. The ad market had a downturn because of global economic headwinds. Coming back up last year and again this year, we've consistently outpaced the industry growth, building our market share over that time. That is what we're focused on doing going forward as well. You can see the opportunity here for Audioboom over the next five years. We've marked that out. The industry is projected to grow at around 22% CAGR. As I said, we've consistently outpaced the industry historically, and we will look to do that again. If we do that again, we have a pathway to more than $200 million of revenue by 2030. You can see the track record. You can see what the future opportunity looks like for Audioboom. Again, we hold a very strong place in the podcasting space.
This is the Triton Digital Podcast Publisher Ranker for the U.S. Audioboom in that ranker is the third largest podcast publisher. There's another ranker from Edison Research, which measures a wider group of podcast publishers as well. We appear fourth or fifth in that ranker. We are one of the biggest podcast publishers in the U.S., where 85% of our income comes from. We do hold a global position too. We are the second biggest podcast company in the U.K. We're big in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, English-speaking nations. We have a big presence. We're building a great platform that's showing off in the financial results. It's also showing off in our position within the industry. Audioboom is a great company, and I think we have a really strong future ahead. I hope that was helpful for those of you that are new to Audioboom.
This next section will dive into the Q1 numbers a little bit and give you an update on how we've performed in the first part of 2025. I think the key message here from us is really both revenue and adjusted EBITDA hit exactly as we expected them to. $17.3 million of revenue in Q1 and $0.7 million of adjusted EBITDA in Q1. To break that down a little bit, that revenue growth, 1% up on Q1 of 2024. Now, obviously, that is a lower growth percentage than our overall goal for 2025. Again, it's exactly where we expected. We are still seeing some of the impact of Apple's iOS 17 change, which reduces downloads from the network. That is in its final, or it was in its final quarter of impact in Q1.
We are seeing some inventory limitations because of that impact in Q1. Bigger than that, we took this chance in Q1 to move on and relinquish around $3 million of low-performing contracts and replace that with higher margin revenue. Now, that's something we've talked about to you on these presentations over the past year. We've talked a lot about moving into higher margin revenue, focusing on that area of the business. That's something we did a lot of in Q1 of this year. We moved out $3 million of low-performing contracts, replaced it with higher margin, and that's reflected in that 10x adjusted EBITDA. What else is there here? I think what we're seeing on the revenue side is continued improvements in pricing and demand in the ad market.
We do expect now we have moved on from that $3 million of lower-performing contracts to see that growth rate accelerate across the rest of the year. We know as of today, and we've said this, we have $63 million on the books for the year. That pathway to the $80 million and the 10% year-on-year revenue growth is very much there. We're very confident, again, of achieving that. While we have that lower growth percentage in Q1 on the revenue side, you know the reasons why. It's improving the health of the company and proving that that business model can gear and grow. As I said, that's led to 10x adjusted EBITDA growth over the last year, around $700,000 of adjusted EBITDA. That business model is working. Money is flowing through that P&L.
The reason for that, again, as we've said before, is improving that revenue mix. That has led to a 25% improvement in the gross margin in Q1 versus last year. Higher quality revenue, improving that gross margin, that's flowing through to adjusted EBITDA. We have that continued stable OPEX base. Brad will go into more detail on a lot of this later in the presentation. Our operating costs haven't really changed over the past four years. It's just, again, allowing more of that revenue to flow through to adjusted EBITDA. Very pleasing that these landed exactly where we wanted them to and sets us up well to achieve our goals for 2025. I think you'll see a little more of that detail in this chart, which takes a look at our mix of revenue.
It compares the top here, Q1 of last year with Q1 of 2025. What you're really seeing here is a shift into our higher gross margin revenue products. Showcase has the highest gross margin amongst our revenue products, around 30%. We've gone from Showcase being 22% of our revenue mix to it being 31% of our revenue mix in just a year. We've moved quickly to improve the quality of that revenue, as you are seeing here. As I said on the last slide, that's leading to 25% gross margin improvement. That's flowing through to EBITDA for that 10x EBITDA increase. By taking out $3 million of lower quality revenue and putting it back in at a higher margin, we're really seeing some strong results in the model. Each quarter, we release three KPIs.
Those are global distribution, which is the size of our network, the Audioboom Creator Network, how much consumption is going on within that network in terms of downloads and video views. We have a second KPI called RPM, which is revenue per mille, revenue per 1,000 downloads to the platform. And then brand count, the number of active customers that we have buying from Audioboom. I'll walk you through those and repaint a good picture of the health of the company and the progress we are making. For global distribution, in Q1 of 2025, we had 94.8 million monthly downloads and video views. As I said earlier, this was the final quarter where we will see that downward year-on-year trend because of the Apple iOS 17 update that has changed the way that downloads are measured. You are seeing a year-on-year decrease for the final time.
You are seeing a step up from the previous quarter. From Q4 of last year, we've grown the network by around 4%. We expect to see growth in the upcoming quarters and be back on a growth trend for our global distribution. We're signing new shows to the podcast network. We're retaining the best shows that we do have. That's going to lead to network growth and a rising global distribution number. That means more inventory to sell, more revenue opportunity for Audioboom. Our second KPI, RPM, how much money we extract from every 1,000 downloads. This is market-leading. No one gets close to our numbers here in the podcast space. That talks to the high-quality advertising products and monetization engine that we've built in Q1 of this year.
Obviously, seasonally, our lowest demand and lowest revenue quarter, we delivered $61 per 1,000 downloads and video views. That is a record for Q1. Ended up 17% versus the same period last year. We continue to make improvements to those ad products. Showcase continues to build. That RPM number is driven by advertising demand, inventory creation, and pricing. Those three things come together and build that RPM number. You can see the progress we have made in this one over the past five years, going from $26 up to a peak of $76 in Q4 of last year. Good, strong performance on the RPM number. Just a sign that we have a healthy model and healthy income when it relates to the amount of downloads and inventory that we can create. Finally, brand count.
Again, another record for Q1, 8,974 brands advertising through the platform in Q1 of 2025. That's up 14% versus a year ago. Second highest quarter ever. Just a little lower than that high demand Q4 of last year. Very much expected that we would dip after that. We will head back up across this year, of course. Brands are coming into podcasting quickly. We've built a new unit to work and bring in blue chip global brands into Audioboom over the past few years. That's having a great effect on this number. Showcase and the advertising technology that we are building makes it easy for brands to advertise across Audioboom. That's helping bring in more customers. Just our general sales work is driving that customer count. A really good result there, I think, on the brand count. Positives across the board here on the KPIs.
We're seeing distribution heading back in the right direction and then records on the RPM and brand count. I talked a lot about Showcase. You have seen the importance of Showcase in that revenue mix model, highest gross margin, and the fastest growing part of the Audioboom business. I wanted to break down a little more information about Showcase and talk you through some updates that we have made to that platform over the past quarter. For background, Showcase is our second advertising product. It is the advertising product that is very, very scalable because it is built 100% through advertising technology. Works at high volumes. More than 5 billion available advertising impressions will be made available to monetize within Showcase this year. Like I said, very high volume, very scalable, tech-based advertising product. What Showcase does is effectively matches up supply.
That is advertising inventory coming from all of our content and all of our content creators. It matches up with demand from our customers and our brands, either directly when we are selling directly to a brand or through a programmatic ecosystem where all of that buying and selling is done through the technology. Showcase is doing that, like I said, in real time and very high demand. We have seen strong growth of Showcase over the past three years since we launched it. You saw on that previous chart that it is now over 30% of Audioboom's revenue. It had another great Q1. There was a 36% revenue increase for Showcase versus Q1 of last year. Continuing to grow very quickly, it continues to be a very important part of Audioboom. Really driven, I think, by the pricing increases that we have been able to put into Showcase.
We're now selling at more and more premium pricing to advertisers as we prove that it is efficient, that it works for them, and has a lot of options in there for them to target specific audience groups and potential customers for them. We have seen a 34% pricing increase in there. This quarter, we added AI to Showcase. We have partnered with a platform called Sounder. That provides artificial intelligence to Showcase. That does two new things, which I think will be very powerful going forward for Showcase. The first thing that it does is provides brand safety and brand suitability guidance to advertisers. The second thing that it does is it allows those advertisers to target audience through contextual targeting.
Let me talk a little bit more about those two things, which I think are exciting to us and can lead to higher pricing, more premium pricing, and stronger Showcase growth. First off, brand safety is very important for this new breed of advertiser that we are trying to attract. A couple of years ago, we set up a new unit to go and attract the biggest blue chip global brands in the world to Audioboom. What they require are high levels of brand safety and a lot of sophistication around that brand safety. They do not want their brands to be aligned with content that is unsafe or questionable and does not suit their brand guidelines.
By adding this brand safety guidance through the AI, we can now go to those blue chip brands, show them how safe this platform is, show them the content that is safe for them to advertise around, give them that confidence, and open up new budgets at those major global brands. Contextual targeting is a fantastic option for our advertisers as well. The AI in Showcase will enable that contextual targeting. What the AI effectively does is for every piece of content that we have across the platform, this is millions of hours of content at this point, it transcribes that content, understands the context of what is being talked about within those podcasts, and then offers out the ability for advertisers to target their brand messages against specific parts of that content. Let me give you an example.
Two hosts on a podcast are talking about travel and booking vacations. Showcase through the AI will now recognize that that conversation is happening. It will then go and ask brands like Expedia or Airbnb if they want to advertise against that specific piece of content. Because of that very, very targeted ability, we can then charge more to those brands to target their advertising there. Premium price point that will grow the pricing within Showcase. It gives advertisers another layer of optionality around how they advertise in podcasts. I think our integration with Sounder and adding AI to Showcase is an extremely important part of our future. It is going to be very impactful as we integrate that over the coming months. We are really excited to see how Showcase continues to grow and continues to drive our business forward.
With that, I'll hand over to Brad, who's going to go deeper on some of the numbers.
Great. Thanks, Stuart. Hi, Brad again. Yeah, let's go through the next few slides. Focusing on revenue, gross margin, minimum guarantees, OpEx, EBITDA, and cash in the next few slides. Simplistically, I view Q1 as a good solid quarter, which sets us up for the rest of the year. One of the questions was from Meg about market expectations for this year. You can view these numbers in the context of the full year, which are revenue $8 million, EBITDA $4.5 million. Hopefully, these graphs also appease Andrew Kay, who put a question saying, "Can we see a quarterly breakdown of revenue and EBITDA?" We've got those on a lot more in these next few slides, Andrew. Hopefully, you can get the information you need on those.
By the way, the presentation in PowerPoint will be on our POC website. Also, the YouTube version will be available on the POC website tomorrow as well. If you need to reflect and look at these slides again, Andrew. Given those market expectations, also answer Stephen O's question about whether we can expect revenue acceleration from the 1% and an improved adjusted EBITDA margin. Yes, clearly, we expect that because our market expectations are, as I say, $80 million for the full year and $4.5 million for EBITDA. Yes, we would expect those to improve throughout the rest of the year. Perhaps that's what's going on with share price today, maybe, is that we are judging Q1 against Q4. Now, Q4 is our seasonally strongest quarter. Q1 is the quietest quarter because that's the way advertising spend works.
As I say, a really pleasing aspect of this quarter is delivering that 10 times adjusted EBITDA improvement on last year. Obviously, benefiting from a smaller number last year. Still, the principles and the way we explained business we have done over the last year, they're really coming through in the numbers, which is good to see in our quietest quarter. Let's look through the next few slides. The first slide looks at revenue, gross margin, and podcast and minimum guarantee exposure over the last few quarters. Very much a continuation of the focus on that high-quality revenue, gross margin, and improved adjusted EBITDA we saw from Q3 onwards last year. Obviously, again, remember that seasonality within the business when you're looking at Audioboom. We expect this thing to get stronger as we go through the rest of the year.
Good to see that sixth successive quarter of year-on-year revenue growth, following that downturn in 2022 and 2023. Overall revenue growth of 1%. With Showcase having a really good start to the year at 36% up year-on-year, we've seen the contributions and the revenue split earlier on with Stuart. The really pleasing point with Showcase is that higher gross margin, we are keeping more of that revenue, which flows through to the bottom line. Premium revenue increased by 9% year-on-year due to those price increases. We're obviously seeing decrease in Sonic year-on-year, but Sonic does contribute at that lower gross margin. Gross margin overall has increased from 16% in Q1 of last year on a group basis up to 20%. That is a 25% improvement there, which again is very, very good. The graph in the top right-hand corner, that really gives a couple of positive indicators as well.
In terms of gross profit, generated $0.7 million more in gross profit from $2.7 million up to $3.4 million year-on-year. That's at that higher gross margin as well, 20% versus 16% last year. Note that Q1 of this year was higher on both of those metrics than Q1 and Q2. Q2 generated $3 million gross profit, Q1 this year $3.4 million. Again, good, encouraging metrics. Focus on higher quality revenue benefited by the continued growth of Showcase, as we say. Good growth on premium revenue. That's coincided with us reducing our minimum guarantee or MG exposure. Now, if you're new to the story, I do go through this explanation every time. Just to give you that context in terms of minimum guarantees, the context is that to secure exclusive advertising rights to leading podcast talent, we offer carefully modeled minimum guarantee revenue share contracts.
We guarantee revenue for those podcast partners. It is our job as a company to generate revenue share or payments in excess of those minimum guarantees. If we do not deliver on that, then we would recognize a lower gross margin than we expect on those contracts. Typically in the U.S., where the majority of our revenue is generated, we recognize 20%-25% gross margin on those tier-one podcast talent contracts. Where we do not achieve the monthly contractual minimum guarantee, we have what is called a minimum guarantee true-up, effectively a shortfall on the agreed minimum revenue share. Therefore, we recognize a lower gross margin than anticipated. The company has worked very hard to honor all of those minimum guarantee contracts. When contracts come up for renewal, we restructure them to ensure that they are attainable.
The chart on the bottom right-hand corner details the percentage of content partner payments that relate to MG true-ups over our total cost of sales. That was higher in Q3 of 2023 when we had exposure to those MGs because of the ad market downturn. Since then, we've seen that exposure decrease quarter on quarter. We'd expect the increase in Q1 at 6% of total cost of sales because of that seasonality within the revenue. We'd expect that exposure to reduce as we go through into the second half of the year. For example, if we had a minimum guarantee of $1.2 million per year or $100,000 a month, we may only generate $90,000 of revenue share in the early part of the year. We'd expect to go over and above that $100,000 a month later on in the year.
Thus, overall, we've gone in excess of that minimum guarantee. We see that impact unwinding in the second half of the year, which is why we saw in the second half of the year higher gross profits. We'd expect that pattern to reoccur as we go through the rest of the year. If anyone needs me to take you through that detail, then please send me an email. I'm happy to take you through that. Again, it goes back to the seasonality point. Along with revenues, that's seasonality and costs as well across the business. Okay, let's go through to the next slide. On this slide, I should mention the OpEx. That's something we're very proud of within Audioboom. It's that consistent OpEx base. We can see it's very, very flat over the last seven quarters here, $2.8 million a quarter. I'm not expecting that to materially change going forward.
We do not need to gear that up significantly to continue doing what we are doing. That has been consistent at $2.8 million in the first quarter of this year. That OpEx, $2.8 million, what is that made up of? 67% of that in the first quarter of this year relates to salaries and commissions. Historically, that has been around the 65% mark. A slight increase there in the first quarter of this year because of cost of living salary increases. If you are ahead within the business, slightly higher commissions. It has been able to remain consistent because our technology costs have reduced since last year. Historically, technology costs have accounted for around 25% of costs. In Q1 of this year, that is down to 18%. Why? That has been through the renegotiation of our ad impression and bandwidth contract with FoxNet yielding cheaper rates.
It's costing us less to run the platform than it did last year through that contract negotiation. Overall, though, because of that's maintained at $2.8 million. Very lean headcount within the business ending the quarter at 41. We'll go to 42 by the end of April with a new sales head high. We'll go to maximum 44 by the end of the year. Again, consistent within the business. On the right-hand side, we can see that adjusted EBITDA improvement. Q1 versus Q1, that's $0.7 million. In terms of that scaling or gearing, we'd obviously expect with an annual expectation of $4.5 million, we'd expect that to increase as we go through the rest of the year. The cash and debtor slide. Good that we've got an increase in the cash balance since the end of the year up to $4.3 million.
We said before, we've spoken about onerous contracts. We recognize a couple of those back in 2024, the start of 2024. One of those contracts ended in January this year, which is good. The second, more material one, will end in December of this year. We are not expecting to significantly increase the cash balance as we go through this year. We would expect to start seeing adjusted EBITDA be more of a proxy for cash generation once we step into 2026, once that onerous contract ends. In terms of the working capital cycle, again, we mentioned this on every call. It is just to give you an update. It is still working as we have seen historically, working very, very well, very, very efficiently, still collecting very well from our customers.
The right-hand slide shows what we write off as a company on an annual basis, but also in Q1 of this year, very, very small proportion of revenue, database within line. We've collected 113% of revenue booked in the first quarter of this year. We expect that to be higher than revenue because we're collecting on a big Q4 in a quieter Q1 and Q4. That's all moving in the right direction as well. All working very, very efficiently in better days, yeah, in line with what we just said. We've got our target of 90 days. That's the end of my section there. As I say, I'm doing that as a good solid quarter, good foundation to build on across the rest of the year. Thank you, Stuart.
Thanks, Brad. I guess last chance to get any questions in, as we'll move on to those in just a moment. I think one more kind of quick slide from me, really, is just to build on a couple of things Brad mentioned there, which is what we're doing for the rest of 2025. As you said and confirmed, market expectations for Audioboom for this year are $80 million of revenue and $4.5 million of adjusted EBITDA. As we've said all the way through here, we continue to be confident about delivering those. We have $63 million of advertising revenue booked for the year. In the past three months, we've added $8 million. You can see the progress there. We are the other way around. I'm sorry. We have added $9 million in the last three months.
You can see the progress that we are making there towards the $80 million goal. We are $8 million ahead of where we were at the same point last year. You can kind of draw those lines and see what we added after this point last year and kind of project that forward, I think, for progress this year as well. Really, the pathway is there to that $80 million. We have made a really good start to be at $63 million of the $80 million on April 9. Continuing to see good progress on pricing and improving that pricing across our platforms. We talked a little about that earlier. Showcase, now including AI, will help us do that. Showcase will be an important part of building our revenue going forward.
We continue to build our ad tech products to partner with the right people to add functionality and sophistication into Showcase and giving those advertisers everything that they need to spend more with us. Good set of show renewals in the first quarter. The first thing we look to do here is to continue to work with our biggest and our best shows. You'll have seen in our trading update today, we announced a number of shows that will continue with us. Those renewals are generally on two-year or three-year terms. We have great working relationships with those shows, and we'll continue to build together. We also signed new shows to the Audioboom Network during this year, during this quarter. You're not really seeing the results of those signings within the Q1 numbers. Those will come in Q2 and beyond.
We expect the signings that we did make in Q1, including things like the Smosh Network, Reading Reddit, Small Town Dicks, those shows will add revenue going forward. We expect them to be delivering more than 5 million downloads or YouTube views every single month. Some pretty big shows in there. That will drive the network and add inventory and revenue opportunities from this point forward. We continue to invest in tech, like I said, bringing in the best technology into Showcase and building out tools for our podcasters to create new inventory, to give them more value as we go forward. We have that path to $80 million of revenue. We're confident around achieving that, given where we are today. EBITDA, $4.5 million is the market expectation. We've shown you the stable operating costs that we have within Audioboom.
As Brad said, we do not expect those to go up in any significant way. That higher Showcase gross margin, as Showcase becomes a higher percentage of our revenue mix, is going to drive EBITDA. We continue to remove more of those low gross margin contracts, that lower quality revenue. We have more of those coming out in Q2. That will gear EBITDA. As I said, fully confident of making 2025 a record year for the business. Thanks for joining today. We have a few answers to some questions coming up. Jake, I do not know if you wanted to say anything more before we get there.
Absolutely. Stuart Last, if I may just jump back in there. Thank you very much indeed for your presentation this afternoon. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions just by using the Q&A tab that is situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Just while the team take a few moments to review those questions that have been submitted already, I would just like to remind you that a recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A, can all be accessed via your investor dashboards. Guys, you can see there we have received a number of questions throughout your presentation this afternoon. Thank you to all of those on the call for taking the time to submit their questions.
Stuart, Brad, at this point, 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. If I pick up from you at the end, that would be great. Thank you.
Thanks, Jake. Yeah, Brad's picked up on a few here. I think probably one of the most popular, though, one is from Eddie and a few others. It's really just asking about tariffs and the economy. Let's get to that one first, I think. We mentioned it in the trading update. Just to kind of reiterate, Audioboom is not directly affected by Trump's tariffs. Our inventory is created and sold within specific territories. Our U.S. entity or entities are responsible for producing and creating 85% of that revenue-generating ad inventory. Nothing's being exported or imported here. There is really no direct impact from those tariffs in terms of additional costs associated with that ad inventory that we would need to pass on to our customers or stock up ourselves. No direct kind of impact there.
Where we continue to watch and wait, I think. Last week, I spent three days in Chicago with the wider podcast and advertising industry at a large event. I think the industry is doing the same thing, watching and waiting, really watching to see how those tariffs impact inflation and consumer spending in the U.S. It's obviously too early to give any meaningful predictions on that. What I would say is that because we've really just worked through an ad market downturn across 2022 and 2023, we know what that looks like. We're stronger and more resilient than before. Lower risk, minimum guarantees, stable cost base. We are much more diversified in our ad products than ever before.
For example, I saw a piece of research from MarTech last week that suggests that 34% of advertising buyers would shift their spending towards performance-based advertising if tariffs have a negative effect. That bodes very well for our business model. Much of the advertising that we run is performance-based advertising. I think we're resilient and much more robust, I think, than we were for the 2022 and 2023 ad market downturn. As I said, we'll continue to watch and wait. I don't think anyone knows the true impact of tariffs. I'm certainly not going to make any predictions on that today. As a direct effect, there is no real impact of those tariffs. We'll wait and watch on that kind of secondary impact as the year progresses. Next question here is about YouTube.
It says, "There were reports a few weeks ago that YouTube would be switching on automated advertising for podcasts. How does that help Audioboom?" Yeah, YouTube is becoming a bigger and bigger part of our distribution. Actually, more than 16% of our distribution came through video last month. People viewing video versions of podcasts, around 16% of our distribution happens that way. Video distribution and audio distribution work very differently. When it comes to audio distribution, audio comes from source. If you're listening on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or Pandora, and you click play, the audio is served directly from the Audioboom platform. For video, it works differently. If you're watching a video version of that same podcast, and you're watching it on YouTube, and you click play, the video doesn't come from the Audioboom platform. It's served locally from YouTube.
What that means is that we can currently only monetize video through our premium advertising product, where the ads are baked into the content. Whereas on the audio version, all of our ad products can run. That is our premium advertising and also our Showcase advertising too on the audio side. If YouTube was to switch this on, it would be strong outside for Audioboom. First off, it would allow AdRip to be used. AdRip is our proprietary inventory creation tool. It would allow that to be utilized in video. It automates the removal of those premium baked-in ads and creates a second window of monetization. There is the potential to, I think, open up millions of new ad impressions to sell every single month that way. Secondly, we would be able to run Showcase across video distribution.
Delivering ads via our global marketplace. I said earlier that 16% of our distribution was in video. Effectively, this could increase Showcase revenue by 16% because Showcase could now run across that 16% of distribution that it currently does not run across. I think we are excited at what this could be. Waiting to learn more from YouTube as to what they are planning. Yeah, it could be, I think, a really great thing for the industry and for Audioboom. We have two minutes left. I am just mindful of time. I think there is one more question here I will answer, which is about shows. There are lots of retail investors talking about shows that have left Audioboom over the past quarter. Can you comment on that? I touched on it a little bit in the presentation. Yeah, I can talk more to it.
Yeah, shows do leave Audioboom. It doesn't happen often, but they do leave. Podcasting is a very exciting space right now. It's a competitive environment. Podcasters and their talent agents are looking for the best network partners. Audioboom is a great partner to some of the biggest podcasts in the world. That's reflected in partnerships with shows that are probably almost a decade old. As you've probably seen, we just renewed our work with No Such Thing as a Fish, one of the biggest U.K. podcasts, Astonishing Legends, True Crime Obsessed. We've worked with these shows for almost 10 years at this point. We have a great track record, I think, of long-term partnerships and renewing our work with shows. A few shows do leave. I would say just remember that they leave for different reasons. Sometimes we decide to walk away from a partnership.
As I laid out at the top here, we are focused on high-quality revenue and high-performing contracts. If a show is not performing, we will make decisions to exit. We'll also stay disciplined. If a show is being priced at a level that doesn't make sense, we won't chase those shows. The risk is too high. It's not sustainable. We need our work to be sustainable, to be profitable. Yes, shows leave. Look at our history. We've delivered strong growth consistently over the last 10 years, consistent network growth, consistent revenue growth. That's not what you get from a company that's losing shows, right? We're building our network. We're signing bigger and better shows like Smosh, which I mentioned earlier, is a huge top-tier podcast. We're very comfortable, I think, with letting the odd podcast move on when it's not a good fit.
Hopefully that gives you some context around there. Obviously, we should be very confident in the growth of our network. All right, we're at 10:45 here, sorry, in New York, 3:45 over there. Time for us to wrap up, I think. Thank you very much for joining us. As I said, right at the top here, Q1 update, very positive from our point of view, exactly where we expected things to be, setting us up for a record 2025.
Perfect, Stuart Brad. That's great. Thank you once again for updating investors this afternoon. Could I please ask investors not to close this session? It will now be automatically redirected for the opportunity to provide your feedback in order for the management team to really better understand your views and expectations. This will only 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, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That now concludes today's session. Good afternoon to you all.