Joining. Adam Klauber, William Blair. I run our insurance and insurance tech group, so thanks for joining. We have MediaAlpha, Steve Yi, who is CEO and founder, and Patrick Thompson, who is CFO. Yep, CFO, sorry. And just wanted to look at the website for disclaimers. I'll say two seconds on MediaAlpha. It's a really, really interesting company. It's a sector that really has been emerging, I think, in the last five, six, seven years, creating markets for digital markets for in and around insurance. Insurance is obviously a massive market. Just on the personal line side, auto, home, it's a $500 billion market. Think about that. I mean, that's a massive consumer market. Still, even though the capabilities around digital have been emerging over the last seven, eight years, it's still relatively nascent to emerging. Still relatively small.
That really goes to the lack of capabilities, tech capabilities of the insurance companies. That is where MediaAlpha comes in, helping to bridge the gap into real-time digital consumer demands for buying quickly and efficiently and accurately and the insurance company systems who cannot get there. MediaAlpha, for a long time, has been helping to bridge that gap. We have seen it. There are some other good competitors out there. We really thought, not just thought, but think they are the quality of the group. Based on that, Steve, you want to talk about the company a little bit?
Yeah, sure. Should we?
Either way, if you're more comfortable, you can.
I'll sit and see how it goes. Appreciate it, Adam. I'll say, I mean, Adam covers the intersection between insurance and particularly personal lines, property and casualty insurance, and the intersection of that and technology and the impact that technology has had on distribution, I think, as well as anyone. I always appreciate being here, reading the research. I think Adam described what we do well. I think I would characterize our mission as being one to help every insurance company. I kind of put an emphasis on every reach online shoppers through our platform. I think that it's a basic mission, but as Adam mentioned, it's an important mission just because most insurance carriers aren't very good with technology. That kind of makes sense. That's one of the visions that we had when we first started the company.
That mission has really held true. I think it's more relevant than ever. There's a J.D. Power report that just came out that basically placed that percentage of online shopping in auto insurance as being at, or at least 47% of auto insurance policies that are now bought digitally, whereas it was only 32% as recently as 2020. Not every insurance carrier, as Adam alluded to, is well equipped to actually handle that and tap into that channel. I think that's really where we come in. Really about our platform, the three key tenets are about the efficiency, making sure that carriers are able to actually buy policies through our platform at the lowest cost per buying possible.
It's about transparency, full data about every consumer coming through based on the data that they've entered on the insurance shopping sites, which are on the supply side of our marketplace, which I'll go into later. Most importantly, for advertisers, really transparency into where these consumers are coming from. Are they coming from an insurance shopping site like The Zebra? Are they coming from a personal finance app like Credit Karma? Are they, in fact, being referred by other carriers? We'll talk a little bit more about that. It's also about the measurability as well, making sure that we have integrations with the carrier to know exactly what the outcomes are. Did this click result in a policy sale? If so, what's the expected lifetime value of that policy?
The granularity that that enables in terms of measurement of return on ad spend, which has enabled us and our carriers to re scale to the levels that we've achieved over the last couple of years. I think at a glance, really the key messages I'd like to have all of you take away is just we have the scale that now matters. I think the last 12 months, we have transacted over $1.7 billion in media through our marketplace. We're about 150 people, so that it's about $12 million per team member, which really underscores our strong operating leverage. We grow very quickly and profitably. We've been profitable since the third month of existence when we founded the company about 14 years ago. This past quarter, Q1, our adjusted EBITDA was almost $30 million, which is up over 100% year over year.
Overall, as I've mentioned, we benefit from very strong secular tailwinds, which is driving change in an enormous industry. As Adam mentioned, it's a half a trillion dollar industry, the personal lines, P&C space, which is our core focus. Overall digital ad spend there is expected to hit $14 billion next year, which is 27% growth from this year. Again, far outpacing the growth you see in overall digital advertising, again, because of the simple fact that insurance carriers and the sector has generally been slow to adopt to online technology and embracing online channels as a primary way to distribute their policies. Again, that's changing. I'll go over this because I've already addressed this. This just goes to how much more quickly the marketplace for insurance industry online advertising is growing vis-à-vis just the overall online advertising sector. This is a snapshot of our ecosystem.
What I'd like you to take away here is really that we're a two-sided marketplace with about several hundred supply partners and, again, several hundred demand partners. Our supply partners, you'll hear us refer to them as publishers. They're basically insurance comparison websites, personal finance apps, lead generation websites, and actually carrier websites themselves where typically cost per click listings are displayed to consumers when they're shopping for insurance. One example would be The Zebra, which is a price comparison site, a site that's striving to be the kayak of auto insurance. We work with them to place our cost per click ad listings on their sites on the results page as a way to help them monetize consumer shopping for insurance on their website. We also work with insurance carriers to display ads on their sites.
When a carrier displays a rate to a consumer, they know exactly really what the probability of that consumer, what the probability is for that consumer to buy a policy. If it's sufficiently low, they actually generate more revenue by kind of pivoting to becoming a media company and actually showing comparison ads on their quote page from some of their competitors. We work with over 40 insurance carriers to do that, again, to help them generate media revenue from all the insurance shopping traffic on their websites. On the demand side, that's simpler. That's just companies trying to sell insurance. Again, on the P&C side, mostly carriers, but we also work with agents and brokers as well. In terms of the media that we leverage to connect online shoppers with sellers of insurance, again, predominantly it's a cost per click model. Carriers buy clicks.
Within the property and casualty space, it's over 90% are really clicks being sold to insurance carriers. We do also have leads and calls as an ad product as a way to connect online shoppers. Predominantly, that's used to connect online shoppers with agents and brokers who don't have that online policy enrollment capability. When we talk about our platform, this is really what we mean, our technology platform. The scale that we have, we have the ability to really handle millions of shopping events daily through hundreds of publishers. Again, with the volume that we have and the scale that we have, we're quickly becoming one of the most important distribution and marketing channels for a lot of the carriers that we work with. It's about real-time customer acquisition.
It's the ability to really reach consumers on a real-time basis at or close to the point of purchase. Because they're at the point of purchase, not only do you have very high-intent consumers that you're targeting, you have consumers where you know a lot about the consumers. Because typically what they've done is filled out a form to get a quote, and you have data about how many cars they have, whether they're a homeowner or not, how many kids they have, their driving history. Carriers can then use that to refine a very granular bid that they want to place to try to reach that consumer. It allows these carriers to really de-average what they're paying to acquire consumers. That's one of the keys to the scale that we've been able to achieve. Talked about the multiple touch points.
Again, predominantly cost per click model, but we support leads and calls as well to support the entire ecosystem. Really, trust and transparency. Advertisers know exactly where they're reaching the consumers, whether it's on another insurance carrier's website, whether it's from a lead generator's website, whether it's from a price comparison site. They can price the media, what they're willing to pay for that consumer, a click from that consumer accordingly, because where they're coming from really makes a big difference in conversion rates and the expected lifetime value. The publishers also know exactly who's buying their inventory and what they're paying for it. We've touched on this a lot. Really, the hallmark of the media that we create a marketplace for is the amount of data that's available about the consumers. Again, they filled out a form.
Oftentimes you'll have 25, 30 pieces of data about them that carriers can use to really refine what they want to pay to acquire that consumer. In turn, all of this data allows us to really be able to leverage our machine learning capabilities to really optimize campaigns on behalf of consumers, on behalf of advertisers, and then optimize the yield for advertisers as well. Oftentimes, for a lot of the carriers we work with, we know exactly what the outcome is. Again, did that lead sale result in a customer sale? If so, how much was the expected lifetime value? Which clicks resulted in quotes? Which clicks resulted in policy sales? Again, what's the value of the policies that were being sold? We leverage all of that data.
Increasingly, we're able to leverage machine learning to really optimize things on behalf of all participants in the ecosystem. Focused on insurance, again, our really core vertical is really personal lines, property and casualty, mainly auto insurance, but also home and others within that property and casualty space. We also have a health insurance vertical as well. The big focus area there is really Medicare Advantage. As carriers start to go online to do direct distribution for a lot of the Medicare Advantage policies, that's our area of focus there. We also have an under 65 business that falls into that vertical. The other verticals, really non-insurance ones, really we don't focus too much on that, but it does give us option value to get into other verticals and get outside of insurance if that's something that we want to do in the future.
I think overall, to get you caught up in where the personal lines P&C industry is right now, many of you may have known that it went through a difficult underwriting cycle in the back half of COVID. Essentially, when people started to drive again and get into accidents again, the industry discovered just how much claims cost inflation there had been because of supply chain issues related to the pandemic. Essentially, claims costs went up by 50% from the beginning of the pandemic or prior to the pandemic to the end of it. Carriers need to then adjust their pricing, which then there's a little bit of a regulatory lag because 50 insurance commissioners have to approve pricing increases.
The market kind of went into what is called the hard market period for a period of two to three years as insurance carriers got their pricing to where it needed to be to retain or regain profitability or target profitability. At this point, we are just emerging from that cycle. You have big carriers like Progressive and Allstate and others who were kind of early to get those pricing increases approved, starting to market heavily again. Certainly, I would say the recovery is not fully taking a foot because a lot of the carriers beyond that really have not regained or gone back to their normal levels of spend. The market is improving and has been improving for the past year or so.
It is really poised for a period of growth for the next, I would say, three to five years, although you really never know how long these cycles go. I will hand it over to Pat for the next financial overview.
Thank you, Steve. Yeah, as far as our financial profile goes, I think Steve walked through a lot of the key pieces on here, but there are a couple of new ones I wanted to touch on. I think Steve talked about how we're a two-sided online marketplace, and those businesses tend to reward scale and tend to be at least winner-take-most markets. He talked a lot about the kind of the tailwinds we have in the industry in terms of auto insurance growing, number of users growing kind of with population. We've got some tailwinds of premiums or rising inflation plus a little bit. You add in the tailwind of online shopping, which is fast, and we're probably in the middle innings of that transition. You add in share gain on top. We think it's pretty exciting.
The operating model we have, I think Steve touched a little bit on it, but we've got 150 people. We have always run lean. We've always been profitable. That's core to our DNA. We're kind of seeing leverage increase in the model. We're diversified across verticals. We're heavily weighted towards property and casualty, but that is both a mix of auto insurance and home insurance. We've got a nice health business across Medicare Advantage in particular, but also under 65. We have really attractive cash flow characteristics that we'll get to. As far as the economic model for us, it's actually pretty simple the way it works for us. Our key top-line metric is transaction value, and that's trailing 12-month basis, about $1.75 billion. That represents total media spend by carriers, brokers, and agents across our platform.
We get a cut of that action for us, which is based on kind of the marketplace model we have. It can either be an open marketplace, which is our kind of full-service offering that we have, or we have a private marketplace model, which you can think of as being more of a technology provider fee. That is a much lower take rate that we take. A private marketplace tends to occur between really large publishers, call it top five, top ten publishers, and their top maybe one or two advertisers. As you think about our business, it is fully a performance marketing model. We get paid per click we deliver, per call, and per lead. There is no risk on our side. Quite frankly, we recognize revenue just like Google does, where a consumer clicks, boom, that is a revenue-generating event.
We would bill a carrier for it. We take our cut and we remit it to the publisher. Moving to the piece that is near and dear to my heart as the CFO, the financial performance. We have the wind at our back right now. You can see here the trajectory of the business really shows the impact of the hard market cycle and the subsequent market recovery that we have seen in P&C. 2020, which is not on the chart, was a good year for us. 2021 was pretty similar to 2020. 2022 and 2023 were tough years as carriers were focused on taking underwriting actions and taking rate to get their P&Ls where they needed them to be, and they were not at all focused on marketing.
As carriers have gotten a rate adequacy, you can see what has happened to their desire to acquire customers and our business results coming from that. We have been hitting kind of record highs in 2024 and in Q1 of 2025, and we put out guidance for Q2 that was relatively strong as well. We feel like we have got the wind at our back as we are going through 2025. We just wanted to deeper dive on Q1, and you can see the growth rates here, which have been triple digits for both top-line and bottom-line for us. Finally, and I touched on this at the beginning of my section, I just wanted to talk about the cash flow characteristics of MediaAlpha as a business. Simplistically, what cash flow is, it is adjusted EBITDA plus CapEx. We have virtually no CapEx as a firm.
We do not capitalize software development expense because it does not meet the threshold for that under the accounting literature. The only CapEx we have is office fit-outs and laptops. Next piece for us is working capital. We are a modest working capital business. There is a bit of working capital usage as we grow, but it has been relatively modest. Really, the biggest use of adjusted EBITDA, as you think about it, is debt service for us. We have some mandatory amortization of a little under 10 million a year plus interest on it. This is a business that has always generated cash. I think since the third month, it has been. We will continue to, and we have been excited to see the cash balance build as results have improved. As we think about this business over time, we have attractive secular trends.
We've got market leadership in a business where scale ultimately matters. We are seeing more carriers move online and kind of recognize that consumers are starting and often ending their shopping journey on the internet and realizing that the targetability and the data richness of our marketplace allows them to go after the exact types of customers that they want and that they win with. We are seeing that virtuous cycle manifest in wins with suppliers or publishers. Steve mentioned some of the big publishers that we have, but we are signing new folks that are interested in targeting their existing user base with insurance offers. We are also seeing folks that are players today switch to us increasingly, which has been very exciting. Lastly, our marketplace is very, very data rich.
Consumers provide a lot of information voluntarily on themselves in order to get customized offers and quotes. We are seeing more and more data as well. We have carriers passing us data. We have publishers passing data. We have seen shoppers multiple times over the years or even in a short period of time. We have a database that really gives us a tremendous amount of insight into how consumers shop, what they are shopping for, and what they look like. We are in the early days of kind of capitalizing on that data, but we think that is ultimately one of, if not our most important assets going forward. We are really excited to see what the future holds.
Great. Got a couple. Sometime I'll kick off with a question or two and then we'll have some time, but the environment clearly is, again, the wind's at your back, but it hasn't been a straight line. So 2024, Progressive, who's the gorilla, got back in the market, spent a lot of money towards the end. Allstate, State Farm got in first quarter, different reasons. Allstate pulled back, State Farm pulled back. Geico is still pretty low level, who's a big spender. How are you seeing the progression throughout the conversations? Not actually that you can't give your data, but in conversations with the big carriers, how's the progression look for the rest of the year? Are they beginning to get back in the market?
Yeah. I mean, I think the conversations with carriers are good. They're positive. I would say that the only, I guess, cycle overhang that we have right now is really the potential for the automotive tariffs to have an impact on claims costs. I would say that a lot of the insurance carriers are really being a little bit more cautious than they otherwise would be at this point of the underwriting cycle. It is not manifesting itself in terms of any kind of pullbacks, but we do think that it is having an impact on their ability to really, or willingness to really allocate even more budget or increase prices even further.
Okay. And then excluding Progressive for maybe fourth, fifth, and this is not exact, but just to give people an idea, what level of spend are they at maybe end of 2024 compared to what they were back in 2019-2020? In other words, were they at a quarter? Were they at 10%? Not looking for an exact, but is it that low?
Yeah. I think it's.
Yeah. I can take that one. I would say they're spending quite a bit more. I would say we've never given a hard number on it, but it's significantly more than they were spending at the prior peak. I think if you were to look at the.
Not Progressive, the rest.
The rest, I would say, are spending probably at or above where they were in the prior peak.
Okay. Okay. So they've already picked up.
I would say that sometimes, I mean, just that our marketplace has expanded so much since 2020, I would say maybe proportionally in terms of just the share of the overall marketplace, some of them are behind where they were in 2020. Certainly, in terms of absolute levels to spend, they're actually higher.
Okay. Okay. Their premium is much, much larger than it was in 2020.
Yes, exactly. Exactly. The volume of shoppers that we have within our marketplace is a lot greater than what we had before as well.
Just, again, not looking for an exact number, but the upside and downside, I mean, it's been a tough market for auto consumers, so that's translating to a lot of shopping. So the velocity of the market, the shopping, is that up 20%, 30%, 40%, 50% compared to pre-cycle like 2018, 2019? I mean, not looking for an exact, but you know what I mean?
Yeah.
Just some idea of how much more shopping is going on.
Yeah. I can take it. You can add on it. I would say the number of shoppers we've seen come through the platform has grown significantly since then, probably as much or more than some of the numbers you've talked about. The challenge is it's hard to attribute that to the average consumer because I think Steve had a stat of it was 30-some % of customers shopped online a couple of years ago, and it's 40-some % today. There's been share gain as well, which is our platform has grown. We would say that shopping is clearly elevated right now, but we've been benefiting from some of those secular trends that will continue. We believe a lot of it will persist over time.
Okay. Any questions from the audience?
Yeah. The other publicly traded companies in this space, so there's a couple that we can differentiate from. One is Everquote. One is LendingTree. I would characterize those companies as being primarily lead generators who have a broad network of both carriers as well as insurance agents that they're selling leads to. They're not a network of supply partners or publishers. They're really generating leads for themselves from their own sites, buying traffic from Google, for example, driving it to their own site, converting it into a lead that they then sell to agents and clicks that they sell to carriers. Even though they sell the same media types, they would be one publisher within our marketplace, for example. They're at a decent scale.
Again, they are not in the business of actually aggregating and pulling together hundreds of different websites and apps to actually aggregate a lot of the shopping behavior that you're seeing from consumers. QuinStreet, I would say, is a more directly comparable business. I would say that their overall market share, I mean, I think we have a much higher market share than they do of third-party publishers. In terms of the scale game, I think we're starting to really put some distance between us and others who are working with third-party publishers. I think that scale is starting to beget sort of competitive advantages because advertisers and carriers can actually optimize much better with the scale that we have in our marketplace and the data that's available.
Publishers are benefiting because there's just a lot more demand or more demand in our marketplace than others because, again, because of our scale and more demand just begets higher yield. They just make more money by being with us versus a smaller network.
Different question that, again, the market's had a lot of ups and downs, but I'd be interested in how maybe in the last four or five years your tech platform stack has evolved. I think about it, and please position it differently, that really there's a couple of components. You spend a lot of time in programming time, hooking in and creating APIs into the insurance companies to get a lot of data. That's one area. I think the second to me is that you obviously have got a very robust market/exchange that people shop on. The third is you're also providing a lot of the analytics to the insurance companies and also helping them shop. Sort of thinking about those three pockets, they're all interrelated, obviously, and you can describe it differently.
I guess in the last four or five years, what's been evolving, what's been updated, what's new and different today versus four or five years ago?
Sure. I would say that a lot of what's new are things that you wouldn't necessarily see as a buyer or a seller on our platform because our technology used to be much more about the bidding platform and the inventory management platform that we expose to advertisers and publishers. Certainly that aspect of our technology, we believe, is still best in class. It has really been, in the last four or five years, about the data integrations that we've been able to get with carriers, most notably all of the data that we get back about the outcomes of the clicks, leads, and calls that's ultimately being directed to them so that we can help them calculate really what their return on ad spend is.
All of the issues that we have with carriers and the publishers to actually get the data that's being entered by the consumers and then passing it on to the buyers or the insurance carriers to actually make for a more seamless conversion experience. All of the data that's available.
Sorry. Stay with that for a second. Because you've had the integrations with carriers for a good number of years, is that the integrations are better? Are your systems pulling the better data? Are the insurance companies having better systems to get the.
I would say a lot of it. I would say that we have now conversion tracking, our outcome integrations with more carriers than before. I would say that those integrations are more robust. Something as simple as they just do not go down as much as they used to. The data that we are getting back is more accurate than before. Yeah.
Yeah. To put a point on it, the way a number of these integrations have worked over time is they might have been, they send us a spreadsheet once a month was how they started. Then we'd have to do a bunch of manual manipulation on it. Oh, crap, they added a new column, deleted a column, whatever's going to happen, and there's latency on the data, doesn't always get updated, it might be incomplete. Now suddenly it's on an API basis and boom, it automatically gets pushed a number of times a day. It's automatically ingested. There's way more data that gets pushed in something like that versus a spreadsheet that a person needs to manipulate and send.
It hasn't been a linear journey, but I think that example hopefully shows kind of the power of automation because we can just get more, better, faster, cheaper.
Yeah. Before we continue, that's the end of the official presentation. We're actually doing the breakout here, so please feel free to stay and ask questions. Sorry if you want to continue, Steve.
I would say that the second part that you really don't see is the data science and how important data science has now become. I think a lot of companies talked about it, and us included, but now that we actually for years, but the reality is that vision of using machine learning to really optimize campaigns for advertisers and optimize yields for publishers really wasn't a reality until fairly recently, now that we have the scale and the data that comes along with the scale. I would say that those are the two main things that have really changed about our technology and what we focus on.
Okay. From an outcome standpoint, I would guess, but please let me know, that probably translates into more of an accurate market and better probably conversions ultimately. I mean, can you demonstrate that ROI, or is that the outcome, but can you actually see that?
Yeah, that is because the more you can help carriers more accurately price access to a given consumer, it just benefits the entire ecosystem. It results in higher yield for publishers. It gives publishers a signal as to what's more valuable to go out and acquire because the publishers are making traffic acquisition decisions themselves. They are figuring out what to bid on Google for certain keywords. The more accurate the value of clicks from those keywords are when they ultimately convert it into clicks that they then send on to carriers, the better that they can bid on Google, for example. They can get more of what's valuable and less of what's not. That helps the entire ecosystem.
And then ultimately, once that granularity results into higher performance at scale for advertisers, they just are allocating more and more budget into the ecosystem. Yeah. Yeah. It is largely a spot market. The carriers can come and then they allocate whatever budget that they want. Again, we get visibility probably a couple of months ahead of time. They give us budget indications and the spend indications. I would say that it operates a lot like Google AdWords in that sense. They can come and increase their spend when they want. They can decrease their spend when they want.
At times like this, when it's a soft market cycle, when they're really looking to increase the level of customer acquisition investments that they want to make, our ability to really handle that increase, I think, is unparalleled, which is why I think one of the reasons that we're getting allocated so much budget in this upcycle. It certainly works the other way in a downcycle as well. One of the reasons that during the last hard market cycle that our P&C business went down a bit.
Part of your business has always been not just, how I say it won't be right, not just selling clicks to insurance companies, but you also help them buy and then remarket. One, could you talk about that business a bit? Over the years, has that been expanding? Is that a bigger and bigger part of your business?
I'd say it's expanded in one realm. Let me just describe what that means. That's one of the things I described early on in my presentation where one of our big publisher bases are insurance carriers themselves. We work with carriers like Allstate and Progressive and others where they're not just buyers in our ecosystem. They're actually sellers. When a consumer is on one of those sellers' carrier site and they get a quote, again, they know that, hey, this consumer is not going to convert with me, or I don't have a good price for this consumer, or maybe I don't even have a product for this consumer.
What we do is work with those carriers to help them generate revenue from those consumers who, again, otherwise wouldn't have purchased a policy from them by showing that consumer comparison ads, oftentimes from competitive insurance carriers. What that enables them to do is then spend more in the upfront marketing that they do to get users to their site. It really supplements the monetization that they have, that they can generate from customers that they're acquiring to their site, and supplements the policy sale revenue that they generate from that. I would say one way that program has expanded is because we're doing this kind of a program with more insurance carriers than ever. I think it's 40 plus at this point.
In terms of growth, I would say that the growth of other publishers, notably like insurance comparison sites, has meant that this part of our business probably is not as big as it was maybe five or six years ago, but it is still a very important part of the overall ecosystem. I do not know , if you have anything to add to that.
I think you covered it.
I apologize. I made a mistake. Sorry about that, guys. I thought we were in the same room. We actually break out as Up and Burnham. I apologize about that as people are weakening.
All right. Thanks, everyone.
I'll join you guys.