Hello and welcome to today's call where Genius Sports management will discuss its acquisition of Legend. We ask that you please hold all questions until the completion of the formal remarks, at which time you will be given instructions for the question-and-answer session. Also, as a reminder, this conference is being recorded today. If you have any objections, please disconnect at this time. Genius Sports, you may begin.
Thank you. Before we begin, we'd like to remind you that today's presentation will include certain non-GAAP measures, and you can find the definitions in the investor presentation available on our website. We will also make forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and should be considered in conjunction with our risk factor discussions in our filings with the SEC. With that, I will now turn the call over to our CEO, Mark Locke.
Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. At our Investor Day, we laid out a clear long-term vision for the company: how we capture next-generation sports data and monetize it across an end-to-end platform spanning leagues and teams, betting, media, advertising, sponsorship, and fan engagement. That strategy underpinned our confidence in the targets we shared on that day: $1.2 billion of revenue, $365 million of adjusted EBITDA, and 60% free cash flow conversion by 2028. Our business is on remarkable footing. We finished 2025 with estimated group revenue of $669 million and $136 million of adjusted EBITDA, delivering 31% revenue growth, 20% adjusted EBITDA margin, and record free cash flow generation. Importantly, our media segment achieved 37% year-over-year growth in 2025, a phenomenal result for our highest growth segment. Today's call is to announce a transformational transaction for Genius Sports.
I'm delighted to announce that we have entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Legend, a global digital sports and gaming media network that's built to monetize attention. This acquisition will deliver exactly what we said we would do, both on strategic and financial execution. Sticking with financials, the scale and profitability that we previously expected to reach in 2028 will be largely achieved in 2026. That means for 2026, on an annualized basis, after giving effect to the acquisition, we expect to deliver approximately $1.1 billion of revenue and $320-$330 million of adjusted EBITDA. As we execute towards 2028, we believe that this acquisition will allow us to achieve $1.6 billion of revenue at an approximate 35% adjusted EBITDA margin and with free cash flow conversion of over 60%, all of which exceeds what we previously shared with you.
As a reminder, the goal for our media business is to be the buying platform for any advertiser trying to reach a sports audience. This transaction supercharges the drivers of this strategy: more data, more audience, more inventory, and more monetization pathways to deliver returns for our customers. At the core of Legend is an AI-powered platform that captures real-time user intent, and it converts it into revenue across sports and gaming. This is the same model used by companies that build products around decision-making moments, then monetize them at scale. Today, Legend owns industry-leading media brands, for example, Covers.com and Casino.org. These properties provide direct audience relationships and full control over user experience and monetization. They also provide hosted solutions for some of the biggest names in media and syndication for tier-one publishers. Examples include Sports Illustrated and Yahoo Sports.
This allows publishers to increase yield through Legend's plug-and-play solution. Underpinning all of these products is a rich data capture and analytics stack that provides audience intelligence and further strengthens our understanding of sports fans and gaming customers. Legend is a global business with over 800 customers and more than 800 people in 13 countries. It is led by an exceptional leadership team that will join Genius Sports and continues to drive the business forward following the acquisition. Legend operates a familiar flywheel. The way Legend engages and monetizes its premium audiences is similar to retail media networks because they sit inside moments of intent, not passive consumption. Users arrive with a job to do: buy groceries, order food, book a ride, or in this case, make a sports or gaming transaction. This is how we define intent.
That intent shows up in the metrics: high frequency, repeat usage, deep sessions, and closed-loop measurement. That is why Legend has scaled efficiently and delivered outsized returns for advertisers. Once a player is converted through Legend, revenue is generated from the player's lifetime spend, creating long-term, predictable revenue with minimal incremental cost. While our sports betting business primarily earns revenue share from betting-related content, Legend expands this model by enabling Genius to participate economically across the full spend of both sports data and iGaming content, further strengthening our picks-and-shovels approach. Legend has an unrivaled scale. In 2025, Legend generated more than 320 million annual visits from 118 million unique visitors. To put that in perspective, one of the leading rideshare apps reaches 151 million unique users, while a major US food delivery app averages closer to 53 million.
The visitors on Legend's owned and operated products have an average 75% return rate and spend an average of nine minutes per session engaging in its best-in-class content. This is product-led engagement, driven and sustained by premium owned and operated experiences, not reliance on single traffic sources. That depth of engagement translates into more than $2 in revenue per unique visitor. By comparison, that represents greater than a 4x uplift on average digital publishers who monetize a unique visitor at only a fraction of that level, typically less than $0.50. That gap is not accidental. It's structural. Across every metric that matters, Legend operates well above category norms. Repeat visitation is higher, sessions are deeper, engagement time is sustained, more pages are viewed, and more revenue is generated, resulting in strong revenue visibility. For Genius, the impact is immediate.
Remember, more data, more audience, and more inventory drives the Genius Media Network. At the center of this network is FanHub, the engine that turns fan engagement into revenue. As you saw at investor day, this is our unified activation platform for media and advertising. With this acquisition, Legend will not sit alongside Genius. Its platform, data, audience, and inventory will be fully activated within the FanHub platform. This unlocks true performance synergies. Legend's owned and partner inventory can now be monetized through one system across sports books, gaming, and broader brand advertising. It also materially strengthens our value to brands and agency partners like PMG and Publicis by giving them access to high-intent sports audiences in one place. Beyond this core accelerator, the Legend platform enables additional growth drivers into new partners, new surfaces, and new monetization use cases.
Firstly, Legend materially expands our ability to help leagues, teams, and media partners monetize digital inventory while embedding Genius deeper into their core digital ecosystems. We move beyond content and inventory creation with GeniusIQ to full-stack execution, distribution, and optimization. The result is that Genius Sports is at the center of our sports partners' digital strategies. Secondly, owned brands like Covers give Genius a more direct, scalable path to fans. This creates real optionality by allowing us to distribute, test, and monetize exclusive GeniusIQ content. This is symbiotic because Genius's products distributed across Legend's vast global brands will further accelerate their core metrics.
For example, we will be able to help leagues like the NFL immediately reach and expand and monetize further international audiences in line with their stated goals, as well as providing an enormous platform to many of the European leagues who are looking to enter the U.S. market. Finally, by integrating Legend's technology directly into partner environments, we can optimize our media flywheel without relying on paid audience acquisition. This is the same playbook that we have already proven with BetVision, now applied to a much broader footprint. Put another way, we now have massive distribution scale. With this acquisition, Genius expands its structural advantage, now operating two full-service synergistic businesses: a proprietary sports data engine generating approximately $600 million in revenue and a performance-driven content, media, and advertising engine generating approximately $500 million. We are the only company operating across both official sports data and AI-driven media monetization.
No other platform expands two large, fast-growing, and interconnected markets in this way. What further differentiates Genius is how these engines work together. We acquire data once and monetize it across betting, media, and advertising. That structure unlocks substantial value. More data improves performance. Better performance attracts more spend, and higher spend strengthens the network. This acquisition highlights the continued evolution of our strategy: business, capabilities, and relationships. We now have the most powerful end-to-end performance-driven sports and gaming media network in the world. With our unique data, insights, and partnerships, Genius is the full-service platform connecting advertisers with high-intent, incremental fans. Our leadership position across these markets is now unmatched and hard to replicate. Commercially, the combined Genius and Legend business has substantial value. The combined company will serve more than 2,000 customers globally, spanning leagues and teams, sports books, gaming operators, media companies, brands, and agencies.
This will be a diversified enterprise customer base with long-standing relationships and multiple expansion paths. Legend's commercial performance is a clear strength. On a standalone basis, Legend pioneered market-leading commercial terms because of the results that they deliver. Demand for placement on Legend's owned and operated properties is strong, with operators often competing for premium exposure across its highest-intent inventory. When customers are onboarded, they choose to stay for a long time. Revenue is a mix of upfront payments and ongoing performance-based earnings, which leads to stable, secure, and recurring revenues. Legend also strengthens our commercial attractiveness to operators. Genius's ability to cross-sell and compete for a larger share of operators' marketing budgets will increase with this acquisition. This is a revenue synergy that works in both directions. Genius's customers gain access to high-intent media inventory and performance-driven acquisition.
Legend's customers gain access to official sports data, deeper audience insights, and differentiated media activation powered by Genius. This is an example of an immediate synergy that is realizable in 2026 and would represent upside to the forecast. iGaming is a particular strength of Legend. While Genius participates in adjacent aspects of this space today, Legend immediately enables a significant expansion into the growing iGaming TAM, particularly in North America, which is Legend's largest market. While we are talking about expanded TAM, Legend also accelerates our participation in emerging gaming categories, including prediction markets. Legend has consistently identified and monetized new gaming categories early, including daily fantasy sports, the expansion of regulated online sports betting, new operator formats, and new geographic markets. Prediction markets are just the latest example of this. They create immediate demand for education, comparison, and decision support, attracting marketing and acquisition spend.
Today, Genius already monetizes this demand through media and advertising activity. Legend will materially amplify this opportunity, enabling us to participate economically across the full curve, from early market emergence through to maturity. So to recap, together we have a larger TAM, multiple revenue accelerations, and a further ability to capitalize on fast-moving market dynamics. Financially, there are three pillars of what the Legend acquisition will enable us to deliver. First is revenue acceleration. That is everything that I have spoken about so far. Second is margin expansion. Media monetization carries structurally higher incremental margins than our core data business. As media becomes a larger share of the mix, we expect group EBITDA margins to expand beyond the 30% level outlined at our investor day. Third is cash conversion. This business benefits from strong operating efficiencies and limited incremental capital requirements.
As media scales and joint opportunities are realized, free cash flow conversion is expected to reach approximately 50% on an annualized 2026 basis and exceed the 60% level that we previously guided. This combination arms us with even stronger economics to continue executing against our long-term strategy. Now I will hand over to Brian to expand on this further.
Good morning, everyone. I will now spend a few minutes on the financials and how this transaction fits into our growth outlook and capital allocation framework. First, I want to be very clear. Standalone Genius is performing exactly as we outlined at investor day in December. Our strategy is unchanged. Our execution remains strong, and our financial framework is intact. As Mark said, this acquisition is attractive strategically and financially.
Acquiring Legend presented us a compelling opportunity to accelerate our revenue and margin growth at a disciplined cost of capital and with an attractive free cash flow profile. On a 2026 annualized basis, with Legend, we would expect $1.1 billion of revenue and approximately 30% adjusted EBITDA margin and approximately 50% free cash flow conversion. To note, our free cash flow conversion metrics cited here for 2026 and going forward will, in light of the Legend acquisition, exclude interest and be based on unlevered free cash flow. That said, even on a levered free cash flow basis, we expect free cash generation to be ahead on 2026 and materially ahead on 2028. Beyond 2026, on a pro forma basis, we expect the combined business will deliver revenue growth of approximately 20% on average, with EBITDA margins expanding above 30% and free cash flow conversion increasing to over 60%.
Importantly, this puts us at or ahead of the financial profile we laid out for 2028 much sooner than we originally expected. The deal economics in isolation are strong. Given the complementary overlap of our businesses, we expect modest cost synergies. However, we believe that revenue synergies to cross-sell and expand our customer base will prove significant and further enhance margins, which would be upside to the numbers we have presented today. On structure, the transaction reinforces disciplined execution. Performance-based incentives, team continuity, and founder leadership stay in place. The upfront consideration represents $900 million at close, comprised of $800 million in cash and $100 million in stock, with an additional earnout of up to $300 million split evenly across year one and year two post-close. The earnout is tied to profitability and cash flow metrics and is payable in cash or stock at Genius's discretion.
We believe this structure appropriately balances risk, alignment, and long-term accretive value creation. From a financing perspective, the transaction is supported by committed debt financing led by Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank. At closing, we expect to incur $850 million of secured debt, and our revolver will remain undrawn. Pro forma leverage will be below 3x, with a clear path to rapid delivering by more than half by 2028, driven by our strong and visible growth trajectory. Finally, our capital allocation priorities remain unchanged. We will continue to generate healthy free cash flow, reinvest organically in the business across GeniusIQ distribution and further products, pursue disciplined inorganic opportunities where returns are compelling and opportunistically return value to shareholders. Overall, this transaction reflects exactly the approach we outlined at investor day: disciplined growth, improving margins, strong cash conversion, and long-term value creation.
Now I will turn it back to Mark quickly before opening the line for questions.
Thanks, Brian. As we said at investor day, our M&A bar is incredibly high. We reviewed nearly 100 opportunities over the last one and a half years and chose Legend because it exceeded our key acquisition criteria on every measure: strategic fit, clear operational integration, and accretive economics. These statistics exemplify how patient and focused we are on the long-term success of the business and our approach as custodians of shareholder capital. We have not, and we will not, enter into acquisitions unless we have total confidence of that business's ability to deliver at the level that Genius expects. The market has been volatile over the last few weeks for reasons that have very little to do with our underlying busines s strength.
Our equity is precious, and as such, we have intentionally kept dilution minimal in the transaction, with a contemplated leverage level that we are extremely confident that we can minimize through growth immediately. We are absolutely thrilled to welcome Legend to Genius Sports. We have known the team for a long time, a combined 46 years in the industry between the Legend's founder and myself. And as a result, we avoided a formal sale process once it became clear how, together, we could meaningfully increase the pace and scale of our execution. This is how upsides are realized, even beyond the numbers that Brian has just described. This is exactly the type of acquisition that we said that we would pursue. This cements our unique position as the only player in sports data and media-driven monetization: two synergistic pillars powered by one shared data layer.
This is how Genius will continue to unlock value through 2028 and beyond, and we look forward to delivering against this opportunity over the years ahead. With that, we will now open the line for Q&A.
Thank you. At this time, if you would like to ask a question, please click on the raised hand button, which can be found on the black bar at the bottom of your screen. When it is your turn, you'll receive a message on your screen from the host allowing you to talk, and then you'll hear your name called. Please accept, unmute your audio, and ask your question. Please limit your questions to one question and one follow-up. We will wait one moment to allow the queue to form. We'll take our first question from Jed Kelly with Oppenheimer. Please go ahead and ask your question.
Hey, Greg, can you hear me?
We hear you, Jed.
Okay, great. Thanks. Yeah, good acquisition. Just a couple of questions. Just looking at the valuation, it looks like you got it around 8.5x EBITDA. So can you just talk about the growth profile? And then just with some of these media businesses, we have seen in some other verticals potential disruption from new agents, Google changes, these new AIs. So can you just talk about how you view the risk profile of some of these publishing businesses and media networks? Thanks.
Jed, hey, thanks. It's Brian. I'll take the first part, and then I'll turn it to Mark and Josh for the second part. That's right. I mean, you deduced roughly what the multiple is at. This is a business that we've known a long time.
They've been 20 years in the making, have a solid track record, have had strong growth over the last few years. And going forward, we continue to expect high double-digit growth. And as you can tell from the numbers we gave you, our overall profile is still 20% CAGRs. So we're excited about it. And we think it's, as you can tell, highly accretive immediately and a lot of opportunities for synergies.
Yeah, I mean, hi, Jed. It's Mark. Happy to take it. On the disruption point, I mean, we're pretty comfortable with the risk profile. I mean, the distinction is that Legend is not a traditional publishing business dependent on SEO or arbitrage or single traffic sources. It's genuinely a performance-driven media network that owns and operates many sites, has lots of partnerships, large distribution channels, huge numbers of users.
I think in the call I mentioned, we had about 380 million unique users compared to some of the very large ride shares that were around 150. So it comes out with a massive network, and the demand is coming directly from sports books and advertisers who are buying outcomes and not impressions. And I think the key thing that we want to focus on is what we're really driving at here. We're focused on attention, and we're focused on intent. And that's the thing this gives us. Because it has a lot of these owned and operated sites, because it owns and produces the content, it's very, very high quality. It's very organic. We get an average of about nine minutes, I think, of dwell time for each user.
And what that does is that gives us the ability to collect a massive amount of data, create enormous amounts of understanding of what the intent is. And that attention and that intent is the thing that's driving it. If you think about things like BetVision and what we're doing there, the ability to distribute and test with those products gives us a huge ramp for growth.
Thank you.
Our next question comes from Jordan Bender with Citizens J.P. Morgan. You may now unmute your line and ask your question. Jordan, please unmute your line by pressing star six and ask your question.
Hey, you hear me now?
Yeah.
Yep. Thanks. Thanks for the question. So the take-on leverage is a change on how the company traditionally looked at the balance sheet. You've laid out why the acquisition is the right fit.
So can you maybe just talk us through why you've taken on or your level of comfortableness around the leverage in the trajectory path to kind of get back down to somewhere around 1x? And then just to follow up, your business is traditionally lumpy with free cash flow generation, just given the NFL. Should this transaction smooth that out quarter to quarter?
Yeah, no, I'll take it. On the leverage, and again, our capital allocation and approach to M&A has not changed. We always said we would look for compelling opportunities that, beyond just our organic investment, inorganically would allow us to accelerate our growth, our capabilities, and, as you can tell, our financial targets. And this checks the box on all three of those. And so we feel good about the leverage, the starting point.
Based on the growth trajectory, which is predictable, visible, we do expect that to come down by more than half by 2028. And so the leverage, we believe, is more than manageable, and it still puts us ahead on every cash metric we had. Meanwhile, Genius continues to perform on its own. So it's really complementary in that regard. I think it's also probably worth mentioning, we've been extremely disciplined in making sure that we've got flexibility. We've got strong liquidity, covenant headrooms, and good optionality around capital allocation, which was a key sort of underwriting consideration for us. Great. And then just on the cadence of the free cash flow moving forward? So it's largely, as you would have seen, Genius in prior years, that we do have some seasonality to it in the back half, just around the timing of our business.
But having said that, this is more than manageable, and the coverage is strong through the year. And we're confident, again, on that leverage from where we start and the even and predictable path down.
Great. Thank you very much.
Our next question comes from Clark Lampen with BTIG. Please unmute your line and ask your question.
Hey, guys. Good morning. Thanks for taking the questions. I've got two. Maybe the first one, Mark, this seems like it has the potential to take you guys meaningfully forward as a sports-focused performance marketing platform. I wanted to see if there's any way of basically just contextualizing for us how much different maybe the Legend's tech stack is versus your FanHub product, if at all. Are both of these sort of AI-powered models? Do they have sort of full DSP, SSP technology? How different are they?
And then I guess maybe second question, more of a financial one. Relative to the 21% sort of pro forma CAGR that you guys now expect for the overall business through 2028, how is media going to grow in relation to that? Is it going to be meaningfully faster? Any context that you could provide for either the CAGR or 2026, I think, would be really helpful. Thanks a lot.
Hi, Clark. It's Josh Linforth here. So the way to think about it is that Legend gives Genius a number of additional sort of technologies and assets that we're able to leverage through the FanHub platform.
So the things that we talked about on the call a little bit were the fact that it gives us a ton of unique sports-focused inventory, and it also gives us access to another 118 million uniques per year that will be integrated into the Sports Innovation Lab acquisition. Together, that will be packaged up within the FanHub platform for us to take out to market for our partners to transact on the platform or through deal IDs, but all the sort of traditional programmatic mechanisms that are available to monetize both audience and inventory. And then from the technology standpoint, within the Legend tech stack, what Genius is gaining here is an AI engine that understands and infers context in real time across all of the digital properties. So it opens up a ton of advantages for us.
It enables us to measure attention and intent and feed those unique signals into our platform to inform decisioning and pricing power for all of our inventory and audience data. And it also enables Genius to push more broadly out into the premium sort of digital ecosystem to create new content and to extend our reach into digital properties like league assets and websites, as well as working in the sort of broader traditional publishing space to help distribute Genius content through taking all the stuff that we're building through GeniusIQ, BetVision. This just enables us further reach for content distribution to pull it all back into the FanHub platform and use the models that Legend has built that's made them so successful in driving revenue out of engagement. And I think a few examples are all here in terms of the sports acceleration.
If you think about what a lot of the European leagues are trying to do, we always think about our betting business. We always talk about the additional services that we can provide to sports leagues to help them achieve their goals. We're obviously doing a lot on the marketing, but on the data side, that's a big part of our business model. Having Legend allows, if you're a European sports league and you want to expand the number of eyeballs that you're getting on your sport and distribute it, Legend in the US, for example, is a really, really good option for them to do that if they want to attack the US or Legend in the European country if they want to attack the European country. So it gives them a larger base of distribution for their product, which is really important.
And again, if you look at the NFL relationship, which is obviously key to us, I remind you all that the NFL is a sort of large shareholder in Genius. Their goals are very clearly to be internationally focused. And they've just announced new NFL games in France and a number of other European territories, Spain included. And so from their point of view, having this distribution network that we own and operate, having this data, having these eyeballs at our fingertips allows us to very quickly help them sort of achieve their goals. And also, it's probably worth touching on the AI piece as well because, I mean, both the Genius platform and Legend both use AI extensively, specifically machine learning. And we're not just slapping AI labels on products. The Legend uses models to optimize traffic allocation. It improves the pricing and the conversion in real time.
And we use the models to generate and interpret sports data, fan behavior. So combined, it gives us a full closed-loop system, which is really, really key to what we're trying to do these days, which is, as I said before, monetize attention and intent.
And on the, sorry, the growth profile question, I guess I'm just curious, I mean, all of that stuff sounds very, very meaningful for this business going forward. So is it right to infer that media on a go-forward basis is probably going to outpace the sort of 21% average? Or maybe, as I mentioned before, is it possible to give us a little bit more detail on '26 betting tech versus media or other?
Yeah. Look, I mean, I'll sort of answer more generically because clearly, media is a huge focus for us here, and it's what we've been doing.
If you recall back to Q2 2025, I rather controversially at the time said, "I think our media business will end up being as big or bigger than our betting business in the medium term." I think that that's really what we're delivering now. We're delivering a business that is faster growing, higher margin, and eventually will be materially larger than our sports betting business. I think it's a very fair assumption for you to make that this will outpace that growth. The focus on our media is really working, and we're really delivering these results with this.
Thanks a lot. Congrats.
Our next question comes from Michael Hickey with the Benchmark Company. You may now unmute your audio and ask your question.
Hey, Mark, Brian. Hopefully, you guys can hear me. Congrats, guys, on this transformative deal.
Also nice to see a strong finish to 2025 and a good guide for your core business on 2026. Just two questions. One, I guess, just a clarification on Legend here. How much of the fan journey begins in search, I guess, versus maybe direct? And the other piece would be just on the catalyst you guys see forward here on 2026, you've got the World Cup. I imagine that would be meaningful, especially with your larger scale now on the ad piece. Then on prediction market, I'm on the Covers.com. I see a calculation. And I imagine now what was sort of a threat, maybe a big opportunity for you on the ad side with the prediction market. So curious how sizable you think that is.
I'm guessing there'll be a lot of competition here for the World Cup and certainly into the next NFL season and other sporting events. And I guess you're also sort of less focused now just on your specific data rights. I think this would be a bigger opportunity for you across all the different sports, domestic and international. Thanks, guys.
Yeah. I think Josh and I will split that up because there's a lot in there which is worth picking up. I might actually take your last point first just because I think it's really important that while the media business is obviously a massive opportunity, I think it's really important to understand how synergistic they are. And so we won't be reducing focus at all on our data rights business, on our data business in any way.
In fact, that's one of the core drivers of the revenue synergies, which we think are very significant. We will come out of the combination of the businesses. We're going to be using the sports data. We're going to be using the relationships with the leagues. We're going to be using the synergies that that provides in a very, very real way. It's something that, to be honest with you, we're incredibly excited about. I mean, Josh, do you want to take the stage, or shall I take the stage?
Yeah. I mean, why don't you take the stage? Yeah. I mean, I'm happy to take it. The vast majority of the people that visit Legends' digital properties come direct, which gives us. The people that visit the digital properties essentially have built up large communities in which they're sharing content.
It is a continuous flywheel of driving more and more people back. Our goal as a business is to be able to reach fans wherever they are. This only strengthens that proposition essentially because Genius is now integrated across league properties, news organizations, as well as owning our own digital properties. It allows us to capture the full fan journey and to be able to monetize them effectively with a whole host of partners. I mean, you touched on Kalshi being there. Genius already works with them within the marketing business, and we see that to continue to grow. This allows us to expand that relationship further. It's been a big growth area for the Legend's business over the last 12 months. We'll be able to capitalize on more of that marketing spend. I'm sure you're seeing it on TV and in digital.
We're tapping into all of that already. And with Legend, it only strengthens the proposition.
Nice. Thanks, guys. Good luck. It's awesome.
We'll take our next question from Ryan Sigdahl with Craig-Hallum Capital. Please unmute your audio and ask your question.
Hey, good morning, guys. Want to see on that same question that Mike just asked, but dive in. The predictive markets, I mean, it's blasted all over the front page of Covers.com. Curious, I guess, your conversations with your league partners, which seemingly had been kind of the biggest block to you guys entering in a bigger way to the predictive markets and monetizing there. I guess curious if you've had a change in comfort or conversations with them or how you feel at the moment.
Yeah. Good question. I think if we look back to the Investor Day, I mean, we were pretty clear on Investor Day that the prediction markets was a big opportunity for us, and it's something that we were already generating revenue from. If you remember, we mentioned the significant revenue that we're generating from the market makers in the U.S. markets, from prediction markets. If you also recall, we mentioned that our ad tech business was benefiting very nicely from the prediction markets. And I think that this is just a way of further strengthening that. It gives us more data, makes us a bigger, much more significant partner of the prediction markets because the combination of the sports data and the fan data gives us much higher ROIs and much, much, much deeper relationships.
So we see this as a compounding transaction that allows us to go deeper into the prediction market, money pools that are available for advertising, and for us to really drive the growth of that business alongside our league partners.
And just for my follow-up question, on the 2028 financial targets, did you basically just layer on top Legend on top of what you guided for a couple of months ago on the core Genie business? Or were there any changes to the existing business and then how our synergies considered within that?
Yeah. Listen, we took our 2028, which was strong and had very strong top line, bottom line, cash conversion. Certainly, we layered on Legend, which also strong on all three of those fronts. As we said earlier, there are meaningful synergies that would be upside to that.
And so you can tell that the 2028 came up significantly, and the years after also come up significantly, the margin and the cash flow conversions.
Thanks. Interesting transaction. Good luck, guys.
Our next question comes from Trey Bowers with Wells Fargo Securities. Please unmute your audio now and ask your question.
Hello. Hi, Trey. We can hear you now. Hey. We've gotten lots of questions, I think more from your kind of consumer-focused analyst and portfolio manager base of exactly what Legend is. Could you guys just maybe kind of simplify for everyone how, for such a high-margin business, Legend makes their money? Is it selling advertising on covers and casino.org? Is it selling kind of the data to the different online sports betting platforms? If you guys could just kind of break down how those revenue dollars are generated a little bit further, I think that'd be super helpful for a lot of the people on this call. Thanks.
Hi, Trey. Yeah. So the way in which sort of the simple version of Legend is that it has an AI-led technology stack that produces digital content. So it basically builds a load of premium publishing websites for itself to own and operate. And it also does that for its partners. And we gave examples of Sports Illustrated and Yahoo. And it essentially networks all of that together. The way in which it generates revenue is through really deep strategic commercial partnerships across the regulated betting and gaming space. And what they do is they take a share of lifetime revenues of players that come through from their properties.
They have a number of other commercial instruments in terms of paying for things like homepage takeovers and cost per click and all the traditional mechanics that you expect from a digital media business. I think it's worth talking a bit more about the revenue profile of the business. It's one of the things we like about this business so much, and one of the reasons that we're so excited about is we've got very predictable revenues from it. We know exactly how much money we can make per user. Obviously, we touched upon that in the script that we sort of had earlier. A lot of the sort of historical revenues that are coming through the business give us a huge amount of predictability about the future growth. I think that's really kind of important to highlight.
The other thing that is worth mentioning is the reason that the margins are so high is it's technology-enabled. So it's got very, very strong operating leverage. Once a platform's built, the incremental revenue just scales efficiently through the platform. So from our point of view, it's absolutely cutting-edge technology. It's the way that the media world is moving. It's the way that the market's evolving, focused on, as I keep saying, on intent. And I think that's something that you'll see. One of the interesting comparables, I guess, if you're talking to your retail guys, is what's happened in the last few days with Disney. Disney have come out with the announcement of their new CEO. And there's a lot of analysis on their business model, where they're pulling in somebody to watch Frozen at $8, and then that person buys a child buys a doll or a costume.
And that then creates a sort of affinity to the Disney brand, which they then monetize over the lifetime of that customer. And really, what we're seeing is we're seeing the same opportunity in sport. You have a customer that comes in. They're interested in a set of data or some information or to watch a game through BetVision on our Legends-distributed sites. At that point, they're coming in. They're watching it. And then you have the opportunity to continue to monetize them through their lifetime. And I think that's really what we're talking about when we're talking about monetizing attention and monetizing intent. It's a really tangible and real opportunity for us to put our datasets and our technology together with Legends to really drive that growth.
Great. Thanks, guys.
Our next question comes from Eric Handler with Roth Capital Partners. Please unmute your audio and ask your question.
Thank you. Can you hear me okay?
Yes.
Hello. Okay. Sorry. So sort of following up on Trey's question, I'm curious, is there a way or is there a path for Legends to open up its network to non-online sports betting brands to have a more broader customer base, sort of like what you're doing now on the Genius side?
Yes. Is the short answer? That's one of the rationales for us doing this transaction is it gives Genius sort of plug-and-play ability to extend Legend's reach well outside the betting and gaming space. When you think about Genius's customer profile, we've got 400 leagues around the world that we work with and an ever-increasing number of media organizations who need help in monetizing their content.
When you think about Genius bringing that distribution of the Legend technology and its ability to understand intent and attention and being able to monetize it, and you layer on top GeniusIQ and all of the rich content that Genius has across BetVision and all of our statistical content, and we bring that across the world to league partners to help them grow their audience and to media organizations, it creates a massive path for expansion for us, giving us additional access to audience data to understand sports fans better.
And more importantly, it helps us achieve our vision, which is to build the go-to destination for any advertiser who's looking to reach sports fans because it will give us a whole host of new advertising inventory and experiences that we can offer up to the broader advertising market with all of the new agency partnerships that we've recently established.
Great. And then with regards to capital allocation, the leverage that you're taking on isn't particularly onerous. Your net leverage will be less than 2x. You generate a lot of free cash flow. So that'll come down quite quickly. Given where your stock price is right now, do you feel like does it preclude you from being active with your buyback program at all?
Yeah. Great question. I mean, look, our equity is super precious. And it's been something that we've been very, very conscious about in the negotiations, which is why we feel like we've struck the right level of incentivization and making sure that we're good custodians of our equity with the $100 million of stock as part of the transaction. I think we have a buyback program in place. We've been pretty vocal about it. We feel our stock is one of the most valuable things that we have. So it's definitely going to be something that we're focused on over the coming period.
Thank you.
Our last question comes from Barry Jonas with Truist. Please unmute your audio and ask your question.
Guys, congratulations. Just a couple of quick ones. Can you give a little more color on maybe the revenue mix for the standalone Legends business? Curious what the geographical mix is? Then within performance, how much is rev share versus CPA? Thank you.
The vast majority of it is North America. From North America, over the last sort of two years, for Legends, it's grown by over 75%. So it's an ever-increasing area for them. And that's pretty well distributed of a mixture of we've got some other European countries in there that are regulated and a good mix across betting and gaming.
Okay. Got it. And then just yesterday, an operator noted increasing CPA trends given prediction markets entering the fold. So just curious, as we think about the standalone growth opportunity for Legends, how do you sort of frame pricing versus wider reach? Thank you.
Yeah. Look, 75% of the contracts. Recurring revenue. So that's been a big focus for us. It's one of the main things that differentiates Legends' business model from other media players in the sector.
I see. Got it. Thank you very much. Congrats.
Thank you for joining today's call with Genius Sports Management. This completes the allotted time for questions, and we will now conclude today's conference call. You may.