A presentation on both Q2 and also more importantly, where we are going in Q3 and beyond. I will be joined today by Raj Mishra, who is on the call. He will be talking about a number of the things that have been happening over this year in India and where things are started there. What I wanted to first do is talk briefly about Q2.
We have got 30 minutes allocated for the call today, so we are going to blast through these various presentations. The purpose really is to not just talk about Q2, but also give shareholders a glimpse into why we remain so bullish on where we are headed as a company overall. With that said, I am going to reduce this a bit here and proceed. There we go. Q2, I want to get the elephant in the room.
I know that people may not have been blown away by our results, but I think you need to frame it in the context of what has happened historically for us as a business, along with where we are headed overall as a company. Obviously, we were extremely happy that we had 27% year-over-year revenue growth.
Our real target is 30%, so it is slightly below where we would like, but the previous quarter was only 22%, so we are headed in the right direction. We think when everybody hears about what is happening in Q3, which actually still has a month to go, people will be extremely excited about the direction we are heading.
We have made a decision that we are not providing any formal guidance yet on Q3, specifically because there is still a third of the quarter to go, and there is a lot that is happening as we speak.
Rest assured, we are extremely confident that directionally what has happened for us as a company in the past where the second half of the year, last year, actually, we doubled the revenue in the first half of the year and the second half of the year from plus or minus really about a third of our revenue happened in the first six months, and two-thirds of our revenue happened in the second six months.
We are expecting something similar to happen here in 2026, and certainly what is happening in Q3 is supporting that pattern in a big way. Why is that happening? Well, a big part of it is that we have been building and growing our capabilities, both from a technology point of view and AI-driven point of view, but also from a manpower point of view and a capabilities perspective in terms of what we can do with campaigns and how much we can make them more robust and what we refer to as enterprise level, meaning larger and more sustained going forward.
A big piece of that over the first six months has also been what we announced in Q1, which was Q Amplify. I will talk in a little bit more detail momentarily about what that is all about, but Amplify is basically built around the concept of doing media buying to boost the campaigns that we are working on and to drive more viewership on the platforms.
That's become a very, very important piece of the creator economy business and of social media marketing. We think we've made a lot of advancements in that area in the first half of the year, and as I said, they're starting to bear fruit right now in Q4, Q3 rather. In addition to that, we've bolstered our sales and marketing efforts. We've improved the visibility of our business overall.
Again, we're starting to see the results of that as we move ahead. One of the other big aspects of what's happened in Q2, and really in the first 6 months of 2026, is that we've increasingly created integration between our operations in North America and India. One of the challenges of the business right now is that there's a lot of margin pressure. I spoke about this on the last call.
As the business has become more sophisticated and has larger budgets attached to it, there's more scrutiny of that by the partners that we have and the larger companies that we're dealing with. We've started to really leverage the ability to use India as a more effective cost center for us in terms of the execution of these campaigns.
There's been a tremendous amount of effort in that in Q2 that's taken place and is beginning to roll out further this quarter and expected to roll out even further next. What that's really given us is the opportunity to be able to not only work more effectively because in a strange way, it allows us almost to be on the clock 24 hours a day in terms of our work capabilities across these projects.
In addition to that, it's created some cost benefits that are in particular helping us in the North America marketplace. That's something that you'll see us continue to do as we go forward and continue to benefit from. Finally, one of the big things that we did is we moved into new offices in India. Raj will touch on that in his presentation.
A big piece of that has been building out what we refer to as Chatter Studios, and we now have our own studio inside the office in India. Again, this is already becoming a key part of what we're doing in terms of the campaigns that we're able to run and manage, along with our ability to create more and more influencers that we represent through the India business.
While the financial results were not as strong as we frankly as we would have liked them to be, we're still reasonably happy with what happened, and a lot of people have asked me about why we didn't have a net profit and what all this investment capital is and why we're doing that.
Again, I think you'll see the fruits of those efforts and those investments as we move forward in the second half of this year, and we're extremely confident that that's the case. The other piece that I really wanted to talk about today is just the creator economy in general.
I spoke about this on the last call to some extent, but the acceleration of that is probably second only to what's happening in the world with AI and the acceleration of AI around the world and the investment capital that's going into that.
The creator economy, in general, right now is exploding in growth. There is not one single brand on the planet Earth that has not, in 2026, increased the allocation of what they're spending in the social media marketing space, but also the size of the budgets and the increased importance of social media marketing.
This should not really come as a surprise to anyone. We all know we carry our phones around in our hands all day long, whether you have kids or not, or whether you do it yourselves. We know the degree to which, whether you're a doom scroller or whether you just spend a lot of time on platforms like Instagram, YouTube Shorts, TikTok, et cetera.
These platforms now for not just marketing and running effectively commercials on them to sell you products and services, but also becoming transactional locations to actually purchase things continues to go like a rocket ship.
We think that we're in an incredibly well-positioned spot right now. It's also why we think that the valuation, frankly, that we have for this business is just ridiculously small given the overall size and scope of the market that we're in.
We are committed to continue to invest in it. We're committed to continue to grow in it. You'll see a lot of news coming from us. I know a lot of people have said, "Where's the big announcement? Where's the big announcement?
Where's the big announcement?" We've held back on a number of things due to some legal issues and some other issues that we've had to deal with. You can rest assured that in the second half of 2026, there'll be a lot of news coming out of the combined QYOU Media Chtrbox business that I think will underscore what we see as the opportunity for ourselves.
I spoke a minute ago about Q Amplify. The same thing is true in India in terms of our increased capabilities to be able to what's known as boost or move more viewership behind the content that we're creating. Spark Ads that you see at the top there is a particular TikTok version of that, where you're able to take existing content and drive more viewership into that.
As the business itself is maturing and as the number of people that see content engage in it, the data that surrounds that becomes increasingly important. Our capability to be able to not just find the right creators, find the right formats, produce the cool content, but be able to elevate that content in terms of viewership on a very, very targeted and specific basis has increased as a huge priority for all advertisers and everybody who's spending money in this area.
If you think about something like the commercial or even print or television rather, or print advertising over the years, and the importance of being able to get onto the right programs or with the right distribution if you were in print, same thing is happening here in the social media marketing marketplace, and it's becoming increasingly sophisticated.
We have become increasingly sophisticated at our ability not just to deliver it and make the distribution happen, but also be able to report on it, measure it, and report to our clients about why it has been effective and how.
An area that we have been looking at for a while and that we are continuing to explore, more so in India right now, again, because we represent creators there that we do not in North America, although we are looking at that as well, is the area of these platforms becoming direct commerce vehicles.
In other words, where you are not just going to Amazon to buy your new hair product or your new, whatever it might be, piece of clothing, where we are all familiar with the concept of TikTok Shop and YouTube shopping, et cetera, and these live streams that are coming transactional.
GMV, by the way, stands for gross merchandise value. In other words, there is 2x the amount of merchandise that has been sold year-over-year on these platforms. Everything is growing like a weed. Singapore, which is one of the leading territories in the world, has been one of the cutting-edge places where it is exploding there.
We are seeing the trend spread across other areas, including U.S., India, Europe, Latin America, et cetera. This is something that we see as an opportunity for us, particularly in India, where we represent creators, and the transactional nature of what is happening in social media is only going to continue to grow massively in the coming quarters and years.
This one, of course, those of us who have been around QYOU for a while, since we started on television, find ironic, but many of you are probably aware that the fastest-growing television channel on flat-screen connected TVs, smart TVs today is YouTube. While all of us are watching all this content on our phones, where smart TV proliferation continues to grow, YouTube is the fastest-growing of any of those channels.
It is free, it is easily accessible, and so the number of hours that people are spending on YouTube now exceeds any other single channel in the universe of channels that are being delivered through smart TVs and connected TVs. Shopping hours on that, as I mentioned a second ago, and transactional hours are continuing to grow.
The net of all of this is extremely exciting for us and something that, again, we are looking to leverage going forward. The other thing we are seeing is that there is the concept of always on. We have been working on this for a while.
Chatter Social was really built to create always-on capabilities in India for brands so that we were servicing what they were presenting on Instagram and YouTube, et cetera, in a sustained and ongoing way with a plan that was not about a one-off clip, but that was about effectively a channel that was being managed. This is happening increasingly as brands are looking to creators to sort of be associated with their brand on a sustained basis.
Because of how we're positioned in the marketplace, because of what we've been doing as an OG in this arena, there's a lot of opportunities that have been coming up for us to leverage this, both in North America and in India, and we see this being a place where we're going to continue to grow going forward.
Obviously, we're international. This specifically is talking about regional languages in some of these places. We're already established, obviously, in India, and Raj will talk a little bit about our regional work that we're doing there. The Middle East, as I spoke about last time, has been slowed a little bit by the Gulf War or the Iran War, rather.
We're starting to unlock more and more business in the Middle East, and we continue to see growth there as we go forward in the second half of the year. Raj himself has deep experience with TikTok in Southeast Asia and Latin America.
A lot of what we're going to be doing around language expansion, using AI, being able to dub into different languages is kind of a blue sky opportunity for us in the future. We get a lot of questions about AI. Obviously, virtual influencers and sort of fake things that are created is a concern, but we really view it as an asset.
We've been able to work on AI capabilities that Jace and the teams internally themselves have created to give us the opportunity to create things faster, to be able to get feedback in terms of what we're doing, to be able to use it as a tool to increase our ability to create great content.
It's not something that for us internally, AI is a threat so much as it's an opportunity that's created about how we can create more work better, faster, and still have it carry with it the authenticity of being created by humans and have the human touch that's allowing it to be authentic in terms of its presentation. Finally, creators, as I mentioned, are becoming businesses.
Obviously, the biggest ones, the MrBeast and the Dhar Manns of the world, et cetera, have already made huge inroads into being able to create real brands with multiple prongs of their capabilities in sort of a global basis.
This is also happening, however, at a micro level and a nano level. There are smaller influencers with less, it could have 100,000 followers that have targeted audiences where they're able to create very strong relationships with those audiences and being able to market a lot of different products and services to them.
We see this also as a huge blue sky opportunity for us as we roll forward, and you'll see more things happening in the area of us using creators and associating with our creators to create extended brand opportunities for us going forward. Where do we see ourselves within all of this?
We touch every piece of this food chain. That's really what it boils down to. It's not so much about being a one-stop shop as it is about having opportunity to have capabilities in any one or 2 or 3 of these areas if it's specifically needed, or to have a fulsome response to what the market is looking for.
As the creator economy has continued to grow and become mainstream, we see with the 10 years that the companies have been in the businesses independently in North America and India to merge those capabilities more going forward and leverage it as a global opportunity for the company. The net of all this for us, of course, is that we know that we need to continue to deliver financial results that are positive, and we expect to do that on an annualized basis.
It's a very big challenge for us to operate quarter to quarter because our industry doesn't really operate on a quarter-to-quarter basis. Internally, we manage it more from an annual basis. We think the annual results of 2026 are going to be something that people will be extremely excited about, including when we announce what's happening in Q3.
We look forward to sharing that information with you, along with some other excitements, the so-called big announcements that we have not made yet that you'll be seeing in the coming weeks and months. With that, I'm going to conclude my screen share, and I'm going to turn it over to Mr. Raj Mishra, coming to you from India.
Thanks, Mr. Marvis. Hi, everyone. Great to have you all with us. It's been a while, and we thought it's a perfect opportunity for you guys to get a dipstick on what we've been up to at Chtrbox India, what we are particularly excited about, and how the future holds for us. Without delaying further, let me really dive in.
Yeah, I mean, just a quick genesis. We've particularly evolved from being called as a traditional influencer marketing agency to a more of a full-stack influencer-led, creator-led marketing platform. Our motto is to help brands, creators, and craft across culture and social media narrative across India and the global markets.
That's what we've been building over the last many years. Sorry. Yeah, my bad. All right, so this gives you a glance about the verticals which we have at Chtrbox. These are not just verticals for us.
These are crafted revenue streams wherein we cater to the Gen Z through Youthink. We have our Chtrbox Represent division, where we represent a lot of top-tier talent. We've got BharatBox, which caters into the regional tier 2 and tier 3 diaspora in India. We've got Chatter Social, which again, like I mentioned, it's our social media vertical where we craft branded strategy for brands who want to really dive into the entire SNS ecosystem.
Last but not the least, we've recently launched Chatter Studios, where we have increased our capabilities and moat in the market, where we come as a full-stack influencer marketing platform to curate substantial value proposition through our post-production capabilities, too. That's something which we're particularly excited about. This slide gives you an idea about the scale, what we've garnered over the last 6 to 8 months.
We've curated about more than 1,000-plus campaigns, integrated a lot of different tiers of creators. We've catered to not just India, but international brands, curated about multiple thousands of content pieces across different categories. The hustle's been pretty much on. Again, we'd obviously host this presentation for you guys to kind of have a look and feel of the campaigns, what we've curated.
But in short, our entire integrated ecosystem sort of helped us enable to deliver end-to-end marketing solutions across the brands. We combine all our capabilities to try and see whether our proposition really fits in the brand's goal.
If it does, then how can we really ensure that they get the best ROI on their investments, what they're spending on us? Again, as Chtrbox Represent is a core of our business where we manage top-tier talent.
Our idea is not just to have a very brick-and-mortar way of managing the talent, but also empower these guys and create more opportunities for these guys to build into their entire social media ecosystem.
So we've fueled dreams of getting people attend Cannes. We've got people to go on Disney cruises, got people to launch their own books by partnering with Amazon. So a lot of interesting work what the team's been putting for our Chtrbox Represent creators.
Again, these are certain highlights for our other divisions, where we've gone into the Gen Z and the localization strategy of the tier 2, tier 3 diaspora, including that of the QYOU Studios. So a lot of the content pieces, what we've shown, has been a derivative of our capabilities, what we really boast about in the market.
Again, like Curt mentioned about the cross-pollination between businesses, so we've gone really big in serving international clients because we have capabilities across different borders and not just in India and the U.S. So we've partnered with a lot of brands who wanted to expand out of India and into different markets.
So through our connects in those localized markets, we've curated campaigns and not just served them for once. 7 out of our 10 deals have been retainer campaigns. So there's definite value which a brand sees in the way we curate and execute campaigns by combining QYOU and Chtrbox capabilities in different diasporas. Again, this is something we've worked with two marquee brands in India.
Mahindra Finance is one of the top financial conglomerates, and Ecologica, again, is a multi-format brand where they wanted to target a different subset of community, and we kind of helped curate that as well. Again, this is about empowerment. This is about getting our creator evolved from being just called an influencer, but more create IPs around them.
So we've empowered a lot of dreams. We've empowered a lot of opportunities for these guys across different brands we work with. So a lot of these offline touchpoints give them an opportunity for ongoing engagement with a lot of the community development aspect, and the brand experiences also is something which is pretty noticeable as we keep curating these campaigns.
Again, for us, we've identified the sweet spot here is not just to serve the creators and the brands, but also create IPs out of creators, which really talk about the propositions, which is what the next level of strategy for a creator would anyway be. We've done few marquee creator IPs which we've already started.
Couple of ones I want to quickly highlight one of that. There's the one you see on the left. That's an ongoing travel and storytelling opportunity with one of our creators, where the idea is to get him travel across the country and engage with different subsets of communities there. We've already garnered about close to 100 million views on the entire IP.
The idea is to keep pollinating such IPs across different subset of creators so that there's a larger value proposition which we drive back to the community and not just the brick-and-mortar way of working with them. Again, these are certain PR and awards which we've empowered for our creators.
The idea was, again, to get them right there where the top-of-mind recall subset is really high for our creators who we manage. As you see, someone's been facilitated in Comic-Con, someone's got an impact award, and recently got facilitated.
Our idea is to, again, create those add-ons which we can as a company so that our creators are really happy and satisfied with the value proposition which we've been derivating for them. Just a quick note on this.
These are particularly 30 plus creators, which we onboarded over the last six months, but our roster's already crossed about 100. This is very core to our business. Again, one thing you would see with the number of followers count, we follow the strategy of catching them early when we can.
Our idea is to catch emerging creators who've got a nick of creating great quality content, who've got a great potential to make it big. Our idea is to incubate them under our ecosystem, farm them, guide them with content strategy, and create rock stars out of scratch. That's the moat which we have in the market, and we are continuing to follow that trend as well. Again, I kind of pause this video. This is, again, not just a new office.
This is a material development in the entire culture of Chtrbox to sort of empanel more cross-collaboration between our teams and have a larger space which sort of envisions what we want to do as a company. We got upgraded into a new workspace. I'm just going to quickly play the video.
As you can see, we just recently moved in here. Team's pretty hyped, and it creates a more cross-collaborative culture amongst everyone. I'm going to play a video after this slide about, which talks about our studio, too, but you all could get a glance in this video as well.
This is something which we've been building over the last six months, and finally, to see it come live was really exciting for everyone in the company, and everyone's pretty much dialed in to really utilize this space as we move forward.
As we realize that our capabilities are a metric of what we have been doing in the past plus what we can do in the future. So we have launched Chatter Studios where we have expanded beyond our production capabilities with a very dedicated studio, which brings in different dynamics to the screen in a much more snackable format.
So our teams and creators get a space to really leeway the opportunity of what they have at their disposal. Our idea is to not just create content, but again, shoot and post-produce and everything under one roof.
Why we are particularly doing it, because there is a lot of appetite for studio-led content from brands increasingly in India and in global markets. So we want to really have a high priority setting as we move forward for this. Again, this is a slide which I really loved.
As we have already completed about 10 years in the market, there is a lot of ways we engage with brands, but what we really thought to do something unique is we turn our own entire company as a creator.
So what we do is we have a very inorganic way of partnering with brands where our own employees are curating slice-of-life content, so that authenticity and the engagement which that content derivates for people who decipher that as a part of the community development aspect is really something which the brands love.
Our idea is to create a new revenue stream out of our own employees, because they are creators in themselves after being in the industry for so long. That is something which is really interesting.
Again, last but not the least, this is just a reflection of the hard work which the team has been putting in on ground. This is a testimonial to the fact that we have been consistently at least stable in the market with regards to being recognized for the good quality work what we have been putting in. With that note, I would say that this is just the beginning for us.
As we scale, as we move forward, like Curt mentioned, we want to really double down on all our capabilities and try and win the market, because we already have all the attributes to do that.
It is just about the timing of everything and every information what is being a material information and what we have been building on, I think, would be preview to all of you pretty much soon. With that note, I would pass the mic back to Mr. Marvis.
Okay. I'm not sure what I did here, but I eliminated my video.
No, we can see you.
Oh, you can see me?
Yeah.
Okay, good. Thanks, Raj. Appreciate that. I think, as I mentioned, we have actually a hard stop in 3 minutes for the call today. There will be another call that will be taking place sometime between now and the end of September, along with some announcements that are coming out then.
Everybody also knows that I'm always reachable via email at Curt with a C, Curt@qyoutv.com. And those of you who have emailed me in the past know that I do everything possible to give you a fulsome response in 24-48 hours, so feel free to do that if you have questions.
I think the main theme of today is that I had an unhappy investor put up a note or whatever and say, "Okay, these guys who just keep losing money and created a lifestyle business." I was saying to Jace yesterday, I said, "Yeah, it's a lifestyle business if you want to work 7 days a week and be under pressure constantly to deliver."
We're working our asses off, and we're not just doing it for ourselves, we're doing it for those of you who have invested money behind us, our shareholders. We take our responsibilities seriously and to heart, and we also want to do it for ourselves. Raj and I have had successful careers. We've been successful guys. This company is nowhere near where we think we can take it. Nowhere near.
While we believe that it's horribly undervalued now with where we are today, it is what it is. Our goal is to continue to leverage everything that you've seen, both of what's happening in the macro creator economy currently on a global basis, but also just some of the things that Raj was pointing out specifically in India.
We fully intend to take these capabilities as a launchpad. As I've said, not to tease it too much, but I think you'll see how that's starting to happen in real time in the quarter that we're currently in.
That's our goal. We challenge ourselves to meet that every single day. Our goal is to do great work and create greatness in everything that we're doing. That's where we're headed as a business.
For those of you who have been on the ride for a long time, as I've said over and over again to you guys, no one's more frustrated than we are in the share price and the valuation, but we are absolutely, positively convinced we can change that going forward, and that's what we're going to keep doing every day, every night, including Saturday and Sunday.
Thank you all so much for your support. Again, send me emails directly. If it's for Raj, note that and I will get it over to him. Appreciate your support and your time today. Thanks very much. Have a good day.