Right, welcome everybody to this presentation with Gentoo Media. We have the CEO, Jonas Warrer, with us today. We're going to do a little presentation, and then we'll move on with some Q&A. The floor is yours.
Thank you very much. Yeah, hello everyone. My name is Jonas Warrer, CEO of Gentoo Media. Wanted to just give you a little bit of an introduction to Gentoo Media, what we do, talk a little bit about our historical results. And then also today we actually had a Q1 report coming out that we'll just flip through, and then I guess going to Q&A. That's the wrong presentation, sorry. That's the wrong. No, but I can break away from the presentation right now. We work as an affiliate in iGaming. This means essentially when I say iGaming, this means online gambling, online casino, and online sportsbook. When I say we work as an affiliate, it means that we are the digital store that a user goes into.
If you want to place a bet on a certain match, let's say you want to play on FCO Stockholm, you would normally go to different websites to see where you can get the best odds. This is what essentially we are doing. We are trying to write about casinos. We are trying to write about sportsbooks. We are trying to write about sports events, reviewing casinos, which casino is the best one in Sweden, which has the best customer support. We try to cover all of this. Essentially when we have users, they come onto our sites, this is our stores, and then they look around and then decide which casino or which sportsbook to place a bet with. Essentially at the end of the day, you can say we are a bridge between players and operators.
This also means that our business is to enrich the users, to ensure that users find a lot of valuable information about the different opportunities out there. This is how we build up a business. We are, as an affiliate, as this bridge between players and operators, quite important in the industry. We are important because we can drive traffic to operators with scale. Our users are very niche users. They are very high intent users, meaning that it's very high value users. We also, as one of the biggest affiliates in the industry, have a global reach. This means, for instance, if you're Betsson, it's very easy to work with us because we can drive traffic in a lot of different countries to Betsson.
Also, an extra thing about the affiliate part is that operators, they only pay us when they actually make money. There is a no cure, no pay element here. For us, of course, that sounds bad, right? In reality, it's actually a very lucrative way for us doing business. If we do it well and we generate high value players, we also generate high revenue for us. What we then see is that we get full lifetime value on players generated. We own the players' lifetime. For instance, if I have signed up seven years ago to one of our sites to Bet65, and I'm tagged now with Bet65, I'm tagged to Gentoo Media. As of today, if I place a bet and lose, Gentoo Media would make money on me because I'm tagged to Gentoo Media.
What we do here and why this business is lucrative is that we can keep building up cohorts of users that keep adding new layers of recurring revenue share. Around 60% of our revenue is from recurring revenue share. We have had before Q1, it is a bad day to be here, so you Q1 later. Before Q1, we actually had 16 successive quarters with all some high revenue. That is five years with continued growth each quarter, setting new standards for revenue. We have also seen over those five years that we had the strongest EBITDA margin in the industry, around 45% in EBITDA margin. We have had the lowest M&A spend compared to peers when we look into revenue growth.
Essentially, and something I think the organization can be very proud about, for over five years have grown the business every quarter with an extremely high EBITDA margin. A lot of that has actually been organic growth. This means that over the last years we have honed in on our sort of recipe for how to act on a global market. In 2019, we were very Scandinavian focused. Then in 2021, 2022, we expanded into Europe. In the last few years, we have also expanded into the rest of the world. Now we are a global business. 60% of revenue comes from Europe and around 20% of revenue comes from what we call the Americas. If I split Americas up into North and South America, around 12% roughly is from South America and then 8% is from North America.
We work in both casino and sports, mainly in casino where we see the highest return and the highest values for us. As I said, 60% of our revenue is from recurring revenue share, where we keep building up new players and new cohorts of players that keep adding value to us. If we look into financials, and I will actually then try to see if I can find this here in our presentation, that should not have been here. Let's see where we are now here. This is actually, if you see here, this is essentially our business to the right here, where you can see to the top you have potential users, and then you have us in the middle being websites or our paid channels where we then connect the users with the partners.
When we then make that connection and the users, they sign up and deposit and start gambling, then we can either get what we call CPA earnings upfront payment, or we can get the recurring revenue share where we get a percentage of the players' lifetime loss, or we can also get listing fees for allowing the operators, the casinos and sportsbooks to be on our websites. The split there is around 60% revenue share, 30% listing fees, and 10% CPA. This means that in 2024 we did EUR 123 million. 60% of that was from recurring revenue share. This means if we close the business down today and just went on holiday for the next six months, there would still be a lot of money coming in on a monthly basis from all of the hundreds of thousands of players we have generated over the last many years.
In Q1, we did 95,000 players, and that number has been around 100,000 each quarter. As you can imagine, we have a very huge player base. To try to give you an idea about the numbers we are dealing with here, in Q4 2024, all of the players that we have referenced to operators, they deposit EUR 200 million with the operators in one quarter. The entire player base we had has deposited EUR 200 million with the operators we work with. That is, of course, where we see the intrinsic value of Gentoo Media. Where do we have the little graph? No, yeah, this is not a very good graph, sorry. As I said, Q1 unfortunately is the first quarter where we actually have seen hardship over the last, over more than five years. Have had temporary headwinds in Brazil that has just regulated.
For instance, I think some of you will probably recall that some years ago you had a regulation in Sweden, right, where operators, they could get a license. Brazil has just gone through that process, and that has created sort of short-term headwinds for us in Brazil. For the first time in 70 quarters, we have actually not grown revenue quarter on quarter and only reached EUR 24.8 million. If we compare to the quarter the year before in 2024, it was EUR 28 million at that time. The drop there is mainly in Brazil. Luckily, what we have also seen in Q1 is that we have gone through a process where we have really tried to refocus our channels and what we do and how we make players.
Outside of quarters and that's been outside of Q1, we have seen a really strong intake in players again, which gives us a high degree of confidence for our ability in Brazil to still be very successful there in a very lucrative market. If we look at our overall business, our paid is basically after the quarter end has really grown. If we look at all of our websites, a lot of most of our websites are growing. We have had one website that has declined, but other than that, all of our other websites are in pretty good shape and growing. If we look into Outlook, we believe that these numbers here for Q1 are sort of reflective of temporary headwinds. We still believe that the fundamentals of the business are very strong.
We still think that we have proven over those five years that we know the recipe how to succeed on a global scale. We have continued over the last few quarters to do heavy investments in technology and will roll out our next generation WordPress platform in the end of Q2 that will start benefiting our websites. We are looking into guidance for 2025 revenue broadly in line with 2024 and an EBITDA margin at 40-45%. As we go into the second half of 2025, also we believe we will see strong developments in our cash and in our cash flow generation, which has always been one of the hallmarks that I've been very proud about in this company. In 2024, we were in a company called Gaming Innovation Group that we delisted the platform and sportsbook at the end of Q3 in 2024.
To give you an idea about our cash flow generation, when we delisted from platform and sportsbook, we gave them around EUR 47 million. This is sort of the numbers that we are able to generate in a year being Gentoo Media. I think that's over to you then.
Perfect. Thank you very much for that. Something that we didn't really touch now that I think many people are looking to hear more about is the cost savings initiatives now that you took in Q1 after a little bit lower revenue quarter. What are the efforts that you're making at the moment to both make the company a little bit more agile and also save the margin short term?
Yeah, I think the strategic initiative to reduce the workforce and to simplify the workshop, of course, there was also an element of cost savings, no doubt about that. It was very much also a result of after the demerger from platform and sportsbook, we were going into the next phase of the company and had to think about how do we position ourselves for the next growth phase. I think if I look at 2024, we hired more than 150 people. That is, at least from being our size of company, a very high number, right? I think we lost a little bit their feeling with what people were working on, what people are doing. Does it still make sense to do activity A or should we change and do activity B instead because we will make more money on that long term?
There has been this desire after the demerger to look at, give basically you can see spring cleaning in the organization, look around and say, well, does this still make sense? We also tried in Q4. We had another record in revenue in Q4 in 2024. We also tried to launch quite some new initiatives there. Some of them I actually personally spearheaded and just got to reflect or conclude some of those activities didn't come with an EBITDA margin at 40% or 45%. At the end of the day, we also have to just question ourselves, does it make sense to keep doing this? We also took the chance here to sort of clean up in some of the activities that had lower margins. Sadly, there was also some of the new activities that we launched that just didn't work out.
Of course, an element of cost savings, but also an element about focusing the business around where it matters the most. For instance, now in publishing, we go from having around 125 to 150 websites we work on. Now we have taken the decision to only work on 70. That is still a very high number, right? At the end of the day, working on fewer websites there means that tech, product, and design can focus around fewer things. Hopefully that will give those things an extra push. I think with what happened in 2024, rapid scaling of growing the business, things have probably got a little bit out of hand, to be honest.
We needed to take the medicine there and simplify the organization, focus a little bit more where we see revenue growth and where we see long-term revenue growth and where we see attractive EBITDA margins. Yeah. You can say 2024 was an amazing year. We broke a lot of records, but there were also a few missteps in 2024 that we needed to deal with, to be honest. Yeah.
Right. Perfect. I just wanted to take a little bit of a step back. You've shown very strong growth consistently. I mean, ever since you took over as CEO of Gentoo Media, what's it called back then. Also, just recently, specifically in the last year, we have seen many affiliates struggling to put out decent revenue growth numbers. You've had a very good run into Q4, and now you took a little bit of a hit.
Can you just talk a little bit about the market structure? Have you seen any sort of structural changes in the behavior from the operators, or do you think that this is more of a temporary setback?
Not very much to think that impacts us in Q1. It is very much Brazil. We are probably taking a hit there, plus EUR 2 million. That is why we just, to some degree, see this sudden drop. It is also a Q1 compared to a Q4. Q4 is a very strong quarter seasonality-wise. There are a lot of people betting in Q4. The main thing is Brazil. On top of this, as I said, we had to review some initiatives we are not making enough money on. Beyond Brazil, there were a few missteps, I would say, in 2024 where we just maybe tried too many different things that did not make sense.
After being over this now, we see Brazil normalizing. Brazil is getting back. Beyond that, I do not see any changes in the fundamentals of the business. Still very attractive fundamentals. We have a high EBITDA margin. We know we do not need to invent new things. We still have market shares that are very low in a lot of the markets we are in, despite that we are number two or three in the industry, right? It is not something that we need to invent new things. Just do it a little bit better and a little bit more focused. Maybe in 2024, we did a few missteps there trying to do too many things and doing it too unfocused. I think that is unfortunately the honest truth. All right.
Also wanted to touch upon a market that has been very high interest, especially from investors during the last few years, and that is the U.S. Initially, you took a little bit more cautious approach to the U.S. You have an exposure, but it's not as significant as many of your competitors. What made you be cautious in the first place, and what outlook do you see for that market in the coming few years? Yeah, thanks. Yeah, so outlook-wise, actually, in March, we had the highest monthly revenue for our U.S.-facing website, WSN.com. Doing quite well there. It's also been a market where we have taken a very cautious approach to investment. I think still, as of today, I think very much as of today that that has been the correct decision.
The issue with US is that it's a very costly market to be in. I think if we look around in the industry, it's a market that has lower margins. It's quite cash flow incentives to build up things there. Going forward, I don't think we will actually change much there. Keep a pretty conservative investment in the US market, keep hopefully growing revenue every month, set a new and new records, and then basically build up profit from there. I don't see US as being a core market as such going forward for us with the current dynamics there, simply because I think the EBITDA margin is not attractive enough for us, considering the demands that we have to have an EBITDA margin above 40%. All right. Also another topic that has been well discussed, especially during the last year, are the Google updates.
To my understanding, they've been pretty volatile, and some sites have been hit very hard, and some have been almost positively impacted from this. You recently said this morning that you would sort of consolidate your efforts into around 70 sites. Can you talk a little bit about the strategic efforts and also how you navigate the Google update landscape? Yeah, with Google, everybody is trying to predict what Google will do and say. At the end of the day, only Google knows. SEO work is by the nature of it, you can say, probabilistic. You think that if you do there, there's probably cause to think that this will benefit your sites, right? This means also, in our view at least, in order to build up a long-term business with long-term sustainable growth, you need quite a few horses running.
If you put all your eggs in one basket and only have one horse running, and then suddenly Google decides that that website is not ranking anymore, it will be very hard for your business, right? The way we have gone about is to have a lot of different websites, also multiple websites that target the same market, to sort of ensure that this volatility in Google might mean that a few of our sites go down, but then other sites go up. There was a Google update in March, and that was net positive for our portfolio. Some sites went up, a few sites went down, but overall very positive. The problem then for us in our strategy has probably been that we have had 150 websites, and that has probably been too diverse. That is something we have taken the conclusion about in Q1.
Nevertheless, I still believe at a very basic element and a strong element in being successful in working within SEO, if you call it that, having websites that rank, is that you need to have some sort of diversity and have many websites that you're trying to get to rank if you are thinking about long-term success, at least in my view, because at the end of the day, things can change. There are 10 spots to fight for in Google. If we have multiple sites, the chances that we will have one or two or three positions, they are just higher than if we only have one. Of course, we have a few websites that we are building up as brands, but that's also a very different investment. For instance, for our AskGamblers brand, we have more than 100 people working on that.
You can imagine it's a site that really has a lot of value to the user, a lot of things going on, but it's also a very different investment. The way to go about here is to have flagship sites where we build up brand value and the value-added services to the user on the site, and then have a wider portfolio of local-focused sites where we don't have 100 people working on each of them, of course, but then maybe not having 145, but only 65 of those. Hopefully we have chosen the ones that have the highest potential for us, where we can validate tech product and design around it, and then sustain it to grow even further. Perfect. I also need to ask a question about AI. We've recently seen the increasing popularity of sites such as ChatGPT.
Do you see this as a big change in the affiliate landscape, and how do you sort of prepare for that potential change? I think first of all, AI gives us quite some opportunities to optimize our own business in terms of operations that I really welcome, alone in data handling, predicting customer lifetime values, some of those things. AI is really good for us. There will probably be an impact in some searches if you think about searches that are very factual, like who won Euro 2022 or how many times has Germany won the World Cup. I think those searches will go down. Most of those searches are also by nature of it, not searches where users convert.
I think at the end of the day, if you are in this element where you really want to play with a casino or sportsbook, you're very down in the funnel and saying, "Now I want to do this." I think at the end of the day, we can still see that people want to make sure that they take the right decision. They want to see a third-party site saying, "Well, this is actually the right one to place your money with." They want to see what other users are saying. I think with AI, the factual things will probably take more and more over.
These things where there's this element of trust, feelings, "Is this the correct thing?" I think that will actually be more and more that users will like to see that there's real people behind this that have actually really tested this and they have put their name into it to say that this is the correct thing to do. If you think about, you can say on a global scale, now Sweden is a pretty mature market, but there's a lot of markets out there where this thing about using your credit card with a sportsbook is still a very daunting experience. There we can see that users really like to see that, for instance, we have the AskGamblers team saying, "We tested it. We have controlled them. This is good." I think those things, AI will not change that.
We will probably see that the factual things will go down and anyhow not an area where we have tried to build our business. Our value add is that we also can add value to the user about strange pros and cons for the casino or the sportsbook. How good is the live chat or the customer service? All of those things, how fast is payments actually handled? These things I just think we need to continue doing also post-AI. AI will optimize our own operations. I think that's looking forward to getting even more benefit out of that.
Great. Thanks. We are actually running out of time, so I have to conclude this session here. Thank you very much for joining us today.
Thank you very much.