Day one of the RBC TIMT Tech Conference. Super excited to once again welcome back DoubleVerify. We have CEO Mark Zagorski and CFO Nicola. I'm going to go hard on Allais. Allais?
Yep.
Allais. Heading into 2025, big investment year for DoubleVerify is what we were talking about all through last Q4. I mean, looking back at the year, what are the achievements that were maybe the most impactful to the future of the company? How did you feel like you're leaving this year better positioned in the current environment than where you entered?
Yeah. So when we kind of came into 2025, we saw it as a year of kind of transition and evolution. We had two main things that we wanted to focus on. First, extending our core value proposition beyond just verification. Around mid-year, we launched what we called the AdVantage Platform, which expanded our business not just to do core verification, but expanded into optimization. Algorithmic-based bidding, compression, and through performance measurement. Basically, this idea that we can verify an ad transaction, optimize or reduce the cost of that transaction, and then prove whether or not those ads worked. We expanded the value proposition there. That was one of our core tenets for the year.
The second was to take our core value prop of verification and move that into entirely new spaces and evolve those spaces as well, specifically social, CTV, and the emerging AI advertising universe. I think we've made some great strides there with the launch of our Meta PreScreen product, which obviously is social. The launch of Authentic AdVantage a few weeks ago, which is a social quality and optimization solution first for YouTube, and eventually we'll launch that across other social platforms. Our CTV solutions that we recently launched, Verified Streaming TV and our Automated "Do Not Air" lists, are just a first of kind of many solutions we'll have around CTV. That, plus the launch of our AI verification tools, I think were really investments that we've made that are going to set us up for a different kind of business moving forward.
One which is less concentrated on verifying transactions in the open web, one which provides different value beyond just verification, and one which is poised to take advantage of what's going on with AI, not just how it's affecting advertising, but how advertisers are actually leveraging it to do what they're doing better and easier.
Nicola, heading into 2025, you talked about at least 10% revenue growth. Most recently, you guided the full year number to 14%. What went better than expected? Obviously, we just talked about this being a year that we were focused on the investment side, but we're now seeing some other momentum building into 2026 that has shown up in numbers.
Right. Yeah. What we were positively surprised by in 2025 is two things. One is our recurring base, which is the majority of our revenue every year, kept spending within an environment that was fairly uncertain the first half going into the third quarter. Our advertisers, our clients kept spending, kept upselling into new products, and kept seeing the value of what we provided regardless of what was happening in the macro. That was one of the benefits that we saw for the first three quarters where we have grown 16% just in the first three quarters of the year. That is one, which is the value of our product remains really powerful regardless of what is happening in the macro. The second part is that the uptake of our new products has been very, very positive.
It's not yet shown in the numbers, but we're entering 2026 knowing that we've invested into products that now have clients testing them and getting us into a solid runway into 2026. Those two things were the positives. We started the year expecting the second part of my answer, which is we thought we would have good traction. We did get that. On top of that, we had recurring spend that was even stronger than we expected.
Yeah. No, that's helpful. I mean, maybe building out on that, can you kind of give us an idea of how revenue visibility has changed over these past few years and maybe how your guidance philosophy has adapted to that?
Yeah. So the revenue, so our philosophy is to be able to verify wherever the advertisers are spending. To the extent that if you look back in the past few years, a lot of spend has moved to programmatic and activation. That is an environment that's very transactional where advertisers do not need to necessarily commit ad campaigns in the long term, right? They are able to make decisions pretty quickly in terms of where they want their dollars to come into play. That has reduced visibility because essentially we do not control the ad spend and we do not control where they are going to spend. Within that environment, the visibility is reduced. Against that, what we have is a recurring base that is becoming stronger with larger enterprise clients.
To the extent that we can enrich the top of the funnel, the top 100 with larger brands, that allows us to offset maybe quarter-on-quarter variability that we would have on specific clients. Last year, we gained clients like Microsoft and Google and P&G. Those will, of course, be in our top 10 even clients pretty quickly, which will offset variability that we might have from other clients.
Yeah. Sorry.
If I can add a little bit too, part of the philosophy coming into the year with the expansion of value prop as well as the expansion into new sectors was to ease some of the variability or reliance strictly on programmatic buying in the open web, right? Commitments in social tend to be a little bit more structured, a little bit more sticky. A, leaning into social, I think, has helped us on that front. The second is, as Nicola noted, buying just about any type of media now has become much more fluid. If that media works, it becomes a recurring buy over time. You will hear that from other companies up here, that yes, their revenue may be not totally baked in, but if it works, advertisers keep spending it over and over.
When we expanded our solution set, the idea was let's tie ourselves to helping drive performance and helping measure performance so that we become more part of the machine that stays sticky, right? Because if you can show that performance is working, then you're helping underwrite a long-term spend with your company. I think that's where we've kind of leaned in with our solutions like Authentic AdVantage, with what we've done with some of the Scibids, custom bidding algos. Those have become very sticky because advertisers know when they use those tools, they're driving performance, and there's no reason for them to pull back on spend if they can show results.
Yeah. That kind of builds naturally into this next question. Nicola, looking out to next year, you gave us kind of like a, I would call it like a foundational baseline growth rate of 10%. Could you give us kind of what gives you confidence around that core number? And then maybe what are some of the levers or layers that may come in over top of that?
That's exactly how we laid out what we found based on the recurring base of our revenue at a 10% rate. The way to think about that is our net revenue retention was 112%. For the first three quarters, we did 16%, and we said that about a third of that came from new clients. If you pull that out, you're at 11%-12% as well. That's the foundation of existing clients' products. The building blocks off of that are existing clients upselling to products, which we always do, new clients, of course. More importantly, for 2026, will be new products. We feel like we're at a point where the next phase of growth for us is product-led. If you look back a few years ago, we launched the ABS product that drove a lot of the growth that we saw in the last five-year cycle.
We're now launching several products, not just one. We're looking at growth coming from those products being introduced in the market and having new clients and existing clients. Ten is really the foundation. It's based on NRR and what's to date. On top of that, you have new products and upselling.
I guess maybe thinking about those new products, Mark, you've expanded the product portfolio following this year of investment, but we've seen traditionally the majority of revenue came from the install base. How do your customers influence your product roadmap? What do you think they're currently looking for or want more of from DV?
Yeah. So regarding products, we've talked a lot about new stuff. We've launched more new products in the last five months than we have in the last five years.
I know. I've been trying to keep.
It's been a lot. It's a lot. There's a lot of acronyms we're throwing out there and trademarks. That's the fun part. Customers are intimately involved when we develop solutions. I mean, they drive the solutions based on their needs. The things that we started hearing from them are lack of transparency in the marketplace and a concern for continued performance acceleration. On the transparency side, I mean, this touches everything. Everyone has heard about the large walled garden saying, "Look, we've got these amazing AI-based black box advertising solutions. You just give us your money, we'll give you results," right? That's great if you're the person who's taking the money and measuring the results, right? You kind of have all the things on your side. If you're the advertiser, how do you trust what's going on there, right?
How do you break open that black box? As we started leaning more into the walled gardens, it was clear that advertisers wanted more transparency. They wanted more granularity with that transparency. They wanted solutions from third parties they could trust to do that. In the social media universe, we leaned into platforms like Meta and TikTok and YouTube where our measurement solutions provide more transparency as to what's going on. We actually saw in those black box solutions, our attach rates for verification were actually three times higher than when advertisers who were not using those solutions. It is clear they want more transparency. The same thing is starting to happen in CTV environments. We launched a series of CTV tools where we have questions all the time, like, "Why do people need DoubleVerify on CTV?
They're buying quality impressions on big screens in someone's living room. Most of those are what's called PMPs, which are private marketplace packages, which we kind of know what's going on with. The reality is just like a box of cereal that looks relatively healthy, when you look at the ingredients, you kind of don't know what's going on there. A lot of these PMPs are the same way. There's not a lot of transparency. There's reselling that goes on. An advertiser thinks they're getting a quality show, but they're actually getting a video impression on Solitaire app someplace. This happens. We believe it's about 15% of all streaming TV impressions actually end up in places where they shouldn't be. We launched Verified Streaming TV.
This was driven by advertisers coming to us and saying, "We know that something smells wrong, and we need your help in digging it out." Our roadmap is driven by customer demands that drive towards greater transparency and a feeling that they want third parties to help them determine what performance really looks like and whether that performance is driving an outcome or measuring attention or just driving down the cost of reach. They're looking for a trusted third party to be that partner for them to do so.
Maybe this will stitch together a few of the things we talked about with social and CTV, but you recently said over the medium term, expanding social, CTV, and AI from under 30% of revenue to over 50%. Could you just talk, I guess, about the investments you have to make to make that a reality? I guess the benefits DoubleVerify could see, maybe two things like that revenue visibility that we talked about over time.
Yeah. I'll start with the investments. On the investment side, we've been investing for a long time. We're always investing in the financial profile that we have. We've already invested in the resources. We still need to do that as we do our integration with the pre-bid solution. We are now investing in CTV. We've launched the products, AI, the next generation of our investments. We're going to continue to invest. What's interesting for us is that the way we invest has evolved with AI support. We're able to more efficiently do what would have taken a lot of people. Now we can rely on machines to help us most of the way there. That inherently unlocks cost savings that can be reinvested into other areas of business. We said this at the beginning of the year.
We're not intending to hire the same cliff as we've had in the past few years because AI is helping us fill the gap a little bit. The market for it has changed quite dramatically recently. We've also announced that the equity grants that we'll get, the value of the grants will be less than $1.5. You won't see it on the stock-based comp line straight away, right? It'll take time to flush through, but the actual value is going to be different. We are able to do things more efficiently, more cheaply. We are continuing to invest. CapEx is the last part where we might see some investments there as we go through new AI tools, but it shouldn't go higher than 5% already. It is more nimble in the way we invest, which is very exciting.
Yeah. Maybe just to lean a little bit there on the AI investments and kind of what we've done there. As Nicola noted, if you think about what our core value prop is, we're just a giant contextualization engine, right? We take in tons of content and tons of interactions, and then we analyze them. We label them, and then we analyze them and put them in buckets so that advertisers can use them to make decisions based on. A lot of that used to be machines learning from humans. So humans labeling, machines taking those labels, and then building models around them, and then expanding and scaling. Now we're using machines to do the labeling to feed a machine to actually scale itself. As Nicola noted, we're getting four times more productivity per labeling engagement.
We're getting thousands of times more speed in actually doing the labeling, which allows us to scale massively into these new environments like social where the volumes are huge. It allows us to scale into areas like CTV where the content is very detailed and very granular with regards to what happens in a scene. It allows us to do this cost-effectively and efficiently. If you look at our, this is a company that runs on 80%+ gross margins, that runs on EBITDA margins of over 30%, right? It still scales and still is handling trillions, and that's with a T, trillions of transactions every year. This is a massive undertaking. We're doing this incredibly efficiently with almost no headcount growth this year, with the exception of an acquisition we made and leaning into even more efficiencies going into next year.
AI is underscoring not only our efficiencies, but one of the things that we have not talked about on the product side, it is creating tons of new opportunities for us too as well. We launched AI verification tools to not only suss out AI content that advertisers are not super comfortable being around, but also starting to understand and engage with agents, right? There is a lot of discussion of what is going on with agents out there. We have the ability because we see billions of agents every month, right, on our sites. Those agents are doing stuff that is usually good, sometimes not, but we can help advertisers determine what that engagement should be with that agent. I think that is a huge opportunity that is coming down the road.
If you think of the growth of independent commerce agents, so me sending a shopping agent out or chatbot agents that are continuing to grow and do things, those right now have very little interactions with advertisers. Advertisers, as a matter of fact, currently, the current standard is if I'm running an ad on a page and a chatbot engages me, don't serve the ad. It's called general invalid traffic for the most part. Don't serve the ad, don't pay for the ad. Think of a world where, wait a minute, I absolutely want to serve this ad because I want to talk to that agent and I want to give them some information. Maybe I want to give them a coupon. Maybe I want to give them a discount. Maybe I want to give them more information about how to make a decision.
That is a universe where we are smack dab in the middle of it because we're seeing so many of those ads out there. I think that's a huge exciting opportunity for us that we, Nicola, certainly hasn't baked into his growth plans for 2026, but we're just starting to lean into the investment around. Yeah. No, that's super interesting. I think we've seen when these newer disruptive formats or companies come out, they do lean quicker into DoubleVerify than maybe the first. We saw how much faster TikTok adopted you guys and let you in relative to Meta because you actually bring them validity.
Yeah. I mean, if you think about folks like Netflix, right, who were not going to do advertising forever, right? They sat on stages like this and said, "We will never do advertising," and then do an earnings call and they say, "Oh, we are going to do advertising next month," right? The amazing thing around that was they said, "We are going to do advertising," and then within two weeks, they called us and said, "We need to work with you guys," because we called a couple of agencies and we tried to sell them. We said, "Hey, are you interested in advertising?" They are like, "Yeah, but we need third-party measurement of verification." They called us. They called Nielsen. They called another company. Within 90 days, we had a solution up and running for them so they could run.
Companies like Reddit who went public and said, "We're going to lean heavily into advertising. This is going to be our future." They have had an amazing run. I mean, think of what Reddit has done. They work with DV as their verification provider, giving them credibility. We see the same types of opportunities as the AI tools who have said, "We're not thinking about advertising," but they will. When they start to emerge, we think there is a great opportunity for us, again, to be independently involved in verifying what happens with advertising on those properties.
Speaking to one of those opportunities that's become a little more tangible here, the DV Authentic AdVantage, you said you closed an $8 million ACV deal in the first few weeks. Can you help size the opportunity into Q4 and next year and how we should think about the potential ramp given some of the bundling strategies?
Yeah. As far as kind of we'll have very little impact on Q4, just to be clear, but we see this as one of our real growth drivers running into 2026, especially the latter half of 2026. Authentic AdVantage, for the first platform we've launched it across, is YouTube. What Authentic AdVantage does, it combines what we call pre-screen filtering, so quality filtering, plus Scibids-powered or AI-powered bidding optimization and measurement all into one package, which allows you to find quality impressions at the lowest price possible and then drive reach. In our initial tests that we've run, and we've run with some of the biggest CPG companies out there, we've seen 25%-35% decreases in CPMs with 30%-50% increases in reach at higher or comparable brand quality or quality and suitability. That's massive.
We mentioned that we've got just out of the gate in the first couple of weeks, we had $8 million in ACV. We're testing this now with our largest CPG customers. We believe this is a solution that can be as large as ABS is for us someday. ABS right now is a $200 million+ product. I think the opportunity with Authentic AdVantage at some point can be as large as that. We scoped out in our innovation day that we feel this is anywhere from $100 million-$150 million over the next three to four years. I think we're well on our way of getting there.
If you just think about it this way, this is a product which we offer a percentage of media billing opportunity because since we're compressing costs, expanding reach, taking a percentage of that win, and we basically have shown that for every dollar someone spends, there's like a $4 return. Taking a piece of that makes total sense for us. If you think we have clients, individual clients that spend over $1 billion a year on YouTube on one platform, this is a massive opportunity for us. If we can just get our attach rates to some even small percentage of that spend, I think there's a big upside for us.
Another piece that I feel like comes up every year is the partnership with Meta is always in focus. Could you just talk about, especially with some of the new products moving into pre-bid, how things are tracking versus expectations, and then when you think you'll start to see maybe kind of that inflection point from a growth perspective?
Yeah. So Meta is right now, as a measurement customer, is around $40 million a year for us. So it's sizable. We launched pre-bid and pre-screen earlier this year in V1, and there was a lot of excitement around it. Like all products, it takes time to evolve. V2 or V1.1, I'm probably closer, was launched this summer, which we expanded the number of block lists that we were able to do, expanded the speed at which we were able to translate violations into blocks. That product has gotten better over time. Between Q2 and Q3, we went from 26 customers to 56 customers. We are ending the year at an ACV. We should end up around $7 million.
We think that product could be as big as our measurement, which is around $40 million on the pre-screen side, and that will continue to grow. Adoption has been great. We've not lost a single customer since launch. Every customer that's tested is now a current paying customer. Now we're starting to see the scale around that as well. It is a value prop that I think takes time to prove out because you need to start with the baseline of quality and safety measurement and then see how you're improving that. We're showing marked improvements in quality when someone uses the pre-screen.
As Meta has changed some of its internal policies around content moderation and their role, for example, they pulled themselves out of brand safety accreditation from the MRC and basically said publicly, "We're looking for third parties to take the helm here." I think this is a great opportunity for us. It will grow over time as we test it out, continue to build a base of customers that are looking to expand on this. It is a powerful growth engine for us. That and Authentic Advantage, I think, will be two key growth drivers going into the second half of 2026.
Nicola, not to ever oversimplify this, but MTM and MTF, right, the two variable models for driving your revenue, looking out to 2026, how should we think about each of these and then what should we kind of keep into consideration looking at those growth rates?
Yeah. The model can be summarized as the media transactions that we measure, times the fee that we charge per transaction that we measure. We've said in the past few years that our revenue model has been driven by media transactions that we measure, right? We measure more and more transactions as advertisers are advertising in new verticals and we're able to verify there. MTF has kind of moved mainly because of the product mix. We do have premium-priced products versus base products. As the mix shift changes, MTF changes. If we think about 2026, it is still going to be MTM-driven, more and more impressions that we will be able to verify now that we have new products. The MTF part has always been an output. I think there are drivers into 2026 that should start to help MTF, right?
The products that we're launching are premium-priced. The CTV products that we mentioned on our earnings call around Do Not Air List, etc., these will be premium-priced products that will be closer to ABS pricing as opposed to basic brand and fraud. I think over time, as those products scale into our mix, it will have a positive impact on MTF. Going into 2026, we're still looking very much on MTM. I'll add one other point, which is percent of media is something that we're now considering for some of our products. We're allowing advertisers to kind of think about whether they would prefer to do percent of media versus a fixed fee. That's also going to start to play a bigger part of the model.
When we think about competition, there's clearly been some changes in the pure play landscape over the last couple of years, one potential and then one obviously we've spent quite a bit of time talking about. When you expand your product portfolio, how should we think about the way that you compete for dollars? As you get more into performance, is it a new slew of competitors that you're aimed at, or is it more just we compete with ourselves around ROAS and the dollars will follow?
I mean, look, I think for any company, when you expand your product suite, you're going to start to touch on other folks. I think optimization is one in which there are lots of people involved in trying to drive better results from buys. I think we play a unique role in the fact that we don't own the media, right? We never have ownership of the media. Our drive to compress cost is intrinsically connected to one goal only, that's drive value for the advertiser, not increase margin for ourselves in any way. I think that plus the fact that we're doing so from a base of proprietary and unique data that we see in the marketplace. We see data across every major platform, social, CTV, mobile, open web. That puts us in a differentiated position to help drive better optimization.
It means, yes, our competitive set is expanded, but because we're approaching in a different way from a different data set and with different motivations, I think it's created a unique carve-out for us in that universe. I think ending on one note on competition, our space has always been one in which there's been only a handful of players, and that handful is getting smaller, which means I think we had talked about this being a winner takes most scenario for years. I think that's really starting to play out now. We're $150 million larger than our next closest competitor, who was the same size we were a few years ago. Another competitor has kind of fallen off the map. I think we are well on our way to being that winner who will take most.
That's great. We could have gone a lot longer. I completely forgot to open it up for questions, so I apologize to anyone in the room who had some. DoubleVerify, thank you guys so much for spending the morning with us.
Thank you. We're here all day for one-on-ones if you have questions. Thank you. Thanks, Matt.