Welcome to ATG's mid-year earnings. I'm joined by our CFO, Tom Hargreaves, and by our Director of IR, Becky Edelman. Today, we'll be taking you through our results and through the financials, as well as through the outlook. Needless to say, it's been a volatile external market with the Ukraine post-COVID, the tech sell-off, inflation and looming recession. In light of that backdrop, I'm especially happy to share that ATG has done well, and that we have what we believe is a good path forward to continue to do well. We'll cover that shortly, as well as our revised guidance, which as you saw today is going up. If you can move to slide five, please. Before going into the meat of the presentation, I just wanna share again ATG's vision.
We play a major role in both of these areas, and so, ATG is unlocking the value of the secondary goods market, and we're accelerating the growth of the circular economy. I think the progress we've made against this market backdrop is testament to that structural shift and the overall momentum that we have against both of those objectives. If you move to slide 6. How do we do it? This is just a little bit of a reminder because we have both new people and returning, but what ATG does is we connect auctioneers and their curated specialized inventory to a global bidder base.
Today, we connect over 4,000 auction houses that are using our technology and listing roughly 30 million items per year to bidders who generate over 180 million web sessions per year for those auctioneers. We bring clear value to both sides. On this slide, what you're able to see is just that on the top side, what do we really bring to bidders? We bring selection, trust, and convenience. To auctioneers, what do we bring? We bring, first of all, the technology, that marketplace technology. We bring the 180 million bidder sessions, and we also bring cost savings, which accrue to them from moving towards the online world. Moving to the next slide. We've talked about our role as an accelerator, but why is that?
That was something I just wanted to address briefly here. I wanted to highlight this not only because of our impact on sustainability, but also because the same dynamic that plays out is the one that is going to continue to accelerate ATG's THV, which is then the, you know, the total that we work against to grow the rest of our business. What exactly happens here? First of all, what do online auctions do? Why do we believe we are an accelerator to the circular economy? First thing is that online auctions attract more bidders to an auction than the offline world for any given auctioneer. If in the old world, an auctioneer maybe would have attracted 200, 300 people in the offline world, and that number is down, we can bring hundreds, if not thousands, of bidders to every single auction.
The curation of the assets by the auctioneer also gives those online bidders confidence, so it's different than when you're buying in a non-curated secondary goods environment. The combination of more bidders and trust leads to more bids. More bids leads to higher return on each one of those assets, and the higher return means that more assets to auction accrue and grow than would otherwise be the case. More assets in turn attracts more bidders. As you see that cycle of more bidders, higher bids, more bids, better returns on assets, and then more assets flowing in, that's something that accelerates the circular economy by making it better to sell secondary market items, but it also is what helps ATG grow. If you move to the next slide, probably the one that you're most interested in is the actual results build.
This is slide eight. These are the highlights. Our THV grew 27% and there's this continued shift online. This is the real driver behind that. What we've seen is that structural shift has continued. There's more items being sold online, higher prices, more inventory, and a move into new verticals. Just as we have for the past several years, that has continued. Our online shares remain stable at roughly 33%, and there's been the continued growth in timed online-only auctions. The reason why we wanted to highlight this is just to hold our online shares steady amidst the 27% THV growth is in and of itself an accomplishment.
Because normally when you see THV growth, as I think I've mentioned in the past, pre-COVID, THV would grow for us anywhere from 3%-5% per year, and we would grow online share maybe 1%-2% per year. Now, amidst COVID, to be able to hold that online share steady while also growing THV 27%, and there's usually a lag effect of new bidders, particularly new verticals, moving online. We're very pleased with that. GMV being up 25%, it means that again, we're delivering what we are saying is growth on growth. The big question that people had for us over the year, and particularly at the IPO, was, you're growing during COVID, but what's gonna happen as COVID winds down?
For us, what we've seen is that we were able to grow, as you know, meaningfully during COVID, and then after that, we've been able to grow on top of that. Again, that's why we're calling it growth on growth. The next thing that we think was really relevant to bring out was the diversification of our revenue. One of the things that ATG benefits from is that we are not geographically constrained, nor are we single vertical constrained. We have both geographic diversity for our revenues, we have two verticals that we operate in. But what we also have is more and more revenues within each marketplace, within each geography and within each vertical.
We don't just have the fixed fee and the commission fee, the commission fee being the, you know, the vast majority of where we make our money, but we also now have been developing the value-added services, specifically, digital marketing and payments. What we've seen in this last period was a 63% growth year-over-year in our value-added services, and that's specifically around payments and digital marketing. The next key highlight is the successful integration of LiveAuctioneers, which, as Tom will go into, is performing ahead of expectations. Again, both the business is doing well, particularly on the payments and digital marketing front. The other part that, as you know, with any acquisition, one of the key things that people look at is the integration culturally.
I think we were pleased when we were making the acquisition, we felt it was a good cultural match, and that has really proven true. Just as with our Proxibid acquisition, the business has integrated well, and I think the team integrates well with the ATG team and has been doing really everything that we've asked. The last part that I wanted to highlight is that amidst this backdrop of the structural shift from offline to online, the different diversification that we have, which is helping us amidst this, inflationary environment, the other key part was just that our competitive position, just six months down from the last time we spoke with you, is definitely stronger. We will talk to you about that a little bit.
Some of the key highlights are around 89 million bidding sessions and 54 million bids placed by the people we bring to the auctioneers. All of that has added up to roughly GBP 58 million of revenue for the year, plus 16% for the last six months, with adjusted EBITDA of approximately GBP 27 million, which is up 58% year-over-year. With that, I'm going to pass it over to Tom, and he'll take you through the details behind our financial results.
If we move to the next slide. Good morning, everybody. Before I get into the numbers, just to say one thing about the treatment of LiveAuctioneers in the presentation, we acquired LiveAuctioneers on the first of October 2021. As such, we've got a full six months of contribution from LiveAuctioneers in this half year. Clearly, LiveAuctioneers wasn't in the prior year numbers, so that does impact some of the reported growth rates, specifically in relation to revenue. Because of that, and to give a clearer view of underlying performance, we've shown pro forma numbers for revenue and revenue metrics throughout the presentation, all of which assume we had LiveAuctioneers in the equivalent period last year. If we move to slide 10, financial highlights. I think John Paul's just given you some of these numbers, but no harm in reiterating them.
Our revenue GBP 57.7 million on a pro forma basis. That's up 16% year-over-year. Adjusted EBITDA of GBP 26.8 million. That's +58% year-over-year. Gives an adjusted EBITDA margin of 46%. That's one percentage point higher than the 45% achieved in FY 2021. Our adjusted diluted EPS is 13.4p, and our adjusted free cash flow is GBP 24.3 million. That's 91% conversion from the adjusted EBITDA of GBP 26.8 million. Finally, we ended the period with net debt of GBP 120 million. That's after paying all the deferred consideration on LiveAuctioneers, leaving us with a net leverage of just below 2.5x. If we can move to the next slide 11. This shows some of our revenue metrics.
Again, all of these numbers are on a pro forma basis. In the top left-hand corner, GMV. I'm just checking the slides are moving. At top left-hand corner, GMV, you can see there we're GBP 1.6 billion for the current half year. That's growth of 25% year-over-year. As John Paul has just said, that growth's been achieved despite annualizing some exceptional COVID-19 comparators last year. You can see in the first half of last year, GMV grew 97% year-over-year. The 25% growth has been on top of that already very strong performance in the prior year. In terms of the makeup of that GMV growth, if you look at the top right-hand chart, you can see GMV growth.
Continue to see very strong growth in GMV, 27% year-over-year, so we've added over GBP 1 billion of extra GMV in the half year versus the equivalent period last year. Online share, the middle chart, is broadly stable at 33%, so it's broadly stable, but that is particularly pleasing, but partly because last year was definitely a good performance with the impact of COVID in the half year. As John-Paul said, typically when you get large changes in THV, that new THV has a below average online share, and so it drags down the overall average. In this case, that's not happened, so online share has been able to maintain it at the same level as last year, all of which has produced a 25% growth in GMV.
If you look at take rate, that's moved from 3.4% to 3.2%, so a slight reduction. A lot of that has to do with mix. The lion's share of GMV growth that we've seen has been in I&C. I&C has a lower average take rate than arts and antiques. Partly mitigating that, as John-Paul Savant has said, is strong growth in value-added services in arts and antiques, which has nudged up the take rate. Overall, put all that together, and you get GBP 52 million of marketplace revenue in the first half year, 16% pro forma constant currency growth. Again, that growth on an already exceptional half year from last year, which had grown 50% year-over-year.
If we move to the next slide, get a little bit more detail of how things have changed as we've moved into COVID and now out of COVID. Again, just checking the slides have caught up. These charts show by half year our main KPIs of GMV, THV, and marketplace revenue. See half year 1 2020 on the left-hand side of each chart. That's basically the last pre-COVID period we had. We had the step up in activity influenced by COVID we saw in half year 2 2020 as we went through the half year, and then half year 1 2021, the prior year comparative for the reporting period now was the first full half year with the benefit of COVID.
If you look at all the charts, you can see there, actually, we've achieved sequential growth pretty much throughout the period as we go into COVID, but also, and as now as we've come out of COVID, and we're lapping some very strong comparatives the prior year again, which is a key feature of the results this time. We move to the next slide. This looks at segmental performance. On the left-hand side of the table, you can see, revenue by segment. So Arts & Antiques, on a pro forma basis, adjusting for LiveAuctioneers, has grown 16% year-over-year. Industrial & Commercial, 16% growth, so marketplace growth. Overall, 16% year-over-year. Auction Services, slightly below that, 11%.
Within there is our white label business, which has actually grown at about the same rate as marketplace, but offsetting that, some of our legacy back office products that revenue growth is lower, bringing the average down to 11. Then Content revenue grew 14% year-over-year, actually above the historic average. Content is the one bit of the business which is benefiting from some softer comps because of COVID in the prior year. All adding up to giving you total pro forma revenue growth of 16% year-over-year. When you get into the KPIs by segment, I'll talk about I&C first, which are the two columns on the right-hand side of the right-hand table. You see our THV of GBP 2.8 billion, up 27% year-over-year.
That reflects pretty uniform strength across all verticals and reflects both a higher number of assets being put for sale on the marketplaces, but also higher asset prices being realized. Of that growth, two-thirds you might attribute to traditional verticals where we've historically had strength, but then a third of that growth has come from newer verticals, which was a feature of last year, and that's continued into this year, with real estate being the standout, which has added a reasonable amount of extra GMV this period. That comes through in the online share of 46%, up 2% year-over-year. That is influenced by the new verticals. A lot of the activity's come through as timed.
If you pull that out, actually online share is broadly flat, which actually is something again that that's is good given the benefit of COVID in the prior year comparatives. All that adds together gives you 33% GMV growth. Take rate down, nudged down a bit to 2% from 2.3% last year, predominantly due to mix, again, coming from the new verticals, in particular real estate, which does carry a lower take rate than the average. As that's contributed, it's pulled down the overall total. Underlying pricing, underlying commission rates achieved on an auctioneer by auctioneer basis, like online share, is very similar in this period than it was in the equivalent period last year. Slightly different mix of revenue growth in A&A.
Pro forma, THV's grown 28% year-over-year to GBP 2.1 billion, but a lot of that has come in areas where we would and we do get a lower online share. Even in higher value auctions, Phillips is a feature of that to come onto LiveAuctioneers during the period and also a number of international auctioneers coming onto the marketplaces. You can see that effect coming through in online share, which is 17%, down 4 percentage points year-over-year. If you strip out that effect, there still has been some normalization from the very high online shares that were achieved in the peak COVID months in the prior year. Overall GMV still up 2% year-over-year to GBP 356 million.
The real standout there is the take rate, which is 7.6%, up one percentage point, which is all about value-added services, increasing penetration of both marketing sales, digital marketing sales and payments amongst the A&A auctioneer base, which has been a strong feature of the first half of this year. Slide 14 picks up on the comment about the diversification, increasingly diversified revenue model that we have. The chart on the left-hand side shows our mix of revenue. Still the biggest contribution to revenue is commission, and that in fact, in terms of absolute contribution to growth in the half year, commission is still the biggest contributor. In terms of share of revenue, that's actually declined a little bit between half year, 63% to 61% of total revenue in the first half of this year.
The reason for that decline is the growth in value-added services. Value-added services is where payments and advertising digital marketing revenues goes, which has gone from 11% to 15%. We'd see this as part of a wider pattern of increasingly diversified revenues. If you take the acquisition of LiveAuctioneers, which created balance between A&A and I&C across the revenue portfolio or new products such as payments, the development of new verticals in I&C, all of those are increasing the diversification of our revenue. We'd argue also the resilience of that revenue model.
Two questions we're asked most commonly now. I'm sure it was on people's minds the most in the audience here is what how will the business perform in an inflationary environment and how will you perform in an economic downturn? Now, just answering those and sort of trying to answer those in turn in terms of inflation, I mean, our biggest revenue line is commission. Clearly commission revenue is based on asset pricing, so we do have an inbuilt inflation hedge within the business in our revenue line. We're relatively comfortable about the impact of inflation on the organization. In terms of how the business performs in an economic downturn, the first thing to say is we do have a very loyal auctioneer base. We've always had very low churn.
We've seen no change in churn in recent months, and we expect no change in the auctioneer churn. Largely based, or all based on the high level of value that we provide to those auctioneers. It's not something that people choose to do to come off the marketplace to save money. Separately, if you look at the two sides of the business, arts and antiques and industrial and commercial, the arts and antiques industry as a whole is pro-cyclical and does move with the economic cycle. If you unpack that a little bit and look at what's driving it, actually the majority of volatility comes from high-end items, typically sold by the big four auction houses where we are not a major player. Where we are a major player is in mid-market, and actually that tends to be a lot more stable irrespective of the cycle.
Level of activity is typically driven by supply, as much as demand. On the I&C side, an important source of inventory is actually from insolvencies. The I&C historically has seen more assets come to the marketplace in bad times than good. If you take those two together, probably a mildly counter-cyclical I&C business and a mildly pro-cyclical A&A business. Across the two together, we'd say we're largely cycle neutral. This is a slide gives a revenue bridge between the two half years.
Last year's reported revenue 34.5, you can see bringing in LiveAuctioneers and Auction Mobility to create a pro forma of 15.3, and then a small FX difference of 0.1, which gets you to GBP 49.9 million constant currency revenue, on a pro forma basis last year. Add in GBP 7.8 million of organic growth this year, gets you a 16% pro forma revenue growth. Not much to see there. The one thing I would draw out there, though, is you can see the FX movement is actually quite small between the two half years. 80% of our revenue is in dollars. When the dollar weakens, our reported revenue in sterling will come down. When the dollar strengthens, our reported revenue will go up.
Everyone I'm sure will be aware that the dollar has strengthened since the end of our reporting period. Who's to say what will happen, but if exchange rates stay where they are now, FX will be a bigger feature in our revenue movement year-over-year in the second half of the year than it has been in the first. We can go to the next slide, shows our P&L, slide 16. Shows revenue of GBP 57.7 million, pro forma growth of 16% as I've already said. If you look towards the bottom of the table, you can see our adjusted EBITDA of GBP 26.8 million. That's 46% adjusted EBITDA margin. Actually, that is lower than the first half last year margin of 49%. The first half last year was a bit of an odd half year.
It was before we were a PLC. It was also a COVID period. There wasn't much discretionary spend traveling happening, certainly no travel entertaining. We weren't incurring the cost of being a PLC, so it's not a great benchmark. Probably a better KPI to look at will be the full year 2021 EBITDA margin, which was 45%. We're 1% above the full year number we achieved last year. 2 or 3 things going on there. We announced at the end of last year that we would be spending more and investing more in technology and marketing, in particular our headcount there, so that's happening. We've also got the costs of being a PLC now fully in place through the whole period. Take those two together, they've probably reduced our EBITDA margin by like about 2 percentage points.
We've also introduced payments in this half year. Payments is a good contributor to absolute profit, but does have a lower percentage margin. That's probably reduced our EBITDA margin percentage by about a percentage point. Offsetting those factors is just the natural operational gearing of the business, which has then pushed it back up to over 45% to 46% year-over-year. The final comment on here, while it doesn't fall in adjusted EBITDA, is we did have a large amount of exceptional items last year related to the IPO. It was a charge of GBP 9.1 million incurred in half year one 2021. There are no exceptional items in the current period. If we can move to slide seventeen on free cash flow generation. Our adjusted EBITDA of GBP 26.8 million.
You have a small working capital outflow of GBP 0.8, which just reflects the growth in the business, the natural amount that gets stuck in debtors. We have CapEx of GBP 1.8 million, leaving our free cash flow at GBP 24.3 million. That's 91% conversion from adjusted EBITDA. We also in the period paid interest and tax, GBP 7.8 million in total. Then there's GBP 4 million of fees and professional fees related to the acquisition of LiveAuctioneers that have gone out in the period. All of those were contingent on the transaction completing, so only got paid once we'd closed the deal on the first of October. Those have now all gone out the door.
We also had a gain on the dollar balances we were holding as we waited to pay the contingent consideration in LiveAuctioneers. All that consideration was paid by the end of the period, which left us with net debt of GBP 120 million. That's net leverage of just below 2.5 times, which is we ended up quite a bit below the sort of target we talked about at the time of the acquisition of just below 3 times. Finally, if we move to the next slide, our guidance for the rest of the year. We are increasing our full year guidance for revenue.
Sales performance in the first half of 2022 has been better than we expected at the time when we set the guidance at the beginning of the year. We're notwithstanding that, we're still holding the line on our expectations for the second half of the year. You put those two things together, the first half outperformance and the unchanged view of the second half of the year, and it does increase our full year revenue guidance. We're now saying for full year FY 2022, we expect low double-digit% pro forma revenue growth. Percentage margin guidance remained unchanged off that, and we remain confident we're achieving our medium term targets of mid-teens +% pro forma revenue growth and mid-high 40s% adjusted margin.
With that, I'll hand over to John-Paul Savant.
I'll take us through the investment case now. We view our investment case as really sitting within a very familiar and proven framework. We are operating in an industry that has that structural shift from offline to online, creating those positive tailwinds. We have a very strong competitive position, but with both geographic and vertical diversification and leadership in each of those respective marketplaces that we operate, which creates that flywheel that allows us to attract more assets, more bidders, very cost effectively. We have a strong and scalable proprietary auction platform technology, and as you know, we operate 5 of our marketplaces on one platform, and the two most recent acquisitions we plan to move onto a single platform over the next 2-3 years. We also, in the bottom left box, have 6 proven growth levers.
As I've said before, this is, we've had three years in a row where we've pulled all six of those levers, and we don't see any reason why we can't pull all six again this year. The fifth point is that, as Tom kind of spent most of the time on now, we have a very proven and attractive financial model that's very cyclical, with cyclically diversified revenue. The last part, in light of all of those benefits we have, from the outside and from the inside and from our competitive positioning, it really comes down to, do we have the management team and the overall team, to execute on the opportunity in front of us? Obviously we believe that we do, and I'll talk in a couple of slides about how that team's been strengthened recently.
Next slide, please. Any good business, you know, we believe, can clearly explain the value it brings. While we've talked about the value that we bring, we just wanted to highlight it a little bit for you. If you look first at that top left portion, for the first half of 2022, GBP 4.9 billion is the vast value of all the assets listed on our system. Given that the auction, if you think about a given auctioneer, they could be running auctions that have a value of GBP 50,000 up through some of the very largest may run an auction for GBP 5 million or so. For a bidder, that means you're limited to, if you're going just to a single auctioneer, you're going and seeing just the inventory of that auctioneer.
By having 4.9 billion assets listed in the first half of the year, that just gives you a sense for how much inventory we're helping give those bidders access to. When you look to the right side, then you see 89 million bidding sessions. Keep in mind that the vast majority of the auctioneers we work with are small and medium-sized businesses. Of the 4,000 plus, probably 3,800 of them to 3,900 are small and regional businesses. Giving them access to that global bidder base that generates that type of activity is unparalleled in the world in what we do. You have below that, the 6 million auction registrations in that period.
As I mentioned before, for a typical auctioneer, in the old world, pre-online, you maybe would've gotten 300-400 people at a given auction, and that number is diminished for people showing up in the room. The number online has grown dramatically. We can bring a large number of the auctioneer's bidders and a lot of new bidders to that auctioneer, which are a huge source of his or her growth. Then finally, you have the 54 million bids in the bottom left. The reason why we focus on the number of bids placed as opposed to just the winners is that when we're talking about the value that we're bringing for our customers, we get paid, it's true, only when our customer is the winning bidder.
However, we're driving value for the auctioneer with every single bid we bring because we could be the underbidder, we could be the penultimate bidder, or we could be just the bidder that kind of got the activity moving and creates that excitement around the auction. We're adding value even when we're not actually the final winning bidder. With that, if you go to the next slide 23. This is one you've seen before, and I think one of the things that's nice about this slide is that I imagine you'll be seeing it from us for the next 10 years because this is something that we don't see changing. As you've heard me say before, we believe ATG is on the very beginning of its journey still, and we have these growth levers which are very accessible to us.
What we continue to work towards this year is to execute against all six of these. If you take them in turn, extending the TAM is really through growing our THV, and we can do that by adding auction houses in existing verticals, moving into new geographies or simply getting auctioneers who work with us already to put more of their assets onto our system. Growing that online penetration we can do by either working to move the auction format from the auctioneer side, from live auctions to timed or live online only. From the bidder side, we're able to follow that, you know, well-proven path of investing in better search, better images, cookie trails, all the typical UX elements that would be considered conversion rate optimization.
The third part, which is quite unique to us and which gets better as we get bigger, is the cross-listing capability. The more that we can buy marketplaces or use the marketplaces we have to allow cross-listing on different ones, we add value to the whole network that nobody else can add. The fourth one is expanding our operating leverage, and whether that be centralizing finance and HR and other activities, or whether it be moving towards a single platform, that in turn allows ATG to continue to optimize that operating leverage. The fifth area is payments, is the value-added services, and in this particular case, it's really a focus on payments and digital marketing, which Tom went into. There's a whole slew of additional value-added services that we believe we can add that will materially grow that take rate and our revenues.
Most importantly, it also is going to be adding value, the value that we bring for the auctioneers and for the bidders. The last bit, which is the accretive M&A. As I've said, you know, we remain disciplined in our approach, but we continue to look and explore multiple opportunities. The great thing is that there are multiple opportunities out there. We're excited about what that will bring in the future. Next slide. We just wanted to give you a bit of some of the concrete things that we've actually done against the user experience, because we've enhanced the value proposition for both auctioneers and bidders over this period.
First of all, we're driving great bidder acquisition, and that's a key reason why we kept those growth gains that Tom talked about from COVID, and then we built on those. We've invested in our SEO, hired an expert who is focusing on that, looking at everything from the way that we use the keywords for descriptions in our lots and the way that we categorize each of the items that we put on the site. We've also invested in improved site search, and we'll continue to do that. The second bucket, where we've increased auction registration. We have a huge series of revamped marketing emails.
One of the key things to focus on, maybe you're a customer, maybe you've gotten some of those, and you should notice that they're cleaner, better images, better calls to action, less cluttered. One of the things it tells us we're doing a good job there is the fact that our open rate is 50%. When we all think about our inboxes and how much comes in, to get a 50% open rate on a marketing email is, I think, a great job by our team. Improved bidder success as well. Last year, we talked about implementing a recommendation engine for the first time at ATG, and we've done that.
One of the things we're seeing is that, again, our under bidder recommendation, which is, again, the bidder who didn't win the item, that was up for sale, we will send them a message about similar items. We have a 50% click-through rate on that email that goes out as well, which is a great sign for the future. On the next slide, we cover a few more of these. The first one, slide I think we'll catch up in a minute. One of the metrics that we've asked that you focus on beyond THV is our growth in timed auction adoption, and that has continued strongly. You saw the number. Our overall THV was up 47%, but timed auctions were up 32%. Again, growing even more quickly than the rest of the business.
Point 5, maintaining high auctioneer retention rates. Again, on a revenue basis, 97% retention. With all the change going on, as Tom talked about, whether it be cost pressures, other things going on, we are not the channel that people are ever going to drop because of the value that we bring. That's a real testament as well to the account management teams that we have, as well as the technology and bidders that we're bringing. That sixth point, again, our ability to grow value-added services. We did buy LiveAuctioneers in October. We said that we would. One of the key reasons we bought them was for the payments. Value-added services is up 63% in the first half of the year, which we're very excited by.
One of the other things that we're excited by is that we hit our first milestone with payments being rolled out more broadly like. As I've said, what we plan to do is to roll payments out, hopefully by December, broadly across Proxibid are beginning to be rolled out. The first milestone that we set for the team that we didn't talk about back in December was that we wanted to see one pound or one dollar worth of payments get processed through the system to make sure everything works. What we call it is, you know, kind of a minimum viable test and, rather than a full minimum viable product. We got through that minimum viable test in May, and we processed our first dollar of payment through Proxibid. We're excited by that.
Now it's a case of scaling up and growing that capability so that we can roll out fully beginning in December. LiveAuctioneers is the acquisition that we made on October first, and as we said, it's performing ahead of expectations, and that is driven by multiple factors. First of all, the group is progressing well in terms of its integration to ATG. In the times that I've been out there, one of the great things has been the common culture, the common attitude toward customers and how we wanna serve and the opportunity that we see in the market and how we want to go after that. That's from the leadership team with, you know, Phil Michaelson, all the way down to all the other people I've met within LiveAuctioneers.
It's exciting for us to have seen what we saw and what made us excited about acquiring that business and then to see it really coming to life. The reason why I focused on that bottom bullet around sharing best practices, when you sometimes have a business that you're buying and you're taking a component of that and wanting to make it available to the rest of the business, that requires a lot of collaboration, and there can be, you know, people who wanna own it and hold on. One of the great things I think we've said is that we created this team that's a joint team between LiveAuctioneers and the legacy ATG group, and it actually is the legacy ATG group plus the legacy Proxibid group. Three different teams working on this, and it's gone incredibly well.
Great leadership by our Chief Product Officer and by our SVP of corporate development, who pulled that together and really led the group. As I said, we've hit that first milestone. Go to the next slide. With this opportunity that we have in front of us, and both the external things going in our favor as well as the momentum that we've created so far, the real question I think often comes up is, for me, just, okay, how do we continue to build the team that can take advantage of this opportunity and that has the right behaviors, the right attitude, and towards our customers, because as you know, we've had this shared success model, and that's a key part of what we want going forward.
What we've done in this last period, we believe, is to really add significant depth to our team. We've added a global CTO who is based out of New York. His name is Pratyush Rai, and he comes from Kaplan. He has deep experience at integrating multiple platforms. He also has done real strong work on user experience and how to make every single thing you do relevant for your customer. We're excited to bring him on board. The second person we brought on board is our first Chief People Officer, and this is Darren Ali. He will be based out of London. What really attracted us to Darren is the fact that he had deep international experience, and he also has post-merger integration experience.
The last piece is really in my interviews with him. He talks a lot about the employee experience. Not just about the customers, which the rest of the business can be focused on, but we have an executive who's focused on the employee experience. In the job market that we have right now, and even if recession looms and, you know, jobs are not quite as plentiful as they have been recently, what you still want is a company that's investing in its people and creating an experience that matters. Because everything we're trying to do is based on our team, and that investing in our Chief People Officer is hopefully giving you an indication of the importance we place on that. The third person I wanted to mention there is Rob Cummings.
Rob Cummings was the Chief Product Officer and Chief Technology Officer at LiveAuctioneers, and we promoted Rob to be our first Chief Product Officer. He will be overseeing all product development going forward. If you look at LiveAuctioneers, which is a step or two ahead of the legacy ATG team in terms of the user experience, you know, we think that bodes really well for our future as well. On the next slide, you should see the three new board members that we added. I think that made it in. We've added three new board members as well. As you know, we have Breon Corcoran, Scott Forbes, and Morgane Ziegler , who are on our board already. Penny Ladkin-Brand needed to move back to Future because she was only allowed one board seat.
We've now added Suzanne Baxter from WH Smith as our new Audit Chair. We added Pauline Stewart , who was the CMO at Stitch Fix, and formerly a senior executive in marketing at eBay. We've also added Tamsin Todd, who is the CEO of Findmypast, and also was at Amazon previously and has deep product experience. We're happy to welcome all three of them onto our board, which again, we think will make us a stronger team. What is so exciting for me and our team and our board is that this is really still the beginning for ATG. We are doing well. There's lots of great things to talk about, but this is still just the beginning.
One of the things I wanted to set out for you is the way that we view the business right now. We really see our business as evolving in three investment horizons. We have the foundation, we have the end-to-end experience, and then we have the expansion phase. The foundation phase was really what we did up until the IPO, where we focused on building the technology that could work in multiple verticals, multiple geographies. We looked at unifying a very fragmented market to create the best inventory that was available for secondary and specialized goods. We also wanted to create the best bidder base. Also key within that was that we really wanted to do this in a collaborative way with our customers, particularly the auctioneers.
That's why we have focused very much on this shared success model, where we make money only if they make money. We are now approaching investment horizon two, though. While we will continue to build on that foundation for indefinitely, we now will start to direct more and more of our resources towards the end-to-end experience. What does that really mean? It really is around the UX of our site. So you've heard me say before, on a scale of 1 to 10, if Amazon is up there at maybe a 9 for buyer experience, you know, we may be at a 4 or 5. Relative to the rest of the way the auction industry works, we could be considered very good. There's a long way to go toward moving towards an e-commerce standard that we feel really happy with.
Investing in better images, better descriptions, a better end-to-end buying experience for the bidder, an easier selling experience for the auctioneers, all of these things are going to be key to what we do, while preserving the uniqueness of the auction format, because we believe that's a differentiator for us. It's also, we believe, the way that you see many different businesses moving, because auctions allow you to see the true value of an asset and for bidders to actually understand that as well, especially in a very open environment like the one we provide. We're excited by that. When you look forward, though, to investment horizon three. We're gradually moving into that as well, but it's not receiving the bulk of our resources.
As we move into that's really about moving beyond the core transaction into the entire auction ecosystem and the entire auction value chain. Launching more value-added services to help auctioneers, whether it be digital marketing, payments, integrated delivery would be another one. We have financing, restoration, insurance, repair, maintenance, and logistics. There's a huge number of businesses out there that provide these services, and today there's no hub through which they can actually access someone buying something at the point of a transaction. We believe we're uniquely positioned to offer all of these businesses access to incremental revenue. Again, as we do this, we firmly believe that we will be attracting more assets and more types of assets into the auction network.
If you look at eBay years ago, it was Beanie Babies, and then as they proved it out, it's expanded to what it is today. We believe that the curated auction format, which is one that we provide where everything is being sold by an expert, is opening up a new world for secondary goods. That's why we believe we're uniquely positioned to unlock the value of those goods for consignors who are selling through auctioneers and giving bidders access to that incredible range of unique and specialized inventory. As we extended the auction ecosystem, we will enhance the bidder value proposition while also lowering auctioneer costs. We are not going to be an auctioneer, and that's something we want to make very clear.
We are here to be a marketplace that brings bidders, and we believe that by sitting in the middle, there's incredible value to be created while allowing the auctioneers to do what they do best. The great thing for us is that we can grow that take rate, as you saw, gradually ticking up, if we had kind of looked at it without the influence of some of the other things that were going on for mix. Adding the payments, adding delivery, adding other components to this will allow us to grow that take rate gradually up without it costing the auctioneers any more money. That's a real part of what we believe is going to allow us to be successful in the future.
Again, the more auctioneers do online, the more they will save, and the more of these services we offer, the more that ATG will be able to grow. Next slide. We are, as I said, in the very early stages of the growth and transformation of the auction industry, and we really want to leave you with what we believe are the five key takeaways, which the first one being that structural shift from offline to online has continued. That growth on growth, the fact that we've had two phenomenal years of growth off of COVID, and then off of that, we've still been able to grow, is a real testament to the fact that the auction industry moving online is happening. The second big bullet we wanted to look at was this diversified and resilient revenue.
The fact that we are not constrained geographically or by vertical, and the fact that we have multiple growth levers beyond just our commission fee, we think makes us incredibly resilient, and that's really proven out and will become even more apparent over these next years. The third point is that we think we have strengthened our competitive position. We're stronger than we were six months ago. We're a better business than we were six months ago. Amidst all the change that's happened, that's an exciting thing to be able to say. The fourth is the six growth drivers. Again, I have that one slide. It's a simple slide, but the reason we put it up is that it shows that it's not independent growth levers. Each of those are mutually reinforcing, and there's a compound growth benefit to them.
What I would hope is that we're showing you that same slide in 5 or 7 or 10 years because all of those levers are very pullable for a long time to come. The last part I wanted to mention was that we do have the team to execute. I think whether you look at the LiveAuctioneers team, where I've been incredibly impressed by the commitment of them to the customer, their innovation, their real nimbleness, as well as looking at the Proxibid team and their response to the customers, the handling of the massive volume increase we've had, and then the legacy ATG team. All three of these groups and Auction Mobility plus Lot-Tissimo and Bidsfire, the other businesses we bought over these years, have all really pulled together. People have adapted and grown.
I really cannot say enough about our team. It's not just the executives that you're hiring up at the top, it's really the people doing the work day in and day out. I think we've really proven that we have a great team. We've added great members to our team, and that's gonna be a key part of our success going forward. With that, the next slide. There are only 2 more. Don't worry. This circular economy comment that you hear us talk about is not just a vacuous statement. It's something that can actually be measured. What you see here is something that we talked about before, but I just wanna reiterate, is that we looked at the top 15 items sold, 15 categories of items sold on ATG last year.
We had this done by an external consulting company that actually measures carbon emissions for different businesses. They came back and said that based on those top 15 items, ATG helped save by facilitating the sale of these items, approximately 1 million tons of carbon emissions versus if someone had gone and bought those same items new. That equated to the carbon capture of 50 million mature trees per year. If you go to the next slide. The goal that we have as a business though is we see this massive TAM of auction, the auction industry, GBP 100 billion on the industrial and commercial side, GBP 40-50 billion on the art and antique side. If you can go to the next slide.
What we really are aiming for is to see whether ATG can save the equivalent of a billion trees in a given year and create that carbon capture benefit. While that is, of course, a massive goal, it's more than 10 times the size business that we are today, my thinking around this has been, who knows? If you don't set a big, huge goal like that, then you're guaranteed you're not gonna hit it. If you do set it and you come even marginally close to it's a pretty massive accomplishment. I think it's a big motivator for our team. They care about the sustainable side of what we do, the fact that everything we do is facilitating growth of that circular economy. It's a big ambition for us, but it's one that we're setting out there.
We're not setting a timeline on when it's gonna be achieved, but, it's something that motivates us and which we think is an exciting part about our future. With that, I think Tom and I will take any Q&A that you have. Any Q, I guess you have.
Thank you, sir. If you would like to ask a question, please signal by pressing star one on your telephone keypad. If you're using a speakerphone, please make sure your mute function is turned off to allow your signal to reach our equipment. Again, press star one to ask a question. We will now take our first question from Gareth Davis from Liberum. Please go ahead.
Hi. Morning, guys. Can you hear me?
Yes.
The 46% penetration in terms of timed auctions in the I&C business is clearly a very impressive performance and ahead of what we were hoping. Tom made a throwaway comment about the success in timed auctions. I just wondered if you could expand a little bit on that comment. Are there certain verticals where that's working particularly well, and what's really driving that momentum? Then secondly, sort of relating that to the A&A market, is there still a reluctance in terms of A&A auctioneers to move to timed? Was the LiveAuctioneers business doing timed auctions, or is that sort of a win for you as we look into next year? Then the second question really goes to the payments rollout. You sort of alluded to December, you'll launch to Proxibid customers.
Can you talk a little bit about where Proxibid customers are at the moment versus where LiveAuctioneers customers were when they launched? Are they? Is it a sort of similar dynamic, and so we should be hopeful of similar penetration, or are there things we need to be mindful of in terms of what those customers are using at the moment? Maybe leave it at those two for now.
Tom, do you wanna do the first question? I'll do the second.
Yeah. The comment on timed auctions specifically related to the new THV that we've brought on, particularly with regards to real estate, where the majority of that activity has come on in timed, which gives a 100% online share, which overall has boosted the total online share, which is 46%, which I think was the number you're referring to. If you remove the impact of real estate, there's continued to be good penetration of timed auctions. It's actually grown largely in line with overall THV. The percentage of THV penetration is relatively unchanged with where it was last year, but it's continued to grow in line with THV. With regards to arts and antiques, the penetration there remains very low.
It is increasing at the edges, but certainly isn't having the same effect that it's having in industrial and commercial, which is very strong. Therefore, that very much is in the camp of future opportunity.
Yeah. Just kind of
Was LiveAuctioneers offering that to their customers, or is that something new to their customer base?
LiveAuctioneers also is offering timed auctions, but similar to thesaleroom.com with lot-tissimo, that take-up is relatively low right now. The thing to keep in mind that, when you look out at Sotheby's and Christie's, which may be the bellwethers for the rest of the industry, the amount of timed auctions they are doing is increasing massively. I think it's 4 or 5 times. What often happens is what the market leaders do, the businesses will adopt because when Sotheby's and Christie's are running a timed auction for the bottom end of what they're selling, that's often a lot of what is the sweet spot for our auctioneers.
If Sotheby's and Christie's can show that they can run a timed auction, selling items between, you know, GBP 500-GBP 10,000, then that should really be a signal, a message for our auctioneers, we hope, to engage fully in timed auction form. You do have some more innovative auctioneers experimenting more with timed auctions with us, you know, Sworders being one, just north of London. We believe that it will be a gradual adoption in arts & antiques, not quite as quick as you've seen in the industrial & commercial side, where the moving of those heavy assets just lends to a timed auction format even more quickly. The second question you asked, though, was around payments on Proxibid.
We believe that they have similar dynamics where, you know, they often have independent contracts with payment gateways. They have an internal team doing a lot of collections management, and it's a big pain point for the auctioneers. We believe the dynamics are quite similar. The part that's different is that if you think about the size of payment that's going on in the industrial and commercial side, it's much bigger payment, and then more payments are made with ACH, eCheck, and those formats as opposed to credit card. There will be a little bit of a different dynamic there, which is why we're not giving a forecast on the rate of adoption, whether it will be the same as LiveAuctioneers.
You know, LiveAuctioneers has had an exceptionally quick rate of adoption, as Tom said, crossing over 50% adoption within the auctioneer base within 15 months. We're not expecting it to be that fast, but we're not giving a detailed forecast yet on how quick it will be.
Perfect. Thank you.
As a reminder to ask a telephone question, please signal by pressing star one. We will now take our next question from James Lockyer from Peel Hunt. Please go ahead.
Hi, yes. It's James Lockyer from Peel Hunt. Thanks for taking my questions. Three from me, please. On competition, you talked about improving your SEO score, SEO performance in the period. And whenever I, you know, whenever I look at your SEO performance, you perform well on Google. Can you just give an idea of what you've done there to improve your SEO performance and if you widen your gap to your peers specifically, and are there any peers that you are more or less worried about than you were six months ago? That's the first question. Second question on A&A, as we've sort of talked about, you saw a reduction in the online share.
Just wondering if there's a structural issue with that from preventing you from growing faster there. Obviously, the fact that you might want to look at the item in real life first. I was wondering if we could think about a ceiling. Is there a ceiling we should think about in terms of online share for A&A? And if there are any tech investments you could do, such as 3D imaging, for example, that might help reduce any potential retrenchment. And then the third question, obviously with your type of business model, operational gearing is incredible, and we look forward to seeing more of that. How much of a buffer do you have within your cost base in case of a major weakness on the top line?
i.e., what gives you and us comfort that the operational gearing won't work the same way the other way around?
Tom, I'll do the first two, and then you do the third. In terms of the SEO, I won't go into huge amounts of detail, but the key part that we're looking at is the way that we display our categories, the way that our categories are set up, the way that we take in lots. We're looking at ways that we can help auctioneers auto-categorize more accurately. If you go on our site, you'll see there's just a wide range of detail that an auctioneer will provide, and sometimes items will be miscategorized, or we will have so many categories that we weren't grouping things properly. The SEO expert we brought in has been able to help us understand better the way that we can set up our categories, the way we can take in lots.
In terms of relative to our peers, what are we doing? You know, I don't really know what our peers are doing differently. We just know that with that combination of the SEO and the CRM work that we're doing, which is allowing us to reach bidders either who, one, with more relevant information or that under bidder that we're allowing, being able to reach, that it's having a good success rate. That's gonna allow us to direct people more directly to lots that will be relevant for them. Again, those are kind of the key foundation pieces. If you have more questions on that, I'll probably get more detail and then come back to you from our product team. In terms of the A&A-
Just one question.
Oh, yeah.
I just, I guess the last part was around competition and whether you're more or less worried about any of the others at this point in time.
Yeah. Right now, I don't think we're worried about anybody any more or less than we were before. We feel that our competitive position has gotten stronger. We've seen that growth even in this environment, and so we feel very comfortable with our competitive position.
Thank you.
On the A&A side, you also asked if there are structural issues keeping us from, you know, what's the online share ceiling. I think that's always a really tricky one to answer because, again, if you'd asked all of us 25 years ago, would we be buying cars online? I think everyone would've said, "No way." What we see year in and year out is that the ceiling on what the price point at which people are willing to buy and the types of items that people are willing to buy online just continues to go up. Even if we weren't doing anything beyond keeping the buying experience more secure, I would believe that would continue to go up, that ceiling, as people get more familiar. The fact is that we are doing more.
When you say what are the technical investments we could make, I think I see it more as what are the experience-based investments that we can make, which is why, you know, we-
Yeah.
that second rise of the end-to-end experience because today, auctions have a very disaggregated feel, where, you know, you search, then you have to register for the auction, then you get to bid, then you have to wait a few days to actually get the item, to even wait for the auction to happen, and then you have to arrange, get payment often by a separate email, and then you have to arrange for your own delivery. Just integrating those elements combined with what the auctioneers provide in terms of curation, we believe is going to greatly increase the trust and confidence that people have in buying at auction, and particularly by buying that auction through ATG. Those are the technical investments we're going to make. We also have other things.
You know, we've talked about things like the, you know, the virtual auctions and virtual galleries and other things you can do, and there's a lot of exciting tech emerging there, but that is not going to be what propels us forward. I think these fundamentals getting in place first are gonna be the most important, and then we can look at getting more creative after we've gotten those fundamentals in place.
With regards to your third question, operational gearing, I mean, you're quite right. We are a business that's operationally geared, and we enjoy the benefit of that when revenue grows. If revenue is to go backwards, then the flip side of that is we would have, we probably would see a disproportionate impact on profit. The costs always costs discretionary costs within the business. But most of our costs, the biggest single cost line for us, are people, which are hard to change in the short term. Frankly, unless we thought that any revenue downturn was a long-term thing, we would be very loathe to cut anything too deeply.
I guess the way we really manage that issue is we tend to take quite a cautious approach in the way we think about things and the way we forecast stuff. We tend to invest once we see the revenues there rather than in anticipation of revenue. We generally don't. We're in a position where because of that, the investment decisions we make are based on sort of tangible performance of the business rather than the hopeful performance of the business. As such, we have been able to avoid sort of overinvesting and adverse hits or unexpected hits to margin when things didn't materialize in the way we might have hoped. Essentially, you're.
Thank you.
There's some truth in your point.
Thank you. I guess, just as a follow-up, do you have any data points that you could point to about how you performed in the last financial crisis?
It's quite hard 'cause the last financial crisis. It would depend when you define the last financial crisis, but I think I guess really.
Around about 2008, 2009 years ago.
Yeah. During that period, the business was a very different size business and enjoying quite a strong structural shift online. Every time we've looked at this for the bits of the business we have got data, it's been hard to discern any impact from the wider economic environment on our performance. Now, we would say that's partly, you know, that's to do with the general cycle neutral nature of the business. Also it's fair to say during those periods, the business was just growing because the world was shifting online, which could also have overwhelmed any impact from the economic cycle.
That's great. Thank you guys. Well done again.
There's no further questions at this time. I would like to handover the conference back to the speakers for any additional or closing remarks.
Again, thank you for taking the time to listen in today. You know, we're very excited by where ATG sits and what the future holds. As I said, I think our team has done an exceptional job over this period. The investments we've made in new people and some of the new technologies we believe is gonna begin to bear fruit as well. Right now, the big thing that we're focused on is, again, that rollout of payments in December. You know, lots of other things going on as well, but payments, we believe is an important part of providing that better experience that we talked about just at the end here.
Thank you for your time and we look forward to any questions that we'll be getting in the one-on-one sessions. Thank you.