Welcome everyone to the webinar, investor webinar for Airtasker Limited, ASX code ART. Earlier today, the company released its full year 2024 financial results, with several key financial and operational milestones achieved. Shortly, I will introduce Chief Executive Officer, Tim Fung, and CFO, Mahendra Tharmarajah , who will run through a presentation on the results. At the completion of the presentation, Tim and Mahendra will then participate in a live Q&A session. Please feel free to submit your questions using the Q&A function on your screen throughout the webinar at any time. I will be collecting these and putting them to Tim and Mahendra during the Q&A session. So thank you for joining us, and without further ado, I'd now like to introduce Tim and Mahendra, who will run you through the formal presentation.
Hi, everybody. Thanks, David, for that introduction. I'm Tim. I'm one of the founders and the CEO here at Airtasker. Yeah, really pleased to share with you our FY 2024 financial results. We can skip forward two slides through the disclaimer and onto the next slide. Airtasker, we're building the world's most trusted marketplace to buy and sell local services. Very, very simple business model. We connect people who need work done with people who want to work. On the next slide, our mission is to empower people to realize the full value of their skills.
One of the really powerful things about Airtasker is, although we're building a really great and convenient service for our customers, we are creating jobs in the local community, and those jobs aren't just the by-product of what we do, that's the core purpose of our business. You can see here two of our incredible taskers who have supported our community throughout the year and during FY 2024 really are happy to say that we put more than AUD 600 million cumulatively in the pockets of Australian taskers through our marketplace. If we move forward to the next slide, our unique value proposition at Airtasker is twofold. We're an open and infinitely horizontal marketplace. So starting with the open community model, Airtasker doesn't use manual operations, set prices, and tell people what to do.
What we've done is we've built a system of transparency and accountability, which enables customers and taskers to be able to find a good match in a trusted but light touch way. This is really important for the ethos of Airtasker, which is that we don't tell people what to do, but it's also really powerful from a business perspective. This light touch operating model means that we have gross margins of, you know, in a range of +95% . The second thing that makes Airtasker very unique is our infinitely horizontal marketplace. We don't just focus on one type of task or a category of tasks like home services.
What we allow is for customers to be able to try and solve any problem that they need done, and we empower taskers to be able to solve the customer's problem in any way that they see fit. By doing this, we unlock an incredible amount of market opportunity, which wasn't possible otherwise. For customers, this represents a really powerful value proposition. They're gonna get offers super fast, they're gonna get the biggest range of people to be able to do their jobs, and they get great value for money. For taskers, we provide instant work, instant gratification. You don't have to go through interview processes and line up for jobs. You're in control of your pricing, and you get complete flexibility of when you work, what you do, and how you earn an income.
If we move forward to the next page, we've got a really simple business model too. Our revenue model really aligns Airtasker as a company with the success of our taskers, so if you look at that left hand side chart there, the GMV or the gross marketplace volume of Airtasker is the sum of all the transactions that go through our marketplace, and one of the unique things about Airtasker is that every task is paid for through Airtasker Pay, our payment system, so unlike, you know, the classifieds businesses, Airtasker sees all the transactions right through, and we make a revenue of about 20% monetization on that. There's a little bit of sales tax, and you know, 78% of that GMV gets paid through to our taskers for a job well done.
If you take that 20% revenue, that monetization rate and break it out, which we've done on that second bar chart there, you can see why we have this 95.4% gross margin or gross profit. We have a little bit of merchant fees, so that's all of the payments and credit card costs that we pay on that whole transaction, represents about 3.7%. And about 0.9% goes to public liability insurance, which helps our taskers to be able to provide that assurance to customers in the case of third-party personal injury, or Heaven forbid, if you know, there's property damage. So Airtasker super win-win business model. It represents low risk for taskers.
So unlike some of these sort of subscription-based products where you've got to pay first and then get value later, Airtasker marketplace business model is very much able to give you access to jobs instantly with no upfront fees. Also, you've got wide range. By allowing taskers to be able to freely see all of the jobs and interact with customers, from a customer perspective, that means that you get the widest possible range of offers. And finally, our business model demonstrates really strong gross margins. So 95% gross margin, a lot of that revenue is dropping straight to the bottom line. So with that, I'll be back later today to talk a little bit about our growth strategy. But you know what you've all come for is the FY 2024 financial results.
I'm gonna pass it across to our CFO, Mahendra, to take you for a spin through those.
Great. Thank you, Tim. Next slide, please, David, and one more, please.... Okay, I might start by providing a quick overview of some of the highlights from FY 2024. So, one of the key goals we set out for at the start of the fiscal year was to be cash positive, and we successfully achieved free cash flow of AUD 1.2 million over the course of the year. So we're up 115% on the prior period at an almost AUD 9 million turnaround, which is a terrific result for the company. On our Airtasker marketplaces, revenue was up just under 10% to about AUD 38 million.
In the UK, which is one of the new markets that we're actively investing marketing dollars in, revenue is up 76% in the fourth quarter, which is the most recent quarter. That was on the back of our marketing campaign, our TV campaign with Channel 4 . There was an out-of-home campaign in the last month of the fiscal, and it's also peak season in the Northern Hemisphere. We'll talk about all these cyclical factors a bit further on.
We also finished the year with cash and term deposits of about AUD 17.8 million on the balance sheet, and we were fortunate enough to complete two partnerships with oOh!media and ARN Media at the end of June and the beginning of July, which has provided us about AUD 11 million of ad inventory that we'll get to spend over the course of the next two years. Next slide, please, David. Looking, unpacking some of our results. So group revenue was up just under 6%, 5.6%, AUD 46.5 million. That's about a 25% four-year compound annual growth rate. The group, for those of you who don't know, comprises two marketplaces.
We've got the Airtasker marketplace that operates in Australia, the U.K., and the U.S. principally, and we've also got the Oneflare marketplace that operates, predominantly in or only in Australia. If we look at the Airtasker marketplaces, purely, so that's the global number, we've got 38 million is their contribution. So that grew just under 10% for the year, and it's tracking about 19%, compound annual growth over the last four years. And as I mentioned earlier, our positive free cash flow number of AUD 1.2 million, a AUD 9 million turnaround on the previous year. And we also achieved positive operating cash flow of AUD 3 million, which was, a AUD 13 million dollar or AUD 14 million turnaround on the prior year. We actually had three consecutive quarters of positive operating cash flows.
The first three quarters of the year were all positive, which is really encouraging. The fourth quarter, obviously, as we'll talk about a bit further on, is a cyclical quarter, so we don't get as much cash receipts in the fourth quarter. Next slide, please, David. So if we look at our marketplaces, so we've got two slides here or two charts here. The left-hand side is really our Airtasker marketplace, the global marketplace that comprises Australia and the U.S., the U.K., and some small markets. And then the right-hand side is Australia, purely. So Australia at the moment still contributes about 97% of the Airtasker marketplaces, so I'm excluding the Oneflare business. So it is heavily weighted towards... Obviously, the group is heavily weighted towards the performance of the Australian Airtasker marketplace.
I'll look at that specifically. We've had some challenging, I think, macroeconomic conditions over the last year. We've talked about this several times, and we've tried to address that through a number of product and pricing initiatives that we've been focused on through the course of the year. Our top-of-funnel gross marketplace volume was down about 4.5%. That was impacted by our volume of booked tasks that came through the platform and the average task price that we saw some softening over the course of the year. Despite that, we managed to get revenue increasing 8.5%, and on a four-year base, four-year compound annual growth rate, we're about 18%.
The monetization rate was up just under 14% to 20%, and this was all on the back of a product investment in reliability and our sales funnel efficiency, and we introduced a revised cancellation policy and cancellation fee structure, and one of the main things I think that achieved was that we now monetize all transactions that go through our Airtasker platform, whereas previously, uncancelled transactions weren't monetized at all, so that's a really positive change. Next slide, please, David. Turning to the U.K. and the U.S., so these are our newer markets. In the U.K., GMV was up 41% for the year, and, sorry, revenue was up 41% and GMV was up 20%.
And the four-year compound growth on revenue was 71% and for GMV, 47%. So as I mentioned earlier, we launched a television campaign with Channel 4 in late October, and we also had an out-of-home campaign, and we're in the peak season. So we spent quite a bit of marketing dollars, not cash necessarily, but certainly marketing investment in the UK through the media asset that we acquired from Channel 4 in June 2023. In the U.S., much smaller market, still very early stage. It's in our early, earlier phase of growth. 73% revenue growth, and GMV was up about 10%.
We're still continuing to explore marketing partnerships or media partnerships and have been cautious with our, our marketing investment in that market, so until we see some success on the partnership front. Move forward one slide, please, David. We wanted to try and explain, I think, our quarterly business or the cyclicality of the business, and so we've taken a view of illustrating the GMV and the revenue performance by quartering across all our Airtasker marketplaces and then looking at Australia, the UK and the US. The business is quite seasonal or cyclical. So in Australia, as I mentioned, you know, GMV was down, average task prices were down. But you can see here by the chart, and we've got a two-year view here.
You can see that the second and third fiscal quarters tend to be stronger, both on GMV and revenue, and what that also means then is that your first half and second half performances are generally about equal, because each have one strong quarter and one weaker quarter. As I mentioned earlier, the product investment reliability and sales funnel efficiency drove improvements in completed tasks, record completed tasks, and improved monetization rates. You can see the green line is our monetization. Sorry, is our revenue line. Turning to the UK, the spring/summer season is upon us, so fiscal, the fourth quarter fiscal and first quarter are the strongest in the Northern Hemisphere. Our fourth quarter revenue, as I mentioned earlier, was up 76% on the back of the TV ad and peak season.
And in the U.S., the fourth quarter is tracking nicely, up 30% in revenue. Still a small market, and we're being quite disciplined in our marketing investment. Move forward one slide, please, David. We wanted to highlight two of the key operational metrics that we focused on: the booked tasks and monetization rate. In Australia, we saw booked tasks were down just under 3% over the course of the year. One of the interesting things, though, is the first half of the year, booked tasks were down about 5%. The second half, they were actually flat, but the second half was up on the first half, so we're optimistic that we're gonna pick up some positive momentum as we go into FY 2025.
And then the monetization rate was up just on 14% to 20%, on the back of a lot of the product and pricing initiatives that we implemented. Turning to the U.K., booked tasks are up 22%, all-time high at 35,000. But notice what was interesting was that most of the, certainly one third of the full year booked tasks, came through in the fourth quarter, which is our peak season, when tasks were up 32%, and the monetization rate was up 17.5% to 15%. The monetization rate in new markets tends to be a little bit lower than, say, the, a more established market like Australia.
As the network effects build, there's a lot of booked tasks, but the conversion rate tends to be a bit lower, but over time that improves. Looking at the U.S., booked tasks are up 142%, so that's an all-time low for them as well, though it's coming off a relatively low base, and then the fourth quarter that was up 254%. The monetization rate was up 58% to 13%, a little bit lower than the U.K. It's still a slightly earlier stage, and as I mentioned, the monetization tends to be a bit weaker or softer than established markets like Australia. Move forward one slide, David.
The other thing I think we wanted to highlight was that the seasonality of the business does affect all our different, you know, categories. So if you look at revenue and cash receipts, expenditure and cash outflows, both from an accounting perspective and a cash flow perspective. So revenue and cash receipts tend to be stronger in the second and third quarters, and that's really due to the fact that Australia, you know, provides a higher weighting of the overall group performance. And then we see that our expenditure tends to be relatively flat or steady, excluding the marketing piece. And marketing tends to flow with seasonality, so with the peak seasons, we tend to spend more in marketing. And then you can see how that impacts operating cash flows.
Obviously, cash flows tend to be stronger in the second and third quarters, but we also tend to have a lot of outflows in the first and fourth quarters as we have annual renewals of the things like insurance and software and so on. So, the fourth quarter tends to be negative, generally because of obviously lower cash receipts, and then we also tend to have higher outflows, and that's just the cyclicality that we have at the moment because of the contribution of Australia. Over time, as we build up our Northern Hemisphere business, hopefully that will provide you know, a balancing effect. We'll have quite a good countercyclical business. Next slide, please, David. So looking forward to FY twenty-five, what are our plans?
You know, having now achieved positive free cash flow in FY 2024, that's certainly a target for ourselves in FY 2025. We're also aiming to continue to deliver double-digit growth through our Australian marketplace in aggregate, and they will then generate cash and cash flow to continue to fund our U.S. and U.K. expansion, which we intend to accelerate through the course of FY 2025. As I mentioned earlier, we have cash and term deposits of AUD 17.8 million on balance sheet. We've obviously got the AUD 11 million of advertising inventory to use from oOh!media and ARN in the Australian market. We expect to be doing significant marketing activity in Australia after a number of years of not having spent a lot of marketing in the Australian market.
We've got just over GBP 1 million pound sterling in inventory left from Channel 4 in the UK, which we received from them last year, and we intend to invest that into the marketplace through the first half of FY 2025. I'll now pass back to Tim.
... Thanks, Mahendra. I think FY 2024 [is a] really really great result, and you know really setting up the foundations for next year. We've also tried to increase the level of transparency around you know those quarterly results and the consistency of those metrics where they're you know whether in challenging circumstances or when they present a really really great story as well. Similarly, with seasonality, I think that is something that is quite important in Airtasker's business. It's crazy! Spring and summer really are the times where people do a lot of jobs versus fall and winter. So hopefully that increased transparency and around seasonality in our operating metrics is useful.
I'm now gonna talk a little bit about our growth strategy going forward. So if we can move slide forward. So, of course, Airtasker, we're gonna continuously invest into our core product experience. We have a very, very scalable platform. We're gonna be talking about that over the next few slides. But our brand and platform in Australia, we're gonna keep investing into that. First of all, what we've worked out is that the metric that we need to move on Airtasker is really to increase our brand salience. What do we mean by salience? It's really that effect of the brand, that when you see something that needs to be done, the first name that pops into your head is automatically Airtasker.
So we're really trying to improve our unprompted brand awareness. And so our partnerships with O and ARN, who owns brands like KIIS, which has Kyle and Jackie O, and stations that feature Will and Woody and things like that, are a really good way for us to drive our brand salience. And one of the great advantages that we have with our Airtasker plus Oneflare platforms in Australia is that we are really covering that entire breadth of customer demand from the you know those one-off jobs that you know everyday jobs that you can get done on Airtasker, all the way through to that spectrum of very very large jobs which Oneflare helps support. Over to Oneflare.
Oneflare's been an incredible acquisition for us, and a great learning experience in the value of this platform. We're gonna continue to invest in the Oneflare platform throughout 2024-2025. We're gonna do that primarily by simplifying the subscription pricing, and then improving how efficient we are at onboarding customers onto that platform. Thirdly, we're gonna invest a lot into marketplace trust. We had a very, very hyper-focused strategy in FY 2024 to increase reliability and reduce cancellations. That had a profound impact, whereby even as booked tasks and GMV were down, we were able to increase sales efficiency so much that we were able to produce a strong revenue result.
The great thing about that is that increased efficiency throughout the sales funnel. As we now add more people into the top of that funnel, all of those customers are gonna benefit from that increased improvements to the product experience, and ultimately, to how well we can monetize each of those customers. So in FY twenty-five, we're gonna focus on marketplace trust. That's the next part of the funnel that we're gonna focus on. And so you can see here already making progress around enhancing the signals that exist on Airtasker, so that customers can find and trust and have great confidence when they're booking a tasker.
So, for example, ID verification for all of our taskers across the platform are doing things like police checks, New South Wales licensed electrician checks. All of these verifications can help customers to be able to make sure they find a tasker that's right for them. They can have that confidence, increases the rate of assignment or booking of that job, ultimately results in greater sales funnel efficiency and more completed tasks. If we move forward a slide. As Mahendra went through, our Australian business is still currently, you know, a very big portion of our revenue. So if you look at what Airtasker Limited is made up of right now, we've got about AUD 17.8 million of cash in that left-hand side box.
We've got Airtasker Australia, which is generating significant cash, and so those two, you know, cash flow generators can actually help us to fund our new investment in new marketplaces, where we actually have to invest ahead of the curve to build up those network effects, build up that brand awareness, so moving on to the next slide, where we'll break this down a little bit, so on the right-hand side here, you can see a chart of Airtasker's growth over the five years in which we're in partnership with Seven West Media, and you can also see here on the left-hand side that during FY 2024 our Australian marketplaces generated about AUD 45 million of revenue and about AUD 31 million of cash flow.
So we've used their cash flow proxy for the EBITDA, but our Australian marketplace essentially generated about AUD 31 million of cash. So how did we get this marketplace to be as profitable as that? During these five years with Seven West Media, you can see in the light blue bars there, that we continued to increase our marketing investment from about AUD 2 million per year in FY 2016, through to about AUD 8 million in 2017, and close to AUD 10 million in FY 2018. And during that period, GMV was growing at two to three X a year, from 12 million run rate to 36 million run rate, to close to AUD 70 million GMV run rate.
Once we'd established those network effects and got it to scale, we were able to actually start pulling back that marketing investment. You can see there from FY 2019 to FY 2020, we actually pulled our marketing investment. We were very lean, and during that time, we were able to keep scaling that GMV from a little under AUD 70 million to well over AUD 100 million dollars, and in FY 2024, about AUD 190 million dollars of GMV in Australia with a very, very lean marketing investment. So that's how we're able to build these profitable marketplaces. We have to invest up front in order to build those network effects, and now we've come out the other side of that, and we have a very, very profitable marketplace in Australia.
If we move to the next slide, our Australian marketplace, the experience that we had was in establishing that first marketplace. We not only had to be able to cover the costs of the marketing investment at the local level, we also had to cover the cost of investment into our software platform and head office infrastructure. So if you look here on the right-hand side chart, you can see that in FY 2024, Airtasker invested about AUD 18 million into our software platform and head office infrastructure, and generated about AUD 31 million off that platform. So we're profitable, and our Australian business is covering the costs of that head office.
but the great thing here is, we've now got this opportunity to leverage that software platform that we've created to cover the Australian market, and we can actually use that platform to move into the U.K., the U.S., and other new markets. and when we do that, we don't have to replicate those platform costs again. so the economics of that are very, very, very powerful in our U.K. and our U.S. markets. Now, if you move to the next slide there, David. so we are currently investing into our U.S. and our U.K. market. so you can see there, our Australian marketplace, we're generating about AUD 31 million of cash, but in our U.K. market, we've invested about GBP 2.5 million of cash in over the past year.
In Airtasker USA, we're continuing to invest cash into that as well. We make these small investments into these markets, but what we're now doing is we are turbocharging those cash investments by doing media partnerships at a local level. This is really, really, really powerful for us because it means that with a small cash investment, we can actually scale those network effects and cross that chasm from marketplace investment all the way through to that profitable and proven model that we have in the Australian market. We're now doing that in the UK, and we intend to do that in the US market as well. These local media partnerships don't just represent advertising inventory, though. You know, that is one of the massive benefits.
But another really important benefit is that we establish these local experts in that marketplace, and that helps us to grow our networking opportunities, it helps us to grow brand opportunities, and it enables us to understand the local nuances of that market. So really, really, a powerful model, both financially, but also from a marketing and operational excellence perspective, as well. If we move to the next slide. The model that we've used to be able to set up these investments in new markets is it enables huge upside for us. So if we look at the way that we created the investment with Channel 4 in the UK, we enabled there to be... We set up a new entity, a new company, Airtasker UK.
We had Channel 4 invest into that entity. And what we've agreed is that in five years' time, which is two thousand and twenty-eight, June, we're gonna come back and repurchase that equity from Channel 4. And the way that we're gonna determine the valuation for Airtasker UK is to take the local revenue that's being generated in the UK, and multiplying it by Airtasker's group revenue multiple. This is really, really powerful because it aligns Channel 4 to not only wanna, of course, drive local revenue in the UK, which they are empowered to do, but also to make sure that Airtasker overall is really, really successful.
What it also means for us is that if things are going incredibly well for both Airtasker UK and Airtasker as a group and our group valuation multiple, then yes, we will have a huge check to write for Channel 4, but we own the other 80% of that business. So we're gonna have 80% of that revenue, and of course, we're gonna be benefiting from a low cost of capital associated with that with that high revenue multiple. So it's a really, really powerful model which aligns both parties, but also helps to manage risk for Airtasker in that at the end of the partnership period, everybody's incentivized by the same things. Everyone does well together.
It's also a really, really compelling proposition for Channel 4 and other media partners, that we're exploring. First of all, they're getting access to a proven model. We have a software platform which is creating very, very profitable marketplaces in Australia, and we've got a track record of using media partnerships to scale that model, to, you know, AUD 100 million-close to AUD 200 million of GMV. So there's a proven investment thesis there and a proven operating model. The second thing is that each of these local marketplaces that we set up has very minimal fixed costs. Airtasker has already built a business in Australia, which is profitable enough to generate EBITDA that covers the entire cost of that software platform. So we don't have new fixed costs in each market, they're leveraging that same platform.
Then the third thing is, from an investment point of view, there's a guaranteed exit for each of these investors. So, that is a very, very powerful incentive to make these deals really, really work for local media partners. The feedback that we've been getting is very, very, very encouraging, and I think presents a very scalable marketing opportunity. If we move to the next slide, David. I just want to pay tribute to the incredible media partners that we've already onboarded. So, in the UK, Channel 4 Ventures, I'm seeing super encouraging results.
Vinay, our venture partner there, is you know really really encouraged by the results we're seeing so far and has been an incredible ally for us in the London and ultimately the UK market. Then back home in Australia to oOh!media who we struck a AUD 6 million partnership with in June of this year, giving us access to outdoor media.
Then across to ARN, who in the early part of this fiscal year we struck a AUD 5 million media partnership with, giving us access to, you know, all of those names like Will and Woody, Amanda and Jonesy, and Kyle and Jackie O, which can really help to get the message of Airtasker out there and ultimately increase that brand salience. So a really powerful suite of media partnerships. And as mentioned, you know, we're seeing some really encouraging progress in all of our markets around this model. So you know, watch this space. I think there's a lot more to come. Now, if we move to the last slide, just wrapping up, Airtasker, a great FY 2024.
We've really tried to increase the level of transparency around our core operating and financial metrics and the seasonality of our business. And I think we've got an incredibly powerful and scalable and risk managed growth strategy for international scaling. So, yeah, really happy to take any questions and hear your thoughts.
Thank you, Tim and Mahendra, for the insightful presentation and the comprehensive overview of the Airtasker business, and in particular, its results for the full year and its strategy moving forward. Now, as Tim has just mentioned, we are moving to the Q&A session. As a reminder, you can submit questions using the Q&A function on your screen, and I'll be putting all of those questions to Tim and Mahendra directly. So let's jump straight into it. Gents, can you talk to the marketing strategy in deploying the AUD 11 million in advertising? Can you utilize any of the spend already done on the UK campaign?
Absolutely. So great question. So, important to say that, you know, during FY 2024, we hadn't utilized any of these AUD 11 million of media credit yet. So we certainly hadn't done that in FY 2024. We're running a few experiments right now, but I think you'll really see that come through in the next quarter when we accelerate our brand investment into Australia. The strategy here is really around building up our brand salience. So, where we really want to demonstrate the breadth of Airtasker's offering and doing it in a way which creates a positive emotional connection with Airtasker.
In terms of utilizing our brand assets, we've made incredible investments over the last two years into creating great content, you know, and brand design, and we're absolutely gonna be leveraging all of that into the Australian market. I would go even further to say one of the big leverage points for Airtasker is, of course, the software and the head office operating costs, but it's also the brand. The more that we invest into this brand, the more that we can leverage it into each of our new markets. There isn't an incremental cost to doing that. You know, a powerful brand will resonate in many of these markets, so we're getting greater leverage out of that too, and really looking forward to extracting the benefit out of that.
There was two questions specifically related to advertising. One, does the Australian media capital deals include Oneflare? The second part of that question was, Oneflare ad spend was approximately 31% of revenue compared to Airtasker Australia of approximately 6.5%. Are you confident of getting a return for this spend?
Yeah, so slightly different marketing strategies between Airtasker and Oneflare. So predominantly, the media spend through oOh!media and ARN is gonna be used to support the Airtasker brand, and that is because Airtasker drives a lot of direct traffic through its brand. That is a primary way through which we acquire customers, and you can see that by how little we spent on paid marketing in Australia during FY 2024 to generate the kind of growth and volume that we delivered. The Oneflare marketing strategy is a little bit more about direct marketing, and so predominantly, a lot of the leads come through our search marketing, which is Google performance marketing as well as SEO or organic Google search.
And so that's why you'll see, you know, a higher proportion of revenue going into marketing for the Oneflare business versus the Airtasker business.
Now there's a specific question here, so I'm not sure if you will have the answer at your fingertips, but we'll give it a go. What share of Airtasker GMV came through contacts, repeat transactions, and how does this compare with full year 2023? Do you feel like this functionality is moving the needle on marketplace leakage, or is there still more work to be done?
So, first, let me address the question specifically, and then I'll provide a bit of context. In terms of contacts, we saw growth through that product during FY 2024, which is great, and we've got a lot of momentum with that product, but we haven't actually disclosed the breakdown, so I'm gonna refrain from sharing the metrics there. But we did see positive momentum through contacts. I would highlight there that that is quite an MVP product at the moment. It's doing single digit millions of sort of transactions through that platform annually. So I think it's a really exciting opportunity.
But we did find that during FY 2024, we really benefited from focusing on just one problem. And the problem that we focused on in FY 2024 was to get reliability up and cancellations down, and I think that had a profound effect on how efficient our sales funnel was. There is another problem to be solved, which is this repeat booking rate, which I think contacts can address. But we are staying very laser focused this year on improving marketplace trust, and that's where you're gonna see the real outcomes happen. One thing I would note about marketplace leakage. Leakage effectively came down in FY 2024 because of the work that we did around reliability.
By charging an upfront connection fee, we're actually making sure that each of those jobs, whether they're canceled or they go through the completion, are monetized, but secondly, that also is a massive disincentive for leakage. One of the, you know, bigger incentives for it was to avoid paying fees, and we've actually structured the fees in a way which really discourages that, so I think there are multiple ways that we have to address marketplace leakage, and I think we've probably taken. We took a huge chunk out of it this year, and I think there is more opportunity to do that.
... Just touching on the question you just sort of briefly mentioned around building trust. What's the work that's gone in there? And is that related to people adding more certification details in, or what, what's the work that's been done there, and how do you think that's improving the business?
There are a couple of things that we've already rolled out this year to start improving marketplace trust, but maybe I can break it down into three things. There's trust in the Airtasker brand, there's trust between a customer booking a tasker, and there's trust in the process of how Airtasker works, and we're addressing each of those. So if you look through trust in the brand, of course, that's a lot of that is gonna be solved through marketing and building up awareness of the product.
If you look at trust between a customer booking a tasker, that is, as the question sort of alluded to, a lot about doing things like ID verification, certifications, you know, like trade licenses being verified and things like that, and we have rolled out some changes there already. For example, right now, you know, taskers actually go through like a facial recognition process, and actually have to match that to a license or a standardized piece of ID in order to get a verified ID badge. So we're doing a lot of things around ID verification and certifications. And then the third is trust in the Airtasker process.
And one of the things I think that has been very unmarketed by Airtasker so far is the power of a secure escrow payment system for all of the jobs that go through the platform. Why is that so important? What it means is that customers actually pay their money into Airtasker, and Airtasker Pay holds those funds until the job is complete. That's a huge trust driver because our customers can then know that the taskers have nothing to benefit from, you know, saying they can do a job that they can't do. And so we've found that it's an incredible improvement when it comes to trust as well.
So, just to sum that up, we're gonna invest in trust in Airtasker as a brand through marketing, trust between customers and taskers by improving ID and verifications, and then trust in Airtasker as a process by investment into awareness of our payment system and other features like that.
Now, I don't want you to look too far ahead, so this is definitely not a projection or a forecast, but the question is: When do you expect the U.K. revenue to be as big as revenue from Australia, given the size of the U.K. market?
I love this question because I'd say faster, better. Look, I think that, you know, if you look at Airtasker's marketplace growth in Australia, once we had sort of, like, kicked off that media partnership strategy, it was about a five-year process to get to a AUD 100 million in GMV, and, you know, we have a 20% take rate on that, so call that twenty million. If you looked at the UK market, I think it is a much bigger market, and so that opportunity can sort of be upscaled by that. But I think, you know, that five years to get to an AUD 100 million of GMV is a good benchmark which we can build off.
Just in relation to the U.S. market, is growth slower than you hoped, and is there a reason for that?
Oh, yeah. I mean, if we look at marketing investment into the U.S. during FY 2024, we intentionally dialed it down massively. Cost of capital very, very high in the current market. Very important for us to be prioritizing what bets we're gonna make. In the U.K., we are turbocharging any cash investment we make with this media partnership with Channel 4. Like, every dollar we put in, we're effectively getting 20% more bang for the buck on that through that partnership. We focused our capital into the U.K. market. We massively decreased our investment into the U.S. market, and we continued to see solid momentum in that marketplace.
But, I think the important thing is, we are exploring media partnerships in the US market. Watch this space, and we are. Once we do that, we're gonna have that same turbocharge effect in the US market, and I think that's when we'll put the foot down.
There's a question here in regards to potential transaction leakage. How do you circumvent the risk of work being done direct with seller and the tasker, if you like, to avoid fees?
I think there are two types of leakage that are worthwhile sort of calling out. There's leakage where a job is sort of posted to our platform or booked on our platform, and then it leaks when it's taken off. There are other types that, of, transactions that people sort of call leakage, which are, you know, I've already met somebody on Airtasker, and I want to use them again in a week's time, a month's time, a year's time. If we go to the first type of leakage, which is it actually came onto our platform, we generated value by connecting you with a user, and then it leaks off, that's not cool, and we're actually stamping that out hard. We've done that through a lot of changes to our monetization scheme or our payment scheme.
But we're also doing it by investing heavily into AI recognition of, for example, imagery, which shows phone numbers and, you know, all of these kind of things. We do that not just for a business reason, it's also really a better customer experience when things go through the Airtasker platform. The second kind of inverted commas leakage is, I met someone on Airtasker, I'd use them again later. And in that example, I think it's very much about Airtasker building a value proposition which makes customers and taskers want to do that. And that's why I don't really call that leakage. It would be kind of like saying, if you went to a cafe, you bought a coffee, and then you decided you liked coffee, and you went to another cafe to buy a coffee, you know, oh, that's leakage.
No, I wouldn't call that leakage. I would say it's on that cafe to demonstrate, well, you got to come to my cafe, because we make great coffee. I think a similar thing for Airtasker. Contacts, I think, has been a really, really great first step in doing that because we've said, you know, the value proposition is clearly different for that second transaction. We can't charge you high fees for that. It doesn't make sense to, because you've already been connected with that user. We know that customers and taskers are never gonna pay us this huge fee for the value proposition that we offer through that.
But we do believe that it makes sense to put your transactions back to Airtasker for the safety it creates for the payment security that you get and for the incredible insurance coverage that you get from it, which makes it a safer transaction. And so I think, you know, you have to adjust it. You have to understand your customers and build a product and a value prop and a pricing scheme which makes sense for that.
Quite a long question, so I'm just gonna read it verbatim. Monetization rate in Aus- on the Australian platform sits around 20%. Clearly, some heavy lifting done in full year 2024 in terms of optimizing the platform. Should we think of this as the peak monetization rate for mature Airtasker marketplace, or would you expect the UK platform to head towards another percent in the next couple of years, or is that a bit early to call?
I think that, the monetization rate improvement, during FY 2024, it's quite important to actually make this distinction, 'cause it's not necessarily obvious. We actually improved the monetization rate, not by increasing our prices. Like, we didn't say, "Hey, taskers, it costs more to use Airtasker now," or, "Customers, it costs more to use Airtasker now." What we actually did is we just increased the number of tasks that go from GMV, you know, a booked task, that actually got through successfully to being a completed task, and the way that we did that is by reducing cancellations, increasing reliability, getting tasks all the way through to the happy path and focusing on that.
And so in that regard, I do think that you will see, over time, as the network effect builds in the U.K. and the U.S., you will see a convergence to that type of number. I would also say that. You know, if you look at the competitive landscape, you know, peers like TaskRabbit in the U.S. and the U.K. are charging fees upwards of 35%, going through the marketplace, and Airtasker's current monetization rate around 20% leaves a hell of a lot of headroom in that space, while still driving incredible value for our customers. Like, right now, our customers are like, "This is cheap." Now, I think that when you have a commission model, of course, everyone would love zero commission.
Everybody would love that model, but relative to the value that is created, I think it represents an incredibly powerful and good value proposition for both taskers and customers, and so I think there is room to move upwards over time.
Management seem to be very confident and excited about the future growth. Have you contemplated, or will you contemplate a share buyback to show confidence and encourage better reflection of value versus share price?
You want to take that one, Mahendra?
Sure. I think, you know, in the current stage, our focus really is on growing and scaling the business globally, for all shareholders and benefit all shareholders. I think in terms of best use of our capital in what is, I guess, a capital tight and capital expensive market at the moment, we feel we just get the best return for all shareholders by investing or continuing to invest in the UK and the US, rather than using that money to repurchase stock from current shareholders.
Final question here for you, Tim. What's the key things that investors should be focusing on over the next three or so months? You sort of alluded to, particularly in the US market, watch out for things like media partnerships. Are they the things that investors should be focusing on?
Well, first of all, I think, things to keep an eye out for. As Mahendra mentioned, our plan for FY 2025 is to absolutely be full year free cash flow positive. But you will notice that in the first quarter of next year, or generally in Q1 and Q4, those are cash flow negative quarters, and Q2 and Q3 are cash flow positive quarters. So I just want to call that out, like, really, really explicitly, that, you know, Q1 is typically, you know, a cash investment quarter.
In terms of growth and what we're looking to deliver on, I think really double digit growth in the Australian market, driven by predominantly an improvement in brand awareness and scaling on top of the brand awareness in the Australian market, so we've got, in predominantly the second quarter of this year, heading into Christmas, really nail the execution of our brand campaigns with oOh!media and ARN, and then I think in terms of the international strategy, we've got an incredible playbook, and so I think it is gonna be about media partnerships and, you know, to keep an eye out for the progress that we're making there.
On that note, I will conclude the Q&A session. We got through a fair bit, got through all the questions in front of us. So, thank you to Tim and Mahendra for your presentation and for participating and answering the questions during the Q&A session. Thanks to each of you watching online, and on behalf of Airtasker, thanks for your time today. Thanks, gents. Thanks, everybody.
Thanks, Mahendra.