We are going to get started. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you all for joining us today. I'm Maria Ripps, Internet Analyst here at Canaccord Genuity, and it's my pleasure to introduce Don Patrick, CEO of Fluent. Don, thank you so much for joining us today, and I'll turn it over to you.
Thank you, Maria. Thank you, everyone, for joining. I'm going to walk through a couple of slides here. I'd love if you guys want to interrupt at all with any questions as we go along, but I'll walk you through where we are and the exciting sort of strategic and financial pivot we're in the middle of. At the highest level, Fluent is a digital advertising company focused on customer acquisition for world-class brands. Our solutions enable our partners to participate in the most exciting, transformative new digital marketing channel called Commerce Media. It allows them to unlock powerful new revenue streams that were not available to them before. An easy way to put that in examples is just to show you one of our solutions. If you went on a Fanatics website and let's say you were buying a Boston Red Sox jersey, you're checking out.
After you fill out the credit card information, your shipping, you press submit. Before the confirmation page comes back from Fanatics, an ad will pop up that says, "Congratulations. Because of your Boston Red Sox jersey purchase, you're now eligible for three months free of Hulu streaming services, or free shipping, or $25 back from FanCash." That technology that sits on the Commerce Media site of Fanatics, all of the intelligence around determining who you are, what your purchasing behavior has been, what your likely next purchase will be, and then connecting you to that advertiser like Hulu, that is our Commerce Media solution. I'm sure some of you have seen it in your purchases online over the last couple of weeks. Fluent has been around for 15 years. We have grown their legacy business for the first 12 at a compounded average growth rate of over 12%.
In 2023, we were the largest player in that customer acquisition space in working with world-class brands like Apple and Disney and Walmart and SiriusXM. We became the largest primarily because we had the best quality. We had a first-party data asset that we built up over the years that helped us best identify who that individual was and how to interact with them in a meaningful way for them to connect to those brands. In early 2023, we decided to strategically pivot the business away from a legacy business and into Commerce Media. Commerce Media was exploding onto the scenes. It had gone really from zero to $50 billion in less than four years and expected to double again.
We took those strategic assets around our first-party data set and our ability to market to consumers, and we launched into our Commerce Media solution I gave you an example of earlier. In a very short time frame, we've been able to drive that business in less than a little over two years to a $65 million annual run rate where we believe we will double it in 2025 and double it again in 2026. That exciting growth will return Fluent back to a double-digit revenue growth company with improving margins and profitability. This is a very simple visual of the marketplace, of the Commerce Media marketplace we participate in here. On the right-hand side is the advertisers. The example I gave you was Hulu. On the left-hand side is the media partners, which is the example I gave you was Fanatics.
In the middle is all of our technology, our ad serving, our AI models, etc. The advertiser, our value proposition is very simple. We connect the advertiser to the most valuable consumer that exists anywhere across the digital advertising landscape. If you're searching in Google or if you respond to a display on Meta, you're a consumer somewhere down in the funnel, right? You're not an intended purchaser. You might be thinking about purchasing. When you have your credit card out and you bought that jersey on Fanatics, you are the most valuable consumer. You have your credit card out, and if the next ad is meaningful and can be an improved experience for you, you will purchase on that. Companies like Hulu or Disney or Walmart, et cetera., this is the most valuable consumer they can connect to across digital advertising.
The media partners I talked about in the beginning was that we unlocked a powerful new revenue stream that was not there before. I'll give you an example of how the economics work. If Hulu says, "I'll pay you $100 to connect to that Fanatics consumer," we'll do a revenue share split. $60 will go to Fanatics. $40 will go to Fluent as part of our gross profit. If you're an average-sized retailer that's doing sort of 15 million transactions, which is not a lot, you will add an incremental profit anywhere between $3 million- $5 million of revenue to your bottom line without any additional costs. There's no shipping costs. There's no cost of goods sold. It's a very powerful incremental profit that allows them to decide to reinvest back into their business or to take that in profit.
That is what's really driving that supply side here, is that ability to access revenue that we're not able to get to. Equally important is that the consumer experience is improved by that behavior. If it's a meaningful ad and it's a meaningful experience and you sign up for Hulu, you're much more likely to come back to Fanatics in a faster time frame. It improves the consumer experience for any commerce partner also. Commerce Media is also called, originally it was called Retail Media because it was beholden just to the retail media. Commerce obviously is non-retail. Commerce is the broader piece. The reason why it's exploded onto the scene and Bain had it at $50 billion last year and $100 billion by 2027 is really it identifies three, it fixes three things that exist across all the digital advertising.
The first one is that it gets as close to one-to-one advertising as you can. If you come onto that site, the Fanatics site, let's say you're a loyalty member already, they know who you are, they know where you've purchased before, and we can use that data along with our first-party proprietary database to market to you in a one-to-one way that doesn't exist elsewhere. The second thing, as I mentioned before, is it improves the consumer experience. Our commerce partners like to have it on there because the consumers will interact and they'll want to come back more frequently. The last one is there are a lot of headwinds in digital advertising around privacy and data compliance. You guys probably can read about it with all the lawsuits that the government sends off at companies.
Because you're coming onto the commerce sites on your own, because you're interacting and deciding and you're not being incented to do anything, all of the data privacy and compliance issues really do not exist in the Commerce Media. That's one of the reasons why it's growing so fast. The benefits for Fluent compared to our legacy business are equally significant and why we're so excited about where we're going. The technology is integrated. Our technology goes onto the website. It's a very integrated platform with our partners. There are three to five-year contracts. There's a revenue share split. There's no upfront cost. Everything's on a performance basis. Equally important, it's very predictable. If we added Bath & Body Works in October of last year, we knew that they did 30 million annual sessions. We knew that 15 of those were going to start in October and end in January.
It's a very predictable model for us to run our business, but equally important to run our cost structure and how we make our investments. We talked about this. It's exploding. It's huge. There are lots of tailwinds in this business. The reason why we feel so comfortable where we are and our ability to grow is obviously we're sitting in a good spot with lots of tailwinds. We've been able to grow this to $65 million in annual run rate as of the end of March. We announce next week, and that number will go up significantly. This is an example of where our numbers sit. The green bars are the growth of the Commerce Media revenue and gross margin. This business runs at a higher gross margin than our legacy business.
Not only are we growing, we're in a faster growth area, but we're at a margin of creative business. We've been able to take it from really flat. We started in January of 2023, and you can see that by Q4 and also in Q1, we've made a significant growth possibility and also a higher margin business. The exciting thing for us from a strategic mix is the bottom circles. In Q1 2023, it was 0% of our gross profit. In Q1, it was 23%. We see that being a majority of our profit as we head into 2026. There is seasonality. That is why you see a little bit of ups and downs on the boxes. The best way to look at it is compare Q1 of 2025 to Q1 of 2024.
The verticals that we serve mostly are retailers, and there's a fair amount of seasonality in that business today. Here's just a quick example of some of the partners that we work with that we're proud to call partners. We've been doubling the business each quarter, year- over-y ear. We have publicly said we will more than double the business from 2024 to 2025 and 2025 to 2026. It's really coming from these partners, right? We land into the verticals like retail. We're also into ticketing and grocery and restaurants. We come out with case studies around how we deliver better results than our competitors. We bring that down deep into the verticals in a true enterprise sales strategy. There is a fantastic opportunity for us to get into other verticals like travel and finance and entertainment. We are not in that right now.
We're not planning to be in that, right? That's the continued growth beyond 2026 for us. In June of this year, we launched a strategic partnership with a company called Rebuy. Rebuy is one of the top Shopify apps that helps merchants increase the size of their basket, interact with their consumers both pre and post-purchase, and recommendation engines. We've integrated our technology within Rebuy's tech stack. Any merchant of Rebuy just needs to click a button, and they now have availability to our Commerce Media solution within their partnership. Rebuy has 12,000 active members. Many of them are very small. They're not the enterprise-type clients we're going after on the retail side, but this is a very efficient way in which to market to this big ecosystem within Shopify. They have more sessions than all, they've doubled the sessions that we have right now across our whole platform.
There's great growth opportunities to penetrate the Shopify ecosystem and the more smaller merchants by our partnership with Rebuy. The last piece just of our growth, this is a traditional consumer experience across a website. You come on and you shop, and then you post, you check out, and then there's the CRM afterwards. We obviously play in that dark blue area. That's where we're focused. It's the most lucrative piece. It's also the hardest to get into. There are significant opportunities across these other areas. Many of our partners right now are asking us to get into things like loyalty, into CRM, and also into the shopping cart monetization. We'll be talking about that a lot more as we go into the future. There's great opportunities beyond what we talked about. We look at our opportunity within this whole ecosystem as a billion-dollar opportunity for our revenue.
We talked at the first part about a legacy business and how important it was in terms of how we started the business up. It really has unique competitive advantages and sort of our moat against our competition. One is that first-party data asset that we've built up over the years. When the example of Fanatics consumer comes on, we will run that consumer against our matchup against our Fluent identity graph. That allows us to better target and understand who you are and serve the most relevant ads. I'll walk you through an example, but we're able to provide significant uplift in revenue by using that Fluent identity graph. The second piece is where we grew up as a performance marketer. We know how to interact with consumers. We know how to work with advertisers to make those numbers work. That's sort of the second DNA that we have.
We really work aggressively with our advertisers to understand what happens not only when you sign up for that Hulu service first, but what happens afterwards. How long will you last? What's the turnover rate? How do we best build those into our models and drive better results for them? Everything is powered by what we talked about, which is that first-party data asset and our AI models. The AI models are built between clicks and conversions and lifetime value. The core asset that we have that serves that, obviously, is our first-party data asset. That's the fuel that really gives us that competitive advantage. I'm going to give you two case studies. This first one is for a media partner. The second one is going to be for an advertiser. This is a case study of a large sports retailer.
They were with our competitor, a company called Rokt, which is the largest player in the marketplace. There were a lot of things going on with this media partner. They were looking to make some changes to their loyalty program. They're rolling out a whole other solution for their consumers. They were not getting the transparency and the ability to work with them hand in hand to help drive their business. They left that company, Rokt, for Fluent. You can see the results on the right-hand side on an apples-to-apples basis. The middle one is the most important to the media partner. By coming on and choosing us and the consumer, for every consumer that came through that website for that retailer, we were able to drive 35% more revenue per consumer than the competitor. Equally important is that first one for the advertisers.
We were able to drive a 27% increase in lifetime value. The quality of the consumer was better, and we're driving more revenue for the partners. That's a direct reflection of that competitive advantage I talked about of utilizing our first-party data asset in order to better identify and understand what is the next best relevant ad that will be meaningful and be valuable to you as a consumer. The second is around the advertiser. This was a gaming company that was looking to aggressively grow their business, and this kind of points to the scale of our solution, our ability to drive significant scale. They came to us and they said that they needed to hit a number for the year in order to bring on new users.
They came onto our system, and we were able to drive 650% quarter-over-quarter growth before they came with us, then after they came with us. They were 30% over their target return on ad spend, so it cost them less to acquire those customers. We're providing those customers that were at a lower return on ad spend. The quality of those users that were coming onto the game, 89% of them were new, which is the main core metric for any new gaming company. This is an example of how that drives that quality for the advertiser, which makes them want to bid up for those consumers on our Commerce Media solution. Here's the strategic and financial pivot we've been talking about.
If you look on that first-party years up to 2022, we grew the legacy business on a double-digit compounded average growth rate over an extended time period, became the largest player in the market. We did have an FTC inquiry that happened in 2020. We settled that in 2023, and unfortunately, with a very nominal fine, but they required us to have certain regulations that were beyond what was existing in the market. We settled with that because we thought everything would be leveled up with that. You can see our business started to decline in that legacy business, primarily because it was on an uneven playing field. We decided to take those strategic assets and go into Commerce Media, which is higher growth, higher margin, and also a much more valuable business. You can't see the growth of the Commerce Media within these numbers.
You saw it on the previous slide. Our inflection point is in the end of Q3 and Q4 this year. The Commerce Media side will be large enough to bring us back to growth. You'll see those numbers moving up and to the right and back to profitability. That's sort of the exciting strategic pivot that we've been going through. Now the financial pivot comes in the later part of Q3 and into Q4. The margins are larger, but equally important. The businesses are more, because of the revenue mix, the Commerce Media business is valued much more valuable than a customer acquisition digital marketing company. We're excited about that strategic pivot. Once we get to the point where over 50% of our business is coming from that, we think the market will start to react positively to that. Here's our cap structure. Fairly straightforward.
We have a total of 37% of holders that are directors and officers. We have 44% that are long-term institutional investors that have been with us for a long time. We have 28 million shares outstanding. Our balance sheet is fairly straightforward. The only debt we have on it is an ABL loan that has about $50 million of capacity that allows us to grow and continue to grow, invest in the growth of our business. That is sort of the story. I hope you got a feel for where we are in the strategic pivot and the financial pivot where we are. We have a lot of tailwinds in this business. In a very short time frame, in less than two years, we've been able to build up a strong number two brand. We position ourselves by driving better results than the competitors.
You can see that in our case studies. We are in a greenfield opportunity with a higher growth, higher margin business. The financial pivot happens in the later part of this year.
I just want to see if there are any questions in the audience. Maybe I'll start with one. Don, can you maybe talk a little bit about your Rebuy partnership and just what does that mean for your commerce segment? To the extent you can comment, what are you thinking about maybe potentially bringing on additional partners like that?
Yep, yep. Good question, Maria. When we look at the marketplace in three segments, right? Commerce Media, there's what we'll call the New Walled Gardens. Those are people like Amazon, Walmart, eBay, Uber. They're the ones that have their own retail media networks. The second section is what we call enterprise partners. Those are the ones I mentioned. You saw on that list, it's anyone from Bath & Body Works, Dick's Sporting Goods, Fanatics, companies like that. Then there's all the smaller players. They're very small players that are primarily on the Shopify or other ecosystems like that. We went heavily into the enterprise side, Maria, because we knew we could build that business up, create partners, and then go down to those verticals. We kind of left that Shopify ecosystem off to the side because there was no way for us to really economically access all those smaller players.
What Rebuy allows us to do is two things. One, it allows us to access all their 12,000 merchants, which we would not be able to access separately. It opened up a whole new market opportunity that we weren't looking at previously. Strategically, our technology is 100% integrated. Literally, if you're a merchant on Rebuy, all you have to do is press a button, and you are now integrated into our post-transaction. It's a great technology integration with a great partner. I mentioned before, we look at the business by how many sessions our marketplace is. The more sessions we have, the more we can get new advertisers in and grow that business. We've aggressively grown our own enterprise side, but this Rebuy opportunity has more than double what we currently have now. There's a great growth opportunity in which to penetrate with it.
Thank you. That's helpful. I think at some point when you were talking about one of your clients on the Commerce side, you talked about 40/60 revenue split. Is that typical for that segment overall, or is that just that one specific client?
Good question. When we got into the business, the answer is yes, primarily it's now 60/40. There are different ways in which to cut that. You can do 50/50 and then have some upfront fees or transition fees or other credits. At the end of the day, the market is around 60/40 in the retail side.
If we go back to slides 14, 15 where you show sort of case study examples, I guess maybe help us understand what's driving those metrics. Is that just largely the quality of your data platform?
Yeah, so we were talking primarily around the sports retailer on the partner side, right? If you, the example I gave you is you're on Fanatics, right? They will pass information to Fluent and say, "OK, here's," they'll give an email address. They might give what's in the shopping cart. They might give what's the size of the shopping cart. That's what they'll give us in order to determine how our models kick in to drive that value. We then take that information and we bump it up against our Fluent identity graph. It's a proprietary first-party data asset we built over 15 years that nobody else has in the marketplace. There's an 80%- 85% match rate between the consumers we have on our partners that match up to that Fluent identity graph.
We take that and we say, "Here's what we know everything about the consumer." We know whether you're a, it's not just like a typical thing where we say, "Hey, you're between this age group. You have this type of income." We know who you are. We know whether you have pets. We know what kind of cars. We know where you live, right? That information around that first-party data asset feeds the models to determine this is the next best ad that you would want to look at. It's the quality of that decision process of saying, "How do I serve the next ad in a one-to-one way?" You come by and buy that Boston Red Sox jersey. I buy it. Obviously, radically different ads are going to be served to you than to me. It gets as close as you can to that one-to-one marketing.
That first-party data asset is our competitive advantage. That's why those numbers are moving where we can compete and significantly drive new revenue versus the competition.
Perfect. Thank you so much, Don. It was a great presentation. I appreciate everyone joining us today.
Thank you, Maria.
Thank you, Don. It's great to see you.