Good day, and welcome to the AppLovin's acquisition of Wurl conference call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing star then zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on a touch-tone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Ryan Gee, Head of Investor Relations and Strategic Finance of AppLovin. Please go ahead.
Thanks, Matt, and thank you everyone for joining us today to discuss our proposed acquisition of Wurl. Joining me today are Adam Foroughi, our Founder and CEO and Chairperson, Herald Chen, our President and Chief Financial Officer, and we're pleased to have Sean Doherty, the CEO of Wurl. During today's call, we may be making certain forward-looking statements regarding our expectations and timing related to the Wurl transaction and the future operational and financial performance of the company and Wurl. These statements are based on assumptions and beliefs known to us today, and we assume no obligation to update them. Our actual results may differ materially from a number of reasons.
We encourage you to review our risk factors in our most recently filed Form 10-Q as well as elsewhere in our SEC filings for further clarification, all of which are available at www.sec.gov and at our investor relations website. We may discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations of GAAP to non-GAAP financial measures are available in our Q4 earnings press release issued February 16, 2022, and available also on our investor relations website. Please be sure to review those reconciliations as the non-GAAP measures are not intended to be a substitute for or superior to our GAAP results. This conference call is being recorded, and a replay will be available on our IR website shortly. With that, I will now turn it over to Adam. Please go ahead.
Thank you everyone for joining us today to discuss an exciting acquisition for our company, one we believe will jumpstart AppLovin's entry into the high-growth CTV advertising market. As discussed on our earnings call last week, we are confident in the prospects for AppLovin and continue to invest for growth across the business, including into several new initiatives. Earlier today, we announced an agreement to acquire Wurl, and we are pleased to have Wurl CEO Sean Doherty with us on the call today. I'll let Herald review the transaction details and the financial implications of the deal. First I wanna share why we are excited to partner with Sean and the Wurl team to push forward our shared vision of performance advertising in CTV. First and foremost is the market and its evolution.
This acquisition greatly accelerates our entry into CTV at a pivotal time when marketers are increasingly shifting traditional TV ad dollars towards connected television. According to estimates, the U.S. CTV ad market alone is growing at over 50% annually, with ad spend projected to surpass $30 billion by 2025. We see the CTV market opportunity resembling the very early days of mobile. A large, rapidly growing digital ad market ripe for innovative performance marketing and attribution solutions. Second is the potential of our combination. Wurl has a strong position in the CTV space, with broad reach to over 300 million televisions and over 30 million users each month. Its CTV delivery infrastructure provides them direct access to content creators and gives them an opportunity to help monetize the viewership with an ad exchange similar to MAX.
We believe that by bringing together Wurl's existing infrastructure with our own performance marketing expertise, we can accelerate the revenue potential in a sizable market. Finally, we're adding an amazing team. We are optimistic with the strategic foothold in CTV that Sean and his team have built, and we believe their veteran leadership will be a tremendous asset for us from which to grow. Sean will continue to lead the company in AppLovin's entry into the CTV market. The team also shares the same strong entrepreneurial spirit that has been key to AppLovin's own successes over the years and will fit the culture we've built very well. With that, I would like to turn it over to Sean to share his perspective.
Okay, thanks, Adam. Hi, everyone. Very exciting day for us here in Palo Alto. Adam and Herald asked me to briefly introduce Wurl and the services that we offer for you. As we go along, I thought I'd also try to highlight some of the parallels to AppLovin that Adam alluded to a few minutes ago. We can dive deeper on some of this if you'd like during the Q&A. Basically, the Wurl service is an infrastructure layer for content companies and CTV apps to scale their businesses. We operate a kind of first of its kind internet-based network that behind the scenes interconnects all of the main components of connected TV, content, applications, advertisers, and viewers.
I think this will start to make more sense if I describe our three primary products and how they help content companies grow their distribution, advertising, and marketing on CTV. Here's a quick overview of our products. Our first product is called Global FAST Pass. It's a B2B service for CTV distribution. You won't see the Wurl brand on your television, but we're behind the scenes powering lots of CTV applications. Global FAST Pass is a 24/7 always-on network that connects content to connected TV apps.
Our FAST Pass customers are CTV apps and content companies, big ones around the world like BBC, A+E Networks, Bloomberg, Televisa, and over 150 others in the United States, Europe, and Asia. For these companies, our network, the Wurl network, provides a one-to-many kind of a CTV on-ramp, so that they can distribute their content to most of the world's biggest streaming apps in over 40 countries. Think of an internet, like giant mesh that's interconnecting all of this content with apps that run on televisions all over the world. Our second service, AdPool, is a supply-side platform that helps our customers monetize and increase their ad yield. Global FAST Pass is helping them get distribution, and AdPool is helping them increase their ad yield.
Like AppLovin's MAX product, AdPool is both a source of demand for CTV publishers, ad demand, and also a mediation service. CTV publishers route their ad inventory to our AdPool service, and we connect it in real time to demand-side bidders. Our third service, Perform, is a unique product in the CTV world, very unique. Perform is a performance marketing service for CTV advertisers. This is where we really start to come together with the AppLovin strategy. Like AppLovin's AppDiscovery, our Perform service uses machine learning to guide ad targeting and measure conversion outcome of every impression. This has never been possible on TV. I mean, you can imagine traditional linear TV doesn't have the two-way capabilities to even track any of this stuff, let alone target.
When we launched Perform in Q3 of last year, we started by supporting campaigns for CTV streaming apps who were seeking to acquire and retain viewers. Thousands of apps around the world that were looking to reduce churn and add more viewers to their apps and increase viewing time. This quarter, Q1 of 2022, we've expanded the Perform service to include support for campaigns run by both e-commerce companies and CPG brands. It's early days. This product is only 8 months old, but we're very excited about the early results and optimistic that this is gonna be the biggest product that we've ever launched. Our business is growing very rapidly. Ad impressions served on our network grew over 13 times in 2021 versus 2019. Hours of viewing has grown at a similar metric.
We expect our growth to continue due to a number of factors, including the network effects of our business model, accelerating sales of Wurl connected smart TVs. It's happening every day. Thousands and thousands of new TVs are getting connected to our network. Also feeding our growth is increased global adoption of streaming, which is, you know, everyone knows, and enormous investments that are being made in premium content that run through our pipes. We're extremely happy to be joining AppLovin. On a personal level, you know, this company has been a rocket ship the past few years. It's been a fantastic experience for the Wurl team, but we view this combination with AppLovin as an opportunity to accelerate our CTV growth even further, joining forces with Adam, Herald, and the rest of the AppLovin team.
With that, let me turn it over to Herald.
Thanks, Sean. We're all very much looking forward to working with you and your team on this strategic new growth vector for AppLovin. As Adam mentioned, I'll run through some of the specifics of the investment and then provide some context for the financial impact before we open it up to Q&A. The purchase price, as mentioned in the press release, is $430 million and expected to be funded with 55% cash from our balance sheet and 45% in AppLovin shares. Those shares will be priced at an average of $72, which equates to approximately 2.7 million shares. Importantly, post-closing, we're also planning to create a multi-year performance-based incentives plan for Sean and his team that very much closely aligns with our shared success.
The plan contains minimum and maximum annual revenue and EBITDA thresholds for the years 2023 through 2025. The amount earned in a particular year ranges from zero at the minimum to a specific amount at the maximum per year and will be paid in equity. For example, in the final year of the agreement, if in 2025 revenue is less than $200 million, that year's performance bonus would be zero. If revenue is greater than $550 million and the EBITDA threshold is also met, that year's annual bonus paid in equity would be $330 million. If every year's performance bonus in 2023, 2024, and 2025 is maxed out, the total payment would be $600 million in equity. We're excited that this aligns very much with our shared success.
In terms of outlook, as mentioned, we expect the transaction to close in a few months. Given the partial year, the revenue contribution in 2022 will be modestly positive to the range for our software platform business that we shared last week, which is $1.350 billion-$1.5 billion for 2022. We do expect rapid growth for this business and expect Wurl to exceed $75 million in 2023 in revenue. While early to estimate, we expect the business to be neutral to positive in cash flow for this year and next. With that, Adam, Sean, and I would be happy to take your questions.
We will now begin the question-and-answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touchtone phone. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. If at any time your question has been addressed and you would like to withdraw your question, please press star then two. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. Our first question will come from Jason Bazinet with Citi. Please go ahead.
I just had two basic questions for Sean. One, can you just give us the broad outline of what the revenue—like the mechanism that you use to generate revenue? Is it a rev share? Is it a platform fee? And then second, I was just looking at your press kit, and it said there's something like 1 billion ad avails a month at the end of 2021. Can you just walk us through sort of the waterfall between ad avails and how we can sort of think about revenue, like the linkage between those avails and how you guys generate revenue? Thanks.
Yeah, sure. On the revenue model side, I think that's the question, Jason. The first two products that I described, Global FAST Pass and AdPool, collect a transaction fee, kind of like AppLovin's MAX transaction fee for mediation. We collect transaction fees for, in the case of Global FAST Pass, hours of viewing. Every hour of viewing that, you know, a viewer in Brazil is watching, we collect a fraction of a cent per hour. And then, on the AdPool service, for every ad inserted, revenue-producing ad inserted, we collect again a small fraction of a cent for every ad inserted. On the Perform service, it's different.
It's a more traditional demand-side service where there's a take rate, in our case, about 40% take rate between the campaign charge that we charge an advertiser and our costs, third-party costs to target and purchase the ad inventory in order to place the campaign ads. That's the rough. It's really a kind of success-based model in all cases. On the inventory question that you had, yeah, I mean, it's. Our ad inventory is growing very fast on CTV. A lot of the content that we deliver are live services, so there's like television-style ad breaks that need to get filled.
The trick with CTV is really to have a very high-performance advertising infrastructure through which you can fill a very high percentage of the ad breaks, you know. That of maybe 20 ads per hour, say, that are displayed while you're watching television, that we can fill all of them ideally, but at least maybe 80% or 90% of them. Wurl is actually known for having the highest fill rates in the CTV industry, where we consistently have fill rates up around the 80%-90% level. Those billions of ad avails, you know, pieces of inventory that get created while people are watching, we're filling 80% or 90% of them every day, and the number of avails is growing every day.
Our next question will come from Matthew Cost with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Thanks. Yeah, hi, everyone. Thanks for taking the questions. So I have two. The first one is just maybe for Adam. I think that between Adjust and AppDiscovery and MoPub and MAX, it's kind of clear how those assets all fit together, kind of primarily, you know, delivering ads one way or another inside of mobile apps. I guess what is the strategic rationale for, you know, pushing deeper into connected TV and what is kind of the, you know, the benefit of combining those assets? What expertise or data, you know, drives value having them under the same roof? And then the second question is for Herald, just clarifying one thing. You said something about Wurl's cash flow contribution. I just wanna make sure I understood.
Was it that it's going to be $0 or more dollars of cash flow over the next two years? If you could just repeat that. Thank you.
Thanks, Matt. It's Adam. So on the strategic side, today, obviously, we've over the last year, we've added Adjust and added MoPub, strengthened MAX as it continues to grow in the marketplace. We've really become one of the strongest platforms for mobile in-app performance marketing and monetization tools and enablement tools for the developers. When we look at CTV and the CTV space, it just reminds us of a lot of the history that we've had on mobile. When we started the business a decade ago, mobile advertising was just taking off, but it was predominantly branded. There wasn't attribution, there weren't performance marketing campaigns, there wasn't much machine learning in advertising, and the relevancy was much lower. The space evolved quite quickly over the last decade to build companies like ours that have succeeded in performance marketing.
When we look at connected TV, obviously usage is through the roof, but a lot of the advertising models that are prevalent on CTV today mirror the advertising models and spend on linear TV. When Sean and I were catching up, and we were talking about where they are in their business, we saw an opportunity to get into the connected TV space and extend our expertise in performance marketing into their platform. Their platform, just to give you sort of a, an analogy to ours, they're rendering content on behalf of the channels, the content creators to the end consumer, and within that content, they get to control the ad inventory. They are effectively a mediation platform as they build out those solutions similar to MAX.
Then performance marketing needs attribution, and it needs data, and it needs an innovative performance marketing platform, and then obviously the capacity to serve full-screen video ads. Well, we do all of that on mobile today. We saw it as a great opportunity to extend our presence to connected TV and then help his partners on connected TV extend their presence to the mobile audience so that discovery can happen both ways. That's what we're really excited about partnering up together to go after.
Matt, it's Herald. I'll answer your second question regarding the contribution of Wurl into this year, next year, and also take that to just talk about our investments in 2022 and 2023 across our growth initiatives as well. To start, you know, we see Wurl as a high-growth business, you know, investing quite a bit into that growth this year. Again, partial year, so it'd be, you know, relatively neutral to slightly positive contributor to EBITDA, we think this year. Next year, given the growth rate, we're hoping it'll be a positive contributor to margin. However, we see an enormous opportunity. We'd rather invest in the business for growth in terms of particularly scaling the headcount side of the business to ensure that we can go attack what Adam just described as a very, very large market for us.
We'd say, you know, it's a neutral to a positive contributor over the short term. I think importantly, when you think about what we had said on our earnings call, a week or so ago about, this year being high 20s% EBITDA margin, that included substantial investments for growth across our business. Maybe I'll take a minute if I can, just to articulate that and give some clarity there. You know, first, putting aside Wurl, you know, we do have a step function increase in software expenditures this year given the doubling of the business from 2021 to 2022, based on our guidance.
This includes additional MoPub, their go-to-market team, additional infrastructure costs for MAX, and in particular for Axon, our machine learning engine, given the fact that there's a massive increase in the volume that it'll need to process, there's a pretty big step-up in compute power this year. On top of that, of course, they need headcount engineering to run both those existing and new projects. This year, I think there's a step function increase in the software costs, excluding Wurl, that we probably wouldn't see in next year as we scale up the software business to 2022. It'll be a more normalized level of incremental investment in software rather than a step function. A second bucket is across our studios.
We're now running full cost across several new studios we acquired last year, and we're investing in new games and existing game development across the studios. As we mentioned, we've got critical mass there, but wanna continue to make the investments organically to ensure we've got great return on ad sales. We're utilizing our couple thousand studio developers around the globe, you know, to grow the existing games and develop new ones. Then the third bucket, which is potentially relevant to Wurl, is we have set aside a significant amount of money in operating expenses to fund new growth initiatives. That is primarily on the software side, although potentially, if we do have a new hit game, we would fund that as well.
We wanna have the flexibility to invest as we always do in the new initiatives that'll ensure our long-term growth rate when we see fit, rather than having to change guidance along the way. Just in summary, those three investments I just mentioned, one in software, the second in apps, and the third in new initiatives. Each one of those represents about $100 million in cost. If we removed any single one of those, let's say that the 22% margin target, which is in the high 20s%, would have instead have been in the low 30s%. We just wanted to give you some feel for the ability for us to grow the margin structure. Our incremental EBITDA flow through to incremental revenue this year is probably in the mid-30s%, based on guidance.
It certainly could be much higher in the mid-40s% without the reserve, and higher if we weren't making these step function investments in software and on the app side. Looking into 2023 and beyond, we think there's a tremendous growth for margin expansion depending on what in a more normalized flow through. Then depending on where we see investment opportunities, we'll still wanna make those investments to ensure we drive the long-term growth for 2023 and beyond. Hopefully that helps, Matt, probably more than you asked for on the margin side, but hopefully helps you in general from where we sit today.
No, super helpful. Thank you.
Our next question will come from Youssef Squali with Truist Securities. Please go ahead.
Great. Thank you very much. I have two questions. One for Adam and one for Sean. Adam, to the usual question of buy versus build, it looks like Wurl is still pretty nascent business. Can you maybe just speak to and I know it's 100% connected TV, and you guys are not there, but it seems like you've often talked about functionality that and capabilities that you guys have in-house that could cut across to the other side. Can you speak to how difficult it is to build a platform kinda similar to what Wurl has built, maybe either in terms of money or in terms of time? And then, Sean, it looks like you so you guys seem to be in three buckets or three businesses, the distribution, the SSP business and Perform's marketing.
Can you just speak to kind of the competitive landscape maybe across these different businesses? Who do you guys compete with most that are out there that everybody would know of? I think the SSP side is kinda well known, but the other two are maybe a little less. Thanks a lot.
Thanks, Youssef. This is Adam. On really the build versus buy, I think the compelling part of what Sean's built is, one, it's just complex to render technology on new platforms to begin with. Then here you've got all of these content creators and these channels that have to come into existence and really push out through hundreds of end devices or device models to the consumer. Being able to help them render that content appropriately on these streaming devices is challenging. Not very dissimilar to us building mediation in MAX and mobile. When you get the creator to then plug into that solution and render content through those pipes. It's very hard to disrupt that relationship.
The foundation of Sean's business is this contractual relationship with all of these brands to render their content to the end consumer through their pipes. The part about his business that gets us excited and gets him excited on the go-forward prospects of the business is now that you're effectively the CDN on behalf of all these brands, you can add incremental monetization by helping them monetize their ad inventory. They're beginning to build some products that they've released to the market that look like very similar to the early instances of our AppLovin AppDiscovery product.
that's where we got excited and said, "Look, this is partly why we're buying to get a faster start, and then the build is gonna be a joint build to really accelerate the advertising efforts so we can speed up penetration into what's going to be a very large and fast-growing ecosystem." Sean, I'll hand it to you for the second question.
Yes. Sorry, I was on mute. Yeah, on the data or on the competitive landscape question, yeah, you're right. You know, for our three different services, we have three different sets of competitors. On the distribution services, it's a handful of companies, probably not unlike Wurl that you've never heard of before, mostly small companies. It's very fragmented, market by market. I think we're the biggest of all of the companies in the market, in that area, in distribution. On our AdPool product, we do compete with SSPs though, but as a. We've got two differences. We act as a mediation layer, which they do not.
That creates some excellent advantages for us with our customers who are not looking for just, you know, delivering all of their inventory to a single SSP, but want a competitive environment where they can, you know, just like, with MAX, AppLovin's MAX, get the best yield from their inventory. The second place that we have a very unusual competitive advantage is in data regarding AdPool because we do all of the distribution services. I mean, we're the provider of data to our customers. We have the data and provide it to them. It's very granular data about behavior and, you know, and ad fills and prices and all those things. It's an enormous, very unique kind of a data repository database that we've got that we can use to optimize advertising.
There's lots of things that, you know, now that we're part of AppLovin, I think, you'll see us start to do with that we just didn't have the resources to do before. On Perform, there's no competition. I mean, it's just a complete greenfield. Frankly, we took the lead from the mobile in-app advertising market and AppLovin in particular over the last three or four years, kind of studying what they were doing and how that industry was growing and trying to figure out how we could apply it to CTV, where there's some differences. You know, you're not clicking ads on your television. There's different methods of attribution and the way that the machine learning works.
it's a greenfield, which is frankly part of the reason that we decided to sell our company and to sell it to AppLovin because we felt like, my God, this is an amazing opportunity for Wurl. Don't blow it. We have to go fast. This is gonna become a big thing, and we felt like doing it with a partner like AppLovin was going to improve the chances of success dramatically.
That's great. Just, I guess, one last one. Just in terms of how we should look at the business over time, will it be integrated? Is this gonna be ran as a standalone and reported as a standalone? Maybe for Herald.
Yeah. We plan to run the business independently. We think Sean and the team have obviously built a lot of capabilities, technology themselves that they can and all these relationships in the CTV ecosystem have taken a long time to build. You know, however, obviously, there's lots of opportunities in terms of technology backend, given what we've built in parallel, the mobile app ecosystem, which is now 10 years old. They're just getting started in some of these ad categories, both supply and demand. So there's gonna be a lot of touch points for us to help go develop that. So like we've done with other of our software partners like Adjust or app partners, they'll have their own brand and independence, but really part of our, you know, our partnership across all of our solutions.
Whether we report it separately or not remains to be seen. I think as you know, we're trying to consolidate a lot of our software revenues into one place. We'll see what makes sense in terms of disclosures rolling forward.
Got it. Thank you, and congrats.
Thank you, Youssef.
Our next question will come from Stephen Ju with Credit Suisse. Please go ahead.
Okay. Thank you. Sean, is there any other data you can share in terms of who the audience on AdPool is, where they live, and on the advertiser side, which verticals are most prominent? I also wanted to follow up on your earlier commentary regarding Perform. CPG brands, yes, you know, it should be a very straightforward transition for them to spend. The rationale seems, you know, very straightforward as well. You know, can you talk about the innovation that has been going on in the background but also needs to happen in the future to onboard more of the performance-oriented budgets? Thanks.
Hey, Sean, you might be on mute.
Sorry. I keep-- There's some construction here in the background. Keep doing that. Thanks. Yeah, in terms of who the customers are, we have content company customers that are, you know, delivering their content through our network and that we're providing advertising and Perform services for. It's about 160 of them now, I think. They're mainly in the U.S. and Europe, a growing group in Asia. They're mostly big media brands, cable and broadcast networks, television and movie studios, some digital-first brands. We have a second customer group that are streaming applications, and so these are in two categories, smart TV integrated streaming applications from third parties or from the smart TV manufacturers themselves that they build into the TVs. The second category are connected TV apps, like, from streaming boxes like Roku and Apple TV and things like that.
Those are really kind of a piece of the distribution puzzle. The end users themselves that we're serving, like Adam said, there's about 300 million. It's probably much more than that now, maybe 350 million TVs connected to our network. We're adding about 50,000 new television monthly active user connections per day now. These are new TVs that are being purchased and consumers that are finding the service. I'd say about 50% or 60% of those televisions, 33 million monthly active viewers are in the United States, probably, you know, another 30% or so in Western Europe, and then the remainder sprinkled around, Japan, Latin America and Australia. I don't know if that was. Is that what you were looking for, the-
Yeah.
In terms of who the customers are?
Yeah, exactly.
On-
Yeah. Thanks.
On the Perform innovation question. Yeah, the Perform innovation question. You know, this is like a fascinating area, like, kind of a target-rich environment right now in CTV since no one's doing this, except us. There's lots to learn. I mean, this is where the synergies with AppLovin come in. There's lots of things for us to learn, things that AppLovin has already learned about what works, and what doesn't work. There's massive scale required for this. You know, we've got 30 million monthly active viewers that are watching television for four hours a day, and we're sampling what they do every six seconds to gather behavioral data and try to analyze all of that to make connections that can predict then what those viewers will be interested in, what ads are appropriate for them, and then measure it all. So it's really.
You know, we have great ideas, and we've managed to build the Perform product during the last six months and bring on some terrific customers. I mean, it's surprising volumes. But like I said before, we want this to be potentially a giant business. We're trying to catch up to AppLovin and their mobile business, and so we need to go fast. We need to, you know, not have kinda on-the-job training about things that AppLovin has already learned about what works. We need to look at combining the datasets that we build in the CTV world and that AppLovin builds in the mobile world and find correlations between those things that can help the combined product be unbeatable. I mean, just kind of there's very few companies in the world that could put together a combination like that.
Thank you.
Well, I-
Yeah.
Go ahead.
Should we assume that the Perform, you know, in terms of buckets of revenue, that Perform is the biggest bucket right now?
No, it's tiny. I mean, It's brand new. Our Global FAST Pass business is the biggest bucket, and AdPool is very close behind that. Perform is definitely the fastest-growing part of our business, but, you know, like I said, we've only been selling for six months. It's a tiny sales team, that's doing all of this direct selling. It's really, you know, great foundation, but lots of room for commercialization now.
Understood. Thank you.
Our next question will come from Martin Yang with Oppenheimer. Please go ahead.
Hi, good afternoon. Thank you for taking my question. The first question is, again, drawing analogy to mobile advertising, is there any single platform on connected TV side that may affect how you track, target, and attribute those data?
Affect, you mean constrain?
Any potential changes in policies, technology-
Yeah.
Uh, that would-
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, I get it. Yeah, of course. You know, there's a battle out there for data. I mean, in CTV, everyone's just starting to understand. I mean, they're just like the performance marketing business is years behind mobile, the understanding of the value of data is years behind mobile on CTV. We've aligned ourselves with our customers who are the content companies and have helped them take the position that the data that's generated from their activity, from their viewers watching their content is their data. The platforms, you know, this is the platform, you know, or app side is very different than in mobile. I'll describe in a second. A lot of the streaming applications and platforms would like to control the data.
You know, they'd like to Samsung would like to control all of the data that's delivered through its TVs, and Vizio the same thing, and Roku the same thing. There's a line being drawn in the sand there and a lot of negotiation that goes on about data rights. So far, you know, we think this is kind of a decade-long thing. So far, the data rights are pretty open. The thing that I like about this market is that it's highly fragmented. There are about 30 connected device OSs that each have at least, you know, 3% or 4% market share. There's no one company that has more than about 8% or 10% market share.
It's not like mobile, where there's the potential for one or two companies to really control how data gets what data gets used and what doesn't get used. It's very fragmented. It's even more fragmented, though. In addition to all those different OSs on each TV OEMs brand and streaming boxes brand, these are not one global app store. I mean, it's like there's an app store for each OS in each country. There's 50 countries times 30 OSs. It's like that because TV content doesn't travel and advertising doesn't travel very well across country borders. You know, they don't wanna watch the same content in France as they watch in Spain.
You've got these very independent operations country by country, which someone was asking before, what's it take to put a business like this together? It is mind-numbingly complicated to create the technology platform through which you can reliably deliver to 1,500 different unique platforms all over the world. That's what we've done. I now that we've finished it, I love the fragmentation because, you know, we're not dealing with any giant single company that's going to try to change the rules.
Got it. Thank you, Sean. A follow-up on your prior comment on the ad impression growth. Can you confirm that you said, can you maybe repeat what you said on ad impression growth in 2021? Was that growth rate over 2020 or 2019?
Versus 2019. The full year, 2019 versus full year 2021, our ad impressions grew over 13x. I can tell you.
13x?
13 x, yeah, in those.
Got you.
2019 to 2021. Yeah.
Got it. Thank you. That's all my questions.
Sure.
Our final question will come from Franco Granda with D.A. Davidson. Please go ahead.
Hi, everyone. Yes, thanks for letting me ask a couple of questions here. You know, given that Perform is only a few months old, I don't imagine you'll be taking the technology over to the core business. But with that said, can you simply plug Axon into the data that Wurl is generating through the different touch points that it has? And if so, what kind of technological leap do you think that would be for Wurl?
I mean, Adam would probably know better than me about that, more familiar with both sets of technology. Adam, I don't know if that's fair.
Yeah. Yeah, I can try to answer. I mean, I think, you know, with any new technology and integration, the real answer is we have to assess. Axon is machine learning with data points and math. So there's nothing special about the data points being mobile originated or mobile resolved. So in theory, a lot of the same capacities that we have expertise in could port over to the Wurl stack. The way we looked at the business really was just very similar to what we have, where Wurl's got the exchange, they have all this ad inventory, and they're gonna create competition within that exchange to maximize the yield of the content companies they work with and obviously their own yield. There'll be DSPs that they work with fitting into it.
Then jointly, we can build the quote-unquote app discovery for connected TV, and extend that through their platform to the audience. The implications are interesting because it just hasn't been done to have performance mobile app advertising extend to connected TV or to have content that needs discovery from connected TV content creators to extend to mobile. Some of the cross-screen overlap is interesting to us. Even within the connected TV device, the market itself and the channels need content discovery. There's a lot of similarities, and we do think a lot of the technology that we built will port pretty nicely to what Wurl has.
All right. Thanks, Adam. You talked about the growth you've been seeing on the active TVs that you serve. What percentage of that comes from growth of new devices coming online, you know, as end users purchase more TVs or smart TVs versus new customers that you're signing on?
Yeah, we don't know, Franco. It's really, we don't know. You can see indications that there's seasonal growth based on there's a lot of TV purchasing that goes on in Q4. You know, there's roughly 220 million, 230 million new smart TVs that are bought worldwide every year. So I, you know, I think we're getting a combination of steady growth from the out-of-box experience on these TVs now is all about streaming. You plug it in and connect it to Wi-Fi, and the streaming turns on. So I think we're getting a lot of just anecdotally a lot of uptake from that, but we don't know for sure.
All right. Thanks for the call.
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