Good morning, and welcome to LBG Media's First Half Set of Results for 2023. For those of you that haven't met me, I think I've met pretty much everyone in here, but I'm Solly, CEO and Founder of LBG Media. I'm joined by Richard, our CFO, who I believe is six months pretty much today at LBG as our CFO. I'm going to take you through some highlights of the business, and then followed by some of our strategic updates, what we've been focusing on, what we've been up to. I'm going to hand over to Richard, who's going to talk you through our commercials, and then onto the more specific financial detail within that.
Back to myself to give you a bit of a strategic outlook on the future, where we're heading for the second half of this year, and also beyond. To kick things off with highlights, I'm very pleased to bring some positive results to the table today. We generated a 10% year-on-year growth in revenue to GBP 27.2 million, and given us further confidence for the second half of the year. We've started things very well. Our EBITDA has grown by 84% year-on-year, so a strong growth in profits in EBITDA. Our cash has increased by 15% to GBP 32.7 million, and that further gives us opportunity to move on any M&A activity that we feel is fit. Our content views have grown to 67.1 billion. That's 87% year-on-year growth.
That's off the back of two very strong years of growth in our content views. Again, that momentum in our indirect revenues also continuing through into the second half. On our global audience, we've grown to 33%, up to 410 million global audience members. Also growing across some of our key territories, such as the U.S. and other markets that continue to be a big opportunity for us that we're driving into. The final one is our brief conversion. As you saw on that sizzle reel, we've got lots of big name clients, whether that's the government, Unilever, P&G, and others, that we've repeatedly done numerous pieces of work with. As those relationships have built, as we've proven our worth in terms of effectiveness and the scale of what we do, we've seen our conversion rates increase across those different clients.
A very positive increase from 18% conversion rate through to 29% year-on-year. All of those metrics that I just talked on just then are underpinned by the huge amount of data that we gather as a business. We have billions of data points that we capture each and every month, whether that's comments, shares, surveys, or many, many other data points. We utilize that to understand our difficult-to-reach audience and distill that down into actionable insights that either drive more engagement and better content that we can put in front of our audience, or better results for our clients through being informed on what they're going to like about products, what they want to see more of, and ultimately purchase.
This wheel demonstrates all of the things that we do, which is capture the data, informs us on what we're going to do next, and then that only grows as we gather more data, more insight on the audience, and then ultimately, as I showed you in the previous slides, those numbers are going up. I just wanted to dwell on the market. If you track back to 1999, you can see that digital ad spend was a tiny slither of the overall advertisement market. Fast-forward to now, you can see that makes up the lion's share. Over 2/3 of advertisement spend is now made through digital. We're at the heart of a growing market, and certainly in the right place. I'd just like to update you on our three strategic growth pillars, which we're focused on, geographic, M&A, and capabilities.
Geographically, we continue to make strides in our audience and also commercially. Our audience is up 33% globally. That's off the back of the great work that the team are doing, insights, data, and technology that we've been developing to generate that. In addition to that, the way that our business works is that we get access to a global audience as the majority of our consumption is coming through mobile phones and also social media networks. From that perspective, we're able to monetize that global audience through their sales teams. We don't have feet on the ground in the likes of Canada or other markets. In key markets that we're focused on to grow our business, we've put feet on the ground. Most recently, we've done that in the U.S.
We've made some great progress in that market where we have over 100 million audience members, so a significant audience. We're not going over to that market and having to spend tens of millions of pounds to generate new audiences. We already have it. We've seen some good success across a number of clients now. Our sales team is starting to make progress. Our pipeline is growing nicely, and we've had some very good wins. Two notable clients, we've had Hulu and Peacock, which are two large streaming providers, one of those part of Disney, out in the U.S., and the pipeline continues to build, too. The next one is M&A. We've had a lot of success with small bolt-on acquisitions. These are typically brands that have big audiences, but are not monetized effectively. We've proven this as an effective strategy for us.
Typically, we see a payback of around 12 months on these. Most recently, we bought Lessons Learned in Life, which is a brand that is more U.S.-focused, big audience, and we did that in March, and we're already seeing that move forward very successfully. We also have a number of other opportunities in the pipeline that we're looking at, and we'll continue to do this. The other piece is our wider M&A activity. In the beginning of the year, we brought in an M&A director, Ben, who joined us, and he's been developing our M&A pipeline, both in terms of existing opportunities that we'd previously looked at, but also really bolstering that M&A pipeline that we've got. We've homed in on a number of strategic initiatives, one of them being our geo expansion, and we're making some very good progress across that pipeline.
What we've seen in the market is it feels like pricing is starting to become more reflective of where the market is. Whereas a year ago, I think people were a little bit more punchy with their views on valuations. We're seeing positive movement in that space. From a capabilities perspective, when we entered the market, a lot of 18- to 21-year-olds were consuming via platforms such as Facebook. We were very quick to adapt to that, scaled audiences, and also monetized it. We've carried on doing the same thing for that next generation coming through. Generation Z, we're very well invested in engaging that audience across platforms such as TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram. We're growing at a phenomenal rate here, 66% year-on-year, outstripping any of the legacy players and also newer players coming into the market.
Our market-leading position amongst young audiences is continuing very nicely. We've done that through a number of means. One of them is short-form video. As I'm sure you're all aware, across the younger demographic, attention spans are definitely getting shorter, and we're seeing that in the content that they're consuming, too. Whether that's across TikTok, Instagram or platforms like YouTube that are also appealing to that next wave of generations across Generation Alpha. We're working very hard to ensure that our content creation, insights, data, and everything that we do from a capabilities perspective is in a great place for them. Beyond that, we're also working very hard on our technology. We've recently re-platformed our websites, which are a fast-growing part of our indirect revenue streams.
We've seen our websites, on the ones that we're testing this on, almost double, sorry, halve in the speed that our website loads. Off the back of that, we've seen higher engagement, but also higher yields through that optimization that we've made. We continue to invest across our technology, insights, dashboards and tools that help us. The final one is LADnation, our insights tool that we built, our panel, we've seen very high engagement rates across that. We're now up to 22% of engagement rates across our panel, which I think in terms of industry norms, you're seeing around 5%-10%, and we're massively bucking that trend. We're continuing to build our strength across platforms such as that. I'll very quickly dwell on the U.S. opportunity for us.
The U.S. is the largest advertisement market in the world, and we are right at the beginning of our journey. A huge opportunity ahead of us. We have a large audience base of over 100 million people. We now have salespeople on the ground that are beginning to make good traction across brands we either work with here in the U.K. and across other markets, but also new clients that we don't currently work with. We've made some very good progress there. In addition to that, we've been making some waves across our content and audience, producing deeper engagement, working with the likes of Tom Holland and other celebrities that are helping us really tap into their U.S. fan base through the content that we produce. A very exciting market. We're very optimistic about the progress that we're making here.
Just to recap here, this is something that we've never factored into any of our numbers moving forward. It's something that we see as above and beyond opportunity. I know most of you are familiar with this one. This is just us shouting about our huge audience and engagement again. That trend continues. We saw a 26% growth in our Facebook follower audience base, which is faster than any other provider on that list that I show in front of us, and outstripping all others in the market. Our engagement levels, which sit at the heart of what we do, understanding how to engage those audience members, again, is proving very strong with 128% growth year-on-year. Finally, video views, which of course translates into indirect revenue, has grown by 106% year-on-year.
Back to our capabilities and the work that we've been doing there, the insights and data that we utilize to understand how best to engage those audience, we're seeing nice growth. Final slide from me before I hand over to Richard. Social responsibility. It's been at the heart of our business for many, many years, tracking back to when we started our first initiative around mental health in 2016. UOKM8 ? was an industry-leading movement around mental health and encouraging people to speak out. I know it's much more common now, and our footballers have got behind it and many other big platforms have. We were a trailblazer in that and continue to look at ways that we can use our huge voice for the right reasons.
We've done that across the environment, and most recently, we worked with the Mayor of London on his campaign to address casual sexism. We built a game, which our tech team built, which very fun game on our website. If you get a chance to play, we can circulate that afterwards. Also, in addition to that, we utilized our contacts across the celebrity industry to create some content around this and really amplify this message. Social responsibility continues to be a very important part of what we do, and again, utilizing our voice for the right reasons. I'll hand over to Richard, and I'll see you shortly.
Thanks, Solly, good morning, everyone. They didn't give the CFO a sizzle reel. I'm still very much delighted to be here for my first set of strong results with LBG. Before we get into the numbers, I'm going to start with a bit of a reminder, some of which you will have heard, on how we monetize our audience and our content. As a group, we've got two main routes to market, direct revenues, which at the half year, were around 42% of group revenues, and indirect, which was around 56%. Starting with that direct, this is where we've got a direct relationship with the brand, and we create bespoke, authentic content with that relationship spanning across the commercial agreement as well as that overall content creation.
Our level of recognition in terms of the quality of our output and our access to our youth audience continues to grow, and those new partnerships in the first half have included big brands such as you've seen with McDonald's, Nando's, and Jacamo. As well as new brands, we have a growing number of brands that are repeatedly working with us year after year, such as British Army, Google, and Unilever, as well as a continued increase that we're seeing in the average size of our deals. Year on year, we're getting to work with bigger brands and doing bigger deals.
As Solly mentioned earlier, our client brief conversion, which is a success rate of us taking an inbound client brief to a firm booking, stood at 29% at the half year. This is reflective of our impressive capabilities and recognition of a creator of that bespoke, authentic content for our clients. Turning then to indirect, we're using this term because in this case, the client is actually contracting directly with the platform, such as Facebook, and not with us. The client is creating their own ad to their own content, and they have a set of criteria in terms of the demographic of the audience that they're trying to reach. The platform uses its own algorithms to deliver that ad alongside appropriate content to reach their desired audience. That revenue then is shared between the platform and the publisher.
Using that Facebook example again, we would get 55% of that ad revenue, with them keeping 45%. Our audience and the diverse range of brands which are particularly prevalent amongst that hard-to-reach demographic of 18- to 34-year-olds are a key differentiator in this space. I now want to talk you through some of the headline financials for the first half of the year and how those different streams have performed. Starting with overall revenue, as Solly said, very pleased to report that our half-year revenue grew by 10% year-on-year to GBP 27.2 million. Research suggests that that digital advertising spend is projected to grow to around 7.6% this year, and our first half revenue performance again demonstrates that LBG's differentiators are enabling us to outperform that overall market.
Additionally, our revenue CAGR since 2019 of 22% also clearly highlights that we're continuing to take market share from those more traditional players. Across those two main markets that I talked about of direct and indirect, both of those have contributed strongly to our performance in the first half, with the direct business growing 9% to GBP 11.4 million. As I mentioned previously, the growing recognition with those big brands, and reflected in our high order book and brief conversion, both of which closed our first half better than last year. Taken together, both of these facts give us a level of confidence around our ability to capitalize on that H2 opportunity that stands in front of us. On the indirect side, our revenue came in at GBP 15.3 million, which was up 13%.
As Solly mentioned, year-on-year content views increased by a phenomenal 87% as we continue to capitalize on our early shift to short-form video content that occurred in the second half of last year. That was on top of a really strong prior year position where we grew 38% in that period as well. As we look to current performance, we're seeing a positive trend continue, and so expect to see continued growth on short-form video views going forward. We talked previously that with that transition to short-form came a softening in RPMs, and overall, taken together with that much larger increase in views compared to that reduction in yields out in the market, means we're seeing a continued net increase in revenues. Obviously, with that focus on audience, engagement, and views, improvements in the yield environment overall still represents a further opportunity for us in the future.
It's our strong belief that these two income streams, which are dealing with different clients and different commercial relationships, giving us multiple opportunities and a level of diversification that also de-risks our business. Their respective performances in H1 provides that great platform as we move into the second half. Moving over now to look at our costs. Net operating costs for the first half of 2023 were GBP 24.1 million. That's a much smaller increase than we've seen in some prior years, which is a validation of the focus and control of costs by management and the business. As you'd expect, payroll remains our biggest cost, but with only a marginal increase in that this year following that careful restructuring program in H2 of last year, which equated to a roughly GBP 3 million annualized cost reduction.
Whilst our cost of sales continues to increase, this is reflective of that growing nature of the business and our high-quality content output that we're doing. The work done by management following that restructuring of last year now gives better visibility to manage our cost base on a much more dynamic basis based on the forward visibility of revenues that we've got. Now turning my attention to both EBITDA as well as some comments on seasonality. First half EBITDA came in at GBP 3 million, which was up 84% on the prior year. This reflects both that solid revenue performance that I've talked on and that good control of costs. On a margin perspective, our EBITDA margins were also four percentage points higher than the prior year at 11%.
Seasonality in our revenues is something that we've guided on for some time now, with H1 and H2 being broadly split around 40-60. That H2 weighting is due to the concentration of brand advertising opportunity, particularly across our Q4, which includes that Christmas trading period. As you can see from the chart on the right, that level of H2 opportunity is something that we've consistently demonstrated our ability to capitalize on over those last four years. Just by way of illustration for 2023, we've used analyst consensus estimates for the full year, which mirrors that historical opportunity trend of 40-60. As I mentioned, we entered H1 with H2 even, with a stronger direct order book than at the same point last year, which together with that brief conversion rate and trends seen on audience growth and content leave us in a strong position to move into H2.
Before I hand over to Solly, I'll just finish with some comments on the outlook. We're a business that's got real forward momentum now across our key metrics, and a strong cash balance to support that strategic program that Solly talked about. We expect the overall growth this year to be in line with market expectations, reflecting that traditional seasonality of H2 ad spend opportunity that I talked about earlier. We're extremely pleased with the progress that we made in the first half and into the second half, and remain confident as a management team that we can deliver on our external expectations for the whole of 2023. With that, I'd like to hand back to Solly.
Thanks, Richard. I know you all thought there might have been a sizzle reel on that last slide, but there wasn't. We didn't let him have it. Yeah, just to close out, the strategic updates and focuses for us into H2 and beyond. When it comes down to geographies, the U.K. market remains a big focus for us. There's a huge amount of opportunity beyond where we are. There's people in our space, more traditional players, that are still generating upwards of GBP 1 billion in advertisement revenue. For us, we see that as a huge opportunity. There's still some of that sliver that I showed before in terms of the advertisement market that is still going to the traditional players, and we're going after that. There's a huge ceiling for us to go for there.
The other piece, the international markets, now makes up around 17% of our revenues across the business. The next one for us is, of course, the U.S. We've made good progress so far. We'll continue to build out our pipeline both into this year and also into next, and double down our focuses on making that market a success. From an M&A perspective, we're going to continue doing our small bolt-on acquisitions, and we've got a number of opportunities in the pipeline that are coming down the road. Beyond that, we will continue to make progress in our M&A pipeline across new geo activity and areas of focus for us, new audiences and other areas.
We will continue to build on that in our conversations that we're having with management teams and look to progress that even further, taking advantage of that large cash balance that we have to move on these opportunities. From a capabilities perspective, we're looking at building out new capabilities, whether that's content creation across those younger audiences, which I mentioned before, but also different forms, whether that's vodcasts, podcasts, or other means that consumers are listening to or looking at. We're looking and experimenting with ways to build out our new capabilities. We're also looking at platform monetization opportunities that we're not already driving on. That's monetizing our Instagram audience, TikTok audiences, and we're continuing to do that via our direct advertisement, and we're seeing more and more demand from advertisers wanting to move into that space.
It was only last week that I was in with the CEO of HSBC and his CMO, and they were talking about the challenge that they have to really tackle those younger audiences up against big banks such as Monzo and Revolut that are coming through. For us, developing those new ways for people like HSBC to tackle and get in front of those younger audiences and help them through that. From a data, insights, and technology perspective, again, we will continue to develop this, and whether that's new dashboards that help our content creators generate more views, whether that's new technology that improves our advertiser and consumer experience, or AI technologies which we're very optimistic about in terms of helping us engage audiences, but also for our advertisers.
A quick example of that, we've been using things like Midjourney to generate imagery, whereas previously, we'd be going to PA or Getty Images to do that. Voiceovers, very clever tool where you can ingest voices into the tool, and it picks up mannerisms and can give you great AI-generated voiceovers that enhance the content. Also in addition to that, coming back to the localization opportunity for us, we're very English-speaking right now, but in the future, we will look at localization. There's tools that help with conversion of language, but also how visually it can help you in terms of generating imagery that makes it look more natural, and we've been experimenting with all of these things and seeing great results. The final one is diversification across audiences.
For us, we have a diverse portfolio across gaming, tech, food, pop culture, and other areas. We will look to go deeper into those topics, such as gaming, where we are already market leading across platforms where younger audiences are consuming, and also tech and others. The same when it comes to male, female, and different ages. We are now 40/60 in terms of male/female split. We will continue to look to diversify that and build on that over time. Just to summarize, a strong result for the first half of the year, both in revenue and EBITDA, up 10% in revenue and over 80% in EBITDA, delivering GBP 3 million. We have got great momentum going into the second half of the year, and we are certainly optimistic based on what we are seeing from that first half.
Our audience has grown to 410 million, and in our business, we throw big numbers around and kind of forget the size and scale of that, but that's near enough one and a half U.S. citizens, just to put that into perspective, which is obviously a huge number. Our content views continue to grow off the back of strong year-on-year growth in previous years, up over 80%, again, another big number, but over 67 billion views. All of that plays back into our indirect revenue and the momentum that we're seeing. Our order book has increased year-on-year, and Richard mentioned before, as it stands at the half year point, each point in which we measure it, we've seen positive movement forward and momentum, and that continues for us. Socially responsible content sits at the heart of what we do and continues to do that.
We've got a number of amazing initiatives which we've been involved with this year and continue to moving forward, such as the one with the Mayor of London. In general, we have positive momentum across some of the different geo areas that we're expanding into, such as the U.S. All in all, a very positive set of results that we feel confident about in terms of moving forward and the expectations that we've set or have been set, sorry. Thank you very much. Over to yourselves for any questions.
Hi. Good morning. Jessica Pok from Peel Hunt. I've got three, please. Can you just talk a bit about the kind of mood music amongst your client base and the sentiments? Obviously, the order book's been quite good so far for the rest of the year. Are clients being quite slow at decision-making for some large things to drop in Q4, which could be unexpected? I know it's early days, just sentiment going into the projects you're talking about for 2024? The second is just on the U.S. Obviously, it's going well. Will we be looking at more investments going into the U.S. versus this year? The third one is just on the M&A pipeline. Are the things you're looking at mainly for indirect, or are you actually looking at both direct and indirect?
Thank you. Firstly, the mood music from the clients that we're speaking to. It's very clear that things are changing, and I think the acceleration of digital as a means to reach audiences, coming back to how much time people spend on their mobile phones now. I think I saw a stat across certain demographics. It's upwards of just four hours on social media, and that's without other app consumption. That change is accelerating. People like HSBC, as I mentioned before, are looking at ways to really get in front and tackle those younger audiences, and that seems to be the general mood music that we're sensing, is people understand that they need to change their approach in order to reach and engage customers they previously had. I think, in terms of marketing challenges, of course, everybody is searching for ways to generate profitable revenue.
For us, improving our effectiveness of the work that we do has been an important factor of our conversations that we've been having with people, and they want to see more information. From that perspective, I think businesses still need to move forward, and advertisement plays a key part of that. I think that advertisement has been scrutinized more, but that puts us in a great place because people are looking for different ways to achieve the results that they have done previously. That's the general sense that we're getting. Conversations that we're having, very positive into next year as well. We've got the Euros, we've got the Olympics. We're working with one of our key clients, Google, on providing insights and data on how our audiences are thinking about the Euros up and coming.
We're very much moving up in terms of upstream, in terms of the kind of conversations that we're having strategically with people. I think that's been a big step change for us. We're noticing that happening more and more. Of course, I think there is sort of a natural awareness of maybe what's to come down the road. I think, people are certainly scrutinizing things more, but I think that puts us in a great position. In terms of the question around the U.S., and our investment into the U.S., we've taken a very measured approach in our growth. We have done since the beginning of this business. We've been profitable since day one.
Some of you may recall, we've never taken any investment since the beginning, so the way that we operate this business and have done since the beginning of time is we want to see the revenue. Once we see the revenue, then we'll invest. It's the same in the U.S. market. We've started to see a number of contracts come through the door, which has given us optimism. Off the back of that, our pipeline is also growing. Over time, we will look to invest in that and grow into it. The final question, I always do this, I never bring a pen.
Our M&A pipeline is balanced across both of those. We try to stick to around 50/50 as a target between direct and indirect for us. The pipeline is reflective of that. Some are more weighted towards just direct, some are weighted more towards indirect, some have both. All of those opportunities are certainly weighted towards the ones that are moving upstream quicker, which are weighted towards the opportunities that we're looking at more imminently.
Thank you.
Thank you. It's Fiona North at William Mason. Only three. First of all, on the U.S., when we met last in April, you said you were trying lots of different approaches. It'd be interesting to hear what you feel has worked best and what hasn't worked.
Yeah.
Secondly, which one shall I have? The RPMs. You talked about softening RPMs. What's the pattern sequentially, and is there any stabilization there? Then the third one, obviously you're not a big player on X, but do you think there's any repercussions across the rest of the social if X goes behind paywalls?
Yeah. Thank you. Some good questions. Firstly, on the U.S. side, what we've noticed is, well, we've not noticed, the market is absolutely huge, and as you can probably imagine, the size of the agency teams that work on these different clients are absolutely massive too. They take a more relaxed approach to having client direct relationships over there. I would say agencies are a little bit more protective over aspects like that. Yeah, they embrace it, and I think that's just down to the size and scale of the market and accepting that they can't cover everything. We've worked very hard at our client direct relationships over there and have been working at those. The Hulu and the Peacock relationships have been built over a period of six months and then transitioned into the contracts that we've won, and business is looking promising moving forward.
We've targeted a number of sectors, gone deep into those sectors from a client perspective and agency contacts, and worked at things that way. That's probably the key learning in terms of the sales market and how the advertisement world works over there. We've got lots of learnings on the audience and other aspects, but I'll kind of stick to that one. On the other piece around the RPMs, do you want to take that?
Yeah. Obviously, from a H1 perspective, we're sort of not comparing apples with apples. I guess from the winding the clock back a little bit to sort of mid-October when that real shift to short-form happened last year, those RPM levels dropped around 30%. Across H1, I think it's fair to say they're a little bit lower still. Going back to my comments in my presentation, there's a seasonality aspect to that as well in terms of H1, H2 waiting. When we get into H2 properly, we'll be able to really see what the like-for-like comparison of it. The most important thing for us is that those RPMs are a factor affecting the whole market. What we've been focusing on throughout, as part of that pivot, is growing those both monetized and yet-to-monetize audience.
As the stats have said, that pivot that we took to short-form video significantly increased our capabilities and output for that. That's continued through the H1 period, and the trend looks to continue. The net effect of that yield environment and our own contribution and output is, as far outstrip to that. Do I think it's softening? I think that we've got some seasonality to it to have a level of optimism around it. Our focus is on what we can influence.
The X one. Yeah, it has been a platform that we've been on for a while, and we've got good audience bases on. I think he's just throwing a massive spanner in the works on everything and doing what he does best, and I think it's definitely keeping all the other platforms on their toes. It's interesting to see that they're adapting some of his, for example, verifications. He charged people for that. Next minute, there's other platforms charging for verification. You see, whether it's successful longer term, we don't know. The paywall piece, again, let's see. He seems to have quite radical ideas, tries them out, sees if they work. If they don't, move them on, move to the next.
I think it's definitely the impact, I would say, is keeping everyone on their toes and changing things very quickly, but no negative impact to us. Equally, I'm not sure I could see a positive impact either. Just kind of quite neutral on that point specifically.
Yeah, thanks. It's Ciarán Donnelly from Berenberg. Three questions, but I'll go one by one rather than hitting you all three at once.
Thank you.
Just in terms of content generation, could you just give us an insight into H1? Obviously, there was what? + 87% on content views, but how much of that was driven by an increase in the volume of the content you put out there versus, let's say, the audience engaging with it more? Just second part to that question, I guess in terms of the capacity you have internally to generate content, how much more capacity is there?
Yeah. That's great. I don't have exact figures to hand to be able to tell you how many videos we put out versus where we have been previously. There's a few factors that have driven that. Some are areas where we've not really focused previously. Let's take tech, gaming, food. Those are three areas that previously maybe weren't on our radar as much. We're generating more views from brands like that. As we're going deeper into certain passion points. Optimizing what we're doing in that space, that's helping us grow our content views as one aspect of it. Definitely with short-form video being a bigger part of our mix, there is definitely much more content we're putting out there, and that's just purely down to the fact that to produce a sort of 60-second video versus a four or five-minute video, it's much quicker.
You can put out more. There's definitely been an increase in the volume of content that we're putting out there due to the nature of that. It's a mixture of things, and we're always optimizing, we're always adapting and changing based on what we're seeing and the trends that we're seeing and figuring out ways to grow those views. Yeah, mixture of different things on that basis. Sorry, the second part?
Just in terms of capacity going forward.
Yeah, sorry. Yeah
Putting out more volume.
Yeah. The capacity going forward. As I mentioned before about AI tools and those kind of things, so I think those are only going to play into our favor, because previously we'd have someone in the office literally recording a voiceover. For us, we have to ingest their voice into it, and off the back of that, we can produce that via AI imagery and certain footage in the way that it's edited. Again, there's things that we're experimenting with which enable us to optimize and make our process even better. I'd like to think that over time, we can get better at producing more higher quality, and find ways to make it more efficient. Of course, where we see opportunity to grow and scale, where it's already optimized, we will do, such as going into certain brands and interest points or different demographics.
Great. Two, just on your commentary around improved visibility on the direct side, I guess if you could just explain to us why you're seeing better visibility. Two, just in terms of that visibility into H2, in terms of, I guess there was the World Cup in H2 last year, with the direct clients you're working with, do you tend to see that the ad spend they have on the World Cup is redeployed to different parts, or they tend to see that as kind of a one-off spend and therefore, it's going to be a hurdle going into H2?
Yeah. Okay, so far what we've seen this year, is we've kind of taken certain points in the year where we measure our order book where it was last year, and also the conversion rate points has been very positive. We typically work on a 12-week cycle in terms of our sales cycle. From everything that we've seen year-on-year so far, it's been very positive, which has given us the optimism around that. Also, you've got the additional piece around brief conversion rate increasing as well. That increase in conversion rate, meaning that we come to the table and win much more than we have done previously, further gives us more optimism around that. When it comes to, of course, not having a World Cup, it's still our busiest quarter by far.
As always, that period, whether it's retailers or other businesses, really homing in on that Christmas period in particular, it's always very busy for us. There's lots of categories from brands which we're not tapping into, whether that's automobiles, whether that's retailers or different banks and so on and so on, that we're just not maximized on. What we do is we focus our attention where we see the opportunities, but also temper our numbers to take into account that we have not got a World Cup this year. Whereas next year we do have a Euros, we do have an Olympics. We factored that into our budgeting and our thinking already. I think last year was an unusual one, having both of those things boiled into one, but we factored that in.
Great. Just the last one from myself. In terms of the brief conversion data that you did give us, do you have a sense of how that benchmarks you versus peers in terms of their success rate?
Yeah. I know it's very good. From the people that we work with in our sales team, that's the highest that they've seen, so I wouldn't be surprised if that's market leading. I don't have any data to hand, but I'm pretty confident that'll be up there.
Thank you. Rachel from Zeus. Just a couple of quick ones. Firstly, on LADnation. You mentioned 22% engagement, which feels very strong versus that typical kind of panel offer. Do you see this as a real kind of USP in terms of that brief conversion and the strong results you're getting there? Is there potential for it to become a standalone product ultimately? Also secondly, you mentioned obviously Instagram, TikTok still pre-monetization. Do you have a view on when potentially you could start to see those become revenue generating?
It definitely is a huge part of our mix when we're speaking to clients. Coming back to the conversation I mentioned around Google before, a key part of that is surveys, insights, and information from our audiences to help them put their strategy together for next year. We're seeing that across more and more clients, so it's a key part of that mix. It's great for us because it gives us richer information on how to engage the audiences, too. In terms of a standalone product, it's something that we price into what we do, so it is a line item.
In time, absolutely, it could become a standalone product, and P&L and business within that, and we do have that carved out, but at the minute, it tends to be a line item as part of our offering, with brands such as what I mentioned before. On the other piece, around the indirect revenues. Just a recap on that. When Facebook turned their monetization on with us, that was an incremental GBP 5 million. It is a huge opportunity moving forward. Instagram have been testing. TikTok are opening up more and more schemes across the board. The U.K. is not a market that is on that whitelist right now from a TikTok perspective. We do remain confident that in the future, it's a huge opportunity for us as it was on Facebook, and our audience levels, as I mentioned before, are market leading.
We're in conversation with them around that. I know they're working at their modeling on how to make it as successful as their other advertisement models. A big opportunity for us moving forward.
Thank you.
Thanks.
Thank you. Sorry, the second wind of questions here. Just one. Just trying to understand the impact of the shift to short form and that sort of disconnect between your growth and engagement levels. Is that really sort of the main reason that we've seen that sort of disconnect this year? Does that mean as you get to Q4, and you've got more of a like for like comparison, you'd expect those two metrics to track more closely, or is there sort of anything else going on in there as well?
I think the other thing, I'd briefly touched on it before, is we're growing our audience and views across those monetized platforms and currently under-monetized indirect platforms. Our overall views are growing. If we look at using Facebook as the example of that shift to short form, our content views growth still phenomenal. Far outpacing that reduction in yield. I think the overall disconnect that you're sort of seeing is that combination of currently non-monetized platforms as well as the factors. It's something we can maybe make a little bit clearer going forward because it's an opportunity aspect rather than a risk aspect.
We'll also be lapping in Q4. We'll start to see some more comparative data as well throughout that period. Yeah, it'll be interesting to see what that shows.
Any more questions? Okay.
Brilliant. Thank you very much.
Thank you.