A warm welcome to Media and Games Invest, the second Capital Market Day here in Stockholm. It's great to see everyone back after the summer, also all of you who are online. My name is Jenny Rosberg, and I'm supporting MGI here on the ground in Stockholm. Those of you who are online, all documentation is on the IR web and on your tables here in the room.
You have like a QR code, so you can get access to all the documentation. We're gonna start with a short introduction by Remco and the business overview, and then we will walk into programmatic advertising and also the ad software platform, the supply and the demand side.
We will have a short Q&A session at 12:00PM, like 10 minutes or so. During that Q&A session, you who are online will be able to send in questions via mail. I hope you will be very active here in the audience also. After lunch, we will continue with the games portfolio and then have a strategic session of the organic growth strategy going forward.
We will have a short Q&A session also after that, those two sessions, and it will be like 10 minutes. The same here, questions from the audience online via email. Then we move on to wrap up with the financial performance and the outlook, as well as the vision for 2025. Then, with the last Q&A session, all of those of you who are online also are able to call in, so you can speak directly and ask your questions directly. I think that's about it. Let's get started. Without further ado, I would like to hand over to the CEO, Remco. Welcome.
Thank you, Jenny.
Yes.
Thank you. I'll take it. It's getting fuller every year. It's good. Yeah, also from my side, from the team, welcome everybody. Welcome everybody who's online, but also especially people that took the effort to come and to visit here. It's not only people from Sweden, but it's also people that really flew in to be here, so really happy about that. Welcome. Yeah, as Jenny said, Jenny, for, thank you very much for the introduction. We are gonna take you through a bit of the company today. I would like to first start introducing the speakers, the team who's here.
I think that's one of the main tasks today is to really also you can talk to our team, and I think that gives a bit better view than only listening to Paul and myself who are normally doing the presentations. Happy to have the team here. Sameer, if you quickly come on stage.
Sure.
Quick introductions.
All right. Myself, Sameer Sondhi. I am the co-CEO of Verve Group and CRO of MGI Group. I've been with the group now 2.5 years, and we are very passionate about what we do. We always every day we say we just started. I've spent 20-plus years in the industry, and I've worked at executive positions at InMobi, Opera, which is the famous Opera browser, and I've been founding members of a company called GroundTruth, which is a very large location-based demand source. As I said, you know, I'm very fortunate to be a part of the MGI Group. We are living our dreams, and we want to make it big. Happy to be here. Thank you.
Sameer is based in Silicon Valley?
Yeah.
West Coast?
I'm based in the San Francisco area.
Always with jet lag?
No.
Different phones, et cetera.
Melatonin helps a lot. Yeah.
Jens?
Is it turned on?
Yeah.
Yeah, Jens. Jens Knauber is my name. I'm COO of MGI and CEO of gamigo group. I'm with the company now since 10 years, actually. Exactly 10 years. I'm responsible and taking care of the game segment at MGI, and I've been in the industry now since actually over 15 years. I've been working in for another games publisher previous to MGI gamigo. Yeah, nice to be here.
Thanks, Jens.
Thanks.
Jens is based in Hamburg and also a big fan of HSV, the Hamburg football. Right. Sonja.
Hi. Great to be here. My name is Sonja. I joined MGI in April this year, so I'm not the youngest, but kind of the latest addition in the management team. I joined as a CIO. Before joining MGI, I spent a long time in corporate finance advisory mainly, but also in diverse operational roles in investment banking.
Thanks. The next speaker, I have to go down. Paul. You don't need to introduce yourself. Everybody knows you.
Just a few words. Yeah, Paul, CFO of Media and Games Invest. With the company now for 4, almost 4.5 years, already. I'm responsible for financing, controlling, investor relations. I spent a few years also in Silicon Valley working for a tech company, then a few years in investment banking, and very happy to be on this speed boat here and, also to guide everyone through the financials today.
Thanks, Paul. Based in Berlin. Ionut. Yeah, Ionut and Sameer actually just joined the C-team two days ago, so, but they are in the company for a while now, so sorry.
Thank you. Thank you, Remco.
Give an... [crosstalk]
Hi, everyone. Ionut Ciobotaru. I'm the Chief Product Officer, just very recently for MGI and, of course, CEO together with Sameer of Verve Group. I joined MGI three years ago, a bit more than three years through the acquisition of my company, which is Pubnative, a mobile SSP. Previous to that, I worked in product. I had another company, mostly focused on web development, e-commerce.
I also worked in gaming at EA a long time ago. So focusing mostly on the product and tech side of our ad platform. Very happy to be here. I think we can build a lot of great things with the teams we have and the assets we've got so far. I'll hand over.
Yeah.
To... [crosstalk]
Next, Miguel.
Thank you.
You need the mic? Yeah.
Yes, I need the mic. I could try without a mic.
Sorry, Ionut is based in Berlin. I'm forgetting that.
Good morning, everybody. Thanks for having us here. My name is Miguel Oliveira. I'm CEO of the Casual Games Business. I joined MGI gamigo through the acquisition of WildTangent, a digital games distribution platform. I have 20 years of experience in the games industry, covering everything from retail publishing through digital distribution. Excited to be here. Look forward to very interesting conversations today. Thank you.
Thanks. Miguel is based in Los Angeles.
Colleagues. Good morning, everybody.
David. Uh-huh.
Thank you. My name is David Philippson. I'm the latest member of the MGI Verve Group. I joined with the acquisition of my company, Dataseat, which I'm the CEO and co-founder of. We joined on the 1 July 2022. Previous to Dataseat, I've founded several other ad tech companies. The most notable previous to Dataseat was an attribution business that we sold to Criteo in 2013. It's a pleasure to be here, and I'm based in London.
Thanks.
Thank you.
Cool. Not to forget, who are also here is our investor relations team and maybe quickly waving. Søren is sitting here. Esther is sitting here. Jenny is presenting, who's external, but also very close part of the team now. That's who are going to present today. What do we want to do today? There's a few, let's say, main takeaways I hope that everybody is gonna take away from here.
First of all, giving you an update of the latest developments in the segments. Secondly, share deeper insights in our strategy and actions. Very important, of course, this morning we published our second quarter numbers, so giving you an overview of the numbers and also the outlook.
There's a lot happening in the markets around us, so we would like to give you a bit of how we see it and what's going on. Then, of course, as said before, getting to know the team of MGI. Bit of an overview, because it's always good if you deep dive, but it's even better if you still have an overview of what's going on. What is MGI or how did it start to happen? I started this in 2012, with taking over a distressed gaming company owned by Axel Springer. I never thought that I would do it for this period, and I never thought that it would get so big, and it still feels like we're in the beg inning of this company.
We have so many opportunities here with the company, and we have been growing quarter on quarter. That's where we started. The business, starting from gaming, we are now an advertising software platform with first-party games content. We have pivoted the company. We'll show a bit more of that during the presentation. We're ad software platform that brings together advertisers and publishers and that via data optimizes the connection between the two.
Still, let's say, honors a lot of principles, and one of them is privacy first. Privacy plays a much bigger role in this environment, privacy has become more important, and you can also use it as a key competitive factor.
From doing more than 30 M&A transactions, we have really started to build organic growth, which is good because in current times, nobody's looking at M&A. We are strongly organically growing, and I think that's also gonna be the path forward. Some financials, 69% revenue CAGR since 2018, 50% minimum year-on-year growth. It was not one big jump year, but it has really been continuous growth. 67% EBITDA CAGR since 2018. 37% revenue growth in second quarter 2022.
As said, Paul will give more details on the second quarter. 18% organic growth, 38% EBITDA growth, also our second quarter was really very nice. Shares are listed in Sweden at the Nasdaq First North Premier and in Frankfurt in the Scale segment.
We have two bonds also listed in Nasdaq, at Nasdaq and at the open market. Team of well over 800 people, 800 employees, 25 locations. I was just the week before in our Jakarta office, in our Pune office in India. It's really become pretty spread out. There are a lot of opportunities, and once you have the technology, once you have the platform, it's all about utilizing it, getting more volume on it, and that part of that is also, of course, globalization.
Yeah, the goal, profitably growing our advertising software platform and our first-party content using the strengths of the flywheel, I'll get to that later in the presentation, and building clear USPs that differentiate us from our competitors. We want to become one of the top five worldwide ad software platforms. That was a lot. We go into more detail.
First important topic, when you are a small company and growing fast, it all starts, let's say pretty, sleeves up and pragmatic. If you become bigger, especially if you're a listed company. Sorry, my microphone is here falling apart. If you get bigger, of course, the stock markets expect certain governance. Also, the company grows, so you need to have your internal control system better under control. A lot of things have to happen outside of just doing business. Governance, sustainability.
Board. We have a single tier board, which is that there is one executive in there, which is me, currently the chairman. Then we have Tobias Weitzel, an IR specialist, also running a debt fund. Elisabeth Parra, coming from the finance industry, based in London.
Antonius Fromme, working at Freenet, big telco, marketing specialist, being in the board. Top executive management team, we just introduced. All of them are here. Then going into the ESG. Important all three topics. I'll start with the environmental one. Carbon neutrality. I mean, we do digital work. Everything is digital. There, of course, you also have servers that use energy, and we have carbon footprint. One of the aims that we have as a company is to become carbon neutral.
We managed to do that from 2020 onwards. One part of that is reducing, of course, our footprint. Less, let's say, waste. The other thing is, of course, compensating if there is waste. Both things are done, but a clear focus on reducing the footprint.
We see also our role as spreading this, not only doing it for us as a company, but also making our players, especially in the games we have a lot of impact, aware of that. One of the things we do with the players is planting virtual trees. For each virtual tree planted, we plant a real tree in the real world. We also try to involve our players in this.
We do a lot more on the environmental side, but we wanted to pick for this presentation just a few highlights. Social responsibility, social part. Gender equality is one of the important topics, and we are a tech company, and it's really a shame that so little women are really studying for technical professions.
We are hiring more and more, but it is not always easy. We're really proud that with the next board, which is proposed to the AGM, we will have a 50/50 male-female split in the team. We do a lot in the team, in the group. Important to also make our team aware of those things. We have a kind of cafeteria system where people can choose between certain benefits, be it kids in a crèche or, let's say getting a bike subscription. A lot of things that we do there. There are more happening on the field. Third part, the governance part. Many big things happening.
I think that's also where we had to really make some step ups from being a small company. One of the big things that we're working on, as everybody is hopefully aware, is that we are moving our headquarters from Malta to Sweden.
There's not a lot of companies that move their seat from one country to another, especially not many companies that are listed. It's not easy, I can say, and I really respect the team because it's a lot more work and a lot more difficult than we ever thought it would be. We are well on our way. At the AGM, there are several topics that need to be voted for to really make this happen. We will move in January to Sweden according to plan. That's what we're working on.
The second is with moving to Sweden, we will also move to a Big Four auditor. What a lot of investors already wanted us to do. Christian from Deloitte is actually here. The plan is also that has to be, of course, agreed by the AGM, but we will move to Deloitte as auditor, and also Deloitte will already be involved in our current or is already basically being involved in our current numbers so that we really get a smooth transition from RSM to Deloitte.
This is things that are happening then, a lot more. That's then the board expansion. I'll go to the board on the next slide. Audit and remuneration committees. We're also gonna split the role of the chairman and CEO. I'm working too hard.
I'm doing the chairman role and the CEO role and also doing quite a bit of operational stuff. Also as good governance, I'm gonna step down as chairman. Want to further remain as a member of the board. Also that is up to the AGM, of course, to decide. Concentrate on the CEO role and, yeah, we will get new chairman. Here is the board that is going to be proposed to the AGM, which is Tobias Weitzel, who is in the board.
I introduced him quickly before in the board already for a while, knows the company very well, to become chairman. I will stay on the board and we also put the flags now, so you see that it's really very international. Elizabeth Para remains further on the board. New joiners are Franka.
She's professor of finance, has very strong experience on heading audit committees, and that's of course, the financial part is very important for us. Happy that she's willing to join. Mary Ann Halford, based in the US, very acquainted with US media part and, having worked for 20th Century Fox, at the moment with Altman Solon, which is a big advisory in on the media sector, also with OCNC.
Somebody who really knows the media sector and is able to open a lot of doors for us. Johan Roslund, I don't know if he's here actually. Yes. We have also somebody in Sweden now. Johan also, happy that he's willing to join the board.
Worked with GP Bullhound, also with Nordic Asia Investment Fund, and was also in the, I probably pronounce it wrong, Unga Aktiesparare, which is, the, let's say, the association of young share investors in Sweden, which of course is also, let's say, young shareholders are very important for us. They understand tech, so that's also for us very important to open some doors. Very happy to have this as the new board. Also here, small disclaimer, this still has to be agreed, of course, by the AGM. Remuneration committee, audit committees, also those will be installed after moving there.
A lot happening on the ESG side. Going to the business. MGI in a nutshell. We're gonna repeat this many times, but everybody should know this. A leading European ad software platform with strong first-party games content.
It's really a unique combination that we have, but that is working extremely well. Some key facts, EUR 287 million revenues last 12 months, EUR 81 million EBITDA, 37% revenue growth, 18% organic growth. We have had higher numbers, but in the current market circumstances, we're really happy with these numbers. I think it was really nice that we have had such good second quarter. 800 employees, 131% ad spend growth, so we are really growing the total ad spend. 500 software clients, which is also growing.
That's customers with more than $100,000 revenue because those are our substantial clients. 95% retention rate, which is also very nice because if you don't lose customers, you don't need to acquire the customers new.
95 is a pretty good rate, especially also that there is some consolidation, so some customers getting together, and also that's of course churn them. This number is a bit special, 98% net expansion rate. We are in a more, how to say it, difficult environment now with maybe recession coming up, uncertainty in the market. This number is saying that the customers that did SEK 100 last year in the same periods are doing only SEK 98 now. That means that we are more or less stable with our old customers, but actually lost a bit.
Last years, we have or last quarters, we have always been growing with those old customers. How come? CPMs have come down in the market, so the money that's paid per thousand ad impressions, that's reducing that.
In some sectors, we see some softness where people are pausing budgets or really doing a bit less. That's a number that went down, but we're still growing, which means that we really were able to capture a lot of new customers which are doing this growth for us. Global reach. We're basically a US company, 69% of the revenue in North America. It's a market which is much easier, not too many different languages. There's some Spanish, but for the rest, it's easy. No frontiers, big customers, big advertisers, easy to grow.
We did a lot of acquisition there. Europe, much more difficult. The different languages, different regulations in all the markets. We talk about one Europe or one EU, not really the case. Still a lot of potential to grow.
Asia, where we have really put focus in the last quarters, month, and where we see really nice traction. I just said I was in Indonesia just last week in India together with Sameer, and we see really a lot of opportunities in those markets. We have the platform, we have people locally, and we are building up those teams. That's a bit of spread. We are reaching 2 billion people, 2 billion devices. That's a lot. 625 billion ad impressions per year. That's huge.
We have 50 million daily active users. Also here, we have a big reach with this company. We have a lot of first-party content, which is our 5,000 own games, 20,000 connected mobile apps, and over 1 billion game audiences.
We have a lot of reach, a lot of things where we can leverage on and generate our revenues from. Some main happenings, and there's much more happening in this company, of course, but some main happenings in first quarter.
We started with presenting our segments a bit different a while ago. We said it's no longer gaming and media, but we say it's demand and supply. Everybody was saying, "Yeah, but your demand side is so small. Why do you show it separately?" 8% or so it was when we started showing it, I think. That is because this company, the more direct supply and the more direct demand we have, and the more they match, so ideally a 50/50, this company gets even more efficient, even more effective. That's the reason that we wanted focus on the demand side also.
We're really very happy that on the demand side, we have been growing very strongly with 76% organic growth in the second quarter. Really strong. Adding new demand sources, scaling them, and really putting a lot of focus on that. We onboarded a lot of new publishers also, so that's on the supply side. Each publisher brings, again, new content. For example, we added Pluto TV, which is a very big TV, CTV player in the US. We added Tripledot.
Yeah, many others, but really some substantial publishers that have a lot of reach with their apps, with their web, with their CTV. Then there's always topic where I try to be very careful, game launches. We are a game company. When we started, we said we are too small.
We need to have critical mass to really run a portfolio strategy when launching games. Because a lot of game companies have the money to launch one or two games, and if it doesn't work, they're bankrupt or they have a problem. You need critical mass. We did this via M&A, and we are now on a constant, continuous basis launching new games. There are 2,000 game launches per month. To really get the one jackpot or to get one big game is very rare.
It is a process where you need on a regular basis to launch games. We have done a few so far, no big hits in there. We have now two game launches, Fractured Online, an MMO. Closed beta has started. There's a playable free week. Jens will.
Jens and Miguel in their presentations will go a bit more in depth. Fantasy Town, a mobile game which is being soft launched. Both show pretty good numbers actually so far. Also here, we don't want to give you too many expectations, because statistics are against us.
Let's see. It might also be we are game company. We also really emphasizing on, yeah, how to say, launching games. On the financial side, we issued EUR 175 million bonds. While the markets were already getting a little bit shaky, the financial markets, we still managed to do that. We did a repurchase of EUR 115 million of the old bond, which was basically a rollover that we did, also extending the maturation. SEK 300 million share issue that we managed to do.
Acquisition. We did two acquisitions in second quarter. The one is AxesInMotion, a mobile gaming company giving us a lot more supply, and the second one is Dataseat, where David is here. Those are kind of puzzle pieces that we still wanted for our flywheel. With what we have now, we can very well grow organically. Focus is not on M&A. Also out of capital markets view, it wouldn't make sense to be on M&A focus at the moment.
This is nice that we still did those two acquisitions and are able to implement or include them in our portfolio. Yeah. The notice and agenda to the AGM 2022. That's what happens every year, but this year it's very special because it of course opens the road to our Swedish new home.
Talking about changing markets. The last three quarters of the year, we have seen dramatic changes. I mean, it started, the world was all in order, was all great. Then COVID came. That was already a bit of a shock for things, but now we really are in much deeper trouble. Capital markets, increased interest rates, inflation, recession fear, limiting access to capital and making capital more expensive. The economic situation, uncertainty, inflation, interest, supply chain issues, Ukraine war. We have a severe risk of a recession.
Some people are saying we are in a recession already. M&A, more expensive capital, less buyers, shifting from a seller's to a buyer's market. Ad tech, identifiers, walled gardens. We see the deprecation of identifiers, IDFA getting out of the market. Walled gardens are closing their gardens more, the Googles, the Apples. Data privacy, big time topic.
Changing and disrupting advertising structurally. Gaming, it's no longer the darling. Everybody loved gaming when COVID came. Numbers went only up, but now we see the other side. Post-COVID consolidation, also big tech players entering. Amazon, over $1 billion budget for gaming each year now. Latest rumor that Electronic Arts will be acquired by Amazon also, yes. We just saw the Google acquisition of Activision Blizzard.
There's a lot of things happening also in the gaming market. It's a great big market, but a lot of companies are really starting to see that and also the advantage of the combination. How are we in this environment or what are we doing to do? We want to be winners. We've learned that also in bad weather, it's different, but there's more good weather captains than bad weather captains that are good.
I think that we really have an opportunity to also use this phase of market downturn to our benefit. We need to be, of course, prioritizing. We need to execute well. We also need to invest. I mean, now blocking all the budgets would be really stupid. We need to innovate. Reacting to the economic situation, we want to get out of the recession whenever it's coming or if it's there, stronger. Further investments or organic growth, focus on active margin and cost management.
We still have room there. With all the acquisitions we did, there's a lot of synergy, a lot of cost saving possibilities, a lot of things that can become more efficient. We need to grow because with growth, I mean, it's a tech platform. The more you grow, the more efficient it will get. Better efficient and profitability.
The base, we are well positioned with our business model and the assets that we have, and we need to go for further scale, revenue growth, margins and synergy. Be innovative and disrupt. We have bought a lot of companies that were okay technology-wise. We have now brought that together. We are investing a lot in getting at least market standard or better or really even innovative. Strong setup we are with end-to-end multi-channel platform with games. It's a pretty strong, unique setup, and now it's about building a USP. Data, game launches, ad tech innovation.
Then accept and navigate the capital markets. We are not, as a company, gonna change the capital markets, so we need to really steer them as they are. Equity has become expensive, selective use only at the moment and focus on organic growth, no focus on M&A.
Important, we are confirming our guidance for this year. The guidance we gave earlier in the year, or let's say we updated it early in the year when we did the acquisition of AxesInMotion. We're aiming for EUR 295 to 350 million revenues for this year, and with an EUR 83 to 89 million EBITDA. It's a bit lower growth than we had in the last years. Normally, we are by far exceeding our, let's say our forecasts. Also here, I'm not ruling out that we still can be better, but this is, I think, already very solid to say in the current market circumstances that we are able to really meet our guidance.
We are continuing to pursue our vision, being one of the most desired global companies to work for, becoming one of the top five worldwide leading ad software platforms, delivering cool games, respecting our partners' values, and delivering transparency to our clients, and building clear USPs that differentiate us. I go into more depth in the last slide of this presentation later today. I'm still gonna continue. Sorry. I mean, it's a very long slot now, but it's Outlook. A bit what's happening in the overall markets. This is now the media market.
If you look at the numbers, overall market is growing substantially. What we also see that the programmatic part is even growing faster. Programmatic, where you get an automated matching, it's a bidding system between demand and supply, is the most efficient.
Especially in a world where the number of channels, the number of apps is increasing every day, it's impossible to do that just with humans pushing the buttons. Programmatic is growing. That's the part where we are working. That's what we really see.
We have, of course, we had COVID, where we saw that the market was really hurt. Still, programmatic was growing fast, actually. That's also COVID led to a decline. We have fast recovery after the COVID collapse. We saw a really strong rebounds of the market basically picking up the thing here. Then, yeah, now we're in 2022, and as you see here, July was the worst month for ad spend in two years. That's not yet in our second quarter, by the way.
It's overall the ad market is really suffering at the moment. Why? Companies are uncertain. They don't know what's coming. They want to reduce cost, and one of the easiest way to reduce cost is really freezing your marketing budget or reducing it. We have seen quite some of them.
Softness in consumer spend due to inflation, fear of recession, cuts in marketing budgets, IDFA also playing a role there because they partly the returns of the marketing budgets are not there anymore. That's the reason that we see really already in June, by the way, weakness in there or already in second quarter. We will expect or we are expecting lower growth for 2022.
As in 2020, at the moment, there's a bit of certainty or companies see that it's going upward again or that, at least the interest rates are stabilizing at a certain point, or inflation is stabilizing. We expect a pretty fast rebounds again, because as fast as people can cut their budgets, they can also, of course, open them again. Overall, market will further grow, but we will see even though this is a report for May, we will probably see a bit more pressure on it.
The pressure is also in so far good. People look also at more efficient spend, so they look also they are more open to try or to test new methods. Again, the move to programmatic probably will only speed up. Yeah, digital advertising is also the bulk.
Programmatic is now becoming the biggest part of digital advertising. Yeah, here some quotes from a JMP analyst, "We expect growth to begin to re-accelerate in the first quarter 2023 and note that our fourth quarter estimate likely represent a peak of the macro weakness." The open web took share of ad budgets in second quarter 2020. We now project that in the US, the ad spend grew 13% year-on-year compared to 11% for the walled gardens.
That's also what we see another movement, that a lot of companies are a bit fed up with putting all their data on Google, that there is also a certain fear of the walled gardens getting too strong. The open internet, the non-Apple, Googles, et cetera, is also growing at the cost of the big ones. Everything is still growing.
Games market, yeah, totally different. So we have kind of natural hedging in our company. Corona was great for gaming. Everybody in lockdown, everybody at home, no other entertainment. Great. Yeah, that led, however, to much lower growth in 2021, exactly the opposite as we saw on the media side. So games market a bit under pressure. End of lockdown. Russia, not to forget. We shut down all our activities, all our games in Russia.
So not for us, it was not a big part of revenue, but for a substantial part of the game companies, it is. Over EUR 1 billion revenues gone. IDFA affecting mobile advertising revenues, supply chain challenging, let's say the new consoles, games, et cetera. 2023. Games market expected to return to growth.
In an economic downturn, normally people are not buying a new car, not buying a new sofa, but still are spending the small amounts for their joy playing games. We don't have a crystal ball, no guarantee on anything like this, but this is to our best knowledge, let's say with the experts that we have access to, what we think that's gonna happen in these markets. MGI flywheel. This is in all our presentations now because it's really important.
We started as a gaming company, 5,000 games, and then we started to really expand this because we said as a gaming company, you can only really be efficient if you're very good in user acquisition and if you're really good at selling your ads. We were not happy with the partners in the market.
We said we build it ourselves. That was when we started via M&A, the same way actually as we built also the gaming part via M&A, building the media part and the glue between the two, or let's say the thing that's really making it work is the data part.
We'll go in more detail later, so I don't go into all the details here. This is a bit of the history of the company. We started in 2012. Roughly EUR 10 million revenues. We are now at EUR 287 million. 10 years, it's a long period, but we also made an, more than 25x revenue. But we also pivoted from a distressed gaming company to buying more gaming companies to realizing that media is important.
We rebranded and we did the listing under MGI. Here you see the really strong growth coming, where we got into the media part and where the media and the gaming are really strengthening each other. That's where we are now, a combined company, integrated ad platform with majority of the revenues on the mobile side, over 60%. Very strong desktop part, 24%. CTV, 13%, where there's a lot of growth, so that's also something that we're pursuing at the moment to get stronger there.
Digital out-of-home is small, but it's a nice add-on. If you have a customer, normally digital out-of-home is part of the budget. Big games, they also use the external, let's say, big digital spaces. That's a bit of the history. How does it go further? What's the future?
It's basically very simple. More players means more advertisers, means more publishers, means more critical mass. It's really about extending this and bringing it further forward. With AxesInMotion, we have a big mobile gamer base now. The app integrations, 20,000 doesn't sound too much. There's people that have more app integrations, but we are integrated in the biggest apps, and by that, reaching a lot of people. On the technology side, the tech side, as said, we are strong on the supply side, building much stronger on the demand side, and we are multi-channel.
The data side, very important. I shouldn't say too much because otherwise Ionut and Sameer don't have too much text anymore. Games. Yeah, we have four studios now. A number set, full margin in-house. I think that's very important to mention here. Highest data quality.
We can guarantee to our advertisers which games they are, who is playing them. It's very brand safe, fraud safe. Efficient UA for our own games. Also, Dataseat will hopefully play a very even more stronger role. It's really user acquisition. The more people we get in the games, the cheaper we get them, the better it is, of course. Improve fill rates of the ads that we have in the games and much higher CPMs.
That's the advantage for the games from the flywheel. Bit of development targeting without identifier third-party data. That's one of the challenges at the moment. Improve AI cross-channel, also finding gamers for online games on CTV and the other way around. Full data transparency and fairness, also very important topics here.
On the data side, data, as said, are the glue between the two. Behavioral data, ATOM already announced a while ago, going very well, going very nicely. It's privacy first on device where we're collecting data, which we are growing. Contextual data, which is another way of working without identifiers, which also the behavioral data is. Dataseat now part of the group Moments.AI, which we had already. First-party and third-party consent data.
That's what we have in the games, in the SDKs, and also furthermore, first-party data will stay. There we become stronger. That's the data that we have from our own games. Third-party data will go away latest in 2024 when Google also stops its identifiers. This world is over.
We've really well prepared, let's say, with all these things to be in a world where that's over. Yeah, this is our fullest picture that we have in the whole slideshow, but that's because there's a lot of logos in there. Also I've experienced that explaining the media side is much more difficult than explaining the gaming side.
Gaming is easier to understand also for investors than the media part is, but therefore, we do our best, and especially also today, put a lot of time in explaining what media is doing. Basically, it's very simple between the advertiser and the publisher. Advertiser wants to spend as little money as possible to get the best result.
Publisher wants for his ads to get as much money as possible, because he only has a limited amount of ads. It's all about matching those two. That's best done programmatic, so automated with a demand side platform, a DSP, and a supply side platform, and a data part in between.
We say we are most transparent, we are most efficient if you really cover the whole chain and not only do part of it. We work for our own demand, we work for our own supply, and we work for a lot of third parties. I'll not go further in detail, that will be done afterwards. We are in the open internet, so we also work with competitors basically, because we think that together we can just get a better result. That brings me to the end of my part. I'm coming back in the end. I would like to hand over to Sameer to take the programmatic part.
Thank you very much. All right. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It's great to be back in the beautiful city, especially when the sun is out. I'll take the next few minutes to talk on the guide to programmatic advertisements, our investments, how the ecosystem is maturing, and, you know, what is our belief and how we have to be prepared. Open internet matters a lot, and it really fuels and grows complementing the walled gardens.
70% of the media spends are actually managed by the walled gardens. The big names of Google and Meta and Amazon, et cetera. You know, we are all the other players, and we are one of them who are supporters of open internet.
What Verve Group, a part of MGI, is we are building an ad ecosystem for the open internet. Walled gardens are gigantic publishers who have you know, UGC, user generated contents and pub data, et cetera. Programmatic has created an opportunity for millions of advertisers to connect to thousands of publishers in a very efficient by means of purchasing the ads with a lot of intelligence being built on.
I'll take a step on the traditional digital advertising on how this has evolved over a period of years. It makes sense for actually us to step back a bit into the back on a few years, et cetera. It was a very manual and a cumbersome process. It was not scalable.
Advertisers would actually negotiate with a lot of publishers in a manual RFP construct. Negotiations are going on and, you know, eventually it was a lot of one-to-one, manual process in which cannot be scaled, et cetera.
That is where the evolution of programmatic and efficient means of buying the ad slots came into the picture. The essential element is to understand a demand landscape. The means and the effective means of efficiently buying the media wherein, the flow of spends . Any advertisers who are represented by an agency having their own trading desk. The demand side platforms, which are the platforms who are actually helping the advertisers to reach the mass publishers. Then we come into the flow of exchanges.
We have one of the largest, in the top five exchange today that exists in the world. Exchanges are working with the SSP, the supply-side platforms, which are always, a publisher can choose one primary or the medium, supply-side platform, or they can work with actually more, and we'll cover a bit on the next set of slides.
This is one slide that talks about the demand landscape, how, what has happened in the last few years in the world of programmatic, and how easy now it is with the technology involved, so the, so the demand-side management is more efficient. Let's take a moment to understand the supply landscape. The flow of the ad requests starting in from any publisher coming in through the mediation platforms using SDKs or any means of integration.
The mediation stacks, which are helping to basically navigate between the walled gardens and the open internet exchanges and the world. Behind the exchanges are the DSPs who are representing millions of advertisers into the system. Now, it's very important to understand that, you know, whether in the waterfall or the sequential means of how programmatic has evolved and with the new technologies that we are actually trying to be at the edge.
That's where Ionut's team is actually, you know, building and supporting all the latest technologies which are coming in. This is a very interesting aspect of things. How does the mediation work? We should talk about the old world, and we should talk about where the new world is actually getting into.
In the old days when the sophistication and the technology was not there, it was a pure sequential waterfall setup. The highest bidder in the system, there's a chance that they may win, there's a chance they may not win. What was happening there? If an ad request comes to the first exchange, if they don't fill, it goes to the next one, right? It's a pure waterfall sequential setup. Now, is this efficient? Not at all. Are the advertisers and the publishers making the maximum out of it? No.
We've seen development happening with the technology in the new world, which is a parallel priority, where same ad request goes to multiple exchanges at the same time, make it very competitive, making sure that the advertisers are reaching to the right audiences and the highest bidder would actually win in the system. We as a group are not into mediation. We are working with all the topmost mediation players in the world.
We are an SSP, by the way. Mediation is one of the features that an SSP offers. We work with the topmost mediation players, and some of the topmost mediation players happen to be very large global demand sources for us also.
This is how mediation works, and we are today ready to support through all the stacks that exist, the big ones, the small ones that exist out there to help the publisher and the entire ad ecosystem. Technology in the best way the magic happens.
We hear too many acronyms in our industry, three-letter acronyms. Real-time bidding has matured over the last few years to a great extent, and we are working with IAB, the OpenRTB standards, which are governed by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, and the communication protocol that is there today. The demand-side platforms, all the exchanges in the supply-side, they're all connected, and they talk and communicate through OpenRTB protocol messages.
RTB is one mechanism which provides an efficient way of buying at real time, making decisions into precision, what sort of creatives, making it a very a competitive bidding environment, where the pricing is also going always in best of, you know, the right favors. All of this actually happens within 300 milliseconds. Okay? There is a timeout mechanism. If there are demand sources, for any reason they're taking too much time, they're actually dropped out.
Think about an ad request generated from our device on our mobile device or any kind of channel that we use for media consumption or content consumption. All the decision-making is happening in a fraction like this, which is 300 milliseconds as a guidance.
RTB protocol has really evolved over last sort of years. There is a new version, I won't say coming every year, but there is a newer version and enhancement on the RTB protocol, and we are heavily engaged with the IAB community both in North America, Europe, across all different locations. Data, I think we've talked a lot, the importance of data enrichment signals. Now, there was a world when there were no data enhancements or enrichment, and this was a very limited insight into the consumers. More than 50% of the ads were actually wasted.
You know, it's just a spray and pray, figuring out that someone is gonna see my ad if I have big budgets. There was a very low ROAS for the advertisers and, you know, very low investments. The publishers may not be happy, fine.
Some users are actually fed up of ads. They may not even come back. The importance of data enrichment and a lot of assets that we as a group actually own, the heartbeat of the system, we have an audience group, which is actually making sure that the data coming from direct integrations from our owned and operated and the other investments that we've done for contextual or cohort, which is ATOM, is one of the products.
A very simple example is we actually get a lot of signals with user consents, location, device, demographic, application context, ad history. There are many more which can come, and that really makes the systems to be smart enough to make better decisions.
Now, advertisers, they believe in higher ROAS, and they don't really talk about CPMs, et cetera. Publishers would actually make more money because of a better yield, and publishers would actually see higher competition coming in because of the data enrichment factors which are happening to reach the right audiences. We as a group have been heavily investing into it across all different business units and the various kinda suite of products that we offer. Programmatic and the importance of targeting and data enrichment is very critical and essential for this entire ecosystem.
Measurement, extremely important. In the advertising ecosystem where there is a full funnel optimization and the measurement objectives, there is brand awareness campaigns, there is user acquisition, and the story doesn't end.
We have to make sure that, you know, companies like us are smart enough for the retention also. This is the funnel, and you know, it is expected all the marketers, they expect that companies like us who own a complete platform are actually helping and working with them to measure most of the defined KPIs and objectives. It's equally important for us to actually be super flexible in terms of what choice of measurement partner they wanna work with.
Walled gardens, they have all the homework done within home, but we are very flexible to work with the choice of measurement partners, independent measurement partners, for a company like us, which is privacy-first and brand-safe focused.
We are working with all the leading independent measurement providers, DoubleVerify, Comscore, Nexstar, primarily to help the marketers to cover the brand awareness, the brand performance, and the performance campaigns. The future forward, this is where the group is investing a lot of time, energy, resources, marketing initiatives. These are the core tenets that we believe in as a group.
We want to be an end-to-end, one-stop shop. It is supposed to be transparent. That's our dream. That's our vision. It has to be very efficient and easy means of buying media. Number two is the best in class of data and audience excellence. Are we ready?
We have invested into the world without identifiers, after buying Beemray, which is Moments.AI, and our latest addition to the family is Dataseat. Again, as I mentioned, that data and audience is very critical for the success for such a gigantic publisher platform or an ad software platform that we are offering. Transparency. Who's buying? How they are buying? What data they are using to buy? Our efforts are being put into the transparency to the extent from all the stack that we're actually offering to the customer.
Number four is cross-channel optimization. There are very few organizations who actually are capable to be very efficient across multiple channels. There are some companies with a lot of respect, they only focus on in-app.
There are companies who are very strong onto desktop and mobile web. We are one company who kinda touch bases through all possible means or screens or channels or mediums of consumption of content. We are in a position today to actually do optimize the cross-channel feature set that we actually offer to our customers. The next one is brand and performance KPI measurement. In my last slide, I actually shared. We are optimizing for the full funnel KPIs.
It's extremely important for brands' performance and brand performances that them partnering with a platform or a company like us or any others, how comfortable they are, how much they trust on us, and we are how ready we are as a solution provider to them to be integrated with them to make sure that the KPIs are met.
We are already in that position. We are investing into making sure that we are ready for the future. The last tenet is quality, ad fraud, brand safety is extremely important. You know, as a technology platform, we are working with almost all the vendors that exist out there. We have to make sure that we are always on the edge, evolving and growing our technology assets to be ready for the market to be supported.
The next presenter will be actually covering a lot in detail around the six tenets that we as a group are working in. This was a very quick glimpse of our programmatic guide. It's fun. It's difficult, but it's fun. The customers love it. That's the reason 95% of the retention rate is actually there, which Remco mentioned. I think I was quick on time. I'll pass it to the next presenter, Ionut.
Which one is the top?
This one.
Okay, perfect. Thank you, Sameer. Let me go to the next slide. That was the previous one. Before I go into each and every of the tenets, I want to talk a bit about our approach, which is quite different than others. We've been building both our platform and our vision based on where the future of advertising is gonna be, not where it is today. Remco touched on identity and identifiers, where we've been building everything privacy first.
When we look at how the ecosystem evolves and grows, it's gonna be more fragmented, and because of that, it will be more complex, and it will be identity constrained. Right? That's a set of challenges that we've been building our foundations upon.
The companies we've been buying, the product we've been building, and we're gonna talk about each and every of those, how they fit in together, and how Verve Group and MGI overall, the ad platform solve for each of these. I think it's important to know where our North Star is. Going from that, let's take them one by one. How do we solve for complexity? Well, by putting all of the pieces of the supply chain together under one roof, right?
The end-to-end stack. We're one of the first, one of the few, but we're seeing that happening more and more. I'll dive deeper into that. Now, audience, we mentioned probably the most frequent words from both Remco and Sameer already. We take a holistic approach.
We started with identifiers and PII, Personally Identifiable Information, but we've expanded into context and cohorts and there's more cool stuff coming from those learnings. In terms of transparency, Sameer already mentioned, we believe in the word open, in the open ecosystem. We believe we can create opportunities. We believe we can create value, and we believe the value distribution is better in a collaborative environment. We work towards that.
Now cross-channel optimization. We try to work across screens in a identity-constrained world where you barely have any identity, either on your phone or your computer with cookies disappearing. In CTV, it's even more fragmented.
It means that the way you reach users and personalize their ad experiences has a lot of similarities that were not there before when you had the identifiers in the old world. Which means the learnings we have from mobile where we come from, and it was the first impacted, we can move to web, and then we can apply those to CTV as well. We're gonna learn a bit of how we do that. But we think that's very important as the lines between screens are becoming blurrier and blurrier. The second part is about the full funnel.
Now that we have all the screens and we can cover the user experience from one to the other, can we solve more business cases and use cases for advertisers? From brands, as Sameer mentioned, to performance advertisers that look at ROAS, and David will speak more to that, right? We have a broader reach, and the advertising ecosystem actually split in half.
There's a lot of physical advertisers, the Fortune 500, but there's a lot of new digital advertisers and even digital native advertisers that spend just as much, and probably will evolve faster with the new channels. Last but not least, trust and quality. Again, this is related to building with brands, but also building with a lot of internal tools and systems.
What this means is that, we want an ecosystem and a marketplace that's vetted, trusted, transparent, and we work hard day and night to make sure that that's the case. Okay. I'm a bit with these buttons, figuring it out.
Let's start with the end-to-end, the ecosystem. What this means in short is we have the DSP, demand side platform, we have the SSP, supply side platform, and we have the data layer that connects all of this together and makes the pipes more efficient and smarter, serving the right ad to the right person. Why is it so important to have everything in-house? Well, first solving for complexity and fragmentation, but even more so allows us to iterate and innovate and maybe David will touch on that as well.
Having everything in-house, you don't need to depend on somebody else's roadmap and plans. You can actually do it, test it, and you can just call the gaming team and say, "Hey, we need to test this, and we need to do it in two weeks rather than in two quarters or sometimes two years with the larger codes." I think that's really important. Bringing, I would say, the entrepreneurial spirit to the richness of having all of these assets in-house, which we've been collecting and building. Yeah, I would say most of the point solutions that we acquired will not have access even to that breadth or depth of vision.
There are a few pillars which this is built, which is our open source SDK, our multi-channel optimization, and our privacy first approach, right? Coming from mobile and again to web and to CTV. All right. Again, these buttons. All right, it's counterintuitive how these ones work. Anyway, audiences, right? We've talked about it quite a few times. We take a holistic approach to audiences or a privacy first approach that you make.
On one side, we have the behavioral audiences that are based on PII data. PII means personally identifiable information. It could be IPs, it could be emails, it could be mobile IDs, whatever we have access to and whatever we have consent for to get information from the users across devices, right?
You might use one app, you might use another app, you might use a website, you might use a console. As long as we have the consent and the PII, we can create a profile based on that and understand your interests. Maybe sometimes you're gonna declare your demographic data, your age, your gender, in order to, I don't know, win a prize. We use that information to create profiles that then helps us personalize the ad experience across screens and improve the advertising results and efficiency.
That identity world is becoming more and more constrained. We've seen it's either the walled gardens or it's the privacy regulations. We see that happening across channels, right? Mobile first, web and cookies coming.
Well, it's always more delayed than not, but the future is coming sooner or later. We think by being early in learning how to adapt and how to perform at similar standards right now will allow us to transition, actually capture much more market share than the others that are, let's say, living in the legacy world.
How do we do that? Well, with probabilistic or non-identity based audiences. One is contextual, so we're gonna dive a bit deeper, which is more related to the situation rather than the user. The other one is cohorts with [inaudible] on device, and that's our ATOM solution, which I'm also gonna talk in a bit. Let's start with behavioral. Maybe I'll just turn this one around.
On the behavioral side, you've heard already the number of users we currently have within first-party data, it's around 1 billion. We have around 2 billion in our marketplace and SDK footprint. We have a broad data set already that we can use to customize. Again, it's email IDs, mostly for the gaming. It's IDFA when it's mobile, and it could be IPs, IP addresses, when it's CTV.
What's interesting here to know is that our gaming portfolio is actually as diversified as our advertising spread, meaning that we have mobile games, we have PC games, and we have games on consoles. We understand these different touch points and that's one of the inputs into our behavioral audiences.
Of course, mobile is our bread and butter as of now, and we believe mobile to be the device that you use every time, all the time, at work, in a business trip, in Stockholm, maybe the bar later, and so on. With those data points, we can understand better user behaviors, and based on that, we can serve more relevant ads. Yeah, of course, this is becoming more and more challenged, but we still think there's gonna be a baseline across channels of maybe 20%.
At least that's what we see on iOS, that will serve actually as control group for our probabilistic segments, which we're gonna talk about next. Okay. Really, I need to. Okay, let's do like this. I turn it around. Yeah.
Let's do it like this. Okay. The behavioral solution is called Verve Activate. That's an internal name. I'm not sure how much we marketed it, but in case you hear it or check our marketing materials and our sales deck, we call those Verve Activate. Our contextual solution is called Moments.AI, came through an acquisition, last year. We have a strong team in Finland working on NLP and machine learning for more than a decade.
What they do is they look at all the websites that are available in our ecosystem and they read the content, and they try to understand from that content what kind of ads would be relevant for a user, yeah. This happens in real time.
Like Sameer said, within 300 milliseconds. The behavioral audience process and segmentation is a bit longer, but this happens in real time. We look at the page and we see I wouldn't even say a person, but let's say a person we don't know who that person is is reading news about games. It's, I don't know, maybe later in the evening.
What can that mean? Well, it could mean that maybe it's a new game that he's reading about, and maybe he needs a new console, or maybe he needs a new PC. We're gonna use the situation and the context and deliver the right ad, right? Without any personal identifier, right? It's better than random or Sameer said in the past, where 50% was waste. We're trying to remove as much of that waste as possible through contextual solution. Of course, being probabilistic or not using identifiers means measurement is a bit more tricky.
That's a challenge we need to solve as an industry anyway, and probably one of the better challenges we need to solve because then we don't need to talk about privacy and identity as much, and we can focus on other things, like creating more value, building for new business and use cases. More interesting things even. Okay. Let me move to the next one, and this time it works. ATOM. So that's our solution that we built. We've been building for the last couple of years, and this is our on-device cohorts.
This is the answer to Apple's ATT, App Tracking Transparency framework. What this does, it collects signals on the device, both from the device itself, from the app itself, and so on, and over time creates a probabilistic segmentation that we then package into cohorts or of, let's say, 50 users, 100, or 1,000. Then similar to the contextual audiences, we can target that across, well, mobile devices, iOS in particular, and within our SDK, and deliver better efficiency.
What's super interesting here is that, let's say on the same device, we could have both PII, so the behavior one, as well as ATOM. What this means is that we can test and benchmark our audience against each other.
Actually, we can benchmark all our audiences against our behavioral audiences, which ideally should be the most granular, the most precise, but with maybe less scale, as of now. We might have more scale on contextual than maybe ATOM, and then we can improve those with larger scales based on the lower scale behavioral audiences. Again, this holistic approach is rather unique, or at least I haven't seen it that much.
There are a few companies that have a similar approach, obviously Google, obviously Facebook, and we can say even Apple. Or I would focus mostly on Google and Apple because they publicly launched their Privacy Sandbox, of course, and also the SKAdNetwork on iOS. There is movement, but I would say we're in good company.
We're in good company thinking about again where the future will be versus where it is now, and we feel pretty strongly about that. Okay. So now this works. Transparency. Touched by Sameer. Going deeper, we think the open ecosystem has two core pillars.
One is transparency, the other one is collaboration. Why transparency? Our whole ecosystem, the Verve one and the MGI one, is built on OpenRTB transparent auditable pipes, right? There are two ways to do it. You can do it as a black box, basically a walled garden, or you can do it as an open box or in the open and using open standards. We stand for the open side.
We've been part of Prebid for I don't know how many years, which is the largest ad serving tech, if you may, or header bidding tech in the web. We've been part of the IAB and IAB Tech Lab for, yeah, even more years. We are leveraging all of the IAB's open source specs or standards, ads.txt, sellers.json, the Transparency and Consent Framework, and more. There's actually a plan to double down on this part, again, to our point about the word open in open ecosystem.
Interestingly enough, now that, you know, there is privacy regulations and there's some antitrust lawsuits coming up, the walled gardens are opening up and you see things like open sourcing their measurement, both from Google and from Facebook, and we're very much looking forward to that, as that brings more value into the open ecosystem. We believe that can create opportunities and also distribute value better. Cross-channel optimization. I mentioned a bit before and Remco mentioned Pluto TV and Tripledot.
If you look at what Pluto TV and Tripledot have in common, it's not much. One is a streamer, a digital native app, and the other one is a game developer for casual and hyper-casual games, right? They probably don't even operate their business in the same way.
They have one thing in common, right? That's that they monetize through advertising. We think in the new world, there's gonna be a lot in common between news publishers on the web, game developers on mobile, and streamers or broadcasters moving to digital on CTV. We try to solve for each of those publishers with different tech stacks or similar tech stacks, but also taking care of their differences.
The way we're structured, we actually have pods, and we have specialists within each of the pods with 10 years of experience, as much as myself and Sameer have, in each specific field. Game development or web or TV/CTV, right?
Because those needs are as much different as they are similar and we believe there's a common core, and that's what we've been building and that's what we're putting together. We believe, again, there's many more use cases to be solved for if those dots communicate with each other. I think that's the key theme here. Let's give an example because maybe it sounds too abstract, but let's say you see an ad on your TV for a mobile game.
Well, you cannot really download from your TV, right? But then when you go home or go at work or you're in transit back, you will see the same ad in a small banner on your mobile phone, and you remember, "Ah, this game I really like. The trailer was really cool.
Maybe I'll download it now, nah? And now you download that game. We solve for a mobile app on CTV, and maybe afterwards the banner was shown on a webpage, right? Maybe half of it was done without identifiers, right? That's the kind of new business cases we can solve and create new value with the existing platform, right?
Because I think that's what putting it all of this together means, for us and for the ad-software platform. Coming back to those use cases, we cover one of the broadest range of use cases because we have all the assets in-house. Meaning it's actually not that hard for us to deliver results across the broader set of KPIs. Let's start with brands. What do physical brands want?
Like a soap brand, right? They would want you to buy soap, I don't know, every week or every month, they want frequency capping. They would want to be associated with a premium publisher, whatever they consider premium, right? That's what the brand wants, and they spend their money constantly because you need to buy those physical goods continuously, right?
Let's take a more digital brand or a brand moving from physical to digital. They would want different results. They will look at engagement. They will look at, "Hey, did you reach my target audiences and how much was within the audience? How much was outside the audience? What was your CTR? What was the time spent on page, maybe my e-commerce website?" And things along those lines.
It could be viewability or view-through rate or engagement, right? A different set of KPIs. If we look even further, we go down the rabbit hole on the funnel, we see the pure digital brands. Actually, brands that have the whole user lifecycle happening within one device. You play a game, you see an ad for another game, you download the other game, and you play it again. You might see another ad there, and the cycle continues, right?
What do they look for? Well, they look for installs or downloads. They look for purchases, they look for return on ad spend, and they look to re-engage users like Sameer mentioned, right? Yeah, of course, we haven't built everything.
A lot of it came through M&A, but that's how we put the pieces together. That's how they make sense. There's still a lot of work to make everything work, but we're already seeing the fruits of our labor, if I may say. Yeah, and very important because I said, yes, we have the end-to-end and it's important to iterate, but it was mentioned about Dataseat and gamigo and UA by Remco. What's super important is not just having the tech parts inside, but actually having the content in-house. Actually, we can test and make sure that everything I'm speaking here happens in our gaming unit as well.
Once we prove that that's the case, some business cases may actually not work, or maybe we won't succeed in making it work. We can actually move those to third parties and offering to the rest of the world, other gaming publishers, whoever is out there and doesn't have their own tech stack or hasn't bought their own tech stack. Yeah, and it's not only gaming publishers, there's other media companies, and you are coming, right? Pluto TV, as just mentioned. Moving forward to measurement.
Well, all is good if we can prove that it's good. Being part of the open and transparent ecosystem means, we don't like to grade our own homework, but we want to prove that we perform. You will hear words self-attributing networks.
Basically, walled gardens grading their own homework, not as much anymore because in an identity-constrained world, the playing field is leveled, and everyone plays by the same rules, allowing us to better compete. Nonetheless, we work with many and different measurement and attribution providers, again, covering all our business cases, right? We start from DoubleVerify, who will check for brand safety and audience verification.
We would go to Comscore and Nielsen, who again will do measurement and then household audience, again, measurement. Foursquare will do footfall. Are we driving users to specific markets and specific, I don't know, stores in the city? Last but not least, all of the usual suspects in mobile, right?
The Kochava, the AppsFlyer, the Adjust, all of these guys that measure installs, ROAS, and the mobile ecosystem. Now expanding actually into CTV, funny enough. We believe in a world built with bridges. We are checking, of course, our results, both with our gaming and internally we have some solutions, but we believe we should be open to third parties, and I think that's how, again, create and distribute value better.
Now, quality. Our industry has been sometimes plagued by malevolent players who come within the ecosystem to either destroy value or extract value, but not bring value into the ecosystem. We have a zero compromise policy for this kind of actors.
They have nothing to do with our ecosystem in general and our platform in particular. We do that in a couple of ways. The first one is internal tools and automation and internal teams that monitor and scan our inventory on a daily 24/7 basis with alerts and everything that's needed and required to make sure we have one of the most trusted and safest environment to transact and run the auctions that Remco mentions. That's one part of the puzzle. Second part of the puzzle is that we collaborate with the largest companies in cybersecurity in our space. Think of HUMAN. Think of DoubleVerify.
Some of them are publicly listed companies, as big as us that are focused only on cybersecurity and making this ecosystem more safe and more secure. We collaborate with them, and we scan every ad request and every impression. GeoEdge as well, checking also bad actors from the advertiser side, right? Because as a marketplace, we are exposed to both sides, right? Once again, build bridges, partnerships, to complement our own in-house tools and teams.
Last but not least is that we basically vet every partner we work with with the same rigor that we vet ourselves, making sure that they work with third-party vendors, doing credit checks and making sure that they have the tools and that they are not a way in for these bad players.
We're doing quite a bit of work there, though we don't talk about it that much. It all happens under the hood. It's more or less a given, right? If an advertiser comes to you, if a publisher comes to you, they expect this. Yeah. This though it costs us quite a bit of effort. That effort is being rewarded actually. We've been keeping the top list of the Pixalate top for the last couple of quarters. It means what we're doing is getting us the results we want and we're in rather good company, I would say there. You see other listed companies like ironSource in the list and some of the larger ones that are unlisted.
We're working hard, and we'll continue to work hard and make it harder for any bad player to have a way in. Again, not only in our ecosystem, but in the advertising ecosystem as a whole. With that said, I guess I will leave it to Jenny for the Q&A part.
Thank you. I will actually ask, yeah, Sameer to jump up on the stage and Remco as well.
I don't know what to do with this.
No, I take care of it. You're a software guy. Struggling with the hardware, right?
Yeah, yeah. With the hardware.
Yeah.
Hardware is. It's complicated. I'll manage this.
We open up for questions. We have microphones here in the room, so just, you know, up with the hand and we make sure to circulate the microphone around. All right. We have one question already here.
Hello. It's Fiona Williams from Edison . Can you talk a bit please about the click-through rates and CPMs that you're getting with ATOM and Moments.AI?
I will take it?
I'll take it. Yes.
I have the microphone. Okay. Very good. Let's start with ATOM. Right now, the current test we're doing and hopefully we're gonna publish something soon. I think I need a disclaimer, but we will have new results from ATOM published within this year. Or at least we're working hard to make sure we publish the new results within the year.
I would say our results have been double-digit. I don't want to give a percentage, but double-digit better than without ATOM with targeting on device and targeting the same audience. I hope our next results are gonna be better than that. Those will also be public before the end of the year.
What that means is, you target using ATOM or you target without ATOM, and you will see double-digit improvement in your ad spend, meaning that the solution works in reaching your target audience. Similar with Moments. With Moments a bit more tricky because on Moments we have a broader range of audiences and we still compete with the cookies, right? On iOS it's mostly IDFA constraint, so we're competing.
Well, it's a bit easier to compete. While with Moments, we're actually competing with cookie-based solutions. I would say right now the results are either a bit below or on par with the cookie-based solution. We haven't been yet able to outperform.
I would say we can perform better when there's no cookie, of course, right? If there's no cookie we can perform. Think of iOS, right? Which is the most, I would say, valuable users from a, well, from a income perspective and audience perspective.
There we can outperform basically anything cookie-based. In Chrome and where most of the ad spend still goes because everyone is, how do you say, clinging on this melting iceberg, which now has been prolonged for another two years, it's still a bit harder. We're working hard on that as well. Again, the measurement piece that I mentioned without cookies is a bit harder, but we're working to bridge that gap as well. Once we have the measurement figured out, I think we can get on par with those solutions. Yeah.
Yeah. What we also see is that, let's say the world is waking up because the reaction on a non-identifier world, people were just shifting budgets to Android and so on. We see that really people are waking up, customers are waking up and starting to really test new things, look at new roads. It is, yeah.
Let's say what we also saw with GDPR when it was introduced, it takes a bit of time for people to realize that the old world is not there anymore and that you need to move to the new world. In this world it's even more difficult because Android, Google is slow on this. Apple was very fast on this, so there is a bit of still two worlds.
Yeah, we see people moving to that and as said, we are really extremely well positioned. The good thing about that people are moving slow, it gives us also more time to really ramp up, to also test and especially also with our own gaming part, that makes a lot of sense. Thanks.
Okay. I think over here, right? Yeah. Please present yourself.
Thanks. Yeah. Jaimee Gilbertson at Carnegie. Great to see the team once again. Thanks for having us. Just a really quick question, kind of very specific, around the real-time bidding and the waterfall mediation methods. In theory, the RTB would be a lot more scalable and a lot quicker to use. I'm interested in kind of hearing what you think about the future of RTB versus the waterfall mediation.
Yeah.
You know, thinking that it would be probably more scalable and more optimized if you only specifically work on like the RTB.
Yeah, I can answer that. See, RTB protocol is the bare bones for the future. Okay? It's a protocol where efficient media buying happens both behind DSPs and SSPs. Mediation is something which is used mostly in the supply side. What I'm trying to say here is that mediation also uses RTB protocol, so they are independent, and the sophistication in real-time bidding actually complements towards how the header bidding and the Prebid, et cetera, is actually happening. They are not kind of like, you know, blocking each other, but they work together.
We can clearly say that Header Bidding is the future. I mean, Header Bidding, which means really that people are bidding at the same time, and that you get really the highest bid that is winning. There is less and less people that are still offering waterfall. Google, for example, is still a waterfall, and there's some that are still using it, but the future is in the interest of all parties in the market is towards Header Bidding.
Just one side might be a technical detail, but everything in header bidding happens over the OpenRTB protocol with some extension and customizations. All of the header biddings, so basically the future of mediation happens over OpenRTB in parallel and in real time.
Thanks.
Okay. We have at the back of the room. Danesh.
Hi. Danesh Sahar, equity analyst at Redeye. I have a question regarding the quality and the depth of data within the first-party data you gain from your own games, like AxesInMotion, compared to the data you get from the installed SDK base you have, and how that translates to targeting and CPM levels. I mean, is the quality of data on par with each other?
Ionut, yeah.
Yeah, I'll take that one. There's two sides of data, and one side is what is actually useful for advertising and advertising efficiency, and the other part is what's available out there overall. Obviously in the case of AxesInMotion, we have troves of data for every user, right? Because we don't see them only when they engage with ads, but we also see them when they do in-app purchases. We see them when they don't engage with ads and play other levels that don't have ads and so on. We have all of the PII information and consent, right? That we can then leverage in our own CRM, right?
We can connect the dots with other parts of our ecosystem. It's richer. Now, if you look at the SDK data, which we have also with consent, it's not that much different in terms of what you can use for advertising purpose. Meaning that, okay, we might not see the full session, but we see when the first ad is served, when the second ad, and when the third ad is served, right?
We can connect those dots and generate insights again to use for advertising. It's. I would say, yeah, there's definitely more data on the first-party relationship that we have with the users in Access, but it's not much different than what we have in our SDK and our marketplace.
Now, what's very interesting about having those first-party data relationships is that you can expand those across from the mobile games, connect them, okay. Do we have overlaps with our casual games and MMOs and all of these things?
We can be much more creative, and that's where we think there's more to uncover. Not much to say at the moment, but we think there's more value that it can be leveraged. Again, not just for mobile, but across the different screens and different user experiences or user journeys, right? We think that's where the value is going in terms of the first-party data vers us consented third-party data.
Okay. Thank you.
Hope that helps.
Another important point is, it was said, I think before by Sameer, that having own apps, own content enables us much faster development cycles. Because a new SDK before a third party starts testing it, you need to have internal testing and those things. With having our own apps available, we can much faster iterate and come to the next version of the SDK or put other things in the SDK. It allow our development cycles are a lot shorter and by that giving us a big advantage.
Yes. I would add to that what Sameer said is all of the walled gardens are basically big publishers, and they have their own end-to-end ad tech stacks, right? Maybe let me add another point which is relevant now that I thought about it.
Actually, there's other data which is equally, if not more valuable, which is the advertiser data, because you ask about the supply and that first-party data. What we have, and I guess I can say it, and others don't have, is, I mean, we have all the purchases in all of our other games, right? I would argue that's even more important because that allows us to predict and create localized, right? Even more important than the supply side data is the advertiser data, or equally as important.
We have troves of that as well. That's also super important for performance and ROAS optimization of these things. You do need to have the balance. It's not only supply side that, hey, all that data is relevant. That data from the purchase and so on, you don't have it on the SDK or on the marketplace. It comes only from the demand side or the advertising unit, the gaming portfolio. Yes. Yeah. You need to have that feedback loop or that flywheel that Remco mentioned on the data O&O gaming and then the media side.
Okay. We have another question.
Hi, Edward James from Berenberg. I've got two questions. Firstly, just on competition, how's the consolidation of the industry, particularly with large players such as Unity and ironSource potentially merging, impacting your position in the ecosystem? And is that changing what you believe the group needs on a three or four-year view to elevate yourselves to lead that industry? And as a second question, how do you think the changes in Google's ad placements framework may or may not change the industry and the way that you operate?
I can take the second one.
Sure. Maybe you take the first one.
I'll take the first one. Our perspective is the following. Actually, we see it in a very positive way for us. See, consolidation in the last few years have actually really helped emerging companies. There were so many struggling companies trying to build independent solutions. One large platform like us, where we have the capabilities to aggregate these assets and join them together. Any organization that I mean once they get into the domination mode, right? You know, whether whatever AppLovin offered in order to break that marriage, it didn't work out.
We are partners, by the way, with all of them so far. I think it opens more doors and opportunities for companies like us to build more products which are kind of like consolidated already because it fits into our end-to-end stack story. Again, you know, our read is it's pretty positive for us.
Yeah, we organized also some music as well. Sorry for that. That's. No, maybe if I can say a few more words about it. It's about time that there is consolidation in this market. If you look at the Lumascape, which is this, yeah, Luma is an M&A company in this field, and they have made every year, they stopped last year, I think, an overview of all the companies in the space. You see really thousands of companies in there.
A lot of startups, a lot of smaller companies. The way we look at AdTech, it's developing so fast that you need to have certain size as a company to be able to do those investments in innovation and change. Also without identifiers, the need to become vertically transparent.
With an identifier, you can have a zillion of parties, and everybody throws it over to the next one, and you have the identifier to work with. Without identifier, that becomes very difficult. That naturally reduces the number of parties in the market. Money for investments, identifiers are things that put this trend, let's say, into the market.
It's also better against the big walled gardens to have a few larger players instead of a zillion of small players, and also for advertisers and publishers, because each player that's in there takes this 15% or 20% or 25% take rate or even more. If you want efficient advertising, there need to be a few, a bit less parties.
It's still insane in this market that from $1 ad spend, 70% often goes in the pockets of the intermediaries and 30% is only there for the publishers, which is actual ads. There's still a lot to optimize in a sector that's basically technology driven.
Mm-hmm.
Still very inefficient.
I agree with everything Remco said. I just want to add one differentiator that I didn't mention but answers the question. Unity and ironSource, right? Just mobile and just gaming, right? Significant part of the market, but not the whole market. We cover web, we cover CTV, and identifiers are disappearing everywhere, and those markets are also growing and transforming. That's one part of the story. The other side of the story, again, their advertisers are only games.
Sure, they will expand, but in the meantime, we work with the Fortune 500, with all the world's. We have opened the platform to SMBs through Match2One, which they are here as in the room today. SMBs meaning small e-commerce and D2C and these kind of things.
On the UA side, although we're heavily in gaming, we also have other verticals already. I would say it's good for the mobile part, but it's not. I would argue it's complementary to our current position, if I may. Now let me answer the other question, which is the Android policies.
I actually think it's good. If you look at what happened in the web 10 years ago, right? Google said, "Hey, just three ads per page, visible and nice and no random crap." Pardon my French. Now they are doing the same for Android. I think that's actually great. I mean, I don't know how much you've played the hyper-casual games specifically, but there's more ads than game in there, right?
Some of them don't have the X button, or when you click it, you go on an App Store page, right? This kind of random stuff. I mean, if they operate a clean marketplace, right, or a clean ad marketplace, well, then they should care about the ad experience as well. I think on AdMob, that was already the case, but now they command it for the rest of the ecosystem. I think that's actually great. It's gonna make for more fair and more, how do you say, resilient business models versus the ones that are more shaky and built upon shaky foundations. That would be my take on that.
In the end, we don't want to annoy the consumers, but we want to, let's say, enable the whole ecosystem with ads, but without having 20 ads before you get to the content. I think also it's a good movement.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Okay. Checking in with Søren, do we have questions coming in online? Also here in the room, any more questions? Raise your hand. Everyone is longing for lunch.
We'll test afterwards if everybody.
Longing for lunch. I have one final question then.
I wanted to say we will test afterwards if everybody has understood what we have been trying to explain, because it is really complex. That's what we understand. Please don't hesitate to ask questions. We try to explain what we're doing, but it's complex, and even if you get below this, deeper into technology, it's even more complex. But yeah, it's also part of the fun of this to improve it.
Okay, one final question then. As it's so complex, it's gonna be about sales and your sales organization. I mean, software, selling software is different from, you know, driving top line with games. I'm curious to better understand actually your go-to-market strategy, direct sales, partnerships, et cetera, and also region by region. Yeah. Is it Sameer or who?
I can start.
Yeah.
You start.
I can start.
It will be the final question, then we get to lunch, I promise.
Today, luckily we happen to be very high on the supply side. I think 90% roughly, and again, Paul can give the numbers. We are on the supply side. Our strategy going forward is we want to be equally split. You know, that's really where we want to be on the demand side of things also. North America, we have a agency and a holding facing team, sales team. We are very aggressively investing to grow that. They are dealing with the holding companies for managed IOs or programmatic, which is PMPs or guaranteed binds. That's a key.
We are also ensuring that we bring that flavor to EMEA. We will continue to focus because we have a very wide spectrum of advertiser base. Fortune 500 performance-based enterprise customers, SMB customers. That's. We really wanna be in that stage and a lot of investments are already being done as we speak for us to grow.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. Yep. We have a platform, again, getting back to that, and the more volume we get on it, the better. There's of course different ways of getting volume. In small mom-and-pop shop, they will not, let's say, need a full, how to say it? They don't have a full ad tech set up, and it doesn't make sense to have a full account manager on that.
For that, we have platforms like the Matcsecond halfOne platform, where people can really put their own ads online in. It's a full do it yourself tool. We have enterprise systems where we enable larger customers to enable their customers. That's an outlet that we have. We have the possibility to do it full SaaS.
People that really want to run a full DSP themselves, we enable that for them. Also we have the possibility for people to book campaigns with us, where we basically on an IO basis, where we run them programmatically. That's the managed sales team.
We're basically covering the whole scope from a Coca-Cola who does partly this itself or partly also via what's Publicis of one of the big holdcos, up to full digital natives, which partly want to run the campaigns themselves, towards really the small shops that have some expertise, but just want to do it plug and play very simple, but also see results with that. That's what we have been building via M&A organically also, and which we are further rolling out and also rolling out globally.
Yeah. I think the global part is very important because not all markets are made equal. If you look at CTV, it's mostly in the US, while Europe is catching up. Actually we're working to scale that up as well. I would say US is the most advanced market in terms of advertising technologies. That's where we fight the good fight because we think being competitive there and winning market share there will allow us to basically expand in any other market.
Talking about global and other markets, we're taking it one step at a time. We're already now in quite a few markets between Europe, LatAm and APAC as well. We, let's say, launch new products in new market based on where the market is.
Mm-hmm.
Where we have the resources and the footprint and the marketing support to actually roll it out. It's step by step. I would say there's the opportunities out there, for us to basically launch all our product lines or most of them in each of the markets we're present in.
It's all the same technology behind it, which makes it, of course, very efficient. The more volume we run on it. Of course, you need to build up sales teams. You need to build up the local presence, and that takes time. We cannot, let's say, there's other people that have tried to conquer the world very quickly. That's not working. We also do it step by step and not all at once. With the acquisitions, of course, we had very nice possibilities also to get in. In Indonesia, for example, we have a joint venture with Indosat, which is the second largest carrier, which we are now ramping up for more volume and all those things. There's a lot of opportunities worldwide. Also here we are careful to not do everything at the same time.
A warm welcome back, everyone, and also online. Yeah, let's kick off this afternoon with the games portfolio. I welcome Jens and Miguel up on the stage.
Thank you, Jenny. Hello, everybody. Welcome back from lunch. I would say I probably have the toughest job here today, which is to make sure nobody falls into a food coma today here right after lunch. My name is Miguel Oliveira. I'm the CEO of the Casual Games business at MGI gamigo. Even though it's called Casual, it's really a very serious business.
Today, you've heard a lot about MGI's flywheel, and I think I need to press the button in order to move on here. You've heard a lot about the flywheel, especially through the eyes of our media team. This segment is gonna cover the flywheel and its effects and the benefits, mostly from a games business perspective. What does games actually mean for MGI? What does games mean for within the games business within MGI?
As Remco shared earlier, we have a variety of game studios that MGI owns, amongst them, the gamigo group, with all of the acquisitions that have been made over the years. To highlight a few, AxesInMotion has been mentioned, the most recent mobile game studio acquisition from a few months ago. KingsIsle, which was acquired last year, our MMO studio in Austin with properties like Wizard101, Pirate101, et cetera. WildTangent, actually the company that I came in through about April 2019.
Overall, our company has a portfolio of a little bit more than 5,000 casual and mobile games. In addition to that, also 10 MMO premium role-playing and strategy games that we own and operate, out of which eight are actually built on top of IP that we fully own and created.
I will focus in my presentation on the mobile and casual part of the business. Jens Knauber, our CEO of the gamigo group and also COO of the MGI Group, will focus on the MMO part of the business. What does our mobile and casual game strategy look like? There are basically three main pillars. First one is a diversified monetization strategy, second one is a synergy-driven growth approach, and the third one is betting on in-house mobile game development. Let me add a little bit more color to what it all means in detail.
With in-app purchase, free to play games, advertising, data, and subscription-based monetization, we can tap into a very diverse complementary set of revenue streams that really help us manage risk, deal with fluctuations in the market, be it seasonality or consumer trends.
It is a fantastic way to go with the trends, go with the direction where the money is coming from, without actually being just cornered into one part of the market. As far as our growth strategy, at the end of the day, what this all means in particular is everything that we've talked about when it comes to the flywheel. It's reducing the cost on the user acquisition side, while at the same time improving our monetization on the revenue generation side. I'll add a little bit more color to that, in particular through some case studies and first-party data that we generated in just a few slides.
Third but not least, we are consciously betting on in-house mobile game development, and this comes in particular because as a game studio, as a games company, gamigo has a long-standing tradition and history and track record of developing MMO games in particular. MMO games are extremely complex, very cost-intensive, and bring some of the difficulties along that we know and learned how to master. When we looked at mobile, it's exactly opposite.
Mobile game development is in general, especially mobile casual game development, is in general less, has a lower risk profile, is less complex, and therefore requires a very different and significantly lower investment profile than what we saw in MMOs. This was really encouraging for us in order to embark and embrace the in-house mobile game development.
Now, having said that, it's not enough just to bet on experience that we have and knowing that structurally it's all possible. We're still adding additional variables to the equation that help us mitigate risk and improve our chances for success even further. One of them is our successful approach to tap into government funding processes and programs that further reduce our cash outflow and investment requirements.
Above that also, our bet on licensing established IPs, which allow us to tap into existing audiences again, once more, in order to drive the success chances of new games that we launch. I look at the room and I see a lot of finance people, so I think it's fair to assume that everybody has seen a P&L in their lives.
On the left-hand side, we have revenues or cost, depending on how you structure it, and then at some point on the other side, you end up with the revenue side. You have costs and revenues. In mobile gaming or in gaming in general, you have the same thing. You have to acquire users, which is the cost side of the equation, and then you have to monetize that user, which is the revenue side of the equation.
Once more, we come back to the flywheel and all of that, as I mentioned earlier, we can use the synergies that we create between the gaming and the media side of the MGI business in order to drive higher chance of success, higher profitability, and what we all strive for, which is organic growth. We have a few case studies that I would like to share with you.
First-party data. In t his case, we're talking about a hyper-casual game, a situation where on the left-hand side you see in terms of schematic outlay our games catalog, pick a game. On the right-hand side, you see the audience, meaning consumers, gamers. In the middle, like Ionut said, a variety of different gaming platforms.
When I say gaming because, you know, is a PC a gaming platform? It can be, and is being used as such. You have PC, mobile, consoles, et cetera. When we ran those tests that I'm sharing with you here, we identified that acquiring a user costs maybe about EUR 0.15. Monetizing that user costs generates about EUR 2.
When we take that standalone game and we take that game and plug it into our flywheel environment, all of a sudden the equation changes. We've been talking about obviously how the media side of our business drives that benefit.
The net result in terms of data that we found is that we ultimately see user acquisition drop from EUR 0.15 to 0.10, and we see the monetization improve, actually double from about EUR 2 to 4. Again, use this all with a grain of salt. We're talking about specific case studies, use cases. It varies dramatically obviously by platform, et cetera, but these data points are the ones that we collected in-house.
Once more, you take improved targeting, you combine that with improved monetization, you end up with what we all want, which is organic growth, because that's what, outside of M&A, acquisitive growth is what drives the engine. Another case study is a situation where we integrated advertising technology into our casual games business, and there we took control of the entire stack, meaning from campaign creation all the way to advertising and display and delivery.
What we saw was that right from the get-go, the monetization that came in through our own sources was already coming in at a higher CPM than what we saw with everything that we had already built in. Now, the additional benefit is that it didn't just start at a higher level, it actually grew at a faster pace in terms of improvement as far as CPMs, faster than the lower CPM revenue streams.
Ultimately, that led to a scenario where by now, more than 50% of our revenues actually come from our in-house source, not because we forced it that direction, but simply because it is what makes sense because it maximizes the monetization overall. As you can imagine, that's great for the games business because we're generating overall more money, but at the same time, also the media business is taking on far more revenue and being able to generate far more revenue from our in-house inventory than ever before.
Now, with all this data in our hands, we're super excited and looking forward to integrating all this technology into even more of our games, starting amongst others with AxesInMotion, as we mentioned a couple of times already before, our most recent mobile game studio acquisition.
Talking about content, let me just share a little bit about our upcoming and current game portfolio and launch pipeline. We shared already earlier that Fantasy Town is our most recent mobile game launch. Very, very positive metrics that we've seen right from the get-go. Consumers are loving the game. I would claim that some of our employees are borderline addicted by now, which is a good thing if kept in control.
For third quarter in particular, the publishing and product team is very focused on improving all of the key metrics that one would expect from, you know, cost per install over in-app purchase through in-app advertising rates and also overall customer engagement and retention. I am super excited personally, because I'm a racing fan. Everybody, I'm sure, has their favorite genre, and mine is racing.
I'm really excited about Nitro Clash coming out later this year, once more bringing up AxesInMotion, the most recent acquisition that we made. This game leverages their racing game expertise and combines it with a modern and very enticing kart game play mechanic.
You end up actually attributing certain features to your cars and then having those cars race against other gamers. Coming out later this year, more announcements as opportune. For next year, looking into 2023, we have Golf Champions on the docket. Being a golfer myself, I have to admit, I'm super curious. I have not played it yet. Lack of time, admittedly, even though I'd love to.
In initial early stage testing has shown really positive response from consumers and gamers when it comes to the variety of different golf matching types and modes. We're betting even more on that and really expanding that proposition. Once more, 2023, that is the game that we can talk about with a name attached to that.
Last but not least, we have Stealth Project. It's a 4X strategy game, a city builder, where I would say you know, because we're gaming and gaming creates magic, and we make everything possible, we manage to have dwarfs and elves and monsters all live in harmony. Obviously, that's your job as the gamer, to keep them all in harmony. It's a city builder game.
Looks already super fun, plays real fun, and more on that as we go throughout the year, and happy to share more press releases and announcements as we go. In addition to all that, those four specific mobile games, we always continue to deploy and launch new casual games, and we continue to aim to launch about 30 per month, and the plan is to maintain that at the current pace.
I think as far as I'm concerned, before the marching band shows up again, I am done for now, and I'll pass the torch over to Jens Knauber, our group Co-CEO, gamigo group CEO, and MGI Group COO. Hold it this way 'cause then you press the right button.
Yeah, I learned it from Ionut already.
Thank you.
Yeah. Thanks a lot, Miguel. Yeah, you have learned a lot now about our mobile and casual portfolio and also a little bit about our strategy. It's on me now to guide you through our MMO business, because it works slightly different. Lifespans of users are different.
Also, development strategies are different from what we do on mobile and casual. MMO business can also be called gaming as a service because once an MMO is launched, you really have a huge bunch of people working on it to keep it maintained, and you always deliver content update. First, talking about the monetization. We have different monetization models. First of all, we are free-to-play.
Free-to-play, I think all of you know it already, but it's the game access in general is for free, and then the game monetizes either via in-app advertisement, although that's not very common in PC MMOs or console MMOs, but mainly through in-app purchases like buying swords or armor or boosters just to gain some time.
We have buy-to-play. Buy-to-play works different. Buy-to-play, you basically buy the access to the game, so one bigger purchase in the beginning, and then usually it also comes with a hybrid monetization that you still have some customization items in-game where you just can then change your character look or stuff like that. You have subscription-based monetization models. Subscription-based also can work different.
First of all, the initial access to the game can be behind the subscription model so that you pay month by month to access the game. Or, what we have, for example, in Wizard101 and Pirate101 is subscription-based combined with a free-to-play model, where the access to the game is basically for free, and then specific parts of the game and specific contents of the game are monetized via subscription model.
You still can play the game for free if you like to, but if you want to have full access to the game, you need to get a subscription. And then in-app purchases, that basically counts for all three models of monetization, so free-to-play, buy-to-play, and subscription. Our growth strategy. First of all, re-engaging players is really a key for us.
We have a huge database of customers, of players, of former players. Whenever we do new content updates or bring anything new in the game, for sure, we try to re-engage those players and try to bring them back into the game. Combined with our community services, basically what stands behind it, that's community management, social media management, also customer support. Only re-engaging players is nice, but attracting new players and customers is also nice.
What do we do there? Portfolio extensions, we have portfolio strategy, bringing new games to the market. Internationalization means expanding games to new territories. I also will show a case study some slides later.
Device expansions means if you are able to play the game currently on PC only, we will expand the game on consoles or even mobile, and that you have a cross-channel, multi-channel, experience. Development strategy for our desktop and console games really works different than for our mobile games because as Miguel mentioned already, desktop and console games to develop them from scratch in-house is complex, very cost-intensive, takes a long time, and you don't have any guarantee that it will work out.
All that together, you have a really high-risk profile when it comes to developing games from scratch. Our approach towards desktop and console games development, no in-house development from scratch, but developing existing well-known games.
Bringing into the games permanently new DLCs, new items, new patches, giving the player something to re-engage with the game. Sure, focus on licensing of strong IPs. This means in-license games from other development teams, a lot of them coming from Asia, where they have already launched their games in the Asian markets or in their territories. We have seen already KPIs for their market, so we can judge already better if those games also will work in our markets in licensing them, publishing them.
We have a resilient MMO portfolio, a dedicated customer base with multi-year relationship. That's an example of Wizard101, coming from our acquisition January 2021 from KingsIsle. Family-friendly MMORPG, which was launched, first launched in 2008 and then still always getting reworked.
Also got a big graphic update in 2018 so that the game looks more modern again. Interactive, meaningful character evolution and exciting fully voiced narrative. That also means that the whole game has voice-over, so if characters talk to each other or you talk to NPCs, it's just with voice-over. An expansive world coming with thousands of hours of diverse and engaging game content. What you can see in the middle, we have recurring revenues. 56% of our revenues are coming from players who are in the game since more than five years.
That doesn't mean they spend money month by month. This just shows how re-engaging such a game is. Sometimes they make a break of a couple of months. Whenever we deliver new game content, they come back.
15, and also a very impressive KPI, 15% of all new players which we are bringing into the game are converting into customers over time. This is possible due to multiple diverse points of sale, as we have a subscription model in the game, we have traditional in-game transactions, and we even for KingsIsle, we do retail packages, especially in US market, where we sell game cards, but also some plushies and things like that. Substantial revenues the game generated since its launch, more than EUR 450 million revenues.
More than 55 million gamers played the game since then. The target group is basically 20 to 30 years old, male and female audience. Not only Wizard101 or the KingsIsle game are showing this behavior, we also see that in our other games.
As an example, Desert Operations, which is a browser game, even 88% of the people of our customers are with us since more than five years. Wizard101, I just talked about. Fiesta Online, 69%, and Pirate101, 52%. What you also see here on that slide is that especially for Wizard101 and Pirate101, the one-year customer base is quite increasing compared to the others. That's after the takeover, we increased the marketing efforts again.
We are able to get new customers into those games and then transform them step by step into the hopefully longer with us than five years bucket. That's one of the two case studies I'm gonna show today, talking about geographical expansion. Also example is Wizard101, which we have expanded into Europe. The game was not published by ourselves in Europe when we took over the company.
The game was published by another games publisher, European games publisher, which was for us, resulting in a lower profit margin, which was for us and for the European games publisher, obviously, and for the players, resulting in delays for updates when it came to updates for Europe, because you have two companies working with each other, you have a lot of processes. For sure, there are also priorities to bring the update first on your own version and then to the other version. This always is leading to complaints from players.
What we did in May this year, actually, we took over the game and we republished it in Europe. The cooperation with the publisher was really good and really helpful, really working together to take it over, resulting in higher margins, resulting in faster releases of updates in Europe.
The game is still three or four updates behind the current version from the US version, but we're gonna publish that now throughout the year. This was leading in total from April to May. You see it, 200% increase effect on top line and this is continuing. If you look at the numbers from July, August, you also see that trend is continuing.
Next one is not in territorial expansion, but what happens if we improve a game? What happens if we bring in game content? That's what we did with Trove. We have just launched in June. In June, our biggest content update for Trove since we acquired the asset back in 2018, October 2018. The game itself was launched in 2015. It's if you look at that sign over there, that's the game graphics. It's a voxel graphic. Looks a little bit yeah like a pixel, but it's a really modern style. We acquired it in October 2018. Since then, we published 14 content updates since the acquisition.
This was also many of those content updates were smaller, but also to learn because the game is on consoles, three consoles, Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo, and on PC, to learn how that process works, to not go through the submissions.
Also, what's the need of our players? How do they react to specific contents? Last year, we started to work on the biggest content ever, as I said, published in June 2022. The recent months since we brought it online shows highest revenues since we acquired the asset. Really great effort also from the teams working on that. Post M&A fourth quarter 2018, compared to the last three months average revenue compared to fourth quarter 2018 when we took over, we see a 46% increase in revenues.
The good news is the update was structured in a way that it's replayable content for players. It's not like a usual update. Players play it for three to six months, and then they are done with the content. This update can be played and played, not forever, but for a long time. Now I skipped one. We also are doing, and especially have done in the last 12 months since we met here last time, a lot in our games.
I'm not going through every single one now, but third quarter last year, Aura Kingdom, Whipmaster was a big update with new class. Fiesta Online: Realm of the Gods, which was the preparation of an update for more updates. It was a huge dungeon with new level and everything.
Trove console update we did last year, one more. Wizard101 Lemuria update, it really increased the player engagement a lot. We have seen that in the KPIs. Trove again. Grand Fantasia was celebrating their anniversary last year in December.
In first quarter this year, Echo of Soul, Trove again, and in the second quarter this year, we have already done Wizard101 for the European server. The returns to KingsIsle and gamigo, what I just talked about, the big launch, the big Trove update I talked about, and the return of the Battle Pass for Rift. Battle Pass is an example of a subscription model. You have to subscribe for the Battle Pass once a month, and then you get extra items on top. Those big updates are driving our revenues.
Yeah, we have done a lot in the past. We also will do a lot in the future. Very excited to talk a little bit about Fractured Online. It's a licensed game from a game developer from Italy, actually. I met the guys, almost the whole team, last week in Cologne at Gamescom. It's an MMO RPG, a dynamic one. It has three character classes.
We went through some phases now, closed beta, open beta, and we just announced that the 15 September 2021, we're gonna go in early access. That's still not the commercial launch, so there's still some way to go until there. Early access is also coming with the Steam release, and it comes with a huge content update.
The second world map is gonna release with the early access. I hope I don't leak something now to the community. There's also the last missing character class getting patched for that. fourth quarter, also Realm of the Gods, new realm number four and five. In between has been already realm number two and three. As you can see, first one, third quarter 2021, was the preparation to have a long longevity of those patch lines, so to say.
In third quarter 2022, Shaiya Guild Ranking Battle update will come. second half next year, new world expansion, which is a big one for Wizard101, will come. Same as on mobile, we have one project in stealth mode. We call it Project Hammer. That's not gonna be the launch title.
It's a licensed game and, yeah. We are all excited about what did come and excited about what will come. If you wanna try some of our games, always welcome to do so. That was my last slide before I come later again, and now I would like to hand over to Sonja.
Thank you very much, Jens. Vorsichtig drücken?
Immer den.
W o? Hier.
Genau. Ne, rechts den Pfeil da einfach. Da. Ja. Ja, ja.
Okay. Thank you very much. Now, let me take you through an update on our strategy now. We have founded our robust business model on a strategy which we have implemented for the past 10 years, basically. We call that strategy buy, integrate, build, and improve.
As we already have heard, M&A has been, in the past, a very important component of the strategy, but it is not a priority now. We want to focus very much on the integrate and the build and improve pillars of the strategy.
On the integration side, the focus is on realizing synergies from past M&A. We do this by implementing cost-efficient management structures. Technical integration is a very important part by moving individual servers and tech platforms into connected platforms and the hybrid cloud. Obviously there's more cost savings to be had, as an example, by cancellation and/or renegotiation of contracts. On the build and improve side, the focus is on organic growth.
We do this by improvements in products, services, and technology, and by various initiatives to grow existing customer revenues and add new customers obviously as well. Finally, internationalization is a very important topic by expanding existing products and solutions to new markets. On the gaming side, one example would be Wizard101, bringing it to Europe, taking over the publishing, which Jens has just mentioned.
On the media side, for example, the launch of Moments.AI in the United States. Let me maybe recap again why M&A is not a priority. I mean, basically, the reasons are twofold. The first reason is that by the recent acquisitions and the acquisitions of the past, we now feel in a position that we have a very, very strong platform already. There is no obvious parts which would be missing, which would require to be added via M&A or inorganic growth in any way. The second reason, obviously, Remco has already highlighted that, is the general capital market environment.
Markets have been extremely volatile, public valuations decreasing, everybody's talking about the recession that adds further uncertainty and intransparency to what's going to happen over the next month, and the geopolitical situation obviously is another part there. One further aspect which I would like to highlight is that there still is very much a gap in valuation expectations when you look in particular at private market transactions, which we have been very active in. We feel that the valuation expectations of sellers there still haven't adjusted to the new reality.
While public markets have been decreased significantly, in private transactions, we expect valuations to further decrease, so that makes it also now not a good time for M&A. Furthermore, debt and equity capital markets, you know, the way they currently are, it's difficult to finance M&A.
Last but not least, and I think that's probably the most important point on this slide, is that our own net leverage is already at the upper end of where we want it to be, so we put a strong focus on deleveraging at the moment. Now I would like to go into an example of realizing synergies from past M&A by highlighting again Dataseat and Axis in Motion, two acquisitions which we did, and they have been mentioned many times because we are all so excited about it.
Dataseat is a DSP startup with a contextual technology. It has shown significant growth over the past years, fitting in with the high demand for non-identifier solutions. What do we get from Dataseat?
Dataseat obviously strengthens our DSP segment and adds more advertisers and additional tech to our platform. What does Dataseat get from us? How can we propel Dataseat? It's that we can allow it to upsell, to have access to further data segments and our first-party data, more game advertisers, plus we introduce a global demand via our global platform and global reach.
On the gaming side, AxesInMotion, it's a leading free-to-play mobile games developer, which enriches our ad software platform with the first-party content that it brings. With the over 800 million additional unique users, that's, I mean, a huge number. What we get from AxesInMotion is additional first-party ad spaces and data enrichment.
What Axis in Motion gets from us is a more efficient user acquisition and an absolutely better monetization of its advertising space. That's an aspect which Miguel has already highlighted. That is the flywheel. If we look at both those companies, Dataseat has shown organic growth of 63% over the last three years, annual growth. AxesInMotion has shown a growth of 36% over the last four years annually. Putting that together, we believe that the growth can even be much higher by making the flywheel spin here. Now it's my absolute pleasure to hand over to David Philippson.
Thank you, Sonja.
Pleasure.
Yeah, hold it that way around.
Yeah.
Thank you. Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for welcoming me here today. As Sonja said, my name is David Philippson, and I'm the co-founder and CEO of Dataseat. As the newest member of the MGI family, I've been asked to give a 10 to 15-minute presentation on what we do and what value we add to our clients and what kind of growth we can expect in the future.
What do we do? We are an in-app, transparent, privacy-compliant DSP, and we work with advertisers that are trying to promote their apps. We help them drive user acquisition, retargeting across promo campaigns, but that's more the headlines.
What I'd like to do is tell you a bit more about myself and my co-founder, and why we created Dataseat, because I'll be honest with you, when we started Dataseat, most people thought we were crazy. I want to explain to you a bit more about who we are and who Dr. Paul is before going into a bit of a bit more detail. My entrepreneurial journey started 12 years ago, but don't worry, I'm gonna stick to my 12, 15 minutes. I started a mobile media agency in 2010. Now, that was significant timing because that was two years after the first iPhone had shipped.
I only had two clients, but it's fortunate that these two clients were the first big advertisers in our industry to be promoting an iPhone app, and there was no way to track a download in 2010. This is when I met this gentleman. He has a Ph.D. from Oxford. In fact, he was lecturing at Oxford University when I met him. I appealed to his entrepreneurial side and encouraged him to quit lecturing and come and join me, and we created a business called Ad-X Tracking.
For those of you that are familiar with more of the details of the industry, that is what is called an MMP or Mobile Measurement Partner or an attribution platform. Again, some people are more familiar with some of the names. Adjust is an MMP. They started after us.
AppLovin bought them for $1 billion. There was AppsFlyer, Kochava and Singular. It was Paul and I that really kind of started that segment in the industry. Now, we sold that business to a company called Criteo in 2013. I became the general manager of mobile solutions at Criteo, and Paul and I were tasked with building Criteo's in-app retargeting business.
I think it's fair to say up to that point, both Paul and I had done our Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours in all things attribution and programmatic and also spending a lot of time studying Apple and trying to predict their next significant moves, which influences our industry so greatly. Now, interestingly, towards the end of my tenure at Criteo, Apple made their first significant move in privacy.
Again, those of you familiar with the detail, they introduced ITP or Intelligent Tracking Prevention 1 and 2. Now, ITP was limiting the effectiveness of first and third-party cookies in the Safari browser. Now, that was important to us 'cause it led to a hypothesis, which was it would make no sense for Apple to limit identifiers in a Safari browser and not limit identifiers in the App Store, which is significantly more important to them.
Our hypothesis was that IDFA would disappear, and that was in 2018. Again, everyone thought we were crazy. They would never do that. That would really hurt Facebook. That would really be bad for all these app developers. We're like, "Well, we don't think Apple cares," which is why we then kind of started and embarked on our own journey.
Now, why is this significant? Because starting a mobile DSP in 2019, 2020, it is crazy unless there's a significant disruption that occurs. It's crazy because it's now a mature industry, and it's a mature industry dominated by very high-valued companies. You know, it's very hard for a new entrant to enter unless there is a significant disruption effect. I'm gonna explain to you why that is important or why we've been able to kind of navigate and grow through that dynamic. It's because there is you know.
My colleagues have mentioned, but I just wanna go through a bit more detail. There's two fundamental types of bidding behavior or your ability to predict the likelihood that an impression will lead to a return on ad spend event.
It is behavioral or contextual. Now, behavioral in the app world was very much driven by Facebook, and I could summarize it by whoever has most data wins. You know, Facebook was able to gather data, you know, from all of their advertisers, from all of their publishers, and all of these other companies that were competing for the same media dollars, they had to do the same thing.
Now, many of these companies know a lot about your device. They would know how frequently you fly from Stockholm to New York, which hotels you book, whether you use Just Eat or Deliveroo to order Chinese or Vietnamese food, and whether you use games or a dating app in the evening. All of that's led to very effective advertising, but all of that was very much dependent on a persistent identifier, ability to build profiles.
Our hypothesis was that that would disappear, which would then leave you with contextual. Now, the way I summarize contextual is what advertising used to be before these big ad tech companies got hold of persistent identifiers. I would describe it as this is why the BMW would advertise in the Financial Times, 'cause contextually it's a good fit. If they are whoever has most data wins, what we are and what the world is becoming is you need to have the technology to advertise and learn.
We'll learn, and our technology will learn that this advertiser is performing very well on this publisher, on this day of the week, on this time of day, with this creative. There's many, many more variables on this device type, on this operating system version, on Wi-Fi as opposed to operator.
We learn that to drive performance. That was all the hypothesis. We'd built the technology. We're crossing our fingers, and then it happened. In fact, in June 2020, Apple announced that they were releasing iOS 14, and there would be an opt-out of IDFA, which basically meant it was, you know, it was largely disappearing.
They actually released it on the 26 April 2021. That had a significant positive impact on our business. Interestingly, Google has followed suit, or at least they've announced they're gonna follow suit. Why that's significant to us is because of all the technology that we're investing in and building and the traction we're gaining here is very much applicable to Android in the future.
This is the last two and a half years of my life. My X-axis is month-on-month. I've removed my Y-axis, but this does represent our revenue growth. I'll just give you a few timelines. You know, this in January 2020 is when Paul and I had self-funded and built our MVP, and we raised seed funding with venture capital.
The lockdowns happened and COVID, and we thought, "How the hell do we scale a global business?" Thank God we'd raised some money. Six months later, Apple announced that IDFA was disappearing. We were one of very few ad tech companies in the whole industry. We were popping champagne corks. We were right.
We actually see, you know, a way forward for our business, while the majority of other ad firms in the industry were going into disaster recovery plans. You know, how the hell are they gonna deal with it based on their profiling-based technology? Now, usually when Apple announces an operating system, it rolls out within three months. It was delayed, you know, which for me was painful at the time. It eventually was released in April 2021. Now, all iOS operating systems take a few months to propagate. It also gave us time to fully bake our solution, which then led to us launching it in November.
Since then, we have had nine months of consecutive growth, and it was around this time that I met Remco, and in July just gone, we joined MGI. Now, it would be a valid question for you to ask me, "Well, David, with a hockey stick like this, why did you sell your business?" I'll explain, because for me, it was compelling. We're pretty good at predicting the future, and my prediction is that a contextual DSP, a successful future contextual DSP, will have an SDK install base. An SDK install base gives you far greater creative control than just receiving bid requests from SSPs.
To receive it from your own SSP, you have better performance, which then gives us this virtuous circle where our demand, currently we spend $ millions, you know, on all of these other SSPs outside of our own walls, but we can now start routing our media demand spend to Verve and Smaato SDKs, which then helps them grow their SDK install base. Their SDK install base helps our performance. There is a clear one plus one equals three just from here.
When you include the MGI flywheel that's been mentioned many times, when you then start including the data capabilities and the owned and operated inventory, it then becomes more of a one plus one equals four, or even in the future, a five.
You know, there's clearly technology synergies, but that's not the only driver. As an entrepreneur or founder, whenever you have strong product market fit, that's not the only thing. You need to scale quickly and globally. To be able to join a firm that has a global presence, that has offices, you know, in multiple countries around the world, with sellers on the ground, this increases our ability to accelerate our growth and essentially, you know, be successful.
Finally, I think this is another important thing from our growth. Now, we made a strategic decision to focus on gaming. That was my decision. I wanted to focus on the biggest TAM, the most lucrative TAM. It was also the most competitive.
You know, we were fighting with the big boys, but it was a good decision because our bet was right, and then we had a good TAM, and we've got some fantastic tier one clients. But my point here is that our artificial intelligence, our machine learning capability, it knows no difference between an in-app game gem purchase or a burger purchase in a McDonald's app or a hotel booking in another app.
You know, so our capabilities are absolutely scalable across various TAMs. So those were the drivers of, you know, why we joined MGI and that particular timing. Now there are some other what I would call headwinds and tailwinds that are significantly in our favor.
Some that have been mentioned today, but there are things that I'd encourage you as investors and potential investors to look out for. I would say over the next six to 12 months, look out for Apple enforcing a ban on probabilistic attribution. That will be challenging for our competitors. It will be good for us. There was an article in the Financial Times in December just gone. It makes interesting reading. Google have announced that they'll be doing similar. Again, those are kind of macro what I call trade winds, more industry things that are in our favor.
What I call tailwinds when I'm talking is more about consumer attitudes and then brand attitudes. People care more about privacy than ever before because of all the big headline data breaches that are going on.
Brands therefore have to care more about privacy, which means that our value proposition resonates more than ever. Finally, I think now that we're part of MGI, our ability to execute on that opportunity is there. That is the end of my presentation, and I think I'm handing back over.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Yeah. Thanks, David. Really forward-looking. Very forward-looking to work with you together in the future, and for sure also the team. One team we are all of us also very forward-looking to work with in the future is AxesInMotion, which I gonna show you now, our recent acquisition in our game segment. You heard the name today a lot, and now I gonna show you what's behind the name. It's adding critical mass in mobile gaming with strong synergy and growth potential.
Why is that? First of all, they have a strong games portfolio of racing games. Their biggest flagship title is called ECDS: Extreme Car Driving Simulator. Because it takes a long time to say it all the time, we shorten it with ECDS.
ECDS was launched in 2014, but had some really major revamps. I'm gonna talk later about that. It's a flagship title, main revenue driver, and is consistently delivering strong results since 2014 until year to date. Downloads, more than 480 million downloads by today. 88% of AxesInMotion revenues are coming from ECDS, and the game actually is monetizing mainly via ad monetization. 87% of the revenues from Extreme Car Driving Simulator is coming via ad monetization.
Very important, US is being the strongest market. That's why it's also a perfect fit with our Verve Group. Car Stunt Races: Mega Ramps is one game to mention in the portfolio. It's launched in 2019. It's a stunt racing game, also very fun to play.
It's an attractive market opportunity. Prototype development only took two months. That's why it's based on the assets of Easy DS. That's why they were able to produce a prototype in a very short timeframe, bring it to the market. Downloads, more than 30 million.
Revenue share, in total of AxesInMotion, 5%, and 84% ad revenues. Then Extreme SUV Driving Simulator, it doesn't make sense to shorten that, launched in 2014 as well. It's recognized as best off-road simulator, and it's really based on advanced off-road wheel physics. Also fun to play. Only available on Google Play so far. We are considering to port it to iOS, but we also have some fresh games in the pipeline. We only have specific resources available, so we considering if we do it or not.
We have refloating the game already, and that means growing daily downloads from 25,000 to 100,000, an impressive number. 55 million downloads so far, 3% revenue share, and 97% monetized via ad revenues. We have seen for Extreme Car Driving Simulator an explosive growth in ARPDAU. What does ARPDAU mean? It's average revenue per daily active user.
The timeframe we are talking about all the time now is 2020, December 2020 until December 2021, when we compared. We have seen on iOS an increase of 204% in-app revenues per daily active users and an ad revenue growth of 19%, ad revenues per daily active users, 2020 compared to 2021.
You see here the ARPDAU has increased by almost 40, 39% on iOS and 87% even on Android. Also on Android, 123% increase in in-app purchase revenues per DAU and 65% ad revenues per DAU. IAP means in-app purchases. That's an explosive growth we have seen from 2020 to 2021. Why is that? That's what I'm talking now about.
First of all, company is founded in 2014. AxesInMotion is established. Extreme Car Driving Simulator was then launched already. Then they worked a lot on optimizing the game. Published some more games, but also worked a lot on optimizing. Successful search result rate strategy to maximize traffic. This was leading to growth.
You see here, whatever they did, it was leading to organic growth. Back in the days in 2015, the team had already 15, so the company had already 15 employees working on the game, on the games. They took two years to focus on scaling the existing portfolio.
This means really optimized the graphic, how they appear in the stores, how the onboarding of users is working, those kind of things. They were focusing for one and a half years roundabout on the operations. That also means how we gonna treat players, how we add content to the game, what kind of content do we add to the game, where do we show ads, what kind of ads do we show?
There you see a strategical way of how they were growing the game and how they were appealing the game. What they found out is that from 2014 to 2018 fourth quarter, almost five years went over, and they had a lot of learnings about Extreme Car Driving Simulator, also taken by the other games they were launching. They decided, because it was their most promising flagship title, to rebuild the game. This means give it new graphics, give it a better gameplay, which is increasing the usability, the first time experience when you enter the game. This was leading to the growth, which I have shown here in that timeframe. Yeah.
They launched that release of ECDS and with that, the company reached new all-time high results, not only in downloads, but also in monetization and revenues. Really well done by the team. That's not all, though. That's not the end of the funnel. We still have, not only with ECDS, but also with the whole portfolio and the games coming up, huge potential to grow the games further. Organic growth based on scaled and cost-efficient UA, user acquisition, keeping the full ad value chain in-house.
Now it comes where we start to talk about the flywheel for AxesInMotion. User acquisition. User acquisition is key. Company has not invested in user acquisition yet, and this was already generating more than 800 million downloads.
That also shows how appealing the game is to the user and what kind of good position they have in the stores. There is a huge synergy potential via cost-efficient user acquisition via our own tech stack based on MGI's demand-side platform, Dataseat, what you just learned from David. In-game ad monetization.
We have huge potential by cutting out the middleman in our ad stack, as well as increased efficiency as value chain and content is fully in-house. That's exactly when we talk about the flywheel, that's exactly what we talk about. New game launches. We're gonna launch two more games within the next six to 12 months, roundabout . I played both of them.
It's fun to play them, the prototypes already, and both of them are based on valuable insights from the previous games. Also there, when we launch games, we can accelerate the flywheel, new traffic, better data, good for Verve and gamigo or Axis in Motion in that case. In-game item sales. You also have seen the majority of the monetization of the games currently is happening via ad monetization. This will stay, but we still will make stronger the in-app purchase part. This means we're gonna include item shops.
We're gonna work with back-end so that we also can track the users better, those kind of things. We're gonna leverage the know-how which we have in our MMO business, where in-game item monetization is a very common thing since 15 years.
We're gonna leverage that knowledge together with the AxesInMotion team, so they are working together and get the best result out of it. Yeah, strong potential to grow this revenue stream in the upcoming years. Content updates. That's very comparable to MMO. We still will deliver content updates also for the racing game portfolio of AxesInMotion in the upcoming months and years, and this will also grow the existing player base organically. Some highlights about the company itself. Yeah, compelling portfolio of visually stunning, highly viral racing games.
So if you check out the games, they're separate. Some have a comic style art style, but really good looking, and some have a really realistic approach. Delivered record-breaking year-over-year top-line growth in 2021.
Have a proven track record in building a massive audience worldwide without any marketing, so really only organic, and now we come and add our user acquisition on top. Strong vision to expand in-game monetization mechanics and to further diversify revenue streams. That's what I talked when I was talking about the in-app purchases. We have an over 80% EBITDA margin. That's also outstanding, I would say. A really great number. Strong pipeline of new games and really highly experienced and a dedicated management team.
Here to mention not only the management team, Jesús and Alejandro, but also the full team. By today, they are bit more about 30 people. They are located in Sevilla, Spain. I've been visiting them a few times since March. 41 degrees.
That's maybe not the best experience always. The team is highly motivated, great people and really, not only fun, but they are also very professional, and they have an idea how to bring the games forward and what are their next steps.
It's really nice to work with them and the teams when they talk to each other, not only Verve and AxesInMotion, also gamigo, the people and AxesInMotion. Great. Yeah. 33% of the total revenues in 2021 were generated in the US. That's so far important. Remco mentioned we are a US company, but majority of our revenues are coming from the US. That also counts for AxesInMotion. That's perfect for Verve. They are targeting their audience over in the US.
This slide I got just gonna show short. Here we come to the flywheel. You have seen it a couple of days today. First-party data from the games are going into the data enrichment machine. Then the data enrichment machine scale distribution, monetization. This is leading to more relevant users, and this is just spinning itself. That's the perfect example how we spin our flywheel. On the right side, you see it a little bit summarized. Efficient UA brings more users. SDK integration of Verve brings more first-party data.
Monetization via Verve SSP brings up to 100% revenue increase by cutting out the middleman. In the end, our world-class US audience in real-time connected to US advertisers. It's spinning itself. Last but not least, games pipeline. Two games I've been talking about.
Jump over that quickly. Nitro Clash, it's a card-based gameplay, more in the comic style. What you are doing there is, you change the racing tracks while you are racing. This means, you also have to change the vehicles with cards, and you then can boost the cards. This means you're not only have the racing cars, you also have, like, trains or boats or snow cars and so on. Really exciting. It's fun. We have different game modes, solo game, leagues, time-limited events.
Monetization beyond ads. Ads for sure is included in all those games, is get new vehicles, upgrade them, and buy a season pass, which is then more also going towards a subscription, and both platforms will be served iOS and Android.
Basic gameplay will be free to play. Drift Master, more realistic style. Just drifting with your car. Super fun also to play, I just can say. Focus on realistic depth of drifting experience. Simplicity is critical, so there will be a thing with thumb control and intuitive actions.
I think that's, for the game audience, very important, so that really everyone can play it without study how to drift and also a wide range of game modes, solo leagues, time-limited events. You can play with friends. You can make something like groups, play with friends, and compete against other groups worldwide. A PVP element will be included and, you do progress through leagues and, monetization will be the same as for Nitro Clash with, season passes, and those kind of things.
We are currently between prototype and soft launch for both games. Excited to see them and, as said again, I'm really looking forward to further work with the team on AxesInMotion and, that's my part for today. Thanks a lot for listening.
Thank you, Jens.
Now Jenny Rosberg is coming for Q&A.
For some short Q&A session.
Yeah.
Let's bring up the team. Let's start with the room. We will have a very short Q&A session, and then we move on to Paul and Remco, and then I know we have analysts online on the phone, so we will make sure this one in between here, so it will be a short one. You're welcome with questions. Here we go. Yes.
It's Fiona from Edison Group. When you were talking about Wizard101, you were talking about acquiring the European rights. Is it common for the rights to be segregated, or is most of what you own global and therefore you can do what you like with it?
Yeah, this was a special case because we were not the original publisher of the game, so we took over the game. Usually, we do our core territories like North America, Europe, also partially South America ourselves, and then if there's an interest for other markets, we would look into out-licensing. Usually, we do Europe, North America. That's where also our offices are. We do it ourselves.
Okay.
Hi. Danesh Sahar, Redeye. Yeah, you mentioned again that you don't do development for console and PC games, but considering the synergies you gain from mobile games, where you have stronger synergies with the media segment there, how much are you looking into porting popular PC games like Wizard101, for instance, or Trove for that instance, or for that matter, to mobile?
Actually, a good question. Actually, we're looking into those kind of projects. For Wizard101, also for Trove, those are open world MMOs, so you also have to look from the technical aspect and also from the navigation, how you can port a joypad navigation to mobile. That's what the teams are looking into, and it's part of our strategy to expand devices. I cannot say now we're gonna do Trove or Wizard or both or none of them, but I'm sure at some day you will hear something about that again.
A quick follow-up on that. I mean, you mentioned also focusing more on the organic growth. I mean, initiatives like that maybe might be more interesting if you dedicate less capital to M&A, for instance, or could you speak maybe more about what you're focusing on for the organic growth?
In the gaming part now or?
Well, I mean in general. I mean, maybe porting or what else are you looking at?
Device expansion is one thing for sure, but also portfolio strategy, so really launching three to five games round about per year. We have set up a launch department which is preparing now working on the Fact Shot launch, then jumping over to the new license game. We launching games, portfolio strategy, device expansion, and we are also looking for territorial expansions also, which also could include an out-licensing to Asia as an example for some of our games. That's mainly the growth drivers. Combined with delivering for our existing games portfolio constant content.
Okay, thanks.
Welcome.
Plus, of course.
Exactly. Yeah.
more user acquisition and also more ARPU per user or ARPU.
Yeah, KPI improvements. Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay, good. Okay, any more questions? No, I think actually we move on, we come to the big Q&A session at the end. Thank you, everyone, and I would like to welcome Paul, the CFO, up on stage. Now we get the number crunching and the financials.
Welcome to the second quarter financial highlights. Starting here right away with a very strong revenue growth of 37%, which we saw in the second quarter. Very overall strong growth with also very strong underlying organic revenue growth, especially despite macroeconomic headwinds, where we saw some softness in the market already. We also overcompensated that by scale and also delivering a lot of ad impressions to end consumers, which we will show later.
We achieved EUR 78 million in total revenues in the second quarter, a very strong EBITDA of EUR 21 million and a EUR 16 million EBIT, which means in terms of growth rates, 38% EBITDA growth year-on-year in the second quarter, 47% EBIT growth and also the margins remained stable as that was also planned despite also further investments which we did.
The overall cash flow was EUR 21.3 Million, which was very strong, and a very strong cash conversion also of 92%. Overall a very strong quarter with a very strong cash generation for the MGI Group. That brings us now into the segment performance, and we have changed segment reporting in the first quarter to also now apply a more operational reporting in the end, which is in line with the transformation from a pure games company much more towards an advertising software platform with very strong first-party games content.
What we see here, and we've talked a lot about it today, is on the left side, the demand side segment, which we're growing by 104% in the second quarter, where 76% has been coming from organic revenue growth.
That was adding new clients, scaling existing clients and also products like Moments.AI, even they are still early stage, also brought a lot of new customers in, and we can already see very good results and therefore our demand side segment is growing very strongly and we also expect that in the coming quarters to further strong grow. It's not even data feed included yet, so that will also add quite nicely in the coming quarters. On the right side, we see the supply segment which we're growing with 32%. That also includes our games now which are adding also a lot of data and advertising space towards the SSP.
We were seeing a very strong organic growth of 14% despite the fact that existing customers, and that's what we saw on the net dollar expansion rate, were rather stable with 98%. As we were also adding 25 new publishers to the SSP side, we were actually also able to deliver a very solid organic growth of 14%.
Looking now into the long-term financial development, and especially in these a bit more uncertain times, I think it's also important to look back a bit and to see where the company is coming from, where it is going to. What we see here is that we have delivered very strong profitable growth now for almost eight years in a row, always scaling revenues and always scaling EBITDA and EBIT.
We have achieved now EUR 287 million in revenues on a LTM basis, with a very strong EBITDA of EUR 81 million and 64 million EBIT, and achieved a CAGR for the full group now since 2018 of 69%. We also expect to grow further and therefore also reconfirmed our guidance now for 2022 and also see a lot of growth potential as we saw today in all business units, including the games, but especially also on the advertising software platform and the combination out of both of them.
Looking now into our software clients and where a certain amount of growth of the company is also coming from. Here we also see that the ad impressions, so the ads delivered to the end consumer in the end, have constantly growing over the last years.
What we see here is in the end, the organic growth, where we were growing from 15 billion in the first quarter of 2020 to 89 billion, and that's just fully organic in the second quarter of 2022. On top we also added acquisitions like VGI, CTV, but also like the Smaato acquisition. In total, we now delivered 161 billion ad impressions in the second quarter and of which 60% were then coming from organic growth.
One thing, and usually that's also linked to revenues, but as also CPMs have been decreased overall in the market, and that's also what Remco mentioned earlier, we also saw that this is not fully translating into revenue growth.
Nevertheless, we were scaling further and as we also increased our ad impressions massively, we could also overcompensate the decreased CPMs and still generate a very strong organic revenue growth. On top, we also added a lot of new software clients. 7% quarter-on-quarter. That's not year-on-year, that's quarter-on-quarter.
More than 30 new clients, which also then enabled us to further scale and grow and that in combination with a stable net dollar expansion rate, which is also reflecting a certain softness in the market. Also comparing to first quarter where we had 125%, etc., but also combined with a very strong retention rate of our clients. On top also a very strong scale.
131% ad spend growth, which means we increased the volumes which are going through our pipes massively, even take rate CPMs, et cetera, decreasing. Overall, also our market share was increasing massively in the second quarter. Also important to mention here that also includes M&A and especially also the Smartway acquisition. Looking now to the seasonality and how especially after the transformation more from a pure games company towards an adtech software platform with strong first-party games content.
We also see a stronger seasonality in line with the programmatic advertising business. Usually the fourth quarter, so the last quarter in the year, is always the strongest because of holidays, Christmas, Thanksgiving, Black Friday, all these kind of things.
The first quarter, there you have a revenue drop of 20% to30%, and that is also something which we saw this year. In the second quarter, and that's I think also very good proof for our growth, we almost achieved already the same amount of growth or amount of revenues as we saw in the fourth quarter.
What we can expect now in the second half of the year, despite some softness in the market, is that we further grow compared to the first half year. That is also then supported by seasonality. All the Christmas and holidays which are upcoming in the second half year. Therefore, regardless of certain softness which we currently see, we also expect further strong growth for the second half year.
Looking now into the net working capital development, and that has also changed quite a bit over the years. We started as a games company in 2014 when we had a negative working capital until 2019, where we were mainly a games company, which means you have lower receivables than payables and have a positive impact also on the operating cash flow.
That has changed quite a bit in 2020 when we also decided to step more towards advertising, and therefore we have now more receivables than payables in the business, which is absolutely new normal thing. Usually, you have 60 to 90 days to collect the revenues while you pay between 30 to 45 days to the publishers, and therefore you have a positive working capital.
We have now roughly EUR 50 million, which is also eating certain amount of cash. What we have managed now over the last three quarters is especially that net working capital compared to the revenues has been decreased. We have really accelerated also the collection efforts, and which means also it has a positive impact on the cash flow.
That's also something which we really want to put a lot of focus on, because obviously there's EUR 50 million cash sitting, which can also decrease the leverage over time as we further collect the revenues. Looking now at the MGI balance sheet, which is especially important in times with a bit higher uncertainty.
On the left side, we see the intangible assets, so almost EUR 800 million, which is the majority of our assets due to the M&A transactions which we have done over many years. In the past, the impairment test was always done by Deloitte.
As we know, moving to EY, we now will transfer this task to EY. EY has a lot of experience with us because since 2018, they were doing all the M&A transactions with us, always doing the asset valuation, and therefore there will also be a very good handover at that part. Looking at the cash position, EUR 125 million. We have a very robust cash position, but further focus now is really on deleverage, but it gives us a lot of buffer and a very good feeling also in this environment.
Looking now at the long-term liabilities, here we see especially two bonds where we have also financed in the end our M&A transactions. It's 235 million bond which is maturing in November 2024, so it gives us plenty of time for this bond.
Then we even rolled over a certain amount of bonds into a new bond which was recently issued now in the second quarter of EUR 175 million, which is maturing in June 2026. Therefore, we have also diversified our debt and bond maturities and therefore have also de-risked the balance sheet. Looking at the earnout payments of EUR 95 million, there's EUR 80 million AxesInMotion included, which are mainly relating to performance targets like EBITDA.
These earnouts would just become payable in the end if we would add another EUR 25 million EBITDA to the full group. Therefore, looking at the earnouts, which would become payable over a period of three years, they would pay in the end for themselves, and therefore we also don't see an increase in leverage, even if the earnouts might come through.
Overall, very strong cash position, net interest-bearing debt of almost EUR 300 million, but also very strong equity ratio of 34%. Looking now into a few more KPIs in relation to our balance sheet. On the left side, we see that we have managed in the last five years always to be between 2x and 3x in terms of leverage, which is also our target. We are higher now with 3.7x .
Nevertheless, we have a lot of EBITDA growth in the coming quarters, a lot of free cash flow, and we expect, and we are very confident about it, that we can delever to below 3x again, on a midterm basis. On top, and that's I think also very important to mention on the right side, we see also the interest coverage ratio, and that remains very strong. That remains unchanged in the end. We have 4x interest coverage by EBITDA and therefore also have very strong credit ratios and also very strong cash position and balance sheet.
That brings us to the operating cash flow and CapEx development, and we have grown our operating cash flow massively to EUR 84 million on an LTM basis, whereof we saw EUR 54 million free cash flow after interest expenses of EUR 21 million.
These are the cash interest expenses because we always have also certain IFRS interest which are not leading to cash outs. The very strong free cash flow is in the end covering the interest expenses multiple times.
We have a limited maintenance CapEx as we don't invest EUR 5 to 50 million into a fully new MMO game and start from scratch and rather work on mobile games also using some government funding to de-risk the development risk and in the end still working on the upside potential. One thing also to mention, the expansion CapEx on the right side that increased due to the AxesInMotion acquisition, but also due to the earnout payments for KingsIsle.
Overall, I think a very good key takeaway is that we have a very strong high free cash flow and cover our interest expenses multiple times. That brings us to the guidance 2022, and we have talked a lot about it today already. There's a lot of companies currently adjusting the guidance or decreasing the guidance or even saying they cannot give a guidance at all anymore. We're really confirming our guidance, seeing also strong growth numbers overall, and therefore are expecting EUR 295 to 350 million for the full year, with a strong EBITDA of EUR 83 to 93 million.
Looking at the LTM numbers, where we have achieved already EUR 287 million in revenues and EUR 81 million in EBITDA, we see already that we are almost there, and therefore there's just a very small gap to reach our guidance, might even be already in the second quarter and the third quarter on a LTM basis. That brings us to the midterm financial targets, and these targets are usually given for the period of three to five years. Here we also expect, as we also did on the last three years in a row, to grow with a 25% to30% revenue CAGR, with a very strong EBITDA margin of 25% to30%, with an EBIT of 15% to20%.
We are also confident that we can decrease our leverage to below 3x again and again. We have outperformed them in the last three years in a row, and we are very confident that despite the current macroeconomic headwinds, et cetera, that in the next three to five years, we can really manage to grow the company with the same speed as we did in the past as well.
That brings us actually to the last slide and to the financial key takeaways. Yeah, I mean, MGI is well positioned to really navigate the cycle. We have a very strong cash position. 70% of our ad revenues is coming also from the US market, which is more recession-proof also than the European market.
50% of our EBITDA in the second quarter were still coming from free-to-play games, which rather profit in an economic downturn. We are also positioned in two very strong growth markets, which will grow in the long run and also naturally hedge each other.
As mentioned, strong free cash flow covering interest expenses multiple times, and we have diversified bond and debt maturities. We expect and we are confident that we delever over time to below 3x again. The earn-out liabilities, as we saw earlier, with the EUR 95 million coming through, then we would add EUR 25 million EBITDA on an annual basis. That also puts it in a good relationship, and therefore, reconfirming our guidance and being very confident around the future performance of the company. Herewith, I would like to hand over then to Remco for our long-term vision.
Long term with us is 2025. We are not, let's say, a communist country, which is doing 10-year things, because this market is just too volatile to talk about very long timings. Thank you, Paul, first for the numbers, of course. It's 10 years now. October, it will be really 10 years that I'm doing this. Now, a few basics of the company. This is basically the building blocks or the stairs, however we say.
First thing that makes life a lot easier, we are acting in growth markets. Gaming, media, they're both growing. A lot easier life for a company than to be in markets that are consolidating. I think that's a very important point to say. Within those growth markets, we are positioned very well on the good side of it.
We are in programmatic advertising, digital advertising, which is growing much faster or where there's, let's say, from traditional advertising to digital advertising, a movement. Games also growing. The demographics, more gamers, more countries gaming, et cetera. Then the shift towards first-party data, the shift towards contextual data. Also there we are well positioned. I think that's good to really realize this is a company that is in markets that are growing.
Second one, platform focus. There's a lot of ways to drive businesses, but at the moment you have a platform, things get more efficient. The basic platform idea is more volume on the platform is driving more efficiency because your costs basically don't increase as fast as the revenues that you get on the platform.
Also that is the second principle, more economies of scale and growing the customer base, and getting a bigger share of wallet. That's the second point or second rationale behind what we're doing. Third one, building critical mass.
When we started with gamigo, a distressed gaming company, there were a lot of people in the company said, "Today doesn't go well, but tomorrow we will launch a game and then the world looks different." Then they came with a lot of games that making billions. Life is not that easy. What we said, the least risky way to grow is not betting on games, but it's just buying companies and building critical mass. That's what we did in the gaming side.
We bought game companies, which gave us a lot bigger audience, which allowed us to do cross-selling, which allowed us to gain, to share knowledge between the parts and really build critical mass, and which most of all allowed us to really run a portfolio strategy.
We can afford one or two game launches. No, we can afford 50 game launches. Even if 49 of them are not successful, this company will not suffer from it. You really have to run a portfolio strategy in gaming. That is what we did with M&A. We built critical mass, and from that, we are now using it as a launch platform. Same media side. We said we want to strengthen the gaming side with media. We could have done everything from scratch.
I mean, it would have taken much longer, much more risk. Probably now in the current downturn of the economy, we would have stopped all those projects because they are taking too much money. What we did also there, learning from the gaming side, M&A, we made a drawing board.
We said we want to be DSP, SSP, multichannel, data, and we just bought companies that fit in there. Last puzzle blocks were basically Dataseat and AxesInMotion, mobile gaming company, and a contextual DSP, which we said, "Okay, that's what we need." Is there more? Of course, but not things that we really need to leverage and to excel our things. M&A, very important, and as Sonja said, yeah, not at the moment our focus. We have a lot of stuff.
Internally always saying, and it's not very elegant way of saying it, we acquired a lot of toys, now we have to play with them. It's time, and we have synergies and all kinds of things. We don't need M&A at the moment, and I think it's kind of fitting very well with the market phase where we're in. Also doesn't make sense to do M&A at the moment because of leverage and all these kinds of things.
With all the things that we have, it's the flywheel. It's really, and I think we have said it so many times that you probably dream of it tonight. We have the flywheel, and it's really the combination of the ad tech, first-party content, first-party data, and spinning it, the synergies.
That's where we are now. With everything that we've bought, we have really bought nice technology. We've partly bought technology that's not so great. For example, LKQD platform or LKQD tech that we bought is connected TV. Great customer base, but the technology is really terrible. We had, I don't know, three to four crashes per day, and we have now semi-stabilized it, but we will deprecate that platform. In Smaato, we also have a CTV platform.
Those are things that are happening in the background that you don't see, but there's a lot of optimization happening between the parts that we acquired. With what we have now, it's about really building USPs, really making sure that we do things more different. We have already this full vertical, the multichannel, which makes us special. There's hardly anybody in the market who has that.
We can make our platform available for SaaS. We partly do that already. Transparency. This market is totally intransparent. All the platforms, it's dark black boxes, especially Google and Apple. You don't even know where your marketing money is spent partly.
There's a lot to gain in transparency, not only towards where my ads are shown, but much more in this market. Contextual, very interesting. ATOM is one of the things that we're working on. It's now really we are working in this company, and we're further investing in USPs to further excel with what we have. This is a bit of history and a bit of outlook here. Yeah. Vision 2025, let's spin the flywheel. There's still a lot of things to do.
It's the network effect that we use between the three elements, but just to go through different parts that we can still do. Actively launching games, that's something that we have been doing. Sorry, I can better show it here because it's so big. Actively launching games. The game updates, DLCs, et cetera. I mean, Jens covered most of these parts, and Miguel. Growing the SDK base via onboarding more publishers. Porting IPs to other platforms, question that came from back.
On the data side, adding tech capabilities, AI, big data. We are hiring experts for that. We have quite a few already, but we need more. Focus on contextual data, focus on ATOM, increasing scale via first-party data, and increasing scale via partners.
Then when it comes to the tech platform, it's improving, of course, the ad platform, increasing cost efficiency, onboarding advertisers and publishers, investing in open source, which is a very special point, for example. The SDK that we have is at the moment the only open source SDK in the market. MoPub was the other one, but that was deprecated by AppLovin. There's an opportunity there because open source gives trust. It's again a point of transparency.
So that's one of the points that we further want to continue to build on and continuous innovation, which is really bringing new products into the market. So that's the flywheel. Then some headlines above it. You've seen these before, at least it's in our slides with a small tweak, by the way.
Being one of the most desired global companies to work for, that's still very important. I have to really compliment my whole team here and also the people that are not here. It's great to work with them. They're really talented. They're good managers, and that is what is building a company. One of the very important points for my—what I really rate as most important, no politics. We really go for building the company, expanding the company, and we hate people that do politics, so we try to fire them. We fire them.
Embracing diversity, global, professional, global also. Yeah, it's very different if you're in India or if you're in Indonesia or in the West Coast US. It's totally different cultures, different styles, but we make it work together. Engage, very important, innovative, and strong drive.
We want people that really want to bring this forward. Becoming one of the top five worldwide leading ad software platforms. We are now a top five mobile platform in a platform. We want to also transport that to our other platforms. Here also, transparent, open source, innovative, multi-format, omni-platform, vertically integrated. Think I covered that a few times. This one we found out was missing in the last slides, so this is what we added now. Delivering cool games. Of course, very important part of it, really the first-party content, 'cause that's also driving the whole story, the whole flywheel.
Focus on making players enjoy our games while monetizing to further invest in new content. It's not only internally no politics, we also want externally respecting our partners' values, delivering transparency to clients. There's too much tweaking in this market, too much intransparency.
We think that we can also win with really trusting the partners. When we have gaming customers, we don't use their data just as is. We would ask them for it. We pay them for it. Those things are very important. Combining our own and partner strengths, consent-based partner data sharing, and also working together with a lot of partners. Building clear USPs that differentiate us, including a white label platform, enabling companies to have their own ad software platform and control their own data. Those are our five headlines.
There's much more happening. We are 800 people, more than 800, so there's more projects than a few that we can stem. On the other hand, it's also, as I showed before, about focus and really executing the things that we do.
That bring me to the end of the presentations and, yeah, time for questions, and then we have a few drinks and stuff. We will also ask you about the format, if it's good. We were a bit afraid of going too deep into ad tech because it's really. Yeah, there's people here that are very experienced and people that less. Sometimes it's really a thick book that, yeah, it's very difficult to understand, and the deeper you go, the more difficult it gets. We want to give you insights, share these with you, and we'll also want to collect some feedback if this format is working well.
Okay. Paul, join Remco on the stage. We open up for questions and we will take one here in the room while the operator get ready with the questions on the phone.
I'm just gonna give the instructions first.
Yeah. Please do.
If you would like to ask a question on the phone, you may do so by pressing zero one. That is zero one to ask a question, but we will start with a question here from the room.
Yeah.
Fiona Williams from Edison . You've talked about adding customers. What are you finding are the main points of resistance, both on the supply and the demand side?
Sameer? Sorry.
So, um, see, the... [crosstalk]
Uh-uh.
Wait, we have a microphone.
Sameer, behind you.
Wait a second.
Here you go.
We have a... [crosstalk]
Come on up.
All right.
Come on.
Get the camera action here.
Come on up.
We are building blocks of a very large platform. Do we do everything? No. I'll give you an example. Are we good into rewarded video slots, large scale video slots? No, not today. Now having Dataseat as an asset, which is a DSP, 90% of the spends currently are on large units.
If we go towards large gaming pubs on that category, now we know that we will be there, right? That is one example. Are we the best in class to be on CTV? No. You know, we have a very fast growing business. These premium pubs, they would ask you such a difficult set of questions. "Give me all the advertisers list that you're running on PMPs. How many direct brand advertisers do you have?" Right?
We are basically, you know, taking those steps. These are some common examples. Similarly, we accessed through Smaato, we acquired mobile web and desktop assets. Are we there on every premium global publisher on the web or mobile web? No. We are still continuing to do cookie syncing with all the DSPs. We are investing into other technologies when the cookies are out. These are a few examples of resistance.
Also here it's about, of course, adding new customers on the supply side and on the demand side. When we talk about customers, it's also suppliers as well as demand side. It's of course also about scaling customers. If you work for a
customer like, I don't know, McDonald's, Amazon or whoever, they have. They use multiple channels, they use multiple agencies, often very much. The structures are very complex in the market, but it's all about delivering quality, showing that they really get money for their value for money. For us, I would say we almost work for everybody already. It's more about scaling the customers and making sure that they start buying other products instead of really new customer acquisition.
Where we're still not as strong as I would like to be is with the holdcos. The big WPPs, et cetera. That takes a bit of time. The companies that we acquired, none of them had really strong positions. Some had some positions, but that's something that we still want to further build on, where we also hire people then that have the contacts and that get us in there. There's still work to do.
Where we also see the results already with the 76% organic growth, also on the demand side and by adding also further M&A that will also bring other customers in where we can cross-sell, et cetera. There's a lot of synergy effects which we can create going forward. I think also due to the new segment reporting, we can really see already quarter by quarter now, that the strategy also works out from a financial perspective.
Mm-hmm. Okay.
There's still room, still a lot of room ahead. We talk about a EUR 500 to 600 billion market, sorry. We have peanuts in that, so we still have to grow.
Okay, should we go on the phone or take more questions? Okay, we go.
Go.
Yes.
Edward James from Berenberg. Just got a couple of questions around FX and organic growth. Could you just explain what the FX impact is to the organic growth in second quarter? Sort of how does that compare on a constant currency base to where the business was last year? A second question to that, if we look at the last 12 months of revenue and we gross up, say, third quarter, fourth quarter last year for the FX environment we're in now, how does that compare to the guidance range? Because we probably are already there. Does that imply an extreme sort of slowdown in constant currency organic growth as a result?
Yeah, maybe to answer that. We don't report FX. There's a few percentage points where we had positive tailwinds also in the second quarter from it. Maybe also to mention, we also have a lot of costs in US dollars and therefore on EBITDA and free cash flow basis, it's fully balancing out.
We had, I think, EUR 300,000 for the first half year in terms of profits from FX because the positive and negative effects were offsetting and therefore, yeah, there is a certain effect. We also were showing a lot of strong organic growth, I think, on the demand side where it's also somewhat impacted by FX, but it's not a very big impact on that end.
Overall, our company is scaling quite nicely. One thing which impacted obviously also certain revenue growth is that also the CPMs have been decreased, but that was also then overcompensated by further ad impressions which we were delivering to end consumers and therefore, due to a lot of traffic, could still also generate good organic growth.
Anyone more from the room? Yes.
Danesh Sahar from Redeye, speaking about the balance in the gaming portfolio. You mentioned in the report that free-to-play gaming is very recession-proof. But at the same time, the mobile games you're monetizing through ad spending, which is not that recession-proof. Can you speak a little bit about the gaming portfolio where you have the MMO games which are supported more by in-app purchases and subscriptions, which might be more recession-proof?
Shall I take it or Jens? Jens, come on. Come on the stage.
Ye ah. Yeah.
We have the expert here, so.
To be honest, I didn't get the question to 100%. We further will monetize our mobile games via in-app advertisement, but also further improve our in-app purchases in our mobile games. As an example, AxesInMotion for Extreme Car Driving Simulator, we're gonna integrate an item, so to say, an item shop where you can buy cars, all those. Because we also see that there's a high potential to grow those revenue streams.
Then for sure, when we talk about the MMO build business, there's no plan to integrate in-app advertisement at the moment. That's just not what you do in big PC MMOs. There we further go on monetizing by subscriptions and in-app purchases, so further adding content.
It's just what we did the last 12 months, just continuing that for the MMO business and mobile, indeed also setting a second focus parallel to in-app advertisement on in-app purchases and then again, user acquisition via our own.
Okay. Yeah. The question was basically if you're seeing that the MMO or PC console is more stable in a recessionary environment than the mobile.
It depends on how you monetize your mobile games for sure. If you have a purely ad monetized mobile game, yes, I would say MMO is maybe a little bit more stable, but we have so much opportunity with our mobile portfolio that I would not give you a hard yes on that. I would say we have so much opportunity that we still will see growth, organic growth also together with UA for growth, that we will see organic growth even on our mobile games portfolio in a down-going recession market. Yeah.
There are some headwinds because the CPMs go down. With IDFA, some people have started spending less or let's say, stopped some spends. We see indeed that there is less spent on games. On the other hand, there is so much potential that we have, first of all, because we are not dependent on the IDFA with contextual stuff that we have. Secondly, we have so much more growth and also margin improvement that we can realize, with doing it via our own ads part, that we don't see the market pressure that a lot of others see.
A quick follow-up. You don't report the gaming segment separately anymore in detail. Could you give some color on how much is PC console versus mobile?
We don't report these numbers anymore. The only thing which we can say is in the end that we have a very stable MMO portfolio. Also, the KingsIsle acquisition had a single-digit organic growth year-on-year. Obviously we added also a lot of mobile games now, especially also with the AxesInMotion acquisition, where we see a pretty nice double-digit organic growth. That is something which we don't take into account yet because that's just after 12 months. Overall, we still have a very solid MMO portfolio, but expanding way more and more also towards the mobile space.
Yeah. Thanks.
Okay. Any more questions in the room? Should we also check with the operator?
Yes. For you on the phone, as a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, you may do so by pressing zero one. As of right now, we don't have any questions on the phone lines, so let's continue in the room maybe.
No, we have one at the back here.
Perfect.
Yeah.
Thanks. Just with regards to the mobile segments of the advertising business. We've seen within casual games and hyper-casual games that sort of downloads are sort of normalizing, but probably normalizing a lot faster than most people thought because user acquisition is becoming more difficult.
The question I guess I'm asking is, how much of the ad inventory is sold to other gaming companies, i.e., a gaming, a casual gaming app trying to acquire users from another casual gaming app? And how much of that portfolio is also hyper-casual? Because hyper-casual as a segment's gonna come under quite a lot of pressure.
What I guess what I'm trying to understand is, as we see the normalization in hyper-casual and casual, how exposed is the business to that, and therefore is growth there just more of a market share shift from using identifiers to contextual, and how hard is that going to be to offset?
Your question is already showing how complex this business is. It's, I think, Sameer, if you can give an answer.
What we do here is all the publishers that work with us, we are one of the top five mobile exchanges today. Selling this inventory, we don't block unless and until it's a recommendation from a publisher that do not expose me to this advertiser. We have a growing base of performance-based DSPs, and I can name a few. These performance-based DSPs, it's their wish, it's their choice whether they want to advertise on a hyper-casual or a casual or a ton of non-gaming premium publishers or so-called, et cetera. We do not restrict it. It's at the choice of these DSPs.
Now, within our own Dataseat choice of which publishers to go for, where the performance is, it's a very new addition to the family, and we will be more scientific towards the best approach on formalizing, you know, the right audience to reach on.
Sorry, just as a follow-up to that, noticed that quite a few of the sort of very large casual gaming companies, be that Rovio or King, where they've got very big brands, are sort of shifting more to top-of-funnel types of engagement because basically trying to identify specific users is quite difficult. In that context, your flywheel, do you think that sort of positions you better compared to, you know, even some of the, you know, the AppLovins of this world or the ironSource, et cetera, because they are much more focused on sort of the bottom end of that funnel?
I would say.
Yeah.
Let David take this one.
Mm-hmm.
Ionut. I mean, they're fighting already. Sorry.
No, I think you're on.
You're on.
No, I thought.
No.
Very good advice. Good question, because I do agree. These publishers that were monetizing through pure performance because the demand side could identify which users, that monetized incredibly well. That has become harder for the publishers, so I completely agree.
A good way to fill that is, as you say, start going up the funnel. You know, so you can then start working more with brand, more with agency, more on, you know, increasing that upper funnel percentage of the business. I think you would agree, within MGI, we do have different demand-side platforms. I think Matcsecond halfOne is one, Platform161 is another.
They are very much, more so than what we are, you know, I'm more selling to those, you know, hardcore performance gaming companies and will remain in performance 'cause that's where we specialize. I think one of the strengths of MGI is that they do have different demand-side platforms that focus on different parts of the market. Really, there's a nice hedge there. Yeah, I do agree with your observation, and I think there'll be more brand spend coming through different DSPs.
Might not be mine, but honestly, delivering a brand campaign is easy. Yeah, it is. You know, it's the performance stuff that's hard, but if you can fill up some of those gaps, you know, with brand dollars from Mediacom and Coca-Cola, then we'll take that all day long.
Ionut wants to add something to that, so Ionut.
Okay.
It was a good question.
Open up.
You're getting everyone involved.
It's a very good question.
Add something else to the conversation. Once you reach, let's say, full penetration in one channel, let's say mobile, and let's say there are certain challenges now with IDFA and so on, what do you do as a business, right? You look at where else can I grow? You look at, hey, which other digital segments are coming up and growing every year with double digits and so on, right? One would be CTV, right? We're experts in brand.
We push audiences for top of the funnel, right? It was on my slides before. We also layer audiences there, so we don't just randomly send brand ads on CTV, but we know which audiences, which households could be more interested in casual games for your example. Maybe we follow up with a banner with Dataseat and get the conversion as well if we so desire, right? That's what I wanted to add to that part.
Thank you. Now we need two more questions to get Miguel and... [crosstalk]
Exactly.
Sonja also on the stage.
Sonja and Miguel, join up on the stage because if we don't have any more questions, I would like to have the whole team up here. Remco, I think it's time to wrap up, so I'm gonna hand over to you for the final remarks.
Yeah, I would like to, this is impolite, start to thank the team for what they did and what they're doing and how they're presenting here. Really very happy to work with these talents and to bring this company forward. I would like to thank all of you, people here, people online, but all our investors, all our partners, you make it possible that we do this. You believe in us, you invest in us, and, yeah, we will do our utmost best to further build value in this company.
I hope we were able today to convince you or to show you what we are onto, and that this company really has a very bright future. But there's also still a lot of work to do this, to get further. We are ambitious. We want to grow this company, and we would like to thank you to be on board here. There will be time for further questions, with coffee. Thank you very much.