To day two of the TIMT Conference. Super excited to be joined once again by Magnite. We have CEO Michael Barrett and Katie Evans, President of Operations. Thank you guys for joining us on a rainy morning here.
Thank you, Matt.
As we think about third quarter results, can you just at a high level kind of speak to us about what drove the performance in CTV and DV+? Then as we come to the end of the year, what's been maybe surprising or played out differently throughout the year than you expected?
Yeah, so we always kind of cite our top growers in the earnings transcript. This year, this go-around, this quarter, one of the new entrants was NBCU. I think one of the exciting things about their inclusion is typically folks have thought of that as inventory out of our reach, largely because it's owned by Comcast and Comcast owning Freewheel. Little by little, I think we have exhibited our ability to be a superior programmatic layer. We can work with any ad server, whether it's GAM or whether it's Freewheel. I think we're excited about their inclusion in the list. We also had Netflix in there, Roku, Warner Bros. Discovery. Just kind of more same-store sales in the CTV story. Kind of a strengthening from a better-than-feared ad economy going into the upfront season.
There was a lot of trepidation. We had just finished Liberation Day. I think the idea that the upfronts might be strong and actually exceed expectation was so far off the table. They actually did, I think. I think publishers were not elated about the CPMs they were getting, but the amount of dollars that they were getting and the guarantees that they were getting, I think, is a statement of spend that you are going to start to see now going into Q1, Q2 of next year. We are excited about that. On the DV+ side, I think it has just been a consistent story all year where we kind of thought DV+ would be kind of a mid-single-digit grower, 5% or so, and that would outpace the market. It has been growing this year closer to the 8%.
I think we attribute that to share gains, that it's been a great year for that team. We feel really good about that business. Obviously, none of that includes any of the Google remedies that may or may not be coming any day soon.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so one thing that we've been talking about for years now is kind of the evolution of the CTV market. As someone who has access, as you mentioned, now with NBCU, 29 of the top 30 publishers.
Yeah, I guess YouTube would be the sole folks.
We'll get them. Can you just kind of give us color on what you see as the current state of the CTV market in terms of evolution? Maybe kind of like if we want to go baseball, what inning we're in and what you think the keys to those remaining layers of maturity are.
Yeah, I think it's important to remember that we are very early on in the business, largely. If you go back a mere three years ago, the idea that Netflix would have ads would be absolutely against the grain. That was the bright shining beacon, like highest price you can get for a subscription, no ads, because that's what the consumer wants. Turns out the consumer wants a lower price for a subscription, and they're willing to deal with ads. That is now the basic offering across the board. There's no tier of any popular service that's not ad-supported. That's the first step. Folks start to sell those ads. Usually, if they have a legacy sales team, they start selling direct. Programmatic's the next phase. We are just kind of getting into that programmatic phase.
If you think about what our biggest competitor would be, I would say it's the direct sales team of Disney, the direct sales team of Warner Bros. Their desire to want to continue to go to market the way they did for the last 75 years on linear. The amount of inventory that we get access to for programmatic is quite small today. You see the success we're having with that. That's only going to increase as folks get more comfortable with programmatic. We do more advanced targeting. Most importantly, a whole new cohort of advertising advertisers come in. To date, we've been talking about the top 500 national advertisers that are brand advertisers that were legacy broadcast advertisers. This story going forward is going to be about the 20,000 advertisers that advertise on TikTok, that advertise on Meta, that advertise in Google on YouTube.
Their barriers to entry have all been eroded. It used to cost a ton of money to create ad creative. Now it can be done in 30 seconds and good. We bought a company called Streamer recently, and we play with the tools all the time. It is fascinating how good they are. It has been too high a price point. There is a glut of inventory today, and there is a price point for every advertiser. It is not performant. These are performance advertisers. Now it is becoming performant. You got great guys like MNTN doing wonderful work. Being able to measure in real-time feedback is essential to these advertisers. That is the dawn of the programmatic era. You do not hire salespeople to go out to those advertisers. You cannot. That is all automated. That has yet to even manifest itself.
Going back to the baseball, we're out of the dugout, but they may be doing the national anthem. How's that?
That's fantastic for a company that sits in that space. And to your point, you're not going to have someone in the direct sales force say, "Hey, these are your 20,000 new clients.
Go get them. Yeah. They can't buy that way. They wouldn't know what to do if you came to them and offered an insertion order. They would say, "Where's your wagon? Where's the interface?
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, another part of the CTV progression we've talked a lot about is live sports. I think you said on your call in October or that Disney in October, you're now involved in the NFL and NCAA football. Is that with ESPN?
They're one of our partners that would provide that inventory for us. We also work with some of the virtual MVPDs, so a Dish or.
Fubo.
Yeah, Fubo and anyone like that that would have access to that carriage, we would monetize. We get it internationally too, right? We do Channel 9, 7 in Australia, and some of the U.K. channels that carry American football. We get access to that because we have partnerships in place there.
Yeah. I mean, digging in on partnerships, and I want to make a capital S on the back of that, not just focus on one, but we got to touch on Netflix a bit. How are you feeling on the Netflix partnership year and some change in and just kind of how this has progressed relative to expectations? We get myopic a little bit. You guys do not. We as investors get myopic on Netflix.
Yes, I never get myopic.
How are you thinking? Or what other partnerships should we be paying more attention to?
Yeah, so on Netflix, we're elated with the state of the partnership. Obviously, it was a huge win for us at the time in terms of what we understood about their go-to-market strategy and their rollout that we felt a degree of comfort in saying that exiting 2025, Netflix could be on a run rate or one of our biggest, if not biggest, customers in CTV. That's playing itself out. It's just a tremendous technical partnership. We hit our marks. They hit their marks. Nothing has, from a technical standpoint, stopped their go-to-market strategy. We really think it's a terrific relationship that we have in place. As far as kind of the overlooked partnerships, I think that I would bucket them in two buckets. One would be ones that are complicated. Folks have never really been in the ad game before.
They want to get in the ad game. Those are kind of the commerce media folks that you're a Best Buy, you're a United Airlines. You have unique inventory. You have TVs in store. You have gate space. You have screens on the seats. Those require wiring. Those require implementation of our ad server. Those, even though we don't cite them as top growers, are super important for two reasons. Number one, they will be at a certain point when they reach scale, a big contributor to the revenue story.
Even more importantly, I think they're proving that this next wave of commerce media, the folks, the Best Buys of the world, the United, etc , they are eschewing what was phase one, which was, generally speaking, take your data, park it in a DSP, white label a DSP, do whatever you want, but it's in the DSP. If an advertiser wants to advertise, they have to come through your DSP. I think they're all feeling, "Why am I limiting advertisers' choices? Why don't I keep it closer to the supply side? I'll partner with a Magnite, put the data there, and bring your own DSP. Utilize any DSP." I feel really comfortable about my data being parked here because there's a safety element to it as well.
I think what you're seeing from those relationships is kind of a sea change in terms of value. That audience creation, segmentation, shifting to the sell side is a big, I think, lever in terms of what's underlooked in terms of the enterprise value of SSPs.
Yeah. Your success in CTV partnerships, obviously, has led to some organic or natural expansion in volume. When we think about kind of the revenue dynamic going forward, how much of it is that continued volume growth versus a take rate or pricing rebalancing? How do you think are kind of the dynamics for each of those variables within CTV?
Yeah, volume, obviously, quite important. Take rates have been quite stable for some time. We've talked about it before. To us, we feel as though there's more upside from a take rate than downside because folks point to it and say, "Oh, there must be pressure every year. You do renewals." Most of these are evergreen in respect. The price points have been all figured out for years. Generally speaking, what we're seeing is, and this occurred probably eight quarters ago, where there was a whoosh of premium inventory. As we talked about before, the preference of the Paramounts, the Warners, the Disneys is to try to sell direct, even if it's programmatic. That tier, that product that we offer, that programmatic sold, a publisher sold programmatic, we kind of just act as the plumbing layer, and you get paid appropriately.
As opposed to if we bring demand or we run an auction, that's a different product, and that's a higher price point from a take rate. We feel as though we're kind of in the historically low range of the take rate right now. In addition to volume increases going forward, we think you're going to see our take rate be able to increase. It'll have a double whammy impact on the volume.
Yeah. I guess kind of building on that, we've talked a lot on the calls lately about all the different direct paths into Magnite. Is that a traditional SSP service with this traditional take rate, or should we be thinking about that kind of differently?
Are you referring specifically to our partnership with Amazon, Yahoo, Viant?
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think we've never really disclosed what the economics are, but they do all flow through our Spring-Serve ad server. And so we have economics in place on that, and we enjoy that demand that comes through the Spring-Serve ad server for those direct programs. That's why we feel when you talk about Open-Path, you talk about any of these direct programs that, hey, it brings more money to the publisher. Awesome. In most cases, it does. Our job is to help the publisher, facilitate that revenue. This is a perfect example of us being able to help because otherwise, you'd have to go door to door on every one of the big streamers to stitch in your direct path. In addition to their normal path coming through our SSP, we assemble it through the ad server.
There is a two-path strategy, and we make money on both sides.
Yeah. So regardless of how the demand's coming in, still ending up back at your ad server.
That's correct.
That's where everything funnels through. Maybe switching off CTV for a second, thinking about DV+. You mentioned it's been a good year relative to kind of market growth rates. How should we think about some of the blend of secular in DV+, which is, I think, typically thought of as a very cyclical growth industry?
Yeah. I mean, DV+ is such a wide swath, right? I mean, you have some areas that are in secular decline, which would be desktop inventory, search referral choking the growth of that segment. And then you have high flyers like mobile app. One of the big growers for a long while for us was online video. What we are seeing is with the price points being so attractive in CTV, we are seeing online video leak from the DV+ bucket into the CTV bucket. It still works for us, but it does create a little headwind for DV+. I think we have to be careful about looking at the portfolio of inventory within DV+ and saying there are high flyers still in there, and then there are other ones that are kind of flat to downish.
No matter how you look at it, I feel as though our role is to outpace the market in terms of growth. I think we've exhibited that over the last couple of years in that business. We remain committed to it, and it's a very healthy cash flow chunk of the business. Obviously, you have the option of a Google remedy hearing that could very much impact the growth rate of DV+.
We'll get to that. I've heard about this. I've heard about the remedy. Going back to the quarter, there were some headwinds in the DV+ business from OpenPath. You're also scaling your own direct solution in Clearline. Can you just kind of expand on the shared goal, which I think you elaborated a little bit on the call, right, about that you agree fundamentally with what Trade Desk wants to do in cleaning up the supply path, but just kind of how you guys are both going after this and how you see this impacting and progressing in the future?
Yeah. A bit to unpack there. I definitely echo what you said, and that is 99% of what Jeff and the team at The Trade Desk are trying to do to the open web, we, Katie's team particularly, leaned in completely aligned. We feel as though there's still a lot of bad actors, a lot of folks that are providing zero value, too many hops, too much cost in the whole process. I mean, again, today we'll process 2 trillion ad requests, and only 400 billion will make it to auction. Even that is an astonishingly high number. One of the reasons why those ad requests are so high is because the end tools, the software, the DSPs, have a huge bias to volume.
If they see Publisher X, and let's just say Publisher X is a very small publisher, but Publisher X somehow figures out how to take one ad impression and make it look like 30 to The Trade Desk, it tricks The Trade Desk, and it says, "That's a big publisher. Funnel more spend towards that." They are very volume biased. Even the best players, like the best publishers, trick the DSPs because they know they'll get more money. We beseech the DSPs to try to fix the algorithm so that we're not bearing the brunt of it because we have the 2 trillion ad requests coming in, and a lot of that is that. We are 100% aligned. I guess where we may differ slightly is tactics, how to do it.
I think changing Kokai and having Magnite not be a default setting would not be the tactic I would have chosen. Katie's and her team quickly went to market, reversed that, were able to rewire it. That is kind of in the rearview mirror. As for Clearline, it does the exact same thing on the buy side. It is not a DSP. We do not want to be a DSP, but there are pockets of dollars out there that are incredibly fee-sensitive, want just a dumbed-down pipe to be able to get into supply, and want it to almost feel like it is a direct business, but it is automated. That is not a DSP. That is the service we provide. Hundreds of millions of dollars of spend are coursing through Clearline. That is our attempt to get publishers more money in a less friction-filled path.
Yeah. I mean, it's great, like you said, that this feels like it's in the rearview already, but you also did speak to the diversification in demand that you see. There are 150 different demand partners, plus SPO creating another layer of resiliency of the platform. Can you just give us some kind of color, I guess, on how much more, I guess, resilient or robust the demand flowing in is?
I think what we'll take away from this exercise, and exercise being probably an innocuous term, but this latest series of the DSPs are going to crush the SSPs, and they're going to perish. I think what we will exhibit, and people will acknowledge post the repairing of the flow to Magnite, is our importance to the buy side. We've talked about how important the holding companies are to us, but we don't often talk about how important Magnite is to the holding companies. They literally have built their businesses on our pipes. When they do their curated markets, their premium marketplaces, they show up on an interface of a DSP as an exchange. If their exchange is cut off, that goes right to the heart of how they make money.
We play a vital role with the biggest spenders at The Trade Desk, at Google, at Amazon, and we're very important to them. I think that folks should understand that the folks that use the DSP value Magnite greatly. We've been able to build—our demand facilitation team is bigger than our supply team, and we get paid by the supply side. In order to run a marketplace like we do and to be able to attract the publishers we do, we have to bring the monetization. We are very dependent upon good relationships, value propositions, building tools, and that's not what every SSP does. There will be a winter for SSPs in terms of this cutting around them, but Magnite's not going to be one of them.
Yeah. Maybe a good place to build on that is talking about some of these preferred relationships you're developing in DV+. I think we spend a lot of time talking about the tech build-out in CTV. When you win in CTV, I think we kind of know why. When you're winning these preferred relationships with Pinterest, for example, what's driving those arrangements?
I'll let Katie opine as well, but in the initial meeting, they sought us out. They saw that we had a plethora of those types of relationships. Pinterest doesn't necessarily look at us and say, "Oh, we're a DV+ client." They look at Magnite and say, "You can do it for Netflix. You do it for Disney. You do it for United. You do it for this guy. You do it for that guy." Wow. You can build out, it can feel like it's my business. You can build a programmatic business for me. You do it for Roku. You do it for Spotify. You can build out a programmatic layer for me. We can hang a Pinterest sign on it, and it'll feel like it's Pinterest's business run on Magnite's rails. That's not a common offering among SSPs. That's quite unique.
I think that folks really, whether it's DV+ or CTV, they view it the same way. If they want to get into the programmatic business, but they want to control the programmatic business, we're kind of the one-stop shop that they know they can do that.
Yeah. I think there's an iteration of marketplaces jumping up, right? Being able to control that, have the safety net of my data staying within my ecosystem. It's not going to the buyers or the demand side. We can kind of run it how we want to with the technology that you provide. It's just, I think, a big direction on where the premium programmatic space is going.
Last call, we also talked a little bit about 2026. I know predicting macro and ad tech is always a dangerous, dangerous game. We talked about 11% revenue growth and 35% EBITDA margins. Fairly consistent with kind of the way we started off thinking about 2025. Could you just talk about what are the assumptions that went into 2026 or the moving parts that may have influenced that outlook?
Yeah. Like all companies who are in the upturn right now in the real budgeting process in terms of going bottoms up for 2026, I think, and as you know, we do not do annual guides. We just do it quarterly. We have gotten into a practice of trying to help in terms of, "Okay, we think the margin profile is going to look like this. The CapEx was artificially high in Q4. Only think of it as being 60 next year." Sooner or later, you give enough breadcrumbs, you back into a revenue growth number to justify the other math. I think we have been conservative before. As you said, it is impossible to read the macros. I think that DV+ as we talked about punched above its weight this year.
I don't think we can always expect it to be a high single-digit grower because of the vagaries of it. Of course, we didn't take into account anything from Google into those numbers. That has CTV growing healthily. Is there upside to both sides of the business? Sure. Our intention was more to kind of help bracket on the cost side and the margin side, which obviously led to coming up with a growth number. I think we feel good about going into the year.
We'll flip to audience questions in one second. Touching on Google, maybe splitting the two lawsuits, the first being the remedies of the antitrust trial, just kind of what you think of the opportunity now versus maybe a few months ago and your ability to gain share regardless of the outcome. The second, if any additional color on your decision to also sue Google.
Yeah. As far as the remedy is concerned, it's been fascinating. I mean, fascinating is probably too strong of a phrase because it's so inside baseball. They're supposed to be having the remedy hearings as we speak, and they pushed them off, which is usually a sign that there's communication going between the two parties. It wouldn't be surprising, according to our outside counsel, if DOJ and Google have rolled up their sleeves and they're having conversations as we speak. What does that mean? I have the faintest idea. The original thought process was that Judge Brinkman would listen all week and then take several months to come back with her final remedy. DOJ wants structural. Google wants behavioral. Some people are reading the tea leaves that she's not going to go structural.
They are also looking at the search trial and saying, "Well, they got off easy on search, so they're going to get off easy again." Huge difference between the two. They have been found guilty of running a legal monopoly in ad tech, and it was just business practices in search. There is no going back. It is guilty, right? That kind of dovetails into our suit. It would be bad fiduciary duty if we did not pursue damages from someone who has been guilty of running a monopoly.
Yeah. Any questions from the group? All right. GenAI, Agentic, whichever way you want to take it, can you talk about both the impact on Magnite the company, but also what you're seeing from an impact from an industry level?
Yeah. Very early days, a lot of movement, which is smart to try to standardize. The tech lab from the IAB has recently come out with their protocols. Another group, it's called Ad Context Protocol or Ad CP, came out with another set. They differ in some ways, but ultimately, both are dependent upon the existing rails. Someone has to vet whether or not that's really the publisher that they're talking to. Someone has to collect the money. Someone has to serve the ads. Someone has to make sure it's not malware. Instead of trying to reinvent RTB, they're trying to improve it by putting an agentic layer on top of it, but the existing infrastructure exists. I think we thrive no matter what system is adopted. We're leaning into every option.
It looks like it's more even closer collapsing of the buy and the sell side, which is exciting because both of them propose that to occur in the ad server, and we have SpringServe. We feel really positive about the agentic future. Lastly, I think that some of our biggest publishing partners going forward will be the ChatGPTs, the Claudes of the world. They are not going to 100% soup to nuts, build their own ad businesses, and they're going to be in the ad business. They're going to be huge publishers for us in the not too distant future of 17, 16.
My last question was what you're most excited about in the next three to five years. Did we just kind of cover it, or is there something else you'd want to call out in the last few seconds here?
Yeah. No, I think this whole agentic future is real. It's going to be impactful to the business. It's going to be great for the end users. It's so complicated today. It's going to simplify it. I think we'll be a centerpiece in it and super excited.
Thank you both so much for getting us kicked off this morning and fighting the rain to be here. We appreciate it.
Thank you.