Welcome to the Team Internet 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'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 on the Investor Meet Company platform.
Before we begin, as usual, we would just like to submit the following poll, and if you'd 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 Team Internet Group. Michael, good afternoon, sir.
Thank you, Jame, Jake, and welcome everybody this Monday afternoon to the Team Internet 2024 year-end results presentation. I'm here with our CFO, Billy Green, and we will run you through the following agenda. First, a brief State of the Nation address in view of the recent reset of our forecasts. Billy will present the 2024 financial highlights to you, and I will then finish up the presentation with a journey through our strategy and outlook. Conscious of time, let's jump straight in. You will have three questions: What has just happened? Why does it matter? Where will the journey take us? Google has announced that starting March 19th, so that's already effective as of now, it will commence opting out all advertisers from their program, Google AdSense for Domains. Advertisers can still opt back in into the program.
However, these opt-in ratios are never as high as an automated opt-in, so we must expect that this will start the decline of this product. Why does it matter? Because AdSense for Domains has been the backbone of the revenue generation of our search division. Google has already, about one and a half years ago, introduced a new successor product that goes by the name of Related Search on Content, which we've already implemented, which we're already scaling. The reason why we have, however, reduced our profit forecast for the current year is that the new product, after only one and a half years of optimization, is not yet at the level of perfection of AdSense for Domains, which has been optimized for a straight 15 years.
This is why we must anticipate that during this transition phase, our margins in this business, which have been in the mid-teens, will now, for a brief period of time, be rather mid-single digit and would then again grow over the next couple of quarters and years to the old levels as we run through our normal process of optimizing the landing pages, picking smarter keywords, coming up with better language on the pages that trigger the consumer behavior that is needed for a successful conversion.
and then together with the fact that Google's new RSOC product also allows receiving traffic from traffic sources that before were non-admissible on AdSense for Domains, like, for example, traffic from other search engines or from email marketing campaigns, this business should then rise back to the same level where it was, or maybe even more given the larger total addressable market.
Before we go into more detail on the journey of the transition from AdSense for Domains to Related Search on Content, let us first put the search division into the context of the larger group. So in our first training update at the beginning of the year, we announced that we will, as of now, report in three reporting segments: domains, identity and software as the first, comparison as the second, and search as the third. It does not stop here. As a matter of fact, we have also reorganized internally so that now also our internal operating divisions match our reporting segments.
While we will spend the first part of the presentation mostly with search, let's also forget about our domain business, which is a trusted partner of the leading online presence and cybersecurity companies all across the world to buy domain names and associated digital products all across the planet, where we did more than $200 million of revenue in the year just ended. Let's also forget about the comparison division, which is helping consumers make confident data-driven decisions in their purchasing, where we've seen more than 40% organic growth and EBITDA going up by three quarters. Last but not least, the search division, which has been the biggest driver of revenue and profits in the past. Now, for the interim, we expect it to be, in terms of EBITDA contribution, in line with the two other divisions.
We will then see how they will all again grow in parallel to a much bigger scale than where they are now. That we will discuss in further detail in the strategy and outlook section. Just as a reminder to demonstrate these two abstract terms, AdSense for Domains and Related Search on Content. You will have already seen this slide in prior presentations. AdSense for Domains, a high-performing legacy product that is now being deprioritized by Google with the five steps: capture the attention, qualify the intent, refine the need of the user, match the intent and need of the user to an ads, and then ultimately completing the journey with the cash flowing in reverse. The advertiser who receives the user pays Google the typical click price.
Google remits the majority of the click price to us, and we then, out of these proceeds, would then need to finance our traffic acquisition cost. Now, with Related Search on Content, the journey does not look terribly different. Again, we need to spark interest on a social media website, then deliver the context around the topic, trigger the intent by showing a series of ads, and then in the last step, drive the conversion of the user into becoming a customer of that advertiser. You might now ask yourself, "Okay, that looks more or less the same. So why is this a challenge in the short term, but also an opportunity in the long run?" Here is again a slide that we already presented after our Q3 results last year, which has always been there.
Apparently, the urgency of the transition of AdSense for Domains to Related Search on Content has obviously increased. Again, let's revisit what is the purpose of the business. Search engines are losing Generation Z and younger as users. We basically engage with these audiences, bring them back to the open web on websites that are built for conversion of their attention into actual purchases.
The opportunity is now to materially enhance the brand and user experience. Brands prefer to have their ads being shown in a contextually aligned content environment rather than on a website that does not include anything other than a choice of ads. Also, the users appreciate the additional content and context around the ads that they are seeing. This also opens a huge opportunity not only in engaging better with users and with brands, but also on the supply side.
Now, some properties that before did not allow to send users off their website to our no-content ads-only experience will now open up to also send traffic onto our websites that have been built with RSOC, increasing the total addressable market of the industry. What is the challenge now? The challenge is the user engagement. Users love to come to our websites. However, now that there is interesting content around the ads, more often than before, they would intend to start scrolling and omitting the click that we need to monetize the experience. This will be a process of including additional ads below the Google Ad unit to basically monetize those users who do not choose to click but just scroll through the content.
For the rest, simply our machine learning-based approach to constantly improve the content, the layout of the website, and the workflow to get the click-through ratios as close to the levels that we've experienced on AdSense for Domains as before. Together with the higher click prices that we are experiencing today because the advertisers are more happy with the new canvas on which we paint the ads, this will then translate into an at least as fascinating and powerful ecosystem as AdSense for Domains has been for the last 18 years. What's now our license to win? First of all, we start out as the leader in AdSense for Domains. We already have a lot of data. We also have unique experience with content and videos.
We know very well from other businesses that we own how to write content that captures the attention of a user and keeps them on the website for many minutes rather than just a bare few seconds. We also, from other investments that we've done in the past, have a lot of experience with working with advertisers other than Google and blending them seamlessly into the content experience. With our comparison division, we already have many years of experience in doing highly automated testing on content-rich websites, which is also a skill that not all of our competitors possess.
This is why, notwithstanding the bump in or the trough in profitability that we must expect for the current year, 2025, we are very confident that this business already next year will turn around into double-digit growth mode and ultimately end up at the same or even higher scale than the business that we had first built around the old workflow from Google AdSense for domains. Before we go into more detail around the other divisions and the strategy of the business, I will briefly hand over to Billy to present the financials for the year 2024 to you.
Thank you, Michael. As Michael indicated, just giving you a brief overview summary of the financials that we released this morning. Those of you who saw the previous trading update we released last month will have seen that gross revenue remains above $800 million.
$803 million being 4% lower than 2023's $837 million is a performance that you've probably already seen. It is important to note and to draw your attention to the makeup within that gross revenue number. That 4% decline is the net of an 11% decline in search due to the challenges faced there. That is combined with growth in both the domains segment growing by 7% year on year and in the comparison segment growing 43% year on year.
There are three businesses growing at very different speeds within that net 4%. Moving along to the net revenue box, the net revenue decline year on year was lower than or moderate than the gross revenue decline. That indicates, as you would probably expect, the opposite of what we experienced during the boom years of search growing rapidly over 2020, 2021, 2022 into 2023.
We gradually, over that time, experienced a ferocious and impressive rate of growth in terms of search revenues and indeed net revenues. The gross margin percentage was gradually declining because our search products tend to be amongst the lower margin products in our business. Vice versa, in a year in which search does not perform as well in comparative terms as comparison and domains, you're going to see the gross margin percentage gradually improve as search becomes a slightly smaller proportional part of the business.
Moving along to adjusted EBITDA, those of you who've heard previous presentations that we've made over the last six to nine months will know that we had noted that mainly due to inflationary factors, the rate at which our operating expenses were growing was in some cases higher than the rate at which net revenue was growing.
Obviously, that's a situation that one would not expect to see in perpetuity. Since the middle of last year, we've been gradually taking cost out of the business in a moderate fashion. That's led to operating expenses being lower in the second half of the year than the first half. Although we saw adjusted EBITDA decline being higher year on year than the net revenue decline, given how we've rebased the cost base over the last six to nine months, we should see improved operating leverage in future, as indeed we successfully improved the operating leverage of the group during 2022 and into 2023.
The operating profit number on the right-hand side of the screen, whilst that shows $8.2 million on a pure IFRS GAAP basis, if you were to add back the impact of $36 million of non-recurring impairment charges, you'd find operating profit in excess of $44 million in 2024. Actually, the $44 million that's recorded in 2024, excluding the non-recurring impairment charges, is broadly in line with the $45.7 million recorded in 2023.
Moving to the bottom few boxes, adjusted earnings per share, that would have shown as lower in 2024 if it were not for the lower share count gradually improving, tidying up the share balance of the business. As we gradually, over time, continue to buy back shares in a moderate fashion, we'll gradually see the share count continuing to decline. Therefore, we should see a return to higher levels of earnings per share.
Net debt, I'll come on to in more detail on a subsequent slide when we get to the balance sheet. I think it's important that we not only talk about the increase in net debt year on year, but the movements in net debt within the year. I'll come back to that. Adjusted operating cash flow was 7% higher year on year, nearly reached $100 million. $99.1 million is a more pleasing performance in respect of that. Naturally, the price-to-earnings ratio you'll see on the bottom-hand side of the screen is something that's already been commentated on and will continue to be. Moving on to a little more detail on the income statement, there's only a couple of highlights that I'll pull out here that we haven't already touched on in the previous slide.
You'll see around the middle of that page, for those of you who track and follow and model the expenses between adjusted EBITDA or rather the reconciliation, the balances between adjusted EBITDA and GAAP IFRS operating profit, you'll see not only the non-recurring impairment charge there of $36 million that I referred to earlier, absent which operating profit would have been north of $44 million. You'll also see non-core operating expenses of $7.1 million.
That looks a lot higher year on year on a GAAP basis than 2023. It is worth pointing out that 2023 benefited materially more than 2024 of non-cash credits related to reassessment of deferred contingent consideration, i.e., earnings in respect of acquisitions that we've made. As with any group, when we acquire companies, we produce our best estimate of the purchase price. We perform a purchase price allocation.
We set up the correct assets and liabilities at the supportable value on the balance sheet. That includes a provision for deferred contingent consideration. Naturally, over time, as those businesses perform either higher or lower than expectations, that then leads to a need to adjust through the P&L the level of deferred contingent consideration on the balance sheet. There was a more significant credit in 2023 of $7 million that reduced the non-core operating expenses to $2.7 million, whereas there was a much smaller net credit in 2024.
If you were to add back those non-cash and indeed non-recurring credits, the actual cash non-core operating expenses were $200,000 lower in 2024 than they were in 2023. Most of the non-core operating expenses consisted of acquisition and integration activity. Those expenses will naturally be lower in 2025 than they were in 2024 or 2023.
The acquisition expenses primarily relate not only to the Shinez acquisition, but also to other M&A activity that we considered in 2024. There were opportunities that were in our pipeline on our radar for businesses that we were interested in looking at. Ultimately, we decided not to make any offers for those other businesses. Therefore, you have a combination within non-core operating expenses of spend not only on the deals that are executed, but also naturally some spend on deals that we end up, for various reasons, not carrying out. Moving on to the balance sheet, I said I would talk about net debt in a little more detail. We delivered as a group fairly consistently quarter on quarter throughout 2022 into 2023, as a lot of you who followed the company for a few years will remember.
We then reached a level of net debt of $74.1 million at the end of 2023, significantly less than one times net debt to adjusted EBITDA, i.e., leverage. By the middle of 2024, so by May, June 2024, that had increased to $109.9 million as the reported net debt as of 30 June 2024. Since then, we have delivered quarter- over -quarter to reach net debt of $96.4 million by the end of 2024, so a $13.5 million decrease in net debt by the end of last year. Indeed, we continue that delivering into this year.
In any month in which Team Internet carries on its normal course of business and generates operating cash as we do without fail every month, in any month, in any quarter when we're not spending that money on either M&A activity or any other non-recurring spend, we are using that cash flow we've generated to fund the share buyback program that continues. The remainder goes to delivering. Absent returns to shareholders via share buybacks or dividends, the remainder goes to delivering. That's why we're able month on month and over time to moderately reduce that net debt, as indeed we were successful in doing in the second half of last year. The final thing I'll say in respect of the financials relates to the cash flow and the cash conversion of the company.
Those of you who followed Team Internet for the last couple of years may recall that having achieved greater than 100% conversion of operating profit to operating cash in 2022, we slightly underachieved in 2023. We converted operating profit to operating cash at a ratio of 96% in 2023. That was lower than the target we'd set ourselves. That indicated to me that there was more work that the team and the business more generally could achieve in 2024. Indeed, in 2024, after a challenging start to the year when cash conversion was lower than 100% for most of the first half of last year, we recovered well in the second half of last year to eventually record a 108% conversion of operating profit to operating cash. That is really the result of two factors.
One is a general additional improved discipline in working capital management across the business. Also, as we find over time that search becomes a lower proportion of Team Internet Group, and search is one of our businesses that happens to have the least efficient working capital cycle, as it gradually becomes a lower proportion, there is an overall improvement in the working capital mix of the group. That leads to higher cash conversion. We look forward to continuing to take advantage of that over the course of this year as search becomes a lower proportion of the business compared to the more working capital efficient domains and comparison businesses. With that, I will pass back over to Michael for the overview of the strategy and outlook.
Thank you, Billy. With more than $90 million of EBITDA in the last year, the question is now, of course, how do we get back there after 2025? The solution is that we have now three similar-sized divisions in terms of EBITDA contribution, with all of them around $20 million. All of them will grow going forward from here. Let's start with domains, basically the stem cell of Team Internet Group. Here we make the global domain access simple, compliant, and scalable.
This is why some of the, or I should say most of the most admired companies in online presence, cybersecurity, and brand protection have chosen us as the partner to buy domain names and associated products all across the world where we cater directly and indirectly through our channel partners to more than 4 million different individuals relying on our services to run their websites. The opportunity is to build the operating system for digital identity. Domain names are still 40 years or 42 years, to be precise after the invention, still the centerpiece of online navigation and digital identity. This is where your website is hosted. This is from where you are sending your emails. Your email, again, is what you log in with in most different services.
Even your trademark might be part of the domain name, or the domain name might even be your trademark, like in the case of a Booking.com. Us managing the centerpiece of online identity, of course, makes it quite apparent that we should expand into other adjacent services, like, for example, trademark docketing services. Why only register a domain name that includes the trademark? Why not creating the trademark in the first place? Why not securing the presence of our customers in terms of social media handles, in terms of blockchain credentials, and even all kinds of certificates that are in existence to prove your identity on the internet? That is one part of the equation. The other part is that we've just integrated a business called Voluum, which we initially reported as part of our online marketing segment.
However, it is ultimately a software-as-a-service solution with the same revenue qualities as a domain business, subscription revenues spread over thousands of customers. More importantly, it also holds second-to-none capabilities in terms of data analysis and process automation, also things that are important in the digital identity value chain. We are bringing these two businesses together for even higher performance. The challenge in this business is just like with domain names, where you have 300 different country codes, top-level domains for each and every country or even independent territories like the British Indian Ocean Territory. The same applies for trademarks, for example. The same applies to blockchain technology, where there are also thousands of blockchains out there. Some of the products are paid for. Some of the products are for free. How do you build a business from it?
Here, our license to win is, A, the trusted partnerships with some of the greatest distribution partners that you could hope for, reaching from Amazon through a GoDaddy or an Alibaba in China, a Cloudflare, or a Squarespace. There are all kinds of customers out there who use our service to basically procure domain names all across the world. This is the strength on which we are building, having the access to enough end customers through our channel partners to make the investment into integrating new products into our workflow pay off.
The rest is just what is our core skill. For more than 20 years, we've been doing the hard work, the hard plumbing job on the internet, connecting thousands of hosting providers to hundreds of so-called registry providers and even more other providers of services like SSL certificates and others.
Basically, the confluence of these factors makes that we can continue growing this business at above market rates and at the same time increasing the total addressable market to keep the runway for further growth very, very long. Then moving on to comparison. Our comparison division delivers on an evergreen purpose, which is cutting through the noise and helping consumers with data-driven and trustworthy websites to make smart decisions so that they would spend their scarce budgets on the right product, also at the same time cutting out waste and making our planet a little bit cleaner. The big opportunity here is that AI unlocks potential to continue the growth rates that we have seen in the past for a very, very long time. AI enables us to do three things.
First, go abroad much faster than before because it's obvious that now with generative AI, of course, supervised by humans, it is much easier and much less cost-intensive to create a new language version of your website. The second is go long-tail. Today, we are thinking in hundreds of thousands of products, but in the future, we will think about millions of products going into the niche, extracting more niche demand and margins for very specific products, for very specific customer needs.
Last but not least, at least in our German home market, where our brands like Vergleich.org have developed into true consumer brands, we will also explore the opportunity of direct sales. Basically, rather than just earning commission by referring a customer to somebody else, why not take the order in the first place and then manage the shipping process to the customer?
Of course, all these three steps are difficult. When going abroad, there will always be an incumbent who already firmly covers that market. However, the KPIs that our platform delivers in terms of conversion rate, in terms of basket size, in terms of the commission rates that we can command from our partners, we are very comfortable that in every market, we can at least bite a big dent into the market share of the incumbents. In terms of going long-tail, obviously, this requires more effort. Generative AI has created the basis.
Quantum computing will give us limitless computing power in the not-too-distant future. Here, we believe this problem or this challenge can definitely be tackled. When talking about going direct to consumer, yes, going to consumers, of course, makes that you need customer support. You need to supervise the fulfillment.
You need to meet certain compliance thresholds. Also here, AI is part of the solution. Today, with chatbots or even with human-like phone conversations, customer support costs now come down dramatically compared to where it was before the advent of generative AI, only two and a half years ago. This is why we firmly believe that we can play these three opportunities through our new SEA-first platform that we have built for scalable AI-driven growth. Let's have a look at 2025. The consensus for 2025 is approximately $60 million of adjusted EBITDA, which includes some $20 million plus contribution from search, admittedly down from $57 million in the year 2024, and about $40 million plus from the domains identity software business on the one hand and the comparison segment on the other hand.
The growth that's projected in here or in here from domains and comparison is just a continuation of the success story that we've already seen in the last year. This also makes that today, the composition of the earnings of the group are much more balanced than at any point in time in the past. Today, all domains, comparison, and search this year are expected to deliver around 1/3 of the group contribution. Going forward, we will see that also the growth of these divisions runs a bit more in parallel than it has done in the past. Hopefully, next time when we reach again the same $90 million EBITDA level that we had last year, it will be rather three times $30 million. That's then just a milestone to grow from there.
To deliver this story, we've demonstrated that we could accelerate the growth of the domain division and make it more efficient at the same time, leading to 46% EBITDA growth in the year just ended. We have demonstrated that we could take comparison out of the post-COVID blues that the entire affiliate industry has experienced in 2023 into a hyper-growth mode that is now not driven like the growth that many companies experienced in 2021 by pandemic, but purely by great technology and strong execution. In terms of search, let's not forget our Google business was delivering $75 million of revenue and about $10 million of EBITDA at the time when we took control of it at the end of 2019. It has then taken us four years to scale from there to $500 million of revenue.
While we retire the existing success engine, AdSense for Domains, over time, we have zero doubt in RSOC's capability to let us build the same success that we had before or potentially even greater, given that we now have better brand experience, better user experience, and can also implement additional monetization forms into the same websites, which were before exclusively reserved to Google. This takes us to the end of our presentation. We say thank you and are now looking forward to your questions.
Perfect. Michael, Billy, 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's situated on the right-hand corner of your screen.
While the team take a few moments just to review those questions that were submitted already, I'd just like to remind you that a recording of this presentation, as well as the 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 this afternoon. Thank you to all of those on the call for taking the time to submit their questions. Michael, Billy, at this point, if I may hand back to you guys 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.
Yes, certainly. That makes perfect sense. Thanks, Jake. If I may, I will answer the first two questions because they're, interestingly, two sides of the same coin, really. The first question is, what is the rationale for buying back shares rather than reducing the significant debt? We absolutely are doing both, not to the exclusion of each other. We continue to buy back shares under our share buyback program, which was launched in autumn of last year. It does not anywhere near use up all of the operating cash that we're generating. Every month that goes by, we generate more and more operating cash. Therefore, in the second half of last year and into this year, we're able to comfortably fund the buyback program from that spare operating cash and also reduce debt. That will continue.
I think it's really important that as a group, we remain balanced on both returning cash to shareholders and on delevering. The second question is kind of the other side of the coin, as I indicated, reminding us that a 10% maximum buyback that we typically request at the annual general meeting each year and is granted to us, 10% maximum buyback effectively is 20% of the free float of the business, given how much of the share capital of the business is owned by some key shareholders. Does the board see buybacks as an important strategy at the current share price? Yes, we are continuing the share buyback program. We haven't considered making any change to the buyback program. We've given our broker discretion to manage the buyback on our behalf.
There remains, I believe, as of today, there's somewhere between $1.5 to 1.6 million of shares left to go until that program reaches its limits. That does continue. Share buyback activity continues. We then have the optionality where we can either prioritize further share buybacks or delevering. Naturally, whilst we've maintained a very consistent capital allocation policy over the last several years, we need to be able to react to and sometimes adapt and evolve that strategy from time to time. The balance of returning cash to shares versus delivering will continue to evolve this year. Those first two questions, they are effectively one is indicating what you deliver. The second is indicating what you buy back more shares. It is a question of balance. It has to be.
We're never going to have a complete consensus as to how much of the capital should be allocated to those two potential uses. Over time, we've been successful in navigating what we believe is a very reasonable balance, and we'll continue to do so.
Thank you. The next question is on the ROI on our AI-driven initiatives. There is a huge number of AI-driven initiatives, both in terms of how we run the business. As you know from prior presentations, AI, particularly in the form of machine learning, has always been in the fabric of our day-to-day operations and will always be. We now see that we can, in some parts of the business, develop accelerated growth. The best example here is probably the comparison business, where without artificial intelligence, the growth of the last year would have been much more difficult to achieve.
In terms of streamlining operations, which is one of the main profit drivers in the domains business, we have materially reduced the cost run rate from the beginning of 2024 to the end of 2024, which will now also help us deliver even better results for this division in the year 2025. In terms of how we measure the success, just like for any kind of investment that you put into the business, what is the additional cost that we engage?
What is the additional either revenue or cost savings in other parts of the business that can be attributed to that investment or expense? Always make sure that we make more money from it than what we spend. However, I should say that with AI, the returns are not measured in single or double-digit percentages, but rather in triple-digit percentages. It's a very powerful technology that helps us achieving great things.
Yeah, the next question is on an interesting topic. It's effectively around we announced today the crystallization of a long-awaited pivot in terms of AdSense for Domains to Related Search on Content. To what extent was that pivot anticipated? I think it's fair to say that the eventual decline of AdSense for Domains and growth in Related Search on Content is something that we have anticipated and spoken about regularly over the last six to nine months since it became very clear to us that AdSense for Domains, although it remains a very high-productive product, was not going to be the product that would be the number one in Google's arsenal with its shareholders. I think the pivots happening over time were something that we knew about and had spoken about.
The timing, the acceleration was not apparent to us. It wasn't apparent to us or any of our competitors. The acceleration and the timing of the pivot has caught the entire industry by surprise. That is really what we're reacting to. It's fortunate for us that we were already at the very advanced stages of developing, launching our own Related Search on Content product, which generates revenue and is profitable today already. It really just reinforces the importance of ensuring that in Related Search on Content, we monetize that as effectively as possible. The next question is related more to the domains business, the DIS segment. The question is, DIS EBITDA margin, 50% margin is very positive, achieved partially through cost reduction, absolutely operating expense reduction. Can you maintain the circa 50% margin whilst continuing to grow this segment organically?
The answer to that is yes, we've already been successful, particularly over the last year and into this year, in being successful in taking cost out of the business in moderate portions whilst still growing revenue. It's not as if we're divesting material parts of that business or closing down material platforms. It's more about platform integration. When you integrate multiple platforms onto one tech stack, for want of a better term, you can very quickly reduce the operating cost without impacting revenue. Indeed, the whole ethos, the whole mantra within the group and within that particular part of the business has been, this is not about cost reduction. This is about EBITDA growth. We are only taking cost out where we are sure that it will only have minimal impact on revenue.
We can continue to take cost out and maintain that margin whilst still growing that segment organically. The next question relates to, neatly having talked about search and domains, neatly falls onto comparison, the third part of the business. What countries and markets is the comparison business launched in? And what are the upcoming launches for this business? I think Michael alluded earlier to some of the markets that we're going to be launching in the future in some English-speaking markets. We launched the comparison business in Italy in October of last year, Spain in November. We relaunched our French-language business on the new platform in January. They are already markets that we already operate in, exist in. We gradually build the brand and market share.
Whilst it's at least a one-year gestation of each business before it really reaches a point where it's profitable from an EBITDA perspective, we should find later this year that those Italian, Spanish, French businesses are already pivoting towards being profitable on an EBITDA basis as we launch in other markets. We are expecting the international businesses will break even for the remainder of this year, and they'll start to make a more significant contribution to profits from next year and into the future.
Right. I would like to add here that we've also already prepared a platform to process non-Latin language, which would then facilitate expansion into Asia. We have also already redesigned the database to also absorb products which are not sellable on Amazon to basically be able to integrate a much broader array of e-commerce companies either in the existing markets or in other markets where Amazon is not the market leader, just like, for example, Japan, most of Latin America, or South Korea.
Okay. The next question is about the should investors expect dividends in the future? The answer is yes. We have to be very careful, naturally, as a public company that we do not make any guarantees about the exact level of dividends that are going to be paid in future periods.
The declaration of our first interim dividend last autumn, which was paid last October, was then followed by us not declaring a final dividend for this year, mainly because in the context of a very recent reduction in EBITDA, I think it's important in terms of the balance of the group that we delever slightly before we get back to returning funds to shareholders in more material portions by a dividend. We can expect future dividends.
It is still a part of the company's strategy. It's just there's a temporary need to rebalance the return of cash to shareholders with deliverings. Investors should expect dividends in the future. There's a question about have we considered to spin off the domains business. Is it feasible? In terms of the constituent parts of the group, it is feasible to spin off any one of our platforms.
We have three quite distinct segments in which we're very happy to report not just the revenues, but obviously the profitability of those individual parts of the business so that the market can see where the value directly lies. In terms of spinning off a part of that business, it is absolutely feasible to do so. No carve-out is ever as straightforward as it might appear to be on paper, but it is feasible to do so. It is worth noting, though, that the timing and the value of any business that we were likely to divest would have to be right. We've been asked many times over the years, and indeed, we've disclosed that we have had approaches for the domains business.
We have never considered that any interest in that domains business has been in the best interest of the shareholders, which is why we have not to date seriously entertained the separation of the domains business from the marketing businesses. It is something that we cannot be closed-minded to. We need to consider each piece of interest in any component part of the group from the lens of whether it gives the shareholders the best value by maintaining the group together or by separating out parts of the group. It is something that we cannot be closed-minded to. Where are we now? Do we expect the decline in Google AdSense for Domains-related business to have any negative cross-sale impact in other segments of our business?
Not materially so, but the change in product from Google, from AdSense for Domains to Related Search on Content does have some knock-on impacts elsewhere. It mainly impacts our search business, and that's fully reflected in the forecasts. Anytime the ecosystem changes, we may well see knock-on impacts to other marketing parts of our business. The material impact is to the search segment that's already fully reflected. Any knock-on impacts elsewhere on the business should be very moderate. It is part of the ecosystem in which we exist. We're very happy to continue to operate both within the domains and the online marketing sectors.
There are obviously very sophisticated business partners that we're proud to partner with in each of those. Therefore, any change in that ecosystem, without wanting to speculate too much about where Google is going in the next year or two, it could have other knock-on impacts.
Yeah. Maybe to add to this, thank you, Billy. The obvious part is, of course, so-called domain parking, which is a major source of income for domain investors. Just like we will transition our media buying activities to Related Search on Content, the same will happen for domain parking.
Quite interestingly, we also own a product, Zeropark, which comes from our acquisition of that company called CodeWise at the end of 2020, which offers an alternative monetization method where basically the visitor to the website is being auctioned in a live auction within a few milliseconds and then being redirected to the highest bidding advertiser, which is something that in the past struggled competing with Google's AdSense for Domains in most verticals. Now it will be a much more compelling offering. We believe that we also have some other businesses which will perceive this as a tailwind and propel them into a more favorable future.
That actually, Michael, helps answer the next question that's come up, which is, where does the lost business from AdSense for Domains actually go in the short term? As in, who benefits from the change? Is it Google or other parties as well? The straight answer is it is other parties as well. We are one of the, we, through our RSOC feed and through the ownership of Zeropark, as Michael just alluded to, we are one of the beneficiaries of some of the decline in AdSense for Domains. There are other knock-on impacts elsewhere in the marketing ecosystem that we need to take advantage of. We are well positioned to do so because we have a stable of marketing platforms.
If we had all our eggs in one basket and we had one or maybe two marketing platforms, then the risk you have with that concentration would be that we would not be able to take advantage of the passage of traffic and indeed the flow of advertiser dollars elsewhere. We do have a broad range of platforms and of products.
I think that's really the point I'd like to draw through from we've referred to the diversification between products in our numbers. The group is in a much more stable condition than it has been in any previous time. Certainly, during my time with the company since 2019, we were somewhat reliant on search and on AdSense for Domains through the impressive growth years of 2021, 2022, into 2023. We now have a much broader range of platforms all pulling at a very similar financial power. That diversification of products, diversification of revenue, I hope will be well received by the market because it is something that was perceived as an issue over the last several years. Now we have a very broad, diversified range, which can only benefit us as a management team and the shareholders.
I wanted to make one comment. It's not only that business is moving elsewhere. As we described on the first page, part of the challenge is that simply the workflow on Related Search on Content hasn't gone through the same number of billions of iterations in order to optimize it. This is why now our margins, which on AFD were rather mid-teens, will now rather be mid-single digit for an interim period of time. However, this is not a final state. We will just go through the exact same process as with AdSense for Domains and just over millions and later billions of page views optimize the workflow, ultimately getting back to the same level of profitability. Hopefully, in a few years, going to present to you a division that is just as profitable as it still was last year.
Okay. I believe we've reached time. Michael, any final words before we end the call?
Yes, certainly. Team Internet is still the sum of three divisions, each of which has a very strong market share in its respective market, each of which has an evergreen purpose, and each of which having all the talent that it needs to grow it further from the point where it is now. Also, all three businesses share the same quality that they are highly cash-generative, and that they can scale very quickly. We do not need to manage complex supply chains. We do not need to build big factories planning for the future.
As soon as the constellation of the stars is right in search, the revenues more or less automatically come back to the levels where they were. The other two divisions, Domains and Comparison, at this point in time, leave no questions open, just long-term growth, high cash conversion, and a lot of AI making the business better from year to year.
Perfect. Michael, Billy, if I may just jump back in there, thank you very much indeed for updating investors this afternoon. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as you will now be automatically redirected for the opportunity to provide your feedback in order that the management team can really better understand your views and expectations? This will only take a few moments to complete, but I am sure it will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of Team Internet Group, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That now concludes today's session. Good afternoon.