Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Audioboom Group plc investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged. They can be submitted at any time via the Q&A tab that's just situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Please just simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and will publish those responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, as usual, we would just like to submit the following poll, and if you could give that your kind attention, I'm sure the company would be most grateful. I would now like to hand you over to the executive management team from Audioboom. Stuart, good afternoon, sir.
Thank you, Jake. Hi, everyone. Good afternoon. It's really great to be here with you again. The last three months have flown by, so it was a good sign when time moves quickly. We've had a great three months and I think a really great 2024, and it was fantastic to be able to bring you that trading update this morning to just give you some more detail on the year. Obviously, we've been able to update you with some news across the last few months, but to really bring you that full trading update this morning with some very positive news about Audioboom was pleasing, and I think today we'll be able to give you some more color over the next 45 minutes about what we're doing at Audioboom and in particular what the next 12 months and beyond looks like.
Usual format today for those of you who are familiar with us. We'll use the first section just to update anyone that's new to Audioboom with some background on the podcast market, the podcast industry, and our business model. Then we'll review 2024 in more detail. We will take a look ahead at the work that we're doing to make sure that 2025 is a great year for us. Then there's a Q&A section at the end, so get your questions in. As Jake said, we'll answer as many of those as possible. But yeah, that's what the next 45 minutes will look like.
And welcome. Really, I think the key thing here today is to provide you some more detail. But first of all, for anyone new to Audioboom, Brad and I will introduce ourselves. My name is Stuart Last. I'm the CEO of Audioboom and have been in this role for the past five years, but I have worked at Audioboom for just over 10 years now, launching the company in the U.S. back in 2014, and I'm based in New York City, which is where the majority of our business is being done. I love the company. I think we have a great future ahead, and I'm pleased to be taking Audioboom forward.
Hi everyone. I'm Brad Clarke, CFO at Audioboom. I'm based in London. I'm approaching seven years in the role now, having started in March 2018. I'm a chartered accountant with over 16 years of experience in financial roles focusing on media companies. Those include Brave Bison in the U.K. and, of course, Audioboom. I will be back a little bit later just to take you through a few financial slides and what was a very good year for the company, but for now, back to you, Stuart.
Thank you, Brad. So always good when the executive summary has a lot of bullet points on and a lot of highlights for the year, I think. So just to walk you through those before we dive in more detail. Key parts of this trading update that came out today was our EBITDA performance. It was our fourth beat of the adjusted EBITDA market expectation that got upgraded along the way, and it was pleasing to beat that by more than 10% again today. This business model is strong, and I think probably the most important and one of the key points in that trading update was that we delivered more than 10% adjusted EBITDA margin in the final quarter. So that will start to show you how this business model can gear as revenue grows for the company.
All of this we'll go into more detail on as we get through this presentation. Our revenue growth was ahead of the industry, so we're capturing market share. Our key ad product Showcase, we've talked a lot about it in the past. We'll take another look at that today. That ad product is really booming, growing quickly, contributing hugely to our revenue and gross margin. We'll highlight our industry-leading monetization engine, record-breaking KPI numbers, and I'll show those off to you today, and then we'll look ahead at 2025, set up nicely, key renewals, new signings of podcasts that will drive revenue in 2025, money on the books, significant money on the books for 2025 already, and I think just the key point being that we expect 2025 to be a record year for the company, so lots to talk about, lots of new information there, I think.
As I said before, the first section really is to give some background on the company and the industry to anyone that is new to Audioboom. If you are new to Audioboom, welcome. Thanks for joining us. I hope this is a very useful presentation for you. First of all, let's look at that Audioboom business model. We are a technology platform, a platform business that sits at the heart of podcasting. So what our platform does, and it does this at great scale, very efficiently, is it connects three key elements. Those three key elements are the creators, the content podcast creators, and the content that they make. It connects them with their audience and connects that content with advertisers. Bringing those three elements together creates value with our Audioboom in the middle, playing that role, the platform doing what it does.
We cannot connect those three elements, and the value is just not there. So creators come to Audioboom. They use our technology to publish their content and push that out to audiences with one click of a button. Their content is pushed out to all of the key listening destinations or the key listening apps. So that's Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Pandora, and many, many others. Wherever there is audience, we are distributing that content to audience. And then we connect that content with advertisers. So we have an in-house sales team, and we have a technology-driven marketplace that is connecting all of that content, all of that audience with advertisers. We bring all that together, and we create some pretty significant value in podcasting. And this model and this platform has a great history of delivering revenue growth.
So you'll see here in the chart that over the past seven years, we've consistently grown this business from $6.1 million of revenue back in 2017 to $73.4 million, as you know, for last year, and a market expectation of $80 million for next year. So that 38% CAGR over that time is outpacing the industry. We've gained market share across that time, and we have proven that this model and this platform works well. We broke even, as many of you know, in 2021 and have delivered adjusted EBITDA profitability in three of the past four years. So this is a good track record here. And while we can show here, I think that this model has delivered revenue growth in this time, we're now seeing, particularly with today's results, that this model will also deliver EBITDA gearing as we go forward.
That's obviously something to look out for. The other thing here to look out for is what the opportunity looks like by 2030. The industry as a whole is projected to grow at a 22% CAGR over that next five years. If Audioboom keeps pace with that industry growth, and bearing in mind Audioboom has historically outpaced industry growth, if we simply keep pace with the industry growth between now and 2030, that would lead to revenue around $215 million by 2030 and obviously the associated EBITDA profit that comes with that. A great opportunity, I think, going forward for us, podcasting as an industry is booming. Audioboom is playing a major part in that boom. We are benefiting from the structural growth of podcasting around the world, and we do expect to move forward at or above that industry growth rate between now and 2030.
That work that we've done, that growth that we've seen over the past seven years has propelled Audioboom to be a leader in this space. This is the Triton Digital Podcast Ranker that measures the size of podcast networks in the U.S. Audioboom recently moved up to be the fourth largest podcast publisher in the U.S., which is, I think, a fantastic achievement given us and our independent nature and our small team of 38 people. We really do do a fantastic job of competing with major companies like iHeartMedia, Wondery, which is owned by Amazon, NPR, which is the BBC of America. We do a fantastic job there. Probably the part that I'm most proud of is our position, I think, in the U.S. industry and the leading role that we are establishing there.
But not only are we the fourth largest publisher in the U.S., we have a global footprint, so we're the second biggest publisher in the U.K., fourth in Australia and Canada, second in New Zealand. We are in the top 10 in Latin America, so we're really creating a global business here, and we're improving our revenue sources, revenue streams in all of those other countries too, so great growth here, great position as a leader in the space. I think this really highlights the work that we've done over the past 10 years to build this company. S o that's a quick look at the industry, our model, and our achievements, and I think it's pretty important here that we quickly get into a review of 2024.
You'll have seen from the trading update most of these numbers, but I'll go through them in a little more detail and give you some color on a few of the areas. So I think the first point that you'll have seen in that trading update was revenue for the year of $73.4 million. That's up 13% versus the previous year. So some solid growth in that revenue number. Our growth for 2024 was 8% ahead of the IAB, which is Interactive Advertising Bureau's projection for the U.S. podcast industry. So we're growing faster than our competitors, faster than the industry, capturing market share, which I think is an important point there. The advertising market is starting to return to good health after the headwinds of 2022 and 2023. And that obviously helped us achieve that strong growth on the revenue numbers in 2024.
I think it's worth saying here, the one negative point that we have for 2024 is how our revenue growth was limited by a change in the Apple Podcasts player, and that change limited our revenue performance by around $15 million, so look, 2024 could have been bigger, could have been better from a revenue perspective. That was a change that was industry-wide and out of our hands, but it did limit that revenue performance, so if there's one negative here, it is that that fades away over the coming months, that Apple limitation on revenue. We get back to a place where we can push forward there again, but I think that having revenue growth ahead of the industry significantly is a great result for 2024. Adjusted EBITDA of $3.4 million. We beat market expectations.
The most recent market expectation was $3.1 million, so 10% above that most recent market expectation, but along the way, along the year, that market expectation was upgraded three times. Started at $1.2 million back at the start of the year, and as we performed strongly across 2024, we beat that market expectation significantly along the way, so to continue to upgrade that market expectation and then go ahead and beat it for one final time in today's trading update, I think is a great result, and again, it highlights the strength of our business model as we return to profitability this year. When we look specifically at Q4 of 2024, the numbers are also, again, very positive here, so $20.5 million of revenue in the quarter, up 7% against Q4 of 2023, and also our second highest ever quarter for revenue, so good performance.
There's obviously seasonality in the business, and Q4 is a strong time for us. But just, again, fantastic to see that revenue growth in Q4. It was our fifth successive quarter of year-on-year revenue growth after that ad market recession that impacted our revenue back in 2022 and early 2023. And we're seeing that revenue growth because of those ad market conditions improving, better demand, better pricing, and also because of that monetization engine that we've built and are continuing to improve within the business. I think I said it earlier. One key point, probably the most important part of that trading update was our Q4 EBITDA result. So $2.1 million of adjusted EBITDA in Q4. That means that more than 10% of that revenue was being converted to EBITDA. So I think that highlights to you. I hope that our model can gear EBITDA.
As we get that revenue into the high teens and early 20s, we'll see gearing on the EBITDA side, and as I said here, we delivered more than 10% of EBITDA margin in that final quarter, up significantly, $1.6 million up on Q4 of 2023. The reasons why that EBITDA gears at a certain point is because we've updated our contracts with podcasters, which reduces minimum guarantees and allows us to overdeliver and therefore retain more of that revenue, and also, as we'll highlight later in this presentation, we have a very, very stable OpEx base. It really doesn't move very much year- on- year. Again, while that is pretty static, as revenue grows into those higher numbers, we're converting a lot of that to adjusted EBITDA, so great, very pleasing EBITDA numbers for the year and in particular for the quarter.
Our KPIs, we have three KPIs that we publish every quarter and allows you to track the health of the business. I'll break those down in a little more detail on this slide. The first one of those is our global downloads KPI. This is really a view on the size of our network. The size of our network is something of a proxy for how much advertising inventory we can sell at any one point. For Q4, our global downloads monthly number was $91 million. You'll see on this chart here very clearly, I think, and we've highlighted it, that Apple's iOS update that I mentioned earlier in the presentation has affected those downloads. That update removed and reduced how downloads are measured across the industry. You can see the effect of that here. Now, obviously, we have plans to grow this back.
One of those key plans is video distribution. We will start to give you a view, I think, from Q1 of this year onwards on video distribution and our work to distribute this content via video and grow audience and therefore grow consumption and build back this number pretty quickly, I think, across 2025. While that one is down, you know the reasons for that, that being the outside impact of Apple's iOS update. We certainly have some good plans for pushing that number back up into a healthier place. The second KPI, slight name change here, actually, just to highlight, we've changed the name of this KPI to RPM, Revenue Per Thousand Downloads. We used to call it eCPM, but RPM, Revenue Per Thousand Downloads, just to bring that in line with the industry and various other media formats.
This is a measure of how much revenue we extract from every 1,000 downloads of podcast content on our platform, and I think a fantastic number in Q4 of 2024 was delivered $75.62. We are extracting from every 1,000 downloads of content. That's market-leading. There's no one else that can touch that in the podcast space. Certainly, no one is able to do that in the audio space. The video space is comparable, but we are definitely a market leader in the audio space on that revenue per thousand metric there. You just see on the chart, and it's worth touching on this most times I highlight this. You'll see how that falls off when there's a weak advertising market, so in that 2022 and early 2023 global ad market recession, you can see that RPM number drop back off.
We've worked very hard to build out our monetization engine, improve our revenue, our pricing, and our sales to get that back up to a record number in Q4 of 2024. Then the final KPI is brand count. That's really a customer count, how many brands are paying us every month to advertise on our network. Another record here, which is a fantastic achievement, a record of 9,497 brands advertising on Audioboom per month in Q4. Really shows for me two things that are working at Audioboom. One is, which we will go into great detail on soon, is Showcase, which is our ad tech-based marketplace. It's very efficient. It allows advertisers and brands to come in and advertise very cleanly and efficiently at great scale on Audioboom. That's helped drive this brand count number up over the last three years to this record level.
And then, secondly, as many of you will know, just over a year ago, we launched a new team within Audioboom, a new sales team focused purely on growing relationships and growing business with blue chip brands, those bigger global brands that are represented by the large advertising agency holding companies. And they are getting good traction and bringing in money from, I think, now 12 of the top 15 major advertising agencies in the U.S. We've seen great traction there, and that's leading to that strong brand count number for Q4 of last year. So, positives, very strong positives on two of those KPIs and good plans, I think, to take that global downloads number back into a much healthier place in 2025 and beyond. Let's talk about the key drivers, I think, of success in 2024.
Showcase is one of those key drivers, and I'll give you a lot of detail on that now. So what is Showcase? Well, Showcase is our second advertising product that we have in the business, launched in late 2021. And Showcase is a global advertising marketplace that runs through our advertising technology. So it's a marketplace that we have built. It's very efficient. It's all automated. And what Showcase does effectively is it matches up supply and demand. So on one side, the supply is all of our content and the advertising inventory within all of our content. And on the demand side, that is advertising sales from our team, as well as various ad tech and programmatic demand side connections with ad networks around the world and ad buyers around the world.
Showcase matches those two things up in real time at massive scale and includes a lot of really fantastic technology for audience targeting so that brands can come in and say, "Hey, we really want to get our messaging to females that live in the Northeast of America and who are between the ages of 34 and 50 and have an annual household income above $100,000." We can target against that audience, and that makes that very appealing to those blue chip brand advertisers, so Showcase is matching up that supply and demand with some very strong targeting capabilities. And it's growing quickly, and it's proving to be an important part of the Audioboom business, so last year, it delivered $23.1 million of our revenue, up 56% versus the previous year, so you can see the strong growth in that Showcase revenue product there. We're increasing pricing within there.
So as advertisers use more of those targeting capabilities that we've built in Showcase, we can charge more for that targeted advertising. And we've been able to increase pricing in Showcase by 30% over the past year. And as I said before, we're doing this at bigger and bigger and bigger scale. So during the year, more than four billion ads were transacted within Showcase. So you can see the scale. You can see the efficiency of this being technology-based. And that gives us an advantage over many of our competitors that do not own and operate their own technology. So that's a key point, I think, for Audioboom. The ownership of our own technology is starting to prove more and more valuable as we go forward.
And all of that, I think, is to say that Showcase booming is important in our business model because it's our highest gross margin product. So our three main products that we have in Audioboom are our premium advertising sales, Sonic, which is our brand-focused platform, and then Showcase, which is our marketplace platform. And Showcase, as you can see here, has a 31% gross margin versus the 20% gross margin of premium and the 15% gross margin of Sonic. The chart just above those numbers highlights the change in our revenue mix over the past three years. So we went from a place where Showcase, with its high gross margin, was only contributing 11% of our overall revenue to this past year, where it contributed more than 32% of our revenue mix.
So real focus from us on ensuring that Showcase, with its higher gross margin, is contributing more and more to that revenue mix. That will allow us to gear EBITDA as we go forward. And it's proving to be a successful piece of work for us. How does Showcase operate in reality? And why is it so good for us? Well, one thing that it does is it helps to optimize our inventory. So this past year, through Showcase, we were monetizing four minutes of content per hour with advertising. Previously, we were only monetizing 2.7 minutes per hour of content in 2023. So a big step up there in how much advertising space we are selling via Showcase in that time. And I think the other key part here is there's significant potential to take that even further.
If we're only selling four minutes of ads per hour in podcasting, the closest competitive product to podcasting is radio. U.S. radio has 20 minutes plus of ads per hour. Now, we're not going to take it to that level. We want podcasting to be a high-quality product, a good listener experience. But there's certainly room to move from four minutes of ads per hour to six or seven minutes of ads per hour sold through Showcase in the coming years, and that will, of course, drive revenue. It will drive that RPM metric and improve the quality of the business. The second key part to Showcase is the development of the advertising tech that I mentioned earlier. Obviously, owning and operating our ad tech here is very important, but we also leverage the best third-party technology to improve and optimize Showcase as well.
You'll have seen in the training update today that we mentioned a new partnership that we are signing with a company called Triton to utilize a piece of technology called Tap. Tap allows us to optimize our ad serving in Showcase and get the best pricing, fill the most amount of inventory, and make the most of all of that advertising inventory. Again, that will be a piece of optimization work to improve Showcase as we go forward. We've talked in the past, I think, about some of our other owned and operated tools that we have built, like AdRip, that creates new inventory and podcasts, and our brand safety tools, all of that coming together to improve Showcase and make it a bigger part of our revenue mix next year.
And then finally, we continue just to invest in building the demand side of Showcase, making sure that we fill as much of that inventory as we possibly can. So that's further investments in the U.K. and the U.S. brand sales teams. We've made hires in 2024 to add to those teams. And it will be an area of investment again in 2025 to build out those teams. We also continue to partner with key demand-side partners. One partnership that we mentioned in today's trading update was Voxnest.
Voxnest will provide commercial support to Showcase. So they will have access through their own platform to monetize some of Audioboom's inventory in Showcase. They get direct access to that. That will optimize the sales part of Showcase as well. So this piece of work is ongoing to improve Showcase and make it even stronger in 2025. With that, I think I'll take a break and pass it over to Brad to go into some of the numbers in more detail.
Okay. Thanks, Stuart. Hi, everyone again. Yeah, let's go through these next few financial focus slides that continue on from the Q3 investment week session. We introduced a few new data points. Obviously, now we can give you the full 2024 context on those. This first slide focuses on revenue, gross margin, and our podcast partner minimum guarantee exposure over the last six quarters, following on from what was a very strong update this morning on 2024. We obviously finished the year very, very strongly. Important point when looking at this business, something investors should be aware of is obviously when reviewing this company, like other businesses that recognize advertising revenue, seasonality affects what is recognized and when.
Typically, we see a quieter first half of the year and then building into a stronger second half of the year. And that's exactly what we saw in the second half of 2024. Fourth quarter of the year, that was a fifth successive quarter of year-on-year revenue growth, following the challenges of 2022 and 2023. 7% revenue growth in Q4- on- Q4, 13% revenue growth overall, above wider podcast industry growth. So all positive metrics. Showcase, obvi ously, Stuart's taken you through that in terms of the really positive metrics that we've had on that. And importantly, for our adjusted EBITDA, that higher gross margin that we recognize on Showcase as well. We can see that chart on the top left-hand corner where we've seen that revenue progression over the next six quarters.
And what we're looking for in the first quarter of 2025 is obviously to go through that 17.1 that was recorded in the first quarter of last year. Top right on the graph details our gross profit and gross margin and how that's progressed over this year. We've seen a $2 million improvement in gross profit in Q4 this year versus last. And when we take into account the ingress contract provisions that we provided for in 2023, there's a $17 million increase in gross profit, sorry, 2024 over 2023. So good, obvious improvement on that line as well. And we can also see how the gross margin percentage has improved over the last six quarters, improving from 3% in Q3 of 2023 to 24% in Q4 of this year. And that's obviously successive gross margin improvement there as well. So lots of positive metrics to show there.
How's that been delivered? Well, obviously, we have the revenue growth. We have the higher contribution from Showcase, and that has enabled us to really reduce our minimum guarantee exposure. Let's take a step back. Let's look at minimum guarantees just to make sure that any new viewers understand what they are. So, secure exclusive advertising rights to leading podcast talent. We offer carefully modeled MG revenue share contracts. Once those minimum guarantees have been agreed, it's our job as a company to meet and ideally exceed those MGs in order to deliver the gross margin that we are targeting. So typically, that gross margin on the tier one podcast talent will be 20%-25%.
What we saw during the more challenging conditions in 2022 and 2023 were minimum guarantee contracts whereby the deals agreed were based on higher advertising rates than what were able to be obtained after the downturn. Where we don't achieve those contractual monthly MGs, what we have to do is what we call a minimum guarantee true-up. That's effectively a shortfall on the agreed minimum revenue share, and therefore, we recognize a lower gross margin. The company has worked extremely hard to, A, honor all contractual MG payments to our podcast partners to maintain the relationships with our partners and our talent agencies that we work with.
When contracts come up for renewal, Stuart says, "We've restructured them to ensure that the new MG levels are attainable." The graph in the bottom right-hand corner details the percentage of content partner payments that relate to MG troughs over total cost of sales. We can see that spike in the third quarter of 2023, where we recognize our exposure to MG troughs in our P&L. Since then, we've seen our exposure significantly decrease quarter-on-quarter as we focus on maximizing the value of the inventory on MG shows. Showcase has helped with that. We're now clearly seeing the benefit, the beneficial impact of contract restructuring, focused efforts from our sales team, and general recovery in the podcast ad market.
Reducing that exposure to MG contracts, increasing that top-line revenue number, they've had a very beneficial impact on gross margin and, importantly, on the adjusted EBITDA that we report. Let's go on to that next slide. What we've consistently said over the last couple of years is the OpEx base doesn't change. Top left-hand graph, we can see that there. OpEx hasn't really changed this year, quarter-on-quarter. We said because of that, when we returned significant revenue growth, adjusted EBITDA would grow or gear because the cost base wouldn't change. That's exactly what's happened in the second half of this year. Revenue's grown. MG exposure has reduced. OpEx hasn't changed. EBITDA has increased, and it's increased significantly. That's really pleasing. That's a validation of what we've been communicating in recent updates. It's a validation of what this company and the model is capable of.
There's a question from Adam that's come in while we've been talking today about the profit and when we can expect that to increase. And I think what I've just spoken through there shows how it can increase because of that relatively fixed OpEx base. Revenue growth now, over and above what we've delivered this year, will obviously go to that profit line. That's our expectation as we go forward. From an OpEx base, it's in line with previous quarters at $2.8 million. That allowed our adjusted EBITDA to reach $2.1 million in the fourth quarter, $3.4 million for the year, $3.8 million higher than last year. That OpEx in Q4 is consistent with previous quarters, 65% on staff costs, 25% on technology costs. That consistency in makeup will continue as we go forward. There's plans this year in 2025 to supplement the sales team with a few additional heads.
But we believe with efficiency levers in podcasting, our headcount is not expected to go significantly higher than the 40 heads that we ended 2024 with. And stating the obvious, with a higher revenue number and a static employee number, average revenue per employee increased 10% year-on-year up to $1.8 million per employee. Over to the cash and debtors and working capital. Obviously, very efficient in that. If you've listened to us before, then you know we pride ourselves on that. Continue to collect our debtors very quickly. End of the year on collecting 97% of revenue booked this year, which is fantastic. The revenue recognized comes with minimal risk attached. On the right-hand side, you can see what we provided for in terms of any bad write-off, representing just $52,000 in the year. That's a very small proportion of our revenue booked.
Our debtor days remain consistent versus 2023 at 82. Our ongoing target is to be below 90, 90 being a typical payment timeline for advertising agencies. The cash balance is relatively consistent over the last year or so. But obviously, that does take managing because as revenue increases, especially during the second half of the year, associated revenue share payments also increase as well. And we also have serviced a couple of owner's contracts that we are fulfilling through to their conclusion, for which the costs of those have unwound against the balance sheet provision that we created in 2023. So no P&L impact. But because of this, we've seen minimal movement on that cash balance. We are confident in that internal working capital cycle and its processes. But given that relatively modest cash balance, it's essential that we're on point with our collections as always.
We need to be during the first quarter of this year. Receipts from our main customers are now very material on an individual basis. So I think that's one of the main reasons why we extended that overdraft with HSBC. We announced that this morning just to give ourselves that coverage should any one of our material debtors just be slightly later than we would usually expect in terms of paying us. So it's a good endorsement of what we're doing here that HSBC were able to extend that facility and shows their confidence in the business as well. In terms of cash generation, that's a question that's come in today and a typical question as well. When can we see that? Well, historically, adjusted EBITDA has been that proxy for cash generation.
But in 2023, we did provide for a couple of owner's contracts, one which ends at the end of January 2025, so in a couple of weeks. And we do have a more material one which does end in December of 2025. While we're servicing that contract through to the end of this year by unwinding that provision against the balance sheet, we would expect minimal movement on that cash balance, really, until we get through the other side of that contract. And that's going to be into 2026. At that point, I would expect our expectation is that adjusted EBITDA will again be proxy for cash generation. So yeah, that's the last of my slides there. I'll hand back to Stuart. Keep the questions coming in. I'll monitor any. But yeah, back to you, Stuart.
Thanks, Brad. Last section for me then is our focus for 2025 and beyond. You may or may not have seen the market expectation numbers for next year that Alice put out this morning. So that's $18 million of revenue for 2025 and $4.5 million of adjusted EBITDA. As always, what we've done a great job of in the past and will look to do again for 2025 is to outperform those numbers and go beyond them.
And I think we have a fantastic chance to do so. How are we setting up for that? Well, I think the key points are here. So the ad market is continuing to improve. We know there was an ad market recession in 2022 and 2023. Last year, we saw some initial improvements in that advertising market, particularly in H2. But we are feeling more and more confident in the advertising market as it continues to improve.
We currently have $54 million of advertising revenue booked for 2025 through the upfront process. That's a sales process that happens in November and December of the previous year where we are working with our customers, our major customers, to put a lot of bookings in place before the year starts. And that's a record number for us, significantly up on last year's upfront number. So $54 million towards that $80 million already on the books. And I think the key part to that is the pricing that we're seeing. So the upfront pricing this year is around 17% higher than it was for 2024. And so not only are we seeing good demand there, we're also seeing confidence in the medium because we can drive pricing higher in those upfront bookings. So that's setting us up well to overachieve, I think, that $80 million number.
Showcase, I think I've talked through most of this, so I won't belabor that point because I'm conscious of time, but I've shown you what Showcase is, how it works, how the new partnerships with Voxnest and Triton Tap can help optimize it, and why it's important to get that as a bigger part of our revenue mix. We also announced in the trading update a big group of renewals. So re-up and contracts with our biggest content partners, again, gives us great visibility on what this year looks like, allows us to go and sell advertising for those shows ahead of time, and just one of the most important things that we do is to renew and create very long-term, multi-year partnerships with those key content partners that we have, and very similar to that, we announced a group of new signings to the network as well.
Those will deliver many million downloads per month in 2025. So we continue to sign top-tier shows to the network, being able to show podcasters that we have a market-leading $75 per thousand download revenue engine is fantastic for us to be able to sign the biggest and the best podcasts that are out there. And then I think the final part that gets to say is the continuation of building those technology tools, investing in the tech, building out tools that really move the needle when it comes to revenue, as we've done in previous years like AdRip and AdVet, two tools that you know about. So all of those parts are coming together, and we're going to focus on going above and beyond that $80 million number. In terms of the EBITDA number there, $4.5 million being the market expectation.
Brad really kind of touched on this, I think. So again, I won't label this point, but that stable OpEx that we have, not expecting that to move significantly higher in 2025, that allows us to really gear the EBITDA part. We know that Showcase has the higher gross margin, and as it becomes a bigger part of our revenue mix, that allows us to push that through. And then continued work to reduce those minimum guarantee obligations, making sure that those minimum guarantee true-ups that Brad talked about are minimized.
You can really see how this model starts to work when we do that. So it will be a record year for Audioboom, and we are fully focused, I think, on taking it to an even better place. That's it from the slides, conscious of time, like I said, because we're getting towards that 45-minute mark. We have a few questions here to answer. Jake, I'll throw it back to you for a second or two.
Perfect. Stuart, Brad, 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's situated on the right-hand corner of your screen, but just while the team take a few moments to review those questions that were submitted already, I'd 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 dashboard.
Guys, as you can see there, we have received a number of questions throughout your presentation, and thank you to all of those on the call for taking the time to submit their questions, but Stuart, Brad, at this point, if I may just hand back to you just to get those responses where it's appropriate to do so. If I pick up from you at the end, that'd be great. Thank you.
Yeah, thanks, Jake. This first one actually came through on the platform ahead of time. It's a similar question from two people. It says, "Trading activity has been significant since September. Are you aware of any large changes in shareholders?" I mean, look, it's been pleasing to see liquidity return. Of course, it's pleasing to see the value of the business starting to return to a level that more fairly represents what we're doing and what we've built. We're aware of two new institutions who are building a position in the company. That's a great sign, obviously, that there's confidence in what we're doing and the results that we're seeing. And we've been able to present this same presentation to those institutions over recent times. So great to see that. I can't tell you much more than that, obviously.
But of course, if those institutions reach the 3% threshold, there will be a TR-1 that highlights that change. So if they continue to build and go beyond that 3% level, that's when you'll see a TR-1. But yeah, I'm pleased that there's confidence from institutions in the work that we're doing. Another one that came in ahead of the presentation says, "How do you advance to becoming the third biggest podcast publisher in the U.S.?" I showed you those rankings earlier where we are fourth. Those are based on the size of the network or downloads and consumption across the network. Our challenge, as we also saw Apple's change impacting the number of downloads and the size of that network, our challenge is to accelerate the size of the network. And I think that's our challenge for the next three years. We have the monetization engine.
We know that works. We know we can monetize things at $75 per thousand downloads. We just need more downloads to monetize, right? So that's our challenge. How do we build out the size of that network? And the Audioboom team, as of this week, our challenge is to find the next 100 million downloads. So that's their challenge. That's the piece of work they are being given. How do we find that next 100 million downloads? You can see from our KPIs that recently we've been averaging just around 100 million downloads a month. How do we find the next 100 million that effectively doubles the size of this network? Well, there's many ways to do that. We'll obviously continue to sign the biggest and the best podcasts. We'll look to expand further into video. YouTube is becoming a big consumption point for podcasting.
So we will work with our podcast creators to expand their use of video and have more consumption via YouTube. So video will be a big area that we're working on. We will target enterprise-level partnerships, so no longer just working specifically with independent creators who may have one or two podcasts. We will work with networks and media companies who have groups of podcasts. Now, they need slightly different tools to the independent creators, but that will be some of our investment in the technology that we have is to build out those tools for enterprise-level partners. Then also, I think we will identify publishers and networks for acquisition. We can bolt those networks on top of the Audioboom platform. Those networks can do the thing that they're great at, which is creating the content. And then our monetization engine, our distribution engine can do that piece of work.
So we will look to identify publishers and networks that we could roll up. Now more possible, of course, because the share price is improving, and it allows us to strike deals a little easier, I think. So yeah, finding that next 100 million downloads is the Audioboom's team's focus, and that will get us into a place where we can move up that ranker. Tony F and Az both asked about Nasdaq. We talked about that in the past. We previously said, I think, on the last call that we had, that we'd spend some time over the back end of the summer working with consultants and contacts here in the U.S. to understand Nasdaq, what it looks like, what we need to do to get there.
Key feedback that we explained was that our current size, it's really it would be tougher for us to do because we would not have the size and the scale to be visible to the right type of investors in the U.S. And the numbers that we kind of talked about, or the goals that we talked about, we're getting to the point where we had $100 million of revenue and $8 million-$10 million of EBITDA. That would be the time that we would have the size and the scale to really get the best value out of a move to Nasdaq. So we can see there's a pathway there. I think you'll see even more in these most recent numbers. You start to annualize that Q4, $20 million+ of revenue and $2 million+ of EBITDA.
You can see that there's a pathway over the next year or so to get us at least into a position where we could make an effective move to Nasdaq. Still very much in our focus, and we have a pathway to it. Then I think final question from Myron, who says, "Do you expect 10% EBITDA margin in the first part of next year?" Obviously, I said it was a key part of today's results, was that number, because it highlights the gearing of our model. No, look, we don't think we expect it in the first part of next year. There is seasonality within this business. I think Brad explained it pretty well, actually, that we pay minimum guarantees to podcasters.
Once we have gone past that minimum guarantee that we pay to podcasters, we keep more of the revenue, and more of that flows through to EBITDA. Now, generally, our podcast contracts are staged across a calendar year. Some are not, but many of them are staged across the calendar year. So once within that contract, we go through the minimum guarantee, that generally is later in the year, then we can hold on to more of that revenue, and that flows through into EBITDA.
So we do expect seasonality in the EBITDA margin to be weighted towards the second half of the year, for sure. I hope that explains that one. I think we're pretty much out of time, so I will leave the questions there, and just to say, I think, again, thank you for your time today. Thank you for your questions. Thank you for supporting the company. It's been great to be with you. Thank you.
Perfect. Stuart, Brad, if I may just jump back in there, and thank you once again for updating investors this afternoon. Could I please ask investors not to close this session, as you'll now be automatically redirected for the opportunity to provide your feedback in order the management team can 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 PLC, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That now concludes today's session, so good afternoon to you all.