All right, good morning. I'm Justin Patterson. I lead the Internet Research Team at KeyBanc. I'm excited to have Steve Pantelick from PubMatic with us here today. Steve, welcome.
Great to be here.
Great. You know, to kick things off. Let's just recap your 2024.
Sure. 2024 was a year for us where we had some terrific growth in key secular growth areas for us. We've been building our CTV business for a handful of years organically, and we hit a high watermark in the fourth quarter of 20% of revenue. Importantly, you know, on a yearly basis, that grew, excluding political, 100%. Really terrific growth in CTV. Mobile app also hit a major milestone, 20% of revenue, grew 16% for the full year. Our emerging revenues, which we just launched a couple of years ago, you know, doubled in the fourth quarter. That's sort of like the core part of our business, the secular growth areas, and something that we've been very focused on developing and growing. Very successful.
One of the challenges we faced midyear was there was a change in the auction process for one of our large DSPs that implemented, you know, about midyear. What I had anticipated was going to sort of be a drop-down in activity and then be relatively stable, that's exactly what's happened. The important thing is the impact of that we were able to grow through. In the second half of the year, that year-over-year revenue impact was $20 million. We were able to grow beyond that. Actually, in the second half of the year, on a reported basis, grew 6%.
Now, one of the stats that I introduced in the third quarter for investors to understand the, you know, the underneath that level, top level, is take a look at our business excluding the impact from the DSP, the headwind, and then excluding the benefit of political. Our core business that I just described — CTV, mobile app, etc. — two-thirds of our revenue grew 17% in the third quarter, 16% in the fourth quarter. I mentioned on earnings last week, you know, thus far through the first quarter, 15% plus. Overall, it's very important for investors to understand what we've done as a company in terms of innovating and focusing our energies towards the fastest-growing secular areas. It was a really big year for us to demonstrate that and sets us up very well for 2025.
Got it. Got it. I heard a couple of transitory factors in there, but core growth healthy. Let's step back for a second in there. You play on the supply side of the market. How do you view the role of the SSP changing right now as you have some of these new formats like CTV emerging?
From our perspective as a company, we've been actually evolving and morphing for a number of years. I think what is really important for investors to understand is that today we have a very integrated platform. Historically, we would have had one core customer set — publishers, mobile app, you know, premium publishers, mobile app publishers, etc. Today, we have four segments. Beyond the publisher segment, we have advertisers and holding companies; that's segment number two for buyers. I'll get into that in a minute. Number three, we have a very important segment related to curation partners and data partners. Number four, Commerce media. Today, we have an integrated platform that works across the ecosystem. That's a really important distinction of who we are.
Calling us an SSP solely is probably not the right moniker, but certainly it's simple to understand in the specific capabilities of what our core long-term competency has been. Now, why is that relevant? What it's allowed us to do is to tap into incremental sources of growth and revenue. Two years ago, we launched Activate, which is a window, a UI into our platform for buyers like Mars, etc. We have a data curation platform where data owners like Experian, Comscore, Instacart, you know, Proximic, all could actually leverage our platform to monetize their valuable asset through curation. That business, by the way, the Connect business, grew 140% in the fourth quarter. Overall, as a company, we've evolved. We've focused on the fastest-growing areas. We've been very innovative, and we have a fully, you know, integrated platform that covers many important areas of the ecosystem.
Got it. Got it. Let's stick with that one theme of just working with the advertisers in there. There's a piece you've been very big on the past few years, supply path optimization. Talk about what SPO is and really how that's just changed your value proposition with the publishers you're working with.
Great. We were a pioneer — this is now probably seven years ago — where we concluded that a vital aspect of us delivering incremental value to our publishers was to make sure that we have great relationships and understand the needs of advertisers. It started out just as a get-to-know-you conversation seven years ago that has morphed over time, where we have deep, you know, technical commercial relationships with, you know, the biggest advertisers in the world. We have relationships with all six holdcos. Supply-path optimization is really a moniker for how do we simplify the supply chain for buyers? How do we make it more efficient, more performant, higher ROI for buyers? We have done that technically through, you know, data integrations, workflows, but importantly, helping advertisers understand what they are buying, the transparency behind it.
Today, SPO, you know, represents about 53% of all the activity on our platform. The reason why that's so important for our publishers is it basically brings incremental demand to their business. It helps us, you know, bring new innovative solutions to buyers and to publishers. Ultimately, it's a very sticky part of our business. You know, I've shared the stat over the last couple of years in terms of the incremental growth that we get from existing cohorts. That is something that's going to continue to be a very long-term tailwind for us. The last thing I'll mention is the reason why it's such an important strategic initiative, beyond the points that I just made, it really helps us get very good clarity about what advertisers, holdcos, need — like what problems are they needing to solve.
Out of that understanding, we've created some really innovative solutions. You know, Rajeev mentioned recently the solution of working with Dentsu. Our buy-side product, Activate, and our data-side product, Connect, are the backbone for Dentsu's Mercury for Media. We've done that, this similar type of innovation, with a number of the holdcos. It's that kind of connectivity that is going to add, you know, long-term value for our publishers and our buyers.
Got it. There was something you said there that I wanted to touch on a little bit more. We often talk about just the need for the supply chain to be more efficient. Could you elaborate on just where those inefficiencies exist today and how some of the products you're developing are helping add that value back to advertisers?
Sure. I mean, big picture, you know, the advertiser who wants to place an ad today would go to, you know, their whole code, their agency developed the creative, and then the actual programmatic implementation of that would go to a DSP. A DSP would decide where they want to place and buy that ad. It would go to an SSP. There is sort of all the interaction on the data side, whether on the third-party side or first-party side. A lot of skips and hops along that process. From an advertiser's perspective, that creates inefficiency, you know, complexity. You know, ultimately our conclusion was there is a better way to do it.
We developed this product, Activate, where a buyer like Mars Petcare can directly access the 800 billion impressions that we process every day and decide where they want to place their ad. It takes out hops in that process. The economics are better. The ROI is better. In this case, Mars shared with us that, you know, they got a 20% uplift above their sales goals utilizing Activate through this process. A part of our long-term mission is how do we, you know, become, you know, that sort of supply chain of the future where we ultimately, you know, provide transparency, efficiency, ROI, and, of course, you know, results for, you know, our partners.
Great. I am glad you brought up that example because I think one of the things that has always differentiated PubMatic from peers and one of the reasons behind your market share is you do solve a lot of these pain points for publishers within there and advertisers. When you look at 2025, what are some of your top product priorities and how is GenAI fueling some innovation at the company?
GenAI is obviously central to our company as it is many companies. From our perspective, you know, as a company, we've actually been, you know, working in this space for really the whole life of our company. A big branch is machine learning. We do a lot of very intense transaction processing, 800 billion impressions per day. The DNA is in our company. About two years ago, we introduced GenAI tools into the engineering organization. We've shared some of the really impressive, you know, throughput productivity results. Last year, we improved our throughput in the engineering organization by 15%. GenAI is a part of the Genetic Makeup. We started to turn our attention towards how do we, you know, leverage GenAI for revenue-producing opportunities.
In the fourth quarter, we launched a product for publishers to, in an automated fashion, assess ad creatives from political ad buyers because, historically, publishers were very reticent to, you know, bring on political ads onto the website because their readership may not really appreciate an alternative point of view. We developed a product where it could be — that could be done, you know, automatically. This opened up, sort of, incremental inventory opportunities for 200 publishers. That really, you know, added an incremental layer of, you know, revenue that we otherwise wouldn't have had without this product offering. What we are doing is we're just extending, sort of, incremental opportunities. For example, we recently launched a report-AI tool for our publishers so they can, natural language, you know, ask, you know, what did my — what was my top producing inventory unit yesterday?
You know, what's the trend over the last seven days, months in a way where it would have probably taken an hour or so to use the tools that we had in place formerly. Our first foray is to make it easier to get access to information. In parallel, we're working on incremental products to help publishers sell more inventory. It's going to be an ongoing, you know, pipeline that we're going to launch, you know, as time goes on. The important takeaway for investors, this is not something that, you know, we're just hiring a few people to help do it. Everybody in the company is centered around these initiatives and in different pockets of the company. You know, for example, in the areas that I manage, I'm leveraging multiple third-party tools to get more productive, take manual processes, making them automated.
We've embraced the opportunity and investors should expect to see incremental products, you know, in the coming quarters and years that will drive, you know, our top line.
Got it. I think a good segue from there — you've mentioned scale a couple of times, 800 billion impressions. You're unique in that you own your own infrastructure. Could you talk about just some of the opportunities having that owned infrastructure creates for you?
Sure. Absolutely. It's an area that we're particularly proud of. We've invested for a decade in developing and, you know, optimizing our own infrastructure. What that's allowed us to do is multiple outcomes. Number one, it's very efficient and cost-effective. We've been able to drive down our unit costs consistently over many years. We believe we're one of the lowest-cost suppliers of impressions in the ecosystem. What that does, ultimately, is it allows us to pass those efficiencies on to our partners. Number two, we're able to actually incrementally reinvest in other areas from the profit that that unlocks. Number three, you know, over time, it allows us to move more nimbly and deliver better outcomes for everybody involved. Case in point, you know, when we have, sort of, our own operated equipment, we can create Private peering with, sort of, the buyers.
Any incremental bidding action in a real-time auction is going to deliver incremental value for our publishers. These are the kinds of things that we're always looking for in terms of leveraging, you know, the infrastructure that we own. Fundamentally, it's really been very positive for us, not just from a profitable generation perspective, but from cash flow as well.
Great. To bridge a couple of points together here, you've got this infrastructure advantage in there and there's this natural mix shift happening at the business. You said over 20% of revenue is now coming from CTV. As you see this shift toward higher value formats, talk about just what that does to unit economics and some of the flexibility you have to operate.
Great. It actually is going to have very positive effects on us in the long run. The reason why is the cost to process a display impression and a video impression is roughly the same. As our mix shift has been going from sort of historical display format to higher value online video, CTV, the marginal profitability is quite high. Because we have basically a fixed cost system, because we own and operate our own equipment, that marginal profitability drops to the bottom line. The long-term trajectory for our economics is very positive. The other point to call out is, you know, we do not plan on just being sort of a one-stop shop. You know, we have a whole portfolio of revenue-generating opportunities that I referenced.
In the case of CTV and mobile app, et cetera, what's important to note is these areas are long-term growth areas. Desktop display, you know, is about 20% of our business today. A couple of years ago, it was 40%. We have clearly, you know, migrated towards these fast-growing areas. To your point, the marginal profitability of our business should continue to grow. What that's going to allow us to do is continue to reinvest in innovation and, obviously, you know, drop dollars to the bottom line.
Got it. Got it. And stick with CTV for a second. You know, there's been a lot of focus lately on just the deflationary effect Amazon's had on just CTV price points in the market. You see some of these large streaming companies, you know, struggle with the prices they're getting right now, what opportunities is that creating for PubMatic here? Should we think of this year as a year of logo growth?
Absolutely. We've been having a, you know, couple of years of logo growth, just to isolate on that one point. And then I'll get to your prior question. You know, as a company, we've been expanding access to the top 30 streamers across the globe. A quarter ago, we had access to 70%. In one quarter, we increased that by 10 percentage points. I want to really dispel this notion that somehow we haven't had access to premium inventory in the CTV space. Absolutely. We have a chair at the table, and you could see it in our results.
Now, in terms of sort of the overall dynamics, you know, supply, demand, price points for a company like ours who has been focusing on driving down the cost to process and everything that we do is about real-time processing, we want more scale because that allows us to sort of expand our footprint, leverage all of our strengths. Ultimately, changes in prices that you've described will expand the market. That is only good for companies like PubMatic where we can incrementally grow the business as well as deliver bottom-line results. There might be some disruption, you know, quarter to quarter, but at the end of the day, programmatic ultimately reaches its pinnacle of outcomes when it's at scale, it's efficient and data is being passed appropriately.
I can think of another thing that might be good for PubMatic. There's a large DOJ case that should have a verdict in the next couple of weeks. You know, how do you think about just what the market share opportunity could look like if Google, which has been the dominant player in the market, is forced to divest its ad tech assets or even just compete in a different manner than before?
As you say, I mean, we're not sure when the decision is going to come out, but from our perspective, you know, it's absolutely going to be a net positive. Two reasons. One, first, we've been competing with Google our whole life, and we've been doing it successfully. You know, point of reference is, you know, you take a look at their network business, which is the closest proxy for us to see, you know, from an outside-in, has been declining over the last couple of years. That's a function of market-share shifts that, you know, gains that we and others have had. Today, we compete very effectively. You can imagine a world where that dynamic changes.
All the innovation and the focus that, you know, we've brought to bear really will, we believe, allow us to take advantage of, sort of, unlocked, you know, publishers. Really, at the end of the day, one of the reasons why Google has been so successful is they brought the buying element to publishers. If that somehow gets unlocked, that buying element will be, you know, spread across the rest of the ecosystem. Ultimately, whenever it does happen, you know, we're going to be well positioned, but certainly there's a possibility that it'll accelerate our growth.
Got it. One more for me before I turn it over to the audience. You know, I thought you were really helpful in terms of framing just how to think about the phasing of revenue growth for 2025 on the call last week. Now, talk about just what's embedded within low single-digit declines for the first half, high single-digit in the second half, and, you know, how we should think about just what the business can grow at again once you're through some of these transitory pressures.
Sure. We are going to lap the DSP change mid-year. In the first half of 2025, we are going to be lapping about, you know, $20 million of revenue headwind. We are on track to, you know, significantly, you know, outgrow that. In the first half, though, our reported numbers will be slightly down on a year-over-year basis in the low single digits. Remember, it is growing through a significant headwind. Where that growth is coming from is this underlying business that I described. Two-thirds of our revenues, you know, are growing 15% plus, which is the data that I shared for quarter-to-date. That is really significant and important that I think investors need to, you know, have as a reference point. In the second half, the denominator is going to be political spend.
We had a terrific, you know, year in 2024 with political spend driven for things like our GenAI products. The bulk of that, you know, 2024 political was on CTV. You know, that's going to be something we're going to have to lap in the second half. With that core growth, we anticipate, you know, growing in the high single digits in the second half. Clearly, as a company, you know, in a full year, we will have grown through two significant, you know, 2024 elements and positions us very well, you know, at the end of the year and into 2026. We feel confident that, you know, we're going to be growing double digits in terms of secular growth areas.
Good stuff. I think we have time for one question if there's any from the audience.
All right. I'll close us out then. Steve, what are you most excited about for 2025?
Really, just the fact that as a company, we are fundamentally different than what we were a couple of years ago. We're indexed to the fastest growing areas, secular growth areas of the business. We have an innovation engine that continues to, you know, deliver, you know, unique offerings. We have an integrated platform. If there's one thing I'd like everybody to take away, it's that we have four customer segments that we're able to generate revenues from each segment, which is something that we didn't have a couple of years ago. Publishers, of course. We have now advertisers like Mars. We have data and curation partners like Experian, Instacart, and commerce companies like Klarna and Intuit. As a company, we are fundamentally different and very well poised to continue to grow into the future.
The last thing I'll say, which I'm particularly proud of as a CFO, 2024 was our 12th straight year of adjusted EBITDA profitability. Twelve straight years. It was our ninth straight year of positive net income. There's not too many companies anywhere that deliver those kinds of consistent results. I'm feeling very good about, you know, us working through the comp challenges in 2025, but particularly, you know, optimistic about, you know, 2026 and beyond.
Awesome. Steve, thanks so much for coming today.
Happy to be here.