Everybody. Where am I? Yeah, welcome, everybody. Welcome to Airtasker's Investor Day 2025. My name's Cass O'Connor. For those who don't know, I chair the Board of Airtasker. And before we start, I'd like to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, the traditional custodians of the land on which we meet today, and pay our respects to elders past, present, and emerging. We've designed the day, and when I say we, I mean just about everybody else bar me, but thank you to Alex in particular, designed the day to be engaging, informative, and interactive. We have presentations, Q&A sessions, working opportunities with our leadership team and with members of the board and our other executives. Before we kick things off, I have a few housekeeping notes to share with you.
The really important one is that at the back near the exit man across there are the bathrooms. Second most important one, and timely it seems, is that all of your phones should be turned off or on airplane mode. Thirdly, for privacy, this session is being recorded. Your voice and/or image may be captured on these recordings. If you do not want that to happen, please let one of our people know, and that would be Alex, who puts her hand up now so that we can make sure that that does not happen. The presentation and recording of today's session will be available on both Airtasker's Investor Hub and on the ASX. Questions and answers. We have lots of time for Q&A towards the end of the session.
You'll see QR codes placed around the room, and they will also come up on the screen from time to time. Just scan the QR code and submit a question. We're going to attempt to answer every single question that we can, but we may not get to them all today. We will reply to them subsequent to this session, and we'll reply directly if we know who you are. When you're asking a question, please let us know who you are. That's about it for the admin. It's my great pleasure to introduce Airtasker's co-founder and CEO, Tim Fung, and Tim is going to go through some Wowzer slides with you and some commentary. Thanks, Tim.
Awesome. It is a really, really great turnout today and an incredible event that has been put on. I am really wowed by all of this turnout and the great event that has been put on. I just want to start with a couple of thank yous. Thank you to Greta, to Rachel, to Ben, and to Craig, who are from the Airtasker team, who have put together a lot of the brand and design around today. Thank you to Andrea, Alex, and a lot of the Airtasker team who have been working tirelessly over the last couple of weeks to bring all of this together. A bit of a round of applause. Also, what a great facility. This is at The Pillars. A little bit of a side note, this was actually co-founded by my co-founder, John O., who was part of the Airtasker journey early on.
Thanks to Bradley Delamare, John O., for having us here at The Pillars. Thanks also to the crew from Red Bull. We've got Nick Havers and Matt Burgess here from Red Bull, who have also sponsored part of the event and set up a great bar and equipment downstairs. I'm really looking forward to that. I'm going to get off the thank yous and turn into some content soon. I did want to also thank our media partners who are here today from ARN, oOh!, and iHeart. We're going to hear some great words from them later on. Lastly, I would be remiss to not say thank you to Modi, my wife, who is here. If we can all make her feel awkward by giving her a thank you as well.
Modi's been the backbone of Airtasker for - 10 years before we started the company and has been a big part of the journey as we go. She's also been more recently a critical part of driving Airtasker into the U.S., so been a really, really important part of that journey. Today is all about coming closer together with our investors, sharing more about our mission, our vision, and what we're planning to do into FY 2026 and beyond. The purpose of today is to give you an opportunity to be able to engage with the executive team at Airtasker and learn more about what we're doing. If you have any Q&A, please use this QR code to answer a question on Slido. Bitcoin care no someone to pull out the phone.
Also feel free to ChatGPT or Google Slido, and then punch in Air25, and you'll be able to answer questions there too, and we'll endeavor to get to everything that we can. We've got a great lineup of content today. I'm going to talk a little bit about Airtasker's mission and strategy. Then I'm going to pass it across to our CTO, Chaitanya and James. We're going to give a little bit more insight and color around our product and technology roadmap. We then got a great session with some of our media partners.
Taylor Collison's analyst, Matt Harper, is here today, and he's going to be taking us through our media partnership strategy and a little bit of Q&A with some of our great media partners, including David Ellis from iHeart, who's flown literally halfway around the world to come from New York here to Sydney and be here today. Thank you, David. I'll then hand the mic to Fiona, our Chief Commercial Officer, who'll take us through our brand and growth strategy before allowing a bunch of time to do our Q&A at the end of today's session. At Airtasker, we're building the world's most trusted marketplace to buy and sell local services.
This whole journey started back in 2011 when I was moving apartments, and I asked a friend of mine to come and help me move because he's got a truck that he uses to do deliveries for his food services business. That friend is actually here today. So Ivan, the proprietor of Hermans.com.au, thank you for being part of the Airtasker founding story. After we moved all of the stuff in Ivan's truck, it got us thinking. It's like, you know, why don't we ask our family and friends to do all these kind of jobs when there's so many people out there who'd want to be able to help another person in their community and be able to earn some money doing that? That's where the idea for building a trusted marketplace to enable this came from.
Airtasker's building a trusted marketplace in local services, but we're doing it with a little bit of a twist. First of all, we built Airtasker as an open community model. That means that we don't set the price of the jobs. We don't set the scope of the jobs. We create the platform where customers and taskers can come together, express themselves, and get things done. This means not only do we have a really great proposition for our customers and our taskers, we've also got a great business model. It's a very light touch and capital efficient business model, which generates really good margins too. It's not only a great experience, it's also a great business. The second thing that makes Airtasker unique is that we're infinitely horizontal. We don't just allow you to post things in certain categories.
We're really allowing customers to get anything that they need done. That proposition is very, very powerful and very unique as we go into new markets with a lot of jobs that you can get done on Airtasker you simply cannot get done anywhere else. A few years into building the Airtasker business model, we were hanging out a lot with a lot of members of our Airtasker community, and we heard some incredible stories coming from them.
I remember there was one person who said that they'd lost their job, and the only way that they were able to make enough money to stay in the country was to be able to string together a number of tasks on Airtasker and be able to make sure they could pay the rent, stay in the country, and be able to live their life in Australia that they wanted to live. I also remember a woman named Carla who told us that she hadn't been able to work for about 20 years. She'd been the victim of domestic violence, and she didn't have the confidence to go out there and find work. Through Airtasker she was able to start with just doing one job, building up that little bit of confidence and being able to get another one and another one.
Over time she was able to put together a full-time income working on the Airtasker platform. What this really led us to is a mission statement to empower people to realize the full value of their skills. We realize that every single person has unique skills, and our job is not just to help you get stuff done. It is also there to create jobs and income and purpose for people in our community. I'm really proud to say that in FY 2025, we had over 45,000 people across the world put money in their pocket through the work that Airtasker does. Airtasker has never been more relevant than it is today as we are seeing the impact of AI and autonomy across the world.
Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA, tongue in cheek, said, "It's the plumbers that are going to win the AI race." I think what's a truism in this tongue in cheek comment is that as we go into this era where a lot of jobs are disrupted with AI, autonomy, and robots, it's actually craft and trade skills that are going to become so valuable as human jobs. At Airtasker, we are really hopeful and optimistic that we can play an important role in that changing landscape due to AI and autonomy. Over the last 13 years, we've proven out the business model in Australia. If we look at just FY 2025, we did about AUD 200 million of jobs on our platform, and that generated about AUD 49 million in revenue. From that AUD 49 million in revenue, our Australian business generated about AUD 34 million in free cash flow.
Really proud of the fact that we've been able to build a business which is not only just sustainable and able to stand on its own two feet, but is able to generate a return, a really healthy return for our investors. That AUD 34 million was enough to cover all of the infrastructure and platform investment that we're making to build a truly globally scalable company. All of our investment into product, engineering, and technology roadmaps was all covered by the cash flow that we generate in our Australian business. After covering all of that, we still generated about AUD 15 million. Our Australian business model is proven. I'm really proud to say that we've passed another new milestone in Australia, which is that we've just completed our five millionth task on the Airtasker platform.
That's 5 million people who have been able to get things done in Australia and five million Australian people who have been able to put an income in their pocket through our platform. A shout out to our team for that incredible milestone. Where to from here? We're not just stopping at building a business in the Australian market. We are scaling globally, and we're going to do that in three ways. First of all, we're going to continue to invest into our core platform and to consolidate our leadership position in the Australian market. We're also going to invest into profitable growth. We're going to be generating and growing into the AUD 50 billion TAM that we have in Australia in an increasingly profitable and cash generative way.
We're going to take the business model that we've proven in the Australian market and scale it into much, much larger markets in the U.K. and the U.S. Let's just double tap a little bit into this strategy. In terms of core platform investment, we're going to hear a little bit more from Cha and James today. We're investing heavily into trust in our marketplace. As we build out more trust in our marketplace, it becomes increasingly valuable exponentially to our users. This is not only a moat in our business, it's also a way to drive increasing value from every single customer and tasker that we work with. We also believe there's a huge opportunity to increase purchase frequency on our platform.
One of the major opportunities we see is that right now, every month, we have thousands and thousands of customers come back to Airtasker returning to rebook a tasker that they have worked with and have a trusted relationship with already. We are going to be enabling that rebooking at scale, and we believe that that is a 2x-3x opportunity for our marketplace in Australia. Lastly, we are going to continue to invest into brand salience. If you look back two decades ago, it was the yellow pages that everyone remembers, this massive yellow book that used to sit in your home, and that was the thing. That was the go-to place whenever you needed something done.
Now that's going to become the blue A in Australia, and we want to be investing into going from where we are today, which is about 65% prompted brand awareness in Australia, to have increasingly be top of mind for every single Australian when they need to get anything done. We are then going to scale this into new markets. I spoke before about how Airtasker was able to generate about AUD 15.2 million in our Australian business last year. What's great about that is that continues to expand. That was up about 18% on the prior, and we're continuing to see that increasing cash flow generation happen. I think what's even more promising is that it's actually not the AUD 15 million that we can replicate into new markets.
It's actually the AUD 34 million figure, which we generate our Australian business model that we can replicate into 10 x bigger markets in the U.K. and the U.S. Really, really exciting opportunity to take Airtasker into some of these absolutely enormous cities across London, Los Angeles, New York, and this massive AUD 500 billion total addressable market in the U.K. and the U.S. A really exciting opportunity. When you actually look at what makes Airtasker a tricky business to start and scale, it's that you actually go into these countries, and on day one, you're kind of standing in an empty field trying to get people to post tasks and get that work done.
I think a really prescient analogue of this is this video, which is about a 15-year-old video that you can check out on YouTube, but it's a fascinating story about human behavior, which is to see a man dancing in a field and how you can go from one lone person dancing there by yourself and try to generate a real movement across the country. This is something that I spend a lot of my time trying to figure out. How do you get from one guy dancing in a field to an absolutely booming dance festival? How do you solve the chicken and egg problem or the zero to one problem, whichever way you want to call it? Over the years, we've worked on really building out a tactical playbook, which I would really describe as like dogfighting on the ground in these new marketplaces.
We call that playbook our SHPAB playbook. This is something that is intentionally a really funny to say kind of word, but it's also really a framework for our team to be able to go into a market and launch a market with a high degree of precision and predictability. What does SHPAB actually stand for? It stands for, firstly, stimulus. We go into a market and we stimulate that market by creating the initial jobs in that city. Those jobs are to promote the Airtasker platform. That's a really critical way for us to ensure that a market goes from zero to one very, very quickly. The second thing we do is we look at the reputation passports that are built by taskers on other platforms in the U.K. and the U.S.
There are many taskers who have built a reputation through their Google reviews or through other platforms. We are allowing those taskers to come onto Airtasker and we honor their reputation on our platform. This enables us to jumpstart the supply side of our marketplace and be able to solve the cold start problem for those taskers so they can get going straight away. We then supplement that with paid performance marketing in each market, above the line marketing through our media partnerships, and we turbocharge that with PR. Airtasker's got a pretty unfair PR advantage because of all the stories, all the people, all the data that is coming out of our marketplace, which makes for incredibly compelling and engaging content. Fiona is going to show us later today how we are using a lot of that user-generated content to grow and inspire marketplaces even more.
Lastly, our business pioneers. One of the things that we've discovered is that in the Australian market, we have many, many businesses using Airtasker and they're using Airtasker hundreds of times, sometimes thousands of times a year. What we're doing is as we go into new markets, we find the look-alike type business in these cities and we nurture them by hand to bring them onto the Airtasker marketplace and get them started. Our SHPAB playbook is really the way that we ignite a market and make sure that it can get started in a very predictable way. Ultimately, as you're building out these marketplaces, it's all about building out a long-term brand profile and establishing network effects in these markets.
If you look back in 2016, we were doing right about AUD 12 million of gross marketplace volume in the Australian market, so less than where we are now in the U.K. We were spending about AUD 2 million a year in marketing. We then formed a strategic media partnership with Seven West Media. Through that partnership, we were able to actually scale our marketing investment to AUD 9 million, close to AUD 10 million per year. As you can see, when we did that, we were able to, the darker blue bars, scale our gross marketplace volume from AUD 12 million to close to AUD 17 million of gross marketplace volume. Once we'd established that brand and that network effect, we were able to then slowly taper and rationalize our marketing budgets. You could see that we'd reached escape velocity.
We were able to continue to scale the business without having to keep paying for the just performance-based type media. That scaled to over AUD 100 million of GMV over about five years and then to AUD 190 million of GMV, which we hit in FY 2025. This model of working with world-class media partners worked for us in Australia, and we're continuing to scale that into the U.K. and the U.S. market. We've got some incredible partners across the pond. As I mentioned, we've got iHeartMedia in the U.S., who's an incredible partner for us. In the U.S., we also have TelevisaUnivision, Mercurius Media Capital, and Sinclair Broadcast Group, which are all really, really powerful parts of the media zeitgeist in the U.S. and can really help us to scale and promote Airtasker into those markets.
We've got an incredible partnership in Australia as well with oOh!media, the leading outdoor player, and with ARN, both of whom are represented here today. I'm sure you're going to be hearing a whole bunch from them about the power and promotion that they can bring. We've got incredible media partners in the U.S., in Australia, and then in the U.K. with Channel 4 as well. We're then turbocharging this, and pun intended, with an incredible partnership with the Racing Bulls Formula One team. This really helps to serve us additional brand cachet as we go into new markets and introduce the Airtasker brand alongside this phenomenon of Formula One, which is going across the world. It also allows us to engage closer with our community. You're going to see later on how we've involved the Airtasker community with the Formula One team.
Lastly, it helps us to create incredible content. The amount of content that we have coming out of 25 races a year, three days of each weekend, is super, super powerful. Thank you to all of our incredible media partners. This is all contributing to us being able to make really powerful progress in each of the markets. In our U.K. market, we have surpassed gross marketplace volume of over AUD 20 million per year. We are doing that with just three employees on the ground in that U.K. market. A really, really scalable and efficient business model. In the first quarter of this year, that grew by about 83%. Similarly, across the U.S., where we started just about a year ago now, we have been able to build the business up to close to AUD 7 million in gross marketplace volume.
That's growing at an even faster clip of over 600% in the last quarter that's just passed. Finally, again, to talk about a milestone that we've just passed, over AUD 1 billion in gross marketplace volume and completed jobs that have gone through the marketplace. A huge thank you to my board, the Airtasker team, and the Airtasker community who have made that possible. A round of applause. Today we're going to be talking about a lot of sophisticated product, technical, and financial concepts. Actually what underlies Airtasker is actually kind of like the world's simplest business model. We're helping a customer to be able to get something done, and we're helping to create a job in the local community at the same time.
This simplicity, this mission that we have to empower people to realize the full value of their skills is something that I find personally incredibly motivating and inspiring. I think that's really important as we go through what inevitably is going to be markets that go up and down, technology that disrupts things, or AI coming out, being folded back, and a lot of disruption and change from that. What Airtasker's doing is something that is enduring and is long term. I want to say thank you so much to all of the investors who have been here and supporting Airtasker's journey along the way.
To those who are aligned with our long-term aspirations and vision for Airtasker to scale across the world and take our mission to communities all across the globe, I'm really excited to partner with you and to take you on this journey with us. Thank you so much. With that, I'm going to be passing it across back to our Chair, Cass. Thank you very much.
Thanks, Tim. Thanks, Tim. I'm sure that everybody learned something new out of that presentation today, which was its usual ebullient presentation, which is fantastic. Thank you. I hope that everyone will continue to for the rest of the afternoon. Next up, we're hearing about the latest innovations from the product and technology teams. Please welcome in the room, Chaitanya Kuber, who's Airtasker's CTO, and via screen, James Nau, our VP of Product at Airtasker. Together, James and Chaitanya are looking at how they can further build out our marketplace where you can get anything done.
Thank you, everyone. Hello. By way of introduction, I'm Chaitanya . I'm the CTO at Airtasker and you're probably wondering where James is. He unfortunately couldn't be with us today, but he has recorded a most exciting video message, which we'll get to in a minute. When I think about FY 2025, I could really stand here all day and talk to you about the amazing work that we've done. I'm going to focus on two things: trust and frequency. Trust is at the heart of every transaction on Airtasker. Customers need to feel confident about who they're hiring, and taskers need clear ways to demonstrate. Hello, testing. Testing. All right. Sorry about that. Technical difficulties. This year, we've launched a completely redesigned tasker profile experience. The new profile puts the most important trust signals first.
Hello. Okay. Sorry. This new profile puts the most important trust signals front and center, making it easier for customers to see a tasker's skills, reviews, ratings, completion rate at a glance. This helps customers make faster, more confident hiring decisions and gives taskers a clear path to building their reputation and winning more work. We expanded our ID verification program and now have over 45,000 verified taskers across all our marketplaces. This ID badge is prominently displayed on the profiles, and customers now know as a result that the person that they are hiring is who they say they are, which in turn builds trust both in our taskers and our marketplace. Frequency. We observed a very clear challenge in our platform. Customers were overwhelmed by a flood of similar offers on their tasks, leading to an indecision problem and too often task abandonment.
This was a critical drop-off point in our funnel, one that directly impacted both the customer experience and our business outcomes. To solve for this, we built and launched a state-of-the-art AI model, the top offer ranking model. This model analyses every offer on every task in real time, weighing factors like price, tasker ratings, and reliability to surface a single highly relevant recommendation to the customer, the top offer. The results have been compelling. Customers are assigning more tasks and doing so faster, meaning we are helping more people get more jobs done sooner. These are not just features. They are foundations for scalable, defensible growth across all our markets. Now over to James, our VP of Product.
Hi, I'm James, VP of Product at Airtasker. Looking ahead, our roadmap is focused on three core pillars: trust, frequency, and AI. Let's focus on the first pillar, trust. Every week, around 40,000 tasks get posted on Airtasker. That's over 2 million a year. That represents a massive opportunity for us to convert more of those posted tasks into completed tasks by building customer trust and confidence earlier in the journey. We're making this happen through Customer Offer Invite, a new feature that's going to allow our customers to take the lead. They're soon going to be able to browse qualified taskers, read all the reviews, and invite those that they feel most confident about to make an offer. This is going to keep our customers on the platform for longer.
They're going to be more engaged, going to build trust faster, and it's going to help them get the offers that they need in order to feel confident to proceed. We're also going to be expanding ID verification and legislative reporting to the U.S., a key step in a market where trust and safety is incredibly important for our customers to assign with confidence, especially when they're inviting someone new into their home. We're also investing in onboarding for both our customers and our taskers. We're going to be setting clearer expectations, offering stronger support, and aligning everyone on what it takes to deliver more five-star customer experiences and more opportunities for our taskers to earn and win repeat work. Now let's move over to our second pillar, frequency.
When our customers find a tasker that they trust to clean their home, walk their dog, or assemble their furniture, we want Airtasker to be their go-to place to continue that relationship. The great news is the intent is already there. Every week, around 15,000 tasks get assigned. Of that number, 83% of those customers have indicated that they would rehire the same tasker again. That's a phenomenal number. Our role is really to turn that intent into action and habit. There are a few ways we're looking to do that. For the customers, we're going to be introducing loyalty rewards. We're going to give them a personalized view of business cards where they can quickly rebook past trusted taskers and easy options for them to do recurring bookings, such as a weekly clean or monthly garden maintenance.
For our taskers, we're building out a dedicated home screen for them to have clearer visibility of their tasketeers so they have more motivation to complete more rebooking tasks. They're also going to have the option to be able to send custom offers direct to past customers, empowering them to really foster relationships rather than just waiting to be rebooked. Now let's move on to our final pillar, AI. Here at Airtasker, we really believe that AI will become the core of how Airtasker is going to become smarter and more efficient. We've already gotten started with our AI-powered post-task flow prototype that is helping our customers post richer, more complete tasks that are attracting better offers. We're also designing our next-generation categorisation model that is going to instantly and more accurately categorise our tasks.
This means that all our tasks are going to be more discoverable and ensure that the right taskers are alerted at the right time, resulting in faster offers and better outcomes. This is just the beginning because the future that we're building towards with AI is going to continue to reduce friction and increase trust across every touchpoint in the experience. Let's take the customer experience, for example. We're going to be leveraging over a decade's worth of Airtasker data to provide smart category-specific price guidance and define what a quality task description is. We can then take this and guide our customers to write better quality tasks that attract the right offers and give them the confidence to succeed. For our taskers, we're going to be designing and building out an offer quality model. That's going to score every offer based off relevancy and personalisation.
We can provide this in real-time feedback back to our taskers to help them write more professional offers that are competitively priced and help them have the best chances of being assigned. As you can see, by focusing on our three pillars of trust, frequency, and AI, we're building towards a more reliable and smarter marketplace, one that builds confidence, that keeps our customers coming back for more, and helps our taskers succeed. Thanks so much. I hope you're enjoying Investor Day and back to you, Chai.
Thank you. Sorry, give him an applause. Thank you, James, for painting that compelling vision for what is to come. I'd like to talk quickly about some of the behind-the-scenes features, I guess, of our team that make this happen. Firstly, efficient or efficiency. Building trust isn't easy. It takes discipline, focus, and a clear sense of purpose. At Airtasker, this discipline shapes how we run the entire company. We continue to grow efficiently with over AUD 200 million in GMV, with only 60 people in product design, data, and engineering. Yep, that's right. Just 60. Powering a global platform across three countries, shipping features, improving trust, and scaling impact like a team twice our size. Now we are taking this lean team to the next level. We've already augmented our engineers with AI by way of Claude Code, the AI coding agent built by Anthropic.
This has helped to streamline workflows, improve productivity, quality, and impact of their work. Early results are clear. We see a significant increase in productivity and reliability when modernizing legacy code, improving automated tests, or upgrading our features. All of this results in cleaner code bases, more rapid iteration on features, and better outcomes for our customers. In the coming years, we expect our team will be far more effective at shipping higher quality experiences, strengthening retention, and compounding the value of our platform. Let's talk a little bit about security. From an infrastructure perspective, we've built our systems using fit-for-purpose vendors for the digital native era, like Stripe, Snowflake, AWS, Datadog, and many others. This ensures that not only our software, but all our customer data is always protected. Security, though, isn't just about infrastructure.
We are proactively leveraging the latest AI advancements for content moderation to protect our customers from scams and spam, as well as reducing leakage on our platform. On the payment side of things, which is really a core part of our platform, 99.9% of transactions on Airtasker are dispute-free. We achieve this through our partnership with Stripe and their fraud detection system, which stops transactions before they happen. They use AI combined with fraud rules tailored to our platform to help with that. This means that a vast majority of our customers are having smooth, secure payment experiences, which builds trust in the platform. Lastly, scale. The third element is what I call compounding scale. At the heart of our success is our ability to stay focused and ruthlessly prioritize.
This enables us to ship with speed and impact that is well beyond what you would expect from a team our size. Our software is designed for global scale, making it easier for us to scale not just in Australia, but the U.S. and U.K. as well. Everything we do ladders up to our vision. The focus on platform protection, robust moderation systems, compound over time. Each improvement makes the platform safer, which builds trust, which attracts more users, which generates more data that we can use to improve our systems. That is the compounding effect that lets us scale efficiently. This is how we are moving closer to our vision to be the world's most trusted place to buy and sell local services. With that, thank you, everyone, and back to you, Cass.
Thank you, Chaitanya and also James in absentia. It's always great to see, to understand a little bit more about, here come the chairs, just hamming me in, but that's fine, to understand a little bit more about how when you get more than 2.3 million tasks a year, how they get processed and matched up into the taskers and then what happens after that. Now we're going to step back a little bit and say, how do you get those 2.3 million + tasks a year? That, of course, is about marketing and within marketing, the media that we use. We have a combination of paid media and media contra deals. To kick us off today, we are going to hear from Taylor Collison, Equities Research Analyst, Matthew Harper.
Matt has done a very comprehensive analysis of how the media deals work from an Airtasker viewpoint. Part of his session, Matthew will be speaking with several of our media partners who are here today. We have the ARN CEO, Michael Stevenson. We have the Head of Strategy and Retail Media from oOh!media, who I just met, Andrew Every. Then we have, as Tim said, all the way from New York, but more recently, Sean's at Bondi Beach, which was a fantastic dinner on Monday night, David Ellis, who is iHeartMedia's Executive Vice President. Come on up.
Yeah, that's right. Okay, hello. So my name is Matt Harper. I'm an equity analyst at Taylor Collison. In my role at Taylor's, I specialize in digital companies. That includes e-commerce businesses, online marketplaces like Airtasker or any other digital native business. In 2024, I decided to initiate coverage on Airtasker and I did so on the back of the media deals that were struck by the company in 2023 and 2024. From my perspective, I saw the media deals as pivotal for the investment case in Airtasker and I thought that they were very misunderstood by the market, which creates a big opportunity. Today, as mentioned, I'm hosting a panel with three of Airtasker's media partners, a session I'm very much looking forward to.
Before we get to the panel, I put together a short presentation on how Airtasker's media partnerships are core to our investment thesis, which will set us up for a good discussion with the panellists afterwards. Let's get into it. Actually, before we get into it, I need to keep my compliance manager happy. I need to say that this presentation is general in nature and is not intended to constitute specific securities or financial product advice or any recommendation. Now we'll get into it. Firstly, media for equity deals, what are they? When a media partner provides media inventory advertising in advance of a repayment at a later date in equity by the company, which in this case is Airtasker. Airtasker has struck these deals in Australia and in the U.K. and U.S., but the actual mechanics differ by market.
We'll start with the Australian deals. Australian deals are very simple. The first step is the media partner provides the media inventory to Airtasker at a later date. Step two, Airtasker then repays the media capital. In Australia, the terms of the deals are two-year convertible notes. At the end of the two-year period, Airtasker will pay the face value of the notes plus a coupon in equity or cash. It's pretty simple, right? These are typical media for equity deals. At Taylor Collison, we see these as a sort of cheap source of financing and a sound capital management tool. Airtasker can begin generating revenue and generating profit before the payment to the media partner, which in our view is great from a cash perspective. Now onto the other side of the presentation.
The U.K. and U.S. deals are a little bit different and a little more interesting in our opinion, and they're going to be the focus of the rest of my presentation. The first step's the same. The media partner provides the media capital. Step two is where it starts to differ, though. Those media partners are given equity in the local market subsidiary. That's in Airtasker U.K. or Airtasker U.S.A. To be clear, that's not in the Airtasker headstock. At the third step, Airtasker at a later date will then repurchase all of that subsidiary equity at the Airtasker group revenue multiple multiplied by the revenue generated in that market. This step three is crucial because it's this mechanism, this structure that ties the repayment that Airtasker makes to the revenue generated in that market.
This mechanism means that dilution only increases if the reward for shareholders increases. I know that all sounds good in theory, but let's run through an illustrative example. Hopefully, that paints the picture a little better. The scenario I'm going to first run through is a media for equity deal. The scenario I'm going to run through first is a media for equity deal, an illustrative example for AUD 7 million of media capital in return for a 20% stake in the Airtasker U.K. subsidiary. We'll assume, as Airtasker does today, that it trades on 3x revenue. Firstly, what happens if we use all of the media partner's capital, the AUD 7 million, and it generates just AUD 1 million in revenue? Let's remember how the deals work.
Airtasker can buy back all of the subsidiary equity, as I said, at the group revenue multiple multiplied by the revenue in the market. The maths would be as follows. You've got AUD 1 million revenue times three, the group revenue multiple. Airtasker can buy back all of that equity for AUD 3 million. In this example, we only need to buy back 20%. The total repayment would be AUD 600,000. Sorry. From a dilution perspective, that only equates to 0.5% in dilution or a little less, in fact. In fact, our incremental group revenue, even though it was only AUD 1 million, adds 2.2% revenue to the group. We've actually added more revenue than the dilution that the shareholders received under that scenario. How we think about this at Taylor Collison is we think about this as downside protection.
Even if it doesn't all go to plan, shareholders are protected. We aren't paying too much. In fact, we're not paying very much at all. Now, to be clear, Airtasker is already generating more revenue than this in the U.K. This is purely an illustrative example. We may as well move on to a scenario which is much more likely. Airtasker generates AUD 10 million revenue in the U.K. market. All the metrics will then scale 10 x. Instead of paying AUD 600,000, you're going to be paying AUD 6 million to the media partner. That then equates to 4% dilution, but let's remember, we've added 22% more revenue now. The revenue far outweighs the dilution. At this point, I'm going to pause and I'm going to introduce another concept, which Tim actually touched on earlier.
The Airtasker U.K. and U.S. business run off the same platform as in Australia. Of that AUD 10 million revenue, we think a good chunk of that, about 70% as an estimate, could fall straight through to the bottom line or be reinvested in those businesses. Running through this scenario again, if we're considering we're paying AUD 6 million to the media partner and we're getting AUD 7 million in annual profit, that's a fantastic outcome for shareholders. As we go further left to right on this table, as the revenue scales up even further, the media partner gets even further upside. Good deal for them. They're now exceeding their initial media investment. The return to Airtasker shareholders keeps scaling up too.
As we move to 5% or 8% dilution, we're now at 30%-40% more revenue, which is all highly profitable, could fall through the bottom line, as I said before. Great, right? We now know that as shareholders, downside's protected. We share in the upside with the media partner. For those that have been following closely Airtasker's announcements, not all deals have been in pure equity. Some have been in convertible notes. How do they work? Hopefully this little animation works. There we go. Check that out. Thanks to the Airtasker graphic design team for your help there. How do the convertible note deals work? Ultimately, they're pretty similar. Airtasker has the ability to repay in cash plus a coupon if they choose to at maturity of the deals.
What that does is it sort of caps out the payment to the media partners once we get to a certain level of revenue. In the table, as you can see, once we get to AUD 14 million of revenue in those markets, our payment hits AUD 8.4 million. If we kept scaling up to AUD 20 million, hypothetically up to AUD 100 million of revenue, we'd still be paying AUD 8.4 million. Ultimately, that means a little bit more upside is kept for shareholders. Great. Now we hopefully understand how the media for equity deals work, whether it's equity or a convertible note. How do we think about all of the deals combined? Airtasker has done a great job putting together these deals. There are fantastic media partners. They've signed eight of these deals to date and may add more in the future.
The way that I think about it is that all the deals kind of stack on top of each other. The key thing to remember is that the payment by Airtasker will never exceed more than the group revenue multiple. As an example, let's consider the first column in the right-hand table. We're at the end of the maturity of the deals in the U.K. and U.S., and we've generated AUD 5 million in revenue. To be clear, that's actually the run rate today. The deals have a few more years left, so highly unlikely scenario. As an example, under that example, the total repayment to the media partners is AUD 15 million. We're getting to the top end of the range, the 3x revenue multiple that we'll be paying.
This is where I mentioned earlier, we think a big chunk of that AUD 5 million revenue can fall through to profit, 70%, as I said before. When you're paying 3x revenue, you're only really paying about 3x profit. We move on to the next sort of question or next sort of flow of thought. Is 4x profit a good deal for shareholders? If you look at peers, growing marketplace assets like Airtasker often trade on around 30x profit or 30x the cash that that business is generating. High Pages, as an example, trades on 30x their last year's cash flow, real estate, car sales, all businesses like that. Now, in this illustrative table, I've been more conservative and just gone with 20x.
What I'm trying to illustrate here is that even if we stopped everything today in the AUD 5 million revenue column, if we stopped everything today at a lower valuation than our peers, after factoring in the payment to media partners, I think the U.K. and U.S. businesses should already be incrementally adding to Airtasker's fair valuation today. When we combine that with the AUD 15 million cash flow that the Airtasker Australian business is producing today, I'm getting, using that 20x multiple I said before, to an AUD 0.86 per share valuation. This is why, as I said earlier at the start of the presentation, I've taken the view that the market has misunderstood these deals or at least mispriced them. To finish off this slide, we take our learnings from the left-hand side table.
As we go left to right, we take the AUD 5 million revenue, we triple that to AUD 15 million. The dilution and repayment to media partners goes a little bit over 2x. We are seeing more of those convertible notes kick in the same as we keep scaling up. Okay. To sort of finish off this slide, we see the scenarios on the right-hand side of this table as the most likely outcome considering the current growth rates of Airtasker and, as I said, we are already at the AUD 5 million revenue today. That is why we are so excited about these deals.
Lastly, to finish off before I go to my last slide, if we can trust in the deal mechanics and the maths as I've sort of laid out here today to protect us as shareholders on the downside and reward us on the upside with the media partners, what do we need to focus on then as investors? The answer to me is pretty simple. All we need to really focus on is, is the media capital driving more revenue in Australia, driving more revenue in the U.K. and U.S., and helping those markets hit network scale? Now, I've provided a few charts to help with forming your own opinion on that. As you can see, Airtasker Australian revenue, all-time highs last year on the back of the ARN and oOh!media deals. Sorry.
In the U.K. and U.S., those two markets are flying on the back of all the media partnerships in those markets going very well. Lastly, a piece of data that you may not have seen before. This is Airtasker U.K. active app users versus TaskRabbit, which is a key competitor in that market. Airtasker, as you can see, has just soared straight past them in terms of active users. Now, this is a data point that we really like, really bullish signal in our opinion. To conclude, the media deal structure aligns the media partner and the company, Airtasker. Shareholders' dilution will only ever be a fraction of the upside created from the deals, giving protection on the downside and sharing in a potentially huge upside. We know that so far, as shown on these charts, it's all going very well.
On that note, I think we can now turn our attention to our panelists, and we can get into more detail on how these partnerships are playing out in reality. Thank you for listening.
Okay. Andrew, Michael, David, thank you. Firstly, I might just start off, kick off the panel with, we'll go one by one, introduce ourselves, introduce your business. We'll start on this side with you, David.
Hey, everyone. David Ellis at iHeartMedia, I'm the Executive Vice President of Corporate Development and Ventures, all the things that we buy and invest in across iHeart, across the U.S. That's a brief overview of iHeart. We're the largest broadcast radio operator in the U.S. We own about 860 radio stations, which also makes us the largest broadcast radio operator in the world.
The podcasts that we publish do about 200 million-300 million downloads a month in the U.S., making us the largest podcast publisher in the U.S., as well as the largest podcast network in the world. We also put on around 20,000 events across the U.S. from large tentpole concerts like the ones that we'll have across Jingle Ball here in December with Huntr/x, with Ed Sheeran, many others, to more genre-focused concerts around the country. We do around AUD 4 billion in advertising revenue in the U.S., publicly traded.
Hi, everyone. Andrew Every from oOh!media. We're Australia's number one out-of-home media network. We reach 99% of Australians every single week with our network of billboards, street furniture, rail, and our emerging retail media networks as well.
That's impressive.
Michael Stevenson, I'm the recently appointed CEO of ARN. We are an entertainment company.
Our assets are in audio, live radio, live streaming, podcasts on demand, of course, video, social experiences, and in real-life experiences. We have 107 radio stations in Australia, two national networks in the KIIS Network, the Gold Network. We have 50 regional radio stations. We have 50 digital stations on the DAB platform. We reach 17 million people every single month. It's not quite 99% of the population, but it's impressive nonetheless. Twelve of those on our radio network, seven million on our digital network. At the very, very center of our business, and it's great to be here with David, is we have a long-term, multi-decade relationship with the iHeart company in the U.S., and we represent all of their assets right here locally in Austr alia.
Great. I might start with a question for you, David. I might pass the microphone up. Media for equity is becoming a bit more common globally. How does it fit in with iHeart's strategy?
Yeah, I think overall, what we think about from the media for equity perspective, and we have a decent number of deals that we've done across the U.S., is what are the opportunities across the U.S. where we want to think that we can create an unfair advantage for ourselves in influencing the outcome and trajectory of companies that we invest in, leveraging the assets that we have. We will look across the startup sector in the U.S., as an example, call it in the financial technology space, financial services from a legacy perspective in the U.S., transact very heavily across our advertising assets.
When new companies look to launch in the space, that's all leveraged based off of the trust that our audience has with consumers and with our DJs, with our podcasters, etc. When we see new categories of companies being created, we want to leverage our unfair ability to impact the outcome of those businesses by investing media.
Great. What stood out about Airtasker as a potential partner?
Yeah, I think there's two primary things. One is we find that the peer-to-peer marketplace model in the U.S. from when we looked at the growth of Uber and Airbnb back in the early 2010s, the primary thing that needed to be built up across our audience was trust. How do you trust someone to lease out your home, to ride in a vehicle with a stranger that shows up and you share your address with?
We saw solid success in being able to reach those audiences across our platform. More recently, when we've worked with other peer-to-peer-based marketplace companies, we've also been able to participate kind of unfairly in helping those businesses scale by leveraging, again, that trust and impact that our DJs, our podcasters, and all have. We also think that the storytelling that Airtasker kind of presents is pretty interesting when we think about how people talk on air in an engaging way to tell what are the interesting tasks that are happening in your local area. Because at the end of the day, broadcast radio and the talent that we have is focused on a local community.
Great. Thank you. Now, there's been some discussion in marketing circles, in financial market circles, that maybe the dial has swung too far towards digital advertising, towards Meta and towards Google. This question is kind of open to anyone that wants to answer it. What's your view on that shift and how do you see that relate to each of your businesses or how do you see the return profile of your businesses in relation to a Meta or a Google? Maybe, yeah, we'll start with Andrew.
Yeah, let me take that one on. Look, I think you've got to use the right tool for the job. Tim took us through Airtasker's job, which is salience and creating trust. If you want to create salience in Australia, then outdoor is the place where you create that salience. We get into, as I said, 99% of Australians every single week. There's a real trust factor when you are on o utdoor. We know that from clients that do A/B testing, when they add outdoor to the bottom of the funnel stuff that they're doing, they can see their lead generation, their effectiveness of their performance rise 4x-7x in some of the A/B testing that we've seen as well. We are a really effective job to make Airtasker our household name across Australia. I'd just say it's about the right tool for the job.
Great. Another one. It's a topic I'm particularly passionate about. Look, I think there's been a theme in marketing for a number of years whereby the pendulum swung way too far to performance-based media. If you have a look at all of the market mix modeling that media agencies and CMOs will be looking at, you're seeing this, I think, enormous over-reliance on search and social in particular at the bottom of the funnel that Andrew was referring to. The outcome of doing that, I guess, or over-investing in those platforms is that you lose the brand salience and you end up competing with everybody else on generic terms. Whereas what the Airtasker guys are clearly doing through their marketing strategy is using what I would call proven media channels. Happens to be right now radio and out of home. Over time, maybe that changes. Who knows?
I think what's been proven time and time again is the combination of television, radio, publishing, out of home, proven media channels that build brand, make every other platform work harder and drive, I think, over time, lower costs for your paid search because your organic search terms increase as you advertise and invest in your brand. That's a marketing principle, and I think it's important.
Anything to add there, David?
I couldn't add anything else. It'd be gratuitous.
Maybe just to follow on that thread a little bit, I know we've talked offline a little bit about last-click attribution and how that maybe would skew what people think as the returns on those platforms. Does anyone want to have a go at explaining what that might mean and how that could be skewing?
Yeah, I'm not sure how relevant it is specifically to Airtasker, but when we're talking about last-click attribution, we're talking about the final click between viewing something online, if you like, and a particular purchase being attributed to a digital platform or search or social and kind of giving no relevance or preference at all to the multiple impacts that someone might have experienced before they actually clicked on that particular ad or finalized that particular event. On the way to work this morning, I drove past an amazing billboard. I listened to Kyle and Jack on the radio, and I watched a television commercial. Those things should have some sort of impact on the outcome or the event that I go through and ultimately purchase if I'm either posting a task or I'm responding to one.
I think every channel through the consumer lifecycle needs to be attributed some sort of value through that process. I suppose that's what we're really talking about when we're talking about getting the right balance between brand advertising and performance advertising, which I t hink the Airtasker guys have done brilliantly. You can see in those charts on the screen earlier, you've got revenue growing. You've got all of the key metrics are growing because you've got the right balance between brand and performance.
Great. Thank you. I might stick with you, Michael. You've spoken in the past about ARN's transition from a radio business into an entertainment company more broadly. It spans audio, video, live events, and digital platforms. In the context of your partnership with Airtasker , how does that broader entertainment business help drive a better outcome for the partner?
I mean, I suppose the distinct thing that we have at ARN, as I'm sort of positioning that business as an entertainment company, is we're a content business. We create content, whether that emanates in radio or it's video or it's a social experience or it's an in-real-life experience. We're creating opportunities for audiences to connect with our content and for brands to integrate their stories in and around the content that we create. The benefit, I think, of having a relationship with Fiona and the guys, as an example, is that the relationship is so direct. We can pick up the phone to anybody at any time. In actual fact, I'm so close to what's happening in their business that when I'm thinking about making content decisions, I've actually got these guys in mind.
At our recent upfront presentation, which is an opportunity for us to share our plans with the broader market for the year ahead in terms of strategy, etc., we launched a content proposition called Pub Rescue. In 2026, you will see Christian O'Connell as he launches into Sydney finding a pub, which, of course, sits at the very heart of our community, but that's maybe been deprioritized, has lost its way. We're going to find it, and we're going to revitalize it. Now, one of the reasons we're doing that, of course, selfishly for us, it's a good content experience. At the end of the day, I'm going, well, which advertiser categories sit neatly within that as a concept? Of course, I go straight to Airtasker. No pressure, Fiona, but we built it for you.
I think it's a good example of how we're working more closely with the guys. We intimately understand their marketing, their marketing plans. We know what their objectives are. We know what their targets are. We're holding ourselves collectively as a team accountable for delivering those outcomes through the content that we create.
Great. Fantastic. That's kind of where I was going with my next question, talking about how closely you collaborate with Airtasker. I might loop you in on this one as well, Andrew. I want to just talk about how that collaboration is working. Does that sort of level of trust, the deep partnership, allow you to branch out and do a bit more innovative things?
In a word, yes. Look, Airtasker is a really important partner of ours. We've got a team of people that wake up every day thinking about when we bring on a new asset or a new format or a new piece of creative, that this is something that will work for Airtasker and achieve what they're trying to do. I think a couple of those real examples are we actually sit down with ARN, and we work about how we can leverage the F1 Red Bull Cash App sponsorship launch together so that we can have a much greater impact together for Airtasker.
Our creative advisory team, Polly, does eye-tracking creative strategy experiments with the various Airtasker creative to make sure that it's going to be unmissable. It's on our network, but make sure it's that little bit extra unmissable as well. It really has that kind of impact. Yeah, really important partner. Our best people wake up every day thinking about how we can drive Airtasker's short and long-term objectives with our network.
Great. Thank you.
I can just add one thing to that from obviously the presentation that you gave earlier. At the end of the day, we view it as incentive alignment. The deal that we have with Tim and with the Airtasker team is obviously for a specifically denominated dollar amount. At the end of the day, the success of the subsidiary in the U.S. is the thing that I get unfairly influenced by the amount of media that we provide. We like to provide more. We like to do more things that result in a better outcome for us, that results in a better outcome for Airtasker.
This might be something that you bring up later as well as the reason why, as part of this recent capital raise. We also wanted to invest a bit of cash, a bit of money where our mouth is alongside the media because, as you walk through, the upside that I have in the U.S. is actually capped. From this participation with the cash investment that we made into the headstock, that's obviously not capped, and we like that.
Fantastic. Do you have anything to add there, Michael? You're happy with that? Okay. Great. Some critics, let's call it that, and this is maybe more a financial markets perspective, but some financial markets participants, they see media for equity deals or they think that the brands receive a lower quality or non-premium inventory. How do you address that perception and what assurances do you give to a partner like Airtasker around inventory quality? That's open to anyone.
Be lower quality if they were buying on one of those other networks, perhaps. It's absolutely not lower quality. The revenue that we receive and generate as a result of this is treated like the revenue that we would generate from any other advertiser, it's easy for me to say. We plan on an annual basis with the team. We're connected to the team. The inventory that we deliver is exactly the same as any other paying client would receive. All of the premium opportunities are open to Airtasker. In actual fact, in that example that I just shared earlier on around Pub Rescue, we're going to Airtasker before we speak to anybody else because in some cases, we're creating concepts for them.
We recognize the revenue in the deal that we have effectively in real time as the inventory is realized. Of course, the difference is the payment mechanism and when you recognize the actual cash. Why I think these deals work, certainly for Australian media companies and are less close to the U.S. market, is that no media company in Australia runs 100% full. As long as you build this into your inventory projections and your yield management projections and the like, this is a real win-win for everybody. It certainly has been for ARN.
I think if I added to that, Airtasker is absolutely unlimited in terms of the inventory of ours that they can pick. Our team goes to Airtasker with, again, before we announce new contract wins like Monash Freeway Transport for New South Wales, with opportunities to get in places where people have not got before or in different sort of ways. If you go through Melbourne Central in the next couple of weeks, you will see really dynamic new wraps and takeovers of Melbourne Central that are extraordinarily high quality. In fact, there is a kind of interesting side note. When we do our proof of posting, we send people out to take photos of the ads so that people know they are getting what they paid for.
The people that took the proof of posting for Fiona today probably are Airtaskers because we are actually a customer of Airtasker as well. There is absolutely no limit. Our team that works on the account, they do not know how it is funded. They do not get told. Airtasker is a critical client, and they treat them as such. Absolutely no limits.
The only other thing I can add to that is it's also a contract. I couldn't give them poor quality media even if I wanted to. They made sure to build that in. It made it. That's a good point. I think that's the only simple thing that I'd add to it.
Very nice. Just one for you, David. We sort of touched on outdoor radio, the proven sort of media categories. Within your stable of media assets, you have podcasting and other sort of newer media types. Do you want to talk us through those mediums and how they maybe could benefit Airtasker?
Sorry for the little diatribe I'll go on about podcasting, but we found it to be a useful investor education tool in the U.S. as well, just understanding the economics of how things work in the podcasting landscape. We bought our anchor asset back in 2018, the first deal I did back when I joined iHeart about seven or so years ago. I have become intimately familiar with the business. As we have been able to grow that from something that did about AUD 10 million in revenue then to call it around AUD 400 million a year in revenue today. The simple answer is the only people that make money in the podcasting business are podcast publishers.
If you own the RSS feed and the show and the ad rights in that show, regardless of where the consumer listens to that podcast, if you listen to it on Apple Podcasts, if you listen to it on Spotify, if you listen to it on the iHeart app, the only people that make money for that show are the podcast publishers. I'll take an example of Stuff You Should Know, which is one of our fantastic shows with Josh and Chuck. If you listen to that show on Spotify, I insert ads based off of a wide variety of different parameters to that show, and I keep all the money for that. Spotify makes AUD 0. The same thing works the other way where Joe Rogan, I imagine some people are familiar with him over here as well.
If his podcast is listened to on the iHeart app, I make no money. When we think about what the reach is, unlike a lot of other media types, it's not based off of the aggregation of where the consumer's actually consuming that product. It's based off of who has the relationship with the talent, both from an IP ownership or co-ownership perspective and a production perspective. That's where we found it to be a pretty fascinating space for us to be able to grow into, obviously off of the backbone of the history of broadcast radio. Talk radio, podcasting, in our view, is talk radio just delivered a different way over an RSS feed instead of over an AM/FM radio tra nsmitter.
Fantastic. Thanks, David. Maybe just to close off, we've heard about how you're working together. You're all aligned. If Airtasker does well, you guys do well too. Maybe just a closing question. What are some of the cool things that you're doing in the year ahead with your business that you're excited abo ut?
How long do we have? I think, again, I go back to us being at a very, very core content business. We will have more locally produced Australian content in 2026 than ever before. That creates enormous opportunities for brands and advertisers. We will continue to have those conversations with the Airtasker team. In regards to podcasts, David's absolutely right. It is absolutely booming. The consumption of podcasts and the ability to commercialize that from our perspective is growing at a significant rate.
One of the things we did launch at our upfront presentation, which I've taken from the iHeart team in the U.S., is the launch of iHeart Ruby in Australia, which is a branded podcast production business. Imagine this. If you had 30 minutes to spend with your customer, what would you talk to them about? We will produce the podcast completely free of charge. We will use all of our facilities. What you do is commit to the media to promote and drive an audience to that destination. What is really interesting in having, again, spent a bit of time with the iHeart teams in the U.S. is video is coming down the pipeline real quick when it comes to podcasts. The opportunities, I think, there for Airtasker and for other brands are massive.
Since we started working with Airtasker, we've announced contract wins and launches, including Sydney and Melbourne Metro, a beaches network going wavily with Laura in the northern beaches of Sydney, massive road corridor networks, Transurban Transport for New South Wales, the Monash Freeway. Every single one of those contract wins is an opportunity for Airtasker to reach a new audience in a new format in a new way. We get pushed really hard by the Airtasker team around the creativity and having the impact that we need to have. All of those are great opportunities for us to try 3D animation, live task posting. Actually, I really enjoy the creative that I'm seeing at the moment on bus shelters.
There's a copy for the drinks, which is actual tasks from actual people, which is a really great way of simulating, like, "Hey, that is an easier way to clean a fish tank," or any of this kind of stuff. Like, "That is the job I don't want to do this Christmas," and that kind of stuff. I think that'll work really well at sort of reinforcing the get anything done messaging with the get anything done, specifically your fish tank or your backyard or whatever it might be.
We've announced a lot of things, but some of the most salient ones over the past month and things that we're looking to going forward are some great partnerships that we've announced with TikTok, rumored or perhaps announced around Netflix and how we're going to distribute and syndicate content in collaboration with both of those companies on our platforms and on their platforms. We're really excited about the expansion opportunity there. We also just came out recently, I think it was actually yesterday or maybe it was the day before. Time zones are still messing with me.
About iHeart being guaranteed human, we think it's a very important statement to be able to make to our audience and an important statement to be able to make to our advertisers that the people that are talking to you across our airwaves, across those RSS feeds or digitally delivered content are humans that are actually engaging with you because that parasocial and community-oriented relationship is incredibly important to us. We think it's incredibly important to our advertisers.
I think that the interesting opportunity that Tim had kind of mentioned as we've been talking over the course of the past couple of days is that in terms of the opportunity for Airtasker and what is the risk of AI doing any number of different things across a variety of different sectors, the likelihood that the winners of that race are going to be plumbers, being able to sit here and talk to those plumbers and engage with them and knowing that the way that you're reaching them is also through other humans, we think is incredibly salient and just aligns brands in an important way.
Fantastic. That concludes the session. Thank you to the panelists.
I think I'm fine. There you go. Okay. That's great. Thank you so much, Michael, Andrew, David, and Matt. That was super duper interesting.
I just want to go back to something that David said at the very beginning of that session, which was about seeing the unfair advantage. Yeah? Some may think, and certainly some in the investor community seem to think that these deals are new, right? These deals are so not new. Well over 20 years ago when I was with Michael's ex-employer at Nine, which was then PBL, so had Nine Network, had the magazines, and also had Nine MSN, digital Nine MSN, we doorstopped Meg, can't remember her name for Nola, CEO of eBay, at a conference somewhere in San Francisco and said, "Hey, we're the biggest media company in Australia. Why don't we do a joint venture with eBay in Australia?" She's like, "We don't do joint ventures and blah, blah, blah." Anyway, they end up doing a joint venture with eBay in Australia, right?
It was amazing because they did not even shop it around. They just took one look at the market and they said, "If we are going to do a joint venture, it is a media for equity deal. We are going to do it with these guys." About 10-15 years later, suddenly new owners at eBay turned around and said, "How on earth do we have a joint venture in Australia? I mean, seriously, we own 100% of every single market that we are in except for Australia." They had to buy us back out. Now Airtasker is here with some of the best media partners in the world, not just the ones who presented today, but across the globe. We are really excited about it. We do believe that we have joint unfair advantages, and we are going to keep working on those. They are working.
To tell us more about how they're working and not just those deals, but in the broader marketing sphere at Airtasker, I'd like to welcome Fiona Stevens, who has been with us for almost two years now, coming up to your anniversary, which is great. Those two years have been after a 25-year career of really taking businesses through growth-focused marketing and being very successful at that. We love having Fiona on board as well. Welcome, Fiona.
Thank you. I have the dubious sort of position of normally talking a lot with my hands. Now I've got a clicker and a handheld mic, so I'm not quite sure how this is going to work. We'll see how we go. Thanks very much, Cass. Thanks very much to the panel who have clearly spoken through a lot of what I was also going to talk about.
I'm going to take that as us being incredibly well aligned and really well connected as opposed to the fact that we hadn't kind of actually rehearsed. And actually, joyfully, we hadn't rehearsed and gone, "I'm going to say this. I'm going to say that." It was all very organic. I'm really excited to be able to talk to you all today. It's not that often that the marketer stands in front of the investor audience and has a chance to have a chat. It's great to be here to do that today. I'm going to take from something Matt said. I can actually talk to you about marketing for two hours if you're interested. Grab me later for a wine, and I will do that. I sort of had to go, "Okay, I've got 15 minutes.
What's really important?" I took from Matt's notes earlier, actually, where it was just like, "What is the most important thing for the investors to focus on about what we're doing in marketing? What can I say about that today that's going to be of real interest to you?" If you want to dig down into more stuff, come and find me. The three things that I wanted to talk to you about today was the AU marketplace, right? Like we've been here for a long time. How are we still growing and where are we growing? How are we growing? What are we going to do to make sure we grow and continue to grow in this marketplace and to do that profitably? Secondly, how do we ensure that all of our marketing investments are working?
There was a bit of discussion there about brand above the line, digital attribution, all that stuff. How do we make sure we know this is working? How can we give you guys confidence that it is working and that we're spending those dollars really, really well? I want to touch on that. I also want to talk about our global expansion. That's obviously huge for us. That's where the total addressable market in the U.S. is way and beyond bigger than what we've got here. It is really important in terms of growth and future-facing growth. I want to talk to you not about that growth. We can grow. It is really important that we do that really efficiently. We can't sort of throw gazillions of dollars at it. We've got to do it efficiently.
I just want to give you some insight into how we're doing that and some of the ways we're doing that. I think the one thing just to highlight here is the way we run marketing here at Airtasker is that it's efficient by design. We don't do all the things we do and then try and make them efficient and try and spread them out and scale them. We actually create our strategy so that it is efficient by design. It is designed to scale. It's designed to be cost-effective. It's designed to do its job really, really effectively from the ground up. It's designed to do it here in every other market. That's kind of a bit of a theme here that it's actually designed strategically to be efficient by design. I'll touch on that a bit as we go.
First of all, let's dive into the powerhouse that is the Australian market for Airtasker and I'll share some of the ways that we're going to go about and that we are going about and will go about growing that market. First, I want to touch on brand salience. We've talked about brand a lot already today. Of course, we have. We've got brand people in the room that you've just heard from. I want to just brand salience is one of those jargony terms that gets used and bandied around a lot. It's really, really important. I'm actually going to reference one of the other brands that we've got here today as a partner, which is Red Bull. Tim mentioned that they're going to be downstairs doing some really fun stuff for us later when we catch up for a bit of networking after this.
I'm actually going to reference them. Red Bull are masters of brand salience, right? Like if you think, "I want a cold, pick me up, drink in a can," and you need a lift, Red Bull have nailed that. You're thinking Red Bull before you even think about where the shop might be, where you might get one. You're not walking into that shop and having a look around and going, "I don't know what to buy." You're walking in there going, "I know I want to buy Red Bull." That's what brand salience means. It means a brand that is sitting front of mind when you have a need state or a want that you're looking to fulfill. That's what we're trying to get to for Airtasker. That's the goal. The goal is you need something done you think Airtasker.
Or even better, you think, "Oh, I could do with that being different. I'll go and look at whether Airtasker does that. I'll go for inspo," right? Like the way people now use Airbnb for inspo. They're not thinking, "I really want to go to that location or go and find the place to stay." They're going, "Oof, I want a holiday. Where might I go or go and have a look?" We can do that with Airtasker too. There's always things that they're doing. That's what real brand salience means. I think just to say upfront, it takes some getting to. It's not a short-term goal. It takes a long time and a lot of media power investment to get there, which is why our media relationships are so incredibly important. It also takes clarity of proposition. You've got to be really clear what do you do.
In Red Bull's case, they do energy. That's what they do. They just do it in the form of a can of drink. What we do is help you get anything done. That's really important for us. The clarity of that proposition, it's built into the brand. It's built into the product, right? We've taken that breadth, the anything done, and we've made it our brand, right? The product has become the brand. It's really important that we have that clarity of proposition. We also need great creative. We need it applied consistently over time. We need it to be backed up with strong consumer messaging, and we need that media exposure. We've got all of those things. We've got all those things. We're on that journey, right?
I'll share some other creative with you shortly, and you've seen some out there, but this is sort of just an example of the creative that's out there and is running across all of our markets, all countries, all channels. I'll show you the assets we've got soon. This is just the sort of hero creative. We're doubling down on that then at a second layer and go, "Hey, we'll bring this to life using relatable, real information." This is what was being referred to before, which is these are real tasks from our platform. They've been posted. They've been completed. There's the number of offers they had, and there's the location. These are real. These are all over billboards. There is any number of these.
We go between having really normal stuff like move a couch or clean my bathroom or urgent help, get rid of my lizard. It really does bring that brand salience of get anything done down to a consideration level, right? Now I'm not just saying, "What do you mean, get everything done?" I'm going, "Oh my God, I could get that done, and I could get that done, and I could get that done." That's how you drive those layers of brand salience, which is, "I know who Airtasker are. I know I can get anything done. Now I can see examples of those things, and I can go and find out for myself." That's kind of how we're proving that out. We're doing that on out of home, obviously. We're also doing that on audio.
We're doing it through some of our integrations. Task Me Anything with Will and Woody was a great integration that we did with ARN. When they had people going out there, sorry, they had tasks posted on the platform and people coming in to cut their hair, to do it was a really great live integration. We're also running Spots and Dots, which are all about getting anything done. I think it's by magic. With Airtasker, you can get anything done. Anything? Okay, I've got to move these boxes, pick up my new TV, and meal prep for the week. I'm bulking. From heavy lifting to furniture assembly, just post a task. Airtasker. Get anything done. All channels are telling the same story, and we're doing it consistently.
Consistency is one of the most important things you can do when you're trying to drive brand fame, brand salience, and brand awareness. You need to say the same thing over and over and over again. Yes, in some different ways, but I want this creative to still be out there in marketing in five or ten years' time. I'm not looking to be changing the messaging. The proposition will still be get anything done, and we will still be using the examples of what you can do on the platform to do that, right? We're also doing it through other channels. PR, for example, we go out there with PR, and we're in front of Australians everywhere they turn. Similarly, actually, to where David spoke about the trust that you have in the talent that they have on their shows, right?
The DJs and the podcast hosts and all that kind of stuff. That's the case for integrations, for example, the Will and Woody integration. That gets that trust, but also PR doubles down on that trust. If we've got editorial content out there saying, "Hey, on the Today Show, pesky possums," and we've got a guy who is in an Airtasker T-shirt who's talking to consumers about how he deals with those possums, and Airtasker's in there doing that. We're earning that content through how we're doing that, and everything is driving brand salience. I'll come on in a minute to talk about the brand versus digital thing because that's important, and I think there are questions around that in the marketplace. I just wanted to sort of underline brand, brand salience, huge for Australian growth.
We have really great prompted awareness when everyone says, "Hey, Airtasker knows Airtasker?" Unprompted awareness is the way we measure brand salience. "Hey, if you want to get something done, how would you do that?" In the past 12 months, so Q1 last financial year to now to Q1 this financial year, our unprompted awareness went up by 6 percentage points, and our consideration, our brand consideration went up by 9 percentage points in one year. We had not even been in market with our above the line for that whole year. We had been in market for 9 months. It is working. Brand salience is working, and we are growing. You have already seen the outcomes and results: growth in posted tasks, growth in GMV, growth in revenue. That is the downfunnel part of what we can see in those changes in those brand health metrics.
I think that's really key to doubling down on that growth in Australia. As discussed, and this is where we turn to the sort of digital side, brand salience doesn't drive outcomes in isolation of other things, and particularly not when you're an online business. You can't walk into a shop and see Airtasker in the fridge like you can with Red Bull. You've got to go online and find it. I want to talk a little bit about discoverability. This is a blank slide for a moment because the next slide's sort of slightly odd and interesting. I guess when I talk about discoverability, it's like, how can everyone see you? How can you be everywhere? Be everywhere is how I think about discoverability. If someone needs what you're selling, how do they find you?
If they do not need it, but they might want it, how do they find you? If they are buying something they do not need, they know that they need anything. It is literally like, how can you be everywhere? That is mostly about digital discovery. I am going to bring this up now. This is data that is a year old, and it is fascinating to see. This is also some of this, most of this is actually driven by Google's own data, of course, but it is also verified and audited, and it is real. The market share of selected search platforms, like Google, is still massive, right? I know we talk a lot about AI search and other search engines, but the reality is that a huge amount of traffic is still using Google and coming through Google. We have got to be on that, and we are on that.
Actually, interesting, I think it was Matt you talked before about the increasing cost of Google clicks in the marketplace. Two things that have happened that are super interesting for us in the last year is that we've managed to reduce our cost per acquisition in no small part to the fact that our brand salience has gone up. There is a real correlation there. I think from an analyst point of view, that was really great to hear you point that out and have that conversation. We've reduced that cost per acquisition. I think the other thing that's happening since then is that we have to broaden out where we are, right? Google's really important for lots of reasons. We've got an incredible team that works on organic search as well. The last click lever is becoming broader.
It's a fragmented market in terms of that last click. Now, the last click isn't everything, but it is a thing, and it's really important. I'm just going to talk just a minute about how the nature of digital discovery is changing. Again, I could talk about this forever. There is so much to talk about just on this topic, but I'm just going to give you a couple of examples, right? AI-driven discovery, really important. Even now, like on Google, which has changed in the last six months, everything has an AI summary at the top when you search on Google. This is just an example of ChatGPT, and this is a real example. I literally did this last night and added that slide yesterday, last night. ChatGPT furniture assembly, I typed in furniture assembly Ryde because I live in the city of Ryde area.
That is what comes up. That is what comes up on ChatGPT. That link there, that Airtasker that is colored in black, is a link directly to our furniture assembly page, and we are getting traffic from there. We have invested in, are investing in, and are really nailing the way you do that, which is through brand authority, branded content, authoritative content that is all over the internet so that when those engines, those AI engines go out and search for authoritative good content, they find us. That is why we are up there. While I said Google's still the lion's share of search traffic, we have seen since January an 800% increase on platform of our AI-sourced site sessions. That number is ridiculously high because it is coming from a very low bar.
Back in January, we were not seeing much site traffic coming in from AI-generated search, but it has increased 800% since then. Of course, it is not just AI, right? Customers are using TikTok, Insta, X, YouTube, Threads, Reddit, everywhere, right, to start their search journeys. In fact, younger audiences are starting—even Google said recently on a stat that younger audiences, 40% of them are starting their journey with social search. I have a 14-year-old. I know that is certainly the case. She gets all of her news about politics from TikTok. I guess the thing is we are there too, right? We have the brand strength, the content creation, and the content distribution strategy that is putting us front and center in these places. That is critical to the growth trajectory and the profitability of the AU market.
We have to be where people are, and we are there. Just moving on from that, the other thing about the be everywhere, it's not just online. It's also geographical. We've got masses of headroom left in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane. They're our three biggest cities because they're the country's three biggest cities. We've got loads of headroom left there, right? We're seeing growth in those cities every day, every week, every month. There are always going to be the density of growth, right, and maximum potential. There's loads of demand outside those cities too. We've been sort of—that's been just happening, happening, happening, happening. With our partnerships with ARN and oOh!media, they've got incredible coverage, actually unlike some of their competitors, in regional and metro markets.
That's really opened up the door for us to be present in the above-the-line opportunities in other places. Perth, Adelaide, Gold Coast, Sunshine Coast, ACT. It's really, really working. We're doing other stuff there too, right? There is a bit of paid search to support that. We're doing localized PR into localized papers. We're doing on-the-ground activations. For example, we had an activation at the Noosa Triathlon a few weekends ago because we want to be in the community. We want to be hands-on. We're a local services marketplace. You need to be in there as well. Just to give you another example, like Sunshine Coast, for example, we grew in GMV terms Q1 this year to Q1 last year. We're 26% up in GMV. It's because we've gone out and asked for the business. We've made ourselves present.
We've got our brand out there, and it's working. There's a huge amount of headroom in our core cities, but there's so much more headroom to come. I want Australia to be covered in the blue A, as Tim said earlier. That's the sort of, I guess, geographic growth part of the Australian growth. Moving from locations to partnerships, which is another way we're really moving hard to grow our AU footprint. Our partnership program is part brand partnerships and part distribution model, right? We're an online distributed model. People buy from us online, and they come to the Airtasker website. If they want to go and buy, I don't know, easy screens, retractable fly screens, and they need an installer, hey, what if we're in that purchase funnel and it says, "Oh, you need an installer? We have installers at Airtask.
Click here and go and post your task." It is a distribution model. It puts us in front of customers at the exact moment of need, right? We see a really amazing conversion rate from partner-driven task posts to real tasks on our platform. This is a model we are doubling down on. As an acquisition model, it is really efficient. We work with these partners, and we have incentivized stuff for customers to come and do us. Once they are a customer, they are a customer. This is a really big part of how we are also driving and doubling down on growth here. Of course, this is a playbook for the rest of the world in terms of a distribution strategy. That is the kind of partnership angle. Again, huge growth potential for AU.
Talking of sort of starting and getting things off the ground, we're also going further. We're extending our actual product offering. About two weeks ago, we launched our first option to buy an Airtasker gift card. It's in phase one. It's not perfect. Please go and buy one. It's not perfect, but we're getting there. You can buy one, and people are buying them, and not just people who are related to. Actual real people are buying gift cards. The next iteration actually launches next week, and we're going to go do a hard push before Christmas because, of course, we are. It's a new growth pathway. It's a new revenue stream, right? It opens up our product to moments outside the moment of need. Even if you don't need something done, you can buy something from our platform.
It opens us up to cultural and gifting moments. It also opens other partnerships, right? I mean, I'd love to see our gift cards in retail stores at some point because, yay. It also opens up things like corporate relationships. We've got a whole lot of stuff going on here, and I think this is just the beginning of something that's really exciting. This is our first new product apart from things like rebooking, which are internal to the platform. I think there's probably some other stuff we can do in the future, and I'm really excited about that. That's kind of the Australian. I mean, I could talk to you so much more about Australia and how we're growing, but I'm going to be running out of time. I'm going to jump into how do we actually know this is all working?
How are we measuring this? I heard a bit before about the last click attribution. For years, people have talked about multi-click attribution or multi-touch attribution. There has really never been a model for that in the, as Cass kindly pointed out, over 25 years I have been doing this, that actually has really, really done multi-touch attribution properly until the last few years, which is when we move into market mix modeling. It is not new, new. It is 5-10 years of kind of being around and being really taken up. I think the exciting thing about it for us is that it helps us understand which marketing investments are driving the most effective growth and in which mix themselves. Rather than just looking at that last click attribution, it looks at all marketing investment and market conditions over time.
TV, audio, podcasts, out of home, BVOD, sponsorships, PR, Meta, search, promotions, seasonality, and external factors like weather and inflation. The model that sits behind market mix modeling brings all that into one place and looks at quantifying the true impact of the money that we're spending. Effectively, it's like for every dollar we spend, what do we get back? How could we distribute that differently to get more? That's effectively what that model does. It gets a bit better than that as well, actually. It also helps us see the payback period. How quickly does that come back to us? There might be things that come back more slowly, but in higher volume, right? That's really important to know. Also the saturation point. When should you stop spending in those channels in that location? What does that look like?
How do you make sure you're not overusing? It also helps us scenario plan by market and channel. Hey, what if we wanted to do this in that market in that channel? Would that be successful? How do we feel about that? Market mix modeling gives us intelligence and data that helps us to make those decisions. That is really important for me. I'm so excited that this is in my toolkit, right? This actually gives me an incredible advantage here. It is also really exciting for our shareholders because you can know that we are using these incredible tools to make sure we are optimizing our spend and being as efficient as we can about how we grow and growing the best we can. We're working with Mutinex. They're one of the best in the space. They're an amazing AU company and growing globally and doing an incredible job.
That's coming in the now. We are in with them. We're in onboarding, and we're, I think, three weeks away maybe from seeing our first outputs. Exciting. I guess the last thing on my agenda is just the global landscape. I'm going to probably shorten this section because you heard a lot about this and we've talked a lot. In fact, Andrew from oOh!media gave a perfect rundown of the core proposition driving down into different layers. I think I just wanted to point out we've basically sort of re-engineered our brand and creative engine. Part of that is efficiency by design, right? We've got our logo, distincti ve asset. We've now got a tagline, get anything done, distinctive asset. We've got a sonic device, which my lovely friend here is going to play.
Airtasker, get anything done.
That little earworm plays at the end of every TV ad in every market, every audio ad in every market. You hear it and you hear it and you hear it. I hope it annoys the hell out of enough people that they're going to remember it forever. We've also got this specific dynamic typeface that we use that's all over everything. It's really specific to us, and you know it if you see it. We've also created this family of what they call Taskies. They're sort of representatives of getting anything done on our platform. There's a couple of things about that. One is that we've got about 20 of them so far. These are just two examples. My personal favorite is Brittany Shears over here. Oops, she did it again. She's great.
The thing here is that it gives us this suite of assets which are ownable, distinctive, specifically Airtaskers. They also, unlike loads of other ways of going to market creatively, we don't have to do photo shoots. We don't have to pay licensing fees for people. There is an incredible efficiency in owning your creative assets centrally and being able to roll them out everywhere. That's something that's really powerful. It's extendable. They can become images. They can become gibbets on Crocs as we did recently for something. There is so much life in these. I guess I just wanted to highlight the core brand has these distinctive brand assets, and we are rolling those out from a central brand point and going out large globally. It's really efficient to do that.
The other thing I just wanted to point out, and this is a total nerd out from me on production, right? Producing TV commercials is incredibly expensive. That is not true. Producing good television commercials is incredibly expensive. Most companies that do that for multiple markets do multiple shoots in multiple places and spend millions and millions and millions of dollars on that. We are efficient by design. We did a shoot earlier in the year. We did it in Vietnam instead of somewhere more expensive. We shot it by design to be applicable to all three markets that we are currently in. We changed out some plants. We changed out some bird noises. We changed out voiceovers so that they are all local for those markets. Each one in their own market looks and feels local.
We shot it once over two days, out of which we got two main ads, each with a 6-second, a 15-second, and a 30-second. We have done them all in four different accents, well, three accents and a language. We have rolled that out. The cost-effective nature of the way we are building this brand globally for efficiency by design is extraordinary. We are continuing to do that. The way we are expanding globally is A, succeeding, and B, really efficient cost-wise. Because we do not have TV in this country at the moment, you will not have seen those ads. I am just going to quickly play them. Only 15 seconds each. One is a U.K. version, so you will hear one sounding like a nice plummy British accent. The other one is Spanish, just because I thought that would be fun.
This is Alan. He recently discovered the power of Airtasker to get anything done. He even used it to get a custom-made hat for his cat. Airtasker, get anything done.
The key thing here is that we mix up your everyday tasks, TV mounting, furniture assembly, all the normal things with something that's completely left field, long tail, so that we make sure, A, it's really entertaining and funny. I love the cat. B, and by the way, that was the real task. We used the real tasks for this and the next one. Someone actually posted a task that they wanted to get a hat made for their cat. That was that task. There is an outdoor one as well in Spanish. If anyone speaks Spanish, great.
[Foreign language] Airtasker. Get anything done.
That was the real task posted about having Irish dancing lessons. That is why that is in there, right? It is real. That is really me wrapping up. I just want to quickly, we have got headroom in Australia. We are going for that total addressable market. We balance the right levels of long-term brand building and short-term acquisition. That balance is really important. It is not one versus the other. It is one and the other in the right balance. We are bringing world-class measurement to make sure that every marketing dollar we spend is being spent really well so that it works for us, but so that it works for you as well. We are investing in smart, efficient tools, processes, partnerships, people to make sure we do that. We have got an incredible in-house team, again, part of being really efficient.
Going back to my opening statements, we're efficient by design. We build once and we scale globally. We're not just growing; we're growing a global brand system that makes Airtasker efficient, effective, and ultimately more valuable, and becoming more valuable with every new customer of a new country. That's actually it from me, but I do want to quickly just highlight our Formula One VCARB partnership, which drives that trust and credibility Tim talked about in the U.S. and U.K. markets. It's an incredibly powerful way to create content and to engage our Airtasker community. Please just enjoy this very short highlights reel of some of the sort of the year's stuff in VCARB world. Also a word from Peter Bayer, who's the CEO of VCARB.
He wanted to be here, but he's somewhere between Vegas and Qatar at the moment, so that wasn't going to happen for him. He's here in spirit, and he's here on screen, so enjoy.
What are you guys doing?
We just want to make a crazy, over-the-top pit crew helmet.
We want to say a big thank you to the pit crew for what they are doing this season. Ooh, we could put this job on Airtasker.
Airtasker.
We need your ideas.
We need your help.
Tick, tick, boom. We're bringing the noise. Baby, we bringing out toys. Separate me from the boys. Chopper be singing, should be on The Voice. Bang, bang, we gon' ride out. Gang, gang, we don't die out.
The partnership between Airtasker and VCARB is super cool because it's really real. It's about people doing stuff at the highest level and using their skills to make something of it.
We be disturbing the peace. Working, we serving the streets. Bang, bang, leave you asleep. Hard body, body, and not scary.
I have been in Airtasker around seven years. I have done around 3,000 tasks.
Wait, bitch, I won't need to try this, so it's no way around it. You the loudest one, it's good or quiet.
We're doing an Airtasker thing. You can use or request any of our producers to do something for you.
Body going, going peace. Bang, bang, leave you asleep. Whoo! It's go, go, go, go, go, go. You can't stop me. Who gon' stop me? You can't stop me. Who gon' stop me?
Hi everyone. I'm Peter Bayer, CEO of the Visa Cash App Racing World's Formula One team.
What an exciting partnership it has been this season with Airtasker. Right from day one, when we landed in Melbourne and saw those team-behind-the-dream billboards, we knew this will be something very special. Since then, it's only gotten better. We have even used Airtasker to help design a special tribute to our amazing pit crew, the real heroes behind the scenes. Our hospitality team's been busy too, using Airtasker to pack gift bags for our guest programs at the U.K. and the U.S. Grand Prix. It's been such a great year together, and we've loved taking the Airtasker brand with us around the world. We're really proud of what we have achieved and even more excited about what's still to come.
Hey, I always learn something listening to Fiona.
Now you've all been sitting for quite a while, so I'm going to give you a chance to fidget in your seats. Behind two seats is an Airtasker sticker. Please look behind your seat because each person is going to get this snappy VCAR cap, which has been signed by Liam Lawson and Isack Hadjar . I'm not the VCAR pep. You've got one. Fantastic. There's one. The other one, I hope is not the guy with the red pinstripe shirt that just walked out the door. Okay, we've got another one. You know it's a collection piece, signed, conversation starter, or it's just a hat. Okay? After that, we are going to move into Q&A, and I'm going to hand over to my colleague, Pete Hammond, my fellow board member. Tim, Mahendra, and Chaitanya are going to come up and answer questions. Answer questions.
Answer questions. Pete's going to ask all of the questions, and they're coming through the screen to him. Let me hand out this very special merch. Thank y ou. Oh, pleasure. That light is horrible. You?
Thanks. Maybe just I might just introduce myself first. I'm Pete Hammond. I'm one of the partners and founders of Exco Partners, or a VC fund. Earlier on today, you saw Tim did a graph which shows the GMV year on year. He shows that quite regularly. It usually starts about there, and it ends up up the top there. We invested somewhere down here, and we've been through the journey. I think we have actually been through the process of the uncomfortable process of investing and helping build a marketplace from an early stage.
I think we've also been at the other side of it when we see them get to scale and how powerful those investments can become. We're super excited about the international expansion. That's a little bit of my background, but let's head into the questions with the team. You've actually heard the pitch. Now you can actually ask the questions, the real questions you want to know. There is Slido. As we've said, you can put your questions into Slido and we'll pick up the questions. We'll try and do as many questions as we can in the limited time we've got. We'll get back to everybody with all the questions afterwards. All righty, let's get to the questions. The first one. Which Airtasker categories are most at risk from AI automation? Chai.
I guess that's for me. Actually, we could probably all have an opinion on this. I think at this point in time, it's probably just an opinion. Look, I think when I think about AI, I always think about it in two different ways. One is productivity, meaning how can it help me do my job better? And product, meaning how can we help others using AI, using features in our product, right? In terms of categories of tasks, I think it's those that are easily replicable or accelerated using AI. Although I don't think AI is at a stage yet where it's going to replace humans a whole lot, wholesale.
I do think people who are really smart, let's say smart taskers on our platform who are using AI to, let's say, do I make flyers for people or I design websites for people, they could probably do a lot more work as a result of using AI. I'm not too sure about replacement just yet, Pete, but certainly, I think acceleration.
I think one of the other, I've got the microphone, so I don't need the one. One of the things I think is pretty cool about Airtasker is we're mostly in local services and people meeting in person and doing real jobs like on the ground, like using your hands and using your own craft and skills to be able to do stuff. I think that's actually much more robust, I think, compared to some of the things which maybe can be done remotely. If you think about something like Fiverr or Upwork or Freelancer.com, I think a lot of those jobs are a little bit more disruptible by AI and automation and things.
Great. Thanks. Next question is, on the new rebookings function, what are we looking to charge and what do we think that'll have an impact on our monetization rate?
I'll take one bit easier. I'll take the first bit. I'll hand over to the other. We're charging the customer, the front end, the customer is a flat AUD 5 fee. Every time you want to rebook someone you've used before, no matter how big or small that task is, it's AUD 5. There are two things about that. One is it's the cup of coffee test. We use that in pricing a lot. It's like it's a cup of coffee. That's cool.
The other thing is we have stuff to cover, so payments and insurance, and there's lots of fees in the background that we provide and customer support that has to be covered. There has to be something, but we want it to be really low. We don't want it to be a barrier to actually people using it. On the task side, for the same reasons, we charge 1.9%. Really, really low, not a barrier. We're also looking to introduce incentives and other things that are going to actually make it net positive for them in other ways. Really low barrier to entry to use that product. Monetization-wise, I'll go over here.
I think maybe just one thing to add to the pricing for rebooking is that Airtasker, we've got a profitable business model already, which is introducing two people together.
We've got a great business model doing that. The way that we look at the rebooking opportunity is really about incremental growth that sits on top of that. To the question about how it might impact our monetization rate, I think if we're really successful, it will bring our monetization rate down, but not because the revenue is going down, but because the denominator is getting much, much, much larger. We think the opportunity in rebooking is sort of two to three X the size of the current marketp
lace. Great. When we're looking at the U.S. and the U.K. marketplaces, do they have similar dynamics to the Australian marketplace in terms of the types of tasks, the way the tasks are operating, the way the posters are operating?
Yeah, that's definitely true. We actually track or categorize tasks by similar categories. We talk a lot about it being infinitely horizontal and a long tail in the marketplace. We do not have categories by default. What we do is we use machine learning to try and categorize like tasks, like cleaning tasks, handyman tasks. What we found is when we have looked at both the U.K., Australia, and the U.S., the categorization is very similar. The top five categories are pretty consistent across all the markets: painting, cleaning, handyman, gardening, those types of things. I guess that makes it a lot easier or gives us a degree of confidence that going into these new marketplaces, we are going to get traction in those marketplaces because they behave very similarly.
Great. Next question is around the going off platform. How is the rate of off-platform leakage today compared to, say, 12-24 months ago?
Ooh, I think by definition, that's a really hard one to answer because we don't necessarily see if it's off-platform, it's completely off-platform. We do have some really interesting data about what's coming into the platform at the top of the funnel. I think what's interesting is there's literally thousands of customers per week that are coming back to the platform that are asking or indicating that they want to work with a task that they've worked with before again on Airtasker. Put into perspective, that's sort of like double-digit % of the current volume of tasks going through the platform overall. It's a big chunk, and we're starting to see that grow. The real challenge for us right now is to manage that funnel and to make sure that those customers who are asking for the thing are actually connecting with the tasker.
What we see is that the taskers are coming back to the platform to check those messages. We can see the read receipt is like, "Yep, read your message." We are not quite seeing all of those offers going back through the platform. We are designing the architecture and the incentives around that to make sure that those taskers who do the right thing are rewarded for going back through the platform. We think that is literally a 2x-3x opportunity and the data is supporting that.
Great. Just in terms of being a tasker on the platform, how does a new tasker get to actually get some traction, given there's a bit of a barrier because there are people on there that have got very good reviews and lots of reviews? How do we help the new tasker become a tasker that's successful?
You could probably take some of this as well in James's absence, but we have, in the last 12 months, massively ramped up our tasker onboarding program. We are feeding a series of things to taskers from the very beginning about, "Complete your profile. You are this many times more likely to be booked if you do that." "Make sure you customize your offers for the task. Do not just copy and paste because you are X more times likely to be booked if you have that." Same if you have a photo of your face. You are more likely to be booked as a tasker if you have a photo of your face than if you do a photo of a truck or something if you are a movie list, right?
We're also doing some online videos and webinars to help taskers understand how they can get better traction more quickly. We're putting a lot of things in place to do that because it is a challenge, right? It is a challenge because you've got people who are on there and have been on there for ages. The other thing that we're doing is the Honored Reviews program, which we're doing in overseas markets because we were new and we had competitors. We're also introducing that in Australia. If there's people who have other reviews on other platforms, we're going to allow them to bring those into Airtasker as well. That will also help those taskers to become more active more quickly on the platform.
You got it. One for you, Chai. When we're scaling internationally, what sort of technology challenges, or are we having any technology challenges in scaling globally? Like the U.S. is a massive market, so how are you finding that?
I can't take any credit for this one. My team knows I'll take credit when I can. Look, I think Airtasker has been really good about how the system has been architected over the years and made some really wise choices in some of the partners that we've picked. If I'll give you one example, it's Stripe, right? Payments is at the core of every transaction. It just works out of the box when we go turn on in the U.S., turn on in the U.K., or for that matter, really the whole world is open when we're using Stripe.
There's a whole plethora of those decisions that make it really easy for us to go and operate in these other markets. I think where I potentially see us customizing is maybe language at some stage. Maybe the U.S. English distinction from British English or Australian English is a thing that we'll want to make for our customers. If we decide to tackle other customizations that are specific to those markets, I could see us doing custom features. At this point in time, we build once and we roll it out across all three markets.
Great. We do not have too much time, so I'm picking the most liked ones in the session. Does the rate of market adoption in the U.S. and the U.K. reflect the growth that we got in Australia? Or how does it relate to the Australian growth?
I think what we're seeing in the U.S. is much, much faster, obviously. We're also putting in a lot more capital behind a playbook that we've developed over 13 years of learnings of how to build a marketplace. Much, much faster, in short. We're actually trying to make that period of investment to get those scale and that network effects much shorter. More capital in a shorter amount of time to get it up to the level it needs to be at. We wouldn't have anything less than that.
I think I'd also add, I think the market's evolved from when we did the deal with Seven West back in 2016, 2017. The consumer behavior to use the internet to buy services, the knowledge in the marketplace that you can buy local services online, people are much more trusting about buying things on the internet. I think in the new marketplaces in the U.S. and the U.K., there are obviously early competitors in those marketplaces or adjacent sort of businesses. They've done a lot of the hard work for us. They've educated that market about buying local services. We're just going to come in with a better product.
A question on the volume. What percentage of the tasks are coming from the long tail, like outside the top 20 categories?
I mean, I think that's a real—sorry. Why is that a hard question to answer about the long tail? I think that there's a long tail, which is obviously the long tail.
We saw removing a lizard, write a poem for my wife, come up with a crochet me a hat for my cat. Those things are like the obvious long tail, and they do make up a chunk of the marketplace. There is also sort of the long tail, which sits within categories. There are things that when you think of cleaning, you obviously do not think of that overall as the long tail. Within the cleaning jobs that we see, there is clean my barbecue, clean up after a party, clean up my attic, clean up the inside rims of my drum brakes on my car. All of those things are essentially long tail as well because they are things that you cannot really get done anywhere else. I think in one sense, those top five categories make up about half of the marketplace.
That tells you that it's quite condensed in many ways. If you kind of flip that around to looking at it bottoms up, you can see that the entire marketplace is like this crazy sum of all these really bespoke little things.
Great. Last question, maybe for you, Chai. How are you using the user engagement with the platform and the behavior of the user to drive the product development pipeline?
That's a good question. We do a lot of things in terms of experimentation. We do a lot of fake door tests where we'll put up a feature which isn't really there. We see how many people engage with it, how many people respond to a question in there or click a button and things like that to really sort of decide, is that a path we should pursue or not?
That is sort of one element of it. I think the other element is we do obsess about all our metrics all the time. Everything from the various different marketing channels and how that traffic is flowing in at the top of the funnel into all our landing pages, to how they are converting into poster tasks, to how they are signing up, and all the way through to paying for the task, assigning the task, and completing the task on both sides of the marketplace. There is a lot of obsession around how users are actually using the product. Based on that, talking about rebooking earlier, that is how we uncovered that, hey, there is actually this untapped demand in the platform where posters and taskers are talking about rebooking, but they are not flowing through. That is something that we want to focus on.
Yeah, we look at this all the time.
Can I add? Sorry. Just to add one thing to that. That's super important. That's probably the most data we get. I look after support as well as marketing. We also have a feedback loop that comes in from all of the support calls and all of the inbound support requests and problems and challenges that we're seeing from customers and taskers. We feed that. That's a big feedback loop. We feed that into what we're doing with product. We look at how we need to improve things because that's the most important thing we can get is feedback from those people. We also send out customer care surveys. We ask people all the time, "What would work better for you?
How can we make this a better experience for you? We both use that tech side, but also that really human element of what do people really want and need that's different to make that experience better.
Great. Thank you very much. The team will all be downstairs having drinks later. If you have any other burning questions, please grab hold of them and ask the question. There are lots of questions, so they will all be responded to in time over the next week or so. Thank you very much. I might hand back over to Tim, I think, who's going to do a few closing remarks. Thank you.
All right. Thank you so much to all of the presenters here today, to our great media partners and to Matt at Taylor Collison, as well as the ELT, and to our great board directors, Peter and Cass, and to all others who helped out. The day's not over yet. The content is over, so that's good. You're going to be able to remove your butts from the chairs at which you've been attached to for the last two and a bit hours. We have a function downstairs which we'd love for all of you to be a part of. Drinks are actually going to be one floor down. You can get there by going down the steps, or there's an elevator out here down to level one.
It's a great little function, and it's actually been supported by the team over at Red Bull who have set up a bar downstairs where you can actually get the new refreshing summer edition, White Peach Red Bull. You can tell I'm like the sponsored guys. I've been told to share the message, but in all seriousness, it's a great brand, a great beverage. Really glad for that support today. We've also got a Formula 1 simulator downstairs. If anyone thinks that they can beat the lap time, that'd be good. Actually, Bradley Delamare, who runs this facility, is a semi-professional racing car driver. If you can beat his lap time, that'd be good. I think he's got a 1:37 for Bahrain, which is only about 15 seconds off Max Verstappen. That's pretty good. We've also got some custom-made swag bags that are downstairs.
They're really beautiful bags. You can actually get them custom, custom heat-printed with whatever you want. We've got some racing balls, decals. Oh, yeah, if you'd like to, thank you. You can customize your own Airtasker swag downstairs. We all know that a large reason why you're all here are for the swag. That's always the case. Importantly, we've also got some umbrellas. If it starts storming, make sure you get your umbrella up before you leave. As a sneaky little extra in there, there's some chunky Airtasker credit in each of those swag bags. If you need to get some things done over Christmas, which we are seeing massive volumes happening over these weeks, which is really good because we're heading into Christmas, get your Airtasker credit.
Overall, really thankful to have all of you here supporting what Airtasker has been working on over a decade, but even more excited about sharing more with you and working alongside you all into the future. We've got a lot to do. We've got a really, really enduring mission and value proposition. I'm excited to be working with you all and hope to grab a drink and see you all downstairs. Thank you very much.