Well, first of all, good afternoon, and if you're joining us from the U.S., good morning. For those of you who I've not met before, I think I've met most of you, I'm Zillah, and I'm the CEO at Future, and I've been here for a little under nine years. During that time we've been on an incredible journey, and we continue to be very excited about the opportunities ahead. I think it's been a couple of years since we had a Capital Markets Day, and it's really nice to have the chance to take a deeper dive into our business, and we hope to bring to life for you how our strategy comes together in more detail over the next few hours, and how we achieve our ambitions.
At the end of the day, for those of you joining us in person, we thought it'd be a really nice opportunity to sample our products, and so the Decanter team will host a small wine tasting, and if you'd like to stay behind to catch up in more detail. Before we get started today, however, I just wanted to take a moment to thank you for making the time to join us. It's been a very unusual week here in the U.K., and as our Queen moves to lying in state today, we just wanted to appreciate you taking the time to be in our audience. She was an incredible person with a huge work ethic and a great sense of community, oh, and quiet dignity, which are attributes which we really value at Future.
In her Christmas speech in 2019, she said that it's worth remembering that it is often the small steps, not the giant leaps, that bring about the most lasting change, and we think that personifies Future and the strategy that we're executing on here. Now, changing gear, we have a fantastic group of people lined up to talk to you today, and I'm going to let them introduce themselves to you when they present. However, this page is just a quick teaser and a little bio of what lies ahead. The big focus for today, however, is around shining a light on how we expect to achieve our ambitions. Growing the most relevant and valuable audiences, we'll also continue to grow and diversify our monetization models.
Sophie will take you under the covers of the women's lifestyle opportunity, while Hilary and Shayna will take a deeper look at fashion and beauty as they talk about how the Who What Wear brand has been able to capture the most valuable audiences. We then will have some Q&A and a short break, and after that, Stuart will give you an overview of what we mean when we talk about audience at Future. Where do they come from, and how do we continue to grow while ensuring we retain the most valuable audiences? Jason and Kevin will then talk to you about how our tech stack and our Aperture platform are a source of competitive advantage. While Penny will see us out with an overview of how our operating model works to deliver sustainable financial returns. Finally, there'll be another short Q&A.
Now, before we hear from Sophie and the team at Who What Wear, I just wanted to spend a few moments recapping on our strategy. What we do and how we do it. It's a critical differentiator that makes Future, and the consistent execution of our strategy is what sets us apart. Future has a very clear purpose. We use our knowledge and expertise to help people to do what matters most to them in that moment. From what is the best moisturizer for stopping the signs of aging to finding the best and most affordable laptops ahead of going to university. You can tell what's going on in my household right now. Our expert content creators harnessing our technology and platforms have the answer, and we aim to help answer these questions in a fun and easy way.
Now, when I meet investors for the first time, many don't quite understand who we are or what we do. I often get asked the question, "Are you just a magazine company?" The answer to that is we are, but we're so much more than that, and I think it's really important in life not to assume anything. I wanted to spend a bit of time with this slide explaining who we are and what we do. Who are we? Well, Future's a global platform of intent-led specialist media. The key point here is our specialist content. Our teams of experts help people with the things that matter, from how to cheat at Fortnite to how to insulate your loft. Our business is underpinned by our proprietary technology and our data platform, and Jason and Kev are going to talk about that later.
In the early days of Future, we debated whether we were a tech company surfacing content or a media company, and we're very definitely a media company. Content is our reason to exist and at the very center of our wheel. However, technology is what makes our systems heartbeat. We have diversified revenue streams also. We have magazines, but also websites and newsletters to name but a few. Our objective is to ensure our content is available where our audiences are, and as a result, we're not constrained by a distribution or product approach. Our relationship is with the audience and the content. In summary, Future is a global platform for English language content that creates intent-led specialist media enabled by tech and data with multiple revenue streams. It's this combination that we think makes us successful. Our audiences are diverse.
The wheel on the left-hand side outlines the content verticals we operate in. You probably can't see it on those slides. These are specialist audiences where we serve, and you can see we operate across 16 verticals, split into four divisions, B2B, games, devs, and tech, wealth and savings, and lastly, lifestyle, knowledge, and news, which is the focus of today's case study. As well as having relevant audience, we also have real scale. We reach one in three online, with a total monthly audience of over 430 million users.
By the end of today, if I've done my job well, then you'll be able to understand why we're so confident in our ability to grow our audiences to one in two over the coming years. Our revenues, as I said, are also diverse, and the wheel on the right-hand side should hopefully be familiar to most of you. At Future, we've created a truly diversified business with three core revenue streams: advertising, affiliate, and direct consumer monetization, with each being over 30% of our revenues. The Future model is well-positioned to withstand good times and hard times. As you have seen from our trading update yesterday, with diversified audiences and our differing client bases, means we can pivot to where the most valuable audiences are at that point in time. As. Penny will describe later, we fish where the river runs fastest.
For example, we grew our market share of travel insurance this summer. While there was no energy switching in the U.K. in our affiliate business, we moved our focus to services our readers most wanted at that moment in time. Now, as a result of the focused execution of our strategy, Future has changed a lot, and the results really do speak for themselves. I'm not normally a huge fan of talking about what you've done. As at Future, we're much more motivated about where we're going. However, one of our values is that we're very proud of our past, and I am proud of what we've achieved. On every metric over the last eight years, we've grown faster than the market. We've increased revenue 12-fold, while increasing our margin 45 percentage points, which is what then underpins the exceptional performance in the AOP.
One of the disciplines we hold ourselves to is to ensure that our earnings growth translates to shareholder value, and you can see we've increased our EPS 122-fold in the last eight years, while leverage has largely stayed constant at around 1.5x . We've achieved these tremendous results due to our focus on our products and our audiences. With online users increasing fivefold, our content verticals grew from 6- 16, and while we've continued to invest in our people, growing headcount 500% in the last eight years. Those I've known a long time, well, this office is a big upgrade from where we were before. One thing to draw out here is that as we grow our brands, we often expand within verticals we already have expertise in.
This helps us de-risk our growth and also provides greater market coverage. For example, we now have 11 online brands in technology compared to three, eight years ago. Our operating model and proven playbook also provides us the confidence that we can launch completely new verticals like Homes. We have a proven playbook that lets us grow our existing verticals while also launching and integrating new verticals to deliver superior returns. As a consequence of this growth, Future is now a leading digital player in the U.S., with audiences bigger than The New York Times, Fox, and Condé Nast. Now being proud of our past is one of our values at Future. The second half of that value is excited about our future, and I am excited about our future.
I'm really excited to add this slide to my collection over the next few years as we move up the audience billboard charts. Now, in addition to being asked the question, what is Future and what do we do? The other question I get asked a lot is, how have we achieved these results for such a long period of time? What people really mean is, how do you expect you all to continue to be successful? The aim of today is to answer both of these questions. To help orient you, I thought I might share the framework that we operate around internally. Firstly, and without sounding like I'm stating the obvious, you do actually need to know where you're going. At Future, we have two very clear objectives, grow relevant and valuable audiences and continue to diversify and grow our monetization.
In order to achieve these, we have three core enablers that underpin our business, expert content, our operating model, and our proprietary tech. While our three pillars ensure that every day we're making the right decisions that help us achieve our objectives, focusing on what matters most, sustainable organic growth, driving the platform effect, and value creating M&A. Now, operating as a responsible business is a must-do for us and underpins all of our decision-making, from taking plastic toys off of our magazines to owning the debate about the trustworthiness of content online. Our number one objective is growing relevant and valuable audiences. We are more than just a media company, and it's a really important point to understand in understanding Future, that investors understand that the value of being a specialist media company with intent-led audiences.
What this means is we don't just want to have the largest audience. Being a commodity news site does not add anything to our group. By growing our audiences that ask questions and that are looking for help in content and topics that prevail through time and that oftentimes lead to a buying decision, means we're growing valuable and relevant audiences. Shayna will talk later about how it's our ability to truly know what our audience is doing that drives the far higher yields and advertiser loyalty, while Stuart and Jason will demonstrate how we build our audiences and why relevance underpins our data model. Our second objective is continuing to grow and diversify our monetization. Having the most valuable and relevant audiences allows us to then create the products to meet their needs.
By being expert about knowing what matters to our audience, we know what to serve to them. Shayna has a great example of this later with the Who What Wear team doing this with a pair of boat shoes. I'll leave you hanging on that cliffhanger, while Sophie's gonna talk about how we built out a new revenue stream and endorsements in the women's lifestyle brand because our readers trust our recommendations. It's our ability to achieve our objectives is in part a result of the enablers that underpin what we do. Expert content, which Sophie and Hilary are going to talk about. Our operating model, a real source of competitive advantage, which will come to life with Penny, and Stuart will walk you through their slides. Finally, our proprietary tech and data, which Kev and Jason will talk you through.
Now, the final part of our model is the three execution focus pillars, ensuring that every day we're making the decisions that help achieve our objectives. Focusing on sustainable organic growth, delivering the platform effect, and value creating M&A. Now, these are so important to us, I just wanted to look at them in a little bit more detail. Now, as I mentioned, our pillars are the framework that drive all of our decision-making, and delivering organic growth is table stakes at Future. I think it's important to understand why we are so positive about our ability to continue to drive growth, even from seemingly old or mature brands across different verticals. An example on this slide, we've outlined our very high level model, which helps us deliver sustainable organic audience and revenue growth.
We start with the process of content creation, so I'm at the top of the chart going left to right. At Future, this really is a blend of art and science, looking for the most relevant content for the most valuable audiences. In addition, much of our content has an evergreen element to it, behaving a lot like a music royalty. I certainly know from my perspective that learning how to improve my golf swing is a perennial piece of content. This combination of data, expertise, and a focus on reviews and how-to content enables the audience leadership that drives our higher yields, which then supports our revenue growth. As a consequence of our operating leverage, which Penny will talk about later, that translates into sustainable long-term organic profit.
Now, I know it's really easy for me to say this, but I also have the evidence to support it. Overall, in the last four years, we've delivered an average organic online user growth of 17%, while delivering over 25% organic media revenue growth annually. Now, looking at this in more detail, GamesRadar+ is, I think, our oldest site, nearly 25 years old this year. You can see we've grown audience 29% CAGR and media revenues 58% in the last four years. TechRadar is also one of our older sites, with over 15 years under its belt. It's also one of our largest sites, and arguably the impact of large numbers makes growth harder. In the last four years, we've grown our audience a 6% CAGR and our media revenue is 22%.
While Real Homes, a relatively new site that we launched in 2017, has grown audience at a much faster rate, but the monetization is a 56% CAGR. Now, what's common on all of these examples is that media revenues grow faster than users due to the benefits of the scale and the compounding nature of what we do. Now, having organic revenue growth gives us the permission and the confidence to look for value-adding acquisitions. Our second pillar is about finding M&A that accelerates our strategy. We look for opportunities with a combination of Future and the target we believe together can create unique value. Hilary and Shayna are gonna talk about that in relation to Who What Wear. We also operate, as you will know, with tight financial discipline. We will not overpay, nor will we pay someone else for our synergies.
In order to ensure we can confidently maintain our track record, our financial returns analysis does not include revenue synergies when we make decisions to buy something. We take a cautious approach to Future financial modeling. Finally, we operate a fiscally responsible balance sheet. We look to maintain leverage around 1.5x, and have a consistent track record of delivering free cash flow conversion of around 95%-100%, which means we continue to delever quickly. Now, our ability to continue to add value to our acquisitions is material. I originally put huge here, and I thought it was a little bit too common. One of the benefits of our model is that we have a large universe of assets from which we can fish. As a consequence, we continue to be very selective.
We have a strong track record of value-adding acquisitions. Given our strategic intent of diversifying both our audiences and our monetization routes, we've a large pipeline of opportunities. Over the last 12 months, we've undertaken four acquisitions. The most recent, Who What Wear, we'll be discussing later. We've considered over 100 other businesses before we acquired these four. Looking forward, we will look to either continue to buy businesses that bring content capabilities, either to enhance existing verticals or grow totally new verticals, or will add capability which because of our platform model, means we can quickly scale the benefit across the wider group. The examples on this slide are purely illustrative. We have, as you would expect, more than just these on the pad.
The key message, however, is that as a consequence of our global breadth, the range of content areas, and our diversified revenue streams, we can afford to be very selective about what acquisitions we do, ensuring we only buy the businesses where we believe we can truly add value and deliver long-term returns. The combination of our focus on organic plus value-adding acquisitions is what is turbocharged by our final pillar, the platform effect. We operate as one Future, and due to the way we work, we can demonstrate repeatedly that the combination of organic and inorganic capabilities create unique additional value to the bottom line. We believe that this is a true source of competitive advantage, and the case study today on women's lifestyle is a great example of this.
Just as relevant will be Jason MacLellan's section on how we've created unique value in our data platform, while Penny Ladkin-Brand will outline how this drives our financial returns. Now, it's a combination of our three pillars that gives us the confidence we can reach one in two Americans online, and more importantly, that this audience will be relevant and valuable to our verticals and our partners. I hope the last few slides have given you a real sense of what we do and how we execute our strategy to deliver the superior returns we've seen to date. The critical message is that we believe through the execution of that strategy, that we can repeat this success of that we've enjoyed over the last few years, over the years to come. The next couple of slides hopefully evidence that for you.
Now, our model is really quite simple, and that's very easy for me to say and probably harder for you to understand. Therefore, I really wanna take my time on this slide to make sure you really get a chance to understand how our model works and where and why we are so confident. We create expert content in subjects people care about. We grow podium positions in English-speaking markets. We increase revenues online through a combination of endemic sales teams, affiliate revenues, and premium content. The combination of these three factors is what creates our above-market returns. The table on this slide looks to demonstrate where we think we are in this journey. Across some of our verticals, we've got 16. They wouldn't all fit in the slide.
If we walk left to right, and looking at the tech vertical in particular, you'll see that we have a podium position in both the U.K. and the U.S. Now, we have around 33% of the market, and therefore, we have loads more room for growth in this vertical. Over the last four years, we've grown our online users fourfold. As a consequence, we've moved from position four, from position fifteen in the U.S. to position number one. As we grew that audience in the U.S., we became number one in that market. By becoming number one in that market, we were able to double our revenue per user as we became a must-buy for our advertisers and our diversified revenues kicked in.
Just looking, therefore, then at some of the other verticals we have, you'll get a sense of where we think we are on this journey. In homes, we were so new in 2018, we didn't even get listed on Comscore. Today, we're number one in the U.K., and we're number nine in the U.S. There is a real opportunity for further growth here as we scale our reach in the U.S., where we will start to see the real benefits of leadership impacting our revenues. In the U.K., where we now have a podium position, we frequently see advertising revenues similar to the same value in pound note terms as our technology vertical. It's a really important point, so just wanna make sure you understand how that works. We have premium audiences that advertisers want to be around.
Games publishers want to advertise on game sites, and we call these endemic advertisers. At Future, we have endemic sales teams who have relationships with the client first and the agency second. We at Future don't have an agency sales team. We have endemic teams who talk about the client first and then meet with the agency. This is a really key part of our defensible model. We're not relying on agencies solely to allocate budgets, but instead, we have direct relationships with our clients, which means we're truly able to deliver the audience that's most valuable to them at that moment in time. However, because we're fiscally conservative, we only invest in local market endemic sales teams when we believe we have a critical mass. Finding specialist sellers also takes a little bit of time.
Prior to this point, the audiences in those markets we sell through our data platform and the wider audience networks. Generally, as a rule of thumb, endemic sales teams can deliver around 3-4 x the yield of an audience sale. It's hugely valuable to us to put that endemic sales team in place, but we don't wanna do it until we've got scale. In the homes example, we have an endemic sales team in t he U.K.. Even though the absolute audience in the U.S. is larger in homes than it is in the U.K., it's not quite big enough for us yet to invest in a local sales team in America. Hence, the opportunity we see in the near term as we continue to grow this audience in America from position number nine to position number five, as an example.
One of the reasons why we're so excited about the Who What Wear acquisition is that it replicates for us a lot of the success we saw with tech in the U.S.. Four years ago, we acquired a business called Purch, and one of their brands was called Tom's Guide. That, coupled with our own tech assets, including TechRadar, meant we became top five in the U.S.. Crucially, Tom's Guide also brought an endemic sales team, which meant we were able to accelerate our growth, and that is the opportunity we believe we can re-replicate today, right now in fashion and beauty. Now, our ambition is to reach one in two online in the US in the medium term across our portfolio.
One of the reasons why we're so confident in our ability to do this is there are multiple ways in which we can achieve it. This chart highlights the opportunity in America if we can move to a top-three position across our verticals. With the dotted circles highlighting the size of the audience opportunity. Now, if you think about the size of these bubbles, you can see we don't need to win everywhere, although obviously we'd really like to win everywhere, to achieve the objective of reaching one in two. The benefit of the podium positions, coupled with the platform model, means that as we take leadership positions, we can increase our revenues per user. Over the last two years in tech, we've increased our yields 30% in our biggest vertical on brands that are over ten years old.
While the revenue per user of Who What Wear is around 3 x that of Marie Claire, representing a real opportunity from an endemic sales team. The continuing growth in the affiliates in the verticals we operate is self-evident, and it is this equation of doubling the revenue per user, coupled with increasing our online audiences, that's fueled our success today, and why we believe that we can repeat this success in the years ahead as we continue to create expert content that is both relevant and valuable while scaling our revenue models across our brands. On that note, let me hand over to Sophie Wybrew-Bond, who's gonna take you through this in more detail.
Thank you, Zillah. I'm delighted to have the opportunity to shine a spotlight on Women's Lifestyle. I'm Sophie Wybrew-Bond. I'm Senior Vice President of our Lifestyle, Knowledge, and News division in which Women's Lifestyle sits. I've been at Future since 2019. Shortly after I joined, I became CMO, and then I moved into the divisional role I'm in now. Prior to Future, I spent four years at Marks & Spencer, where I was Head of Brand, and before that, more than 20 years in media, where I launched and developed a number of women's and entertainment brands. Happily, this combination of retail and media experience has collided at Future and has been absolutely invaluable for me. Not only do I love competing in Women's Lifestyle, it's hugely appealing, and as Zillah's outlined, it's a very exciting opportunity for Future.
In the next 15 minutes or so, I'm gonna explain how we've gone from no presence in this sector in 2019 to challenging the very top players in the U.K. and the U.S. here in 2022. I'm gonna tell you why this vertical is so attractive for us and why we have a right not only to play, but actually to win in Women's Lifestyle. I'm gonna get started by showing you our growth trajectory and the component parts as we move along the timeline that's driven it. As I said, when I joined Future in 2019, there was no Women's Lifestyle vertical, although Future, of course, did reach lots of women through its other verticals.
In 2020, we had gained a number one position in homes in the U.K. through the acquisition of TI Media, and as Zillah said, we've stayed number one in the U.K. for the last two years in homes. We became determined to grow scale in Women's Lifestyle in both the U.S. and the U.K.. As you can see on the timeline, the acquisition of TI Media brought with it brands such as marieclaire.co.uk, which was already a pure play digital brand by that point, Woman & Home, and GoodTo. We moved Woman & Home and GoodTo sites to .com so that we could compete more effectively in the U.S., and we've since migrated them to our proprietary web platform, Vanilla, which Kevin will tell you more about later.
We actively sought an acquisition that would provide a fast start and bring a flagship brand to the portfolio. Moving a bit further along, acquiring marieclaire.com in the U.S. in 2021 for the first time since it was launched as a JV by Hearst and by the brand's owners, Marie Claire International, back in 1994. That was really a tribute and testament to our success with the British Marie Claire and the trust that the brand owners had in Future to build a really diversified revenue business. This brought a famous brand to Future's portfolio in the U.S. and one that could reach affluent, engaged, and highly valuable female audiences. Acquiring Who What Wear is a game changer for us in the U.S., just like, as Zilla said, Purch was for our tech verticals back in 2018.
Another famous brand to add to our stable with a proven multiple of ad and e-com revenues for its reach relative to our other brands. You'll hear more about this later from Hilary and Shayna. If you move further to the right, Women's Lifestyle brands are now at number three in Comscore's beauty and fashion category in the U.K., having been number 10 last July, and we're closely challenging Hearst for the number two spot. In the U.K., we've grown 24% year-on-year, and this growth, coupled with our number three position, means we're able to now win some significant ad campaigns, and we're working on one currently for the autumn with Marks & Spencer.
In the U.S., we've grown to number five after Yahoo, Dotdash Meredith, Hearst, and Cosmo, ahead of Vogue, ahead of The New York Times Fashion and Style, and other much more established networks. In the U.S., our Women's Lifestyle sites have grown almost 40% across the year organically, 91% if you include Who What Wear, and that outstrips the competition in both the U.K. and in the U.S. over the past few years. We weren't on the map in 2019. It's huge growth in such a highly competitive market, and it's been done through this combination of acquisitions and also growing organically, and we continue to show progress. Our growth in female audiences, of course, isn't just restricted to Women's Lifestyle brands. We've also grown our reach among women in the U.S. and the U.K. in our other verticals.
We've talked about homes already, technology also, and entertainment. Just to put the growth on this slide into context, in the U.K. we've grown our female audiences across all of Future's verticals by over 80% between 2019 and 2022, far outstripping competitors. Vox is the next highest growth rate of 47%. Hearst is relatively static at 3%. Vice Media and Condé Nast in double-digit decline. In the U.S., we've grown female audiences again across Future 45% in the same timeline and have completely bucked the trend of competitors who are largely in decline, with Hearst down 9%, Condé Nast 27%, and Vice down 40%. Now you've seen our growth trajectory.
I just wanna take a couple of slides to describe the commercial appeal of the Women's Lifestyle market and why Future's so well-placed to grow our share. Fundamental to the appeal of this market is the driving force that women play in influencing purchase decisions. According to Forbes, 70%-80% of all purchase decisions are influenced by women. Facilitating the female-led purchase decision process is a sweet spot for Future. It's absolutely rooted in our DNA of providing high-quality content to help our audiences find and evaluate the perfect product for their needs. Women are very active in their search for information, albeit their journeys to research fashion, beauty, and home related products are not necessarily as linear as they are for technology. Key to delivering on their needs is providing inspiration as well as the practical information to make a purchasing decision.
We need to provide that inspiration on the platforms where women are spending time. On social media, as well as our own sites. We use trusted voices to cut through and provide reassurance, curation, and advice. With beauty, women enjoy personal recommendations, a first-person kind of approach. They don't necessarily need any more the face-to-face interaction of the beauty counter. Digital inspiration, reviews, and how-tos are very helpful. Media brands, of course, remain trusted intermediaries in this search for information, inspiration. Editors, of course, are the original influencers. Arguably, they have even more credibility as they are backed by media brands. We have a number of highly specialist editors who are so authoritative and influential. We've got our Marie Claire Beauty Director in the U.S., Deena Campbell, and in the U.K., Lisa Oxenham, very highly respected and influential authors.
Editorial has shifted from a much more arm's length glossy magazine kind of approach to much more first-person advice, tutorials, and how-tos. Again, a heartland strength for Future. As we build our women's lifestyle brand portfolio and grow our audiences, Future's well-placed to take advantage of the growth that's happening outside of our world in online shopping for beauty and fashion. It's fair to say that women are very comfortable with the online shopping experience, and they have a marked preference for shopping via mobile. This benefits Future, as 80% of the visits to our Future women's lifestyle sites are from mobile versus 70% as an average of right across Future. It's very easy for our female audiences to transact as long as we give them a very easy, frictionless, inspirational journey, and they travel through to shop.
Secondly, the fashion and beauty market has long-term growth fundamentals, both from a volume and from an e-com penetration perspective, and that represents great growth opportunities for Future. Again, when it comes to shopping via mobile, beauty and fashion outpaced other online shopping categories significantly, growing 57% versus an already high rate of growth on mobile devices, on all devices of 42%. Predictions show that growth in online shopping, such as fashion, is set to continue. It's currently under-penetrated. It will be over-penetrated in the next two to three years, so it's a fast pace of growth. Again, from an ad perspective, the market's expected to continue to grow at pace. According to Statista, beauty and personal luxury advertising spending was set to reach $7.5 billion in 2021.
TV is still the predominant advertising medium, but digital is not far behind and growing as more and more consumers flock to shop online using the internet for product research. Of course, that causes advertisers to follow suit. Now it's time to talk you through our brands. I'm gonna walk you through our portfolio of brands and their target audiences. It's so important that we immaculately understand who our audiences are. They are looking for authentic brands that are relevant to them. Our growing portfolio of women's lifestyle brands is able to serve a number of categories of content. As you can see here, it covers a spectrum of ages, all of whom are highly desirable audiences for our advertisers to reach.
As I've already mentioned, these women have significant spending power and influence over purchase decisions and an increasing willingness to shop online via mobile. The sense of coverage appealing to every life stage also gives us a great competitive advantage as a portfolio and a certain level of defensiveness. I'm gonna start at the youngest and arguably the hardest to reach age with My Imperfect Life. This is a brand we launched immediately after acquiring TI Media as we started to build. It's aimed at the 18-24-year-old Gen Z who recognize that life isn't perfect, and My Imperfect Life helps them make sense of their changing world. Beauty, fashion, well-being, and relationships are key categories but seen through a lens of a very conscious consumer. Eco-friendly beauty, ethical and affordable fashion are highly relevant.
I'm gonna skip over Who What Wear, 'cause you're gonna hear from the very well-qualified Hilary and Shayna to discuss that. Then move on to Marie Claire, which I think probably almost needs no introduction. It's our most well-known women's brand. Whereas, you know, we hold the license to publish both the .co.uk and the .com. Marie Claire was well ahead of its time, talking about female empowerment and sustainability back in the nineties. It's got real credibility to write in this space, and other brands are scrabbling to catch up and be relevant. Beauty is a core category for Marie Claire, and a Marie Claire seal of approval is sought after by beauty brands, which is where we get potential revenues and existing revenues that are growing in endorsements and awards.
The Marie Claire audience is college educated, confident, influential and affluent. In the U.S., she has a median household income of over $185,000 a year. GoodTo. GoodTo is for women in a family life stage. It provides authoritative, easy-to-follow parenting, food, health and well-being advice, alongside money-saving tips and tricks, which are ever more sought after. Powered by eight years of topical authority, GoodTo's domain is very strong, and it ranks number one in searches for terms such as gifts for new moms and best prams. Woman & Home. Woman & Home represents modern women who are in command of all elements of their busy lives. These women are the original influencers who have multiple interdependencies in their family, work, friendship and community circles.
Woman & Home helps its 40+ readers make considered choices in fashion, beauty, home, health and wellbeing through product-oriented shopping content and authoritative reviews. Just in summary, you can see we've diversified through building the portfolio, our audience reach across all these ages, so we can monetize our female audiences and capitalize on the market growth in ads and e-com that I described earlier. Why is Future so well set to succeed in Women's Lifestyle? I think you could see from the bubbles, we see no reason why Women's Lifestyle should not be the same scale as our gaming vertical. Firstly, Women's Lifestyle displays many of the same characteristics as our heartland technology and gaming verticals. We're continuing with our track record of immaculately servicing our audience needs on subjects that they care about.
We can find audiences who display intent via deploying the same podium search strategy we've succeeded with in other verticals, and that's supported now by our expanded direct sales capability brought to us via Who What Wear acquisition. Also by our comprehensive and modular end-to-end technology, which will bring benefits to Who What Wear once we migrate that site next year. As Google refines its algorithm, we're in the middle of another refining of the algorithm right now, increasingly prioritizing respected authors and high-quality original content. We are very well-placed to win at search as our content quality is recognized by Google, meaning we can rank highly for subjects in our target categories of fashion, beauty, and home. At the same time as winning through that podium strategy and search, we're diversifying our audience sources to include social and also email newsletter referrals.
Wrapping up, how does our progress, which you can see has been significant so far in Women's Lifestyle, translate into exciting growth opportunities for advertising and e-com affiliate revenues? I mean, first of all, we now have scale, and this scale has been further enriched and accelerated by the acquisition of Who What Wear. We now reach over 35 million users a month, and we are continuing to drive growth as increased reach gives us this opportunity to grow yield as advertisers, as we've discussed, look for market leaders and safe haven brands to spend with. Not only does Who What Wear bring us clear expertise on ads monetization with its outstanding direct sales capabilities, but also in e-com, where Who What Wear is driving a purchase every 30 seconds.
As many of Who What Wear's advertisers are retailers, by combining the two, you get a multiplying factor. Finally, to improve our monetization across the vertical, we'll be able to share our expertise in fashion and beauty. Having scale brings us strength, and we learn ways of improving our performance all the time. We're already learning from Who What Wear and vice versa, I hope, and we're less than 90 days post-completion. I've set the scene on our growth in Women's Lifestyle. There's more to come. We're very excited about the future, and front and center of that is Who What Wear. I'm gonna introduce you to our newest colleagues who've come over from LA to meet you.
First of all, the Co-founder and Chief Content Officer, Hilary Kerr, and then founding member and now President of Commercial for Women's Lifestyle and Homes, Shayna Kossove. I'm gonna hand you over to Hilary first of all.
Thanks, Sophie. Thank you so much, Sophie. Thank you. Hello to everyone. I just wanted to say that it is such an honor to be here today in such impressive company. As Sophie mentioned, I'm Hilary Kerr, and I co-founded Who What Wear in 2006 after starting my career in the print world at Elle Magazine in New York, where I worked in editorial and covered a wide range of topics, including food, design, travel, entertaining, beauty, music, art, and more. At Who What Wear, I look after our editorial, creative, social, copy, and podcast teams as our chief content officer, a job I love tremendously. As you know, Who What Wear is a new addition to Future, and I have to say that after nearly 16 years as an independent company, it is truly a thrill to be a part of this organization.
Who What Wear and Future share so many key values and cultural similarities, including a laser focus on the right audience, a shared playbook for using expertise and data to create the most compelling content, and a dedication to sustainable organic growth. In addition to these shared strategies, I also believe that we bring new capabilities and insights to Future and are quite excited to capitalize on Future's many, many areas of strength and expertise. For example, the Who What Wear team brings 15 years of direct relationships with luxury, fashion, and beauty advertisers in the U.S. as a majority of our revenue comes from client-direct branded content campaigns. We also bring brand awareness, a highly engaged and diversified audience, and a proven track record as a must-buy for clients in the U.S. market, which is key to Future's expansion in the women's lifestyle space.
While I might be biased, we also bring a portfolio of incredible content and some of the best editors, creators, and creatives in the industry. Meanwhile, we benefit from so much that Future has to offer, including their audience expertise, proprietary platforms like Hawk that will take our e-commerce to a whole new level, and a robust tech stack. Future's many strengths will power the Who What Wear business and capabilities in phenomenal ways. In joining Future, we are entering a new era for Who What Wear, and I truly feel that we are better together. As an independent company, we always had a long list of innovative ideas, and with Future's support, we can tackle more opportunities than ever and truly make the business explode. This is a tipping point, and I truly feel confident about the future, which, yes, is a pun.
I don't want to get too ahead of myself, so I'd like to start with a proper introduction to Who What Wear the brand. I'm going to share who we are today, followed by a bit about how we got here, and then we can discuss where we're going as a part of Future. As I mentioned, we launched Who What Wear in 2006 with one daily story that we emailed to 200 friends and family. Today, we are a global community of over 23 million fashion and beauty lovers who come to Who What Wear to learn what to buy and how to wear it.
Since day one, we've had a clear mission to inspire and inform our audience about everything fashion and beauty, which in turn empowers them to make a purchase right then and there in our shoppable content. Because our content is so effective and our audience is so primed, as you heard, a Who What Wear reader shops a fashion or beauty product recommended by our editors every 30 seconds. That's over 3,000 products a day and counting. I'm incredibly excited to see how we can accelerate that growth with Hawk, and I have a hunch that it could be quite meaningful.
While we started with a single daily story that we emailed to our audience, today, we create content for our community in a wide range of places, platforms, and mediums from social media, where we've always been one of the first fashion media brands to join and understand a platform, to IRL events, which is in real life if you don't speak fluent acronym. The reason for this expansion is because we're constantly evolving the way women consume fashion and beauty content, and more importantly, the way that they shop it. Our audience follows us as we innovate on each new and emerging platform. That's a small snapshot of who we are today, but let's quickly touch base on how we got here. For that, we need time travel.
Yes, we are going back to 2006, which seems like a lifetime ago because the pre-iPhone world was a decidedly different place. Vogue didn't have a website. Facebook was only open to students. Paparazzi photos of celebrities were suddenly on the rise and seemingly everywhere, and the fashion industry was incredibly wary of the digital world. But we were not wary of this world. We saw an opportunity, specifically to use our training as print magazine editors to create high-quality fashion and beauty content online since no one else was doing it. Our value proposition was simple. We'd inspire our audience with of-the-moment celebrity and street style photos, inform them about the latest trends, and empower them to make a purchase with content that was 100% shoppable. We were creating a destination for an audience that wasn't being served.
Who What Wear wasn't simply there to entertain like every other brand. Instead, we focused on creating contextualized shopping content that truly inspired, informed, and empowered our readers. No one else got the formula quite right. Legacy fashion media brands didn't understand the audience that they were serving or the mindset of someone consuming content online, and they just tried to replicate their print magazines in digital format, which didn't work. Other digitally native brands in our space were focused on massive scale at any cost, which means trying to be everything to everyone and diluting your point of view. Who What Wear has always focused on our original mission, making style accessible to everyone, and that has attracted the right audience that trusts us and comes back to our brand over and over again on our own platforms and on social media.
Because of this content strategy, and because we stay focused and ignore the hot button topics that many of our competitors court, we have less dependency on Google algorithms because we have created an audience that comes to us from diversified places, including our incredibly robust social media following and a very engaged newsletter audience too. How do we continue to attract, grow, and serve this audience in 2022 and keep them coming back for more, especially when the digital landscape has changed so radically? By creating highly focused, high-quality content that stays true to our mission of making style accessible to everyone, it's the start of a virtuous cycle. More on that in a minute. In 2022, accessible means something more evolved than it did in 2006. Then it was simply about removing gatekeeping, which was the norm in fashion.
Literally just telling someone what a product was, how much it cost, and where they could shop it, that was accessible then. Now we think about accessible content in three ways. First, in terms of representation. Our audience wants to see themselves in our content, whether that's their personal style, their body type, or pieces that fit their budget. We create content that inspires and attracts a diverse community, which is why diverse creators, talents, brands, and designers are so important to us, along with circular fashion and sustainability and inclusive imagery. Next, we think about it in terms of responsiveness. Thanks to social media, we've always listened to our audience closely. They tell us a lot, and we're able to pivot our content depending on what's going on in the readers' lives and the world around us.
Finally, we think about it in terms of real-time data analysis. Our content team works incredibly closely with our data and audience development teams to truly understand what's resonating with our audience. Because of this close relationship, we can optimize what affiliate products go into our stories and cover breaking trends with almost no turnaround. This is a cultural similarity with Future and part of the reason that we were so excited to join Future. It's actually quite unusual in this industry to have this shared understanding of content and data, of art and science. It's also important to know what we don't focus on, specifically hard news, politics, celebrity gossip, and adult content. I'll share more about why this is important in a minute, but it's a critical piece of our content strategy.
Instead, we focus on storytelling around fashion and beauty, because at the end of the day, these are emotional purchases, and our audience needs to feel inspired. Because our reader sees this content that affirms her values, that relates to her directly, that pivots depending on what's going on around her in the world, and is full of shopping picks that are fully optimized, she develops trust and affinity for Who What Wear. She knows that it's a safe space to make her personal shopping decisions. Of course, we can't forget about search. No. Because search is very important to us, and it's critical to Future's strategy because it shows intent, and our audience demonstrates that in a huge way. 98% of the top search terms to Who What Wear are fashion and beauty related, which is huge. By contrast, consider the following within our competitive set.
71% of the top search terms to POPSUGAR are entertainment or celebrity related, not fashion or beauty. 54% of the top search terms to Refinery29 are celebrity, entertainment, or adult content related, not fashion or beauty. 68% of the top search terms to Bustle Digital Group are celebrity, entertainment, or adult content related, which is, you guessed it, not fashion or beauty. You know the backstory, you know the mission, you know a little bit about the brand, and you know the ways in which our audience gets to Who What Wear, but I'm sure you're wondering who exactly is this audience anyway. As I mentioned earlier today, we are a global community of 23 million people, most of whom are in the U.S..
More importantly, it is a highly qualified audience and the audience that we set out to serve in the beginning. According to Comscore, we are number one in our competitive set, which includes Vogue, Refinery29, and more, with women 18-34, which means we are over 2.5 x more likely to reach millennial women than our competitors. Our audience has a high median household income of $132,000. It's overwhelmingly female, and it's quite diverse. 40% of our readership identifies as BIPOC, which is Black, Indigenous, and people of color, and Hispanic. She is also highly educated. We are number one in our competitive set for our audience having a higher degree. She is a parent. 57% of Who What Wear readers have kids, including yours truly. She is the decision household maker.
We're number one there as well. If you're wondering why all of these things are so important, it's for a number of reasons. Being number one in so many categories is incredibly important to our commercial clients because it shows that we have the exact audience they're trying to reach, the most qualified. It also shows the enormous buying power she has as she's making the purchasing decisions for herself and her entire family. This is what we've built over the last nearly 16 years, an incredibly focused content strategy that creates the best shoppable fashion and beauty stories, a qualified, intentional, diversified audience that comes to us from a variety of channels, completely primed to shop. She trusts us and seeks us out because we pivot our content depending on what's going on in the world around us.
We surprise and delight her with both high and low fashion and beauty picks, so there's always a purchase she can justify making. In other words, this is a resilient audience. We've also built a very effective brand safe environment for our commercial partners who come to us for our high-quality branded content, storytelling capabilities, and the most desirable audience. I realize I'm just touching on the branded content piece of our business now, but my amazing colleague, Shayna, is going to speak about it in great detail in a moment. I do think it's worth noting that the vast majority of our revenue comes from branded content, which is the inverse of most of our competitive set. It's incredibly high yield for us, plus it's effective for our commercial partners who can't place their money elsewhere to the same effect.
Part of the reason for that is because we think about all content holistically. If it's on our site or in our social media feeds, it has to be good. We hold everything to the same exacting standards as our editorial content, and our audience loves it. In fact, when we review the top stories each month, invariably there are branded content pieces in our top ten, which is really quite a feat. It all goes back to that virtuous cycle that I mentioned in the beginning. Our audience comes to us primed to shop. The content she engages with, whether it's branded or editorial, is excellent. That compelling content inspires her to shop, and she feels excited to share her purchase with her own social following, who then come to us, and the cycle continues. What's next? Beauty. At this point, we have a proven fashion playbook.
We know exactly how to make irresistible shopping content for our audience. Now, we are deploying that same expertise to the world of beauty and are confident that we can replicate our success in this category. Even better, the world of beauty is one that we already know and love. But as an independent company, resources could be challenging. Now, with Future's incredible support, we are ready to take all of our learnings, power them with Future's phenomenal search strategies that are truly world-class, and create the most compelling, shoppable beauty content all through the Who What Wear lens. I'm pleased to share that we've already started innovating in this space since the acquisition, which as you heard, was 90 days ago. We move fast. While it's early days, the initial results are highly encouraging.
For example, we just launched a new content series that offers an innovative, social-first, shopping-centric approach to beauty product reviews, and that's just the beginning. We have so many ideas, and I'm really excited to get going. Our audience is so smart about shopping when it comes to fashion, and we want her to feel equally confident in making the best beauty purchases for her personal taste, skin and hair type, budget, and more, and we are confident that we are well-positioned and well on our way to becoming the destination for beauty buys as well. With that, I will hand it over to my dear colleague, Shayna, who is going to give you a really excellent presentation.
Okay. Thank you, Hilary. My name is Shayna Kossove, and I'm so thrilled to be here representing Future with our new colleagues. I'm a founding member of Who What Wear, and I serve as Chief Revenue Officer of the company, which means I oversee ad sales, but also integrated marketing, client services, branded content, and our influencer teams. Prior to Who What Wear, I was a founding member and Head of Revenue for a video content startup called LXTV, and I led the sales team there up until the acquisition of the company to NBC. Before that, I had sales roles within major publications, including O, The Oprah Magazine at Hearst, The Hollywood Reporter, and a few others. At Future, I'm now overseeing women's fashion and beauty, where we are applying our best practices and strategies to the group.
The editorial and audience strategies that Hilary just discussed have laid the groundwork for the incredible success we've had in monetizing Who What Wear. Just as important, we've cultivated a team of experts and innovators who are literally the best in the business when it comes to sales, integrated marketing, client services, branded content, and influencer marketing. These groups make up what we call our media revenue teams. Together, these teams manage all pre- and post-sale functions for our advertising clients, from campaign ideation, planning, branded content creation, the campaign execution, talent management, optimization, and the post-campaign reporting. A team mantra of ours is to focus where we're winning, which for Who What Wear means fashion, retail, and the luxury business. Our sales team is structured around these top-performing verticals.
The senior sellers in our company, which lead these sub-channels, have each been with us for seven or more years, so they hold those deep direct client relationships that we've been talking about. We use that same philosophy, focus where we're winning, when we go out to the market. From a high-level view, we could literally go into a sales pitch with just these next few slides and effectively communicate why any advertiser looking to target the female millennial and Gen Z audience should spend money with us to promote their brand. Here's where we provide unrivaled solutions and cannot be duplicated anywhere else. I'm gonna explain these with examples in the slides that follow, but in summary for now, Who What Wear is a leader in fashion and beauty.
We have the highest index of women who fall within the IAB digital segment for style and fashion versus our competitors. In other words, our audience loves fashion more than the audiences of our competitors. We're leaders in shopping. We ended last year with almost $65 million in referred sales of fashion and beauty products shopped from our editors' recommendations alone. We're leaders in branded content. Last year, we executed over 350 pieces of original branded content for our clients, so basically one a day in 2021. We're leaders in social media. We have more Instagram followers and higher engagement than our competitors. We're leaders in the influencer space with an expert team tracking over 12,000 individual influencers, yes, there are that many and more, making it the most diverse set of talent in the world.
We've actually been working with influencers since the beginning of the business, and many of the early fashion influencers or bloggers, as they used to be called, found success after they were first featured on the virtual pages of Who What Wear. Just as they benefit from being associated with Who What Wear and our advertisers, we benefit from these influencers as they are professional content creators, also distributors, and of course, highly influential in evangelizing our brand. Today, we're also leaders in the podcast space. We have two original series that are both directly monetized at a premium by our expert sales team. Both of them are hosted by Hilary. She's a little busy.
In a crowded marketplace, and now more than ever, it's important that we look further into why Who What Wear and how are we different from the other fashion and beauty competitors. This chart represents our position among our competitors and really shows that we're offering something different from the rest. We're connecting our advertisers to an audience that they truly cannot get anywhere else. They're simply the most influential with the highest spending power, and they are obsessed with fashion and beauty. Year after year, the number one reason why our audience comes to Who What Wear is for inspiration on what to buy and how to wear it. For an advertiser in the fashion and beauty space, Who What Wear is a must-buy.
Without having Who What Wear in the marketing mix, you're missing out on this key audience that, as you can see, is not duplicated anywhere else. This is further demonstrated by the actions that our audience takes when they consume the content. It's what happens after the ad is viewed, the email is opened, and the product is clicked. Here in every single step of what a traditional purchase funnel looks like, Who What Wear ranks number one. Our followers are the most interested in fashion products. They spend more time engaging with our content, and they purchase based on what they see on fashion sites. Adding an additional step in the process that really puts us in a category of our own, Who What Wear followers are the most likely to share their purchases on social media, influencing their many followers and creating a virtuous cycle.
We are always evolving to stay ahead of what's next in fashion and shopping. When we launched in 2006, as Hilary just walked you through, we were one of the first to combine content and commerce. Over the last 15 years, and as an unofficial mission, we have been obsessed with constantly evolving the way people consume content and commerce. We've conditioned our audience to shop our editorial and branded content across multiple platforms, starting with a shoppable daily email and on and on to live video and social commerce. This innovation is important in an always evolving industry. A recent Accenture study states that the global social commerce industry is expected to grow 3x as fast as traditional e-commerce, and that this will be driven by Gen Z and millennial consumers.
At Who What Wear, we've truly created a community of early adopters who are more likely to shop and engage with these new and emerging platforms like social media and live stream video. As brands everywhere are working hard to figure out their social commerce strategies, we're ahead of the game, and already 1 in 10 of our affiliate purchases is taking place across our social channels. Okay, the boat shoe. Next, I would like to walk you through a recent campaign so you can see what each of these elements as each of these elements are in play. This campaign was for a US footwear brand, which began in 1935 as the first non-slip boat shoe. Their goal, almost 100 years later, was to reach and engage the fashionable millennial and Gen Z audience.
We created an editorial style branded content series called All The Ways to Wear, and we tasked our expert editors and a group of outside fashion influencers to style the brand's shoes according to their own personal style. Here on the left are a few images of the looks our editors and influencers created. From there, we rolled out a whole slew of content using the original imagery that they created, and the final product was a custom shot and styled shopping story, which was distributed in our newsletter, which is what you see in the middle, and then promoted on our homepage next to that. We further created and distributed companion content for social media because we meet our audiences where they are.
We created a TikTok extension, Instagram stories, and Facebook posts, as well as corresponding brand banners that ran across our site, surrounding our content on Apple News. The final element of this campaign was an influencer styling event where our editors and influencers were gifted their choice of shoes from the collection. It was overheard at the event that the clients were amazed that the majority of attendees selected the same shoe style. As you can see in this top middle image, they loved the sneaker. This was a style that the brand actually hadn't prioritized in their marketing efforts, but soon decided to change based on its popularity with those in the know.
The result of all of this became a longer-term partnership between Who What Wear and the brand, and we're excited to be launching a limited edition boot in collaboration with them this winter. Okay. I love this slide because it's a collection of real follower comments from the sponsored post that came out of this campaign execution. I need a pair. The shoes are perfect. I'm getting these next. It's kind of all you need to know. This is a perfect example of what marketing a product the right way to the right audience can do. That is the power of Who What Wear, and this is a snapshot of the health of our ad business over the last few years. These key measures prove our strategy is working.
The first stat relates to our top 20 accounts, and these are the major retailers, fashion brands, and luxury conglomerates. They're more than just a seasonal or a one-off campaign. These are extended partnerships where our teams have truly become specialists in our clients' businesses in order to ideate and execute in meeting their goals. What's essential for us is that these clients return and grow yearly. In just the first seven months of this year, January through July, we're already more than double our full year top 20 accounts revenue from 2019. Another important measure is our average deal size, which has grown over 45% in that same period. Maybe the most impressive of all is our stellar advertiser return rate of 93%. Not only are these brands coming back year-over-year, but they're investing more.
In our new roles at Future, we're bringing our skill set, relationships, and ways of working to the women's category. As we look to grow Marie Claire in the U.S. with a similar approach, we wanna show the competitive advantage and why this is a necessary touch point for brands in the space. Just like the Who What Wear audience, Marie Claire, the Marie Claire woman is the most affluent in the set, but is further differentiated by the fact that she's also a manager or holds an executive position in the workplace. Marie Claire is now just one part of our total women's portfolio. We've barely scratched the surface. Going back to what Sophie explained earlier, we're now serving a highly diverse women's audience across many interests and demographics.
Our brand partners now have a home within a unique set of premium fashion, beauty, and women's lifestyle sites that offer editorial credibility, audience diversity, and scale, combined with our proven expertise and success in direct advertising solutions. This is good news for our advertiser, and it's good news for all of us because with Future we will deliver more, and there is so much room to grow. Future brings innovation in SEO, ad products, proprietary technology, and data. As part of Future, we now have access to their many resources, which means the power to create more content in new categories such as beauty and specialized teams to accommodate bigger budget campaigns and of course, the type of scale we could only ever dream of. This means that we deliver more. More dollars from existing clients and the retention and growth of our core accounts.
New clients in new categories like beauty, homes, and finance. New clients with bigger needs such as large scale event and video production, and now new business in categories where scale is a priority, such as mass beauty. We look forward to beginning the new fiscal year within our new company and bringing bigger and better opportunities to our family of advertisers. Thank you, and I believe now we're moving into a Q&A period.
Thank you. We thought before we had our quick tea and coffee break, we would just open up the floor for 10 minutes of Q&A, and I think Marion's gonna pick up any questions that come online. Feel free to direct your questions to any of us, but probably because we need a Q&A afterwards, maybe those who presented so far would be best. Anyone got any questions?
Nina Sheikh from Peel Hunt. I've just got three questions, please. The first is, it seems that there's a big focus on branded content and working with clients in order to generate that. How much of your advertising revenue is the percentage that is branded content versus just kinda traditional display advertising? I think you mentioned this, and I missed it, but what is the uplift of yield of the branded content versus more traditional means?
Yeah. If you're asking that for Future-
Uh-
Who What Wear?
Who What Wear, sorry.
I'll try to answer all of that. Who What Wear, about 75% of our business is branded content, but that's really a mix of anything custom other than programmatic or banner advertising.
The yield uplift versus traditional display on the
Material.
Second one is just on the specialist sales team.
Mm-hmm.
Will you need to invest more in the specialist sales team in order to expand the capabilities across the group in the U.S., or is there enough capacity as it stands right now?
In my opinion, there's the capacity. We're the experts, the best there is out there for fashion, beauty, and women. When we expand beyond that, I guess we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.
One of the things we really liked about the business when we bought it was actually the margins that it operates under. Although there's a lot of branded content, they were very fiscally disciplined like we were. It's generally about 20% cost of sales on that, whereas a lot of other businesses you look at will be the inversion of 60%, 70%, 80% cost of sales, and the drop-through was actually quite material. You know, we're quite happy to invest at those sorts of margins because, you know, 80% flow through is. We're quite happy to put more effort in if we need it.
Shayna's actually now managing the Future team that were in place that come across from Marie Claire, so we've kind of got a bigger team just now, and we'll review it as we need it.
Okay. Just the final one. Again, this is just on Who What Wear, and that's the e-commerce or affiliate revenues. As we all know, we're moving through a more difficult macro environment. Do you anticipate there could be some headwinds for the affiliate revenue? There are so many opportunities to expand that you do expect that to grow within the next 12 months?
Is that a Hilary question or me? Yeah.
I mean, I think there's always room for growth, but I also think part of the reason for that is because she comes to us because she wants to shop already. She's already primed, and because we've always been very conscientious of making sure that we have excellent finds at every price point. So no matter what she's shopping for, she will find something that is her taste, and it's cool and makes her feel great. Whether it's at a high price point or it feels like an absolute steal, she can justify it.
One of the best performing articles you had on during Prime Day, I think was, "Look what we found on Amazon for under $100," right?
Mm-hmm.
That was the article. Even at that point, you know, you wouldn't think to shop on Amazon if you think about how the ladies present in terms of Who What Wear, but actually that audience is there for us as well. I wouldn't assume that the only audience is people who are buying designer brands. Actually, the content is much more priced high to low, which again, is why we were so excited about the opportunity.
Also-
The person who buys designer brands also likes a $5 lipstick.
I was just gonna say, it's the lipstick effect also.
Yeah.
Right? When there's a recession or some people are. Beauty is our next big opportunity, so.
Okay. Thank you.
Yeah. Hi. It's Nick Dempsey from Barclays. I've got one question for Zillah Byng-Thorne and Penny Ladkin-Brand and one for the Who What Wear team. Just going back to slide 19. Don't know if you can bring that up or you can remember it.
Yep. Can you go to 19 for us?
It's the one with the different bubbles.
The bubbles.
Tech fills its entire bubble. I guess that's great that Tech's achieved that, but it made me think that in order to continue a good rate of growth, do you need all the others to start filling out their bubbles in the way that Tech did? Should I worry about the execution on that?
Yeah.
'Cause Tech was phenomenal.
If I referred you back to the previous slide, I think it was slide 13, we were making a point which TechRadar, which is over 15 years old, grew its audience 6% CAGR over the last four years, and it grew its media revenues 22%. I think, you know, we're not anywhere near a slowing, mature market. The other point I think which is really important, which was on the preceding slide 18, is that although we're number one, which is why it fills its bubble, because that's what being number one gives you, we've only got 30%, 33% of the audience in the U.S. We haven't got 100% of the audience. What we've got is a number one position. As Sophie described, what we're really good about is taking other people's audiences and winning share.
We believe that we've got lots more headroom in Tech. I wouldn't worry that everyone else needs to perform. However, everyone else also, we would like to perform, but it's not the reason that drives the growth.
Okay. The other question was, I mean, you referred to the podium strategy for search engine optimization, and looking from the outside, Future achieves that incredibly well. We all tested that. For the Who What Wear team, you know, since you've been part of Future, can you talk about the difference the Future kind of infrastructure has made to the traffic through SEO, so we can maybe understand that from somebody who hasn't been part of it?
Stuart should answer.
Yeah, I was gonna say we're not exactly there yet.
Yeah.
It's like it's been 90 days.
Well, that's what I was gonna say. Stuart's actually gonna talk about audience in the second half, so it might be actually a better question for him. The Who What Wear brand isn't yet on the Vanilla platform. Right now what we've actually been doing is we're just about to announce that the Who What Wear team are moving into Stuart's team. We'll have one integrated audience team. I don't know if you wanna pick up, 'cause you met the team in LA and you thought there was lots of opportunities.
Yeah. I think it's a good question. If I was summarizing the difference, we think there's a huge amount of growth in search traffic to be had from Who What Wear, and we would consider it to be an and, not an or to their existing strategy. Then coming back the other way, we think there's a huge amount they can give us in growing performance on some of our channels like email and CRM in particular. We do see it as genuinely additive to the audience operating model, and I'll talk about that in a while. We see a lot of headroom for growth in organic search on Who What Wear, for sure.
Marion, there's a question at the back of the room. I don't know if we wanna do that, and then we can come back up front.
Hi. Could you give some background as to how you met Who What Wear and, like, how long you've been chatting for, were there other people chatting?
We courted for a long time. In fact, we courted for such a long time that we did a trip to the U.S. and the lady said, "We'd like to come back and we'd like you to come and meet us in person again." We'd already met in person. "And it's really important that the chemistry's right." I literally got off the plane, turned around, and went back to the U.S. so we could meet again. They made us work hard for it. But since before Christmas. It was a competitive process, but I think we spent one weekend going back and forth. It was between us and someone else, I believe. I think what was really important was the strategic fit for both sides.
There was lots of late night conversations and the consensus view in the end, I believe, was that the fit here was actually the best, and so it wasn't just a price decision. It's my understanding you were in the call, not me
It was much more about did we have the right combination of capabilities to help fuel the growth of the business.
Can you give any color on how the senior management are locked in or how they're incentivized in any financials around the deal?
No. Apart from obviously we wanna lock in all our talent, and one of the key parts for us in the acquisition was that both that the management team would stay on board, and that was part of it. There was a founder alongside Hilary who came out and hasn't come across with the business. You know, I think what came across today for me certainly was that Shayna and Hilary are really passionate about the brand. What we were really excited about with Shayna was the ability to take a bigger opportunity of the U.S. business for us.
I won't speak for the ladies in that regard, but we got the sense that what we wanted to do quickly was to give Shayna Kossove more accountability and responsibility, so therefore she could grow, and that's why we've basically split our sales team in the U.S. into two. We've got our SVP of sales who runs Games and an SVP of sales who's basically gonna run Lifestyle Knowledge and News. We've just changed our acronyms, so I can't remember it. That will be Shayna Kossove. And then at the same time, we're actually putting Marie Claire in the U.S. under Hilary Kerr to give her more responsibility. I think we feel like we're part of the story together from that perspective. I'm gonna take two more and then we'll go back. We'll have a break and then.
Thank you. It's Bridie Barrett from Stifel. Can I just ask, firstly about, the one and two target that you've got for the U.S.? Do you see the Who What Wear business as the vehicle to get to that? Or, you know, is the ambition kind of spread more broadly across all of the other verticals? And a sort of an add-on to that, if it's the latter, are you able to give us a sense of how much of that might be organically driven?
Yeah, certainly, and it's absolutely not just about Who What Wear. I think the one thing that anyone who's known our business for any period of time knows that we just don't bet on one thing. Because as we all know, over the last three years, the world changes a lot and therefore, you know, if you're only betting on one outcome, there's a lot of risk attached to that. We're really confident that we can get on the podium now in the U.S. on fashion and beauty. I think it's a real important distinction point here 'cause we're talking about women's lifestyle, because for us right now, that portfolio doesn't justify being split into different verticals. We aggregate it as women's lifestyle. What we're really homing in on today is fashion and beauty.
If you take a step back, that would give you parenting, that would give you well-being, which are huge markets in their own right, which we haven't split out at all today. We've just actually been looking at fashion and beauty. The bubble chart was just fashion and beauty. Just in women's lifestyle alone, there's three or four completely new verticals that I suspect standing here in five years' time, we'll be talking about those individual verticals and what contribution we get from that. What Sophie was, I think, trying to illustrate is that all of those are also things that we are continuing to build out in the portfolio. My Imperfect Life was an organic brand. It didn't exist. That was an organic audience that we've been building.
I think what we're trying to demonstrate from my slides with the GamesRadar+ and TechRadar examples was that these are audiences which have been growing materially over a long period of time, which are still. I mean, GamesRadar+ is 23 years old, right? Or 22 years old. It's an old brand and yet still giving material. I think it was like mid-20s CAGR audience growth. We don't need our growth to come from the things we're buying. Our model is to do both because actually if things go the way we think needs to go, then it becomes compounding, and we get better and outsized returns. You only kinda need some of what you're doing to work to meet the ambition, if that makes sense.
Thank you. Just one more, if you don't mind. I like to think that I fall into the Who What Wear demographic. I have to say, before you guys acquired it, I'd never really noticed it in the U.K. and, you know, appreciate it's very much a US brand. Are you able to give us a sense of where you think the U.K. could get to as a proportion of the whole in time?
Do you wanna take that one? Thank you. It's another small but mighty brand in the U.K. because it's. When did you launch? Was it 2015 in the U.K.? It's seven years old, but it's got this multiple accelerant of e-commerce and ad revenues, a bit like the US sister. Now being close to the mothership and, you know, In fact, it's moving into our offices next week, means we'll be able to grow it out and, take some of that playbook into our female brands here as well. In terms of the proportion of the whole, yet I don't know. We're still early in the integration, but I think there's a lot to learn on both sides.
I think we've got time for one more, and then we'll move to a break. Oh.
Hi.
We're gonna take one online as well after this.
Okay. I'm Marcus Dyer with JP Morgan. Also one question to the Who What Wear team. Clearly what you've built is very impressive. First of all, very much congratulations for that. What I want to understand a bit more is how global can the brand really be? A bit like the previous question, 'cause you. It feels a bit like the world more and more starts to speak English, trends are getting closer and closer. We're focusing on the U.K., we're focusing on still in the U.S. Obviously, there's a lot of growth. If you think this through, the world is still bigger and it's getting closer. Where are we on that? Maybe that's also a question for you, even more, to go into other markets with this.
Yeah, 'cause it strikes me it's just more in the playbook rather than execution rather than anything else that will make it even bigger than it is today.
Yeah. If I just talk about our approach to global. We are firmly English-speaking global, that we don't put barriers up to our content. We have a readership around the world. We have offices with sales teams in Australia, the U.K., and the U.S.. We monetize directly in those markets, and we have some brands in Australia that only exist in Australia, and then we have some brands which we talk about today, which are also in the Australian marketplace. We firmly don't do foreign language, and we don't operate in non-English speaking markets from a dedicated sales team perspective, because our view is that in order to achieve certain margins, it's in our interest to keep our business simple. We believe that language, currency, tax, and regulatory all create complexity which start to erode the margin.
If you ask me this question in 10 years' time, and we've got to one and two and three in the U.S., which is the real ambition, not one and two. We get to two and three in the U.S. And growth rates are starting to look, you know, more anodyne at 2% or 3%, then maybe we might think about it's worth then giving up a few points of margin to open up these new markets. But at this moment in time, our view, our focus is very much global English speaking because it allows us to protect the simplicity of the business, makes it frictionless in finding those audiences. Because for us, the big pivot, you know, five years ago was the audience finds us, we don't find them, which is why we're successful in the U.S. 'cause we're not in the U.S..
We're finding our audiences, and we meet them where they are, wherever they are in the world, and I think that's the kinda key subtle differentiator, if that makes sense. That would therefore also apply to Who What Wear from that perspective. You've got one online.
The question is, your purchase 3-4 years ago into visual content creation, how has this powered or enabled a meaningful drive in audience reach? That's in two parts, so in general, and then in women's lifestyle vertical, in particular.
Sure. That would be, I think, in relation to the acquisition of Future Studios a couple of years ago, which was at the time called Barcroft, which rebranded to Future Studios. It absolutely is fueling our growth in video audiences and much more importantly, video monetization as well. We were just discussing today, we have an event the last couple of years called Future Games Show. It's a virtual event. We started it off as one event a couple of years ago. I think we ran two this year. Probably gonna run four next year, but we're actually gonna now orientate that into a video-first strategy for our games. We were the original disruptors in gaming, you know, 30 years, 35 years ago when we launched Amstrad Action.
What we think now is with the confidence of Future Studios plus our editorial expertise, actually wanna be at the vanguard of how video is consumed in gaming. We've got a big bet going on there over the next 3-4 years, which goes back to our ability to grow organically in mature markets. Regards to the second point, I'm gonna hand it over to Sophie 'cause we've got some exciting stuff going on there.
Yeah. I think video, because you've heard about the social content that Who What Wear produces, video is absolutely critical, and the guys have produced sensational video. There's a depth of content there already. I think already, the Future Studios team have brought their expertise to the YouTube channel. And actually being able to curate Who What Wear's content and bring Future's strength there has significantly outweighing ad revenues via YouTube, so there's more to come.
Great. We take a break for 10 minutes, and we come back on at 20 to the hour wherever you are globally.
Thanks everyone, and welcome back to the first of our after the break sessions. My name's Stuart Forrest. I'm the audience operations director here at Future, and I joined the business in October 2021, so just about a year ago. Before Future, I have a very strong track record in growing and monetizing consumer media businesses in B2C verticals, so things like food, parenting, TV, and entertainment, and autos. And more recently, I've been building organizational capability in some of the areas that I now focus on. Things like diversification of revenue through affiliate and also organic search capability. I've had my whole career in media businesses, and I've competed with Future in the past.
My role here is to help the business to meet its objectives by ensuring that we target the right audiences, and then in return, that the audience informs our business decisions. I guess I sit at the intersection of specialist capability and vertical brand ownership. Before I joined, I've always admired Future's approach to audience, and I'm really excited by the ambition of the group and our ability to continue to deliver. In the next 15 minutes or so, I'm gonna show you how our audience operating model helps us to reach our strategic goals at Future, which Zillah has already outlined. One of the things that I've been most impressed about Future so far is the clarity of purpose around audience, and there's a focus on audience across the whole business.
Audience acquisition capability is embedded in our DNA across content, as you'd expect. There's a willingness to prioritize this in the decisions we take and in our approach to technology, data, and engineering. I think this has been, and will continue to be, a really, really strong place from which to deliver growth. Future's now a scaled media business, as you've heard, reaching over 300 million users every month, and more than 1/3 users already, and we're well on track to reach our ambition of 1/2 U.S. users. However, a critical part of our strategy is that we operate in specialist markets with endemic audiences. We believe that not all audiences are equal, and that the more qualified and targeted an audience is, the more valuable it is.
We reach our audiences across the 13 B2C verticals and 3 B2B verticals that you've seen and that are on this chart here. While it's a scaled audience, it's also a very diverse audience, and I think that's really important. We're not overly reliant on a single vertical for our revenues. At Future, our audience strategy has a two-pronged approach, which we describe as everyone and the right one. What we mean by that is that while the value of scale is clear, at Future, we believe strongly that endemic audiences are inherently more valuable, and there are two reasons for that. The first is that we think that endemic audiences are more engaged and invested in our brands.
They come frequently to our properties, and when they come frequently, that allows us to put them into hyper-valuable audience segments with the context and knowledge that we gain about them when they're on our properties. Secondly, specialist audiences can guide or specialist brands can guide audiences to much higher value behaviors at just the right time. At Future, we're experts in helping consumers make purchasing decisions with both informational, in our consumer electronics business, and inspirational, in our women's lifestyle business, content. We do that in all our verticals, and it's a really critical driver of our valuable affiliate advertising revenue streams. We like to visualize this strategy using the pyramid you see here, with large scale and high volume audiences at the bottom, and then a smaller number of high-value users further up the pyramid.
At Future, we're skilled in using our content and our audience operating model to acquire and then engage audiences and move them up and down the pyramid at just the right moment for them to be the right one. To bring that to life with a specific example, the women's lifestyle business that you just heard about has Marie Claire absolutely operating at scale, whereas Who What Wear is very much at the top of the pyramid, focusing on those super valuable shopping behaviors, 30 purchases a minute or whatever it was, and it's driving huge ARPU. By combining the two approaches, we can drive value for our advertisers and partners. We don't see scale and engagement as mutually exclusive goals, and actually, we're really comfortable and happy operating in both. Our operating model for audience enables that by design.
Our strategy has been to define an operating model for audience which allows us to reach everyone, engage with the right one, and then replicate that model across multiple sites and specialist verticals. At the heart of our model are what we call the three Ps. Our people, our processes, and our platform. Our audience center of excellence has been part of the future growth story for some time, and you will have heard it spoken about at these events. While the organization we have today represents a gear shift from what you might have seen before, the rationale behind it remains the same. The first of those is that we're here to embed best practice across the organization.
We're a large and diverse business by both geography and vertical, and so it's really important, far more important than ever, that the audience team operating horizontally ensures that we're defining and propagating best practice across all our verticals. Secondly, there's considerable operating leverage in working horizontally across these areas, particularly with our suppliers, and we'll show you some examples of that. Finally, as you've heard, acquisitions bring new capabilities, such as with Who What Wear. The role of audience is to distill those capabilities to their essence and then apply them across the organization. This is our audience center of excellence operating model, and you will have probably seen and heard about our capabilities in audience development and platform SEO previously, so I'm not gonna spend too much time talking about those today.
This year, we've added four new areas of activity to broaden our scope and deepen our capability. The first of those is our paid performance team, which covers all paid acquisition across the group, paid search, paid social, display, and then some more nascent channels such as influencer marketing. One of the main benefits of the formation of this team has been leveraging our considerable scale from GoCompare across the rest of our business. GoCompare has substantial buying power with Google and Facebook, and we can access better rates, better account management, and crucially, all of the latest innovations in how our spend is traded to drive efficiency. We believe that that's out of reach for many of our publishing peers. Secondly, our email and CRM teams have come together as one, so we can realize the huge opportunity we see in email.
You'll hear more about SmartBrief and the capability that brings us from Kevin and Jason. In this team, we're bringing the email acquisition and engagement skills which came with Who What Wear, with MoneyWeek and Kiplinger to the rest of the portfolio. With an audience base the size of ours, over 300 million, we see email as a substantial route to greater ARPU from the users that we're already very effective at acquiring from search. Then we have a couple of enablers within audience. The first of those is a data function. It's been a huge success this year. It's a new function within the team. We see this as real competitive edge. We've built some fantastically innovative tools that help our content creators to understand and capitalize on audience demand, and I'll touch on some specific examples of that later.
Finally, within the model, I'm really proud that Future has the best audience training capability in the business. We deliver training to editorial teams across 18 different topic areas. That ranges from classroom-based immersion for new starters to self-serve training in more niche topics via our Future University platform. Our training is all created and delivered by the audience team. It's really fresh, it's rooted in real-life case studies, and we're also really agile in responding to any changes or updates in Google policy, and that's a really important competitive edge for us. It's also worth saying that the audience team operating horizontally sits right at the heart of our community of expertise in content. We run a regular monthly lunch and learn drop-in session.
We're really active in our Slack channels, and obviously, the audience team plays a really big role in the M&A process. While we've grown audience substantially in the recent years, as this chart shows 70% growth in average monthly users since 2019, in fact, non-Google search traffic has increased its share of our mix over that time. The non-Google search sources have grown their share by 10 percentage points. Even while we grow, we're actually not increasing our reliance on Google. Quite the opposite. We've diversified our audience acquisition channels, and we're particularly proud of the fact that 20% of our audience now comes direct to our sites. We think that's a really important affirmation of the power and quality of strong brands.
If you do a good job for people, they will come back, and we see that happen increasingly as time goes on. It's a real testament to the investments we've made in really high-quality content and the way in which they've added value to the lives of our users. If we turn back to organic search traffic for a moment, one of the great enablers of our success in that channel is our publishing platform, which we call Vanilla. You'll hear more about this from Kev and Jason in due course. The great thing about Vanilla from an audience perspective is that it's fast, it's flexible, it's web-friendly, and so it does an amazing job of ensuring that Google can find, understand, and value our content. That means rankings, and that means that we can outrank our competitors.
If we look back over a four-year span in the chart on the right of this graph, you can see that we've driven continuous traffic growth against the backdrop of successive algorithm updates from Google. Over this time, Google has made very clear that what it wants from publishers for users is high-quality content and an amazing user experience, and that plays very much to our strengths and to our brands. I think the key point is that while we are diversifying the sources of our audiences, we're also getting much better at bringing audience from search. One of the best illustrations of the power of strong brands in search is our podium strategy, which Sophie touched on earlier.
What we mean by this in a search context is that we'll compete for a high volume, high intent, high value term across multiple brands at Future. We do that partly to lock out the competition. We recognize that if you can have lots of brands towards the top of search, then you have a much better chance of winning the click. Also because we recognize that different consumers can come at the same search query and the same intent with a different nuance of their particular needs and a different bias. Actually, the more brands we have at the top of the search, the greater the chance we have of winning the click. Here's a really good example of that in action. This is from last week, actually. This is from the Apple event this time last week.
I'm sure many of you in the audience were watching. Apple announced the iPhone 14, the Apple Watch 8, and the Apple Watch Ultra. These events are really important for Future, and they're really important for Apple. It's a big date in the release calendar. Coming back to that pyramid of everyone and the right one, it's one of those moments where significant new hardware releases can propel an awful lot of consumers straight up to the top of the pyramid where they become the right one. I know I spent a good part of last week justifying why I really do need a watch that will take me to the bottom of the Mariana Trench to walk my poodle in Richmond Park every morning, right? And I'm sure I'm not alone. For those reasons, it's a really competitive landscape in search.
Specialist sites like ours, national newspapers, and also some of the blog sites are all competing for visibility. Actually, it might not be clear from the image, but what you see in these snapshots are two of the biggest queries on the day, iPhone 14 and the Apple Event. What you also see is that in the search snippets, every single brand you see is a Future brand. Our strategy was really, really effective on the day. We were able to lock out the competition, and the results were fantastic, right? The US traffic was up 37% year-on-year. UK traffic was up 22%.
It's also worth saying that last year, there hadn't been an Apple event for two years, so arguably there was much less demand for new product this year than there had been last year, where you had a lot of pent-up COVID demand. We're really, really pleased with that result. One of the great enablers of our success in audience, across our audience operating model, is our use of data. It's been a big investment for us in the last 12 months. Those investments have brought huge improvements to our reporting, forecasting, and data tools, and what they do is help the business understand the size and shape of consumer demand and also the performance of our content. Data helps us to be more efficient in how we deploy our resources. It increases our understanding of our audiences, and those two things drive performance.
We have plenty of examples of how data has been a great enabler of audience growth, and you're gonna hear more from Jason in particular about smart publishing. I wanted to just dwell on a couple of specific examples which have made a difference to our life in audience. The first of those is a machine learning-based forecasting model, which has really improved the speed and accuracy of our audience forecasting. It sits on historic performance data from our brands, and it brings into play Google Trends insights around consumer demands. It's done an amazing job of helping us plan and manage our business, inventory forecasting, and highlighting content opportunities. It's been transformational on a day-to-day basis. The second example is a much newer one, but it's much more operating in real time.
It's actually one of the major drivers of the successful Apple event last week. That is a tool which was built in the audience team. It combines third-party data sources and our own data, and it basically scrapes results in the search against really important search terms, key moments like iPhone 14, New York Fashion Week, what have you. Then the tool alerts editors when specific Google Search features have appeared in the SERP. Now, that's really important because if you think back to when you last used the web, you will very often see those news boxes at the top of the search, and they're normally a sign that Google is seeing spiking demand, and they also absolutely hoover up traffic, so it's really important to get into those boxes. The appearance of those boxes triggers a response from our audience team.
They might update a whole load of content, or they might use Vanilla's live blog feature to show Google that actually we have up-to-the-minute and comprehensive coverage around that topic. It's a fantastic tactical tool that allows us to make the really good decisions about when we need to do something and exactly how we need to do it when we execute, and that makes a massive difference on the day. I wanna talk about CinemaBlend because I think it's a really great example, having given you a very quick tour around our audience operating model, about where, when we apply it to an acquired brand, it can really accelerate growth. We bought CinemaBlend in October 2020, and we migrated it to Vanilla in October 2021. Almost exactly a year ago.
This year it's been an amazing growth story for Future. TV and entertainment is a really exciting space. There's a lot of volume in that market, and it's a very rich and valuable space, but it's also heavily competed. There's lots of specialist sites, national newspapers and so on and so forth. In the past 12 months, we're really proud of the fact that CinemaBlend has driven 25% year-over-year growth in sessions. That's against the backdrop of post-lockdown behavior, so, a lot less demand for TV in general than we saw when people were cooped up in their homes. That growth story is really a story of all the elements of the operating model coming together. Firstly, CinemaBlend is now on Vanilla, fast, flexible, web-friendly.
It means that Google's able to find the content, crawl and understand the content, and value the content, and those really are the simple ingredients for making sure that you rank in Search. Secondly, the content itself has improved. The audience team have worked really closely with the CinemaBlend team to build a highly valuable evergreen content strand on top of what they had when they came to us, which was a TV entertainment news-focused business. We've lifted the base straight away. Finally, the team are using our tools and processes, some of which I've outlined, to improve their core TV news business. They've been one of the primary users of the Smart Publishing project, which you'll hear about. That's been really additive to their business.
It's a fantastic growth story of a business we acquired nearly two years ago, and I feel very confident that when I'm next in front of you, I'll be telling you the same story about some of our more recent acquisitions. Finally from me, at Future, it's really important that acquisitions are additive to our business. One of the elements of my job that I really, really love is working with those newly acquired businesses and understanding the good stuff that makes them tick, and then thinking about where we can scale that capability across the business. You know, we really want acquisitions to be additive to our audience model, as well as having our audience model be additive to those acquisitions, and I wanna call out a couple of recent examples.
Firstly, you've heard a lot about Who What Wear, and one of the things that I'm most excited about is the skill it brings in email and CRM in particular. That team are fantastic at finding audiences in exactly the right moment on site, recruiting them to an email newsletter via CRM with some really fantastic entertaining messages, and then this is the crucial bit, re-engaging with those audiences when they are back in that right moment to turn that engagement into transactions. We see a huge opportunity to roll that out across the business.
Secondly, our colleagues within the Dennis Publishing business, which we bought in October 2021, are using audience data and CRM tools in conjunction to identify high-value consumers on our news brands, MoneyWeek, The Week, The Week Junior, and Kiplinger, and move them up an engagement curve towards subscription purchase. Both of these are gonna be really key tactics as we look to drive ARPU in different ways across the group, either from increased engagement or by driving transactional behavior. That's everything from me. Hopefully, I've given you a good insight into how the audience operating model here is a major enabler for our success, and I'm gonna hand over to Kevin Li Ying and Jason MacLellan, who are gonna give you some insights into the data and engineering capability which underpins that. Thanks very much.
Thank you, Stuart. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Kevin Li Ying, and I'm the CTO for the group, and I'm delighted to be here talking to you this afternoon. Hopefully, over the next 20 minutes or so, you will get a good understanding of how much our lean, robust-
Scalable tech stack has evolved since our last capital markets day back in February 2020. A lot has happened since. First, a bit about myself. Originally from Mauritius, I'm a proud Future veteran of 18 years. I have been privileged not only to have a front row seat witnessing the Future transformation, as Ella said, over the last eight years, but also proud to be part of that leadership team that has continued to successfully deliver year-on-year. This continuing success is underpinned by our proprietary tech stack, which consists of a blend of underlying technologies, which are both homegrown and acquired, and then refined by our smart, talented, diverse group of engineers. Our tech stack is a strategic enabler, which give us control and speed to market, allowing us, with its modular design, to build once and use across all brands in all verticals.
That applied modular design philosophy, which is about each technology delivering distinct benefits, business benefits, makes it cost-effective. Altogether, our tech stack gives us that competitive advantage, allowing our website to grow, exist and grow, our editorial teams to operate efficiently, and our valuable audiences to get the right user experience and the access to our editorial craft. Technology-powered growth that is predictable, sustainable, and that drives both revenue and profit for our organization, all the while meeting the needs of our audiences. For some of you here, you have seen this tech stack before, but for those who are seeing it for the first time, our tech stack continues to be that bedrock upon which we build to support that organic growth and integrate the acquisition into. It is an end-to-end capability for the modern media business.
It is the best tech for our business and not tech for tech's sake. At the start, I mentioned that a lot has changed. If you look at the slide, you will see that since 2020, we have added a number of innovative and complementary capabilities. Today, I will cover Vanilla, our proven web platform that powers 49 brands, and three monetization services, Hybrid, our ad tech, Hawk, our eCom affiliate tech, and SmartBrief, our email CRM tech. After my presentation, Jason MacLellan, our brilliant SVP of Engineering, will cover our latest strategic tech enabler, Aperture, our data platform. Altogether, it makes for a unique, modern, scalable foundation, which complemented by our tech strategy as depicted here, is critical.
Our tech strategy is that glue connecting the whole business and technology together, creating a symbiotic relationship, enabling the execution of our business strategy through alignment and transparency when it comes down to tech business priorities and tech business requirements. Also where technology is a true partner with the rest of the business developing a one commercial product approach to our tech stack development. Intertwine and dovetailing at the same time, the tech strategy is made up of four pillars. Top left, protect, where we continue to invest in the health of all the technologies that make up our stack in order to grow its maintainability, resilience, and availability, all the while ensuring sustainable cost effectiveness. Bottom left, optimize, where existing tech products go through a hypothesis-based roadmap methodology to drive continuous improvements, providing incremental marginal gains within a particular financial year.
Bottom right, adding new capabilities, which is about Future developing new tech functionalities with clear business outcomes, or when we integrate acquired tech assets into our stack. For example, we're working with the Who What Wear teams to develop new functionality and editorial processes following the acquisition. The last, top right, the platform effect, ensuring we're applicable and economically viable, reuse of all of what we have to boost and scale any asset. Now, this commercial approach to tech engineering aligns itself across the Future wheel, which sits at the very, very center of the diagram, and we measure the effectiveness, outcomes, if you like, from each part of our tech stack against each spoke of the Future wheel. Vanilla is a great example born out of this commercial approach to developing a single web platform for those 49 brands.
Robust, resilient, lean. Vanilla is highly UX effective. That helps us drive down the cost of acquiring valuable audiences. Scalable. A total of 14 brands have been migrated over during the last 18 months alone. It is more than that. It is rich in audience monetization and engagement functionality. For example, like with previous brands that have migrated over, Who What Wear migration onto Vanilla is next. As a brand, it will benefit from all that Vanilla offers, but also as a brand, it will preserve its identity as much as retain relevant functions like the fashion-focused web templates that would be added to our platform. In turn, those newly added templates will be available for use by any other fashion or fashion-related brands on that platform. Vanilla's evolution is in continuum, and acquisition turbo boost this evolution. Acquisition brings more than just valuable audiences.
They bring in validated user research, new capabilities, new processes. Those are all additive. For example, with the acquisition and upcoming migration of Who What Wear onto Vanilla, we have acquired hard-won proven innovation with image search. This capability is new to us at Future, and it will help us develop more SEO niche strategies across our brands. Another example is that with the TI Media acquisition, which brought in new web templates to connect and engage with our specialist and valuable audience in the women's lifestyle vertical. Finally, acquisitions bring new colleagues with complementary experience and expertise, and that fresh perspective to how we could further evolve our platform a tiny bit faster.
This virtuous circle of acquiring, integrating, embedding, scaling, and reusing those acquisition advantage with our own means that Vanilla is well-positioned for the short to medium term and already looking into the long-term innovation as well. A multi-horizon planning being done today. Vanilla decision engine and enhanced live blogging being two examples that we have drawn up the skeleton. Later, Jason will explain how data also will play a role in developing these next-generation functionality. Now, with Vanilla being a stable vehicle to monetization, Hybrid is our proven competitive advantage and strategic enabler in supporting our commercial advertising arm of our business. Again, lean, robust, and scalable, built out from the best third-party and proprietary ad technologies. It runs on 52 brands today, delivering both display and video advertising demand. That advertising demand sources are 100% diversified.
This allows commercial trading on first-party advertising, both programmatic and private marketplace advertising, and of course, third-party advertising on site. It is unique. As you can see in the diagram, it is equipped with both client and server-side open auction capability. At its core, it is flexible by design and allows us to face the ever-changing digital advertising market. We are proud of its diverse tech and commercial ops capabilities, from malware detection to a high degree of configurability with clear return on investment. Dovetailing with Vanilla, Hybrid has consistently delivered major increases in revenue across verticals, and here are three notable examples. CinemaBlend, delivering 43% revenue per thousand session growth. Marie Claire, delivering 103% revenue per thousand growth. Ideal Home, delivering 23% revenue per thousand growth.
We achieve this through implementing our tech strategy and operating in a symbiotic way with our commercial teams and colleagues, while leveraging Hybrid's unique competitive advantage. It runs everywhere. Hybrid can run on any platform, and in the next two weeks, we will deploy it onto Who What Wear, while even though that brand is still on its legacy web platform, therefore demonstrating its designed for speed to market and flexibility. All the while, when Hybrid went on Who What Wear, we'll be exercising yield optimization as depicted on the right-hand side, trading the ad stack, prioritizing first-party sale, followed by third-party sale, and further increasing revenue per thousand advertising on our third-party open auction, simply by applying market pressure as a result of our single pipeline and yield optimization algorithm, which is unique, running on our one single stack.
That's competitive advantage, which can go further as we continue to think about new capabilities to further support Future's growth ambition. Automating manual advertising operation tasks, both in setup and optimization of advertising slots and advertising creatives being one example. Scouting for further revenue opportunities across a field of 2.5 million published article is another example. In turn, Hybrid does coexist, can coexist with our next tech enabler, Hawk. Simply put, e-commerce affiliate technology that has served the business well. It is brilliantly put together. Integrating perfectly into our Vanilla web platform, Hawk, through its catalog of widgets, is used to enhance buying guides, reviews, deals content by delivering the best, more trusted and cheapest price as well as retailer information to our valuable audiences. Scalable, it is integrated into the very fabric of each site that we add to Vanilla.
Flexible, anywhere economically viable, it can be deployed on brands which are still hosted on their legacy web platforms. Overall, it is a cost-effective high margin tech solution, highly automated, following for rapid expansion into new content verticals and supporting new brand launches in existing verticals. An expansion example would be fashion as a content vertical being the next logical step following the Who What Wear example acquisition. Like Hybrid onto Vanilla, Hawk has also consistently delivered major increases in revenue across them. Back to the same three examples I gave for Hybrid. Hawk has helped CinemaBlend deliver 228% per thousand session growth. Marie Claire deliver 53% revenue per thousand session growth, and Ideal Home deliver 65 revenue per thousand session growth. Hawk is brilliant.
It has depth and breadth with circa 500 million product offers from 4,300 merchants and connected to 80 global affiliate networks. This is not just demonstrating scale of our database at a technical level, but also a vast e-commerce product proposition for a good user experience. For example, it already holds beauty product offers, and therefore, it will be additive to Who What Wear. In return, this depth will further be augmented with fashion products because of Who What Wear. It is also unique with a matching algorithm, which is robust. It finds the right product and matches it automatically with our editorial content with a high degree of accuracy. It is intelligent with its merchant preference scoring system. Again, automatically calculating the best product deals to offer to our valuable audience while ensuring that Future also maximizes on yields.
For Hawk, innovation is about working closely with the business as a partner via our tech strategy. Its next set of priorities are about focusing on speed of back office processes, efficiency to allow more brands to use Hawk and the stack to remain lean. Speed of adding new e-commerce type of products to diversify our e-commerce proposition at a per brand level, expand onto new brands in different verticals. Trialing new e-commerce affiliate widgets beyond display widgets, which may be image commerce done well and/or video commerce further down the line, and maybe email commerce. On the subject of email, SmartBrief is the final tech asset that I wanted to present to you today. In its own right, it is an end-to-end platform for email newsletter publishing and ad monetization within email.
With 1.8 billion emails sent in the last 12 months across 337 news email newsletters, B2B and B2C, serving 8 million subscribers. It has been optimized during the last 18 months in order to support the launch and migration of 50 email newsletters, of which 36 were B2C. Combined, those 36 B2C brands has seen an increase in 48% in commercial revenue. The email platform not only scales, but also has unique functionalities that allows us to pursue our single source of truth in email CRM data, because this gives us scale of reach. To carry out custom audience targeting, driving high intent audience with a high propensity to purchase onto our websites and further developing either e-commerce engagement activities or general niche content strategies. Similarly to Vanilla, Hybrid, Hawk and Hawk, which will benefit Who What Wear and vice versa.
SmartBrief should provide Who What Wear with a unique email CRM capability, and in turn, it will gain in additional audience CRM data. SmartBrief Tech wins because it shares our tech strategy, which is about protecting, optimizing, adding new capabilities, and leveraging the platform effect to not only scale and be resilient and be trusted by email service providers like Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook in terms of email deliverability, but also with new added capabilities to engineer greater editorial efficiency and productivity. It is equipped with automated content scraping. It is equipped with automated content categorization. It is equipped with a highly curated editorial workflow adapted for B2C. Finally, what makes it unique is that it has a smart advertising pacing ad technology, delivering both endemic and demographic ad targeting for both sponsored and dedicated send email newsletters.
To demonstrate, following the Dennis Publishing acquisition, we have moved the Kiplinger email newsletter across to the platform, and now we are benefiting from having a larger addressable target audience, as well as delivering better engagement. In closing, Vanilla, Hybrid, Hawk, and SmartBrief, alongside the remaining blend of technologies and services that make up our proprietary tech stack, is agile, lean, robust and scalable. It is a strategic enabler that gives us competitive advantage, which underpins yesterday's, today's, and tomorrow's growth ambition. Thank you. Now I'll invite Jason MacLellan to cover Aperture, our data platform.
Thank you, Kevin. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Jason McLellan. I'm SVP of Engineering here at Future. My background is a mixture of management consultancy and technical leadership positions across a variety of sectors, from financial services to retail to health. I've thoroughly enjoyed applying that experience within the publishing and media domain. I've been with Future for around 3.5 years now. I lead several of our engineering teams, such as Vanilla, Hawk, and Hybrid that Kev has talked about, but also our data platform, Aperture, which is what I'll be talking to you about today. Why does Aperture exist? Primarily, this is about making sure that we can maximize the value of our data, particularly our valuable first-party data. There's kind of two key components to this.
The first is the nature and the value of our audience, and the second is the current direction of travel around privacy. On that first point, you heard Hilary talk eloquently about the nature and the value of the Who What Wear audience, and you'll hear a similar story across the Future portfolio. It's also the nature of our content that makes our data valuable, particularly when it comes to the data signals that we can use. First, the specialist nature of our content means we get strong signals. Second, we are connecting with people about their passions, which means they're highly engaged, and therefore we get more signals. Finally, the high intent that you've already heard about today. Our shopping content gives us particularly strong signals, which are valuable to our partners. We understand our audiences better than anyone else.
The second component is the increasingly important privacy angle, and it's the fact that we are in complete control of our data. It's first-party data, meaning it's collected directly on our site and our platforms. It's permissioned through the consistent collection of consent. And finally, we're in control of protecting our users' privacy by being in control of how we store, secure, and manage our data in line with our privacy policies. As a result, we're extremely well-positioned to adapt for any legislation changes or wider changes to the digital ecosystem, such as third-party cookie removal from Chrome. As the trend towards a more private web continues, we're well-placed to take advantage of this, and we believe this data is only gonna become more powerful.
We think of Aperture as our Vanilla for data, a single, scalable, proprietary, and agile platform that unlocks value across the entire Future portfolio. What is Aperture? It's our end-to-end data platform, which enables us to collect, process, and activate data across all of our brands and all spokes of the Future wheel. We have a huge number of data points, and the platform benefits from both the scale and breadth of Future. Content and data have always been at the center of the Future wheel. Vanilla is where our content comes to life, and now Aperture does the same for our data. How does it work? On the left-hand column, you see the data sources that we leverage within the platform, from our website analytics data to affiliate data such as clicks and conversions to subscription data and social data.
Aperture collects all of these data sources and combines them in a single platform. We have standard patterns that can be leveraged to quickly and efficiently onboard new data sources, such as with newly acquired properties. In the middle box, we have the platform capabilities. These are reusable components that prepare our data ready to be leveraged in a variety of ways. Our data platform provides all the capabilities you would expect from a data platform, from reporting and analytics to decision support. For example, what is the optimum ad load to maximize revenue on our e-com content, to supporting innovation with hypothesis development and test evaluation. The bit that's really of interest to us, and the bit I'm gonna spend quite a bit of time on today, is the specific activations of our data which drive monetization.
You can see some examples of these in the third column. I'll talk through each of these examples, which are at different stages of maturity, highlighting the evolving nature of the platform. First, I'll talk about how we're activating at a customer level to create valuable advertising segments which are driving both sales and yield. This is one of the most obvious use cases for our first-party data and one that we've talked about before. This is at high level of maturity, fully embedded within the business, and now a critical part of our sales strategy and process. Secondly, I'll talk about an article level activation which we're using to drive audience, which Stuart has touched on, called Smart Discovery. This is a new initiative this year, but we're very excited about the potential that this can unlock.
Finally, I'll touch on an activation which is about driving user engagement called Next Best Action. This is only in the early stages of maturity, but will become a much bigger part of our stack next year. Here we can see the ads example. On the left, you can see the data sources which are used in this activation. On the platform, we leverage some core and key capabilities to enable this. First is content classification. We have Future-wide classification of our content by subject, product, and purpose. We enhance editorial tagging of our content with machine learning models, which classify our content consistently and accurately across the portfolio. This combined with our ID resolution and profile creation capabilities, which give us the ability to join up user data across our brands and products to create valuable audience profiles.
How does it work? There are three main types of technique which we use to activate this data. The first is audience targeting. This is targeting audiences anywhere on our portfolio using data that we've collected from previous interactions or visits to Future sites. A very simple example of this would be leveraging demographic information, say to target a female audience under 25. Secondly, we have contextual, which is targeting based on the characteristics of the content. This is particularly valuable on our high-intent content. For example, the ability to target laptop intenders using our best laptop buying guides. This is also how we target first-time visitors to a Future property. These signals can be combined to create more sophisticated targeting. Continuing the example, targeting a female audience under 25 in market for a laptop.
These signals can then be combined to create even more sophisticated use cases, such as a female audience under 25 in market for a budget laptop in a back-to-college setting or context. As we improve the accuracy of our targeting, our audience benefit from more relevant ads and offers, our partners benefit from improved performance on their campaigns as they reach the right audience, and finally, we benefit from increased sales and increased yields. As third-party cookies go away on Chrome, the ability to target in this way is only gonna become more valuable to our partners. With our reach in tech and games, we've got lots and lots of examples of this, but in the spirit of today, I've called up two examples of how we're using Aperture to win business and drive yields within the women's lifestyle sector.
L'Oréal were looking to target holidaymakers on our women's lifestyle brand. We were able to identify and reach that audience by using our travel content and things like price comparison, looking for travel insurance. L'Oréal also used the platform to target women who are interested in sustainability. Prada took advantage of these capabilities to specifically target gift givers with their Valentine's Day campaign. Both of these examples are before we've incorporated the valuable audience that comes from Who What Wear. The reach and sophistication of our segments will continue to improve. As we grow women's lifestyle audience organically, this becomes a continuing benefit. Hopefully, that helps bring to life how we're using our data to drive advertising, sales, and yield.
The second one I'd like to talk about is about driving audience growth through Smart Discovery. In this context, we leverage search and social data and then combine this with the following platform capabilities. We use natural language processing and sentiment analysis to understand the nature of conversations taking place. We use clustering techniques to identify macro and micro topics, and finally forecasting to identify what are valuable topics. Why is this valuable? Well, we've heard that content is at the heart of the Future business model. One of the most impactful decisions which we make in Future every day is what to write about, and this decision is made hundreds, thousands of times a day across the portfolio. Smart Discovery is about identifying emerging topics with highly engaged audiences, which we can then create content to serve that audience.
The acquisition of Waive earlier this year has accelerated this capability, and this has now been incorporated into Aperture. This is about blending science and art, so it's about taking the data science and combining it with the expertise of our audience and our editorial teams with some really encouraging results so far. We've launched Smart Discovery across three of our brands in the TV and entertainment space. The chart shows the uplift in average audience per article when using Smart Discovery recommendations. The results so far are really strong, with overall a 2x impact. Brand B obviously catches the eye with nearly a 5x impact. This is kind of expected. This is a broad lifestyle brand who cover TV and entertainment, but it's not their specialism.
This demonstrates the power of where these recommendations can enhance that editorial team in terms of the decisions that they're taking. However, perhaps the most encouraging one for us is actually brand D. This is a dedicated brand within the TV and entertainment space. It's a really strong editorial team. They're very well connected and very experienced. For us to be able to have a near 2x uplift with version one of Smart Discovery is extremely encouraging for us. How does it actually work? This is quite a complicated chart, but I think the conclusions are quite easy to understand. This was an example of where a kind of unanticipated trend, in this case, the unexpectedly popular TV show, Squid Game.
We were late to identify this trend, so we effectively published six days after the trend emerged, and as a result of that, we missed the peak across both search and across social media. Smart Discovery is all about identifying these trends earlier and act upon them earlier to maximize the opportunity. There's a real example of that from recent weeks with the brands that are already engaged on Smart Discovery. This is a similar example. In this case, the trend related to a TV show, Girl in the Picture. In this case, when the alert fired, we were able to publish two days after the trend emerged, and thereby able to fully maximize the opportunity on both search and social.
This works in a couple of ways. One, it can identify topics and conversations that the brand teams, the editorial teams were just not aware of. Secondly, sometimes it just gives confidence to go early in a story, so it's something they're aware of, but they're not convinced of the value. Thirdly, it sometimes just gives a different angle or perspective on a topic. This works well with the Future portfolio, as it allows brands to pick the angles which are going to resonate well with their audiences. This is obviously one example, but these recommendations, there's multiple recommendations every single day. This same pattern is repeated across a number of stories. This is a super exciting start, but it's only the beginning. We're now rolling this out to all of our brands who cover TV and entertainment.
As we get more data, we'll be able to further optimize and improve our recommendations. Technical work is already underway to extend this to further domains such as sports, gaming, food and drink, and fashion. Finally, we will embed more data sources, other open sources such as Reddit, and we'll also leverage the reach of our brands on closed platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. Coming back to Who What Wear, the scale and value of the audience on Instagram will be an extremely valuable source for this technology as we move into fashion. Finally, to touch on a kind of upcoming initiative. As I mentioned early on, Aperture is an evolving platform, and we're constantly adding to it.
Next Best Action is an activation about leveraging our audience data in order to determine what is the next most valuable action for our audiences to take. It does this, leveraging platform capabilities such as propensity analysis, how likely is the audience to take this action in this context, and what is the value of that action by calculating lifetime value. Specific benefits of increasing engagement will be more engaged users, so more page views and more data signals, improved email collection rates. Increase digital and print subscription sales. Finally, opportunities to cross and upsell to existing customers. These capabilities are already in use across the business. The Future playbook is all about automating and scaling and optimizing across our portfolio. By building these techniques into Aperture, that will allow us to do this.
In summary, Aperture is our scalable, proprietary and end-to-end data platform. It gives us full control over our data, which is increasingly valuable in a more private way. It is agile and constantly evolving, allowing us to take advantage of the many opportunities that our data gives us. It's the nature of our audiences and our content that make this data so valuable. We are proud of what we've achieved to date with the data platform, but this is really only the beginning, and we're even more excited about the future. Thank you very much for listening. I will now hand over to Penny, who will talk about the agility of our business model.
Hi there. Thanks, Jason. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Penny Ladkin-Brand. I'm CFO of the group, where I've had the pleasure of working for the last seven years, and they have been truly exciting ones. I'm delighted to have the chance today to tell you a bit more about our business model and why I believe this is such an attractive and robust business. We've talked a lot today about our three levers of growth, organic growth, platform effect, and value creating M&A. These create a business which we believe has got really attractive financial characteristics of sustainable organic growth. For us, growth, profit, this is more about profit growth than revenue growth, and we've achieved 66% EPS growth CAGR over the past four years.
Revenue growth, though, is obviously a leading indicator, and we've also achieved 11% organic revenue growth over that same period. The benefit of the operating leverage in the business means that even at a lower percentage growth rate of revenue, it translates into stronger bottom-line growth. We've seen 190 basis points increase in our adjusted operating profit margin over this corresponding time period, which has translated to 106% operating profit CAGR. We also benefit from really strong cash conversion, with historic average free cash flow conversion of over 100%. On a normalized basis, we expect cash conversion to remain at around 95% or so. This helps us accelerate our strategic growth objectives through M&A. Over the past four years, we've funded 16 transactions for GBP 1.4 billion.
I'm just gonna spend a bit of time today running through each of these financial characteristics to shed a bit more light and share how we expect them to play out going forward. Just starting with revenue. As I mentioned, we've seen 11% organic growth on revenue over the past four years. We look at our revenue in terms of two major categories, media and magazine. Through time, we've seen a really strong correlation between user growth and media revenue growth, with organic average user growth of 17% translating into media revenue growth of 25%. You can see there historically, we've benefited also from yield growth as well as volume. As our planning assumption, we use user growth as the proxy for revenue.
The market opportunity to reach one in two users of the Internet, on the Internet in the U.S. through growing into new verticals that we've laid out today, we see as a material opportunity for Future revenue growth, just as we've seen historically. You can see on the chart in the first half of this year that we saw a reduction in users as we lapped the COVID spike in audience that we saw in the FY21 pillar on the chart. The really pleasing thing is that, as we announced in our trading update yesterday, in the second half, we've seen a return to growth, which really helps us reinforce the confidence in the continuation of the model. As I mentioned, through time, we expect profit growth to grow ahead of revenue growth through the platform effect of the business.
Now, the platform effect is really about the multiplier we see in the business from the combination of organic and inorganic opportunities. We've seen today how the technology platform and business processes can help accelerate our inorganic brands. We also find the cross-pollination of tools, processes, and ideas from newly acquired assets, some of these Stuart talked about earlier today. This provides a really powerful route to innovation across the group. Learning from a peer is often much more successful than a great idea from your boss. We see this platform effect through the three KPIs that you'll be familiar with. One, the mix of magazines versus media in the business. As media revenues grow, they drop through at a higher margin. Our direct costs are scalable and deliver a really strong return on investment.
We continue to invest here in order to drive our future growth. Finally, our scalable business model means our overhead costs remain super efficient as we scale. I'll just go through each of these drivers in a bit more detail. We expect revenue to grow faster in media than in magazines, which are in secular decline. You can see on the chart here the historic average organic media growth versus the historic average magazine decline. As we look forward, we expect a more normalized media growth rate, and our target is an organic 10% user growth. Similarly, the significant addition of subscription revenues into the magazine portfolio also means that we expect a much lower level of magazine decline.
However, as the revenue mix changes, we see the significant differential in the margins as you can see here, with media at 81% versus magazines at 65%. That means the change in revenue mix dropped through to EBITDA at a much higher rate. Then I've added here the direct costs to get to the direct contribution margin of 49%, which excludes the overhead costs. Whenever we look at an acquisition, we're always looking at the gross profit margin of the business as a really good measure of the health of the quality of the revenues. Now, one of the reasons we're able to achieve this margin is the center of excellence model we operate, where we share the direct costs across the two divisions, which is why we haven't separated it out.
This is partly how we achieve the high margin by getting the economies of scale through the global teams structured into vertical decision divisions. This means that all other things being equal, we would expect single-digit incremental revenue growth to drop through to operating profit at a double-digit rate. I believe this really sets us up for long-term sustainable growth. To explain this further, I thought it'd be helpful to share a bit more detail on the makeup of our cost base. We saw in the previous slide, our variable cost of sales and our direct costs, both of which are roughly around 25% each of our revenue. The chart on the left-hand side shows the breakdown of the cost of sales.
You can see here the variable cost of sales are largely linked to revenue, with only the magazine production at around 22% of total cost of sales, relatively fixed, and that you need to decide how many magazines you're printing and go on risk with these before the copies are sold. Even here, though, we have really quick access to data on the sales performance of the titles, and through the pandemic, we showed our ability to adjust our volumes really quickly based on the market demand. The benefits of digital marketing and advertising and magazine distribution for subscriptions, which makes up the rest of the cost of sales base, is that you only incur these costs if the revenue has been sold. This means that we variabilize down in a downturn as well as up relatively efficiently as we scale.
Then on the right-hand side, we've got the direct costs. You can see here 30% of these relate to marketing for our price comparison business and our subscriptions, with the remainder relating to sales resource around 23% and editorial almost fifty percent of the direct costs. Sophie and Hilary laid out earlier how we monitor what content is in demand and adjust our editorial beats accordingly. We have a phrase we use internally, a fish where the river runs fastest, although I think Shayna has adapted it to focus where you're winning, so which is maybe a bit more direct. I think we'll use both.
I think there's a really good articulation of our approach to resource allocation and great agility in the business model to move into adjacent verticals or rebalance content investment across the brands. The Smart Publishing platform, which Jason has just outlined, we're super excited about as a way to do this much more scientifically and effectively. We think of this cost base as driving a return on investment, and we'll flex it up or down according to the market opportunity. I'll talk a bit more about this, shortly, but just to finish off, on the cost mix, I just wanted to turn to overheads, which represent about 20% of our cost base.
You can see here the benefit of the platform effect, as that's declined from 22% of our revenue in 2018 to 13% of our revenue in the first half of this FY. The platform nature of the business means that we can scale efficiently and effectively. Looking at the cost in a risk-based scenario, only around 30% of our costs are fixed in terms of long-term contracts, such as rent on this lovely building or software contracts, when the majority of the costs are semi- to fully variable so that we can rebalance according to the current business needs. Just moving on to how we do that. We operate an agile and global operating model through our platform. One of the key elements of the platform is it allows us to take content and monetize it in multiple geographies.
We've talked today about the opportunity to scale up in one of the largest markets in the world, the U.S., and our ambition to reach one in two users online. However, our teams are based around centers of excellence. This allows us to build communities for talent. Many of these centers of excellence are in the U.K. While we have in market, the front office roles only that we need to have close to the customer. Today, around 40% of our revenues are in the U.S. Our cost base doesn't necessarily reflect this. However, we operate as a living wage employer, and we've created living wage equivalent rates in the U.S. where these rates don't always exist. It's important for us to operate as a responsible employer. This also helps to retain our staff.
For this reason, we aim to create hubs outside of capital cities so that life is more affordable for our workforce and helps retention. Over the past few years, we've also been investing in our early career entry programs such that we can continue to grow the business by developing the next generation of talent. Our Bath office, for example, is literally attached to one of the halls of residence for University of Bath, providing a rich pool of talent for anyone who just wants to roll out of bed into the office. This center of excellence model also ensures more flexibility to focus resource where the opportunities exist, as they have a functional as well as a brand specialism to allow for much more flexibility.
This allows us to continue to invest while continuing to benefit from the operating leverage and flex to the market. We've talked about organic growth and the benefit of the platform effect on margin. The third characteristic of the business model is the cash generation, which the business drives with low CapEx at around 2% of revenue, and strong cash generation with cash conversion on a historic average of around 100%, and a go-forward sustainable expectation of around 95%. As I mentioned, it's important for us to be a responsible business, and so we want to operate as a true partner to our suppliers in our payment terms, as in any other aspect of our business that the market requires. The cash-generative nature of our business, though, provides us with strong firepower for the final element of the story, our capital allocation approach.
Firstly, we focus on organic growth, and then where appropriate, we leverage our strong cash flows to create value through M&A. The combination of organic growth platform effect and value-enhancing M&A will enable us to achieve our growth target that we've laid out here of 25% of operating profit. Over the last four years, we've acquired 16 businesses, GBP 1.4 billion, in order to acquire either a strategic capability or unlock a new vertical or podium position. These deals have been funded half through equity and half through cash. We integrate everything in full and only acquire where the businesses will help to accelerate the strategic objective and where the combination of businesses serves to drive unique value as Zillah has outlined earlier. Who What Wear, we think, is a truly great example of this.
While our acquisitions are different, we learn so much from every acquisition. It provides a really unique benefit into our business. Our methodology is an investment case only taking into account the cost synergies and no revenue synergies really helps to de-risk these investments. We have a strong balance sheet with facilities of GBP 680 million, having extended them earlier this year thanks to our supportive banking partners, some of whom are in the audience today, and they've been really supportive of our growth. We've got over GBP 200 million of headroom. We believe we can continue to deploy this capital to help us achieve the strategy that we've outlined today. I just wanted to take a moment to rewind over what's happened over the past four years.
You can see here the bridge displays the future core EBITDA in 2018 adds on the acquired EBITDA, and then adds on the value creation to get to the combination of organic and inorganic growth that helps us to get to this year's consensus EBITDA. Looking specifically at the numbers, in 2018, our EBITDA was GBP 20.7 million, the starting point, is then complemented by acquired EBITDA of GBP 127.6 million.
Therefore, to get to 2022 consensus of GBP 29.3 million-GBP 93.6 million of EBITDA, the delta is the value creation of GBP 145 million, which is, as I mentioned, the combination of organic and inorganic, which, because we integrate everything in full, you can't really separate out, but it's still very strong growth. This shows that we've been able to more than equal the acquired profits through a mix of organic and platform effect in order to drive 102% growth in EBITDA on a CAGR basis. As we look forward, we continue to see strong opportunities to continue our M&A journey, leveraging our strong balance sheet while retaining our cautious approach to leverage.
The combination of organic growth, platform effect, and value-enhancing M&A will enable us to achieve our growth target for 25% of operating profit, which we believe is a really sustainable target over the medium term. Thank you very much for listening. I hope you feel as excited as I do about the future, and I'll hand over to Zillah to wrap up.
Thanks, Penny. Just before I do a quick recap. That last slide of Penny's, if you look at those numbers a slightly different way, what you can see is we basically doubled both the acquired EBITDA and our existing EBITDA over those four years. It kind of doesn't matter how you look at it. We're creating huge amounts of value in the business. I know sometimes the skeptics in the room want to challenge us a bit on that, so we just wanted to make sure we nailed that point. Also in full disclosure, completely randomly, isn't life strange? My son is in those halls attached to our building, starting next week. I just can't get away from Future. He's gonna work in computing, so I'm hoping Kev will give him a job in due course.
In summary, I think you'll agree with me that we have got a fantastic business. 2022 just continues that strong track record in what has been, and continues to be, an exceptional year. Every time I think life can't give us another surprise, it gives us another surprise. Yet this business continues to perform, and we continue to deliver, and we continue to meet the expectations of our shareholders, and we continue to do what we said we would do. We think that is really valuable in a market like this, where we really want to know that businesses can perform and have the confidence of the conviction of what they're trying to achieve. We've got a proven strategy.
We've had eight years of executing on it, and we've focused a bit over the last four years because the comps are a bit weird. That's why we've tried to look at it over a four-year basis. You know, it's been around for eight years. It's working really well for us, and everything you've heard today is about how we're adding to that, whether that's enhancing Vanilla or I was actually looking at Vanilla again. I remember when that was eight sites on that platform. We used to go, "will it scale?" and we were having a chat this morning. It costs us about GBP 200,000 to migrate an acquired website onto Vanilla. When you think about that, I mean, that is so cheap, right?
I mean, like, when you think what other companies spend putting their websites onto platforms, so hugely scalable, hugely cost-effective as well, which is why the CapEx in the business continued to stay pretty low across the organization. I'm hoping what should come across clearly is that across the entire organization, we have a really efficient and agile business model. We hate waste. It's like a real kind of like just anathema to us as an organization. We're always trying to think, how can we do it better? How can we do it simpler? How can we do it faster? That really drives everything that we do in the business. We've got really attractive verticals.
Again, I remember in the early days, people used to say, "Well, what happens when, you know, you max out on tech?" Well, first of all, we're nowhere near maxed out on tech, but I think what today's really demonstrated is the huge opportunity in the verticals we've got across the portfolio. We haven't talked today at all about GoCompare. We haven't talked today at all about B2B. We haven't talked today about Wealth and Savings, which are big bubbles on those charts. I want you to remember that today as a CMD, we're taking a deep dive into a little bit of the business. You just imagine that this conversation is repeated in every one of our verticals across the portfolio, and therefore, we feel very confident about our ability over the 3-5-year timeframe.
Finally, the really important part that underpins our business is our audience. I really hope you've got a sense of how we really do understand who our audience is, where they are, and what they want, and we can find big audiences, and we can always find the right one. For our business that really matters because in GoCompare, you wanna just find the person that's going to make a buying decision. Finding a big audience is expensive, and it can be really value destroying. Where on lifestyle you just wanna reach the biggest audience. You wanna be the most helpful on lifestyle. Being able to flex in both directions is a core capability of the group.
However, the bullet point that's missing, which is shame on me, is actually the biggest asset and across the entire organization is our people. As Penny just mentioned there, the biggest cost base in our organization is editorial, and that's followed secondly by sales. Where we invest is, Kev's got an amazingly efficient tech team. People often say to me, "Why don't you spend more on tech?" I could spend more on tech, like, tomorrow, right? It's not about the amount of money you spend, it's about what you deliver for that.
I think what you've really got the sense of today is that our tech team and our data team are so fully integrated in our business that we are working as one around what's the right next thing for our audiences, what's the right next thing for our customers, and therefore, the tech is efficient and scalable. Fundamentally, Future's a people business, and so that is our biggest asset. I hope you really enjoyed meeting some of the team today and got a sense of the quality of the bench across the portfolio and the diverse nature of our backgrounds because Future's a varied business and it's got diverse revenue streams, and therefore it's got diverse talent, which I think has really come across clearly today. We're gonna move to Q&A, so happy to take any questions.
I ask the team to come and join me on here so we can direct them to the team. Gareth, we missed you last time.
Hi. Gareth Davies from Numis.
Come and join up here.
You mentioned GoCo, so maybe I'll ask a question on it relating to audience. I just wondered if Stuart could talk about how he's worked with that business, 'cause clearly their audience acquisition strategy was different and sort of didn't reflect the way you think about the business. Could Stuart maybe talk a little bit about how that shifted? In the context of Penny's kind of 30% marketing cost being biased to GoCo, is that a number that sort of shifts to editorial over time so it doesn't come down in absolute terms, it's not a cost saving, but it shifts into other category? Or how should we be thinking about that marketing figure over time?
Stuart?
If I take the first question, you're right, GoCo is a very different audience acquisition model. If you look at GoCompare as a domain, it's not very high up in our list of big sites. It doesn't need a very large amount of traffic. It's very much at the right end, top of the pyramid. We use paid media to drive those audiences. We acquired a huge amount of capability with GoCompare, so that paid audience team have mostly come from GoCompare. They're used to operating at scale. Really the job there is about driving efficiency and automation so that we can get more for our money. And you know, I would characterize that in some of the trading strategies that we use to spend our money.
PPC is increasingly moving towards automation, to drive better use of that spend. That's broadly the approach. I think the really interesting thing is how we can leverage a lot of that capability across the other areas where we're spending money to acquire audiences. That wasn't central to your question.
I think the other point, just to build on that, is, so when we bought the business, the email traffic was relatively small and the SEO traffic was maybe not a core embedded feature. Obviously one of the things that's been able to drive our success and it has been our SEO deployment across GoCompare. Stuart runs that team also in terms of, you know, audience at the broadest sense of the word, and it's really embedding that capability into GoCompare in terms of how we think about things. You might have noticed, some of you, that we rebranded GoCompare over the weekend, two weekends ago, to Go.Compare. It's a really subtle point, but it's really important.
Not only does it look brilliant and really modern, which is obviously important for a brand, but by being Go.Compare, when you type that in, you don't go to Google PPC, you go straight to Go.Compare. These are clever ways we're thinking about how do we drive a natural audience to the site that we don't have to pay marketing for. Now, it's two weeks in, so we don't have huge results yet, but it looks very promising. The idea here is about we're thinking all the time about our traffic as being how many different ways can we drive audience using the full breadth of the portfolio so that you're not having to type GoCompare.com, which then takes you to the SEO, the PPC term that then means we have to buy it from Google, but actually instead takes you straight to the site.
That's a really nice example of some of the innovation about how we think about our audience across the portfolio, but done in collaboration with the GoCompare team. It was their idea, but helped by the expertise in Stuart's team.
Penny.
In terms of that cost base, the costs are both the price comparison customer acquisition, but also customer acquisition for the subscription revenues. Which obviously we calculate on a lifetime value basis. Through time, I think we wouldn't necessarily expect to see the change in mix. We'll continue to invest in editorial to drive growth through customer acquisition. If anything, the kind of change in strategy that were outlined, we're hoping to drive additional growth, as opposed to cost savings.
Edward from Berenberg. Got a couple of questions just on Vanilla and Hybrid. You've got roughly 49 sites and 52 sites on those platforms respectively. Does that mean that there's a lot of still sort of, let's say, low-hanging fruit in terms of migrating sites onto those platforms? 'Cause there's what, 250, 260 odd brands. As a second question, to that, I assume or should we assume that that migration for some of the newer verticals, say, women's lifestyle and others in the U.S. will kickstart that growth in terms of taking those sort of verticals from bottom left to top right? Within that, how long does it take to get those verticals operating?
If I start and maybe Kev or Jason can pick up the second part of the question. Of the 250 brands, not all of them are digital platforms, digital brands, so there's a lot of magazines in there. We're probably about 75% of the digital assets are on Vanilla. There are some which are just so unique, it doesn't justify putting them onto the platform. I'll give you an example. We own a brand called plotfinder.co.uk. It has search capability. It's really niche. It's a nice brand. It makes some money. But to build that functionality into Vanilla, there's no benefit to the rest of the platform for that 'cause we're not selling plots of land. We just run that aside.
There's about half a dozen we've just kind of red-ringed and said, "They do something..." Music Week is actually another example. It's got charts on the website. We don't need charts functionality, so we're not putting it onto vanilla. We're quite disciplined about if it's not gonna scale the product enhancement, we don't put it onto vanilla. Otherwise, we're happy to do that. Maybe Kev or Jason can talk about how long it takes.
Hi. Could you repeat your second question? Sorry.
The second question was
How long?
is migrating sort of, you say the U.S. sites or some of the newer verticals.
Yeah
Is that kind of does that kickstart the shift from bottom left to top right in terms of sort of growing those bubbles? How long does that process take to say get all of the women's lifestyle vertical onto the platform so that you can start that process?
In terms of the bubble that you saw in terms of user growth?
Yeah.
Uh-
If you wanna take the how long it takes the platform.
Yeah
How long do you think it would take to migrate and what way? Why don't you answer that?
In terms of migration on average, depending on the complexity, we've done so many now, it's just like about three months.
That was three months.
Yes. Three months.
Kev whispered the punchline.
There you go. Certainly no two brands operating on different platforms are equal, so therefore they all come along with their underlying complexity that we look, analyze, plan, and therefore to migrate accordingly. On average, three.
One of the things that's really different about Future, and again, lots of people make assumptions, is we have a tiny, and I mean tiny product team, and you'll never hear us talk about the product director or the product team. It's not that they're not valuable, but I mean, this is like, it's like 10 people across the organization. Because a lot of our product innovation comes from the businesses we look at, the businesses we buy, or from our P&L owners themselves. The acquisition of Who What Wear, we're actually gonna build some new product technology into Hawk, as Kev mentioned. We're also gonna look at one of our templates. Before we migrate, we're going to upgrade the product, and then when we migrate Who What Wear, everyone in the portfolio gets that functionality.
That's how we in essence crowdsource our product development because you're kind of buying something that's already proven somewhere. You don't have to hypothesize. You don't have to wireframe it. You don't have to A/B test it. You take what's already proven. You work out how it can work on vanilla. Kev reverse or Jason reverse engineers it. And then they get shouted at by Penny and me about why it's not happening faster. And then we scale it across the whole portfolio. If you go and look at GoodTo, that template is totally different from TechRadar, but they're both vanilla because we've evolved the product through the tech team working with the editorial team or the business owners in terms of how we do that.
Hi. Jessica Pok from Peel Hunt. I've just got two questions. The first is, Who What Wear's already got a brilliant email subscription letter, but you've obviously got the email marketing piece of technology, SmartBrief. Is there opportunities to elevate from SmartBrief into Who What Wear, the Who What Wear newsletter? The second one is more for Penny and Zillah. The business is much bigger than what it was a couple of years ago, and obviously you want to move into these kind of new verticals. You know, increase women's lifestyle more and parenting, et cetera. I know Future's always been agnostic about the size of acquisition, but the assets in the verticals you do want to move into, what type of size can we expect those to be?
Will they be larger than what you historically have acquired at? Or, actually they're rather small scale?
I'll take the first one, and Penny takes the second one. I think what really came across today is, and I was just making the point about product, is we really do try to learn from the businesses we acquire. I said at the very start of the presentation, quite modest organization. We don't think we're right. What we're interested in is finding the best. We're happy to change what we're doing if we buy a business which does something better, because why would you be so ignorant as to ignore a capability that's staring you in the face from people who've got proven track record?
With the email CRM capability we've got from—Actually, a combination of Purch had some capability, and then SmartBrief, and then Dennis, and now what we are, what we're doing is bringing all those teams together, to then look at how we basically leverage that more. I would be amazed if we aren't working together more closely over the coming months, and we don't see some enhancements across the portfolio. Which is one of the reasons why the team pulled those out to kind of explain that that's a really high value audience because they have signed up for that newsletter. They're engaged, they've identified, and they open. The click-through rates can be just huge in terms of the engagement on a newsletter. You really know that audience is valuable.
Penny, do you wanna take the second one 'cause you're in charge of the checkbook?
In terms of M&A, I mean, through the last sort of six, seven years, we've looked at a real and acquired a real mix of stuff from, you know GBP 500,000- GBP 500 million. But what we're really looking for is whether it's unique value creation. Our strategy remains the same. We'll look at a broad mix of stuff, just really looking for where it can accelerate the strategy. We look at a mix of everything.
I think this year's had a great example of that. You know, Waive was, you know, like less than GBP 1 million. You know, it was a tiny. We're basically an acqui-hire. We were basically hiring some talent. WhatCulture was pretty small. I mean, you know, like tiny, but additive to what we were doing, and we definitely felt we could add that. Dennis Publishing was larger, you know, in terms of the size and what we are. It sits right in the middle. You know, we're not at that point now. We're like, "Oh, well, we're not getting out of bed unless it's GBP 10 million." You know, if we think we can make it better, then that's brilliant.
What happens is the verticals themselves or the teams. I can't remember where Waive came from actually, but we'll say, "We've seen this business. We think it's a great idea. What do you think?" If it's really small, it's like, "Brilliant. If you think you can make it happen, and when we're happy it meets all our internal hurdles, if you're sponsoring it, yeah, get on with it and go after it." Which means that the corporate in vertical almost doesn't have to worry about it. Whereas the bigger deals are where we would then spend more of our time.
Thank you. Bridie from Stifel. Two questions. First, just coming back to Hawk. The examples you gave for revenue uplift on those sites were quite impressive. I appreciate the set of circumstances in the first half of the year in the affiliate business were fairly unique. But could you maybe just put those examples in the context of the growth that we saw in the first half, the single-digit growth, and maybe just talk about whether or not you would expect to see the affiliate revenues growing above audiences moving forward? I think earlier you sort of said you tend to sort of budget for revenue growth in line with audience growth, but that seems a little inconsistent with the kind of uplifts that you're getting from Hawk.
That's a little bit of trade-off there between the two of us. Who was taking that answer? Yeah, it's a great question. The good news is, you know, we have seen e-commerce trends return to, you know, a positive environment, which is what we were kind of indicating yesterday in our trading statement. We certainly did lapse what was an unusual time the first six months of the year. I think we also recognize that still don't think we're normal, if I'm perfectly honest, because there still continues to be a whole raft of things going on out there which make life unusual, including ongoing stock shortages, et cetera. I still can't get a PlayStation 5. I keep saying it publicly thinking someone will send me one, but it doesn't seem to happen. I keep searching.
So, you know, we absolutely are comfortable that what we saw in the first half was abnormal in terms of the affiliate trends there, but we would definitely expect to see affiliate growth. I think the reality is some of our businesses are at different rates of maturity, and so I don't necessarily think TechRadar is gonna grow at 50% or 60% every year, and it's a big part of our portfolio, likewise Tom's Guide, but we do expect it to grow in line with its audience. Does that make sense? Whereas the women's portfolio, which has got a much smaller digital presence and a much smaller e-commerce presence, therefore, we'd expect to grow much higher. Sophie can certainly talk to the fact that we set things that are like, "This is the growth curve we expect.
This is what happened in tech. This is what happened in games. Therefore, this is your budget because it's what this is what we know happens as our businesses ramp up. I'm not sure you'll see the historical levels of, I think, when we first we were like 200% and 100%. I don't think you're gonna see anything like that because there's a portion of the portfolio which is more running in line with. We certainly think that there's fast-growing parts of the business.
Thank you. Just one question on the algorithm change. You seem quite confident that you know, you'll ride that out and potentially even benefit. There were two spikes in the audience chart that you showed us were actually following the change. It looked like audience went down by about 20%-25%, if I'm reading that correctly. Can you maybe just sort of talk around that? Was that. I know it was during the pandemic. Was there anything in particular? Is it seasonality or. Sorry, page 63.
Do you want me to take it or you want to take it?
I can take it.
Do you want to take the algo bit in general?
Yeah. The algo bit in general, I mean, Google have released, I think, four algorithms in the last eight weeks. We don't take it on an algorithm by algorithm basis. We play the medium term to long-term game. I think any publisher who thinks that they'll see an algorithm change which requires a complete pivot in SEO strategy doesn't have a very good SEO strategy. Actually, if you look at what Google's saying over the medium term.
Look at all of their algorithm updates. They're all against that context. There has been a move by Google towards a better user experience for people online. Higher quality content, faster experience, and truthful content. That's the goal we move towards, and we find that the algorithm updates generally reward us, right? I'm not gonna lie and tell you that I don't worry about those algorithm updates 'cause of course I do. We have to watch and respond. To your other question, I think you may have answered it, which is that, yes, we did see a drop in traffic, but it was more lapping against the previous year. You know, it was an incredibly unusual set of comps.
Do you think you can add the COVID lockdown end dates to the chart?
Yeah. Yeah.
Because both of those were literally coming out of the COVID spikes.
Yeah.
Sometimes you see it where you get an algo update, they quite like to do it in November. We have a massive spike for Christmas, and then in January, the traffic drops down. Again, it can look like it was an algo impact.
Yeah.
Actually it's the seasonality of the business, which is why we try and show you them all, so you can see the general direction as much as the individual impact.
Thank you for passing the parcel. Ross from Investec. Just one question and just really about the user journey across the sites. Is there anything more you can do to link adjacent verticals? Obviously, with 16 verticals now, there's a good chance one of them is gonna bump into another. So I guess that's the first question. Second one then, obviously the high level number of one in three becomes one in two, becomes two in three. I guess my question is, would you like to be able to get to a point where you can say one in two of our user are using three or more, or four or more, or five or more of our current verticals?
On the first part of that question, which was about how do we move adjacencies, that was actually a little bit what was being teased out by Jason about Next Best Action earlier on in Aperture. I don't know if you wanna talk about that a bit more, Stuart. One of you two wanna pick up some of the ideas around that?
Yeah. I mean, potentially in the context of what I was talking about in terms of increasing engagement and making relevant content recommendations to our audiences, that might be one way of kind of driving engagement across our brands and adjacency. That would be a natural extension of that.
If you go on to Who What Wear's website or which you all should do if you haven't done already, you'll likely, when you're on it, be offered one of, I think, three messages about signing up to an email, depending on what site you're on, which is the Next Best Action. Having come on, depending on what you're looking at the site saying, "Okay, this is what we think we should now serve you as an option to sign up to an email." That's the idea about if we can then get you to sign up to that, and then we can see what you click on to read, we can then work out what we push to you next in terms of what might be interesting to you.
The other thing that Kevin and Jason and the team have been working on a little bit is, and we're testing it, you may also like equivalent type content features, so the cross-pollination across the portfolio, which I think is what you're talking about. We've got the data and Aperture now to know what you might like. It's just whether or not us doing that, making that recommendation is the best action to take, which is why we're now looking at Next Best Action. As you become increasingly capable with your data capability, you have to be very thoughtful around how you use it. What you don't wanna do is inadvertently take an action and, you know, reduce the ability to monetize that individual on a shopping mission.
You don't wanna take them to an advertising site if I can monetize them on a click-through at that point. There's a kind of a connection here across the team that kind of looking into exactly that sort of work. I can't remember at all your second question.
Yeah. I sort of forgot it halfway through myself. Yeah, it was more about trying to be able to talk to that KPI, that one in three, one in two, et cetera.
Oh, yeah. That's right. The one you have.
Becoming about more verticals. I guess the second, the follow-up, to the first question, was really just a bit more around, is that quite early stage in terms of that cross-pollination, and could we see that as a bit of a yield boost as we look ahead?
One of the things I think came across really clearly today is that we focus where we're winning or we fish where the river runs fastest. All of that is open to us, and there are little bits of opportunities that we're working on just now. We're kind of teasing some of them out today in today's showcase. However, this is the point about product and about being really focused. You can spend an awful lot of time on some of this stuff. It sucks a lot of energy out of the organization, but it's not necessarily where the river's running fastest. What we need to do is make sure, and you heard us talk before about horizon planning, work on that stuff just now, which is what we're trying to demonstrate, which is the growth in this business isn't tapped out this year.
It's not tapped out next year. We're laying the foundations just now to give us the growth in years three, four and five. I said that to you five years ago as well. You know, we're continuing to do that. Right at this moment in time, the opportunity we have is to get podium positions in the brands that we own, in the verticals that we are in, because that's the most valuable thing, rather than me saying, "I've got four. One user going across four of my brands." We'll know that because of Aperture. Much more valuable is being in podium positions because that's when the flywheel really kicks in for us.
Simon Davies from Deutsche Bank. Three from me, please. Firstly, Jason talked very convincingly about the virtues of the demise of the third-party cookie. It doesn't seem to want to die. Do you have any insights in terms of when that might actually happen? Second and third are probably for Penny. On your slide on capital allocation, you didn't talk about share buybacks as a possibility. Is there a valuation level at which the value of your own shares would be more compelling than anything else that you can possibly buy? Thirdly, on the dollar, obviously a massive tailwind at present. Can you help us simple analysts work out exactly what the conversion rate is in terms of dollar impact on profit?
First bit, I mean, I don't have any specific inside information on the timing. I think it's inevitable with the current trends and the way we're going. The difficulty obviously for Google is finding an adequate replacement. You know, we're really comfortable with where we are and the value of our first-party data, and it's only gonna get more valuable, not less valuable, depending on what that looks like.
In terms of your questions, I'll take the FX one first because I've forgotten the middle one.
Share buybacks.
Share buybacks. Thank you. In terms of FX, there obviously is a benefit. I drew out in the slides today that 40% of the revenue is in the U.S. I think, in general, we try and manage FX within the context of the overall group. This year we saw an adverse FX trend, and we tried not to bleat too much about the headwind into it. We largely don't talk about it, but it's obviously a beneficial trend just now. In terms of share buybacks, we've had lots of conversations about those. And particularly just making sure that we really understood.
I think, our conclusion is to the extent that we can continue to leverage our capital for organic growth opportunities or M&A, which is accretive, then we think that is a better longer term return for shareholders. Obviously at some share price it makes M&A quite more challenging, although we have bought things over time from 1 times multiple to sort of, you know, mid-teens. It makes our return calculations like much more challenging at a lower multiple valuation, but we continue to be able to see things for which we return. For now, we certainly don't think that that's on the horizon, but we'll continue to monitor and whether that's the right thing to do.
It's pretty much something on the agenda once a quarter at the board. We just look at and review and make sure that we don't not consider it. You've been waiting patiently.
Yeah. Hi, Nick Dempsey from Barclays. I've got two left. So if I'm looking at the cost base, Penny, and trying to understand what could be cut in the event that the top line were to go down sharply. So we've got, magazine production can't be cut, not fully inside cost of sales. Is that what you said?
Not on that issue. Obviously, if we start to see an adverse trend and we monitor every issue, then we would cut production for the following issues, and that's what we saw at the start of the pandemic as in, you know, if you cast your mind back to that time, as painful as that is, you know, shops shut apart from sort of grocery and essential retail. We were able to radically cut production and still run the magazine portfolio.
We've got editorial, and I guess sales inside the sales, marketing and editorial. We keep showing us how much is fixed in terms of overheads. I'm not missing anything there. All of those are the bits that couldn't be flexed downwards in the event that-
Well, I guess what we were trying to tease out is, A, that we're continuing to invest, and so for example, at One Moment we are running with a number of vacancies and we're looking to grow our headcount. When we're looking at that portfolio, we do look at the direct cost base in terms of it should generate an ROI. If it doesn't look like it's going to, then you would no longer continue to invest and then in fact you would look to rebalance. Around 10% of our salaries and wages, for example, is freelance, and so it's much easier to look at retaining our content production from staff rather than outsourcing it if you need to balance that scenario.
Similarly, while obviously we love our sales team, that some of them, if they don't earn the commission, might revisit their opportunity with us. But hopefully-
About 10% of their cost base is also variable on commission.
Yeah.
You overnight have two variables, 10% on editorial, 10% of sales because of the contributor point and then because of the commission point, and then as Penny says, you just then start to work through it.
Yeah.
Okay. Yeah. My second question was, you're always very convincing that your technology is much better than other content creators, but those people must have noticed how successful you've been. Can you convince me that other people won't be able to catch up? I'm thinking of Dotdash Meredith as a kind of starting point there.
Yeah, sure. Honestly, I don't know their tech very well, so I can't speak to them specifically, but I can speak to where we are, and I think that Kevin and Jason MacLellan are amazing. I don't really like to bring them out 'cause I want people to know who they are. I like to keep them in a way in the room embarrassed. I'm really taking a risk. You know, Kevin and Jason MacLellan have built an amazing team, and they operate a two-in-a-box strategy. One of the things that's really important is no one person owns the code, no one person is unique to what we've got. We've got a lot of like risk assurance across the team. We've bought, Penny Ladkin-Brand said 16 businesses, was it, in the last four years?
We probably bought about 16 before that. All those businesses, almost all of them had tech. We bought RAMP, Hybrid-
Hybrid, yeah.
from Purch. We thought it was excellent, so we kept that. We bought SmartBrief from SmartBrief, clue's in the name. We thought that was excellent, so we kept that. We haven't found anything that touches our e-commerce. We haven't found anything that touches our Vanilla platform. Source and Proof, which are the editorial asset management is a really important part of our business. We haven't found anyone who's got anything that touches that. The reason we feel so confident is as we go through those processes of due diligence, we see everyone else's tech. We see how they're running their businesses. Where we get to conclusion is that, you know, if we think it's better than what we've got, we're going to put it into our machine and embed that.
In fact, that's why we've got a team in France because that team were unique, they were very talented. They came through the Purch acquisition. We wanted to make our model work, so we fixed our model to accommodate that. At no point have we kinda thought, "Wow, I wish we had that, and we don't know how to do it." On the ability to copy, it's a huge compliment people try and copy your business model. Lots of people have tried to copy Future. You know, there's a story I tell all the time about the chap who was head of product on Hawk, the editor-in-chief on TechRadar at the time, the chap who ran our audience team at the time, all went off to TI, going back about five years ago, TI Media in the U.K..
TI Media in the U.K. had a brand called Trusted Reviews. We were panicking. Trusted Reviews, sorry. We were absolutely panicking. We were thinking, "Oh my goodness, they know the recipe. They know how to make this cake. They're gonna, and they've got a brand that does what TechRadar does. So if ever you should be worried, this is the moment you should be worried." Well, you just won't know this brand. It's nothing, right? When we bought TI, we didn't come across. Because it's not the recipe that is what makes Future. It's this, and that's the piece what we're really trying to get across today is the model is so ingrained in everything we do that it's how you bake the cake, you know, is the real magic in the business.
Honestly, I'm not worried about people trying to copy us. In fact, I'd happily let them because go and be busy trying to imitate us. While you waste your time, we'll carry on doing what we're doing. It's not something I worry about at all in any way whatsoever. We've been tested a couple of times. That's kind of happened, and we've been like, "Yep, it's robust. It holds up." Another point that's really important there is therefore then it's not any one of us, it's all of us. Together, that's how the kinda magic happens in the business. That's a good place to finish, isn't it?
We have some questions.
There's some questions online? Oh, she's a taskmaster, right? Irene's making sure she gets her money's worth today.
Zillah, you obviously raised GoCo and the fact that this was not about all parts of the business, but we did get a question which was. How does it, how does GoCompare fit into your strategy?
I think hopefully we tried to illustrate a couple of examples where Jason talked about the value of the data and Aperture and how that drives us. I mentioned earlier about the ability for us to take our diversified model into GoCompare. There wasn't anyone doing energy switching, but travel was a good opportunity, so we went long into that, and we took market share over the summer in travel insurance. We were delighted with the performance of the business during that. Wealth and savings, you'll remember that bubble chart. The biggest bubble outside of tech is wealth. One of the reasons why we invested in GoCompare is to really increase our capability in those relationships and in wealth and savings.
The savings brands are just in the process just now of launching out those money products, which the GoCompare relationships enable us to fulfill. It also gives us really rich datasets in terms of knowing what to target to people. Even with the Look After My Bills asset, which some of you may remember was an energy-switching product, had about 500,000 subscribers, but that's been driving all the traffic to Real Home. Not Real Home, Money Edit, which is an organic site we launched 18 months ago, 12 months ago. That audience has been growing, like, threefold. Most of that audience is coming from that subscriber base. We're making. As I said earlier, we hate wastage. We're trying to make the most of every asset we've got and work out how we can then monetize it, so fits beautifully with our strategy.
The final one, we obviously had a question about the characteristics about M&A, but perhaps they're trying their luck. Could you give us an update on what the M&A pipeline looks like right now?
I thought I did that at the start of the presentation, which is it's huge. There's lots of things in there, and the benefit of our business model is we can go broad, we can go wide, and we can go global. You know, we can buy things in Australia, we can buy things in America, and we buy things in the U.K.. One thing we're not constrained about is the vast opportunity of targets. I think the thing for us is that we're very conscious of our ability to see where it adds value, and we never wanna buy something just because we feel we should be buying things. We are very happy the pipeline continues to be able to be executable on. I think that's us done. Thank you very much for your patience.
I really appreciate that. We are gonna do a wine tasting if anyone wants to stay and sample some of the products at Decanter, but otherwise, thank you very much.