Welcome, everyone, to today's webinar for Airtasker, Australia's leading online marketplace for local services. Sorry, my screen played up a bit there. Airtasker is pleased to invite you to attend this webinar where we will be going through the half-year 2025 results. Shortly, I will be introducing Airtasker CEO Tim Fung and CFO Mahendra Tharmarajah, who will provide a detailed presentation on the company's half-year results. At the completion of the presentation, Tim and Mahendra will then participate in a live Q&A session. Feel free to submit your questions using the Q&A function on the screen throughout the webinar. I'll be collating these and putting those to Mahendra and Tim during the Q&A session. Thank you for joining us. Without further ado, let's get started. Please join me in welcoming Tim and Mahendra, who will now run you through the formal presentation.
Thank you, David. Thanks, everyone, for joining us today. I'm Tim. I'm the co-founder and the CEO here at Airtasker .
I'm Mahendra. I'm the CFO at Airtasker . Good morning.
Okay, let's jump into things. We'll move past the fine print disclaimer quickly and just talk a little bit about Airtasker . Airtasker is building the world's most trusted marketplace to buy and sell local services. If we just move to the next slide, it would be great. Airtasker is building the world's most trusted marketplace to buy and sell local services. In very simple terms, we connect people who need work done with people who want to work, sort of the world's most simple business model. On the next slide, our mission at Airtasker is to empower people to realize the full value of their skills.
I think something that's really important in the age where a lot of jobs are being automated and moving to artificial intelligence and autonomous driving and things like that, Airtasker is all about creating jobs for humans and allowing humans to be able to monetize their skills to be able to earn income. Really pleased to say that we've passed a new milestone of putting over AUD 650 million into the pockets of Australian workers. That's after we've created a business, generated revenue. This is the money going into the pockets of our taskers for all time. A really great milestone to pass. On the next slide, Airtasker is building out a marketplace for local services. We've built Australia's number one marketplace for local services.
We are doing things in a slightly different way to some of the other folks that have gone about building a business in this space. The first is that we have built Airtasker as an open community. That means that anyone can be a customer, anyone can be a tasker. What Airtasker enables is that transparency and accountability between the buyer and the seller of services. That is a really great thing in terms of reducing friction and allowing more jobs to be created. It is also a really great business model. It is very light touch. This helps us generate gross margins of about 95%. The second thing that makes Airtasker very unique is that we are infinitely horizontal. This has two really important consequences.
The first is that we can help address services that don't fit into those traditional cookie-cutter categories, which a lot of other marketplaces in services have assumed people need. We're allowing people to do all those things that don't fit into those categories. The second thing is as great as a way to be able to build awareness for Airtasker because people always hear about Airtasker and all the crazy jobs that we can help people with. They're inspired by that. That drives up our earned media. That drives down our cost of acquisition in marketing. That is what makes us a very efficient and ultimately a very cash flow generative business. On the next slide, competition is really interesting.
If you were to segment the market in a couple of ways, first of all, it's important to sort of differentiate those that are in remote work versus those who are in local services. In remote outsourcing, you've got companies like Fiverr and Upwork and Freelancer. Those companies have a similar business model, but a completely different market. They're traditionally having customers in developed countries and outsourcing that to workers in lower labor cost countries. They have a similar business model to Airtasker, but a completely different market. The second way then, if you look into local services, the second way to segment the market is to differentiate between those in advertising businesses and those who are in e-commerce.
If you look at advertising, there are companies like hipages in Australia, or there's Thumbtack, Angi's, and Checkatrade in the U.S. and the U.K. that don't operate in Australia. These businesses are typically characterized by making the seller of the services the primary paying customer. That is very different to Airtasker. We're very customer-centric. We're very much the person who's buying the services is the person that generates revenue for us. They're the paying customer. Our business model is very customer-centric. In this space, really, there's only two main players: Airtasker and TaskRabbit. TaskRabbit operates in the U.S. and the U.K., not in Australia. We have quite a different business model, though, which is that TaskRabbit is a very curated agency-type model where they will essentially charge workers to join the platform. They'll make the decisions about who gets what job.
Whereas Airtasker is very much your community model. Anyone can join. It's completely democratized. We're not in control of who gets the work. The customer chooses. If we move to the next slide, we're well positioned from a competitive landscape. Importantly, we've also got a revenue and a business model which tightly aligns us with our customers too. It's a really simple business. It's free to post a task and receive offers. It's free for workers to be able to access all the jobs and create quotes to do jobs. We only charge a fee when a job is successfully completed. If you look at those charts on the right-hand side there, the GMV is all the money that we collect in terms of booked tasks.
After you've decided which task you want to use, that money is the amount that's going into our escrow platform. From that, we charge about 20.7% as our cut of that GMV that we charge as revenue. On that revenue, we have about a 95% gross profit. We pay a little under 1% out to insurance premiums. We pay a little over 3% out in terms of credit card merchant fees for transacting those payments. We end up with about 95% for each job that goes through. If you kind of take the average job value in Australia, which hovers between AUD 240-AUD 250, we're making about 20.7% on that, which is in the range of AUD 45-AUD 50 per job. We have about a 95% gross margin on that.
A really, really scalable business model with a strong average basket value. That's a little bit about Airtasker . I'll be back after Mahendra presents our results to talk about the growth strategy for the future. In the meantime, over to you, Mahendra, to give a recap of the first half.
Great. Thanks, Tim. Good moves to look forward a couple of slides, David. Next slide, please. Okay, I might start with, I guess, looking at what we said we would do at the start of FY 2025. We set a couple of objectives for the full year. The first one was that we were going to operate within our cash envelope and be at least break even or FCF positive over the full year. We're pleased that we're on track to achieve that. We had an FCF result of just over AUD 500,000 for the first half, which also helps us fund, that's after funding U.K. and U.S. expansion, the cash component of the U.K. and U.S. expansion. The second objective was on our Airtasker marketplaces to achieve double-digit revenue growth. We've achieved just under 15%, 14.8% for the first half.
We are pretty confident of maintaining that trajectory into the second half of the year. The third item was really to leverage the media partnerships that we closed in the back half of 2024 and then the early part of 2025. We obviously implemented or completed a number of transactions in Australia, the U.S., and the U.K., follow-on media in the U.K., which allowed us to have media inventory of about AUD 51 million at roughly the start of FY 2025. Move to the next slide, David. Breaking that down, how does that look? Group revenue was up about 10% on the previous half, on the corresponding half, AUD 25.7 million. As I mentioned, Airtasker marketplace was sitting just under AUD 22 million at 14.8% up. The positive cash flow, which was a significant turnaround.
In the prior period, the statutory cash flow was impacted by the fact that from an accounting perspective, we treated term deposit investments as cash outflows in the first half and then cash inflows in the second half. On a full-year basis, they netted nil. It does present a different picture. You can see it in the chart. They are going out in 1H 2024 and coming back in in 2H 2024. Operating cash flow has been consistently positive for the last couple of halves. You can see three consecutive halves of positive operating cash flow. We finished, obviously, just on AUD 2 million, which was about a 36% turnaround on the previous year. Really pleased.
I think that's the core of the business in terms of if you can get that positive operating cash flow going, then it drops through into your FCF number. Move to the next slide, please, David. One of the things we wanted to talk about was our non-statutory operating segment result and group EBITDA working backwards. If I start with the Australian marketplace, we look at our Australian marketplace as being cash generative and EBITDA positive. We had about AUD 14 million of EBITDA out of the Australian, I guess, operational business. That went down a little bit, about just under AUD 2 million on the prior period. That was principally because we invested significantly more dollars into marketing. There's about AUD 3.5 million increase in marketing in the year, including about AUD 2.5 million relating to our non-cash marketing from our media partners.
All this is going into above-the-line brand marketing. The next two items are really our fixed head office operating expenditure innovation investments. They tend to move between those categories depending on what projects are happening in the business over the course of a year. Sometimes our projects can be capitalizable, and they'll be capitalized on the balance sheet because they relate to the core platform. Other times, they're more maintenance-oriented or of that nature, and so there might be operating expenditure. Other times, they fall in between capitalizable and OpEx, and they're more classified as innovation. That sort of explains those two numbers. Basically, our Australian business covers those costs. We finish with an Australian net EBITDA of AUD 4.1 million. After that, we get into our new marketplaces, principally the U.K. and the U.S.
We can see we were at a negative EBITDA of about AUD 14 million. That was up about AUD 8.9 million on the prior half. That was really driven by the fact that we invested about AUD 8.8 million into marketing in the course of the first half. That comprised largely non-cash marketing from our media partners in above-the-line brand marketing. The final item was really the treatment of how we account for, so this is a statutory accounting for our share purchase liability. Obviously, we structured these media partnerships where we're receiving the media capital upfront from our media partners. We have an obligation in four to seven years' time to either repay the convertible notes or convert them to equity and then subsequently to repurchase the equity we've issued currently or in subsequent periods.
There's a mark-to-market calculation that occurs at each reporting period. What happens is at the start of the transaction, we book the face value of those commitments. Then there's a mark-to-market associated with the fact that the final purchase price is tied to the revenue forecast for that subsidiary and the group market cap multiple. Obviously, in the last half year, we've had a couple of some movement on our group market caps. That's been up about 16% from the start of the fiscal year to the end of the first half. At the same time, all those obligations are denominated in foreign currency, so sterling and U.S. dollars. There's been about a 5%-8% movement on those currencies over the course of the year relative to the Australian dollar.
We have had to recognize an unrealized foreign currency loss. We see those as, I guess, they're non-cash unrealized transactions. There will be some movement on those numbers depending on what happens with foreign currency translation rates and what happens with our group market cap multiple. We are focused on really the core business, which is the Australian marketplace generating AUD 14 million and then investing a significant amount of marketing dollars in the new marketplaces to scale those markets. Keep in mind that we own 80% of those new marketplaces. While we might be recognizing an increasing repurchase obligation, we are also gaining the balance value of those assets. Next slide, please, David. If we turn to the Airtasker marketplace, as I said, 14.8% revenue growth. GMV was up a little bit less, about 9%.
We hit a record AUD 105 million in GMV over the course of the half year. We've obviously been investing in brand marketing across all our marketplaces, as I mentioned. If we turn to the Australian marketplace, really good results. We've had not a lot of marketing dollars invested in Australia over the last few years. We've certainly increased that in the current half. You can see that we've gotten into low double-digit growth, 11.5% in the Australian marketplace. That's on a good trajectory. Our GMV is also up just under AUD 100 million. Pleasingly, our monetization rate continues to improve through the funnel optimization work we've been doing, plus our yield management activities. We also launched brand marketing through oOh!media and ARN in the half year.
They've certainly helped us improve our unaided brand awareness by just about 7% from where we started the half year. Next slide, please, David. If we turn to the U.K. and the U.S., they're both on a good trajectory. The U.K. was just on 100% improvement in revenue or growth in revenue on the previous corresponding period. GMV was up about 65%. That translates into about an AUD 13 million annualized run rate. I think Tim will talk a bit more about that further on. We obviously secured a follow-on investment from our partner, Channel 4. We completed a media partnership with Channel 4 in June 2023, which provided us about AUD 6.5 million. We completed another transaction in November 2024 for about AUD 7.8 million.
That was really good validation from that partner that in 18 months later, they were prepared to invest further dollars, about the same amount as they did the first time in the business. They were pleased on the trajectory that's taken. We're obviously now in London as well as Birmingham and Manchester. We're feeling pretty confident as we go into the peak spring and summer seasons in the northern hemisphere. Turning to the U.S., obviously a very, very small market still, very early stage. Revenue growth just under 200% on the corresponding period. We've completed the deals with TelevisaUnivision and iHeartMedia in August, and then Sinclair and Mercurius in November. We had about AUD 33 million worth of media capital from them. We started with Televisa and iHeart in September. We'll move into utilizing the media distribution from Sinclair and Mercurius in the second half.
We also were in L.A. at the start of the period. We're going to be expanding into further cities in the second half of the year, again as we go into the peak season in the northern hemisphere. Next slide, please, David. Looking at where we are at the halfway point of FY 2025, we're on track to deliver full-year free cash flow. We're on track to deliver Airtasker marketplace double-digit revenue growth, currently sitting at 14.8%. The Airtasker Australia business continues to generate enough cash to fund the cash component of our U.K. and U.S. expansion. We're accelerating the growth trajectory in those new markets with the combination of cash investment as well as non-cash media marketing, 100% growth in the U.K. and just under 200% growth in the U.S.
We're starting the second half with AUD 18.3 million of cash on the balance sheet and about AUD 45 million of unspent media capital from our media partners. I'll hand back to Tim.
All right. Thanks, Mahendra. Great update on the first half. Yeah, really pleased to see that we have been able to continue to really scale the business into new markets while at the same time maintaining our group cash flow positive. Really disciplined investment and smart use of our capital. If we move forward one or two slides. By the way, we're skipping over these lovely pictures of Airtasker taskis. You will probably start to see in a lot of our marketing campaigns these great characters like Tara the Pot.
These are really the folks that are going to hero all of the categories on Airtasker and be there together with our Taskers. From a marketing point of view, I think it's a great brand asset. It's also a really smart brand asset because what it allows us to do is extend all of our content and be able to make a lot of imagery and video at a very low and efficient cost. That's a big part of why we're using animation throughout our marketing. If we do move to the actual crux of the growth strategy, I would say at the highest level, our strategy is to invest into Airtasker's brand and core platform and make sure that we maintain the market leadership position that we've built out in Australia and use that to drive profitable growth.
In our Australian market, being very disciplined with how we invest into the platform and the brand, we are able to increasingly drive more free cash flow out of our Australian business and use that investment to expand into that third pillar, which is our U.S. and U.K. market expansion. In order to do that, we're taking the learnings that we took from Australia around media partnerships, combining that with our cash to really turbocharge that investment into the U.S. and the U.K. On the next slide, I can talk a little bit about each of those pillars. First of all, in terms of investing into our core platform, we have made some great investments into Airtasker's brand alongside our Australian media partners, oOh!media and ARN.
You can see up here some of the great integrations that we're doing together with Talent, as well as just straight advertising. We're doing a combination of both earned and paid media in collaboration with these partners. Over the period, we've been able to already start to see some great results from those market investments that we've made. We've seen unaided brand awareness during the last quarter increase by about 10.5%. We're seeing consideration increase by about 28%. Making that upfront investment in brand, you've got to look at those leading indicators. Those leading indicators are really telling us we're making the right moves to invest into the long term of our brand. I think that is very, very important in this age whereby Google is increasing their acquisition costs by about 60% CAGR over the last three years.
If you're dependent on Google and you're dependent on these paid advertising platforms, that's not a good place to be. Where Airtasker is really invested into is our brand. It's sort of less reliant on those channels. The second thing we've done to invest into the core of Airtasker's platform is double down into building out marketplace trust. What we're really doing is making sure that from a conversion perspective, customers who post a task are more and more likely to be able to find a task that they can trust and be able to assign that task. That's what generates revenue for us. We're also making sure that the customer experience of Airtasker is enhanced as we do that.
Some of the things that we've done there, for example, in June the last quarter, we rolled out ID verification across all users. Now our taskers are ID verified. We also capture legislative reporting or tax information on our task. That also helps to drive trust and increase the quality of our tasker base. We also rolled out, for example, Airtasker Top Offer product, which allows customers to be able to see what are the offers and how are they stack ranked and providing guidance to our customers as to which tasker is going to be the best for them. Stepping into that space of helping customers understand who they can trust throughout the marketplace. All of these features we feel are really combining together to increase trust and ultimately increase customer confidence to be able to buy services on Airtasker.
If we move to the next slide, we've also started to look into AI and how artificial intelligence could really help Airtasker. There are two main areas which we think are very, very interesting. One is to improve the customer experience of Airtasker. When you think about posting a task, we can really use these generative and LLM models to be able to help customers explain and articulate what they need, make that easier for them. That is going to help make that funnel even more slick. That is going to result in more posted tasks. Really excited about how AI can help us take a loose customer need and turn it into a very definitive and useful task in our marketplace. The second area is operational productivity. Lots of opportunities.
We're already starting in our business to invest in AI in customer service, in AI for model and task categorization. That's happening by the by, not the least of which is using Copilot to make our engineering and product teams a lot faster. On the right-hand side, we've actually got quite an exciting announcement to share today, which is that Airtasker has been collaborating with OpenAI, which is ultimately the industry leader in artificial intelligence. We are an official partner in rolling out OpenAI's Operator product in Australia. What is Operator? It's really, really interesting. Basically, it allows you to speak with an AI agent who will go to Airtasker and help book you a task.
This is really, really exciting because we are looking at ways that AI can help customers make it even easier for them to make bookings on Airtasker. This is sort of like the ultimate opportunity to experiment with how that could work in the real world. If you actually are an OpenAI Pro subscriber and you go in and look into how you can use Operator to book local services, you'll see Airtasker's prompts in there. Really excited to see both how this can help us drive distribution. As Google Search and traditional search starts to decline and artificial intelligence search starts to increase, it's a great opportunity to explore that distribution. It's also a great opportunity to learn from how customers are engaging with Operator to learn how we can build those features into Airtasker.
Ultimately, Airtasker is really, really well positioned because our business is built on a real-world network of real-world people. As much as AI is likely to disrupt and most likely undercut a lot of these sort of advertising businesses, Airtasker's moat is a real physical network of real people. That's probably going to be some of the last stuff to be automated out. On to the next slide. As we mentioned, we are investing heavily into our core platform. We're going to keep doing that in a very disciplined way while staying cash flow generative. In Australia, if you look into FY 2024, we roughly generated about AUD 45 million of rev in Australia, had about AUD 14 million of direct costs to power the Australian market, and generated cash flow of about AUD 31 million whilst growing revenues at the same time.
We know how to build a very cash-generative marketplace. Australia is sort of the prime example of us being able to do that. If we go to the next page then, what we're doing, if you look at that left-hand column there, we've generated AUD 31 million in green. Airtasker had about AUD 18 million of fixed operating expenditure or fixed investment in FY 2024. The AUD 31 million generated in Australia covers all of those fixed costs and leaves us with around about AUD 13 million of free cash after covering all of those fixed costs. We're taking that AUD 13 million and investing that into the U.K. and the U.S., leveraging that platform and those fixed costs that we've already covered. As Mahendra mentioned early on, we did about AUD 50 million of these media deals in 2024.
What that does is it takes that AUD 13 million of cash and really allows us to get massive leverage on that to grow the marketplaces in the U.S. and the U.K. The deals that we've done with these media partners, it's a massive win-win. It's also really powerful for Airtasker , because we only pay for performance in these deals. The more revenue we generate in these marketplaces, the more we have to pay. Of course, the more value that we've created because we're generating a lot more revenue. The second thing is we've really ring-fenced the downside. These media partners are investors into Airtasker U.K. and Airtasker U.S.A. We're talking about being able to scale incremental value in our business and not risking or betting the house on these new marketplaces.
We're not betting what we've built in Australia to do this very much incremental. If we look on to the next page and how those media deals are actually structured, we have a combination of different instruments that we've used, but ultimately, they all come down to the fact that at the end of the investment period, which is between four to seven years from today, we buy back the equity that any of these media partners hold in Airtasker U.S. or Airtasker U.K. The way that we're valuing that equity is to take how much revenue is being generated in those marketplaces multiplied by whatever our group revenue multiple is. Hopefully, we're trading at a good revenue multiple of 6x-10x revenue or something like that. Airtasker U.S.A. is generating in the range of, say, AUD 50 million.
We would pay AUD 50 million times by a 6x-10 x revenue multiple to value Airtasker U.S.A. Of course, we own 80% of that business, and our media partner owns in the range of 20% of that business. It really is paid for performance. The more revenue these media partners help us generate in these entities, the more we're going to pay for them. It is a very, very win-win situation for those. What is also great is a really good deal for the media partners. They're loving this model because Airtasker has proven that this broadcast media works in the Australian market. They really love the fact that there's minimal fixed costs. Every dollar that we're generating in these markets is going back into growing that marketplace. All of the software is paid for.
All the fixed costs are already covered by Australian business, and it's all upside. The third thing is, as much as it is a right for us to buy back this equity at the end of the investment period, it's also a guaranteed exit from their point of view. It is really a win-win all around. I'm really excited about when you see the magic happen between two partners really being able to help each other. That is something that we've really achieved with these media deals. On the next slide, as mentioned, in 2024, we completed over $50 million in global media partnerships across Australia, the U.S., and the U.K. I'm really excited about how we deploy that war chest of media to grow both in Australia and the U.S. and the U.K.
What we really thought about is, if we have this media at scale, how do we make the most of every time we're talking to the customer, every time we're reaching a new person, how do we make the most of that media and take Airtasker's brand to the next level? If we look back, we started speaking to a few celebrities in the U.S. and the U.K. We're like, "Oh, if you look at what Ryan Reynolds has done with Mint Mobile in the U.S., maybe we could use a celebrity to be a spokesperson for Airtasker." We start exploring this opportunity. During that period, we actually get pitched, "Hey, what about Formula One? Have you guys looked into sponsoring a Formula One team? It's a huge investment.
A billion people a year watch the Formula One, and it's growing so aggressively in the U.S. market. It's absolutely nuts. You guys should get onto that train." We initially were hesitant with that. We're like, "Oh, Airtasker is not really about the glitz and the glamour. We're not so much about Ferrari and Rolex. We're about honest people doing a hard day's work and making money from their skills." We sort of set that to one side. Looking at what happens in Formula One, we started looking at all the people who are doing the jobs behind the scenes in Formula One, the person who's in the pit stop or the person who's assembling the garage or disassembling and moving the garage to the next country or the person who's cleaning out the garage and the car.
We started looking at it and going, "Man, that really is what Airtasker is all about. That's people doing incredible jobs with unique skills, but really putting their effort into doing that at the highest level." Speaking to the Red Bull team, they were really excited about this too. They're like, "We're not monetizing this asset. There are 1,500 people in the Red Bull Racing teams. People only know the top two, the drivers in the team, how could we tell that story?" It was really a collaborative partnership where we said, "We can do this together.
We could tell the stories about all the team behind the dream of Formula One. If you go on to the next page, we announced last week that we're going to be working with the Visa Cash App Racing Bulls Formula One team and doing a unique world-first global partnership where we focus on the people behind the scenes in the team as opposed to just the drivers and just the car. If we move to the next slide, this is a really, really exciting opportunity to leverage all of that media value that we have to make compelling content, which is exciting for our customers and our users. First of all, we drive through this partnership a global brand cachet. If you open up the Airtasker app right now, you'll see the VCARB official team partnership throughout.
That really helps people to trust the Airtasker brand and want to give us a go across Australia, the U.S., and the U.K. The second thing we get from this partnership is extensive content opportunities. Across the team, we've got access to drivers, to the racers, and to the factory to create content and be able to talk to our audience to drive brand salience for Airtasker. The third thing is it's highly efficient. This partnership costs less than 5% of our annualized marketing budget. It's a really, really efficient partnership because we're focusing on the people that are not typically the ones that are put in front of the audiences. You can see on this screen here, Danny, Edward, and Renzo, the EA, the garage ops, and the rear jackman for the car. They're the people that we're celebrating.
I think it's a very, very efficient partnership. To put into perspective how big Formula One is now, about 1.2 billion people watch Formula One per year now. I think a lot of that is due to Netflix's Drive to Survive series, which famously has had about 390 million people watching. Formula One is really, really taking off. About 144% year-on-year growth in young viewers. Really excited about this partnership. We announced it last week. The buzz that's already happening around this is really, really great to see. Thank you very much. We can move to the next slide. Thank you very much for your time today. We provide a lot of information about our results in the next years after this presentation, but we won't go through those there. They're there for transparency.
Yeah, I think we've done a great job in this first half. Really excited about the results and continuing that momentum into the second half. Thank you very much.
Thanks, James. Great presentation. Very, very detailed, which is good, which is what investors like to see. Like I said at the beginning, we'll now move into the Q&A. If anyone does have any questions, submit them using the Q&A button on the screen, and I'll put them to Mahendra and Tim. We'll jump straight into it. We do have a few questions already. You had a very large group EBITDA loss this year. Can you explain it?
Sure. Mahendra, do you want to take that one?
Yeah. As I mentioned earlier, at the start of last year, when we implemented these media partnerships, we obviously knew we had an obligation at some point down the track to repay those partners by buying back their equity or repaying their notes. There is an accounting treatment that goes with that. We need to recognize that value or that obligation, that future obligation. We generally recognize that at the face value of the media value we're getting at that point in time. There's then essentially a mark-to-market obligation that occurs at each half year. We revalue that obligation. If you revalue the obligation and the obligation's going up, then that has to be recognized as a P&L expense. At the moment, it's an unrealized expense.
It could swing the other way depending on what happens with our revenue forecast or what happens with our market group market cap multiple, which are the two main drivers of that valuation. The final component is really what happens with FX. Obviously, we're transacting in two very strong currencies, in the U.S. dollar and sterling relative to Australia. We've obviously had some adverse movements over the last half year, and that's impacted that. I think it'll swing back and forth, I think, over the course of the next couple of years where the first of those international partnerships is not due to be settled until June 28th . We've got still a number of years to go.
Time will tell how we will end up settling those, whether we end up paying for those, the repurchase of that script in the U.K. business and in the U.S. business with cash, or we end up repurchasing it by issuing script in the parent entity. A lot of things will depend on which option we select.
I think it's also worthwhile just adding to that. The share purchase liability that Mahendra spoke about is dependent upon the Airtasker share price revenue multiple and the estimate of the local revenue that's being generated. As our forecast of revenue goes up and Airtasker share price goes up, that liability will also go up on paper. I think we can all agree, if the revenue's going well in the U.S. and the U.K. and our group share price is going up, that's a good thing.
Unintuitively, I think those two things are actually linked.
In terms of your marketing spend this year, what proportion was cash and non-cash from media partners?
Yeah, I can take that again. We had a pretty significant uplift in marketing spend across the group. Total marketing spend was about AUD 18.2 million across the whole group. In Australia, Airtasker eStray , the international Airtasker marketplace, as well as the Oneflare business, about AUD 10.9 million was in the form of non-cash through our media partners, and the balance, AUD 7.3 million or so in cash.
Probably a question for Tim. You touched on in your presentation above-the-line brand marketing strategy. Can you explain probably in a bit more detail what that means?
Sure. I think there are probably two main ways you can sort of generate customer engagement and drive revenue.
One would be an investment into paid performance marketing, which is a little bit like things like Google Ads, where you pay AUD 5 per user that comes to your website, and hopefully, you can make AUD 6 on that, and that's going to arbitrage you a dollar. Really great in terms of incrementality and predictability and being able to look at the data on that. The big downside of that kind of marketing is that you get hooked onto it, and you can never actually get leverage because you're always paying AUD 5 to generate AUD 6. That's typically where a lot of e-commerce products companies find themselves, which is they're beholden to the Googles and the Metas and the TikToks to generate revenue. The other kind of marketing is the above-the-line brand investment marketing, which would be things like broadcast television, which would be the outdoor and audio marketing.
That is really about investing into the brand so that people come to Airtasker directly when they need it, and you're bypassing and reducing your dependency on things like Google Ads and Meta Ads. The upside of that is that you are building a long-term asset that's going to continue to generate new customers for you over a long period of time. The downside of that is you do have to invest upfront into doing that. That is why what you'll see and we look at about a three-year payback period on that kind of above-the-line marketing. The important thing there is that you've got to look not at just the revenue in that period, but you want to look at the leading indicators of what's going to generate your revenue over a long period of time.
The most important indicators for us are unaided brand awareness, which increased about 10.5% during the period. It is working. That is good. People are aware of Airtasker . They're thinking of Airtasker when they need something done. Also, consideration, which is once you're thinking about Airtasker , would you actually consider using Airtasker ? That increased by 28% during the period. The leading indicators are working. It is an upfront investment, but it is also a very long-term and robust return that you get from that investment. Now, just looking at the F1 deal sort of towards the end of the presentation, is there any cost or investment from Airtasker for this deal? Yeah, there is a sponsorship transaction fee. As we mentioned there, it's really a very efficient marketing investment. It's less than 5% of our projected full-year marketing investment.
We're under confidentiality, and we don't disclose the very specifics of that. I think a very disciplined and highly efficient marketing investment.
In terms of the top offer point that you raised in your presentation, is that based on just the price or price plus rating plus completion rate? What drives the top offer element?
Yeah, we've got a very sophisticated algorithm which combines a number of those vectors that were mentioned. Experience, pricing, speed of offer, all of these things go into that algorithm. We don't show the specifics of that because what we want to do is drive really good overall tasker behavior.
What we show to our tasker is, "Hey, if you make your prices competitive, if you have a really great profile, if you have really great reliability, you're going to do well." We don't disclose the specifics of those things because we don't want people to just do so well to game the algorithm. Yes, it's all of those components.
Question here on the improvement in the monetization rates in offshore marketplaces. What do you think is driving that?
Yeah, what was really cool is during this period, we didn't really change pricing. We didn't really change fees. All of these improvements in the monetization rate are really just a reflection of how slick the sales funnel for a customer has become. The more that customers get a reliable, good outcome from taskers, the more those monetization rates are going to improve.
When we, for example, implemented a cancellation policy and cancellation fee in Australia, we saw cancellations just absolutely plummet. We rolled that out to the U.S. and the U.K. and had the exact same effect. I think what that's really illustrative of is you can really invest into the platform and some of these features of the platform and get massive global leverage on them because you're investing into a piece of software which rolls out everywhere. Predominantly, it was just because we saw reliability increase, cancellations decrease, and so we're getting more happy customers and a higher monetization rate at the same time.
Question here around penetration and sort of the advertising timeline. I'm going to try and paraphrase it the best I can. Do you spend and then monitor spend and then have a penetration timeline when you think that spend will translate?
What sort of upfront advertising spend do you need to commit to then try and help you reach that penetration goal?
I think one of the big upsides of how we're expanding into the U.S. and the U.K. is all of the first thing is all of the investment is essentially variable investment where we can dial it up and dial it down, and we're not going and creating new fixed commitments. It's not like investing in real estate leases or hiring big teams of people. It's very much how much do you want to invest into the brand, at what point, and how much do you want to invest into performance marketing to back up that brand investment. I think that's the first thing to say is that it's very much a two-way door.
We can dial it up and dial it down literally on a week-to-week and month-to-month basis without taking on massive sort of long-term risk. In terms of the timing of when you invest into brand relative to scale, what we learned in Australia is it's always really uncomfortable. The quantum that you need to make a dent into brand investment is often very large relative to your current revenue. When we look back at what we did in the Australian market, we were sub AUD 1 million of revenue when we sort of started investing with Channel 7.
I remember people would always say, "Oh, geez, that's courageous, let's say, for you to invest in your brand so early." I think when you look at the data, we shared that chart, I think, on slide 14, you can really see that over five years, it's very smart to invest in your brand upfront. You do not want to be reliant on Google and Meta. Like I said, some pretty compelling data which is showing that Google is increasing their prices by about 60% each year. Companies that are dependent on that as their primary source of customer acquisition, I think, are going to find it pretty challenging.
Couple of macro questions here, so we'll do the best we can.
Just talking about operationally at the moment, particularly post to the recent rate cut here in Australia, are you seeing any uptick in jobs posted or any operational changes as a result of the rate cut that's been announced?
Look, we look at data very frequently, and I'm very big on having a very high-frequency cadence of iteration. We look at data weekly, and we make decisions very rapidly off that data. The rate cuts were sort of, I think, seven days ago. Have we seen immediate day-to-day notable impact? I would say it's positive week to week, definitely, but not like some crazy step change.
That said, if we look back at since 2022, it's certainly been a difference in the demand trajectory between an environment of increasing or very high interest rates versus the period that we saw before 2022, which were consistently low interest rates and very high consumer confidence. We are pretty encouraged that there's a high correlation to as the interest rate cycle starts coming down, that could be very, very interesting for consumer demand in local services.
Another macro question in relation to the ATO, which I don't like talking about at the best of times, but we'll jump into it anyway. ATO reporting regime, how has that been received by taskers? Does that help them with their business and therefore encourage further use of Airtasker?
I would say the legislative reporting so just to step back and explain what this is.
All platforms which are doing transacting workers through a platform were required to collect tax information so the ATO can make sure that people are staying honest to their earnings and paying their tax. First of all, the vast majority of taskers on Airtasker were doing this anyway. They're like, "Obviously." You're paying through a centralized platform into a bank account. It's not like it was cash in hand or something like that. Most taskers were used to this already. What was the impact? I would say the impact was that we have seen a migration to very high-quality taskers winning a lot of work on our platform. We have seen that a number of workers that were using VPNs and coming from overseas and things like that, non-local workers, we put a bit of friction on them.
Share is moving towards these local and high-value taskers. I would also say that it has put some friction on taskers' salaries. You can argue whether that is a good thing or a bad thing. There are two different lenses on that. Certainly, I would say the overall impact of this has actually been really, really positive and really, really aligned with our strategy to increase trust in the marketplace, which certainly made it a more trusted environment. For example, you see that all taskers who pass this ID verification and reporting regime have a blue tick next to their name now. That is the vast majority of taskers on our marketplace due to this change.
The question in relation to the Australian market, do you classify this market now as mature?
Are you therefore sort of protecting your patch rather than looking for significant growth?
I would say that it's very established. I think it's neither black nor it's white. I would say that Airtasker in Australia is definitely more established than it is in the U.S. and the U.K., where we're looking for 100% and 200% year-on-year growth and delivering on that. In the Australian market, we're doing close to 15% year-on-year growth. If we can accelerate, we believe there's an opportunity to accelerate that. The 100% and 200% volume growth is probably where we are targeting in the U.S. and the U.K. That said, I think there is a very large opportunity in Australia, which is repeat transactions between the same customer and the same tasker. We're seeing some really encouraging results in how people use Airtasker in that way.
If we can find product-market fit in that space, then game on in Australia could be a very, very large opportunity.
Couple of questions here in relation to Oneflare. I'm just going to group them together to make it easier. How is that business going? It appears that revenues from Oneflare have been steadily declining. Is there any reason for that? Are you moving sort of marketing spend more towards Airtasker to capitalize on the opportunities there?
Yeah. Oneflare, we're committed to this business, and we're maintaining robust revenue in that. It's on track to do between AUD 8 million-AUD 10 million of revenue in FY 2025. We're committed to that business. It's a great strategic asset to learn more about our customers, gather more market share in the Australian market.
It is a challenged business model, these advertising business models like hipages and Oneflare, because ultimately, we think that the right move is to be a customer-centric marketplace where the person who's paying for the services is the ultimate person that needs to be satisfied and happy in order to generate more repeat business rather than an advertising business model where it's more the seller needs to do that. We are very much committed to the Oneflare business model. I think we're maintaining resilient revenue there. We are at the same time exploring some bigger swings to try and turn this business model around. For example, exploring things like instant access. We have run a number of experiments to test whether we can have customers be able to sign up directly on the website rather than going through a telephone sales operation.
Also, some pretty big experiments in terms of pricing to make sure the value of the product is perceived to be super, super high by the users. It is correct to say that it is a challenged business model, but it is strategically valuable to Airtasker and we're committed to it.
Mahendra, probably a question for you. In terms of the full year 2024 revenue in Australia versus 2025, do you have a sort of a makeup there? I'm sort of putting you on the spot for the job.
We don't have FY 2025 yet because we haven't finished the year. I'm assuming that that's meaning to be the half year.
Yeah, it must be half year. Yeah, 2025.
Half year 2025 for Australia was just over AUD 20 million. It was about an 11.5% growth on the FY 2024 period.
Now, question in relation to probably market awareness, pretty direct question, so I'll just hit it straight off the bat. Share price hasn't moved much off the back of today's results announcement and associated presentation. Is there more work to be done to educate the investor on the value of media deals, how the media deals work, and why they're going to help the company generate the returns they're going to generate?
Yeah, ultimately, I think it's about walking the walk as much as talking the talk. So I think delivering results, clearly, that's where the ultimate focus has to be. For example, I'm here in Los Angeles and focused on delivering in the U.S. market and getting it on rails to deliver compounding growth. That said, investor education is also something that we've started to prioritize. And if Mahendra, you want to jump in with any specifics on that.
We do believe that it's important to drive education. We're working with some great partners, and I think we've made some great progress there in terms of investors starting to understand the media deals a bit more. One interesting thing on that is when people get the media deals and it's sort of like the light bulb moment happens, you generally see them switch from a little bit of skepticism to like, "Oh my God, that's epic. That's incredibly strong in terms of those media deals." Mahendra, is there anything you wanted to add in terms of what we're doing in IR?
Yeah, I think I'd add, I think we obviously see the movement on the register and the composition of the register over time.
I can certainly say that there have been a number of smaller institutional funds that have taken an interest over the course of the last six to nine months in the business and have been building up positions. That has partly accounted for at times during the course of the year a run up in the stock price as there's obviously buying activity, and then it settles back down. We do not have a lot of liquidity given that the stock is quite tightly held. The original founders and early investors still hold the lion's share of the stock. We have quite a long retail tail of investors that probably are not as active in trading and buying and selling their shares.
I think that tends to lend itself to short bursts of activity pushing the price up when people want to build a position or funds want to build a position. A number of funds have said to us they've built positions and are waiting to see kind of what the next milestone is. Then they'll reassess. I think for us as a management team, it's really about, as Tim said, walking the talk, delivering on what we say we're going to do and delivering on that. We're in it for the long haul. I think it's a long journey. The media partnerships are long-term. They're over a long horizon. I think we just need to keep doing what we're doing.
Another macro question, more related to the U.S.
Does the Trump presidency and his focus on various communities or groups within the U.S. have any impact on the Airtasker business?
I don't think so. It's important to say that I think there's sort of like an old worldview that the Hispanic community in the United States is there's a stereotypical sort of view that can be taken on that. If you actually look at the growth of the second generation, third generation Hispanic community now, we've got the fastest growing cohort of college-educated, wealthy Hispanic community. I think the stereotype of the Hispanics doing all of the work for the other people is probably not quite the real world picture. I think overall, yeah, we're probably staying out of U.S. politics.
Last couple of questions. You have given a fair amount of time and you've got through a lot of questions.
There's a question here, and it was, "Sorry if I missed this, but how much of the U.K. entity does Channel 4 now own? And what valuation was the recent follow-on investment done at?"
[audio distortion] of equity. The recent transaction was structured as a condo. We did not settle on a valuation. If we complete a subsequent equity round, there will be a valuation set at that point.
That does bring us to the end of the questions. I know I'm taking up—we have gone through a lot of questions, and there are a couple coming through, but we might deal with them offline. Apologies. We have kept Tim sort of here for an extended amount of time, and I appreciate the time both of you have given, not just to the presentation, but answering all the questions that have come through.
To Tim and Mahendra, thanks for presenting today and participating in the Q&A session. For each of you, thanks for watching and for giving us a whole pile of questions as well. The webinar itself will be recorded, so that copy will be sent out to each of you in the coming days and will be made available to shareholders. Thank you, everybody, for your time today. Thank you, Mahendra and Tim, and have a great day.