All right, I think we're live. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today for our first fireside chat on this year's Truist 's Fourth Internet Summit, so my name is Youssef Squali. I'm the Lead Internet Analyst at Truist, and my guest this morning is Mark Zagorski. He's CEO of DoubleVerify. Mark, thank you very much for being here.
Of course. It's great to be here virtually with all of you.
Yes, yes. So I'm going to assume that everyone on this call is pretty familiar with the company. But just in case, and maybe to just put things in context a little bit, measurement and verification of digital ad traffic seems like a crucial function of the digital ad ecosystem, considering just how fragmented and convoluted media buying is online. Maybe help us contextualize this market. How big is it? How fast it's growing? And your role within it?
Yeah, so just taking a step back, if you look at what DV does, is we ensure that the exchange, the value exchange, the advertising value exchange between buyers and sellers is verified and secure. So think of a buyer of an ad and a seller of an ad. We ensure that transaction of that ad is viewable. So it actually can be seen on a page or the video can be viewed. The transaction is fraud-free. So there's actually two legitimate players involved, that the ad is delivered in a brand-safe or brand-suitable environment and in the right geography. So think of those kind of four key axes. And increasingly, we're not only protecting that spend, but we're helping it afterwards to perform better as well.
We do that across everything from the open web, so buys across The New York Times, to programmatic buys that go through places like The Trade Desk and Google and others, to social platforms increasingly. Places like Meta and TikTok and Snap and Pinterest. That market, the market we believe, has a TAM of around $20 billion. Right now, it's relatively underpenetrated. I think with regard to actual clients we dig into, we think it's around 50% penetrated. It's a growing market, right? It grows along with the size and scale of the digital ad market, which is growing in the low teens or, depending on the year, single digits, high single digits, low teens every year. Since we are a volume-based business, we grow along with the growth of the market as well.
Okay, excellent. I actually omitted to mention this at the beginning, but I'm going to be asking a whole bunch of questions. If anybody wants me to ask a question on their behalf, just email me at youssefsquali@truist.com. I'd be happy to include that, your questions, time permitting. Digging a little deeper into the story at a high level, there are basically two types of products in the portfolio, right? There are the post-bid measurement business, which is how you all started. Then there is the pre-bid activation. Maybe talk about the difference between the two and kind of, again, their respective growth prospects. Do they have any material difference in margins to you guys?
Yeah, so the way we verify a transaction is either after the ad has been delivered, which we call measurement. So the advertiser has bought the impression, and it's contracted and can be delivered. We measure whether that impression, that ad impression, actually met the standards that the advertiser requested, right? Along with brand safety, suitability, viewability, fraud, and geographic performance perspective. In many cases, we can actually block the delivery of the ad. So although it's already been purchased, if we see something that we don't like that doesn't align with the advertiser's demands, we can actually block the appearance of the ad. But in that case, it's called post-buy, right? It's post-buy measurement. The money has already been spent. It's helpful and important and metrics driving.
But in those cases, the advertiser generally has to go get a make -good from an advertiser or from a publisher or a platform, or has to figure out how they can get the additional reach that's been blocked. The other part of our business, and that's how we started. We started basically measuring the Open Web and telling advertisers what they were getting either aligned or didn't align with what they expected. Where we saw significant growth over the last few years is what we call pre-bid verification. And this is when we insert ourselves before the ad is purchased on platforms like The Trade Desk and other DSPs in the programmatic space in the bidding process. So when an advertiser comes in and says, "Hey, I want to buy that ad.
Let me put a bid against it." We look at the ad opportunity and we tell them before they even buy the ad to say, "Nope, this does not look good. It looks like it could be fraud. We think it doesn't meet your brand suitability criteria or your brand safety floor. It's not the right geo," et cetera, et cetera. So that's the pre-bid. That obviously is incredibly valuable to advertisers because rather than blocking the delivery of an ad someplace and trying to make up for it later, never buying the ad in the beginning is very valuable, right?
So when we look at the growth of that business, so what we call our activation business, our pre-bid business, it's grown at a very aggressive rate over the last several years, much faster than our measurement business, which was kind of the standard bearer and the activation business, kind of the growth engine for us. That activation business started off almost entirely in the open web through being activated through DSPs. That now is growing where we do measurement across all platforms: social, open web, video, mobile, et cetera. Activation has really been limited up until recently into the open web, and we didn't get into social. But recently, we now are starting to do activation across YouTube. So we bought a company called OpenSlate, which does pre-screen and pre-bid analysis there. It's small but growing.
But the real opportunity for us on the pre-screen side down the road will be across the larger social platforms like Meta, like TikTok, et cetera. And that's something that's on the horizon for us.
And where are you in terms of penetration of these? So I think the last we heard was that you're going to be testing with Meta on the pre-screen on the activation side early next year. And then with TikTok, you're already out?
With both, they are in the development stage. I think actually Meta may hit the market a bit earlier than TikTok, but we expect both to hit in the H1 of next year. TikTok, we do some pre-screen, and this is where we get into the weeds here, but the pre-screen we do for TikTok right now is a TikTok solution. It's kind of like a white-labeled embedded solution for them. It's not very sophisticated, but what we're working on with them now is launching an advertiser-paid open solution so that advertisers can opt into it and then buy impressions the same way they do with us on other platforms as well, so we know that social now is an increasingly large part of our business. Last quarter, it was 48% of our measurement business.
So we know that getting the commensurate activation aspect of our business in social is going to be key because we build this beautiful flywheel, right, where we can measure and find errors or verification challenges, push those into the pre-bid filters, and allow the advertiser to filter those errors out before they buy them. Then you create this virtuous cycle in which measurement feeds activation, activation powers measurement. The two work together and grow very nicely. And what we really want to do for advertisers is drive better performance. Because what we find is when we take the junk out of the system, what's left just performs better. So although we talk a lot about our business being a verification business and a protection business like insurance, ultimately what we're evolving into is a real performance business.
We've always had it kind of in our DNA of taking when you take garbage out, what's left performs better, and we're leaning further and further into helping drive better performance over time for advertisers.
I guess because of that, and correct me if I'm wrong, pricing on the activation side is higher than the pricing on the measurement side, right? Does that mean that also margins on the activation side are higher than margins on the measurement side or not necessarily?
We have a very high margin business. So the cost of us either measuring or filtering on the pre-bid side, another impression is minuscule, right? We run it this last quarter, we ran at 83% gross margins. It's a very profitable business. So I wouldn't say the, I mean, the margins, yes, ostensibly are better because we charge more per impression on the activation side. But we kind of don't think of it that way because we're just a volume business. Like whether we get measurement or activation, they both drive volume, they both drive dollars. That being said, activation, we get paid anywhere two to three times more per impression for activation than we do for measurement.
Yeah, yeah. Okay. Moving on to just at a high level, if I look at the U.S. economy this year relative to expectations, it obviously proved pretty resilient, and you look at the digital ad market, I think coming into the year, people were talking about high single digit growth. We ended up being low double digit growth, as you said. You've had some pretty impressive wins across, again, social platforms like Meta, TikTok, across big brands, I think, especially recently, but some of your largest clients also had some mishaps. I'm thinking about the half dozen CPG and retail customers that you've called out earlier this year as having positive spend. Contextualize that a little bit for us . Last year, you grew around 27%. This year, that growth dropped to about 16%. I guess arguably that's still higher than the overall growth in the digital ad market.
So that's still good, but pretty big deceleration. How much of that decel is from those customers versus maybe other things that you'd want to highlight?
Yeah. So earlier this year, we talked about kind of this cohort of six, some of our biggest customers who had anomalous kind of drags on their business. And the good news, bad news about DV is as we've gotten larger, our customers have gotten larger with this as well. So our top 10 customers, we've got folks who are spending $20-$30 million a year with us, which relates to literally hundreds of millions of dollars of digital ad spend if you think about the percentage we take of that ad spend. So they're big customers. And we just had a series of issues with a handful of them. Some of them, one of them was going through a massive restructuring, closing stores, et cetera. So they're a retailer and they cut back on advertising.
Another reconsidered their entire ad spend and decided to shift agencies, shift how they were buying media, which impacted us, so we had some pretty significant headwinds at the beginning of the year that impacted these advertisers, and it wasn't pulling back on our solutions per se. It was pulling back on ad spend. I would say a vast majority of the decline that we saw year -over -year came from these customers, and I think that was obviously disappointing to us, but it's the game we're in now as our customers get bigger and bigger. If they decide to cut ad spend by 20% in a year, it's going to impact us significantly more than it did in the past.
Now, that being said, I think our goal is always to have a well-diversified portfolio of customers to not have concentration in any one vertical, which I don't believe we do. But in this case, the drag this year was because of a majority because of those folks. And then the other part of the business that we felt didn't perform according to what we expected to was the social aspect, which we mentioned in the last call, which I think had a slower start than we expected.
Yeah. So how do you think that plays out not only in Q4, but also next year? I think another thing that you highlighted was, and maybe this is more near-term rather than a longer-term issue, is around these brand advertisers that have been kind of crowded out by political ad spend in October especially, but also a little bit in November. How should we be thinking about that prospect going forward?
Yeah. So I mean, we had a good Q3. We grew revenue 18% year -over -year. We saw ABS come back, back into double-digit growth. We saw our supply -side business pop up over to 30% growth. So it was a solid quarter. But what we did see since we work with brands and big brands is that near the end of Q3 and then rolling into Q4, the massive amount of political spend that was out there had really two impacts. The first was we did see some crowding out. So we saw advertisers basically saying, "Look, the CPMs have gone up 20% on the places that we want to get to, 20%-30%. We're going to sit this out or lower spend a bit." So we saw that start at the end of September, rolled into October.
But actually the bigger point was that we saw a lot of advertisers who basically just said, "Look, we don't know what's going on this election cycle. We're just going to pull back. We're just not going to advertise." It was less the crowding out than it was, "Hey, we're just concerned about the vitriol." And even though your tools are great and this is what we use you for to stay away from stuff we don't want to be around, we actually don't even want to be in the environment at all, right? So let the political ad spend take up those spots. We'll sit it out. So for us, we did see a drag in October because of that. Now, I think you've heard on other calls and other CEOs have talked about this. It's all about how fast that money rebounds now, right?
In Q4, it's going to be challenging for them to put all of it back into the market. We've got a shorter holiday season coming up. But I think that's what we're looking at right now is how fast this spend catches up in Q4.
And for 2025, around this issue of these customers that have pulled back the spend because of company-specific issues, on the last earnings call, I think Nicola talked about still double-digit growth next year. Would that assume that these customers basically don't come back, or is that assuming that these customers come back? What's the scenario analysis around those problem customers?
Yeah. I think the scenario around that is that they are going to grow. They're back into growth status, but they're not going to grow as fast as kind of the rest of our cohort, the rest of the business that we have. So they're not going to decline year -over -year, we don't think. We think a lot of them have stabilized. But there's going to be some puts and takes. One of them, we expect to file for bankruptcy soon. So that's going to, their spend is going to go probably almost to zero at some point. Others have shown some health. So I think, as Nicola has said, we're looking forward to not talking about this cohort of six next year. And that's what our goal is. And I think we're going to be out of those woods. They'll be back.
I'm not going to say they're back to normal growth. They're going to be stabilized and not a drag on the business year -over -year going into 2025.
Got it. Okay. You touched or you mentioned ABS. ABS is your biggest revenue product. It was growing like a weed. It was growing very, very fast, 20%-30%. Then it dropped into single digits in the last few quarters, and then last quarter kind of inflected and grew double-digit again, I think 13% or something. Talk about that product in particular. What's going on there and how sustainable is the double-digit growth for that product?
Yeah. So it's interesting. ABS is about slightly over half of our activation or pre-bid business, so that one product. And it did get back on a growth trajectory. It grew 14% last quarter. The nature of the growth on ABS is now kind of different than it has been in the past. So last year, at this time, you'd see a vast majority of our ABS growth came from current clients. So current clients spending more volumes going up. And I think when you look at the growth now, where it's coming from, it's coming from new customer activations. So new people that we fired up and then upsells of current clients who've not used ABS who are going to use it. So we had folks like Pepsi and AB InBev who were new activations in the quarter who started spending.
And then we had upsells with people like DoorDash and Miele and Cathay Pacific who we expanded their markets and got them to employ it in more places. So it was our number two growth driver last quarter. We still think it has lots of legs. If you look at our top 500 customers, still only 68% are using it. So that's up from 63% or 65% in Q2 of this year. So we are growing penetration. But we're still, we've got over 30% of our customers in the top 500 who are not using ABS, so.
So if it was number two growth driver last quarter, what was number one?
Number one growth driver last quarter was, interestingly enough, also on the activation side. It was our non-ABS activation business, so our non-ABS, and this is pre-screen social. It's our Scibids business, right, which is doing really well, so Scibids and then just basic, or kind of let's call our old school activation, so we have products. Before we launched ABS, we had pre-screen brand safety, pre-screen viewability, and these are pretty binary and consistent, so everyone gets the same brand safety floor. Think of ABS as being the souped-up version of brand safety, which now dominates our activation business, but non-ABS programmatic had a great quarter, and it's driven by Scibids, which is our optimization solution and some of our basic solutions as well. Scibids is performing at the top end of our expectations.
As we noted in the call, we still believe it's on track to be a $100 million business in 2028.
Let's dig a little deeper into that. So Scibids was an acquisition in a French company that you acquired about maybe a year and a half ago, something like that. What does it do exactly? And yeah, it seems to be tracking ahead of your expectations, even short term, near term, I think at a longer term, sorry, at Investor Day, you have already put that $100 million buy. So you're reiterating that. But maybe just explain to us in layman's terms, what does it do and what's the strategic value of it to the company?
Yeah. So if you think of, we've got pre-bid, which kind of filters impressions. We've got post-bid, which can measure and verify impressions, ad impressions. What Scibids does is it optimizes that transaction. So it takes a variable and can compress, or it can optimize against that variable while maintaining quality. So think of it this way. We can employ it in a transaction where someone wants to get higher brand safety and suitability on the pre-bid side, measure it on the post-bid side, but they don't want a commensurate higher CPM. So one of the challenges of what we do for advertisers is, yes, when you take garbage out, it performs better, but sometimes it costs more too. Junk food's cheaper, right? And when you buy good stuff, it costs more money. So how do you get the good stuff for less money?
You stick an optimization tool in there, right? And it allows you to now put a third variable in. Don't just look at the quality of the media, but look at the cost of the media and the reach I can get and find me the cheapest way to deliver the highest quality, right? So it actually addresses one of the biggest questions that our advertisers have, which is great. We want to filter out bad stuff. We want to measure and ensure we get what we paid for. But we also want to do this as cheaply as possible. And where Scibids fits in is an optimization engine that allows us to throw a third variable in there. And in many cases, we can throw a fourth variable in there.
It's an algo-based solution that can juggle multiple different variables and then allow the advertiser to control the bid against it. So it is an optimization tool that works really well with the data sets that we have, but can work with lots of other data sets too. Even if the advertiser is not working with us, for example, on media quality, not doing verification with us, they can use Scibids to optimize against a third-party variable. They can optimize against purchase or attention or other things. So think of it as this kind of cleaner and compressor. It basically takes what your objective is and makes sure it's done more efficiently, more effectively.
If we're cleaning garbage out, big piles of garbage out when we do what we're doing on verification, this is now going in and refining and saying, "Okay, let's do this even with a more fine-tooth comb and actually make sure that we do it as cheaply as possible.
Yep. Yep. Okay. Thank you. So I'm going to try to incorporate a couple of questions that came in with something that I already was going to ask you, and that's the Moat, right? Moat was a number three player. You guys are obviously number one, but Moat was a distant third that used to be owned by Oracle. Oracle decided to do away with it. And as a result, between you and IAS, the other competitor, you guys have been going hard trying to get all their customers. It seems like they stopped supporting their customers back in September, which basically means all these customers have already transitioned somewhere, either to you guys or to IAS. So the question is, have you already gotten all the logos you're going to get because these customers have already transitioned? And dollars and cents perspective, how big is this opportunity?
Yeah. So the whole Moat collapse was an interesting one for us. We had started picking off their customers over the last 12 months. So we won people like Ulta Beauty and Pepsi and Uber. So they started kind of shedding customers as early as late last year, and we were starting to pick them up. What happened this year to the folks on the call was basically Moat announced and Oracle announced they were shutting down the business, and it became just a free-for-all, right? It was every customer for themselves. They gave them 90 days to find a substitute. So what is usually an RFP process for us that can take six months was compressed into six weeks. So it was a very aggressive RFP process.
It was not the normal one where we go in and build strategies with customers and test products over time and improve the efficacy of our solutions. And so it was fast, fast and furious. The bottom line is we won a vast majority of the RFPs we went after. We won deals like Google. We won deals like Inspire Brands, Charter Communications, BlackRock, P&G. These were big wins for us. And so I think to get to the point of the question, I think a vast majority of the Moat opportunities have been allocated. There may be a couple of little pieces, parts in parts of the world that maybe are small enough where they picked up local solutions or they're kind of using a built-in solution on a platform someplace.
I think the big, I'd say at least 80%-90% of all the dollars that could have been allocated have been allocated. What was the outcome of this? When you took a look at the scale of this business, there were a lot of numbers kicked around. I think the scale of the business is not what everyone expected it to be just due to the fact that not everyone, we knew what it was going to be because the business was in decline. And when you heard numbers like, "Oh, they were doing $100 million of this and $100 million of that," that was last year's numbers. They were in decline. So I think the numbers that were actually available were smaller than what the market kind of was framing.
And then the nature of the deals themselves, how we went to the deals themselves was pretty aggressive. So we're not going to see a big pop from these customers this year because as they scale up, as they scale up, we did things like gave them a couple of months for free as they roll up. We compressed prices a bit. So we looked at this when we went after these customers. We looked at what is the total lifetime value of a Moat customer, right? And someone who's big like Inspire Brands or Charter or P&G or Google, these have big lifetime values, but they were using a really basic Moat product out of the gate. So when we look at the impact on our business of winning these guys, it's single-digit millions going into next year.
But what do we think of over the next two to three years they're worth? We believe that these are tens of millions of dollars of incremental revenue for us. Our average customer tenure for our top 50 customers is about seven years. So for us, this was a land and expand attack. We wanted to be incredibly aggressive to go after these guys to get them in our wheelhouse and then grow them over time because the one thing we know is they were using basic Moat products, just basic measurement. Moat didn't have a social product. They didn't have a pre-bid product like ABS. They don't have an attention product. They didn't have Scibids.
So these are all things we're going to upsell them over time to build that single-digit millions that they'll come out of the gate with up into tens of millions over the next two to three years.
Okay. Yep. All right. So maybe switching to margins. You guys did a great job, really historically maintaining margins at 30 or low 30s, although last quarter, you popped to the mid-30s. So one, talk about the key drivers of that. And second, how sustainable are these mid-30s margins now? Is that kind of the new normal?
Yeah. So I mean, our business has an incredible amount of leverage in it, right? I mentioned earlier that our costs of analyzing another impression are very, very low. And the investments we've made over the last several years in many areas, well, first of all, it's all people. We invest in people. We invest in footprint. And a lot of that was, A, building people infrastructure to be a larger public company, which costs money, and B, catching up on the sales front globally where we were slightly underpenetrated. Our competitor had more offices and more places. And we knew if we can get in front of customers with people in market, we can win deals. Our technology is better. So we spent a lot over the last few years investing in those things, plus the third leg, which is our technology teams and our technology resources.
We've seen, as you've seen last quarter, our G&A expenses were slightly down year -over -year. Our sales and marketing are starting to decline. So what that means is where we're really going to invest moving forward is in technology and product and tech. We win based on that. That's how we get our advantage. I believe that's why we're over $100 million larger than our closest competitor. So we're going to continue to lean into our tech and product expenses. The other expenses, I think we don't need as much. We don't need as much focus there. So we're going to continue to see leverage come out of this model. Do I think we're a 40% EBITDA business in the next year? No, because we're going to continue to lean into getting advances in product, continue to focus on expanding our social footprint, leaning into AI investments.
Those things pay off for us. So I do think margins will hold in the low 30s, mid-30s in that zone on the EBITDA side for the next several quarters for sure. But we do have a ton of leverage in the model, and we can take it when we need it.
Yeah. No, this industry, between you and your main competitor, margins have been really, really rich, and it's been pretty impressive. I guess stepping back and looking at big picture, we've seen the rise of some new channels like CTV, retail media. Audio is something that more and more players are talking about. Trade Desk has talked a great deal about audio on their last earnings call, not to even mention the evolving kind of search landscape with the advent of AI search and how that may impact the market in general. But from where you sit today, do you think marketers will be allocating their budgets kind of any differently in 2025? And if so, will that impact you in any way that we should be kind of aware of?
Yeah. Look, we started talking earlier this year about a pretty significant shift into the walled gardens, and the walled gardens include everything from CTV platforms that are pretty controlled to the social networks to the big platforms like Meta and TikTok, etc. I think that is not changing. I think the open web will continue to be challenged, so the traditional open web that people think about going to publisher sites, etc., is going to be challenged because the walled gardens are just capturing so much user engagement, right? Whether it's short-form video, right, on TikTok or Reels or YouTube Shorts or CTV, which is basically eating the linear business, these kind of controlled environments are really taking away from the open web, so we do see a pretty significant shift to ad dollars to those platforms. This is nothing new, but I do think it's accelerating.
I don't think GenAI is helping the Open Web. If you're not even going to the websites anymore to actually see the result of your search, you're just getting everything in the search page. You're not going there. It's going to impact volumes there. The volumes aren't there. The dollars aren't going to follow. There's just not enough reach for advertisers to get. So we do see social eating up more and more of advertiser dollar, CTV eating more advertiser dollar. What that means for us is a continued focus on those products within Meta, within TikTok, within Netflix to prove our value within those walled gardens, and particularly ensuring that we have pre-screen capabilities or pre-bid capabilities to match our post-bid.
And that's why we're leaning so hard into the Meta solution for pre-screen that we'll launch in the H1 of the year, same thing on TikTok, because we know that the open web aspect of the universe that's out there is going to continue to be challenged to attract new and growing dollars.
Have you guys quantified how big maybe those new emerging channels like CTV and maybe retail media could be for you as we think not just 2025, but just over time?
Yeah. I mean, look, I think we've talked about CTV a lot. It continues to grow from a volume perspective for us. I mean, last quarter, CTV impressions grew by 60% on our measurement business. We still haven't kind of cracked the code on CTV yet. Part of that's because in that walled garden, we have less data flow coming in for our brand safety and suitability solutions. What advertisers really want is they want to ensure that they know on a program level that their ads are being delivered to appropriate content. Right now, in the walled gardens, we do not get program-level data from the large platforms. So I think we have a pretty large opportunity there once we can crack that nut and get that data coming into us. So I think CTV can be big.
The one thing to consider there, though, is CTV is big, but our model is about impressions. It's getting paid for impressions. CTV impressions are relatively low, right? If you think of a one-hour Netflix session that's ad-supported, it has four breaks of two minutes each, right? Each two-minute break has usually four spots. So you're looking at 16 spots in an hour. In an hour-long session on TikTok, you could get literally thousands of ad impressions, right? If someone just sitting there going through. Since we get paid on the impression basis, we think the opportunity in short-form video and social is much larger than it is for us in CTV. That's just the nature of the game. So CTV is an opportunity for us. It won't be as big because of the way our model is.
We get paid on each impression just due to the number of impressions that run through CTV versus social, etc. Retail media is a really neat one because that's all new dollars, a lot of new dollars coming into the market, right? This is a lot of co-op dollars, other spend that was being spent in other areas that's now being pushed into digital. We've seen that business grow over time. Last year, it was around a $20 million business for us. This year, I think it's probably going to be close to maybe double that size year -over -year. So it's growing really nicely. And retail media is cool for us because it touches all three lines of our business. So someone like, think of our retail media networks. We work with folks like Amazon or Best Buy or Kroger.
In those cases, we work with them as a platform partner. So they build these retail media networks. They send their impressions out, and we help them filter and score those impressions before they get sent out. So they pay us from a platform basis. We can work with them as a measurement partner. So advertisers who are buying into those environments want those impressions measured, right? And then in many cases, those retail media networks also do buying through DSPs across those platforms. So we get activation revenue from them. So for each one of those line items, we get paid. And for example, our last quarter, our supply side aspect of our retail media business grew 38%, right? And activation grew 33%. So we had over a 30% growth in our retail media network year-over-year growth, which was pretty solid.
I think that's a growing space for us. Scale, I think right now, it's, again, like I said, it's upwards of $30 million plus for this year. I think next year it continues to grow at that rate. That could be a $100 million business in the next few years as well.
Okay. All right. I think we're running out of time. So let me just ask one last question, which I had, and somebody else came in with a slightly different version of it, but M&A. So talk a little bit about capital allocation. So you said earlier that obviously the focus is on growth, but you do have a lot of cash in the bank. You have no debt. You've been growing fast. You have a very cash-generative business. Moat, number three player, is no longer around. There is more than just talk about number two player in the space being in play. How does this? Well, one, what is your appetite for M&A? That's one.
Two, how do you think the potential of the number two player being taken out by private equity, I guess, or maybe strategic, we don't know, will impact the overall environment for you guys? Is it positive? Is it neutral? Is it negative?
Yeah. So I mean, lots to unpack there. On the M&A front, we're always looking for opportunities that do three things. A, expand our geographic footprint. So get us into markets where we haven't had a strong presence. Get us salespeople in those markets, get us client relationships, and where we can kind of slide our technology in to cover that market. We did that with a small purchase in Germany a few years ago called Meetrics that allowed us to get into the Nordics market and the German market. We replaced the technology, took the customers, and kind of rolled along there. So A, geographic expansion. Two, things that accelerate our roadmap. So things that we want to build, but kind of just we want to get there quicker by buying it.
So we bought a company called OpenSlate a few years ago that allowed us to do pre-screen on social before a lot of the social networks were kind of cracking open. And that kind of we had that on our roadmap. We wanted to get there quicker. We bought OpenSlate. So the third thing is we look at adjacencies that we think can help our business or fill out our basket. And that's where Scibids came in, right? So that was an optimization kind of tool that we didn't have data science capabilities around. It was kind of new to us. We knew it would help our core business, so we bought it. So we're always looking at companies in those three areas, and we're going to continue to do so.
I think as we talk about our evolution from not just being a protection business, protection and performance business, we're going to look at businesses that help us in that performance space. So help us better drive outcomes, help us create greater efficiencies in media spend, help us better designate where ads should be run and how they should perform. So we have a good appetite for M&A. We don't want to overpay for things, right? So we're pretty conservative in how we spend our cash, but we know we're sitting on a nice amount of cash. That being said, capital allocation, when we think our stock is undervalued or we think there's an opportunity for us to continue to deploy capital in ways that are accretive to our shareholders and to the company, we've done a buyback so far this year. We started earlier this year.
We have authorization now for another $200 million in the buyback, which gives us a total amount to spend of $275 million, which is a significant amount, and we believe in the future of this business. And so that's also a way that we allocate capital over time: looking at how we can efficiently drive growth, which is still our number one priority, but also look for opportunities where we think our stock is undervalued and we can deliver value to our shareholders in that way. Finally, with regard to our competitor, we're heads down. We're always focused on continuing to grow this business, continuing to build it through innovation, getting new customers, servicing the hell out of them, and growing them over time. That's our focus.
So we kind of aren't staring at them and saying, "Oh, what could happen if, what could happen if." But look, I think that if you think about what companies in our space do, we focus on innovation, we focus on investment, and we focus on growth, right? Those are the three things I just talked about. I don't think those three words usually are the first things that come out of someone when they think of private equity, right? It's usually the exact opposite, which is cut, squeeze, right, and drive margins. So if something like that happens, should occur to anybody in this space, I think it creates a dynamic where our focus on innovation, our investments over time, and our continued commitment to growth just become that much more refined and that much more of a differentiator for us.
That is a great answer to a tough question to answer. But thank you. Thank you. That's all the time we have. Thank you, guys. Thank you, everyone, for attending. Mark, as always, thank you so much.
Absolutely. Thank you, Youssef. See you, everybody.
Bye.