Hello, everyone, thank you for joining the VerticalScope Holdings, Inc Q1 2026 earnings call. My name is Claire, and I'll be coordinating your call today. During the presentation, you can register a question by pressing star followed by one on your telephone keypad. If you change your mind, please press star followed by two on your telephone keypad. I'd now like to hand over to Diane Yu, Chief Legal Officer at VerticalScope Inc to begin. Please go ahead.
Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to VerticalScope Holdings' first quarter 2026 earnings call. I'm joined by Chris Goodridge, our Chief Executive Officer, and Vince Bellissimo, our Chief Financial Officer. We'll begin with commentary on the quarter before opening the floor to questions. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that today's presentation contains forward-looking information that involves known and unknown risks and uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual events to differ materially from current expectations. These statements should not be read as assurances of future performance or results. Such statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from those implied by such statements.
A more complete discussion of the risks and uncertainties facing the company appears in the company's management discussion and analysis for the three-month period ended March 31st, 2026, which is available under the company's profile on SEDAR+, as well as on the company's website. You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this presentation. The company disclaims any intention or obligation, except to the extent required by law, to update and revise any forward-looking statements as a result of new information, future events, or for any other reason. Our discussion today will include references to adjusted financial measures, including adjusted EBITDA, free cash flow, free cash flow conversion, and MAU, which are non-IFRS measures. All references to currency in this presentation shall refer to USD unless otherwise specified.
Now, I will turn the call over to Chris Goodridge, CEO of VerticalScope. Chris.
Thanks, Diane, and good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. Q1 was a quarter of focused execution, and as I look at where our business stands today, I'm increasingly confident that we're setting up for a strong year as the quarters progress. The pace of change around us continues to accelerate, but as I've said before, the hallmark of VerticalScope has always been our ability to adapt, evolve, and seize the opportunities that arise from change. The strength of our core operating model continues to build our balance sheet and increasingly is creating optionality. Our strategy continues to be anchored in four key areas. First is growing direct connections, both with our users and advertisers. Second is diversifying our revenue sources. Third, AI-driven product growth. Fourth, leveraging our strong liquidity position and cash generation to make disciplined investments to accelerate growth. Let me begin with our audience.
Despite the significant shifts in the search landscape over the past year, the quality of our MAU base has really proven itself. MAUs averaged approximately 85 million in Q1, which was stable compared to Q4. However, we saw MAUs climb to 90 million in March as we continued to diversify our traffic sources. Increases in contributions from direct traffic and Audience Engine are driving these improvements. We're also encouraged by changes Google announced in early May to its AI Overviews and AI Mode products. These updates are specifically designed to surface more links to authentic voices and first-hand perspectives from online discussions, including showing the community name and linking directly into forum conversations. This represents a meaningful shift from where Google has been trending, which was towards more self-contained AI summaries that gave users less reasons to click through to the source.
We've seen in the past that when Google makes product changes that point users towards forums and authentic user-generated content, that our communities benefit. It's still early, but we see this as a potentially significant tailwind for our traffic as these changes roll out more broadly. Vince will walk you through the details, but I want to offer my perspective on our revenue performance. The top-line result reflects what we've discussed previously. Q1 was our toughest year-over-year comparable, and the impact was again concentrated in programmatic, where we faced both lower traffic volumes, lapping last year's search-driven levels, and another quarter of relatively soft CPMs. The good news is that we're seeing signs that both of these headwinds are easing. Traffic trends have improved, and CPMs have started to firm up in Q2, which gives us confidence heading into the rest of the year.
E-commerce delivered its fourth consecutive quarter of growth, up 25%, and is increasingly powered by AI-driven initiatives that I'll talk about in a moment. We're also really pleased with the momentum building in our direct advertising business. Direct advertising grew 7% year-over-year in Q1 and now represents over 40% of our digital advertising mix, up from 30% a year ago. That shift is significant, and it reflects a broader trend. As the open web gets noisier and more saturated with AI-generated content, brands are placing a premium on reaching real people in brand safe, contextually relevant environments, and that's exactly what our communities deliver. We're seeing particular strength in automotive, where OEMs and aftermarket brands are investing in immersive content campaigns to reach our highly engaged enthusiast audiences.
Outdoors and powersports are also strong, and we've won meaningful new mandates in insurance and telecom in both the USA and Canada. Our pipeline for the second half is building ahead of prior year, and we're confident this channel will be a meaningful growth driver as the year progresses. Even through a period of significant change in user patterns, we continue to demonstrate our ability to generate free cash flow. Adjusted EBITDA margins came in at 20%, which is consistent with our normal seasonal pattern where Q1 is the low point, and we converted 86% of adjusted EBITDA to free cash flow. As we move back to a return to growth and begin realizing the expected gains from our investments in AI, we believe we'll be set up for even greater operating leverage than we've demonstrated in the past. Turning to our product and AI initiatives.
We're pushing hard to become an AI-native company where agentic tools are amplifying the output of every team. To this end, we made an important strategic move this quarter with our partnership with AltaML to embed four deployed AI engineers directly into our operations. AltaML is a proven Canadian AI leader and will be a catalyst to accelerate our pace of change. This is about building production-grade agentic workflows in all areas of our business. The opportunity here is twofold. These workflows are designed to unlock new sources of revenue while simultaneously driving the kind of operating leverage and efficiencies that we expect will show up in our results as we move through the year. We've already identified savings that we're reinvesting directly into this work with AltaML, and we expect to report on tangible outcomes over the coming quarters. Meanwhile, our core AI initiatives continue to gain traction.
Fora Frank has become a staple of our community experience, adding value to human discussions and driving significant engagement improvements to threads. Our latest product release included a new commerce-focused initiative powered by AI to significantly improve in-thread commerce experiences. Within weeks of launching, this new feature is already delivering over half a million dollars of annualized revenue, and we have several paths to continue to scale it up. Last but not least is AudienceEngine, which we introduced at our last call. It continues to scale in line with our expectations, providing us with new users and sources of profitable revenue. We're learning and experimenting as we build up this new capability and as we focus on finding quality audiences and optimizing their performance. Turning to data licensing.
As I've spoken on past calls about the opportunity we see in this space and the patient approach we've been taking, the demand signal continues to be clear and persistent. Over the past three months alone, our TollBit integration has blocked 275 million unauthorized scrape attempts across our communities from AI crawlers from the major LLMs. That demand is shifting the conversation. We're actively engaged in discussions that are more advanced and substantive than anything we've had before. At the same time, we'll continue to take the necessary legal steps to protect our content and intellectual property against unauthorized use. We see both paths, commercial and legal, as complementary, and we're prepared to move forward on both. We also recently relaunched the Fora Data API, which provides enhanced structured access to our community data for licensed partners.
You can find information about our new API on our corporate website. Finally, a quick comment on capital allocation. The strength of our core operating model continues to generate healthy free cash flow and a consistently improving balance sheet. We entered the second quarter with over $75 million in total liquidity and very low leverage. We're well-positioned to deploy capital where it creates the most long-term value for our shareholders, and right now our focus is squarely on investments in AI that accelerate growth and operating leverage. On M&A, we continue to see high levels of inbound opportunities. We'll continue to be disciplined and selective, acting where the right opportunity presents itself. Let me bring it all together before handing it over to Vince. The quality of our MAU base is clear, and we have several paths to grow.
Direct advertising is growing, and our pipeline is strong. The AI investments that we're making through AltaML and across our product suite are expected to contribute as real growth drivers and real operating leverage. Our balance sheet gives us the optionality to be opportunistic, positioning us well for some strong quarters ahead. With that, I'm gonna turn it over to Vince to walk through the numbers in more detail. Vince?
Thanks, Chris. Good morning, everyone. I appreciate you joining the call today. Our top line reflected the lapping of difficult comparables, the core fundamentals of our business continued to power through. We demonstrated the durability of our cash flow generation, the discipline of our cost base, and the optionality we continue to preserve on our balance sheet. These give us the flexibility to navigate through a challenging first half from a year-over-year perspective, while continuing to invest in core AI initiatives aimed at driving meaningful operating leverage and long-term growth. Let me walk you through our results. Chris described earlier, Q1 represented our toughest year-over-year revenue comparable. Revenue was $11.6 million, down 15% year-over-year, driven primarily by a 22% decline in digital advertising revenue to $9 million.
The decline in digital ads was largely due to a 34% decline in programmatic revenue, resulting from lower impression volumes and CPM declines. With stabilized organic traffic, improving yields, and incremental contributions from AudienceEngine, we expect the channel to return to historic sequential growth patterns as the year progresses. Q1 represents both the seasonal and structural low for the year. Programmatic remains a meaningful and highly profitable part of our business, and as conditions improve, this performance will directly flow to the bottom line. The decline in programmatic was partially offset by a 7% growth in our direct advertising channel, driven by increasing demand from advertisers and agencies for the contextually relevant brand-safe environments our communities provide. We are positioning the operations that support this channel to benefit from new agentic AI capabilities in the coming quarters.
Initiatives designed to enhance reach and scale while deepening our direct relationships and servicing our audience more effectively to partners. Our sales pipeline remains active, with forward bookings pacing ahead of prior year, a positive signal as the channel moves through the balance of the year. E-commerce grew 25% in the period, largely driven by incremental contributions from Ritual Technologies, which we acquired in April of 2025. E-commerce remains one of our highest conviction growth levers. This is high margin revenue tied to a high intent user base, increasingly enabled by our AI initiatives. As Chris noted earlier, our AI-driven end-to-end commerce experiences have enhanced our affiliate revenue opportunities. We are focused on scaling these experiences to further optimize our ARPU profile, and we expect them to be a key driver of commerce momentum as we move into the second half of the year.
Turning to monetization. Total ARPU was up 3% year-over-year, despite an 18% decline in MAU. This is a clear signal of the underlying quality of our audience and demonstrates the tangible impact of driving growth in higher yield revenue streams, such as direct advertising and e-commerce. Within that, digital advertising ARPU was down 5% to $0.03. Decline reflects the shift in audience mix as we diversify traffic sources amidst ongoing changes to the search environment. These new traffic sources currently monetize at lower programmatic rates than legacy organic search-driven traffic. Our focus is on narrowing this yield gap by scaling our direct sold footprint and prioritizing AI-driven products that drive higher yield, engagement, and ARPU growth over time. Turning to our operating performance for the quarter.
Net loss for the period was $3.1 million, compared to a net loss of $2.4 million in the prior year. The loss was attributed to the revenue decline and $5.1 million in non-cash depreciation and amortization, largely related to acquired intangibles. Excluding the non-cash charge, the business was profitable and cash generative. Turning to our cost base, operating expenses were down 3% in the period, driven by ongoing savings from the organizational changes we made in mid-2025. As Chris mentioned earlier, subsequent to the quarter, we identified and executed on an additional $1.5 million in estimated annual annualized cost savings centered on headcount, software, and technology costs. Our strategic priority is to redeploy these operating savings into capital investments in AI through our partnership with AltaML.
In total, we expect to invest approximately $2 million in CapEx towards AI initiatives this year, in addition to our existing $1 million capitalized run rate related to ongoing platform development. We believe this reinvestment of savings into AI workflows will drive incremental operating leverage as we exit 2026. With our cost base trending lower, adjusted EBITDA was directly impacted by the revenue decline in the period. Adjusted EBITDA was $2.3 million, down 36%, with margins compressing to 20% from 27% in the prior year. Consistent with seasonal pattern we have described in prior calls, Q1 is a low point for margins, with profitability improving sequentially through the year and Q4 typically our seasonal peak. Our expectations on margins haven't changed. We continue to target 30%+ margins on a full year basis.
The opportunity to expand margins through agentic workflows is real, and we will report back on progress as milestones are completed over the coming quarters. In the quarter, we converted adjusted EBITDA to free cash flow at a rate of 86%, identical to prior year. Maintaining these conversion mechanics through a completely different operating environment demonstrates the durability of our cash generative model. Operating cash flow grew 20% to $3.5 million, and we ended the quarter with $19.6 million in cash. In April, we made a $12 million voluntary repayment against our revolver, lowering the drawn balance to $32 million and bringing our implied net debt position to approximately $27 million. Our revolver remains a core strategic asset with $68 million of available capacity to deploy at attractive rates when opportunities arise.
The April repayment was a proactive decision to optimize our financial position and lower borrowing costs. We intend to remain aggressive on voluntary debt repayments for the remainder of the year, and we expect to exit 2026 with a net leverage below 1x on a credit agreement basis. Looking ahead, Q2 will still reflect a difficult programmatic comparable, though we expect improved performance from the channel. As we move into the second half, the comparables clean up, and we transition from lapping to leveraging a more stabilized base. The trends in our direct advertising channel, AI-driven opportunities in commerce, the continued diversification of our traffic mix, and the operating leverage we are unlocking through our work with AltaML all combine to support a trajectory that improves as the year progresses, building long-term value for our shareholders and employees. Thanks for taking the time to listen today.
With that, I'll pass it back to Chris.
Thanks, Vince. We'll open it up to questions now.
Thank you. To ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad now. If you change your mind, please press star followed by two. When preparing to ask your question, please ensure your device is unmuted locally. Our first question comes from Aravinda Galappatthige from Canaccord Genuity. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. Chris, I'll start with the MAUs. I mean, there is a, I think some pattern of stability here. There's no question, particularly when you consider the seasonality. Can you speak to what it's been so far? We're in the middle of May. It looks like that $80+ million , you know, whatever that number might be, end up being $85 million, that can be stabilized before potentially growing, I assume. Can you talk to what it's been post-quarter just to kind of, perhaps corroborate that view?
Yeah. As I mentioned, Aravinda, we the final month of the quarter, we were at $90 million, and we saw that continue to grow into April. And those patterns are holding in early May. We do think, like I mentioned, that the quality of that base is shining through. You know, as we, you know, experiment with new means of growing our audience, you know, we'll see that grow. We also think, you know, as I mentioned in my remarks, there could be some favorable backdrop with respect to how Google's rolling out new versions of its AI experiences that we think could be, it's early to tell, but we think could be very helpful for us as we move through the year.
Okay. Just to clarify, April was higher than March?
Yes, April was higher than March.
Okay, perfect. Excuse me. In terms of the direct component, can you maybe talk to how much sort of the direct traffic grew in Q1?
I won't give an overall growth rate. What I would say is, you know, Google as a percentage is a minority of our traffic, and the direct is continuing to build. I'm not gonna give specific breakdowns or specific percentages, but it's a very significant mix. Even within the Google portion of traffic that we call, you know, from search, there's a healthy portion of that that's branded, meaning people are just using the search engine to navigate directly to one of our communities. You could call that direct. We don't do it in our internal tracking, but it adds to that base and makes the number, you know, even larger.
It's steady growth in direct and that's certainly the plan to continue to build in a steady fashion.
Okay, thanks. Then perhaps for Vince, on the, on the cost base, how should we think about sort of the OpEx base moving through the rest of the year? I know that you kind of gave a margin guide. I mean, your sort of, you know, if I leave out the share base comp, your wages, your G&A and platform components, they kind of add up to, I think it's around just under $10 million a quarter. Is there more downside from here through the rest of 2026? Do you think that you've kind of the Q1 reflects a lot of that, lot of that action, cost action?
Hey, Aravinda, and thanks for the question. I did mention that post Q1, in April, we did do an additional round of rationalizations, concentration headcount, but there were also some platform and tech savings there as well. That's about a $1.5 million annualized run rate. That won't be reflected in the Q1 number. In fact, if you had pro forma that change at the beginning of the year, you'd likely see margins for the business in and around 25%, which is more in line with the 27% you saw last year. We do think there's an opportunity with the work we're doing with AltaML right now and the investments in agentic workflows to realize more efficiencies.
Too early to tell what that will be or when it will land in a year. The motivation here is to sort of automate, where possible, a lot of the busy work that most organizations find themselves in. There is an opportunity. We think it's real, but it's too early to measure that amount and when it'll land.
Okay. Okay, understood. Thank you. I'll pass the line.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Vince Valentini from TD Cowen. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Hey, thanks very much. Chris, on the content licensing, you say you're having more in-depth discussions than ever before. Are you still leaning towards some sort of partnership where it's not just maximizing dollars you get, but trying to get some capabilities back from a partner on the other end, is just as important? Maybe you can just let us know where your head's at, if it's more just money these days.
Yeah. Thanks, Vince. That could certainly be part of the mix. We see that actually opportunity in a few respects. One could be through data licensing partnerships, but you have to remember also we're a pretty big cloud user. That is often a component of those relationships and, you know, wanting to retain your business and help grow your business as well. In our case, that's with Google, as being a, you know, Google Cloud customer. We do think that that could be part of the mix. The key thing for us, I know we've been talking about it for a long time and said we're being patient and everything else, the key thing for us is having a proper value exchange.
If we see that through capabilities, or access to technology and there's a clear win from a value perspective for us, then we're certainly that can certainly be part of the mix. We also see it as a financial opportunity to have a proper value exchange that hasn't existed.
Okay. Do these discussions give you confidence that something should happen this year?
I knew you were going to ask that, Vince. You know, I do think it's a fair question. You know, my expectation is that we'll see, we'll see a P&L impact this year.
Okay. If we exclude that, any revenue that may come from that, take that out of the equation for a second. Are you seem to be signaling that we're still going to have some tough comps in Q2 on programmatic, so total company revenue growth probably still stays subdued or negative. Are you seeing at this point, like, some visibility to year-over-year revenue growth being positive in the back half of the year?
Hey, Vince. This is Vincent, and thanks for the question. Your assessment of Q2, I think, is overall in line. We will see difficult comps, we called out programmatic from a year-over-year perspective. The gap will be narrowing, and we're seeing that in April right now. Or we saw that in April, sorry, and leading into May, that the gap in programmatic from a year-over-year perspective is narrowing. It's too early to tell in the back half, or when in the back half growth will be on the top line. We have so many irons in the fire right now. We've signaled on direct, we've got some good signals there. We think that'll continue growing into the back half of the year.
We called out sort of early days on these AI-driven commerce initiatives. Really encouraging results on minimal amount of work. The team is looking at many more iterations of that to drive transaction revenue across our platform, which just makes so much sense given our user base. Then I think the third component is, you know, the work we're doing right now with AltaML more broadly, the agentic network that generates direct sales capabilities for us, allowing our sellers to be sellers, and eliminate some of that work that they're doing. That should free them up and get them in front of the brands, and it's the major brands that is that really focus on our audience and our vertical. Too early to tell, but, you know, we will see improving results.
We will see the year-over-year gap narrowing as the year progresses, and there could be possible growth towards the end of the year and into 2027.
Okay. That's helpful. Thanks, Vince. Just to clarify, you've talked a couple times about the $1.5 million OpEx savings run rate, but then you used the word reinvest and you linked it to some of the AI initiatives. To be clear, the $1.5 million you expect to show up as realized EBITDA, or you're taking that money temporarily and reinvesting in better AI capabilities?
It's basically reinvesting OpEx into CapEx spends. That $1.5 million will be part of that $2 million AI investment for the year. We expect about $2 million in CapEx related to AI that'll fall in 2026. That's on top of our current run rate, which is around $1 million in CapEx, and that's related to, you know, internal developments on the existing platform. Collectively, that'll be about $3 million in CapEx between the two work streams for the year.
Oh, okay. Thanks for clarifying. The EBITDA does go up, but the free cash flow does not.
There'll be an impact of free cash flow, correct.
Thanks, guys.
Thank you.
Thanks, Vince.
Our next question comes from David McFadgen from ATB Cormark . Your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Okay. Yeah. A couple of questions. You talk about having a higher volume of inventory from alternative audience channels. Can you tell us what those channels are?
Yeah. Thanks, David. A variety of channels, social channels. We're looking at, you know, display networks. There's several different areas that we're looking at. What we're trying to do is find a match with audiences that kind of fit with how we monetize. Like I mentioned, we're experimenting in a number of different ways. We think it's a capability, an important capability that we're building that we haven't had in the past. You know, there's some, probably some obvious channels if you think about the nature of our business and our communities where we can find users that would be a good fit. We're certainly looking in those areas.
Okay. It seems like you haven't really generated a lot of traffic yet from these alternative channels. It's something you're exploring, right?
It's generating real traffic. There's no question about that. Like I mentioned in my remarks, that combined with seeing some gains in direct have allowed us to kinda offset any of the, you know, the noise we've seen from Google. So again, we see it as a great capability. We think it can build, you know, it can really help build up the user base over time. We're really focused on making sure that the ROI of users we acquire is there. We're not just looking to build an MAU number for the sake of an MAU number. We wanna make sure we have real return and real lifetime value.
Okay. You don't wanna share with us some of the channels that have contributed some decent traffic for you today? You don't wanna share that with us?
Not today. I think that's part of, you know, what we're trying to do, you know, to build that up. You know, I think we're better off as a business if we keep some of those tricks to ourselves, because I think there's some definitely some proprietary aspects to what we're doing, and we wanna make sure that, you know, we give that a real good chance to grow. Yeah. We may share more in the future, David. We'll see. For now, we really wanna give it the space to be able to build and grow. We'll be changing and looking at different sources of audience all the time. I don't wanna send you down a path and have it change dramatically.
Okay. It's just, you know, from an investor point of view, you know, if when there isn't transparency and all of a sudden we wake up and the quarter is bad because you've lost audience from a channel, and it just comes totally out of the blue, it doesn't help to build investor confidence or a multiple, right? Anyways, I guess that's just a comment. On the e-commerce side, what would the revenue growth have been if you exclude any acquisitions? Like, what would it have been on a pro forma basis?
It would have been flat to last year, David.
Flat. Okay. All right. Okay, thanks guys.
Thanks, David.
Thank you. As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad now, and we'll pause for questions to be registered. Our next question comes from Gabriel Leung from Beacon Securities. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Morning, thanks for taking my questions. Just a couple of quick things. Chris, you know, with the increasing portion of advertising revenues coming from direct advertisers and perhaps an improving CPM environment, do you anticipate the digital advertising ARPU to start showing year-over-year improvements maybe in Q2 or perhaps in the second half?
What I'll say, I'll let Vince add his comments, Gabe, but I, we do see, you know, a clear, obviously a clear trend towards improved direct year-over-year. Direct monetizes at a higher rate, clearly much higher than programmatic, so that does bleed through to that ARPU number. On the programmatic side, like Vince had commented earlier, that gap there year-over-year is really closing. It's really twofold. I mentioned it in my remarks, like you're seeing, you know, the comparable from an impression standpoint get easier. CPMs have been a headwind for the past couple of quarters, at least Q4 and certainly into Q1, we've seen that reverse in really the second half of April and into May.
We're seeing, you know, more normal patterns from a CPM perspective. Historically, what you see when you do have normal patterns is, you know, strong as you get through, you know, the later Q2. You tend to see Q3 as being, you know, more like similar to Q2, and then Q4, you see that big jump. We think we're now back on a path towards that sort of more normal pattern. Vince, would you?
Yeah. Gabe, the only thing I would add there is, I commented during my talk track, the ARPU and the ROI, Chris commented as well, that we're seeing from audiences, AudienceEngine right now is low. It is ROI positive, it is much lower than CPMs we would have seen or from historical organic search and definitely lower than the CPMs we're seeing from direct channels. As we build out that muscle and continue to diversify that traffic base, one of the goals internally for us is to, again, find a more lucrative ROI, more long-term value, engage with the audience that are gonna provide direct contributions to our platform, et cetera.
We may consider also in the future, you know, on maybe splitting out that ARPU number and sort of giving the market that view. We're not there yet as because the strategy is still evolving. Some more to come there, but overall, there is a valuation impact from AudienceEngine at the moment. We'll think of a way to package that up as the strategy continues to evolve.
Got you. No, thanks for that feedback. Just lastly, just in terms of the data licensing opportunity, I mean, just given the amount of unauthorized scrape attempts you're blocking, and clearly there's a desire for your data. I'm curious what might be holding back, you know, finalizing a deal here. Is it, you know, more on your end in terms of what you want or more on the counterparty side in terms of their willingness to pay? I'm just curious what the dynamics are in terms of the conversations there.
Yeah. It's a good question, Gabe. Like, I obviously don't wanna say anything that's gonna, you know, have an impact on discussions we're having. I think it's a combination of things. Like, in reality, it's getting the engagement, it's getting the understanding of the impact and understanding the value, also, you know, us not just jumping at the first opportunity. Like we've deliberately been patient. We see this as a long-term play, we've continued to believe that that patience will be rewarded, that continues to be our position. Obviously, you're right. The wording in our talk track today has definitely shifted, it's deliberate. You know, it's a combination of things.
I do think the fact that you're seeing the amount of blocking happening generally in the industry as kind of the open web kind of woke up to this over the last kind of year and a bit. I think we were relatively early in that respect. I do think, you know, sources of high-quality information, like authoritative human voices, you know, they really do come at a significant premium. You realize how much they're needed to make the AI systems work and work effectively. You know, we're at or certainly approaching that point where the value exchange is surfacing and will make sense for something for us to do where it hadn't previously.
Got you. I appreciate that feedback and congrats on the progress. Thanks.
Thanks, Gabe.
Thank you. We currently have no further questions, and therefore concludes the Q&A session. I would now like to hand back to Chris Goodridge, CEO, for any closing remarks.
Well, once again, thanks everyone for taking the time today. Thanks for all of the questions. We look forward to seeing everyone again, at our next call in August. Thanks very much.
Thank you. This now concludes today's call. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect your lines.