Buddy, thanks for joining us here for End of Day Fireside Chat. My name is Barton Crockett, and I cover internet media with Rosenblatt. I am very happy to have Rajeev Goel, co-founder and CEO of PubMatic. PubMatic is a company that I do not currently cover, but it is an area that I am very interested in. I am really happy that Rajeev is willing to help us kind of explore the company together here a bit. Rajeev co-founded PubMatic with, I think, your brother in like 2006.
That's right.
Yeah, after spending time in consulting. I think you worked at SAP for a bit, and you were also an entrepreneur for a while before that.
That's right.
You took PubMatic public in 2020. Given that you're a founder and this is a very meaningful company, talk a little bit here at the start about what inspired you to found PubMatic. Is this company kind of progressing after all these years like you expected? What's been most surprising, do you think, in this period?
Yeah. Thanks for having me on, Barton, and great to connect with everybody. As you mentioned, my original job was as an entrepreneur. I started a company in college. I think then I'd always have to work for myself after being my own boss from the very beginning. That business was in commerce, selling custom-built golf equipment online. It was a Sequoia-backed company. Anyway, fast forward a couple of years, and my brother and I are experimenting with various online monetization kind of models. We kind of discovered that there was a big opportunity around digital advertising and publishing in that all of the systems for advertising would have to be very different in the digital world than in the traditional world.
How audiences are targeted, how you decide how much to spend, how publishers sell their inventory, how they price, how they package, all of this would require a big rewrite of the infrastructure. That is really what got us excited. We approached it from the publisher point of view. That is in the name. PubMatic is publisher and automatic. In fact, the first time I hung up a sign in an office in downtown Palo Alto, it was like this big Victorian-style home. Somebody walked by and said, "Oh, you're opening a pub here." I said, "No, actually, it's a software company. A pub may have been more profitable.
Some PubMatic shots there. That'd be pretty good.
Yeah, exactly. That is what really got me excited or got me into the opportunity and into the business. It has been an exciting business in that I think digital advertising, there is never a dull moment, right? If we go back 20 years, there was no iPhone. Streaming did not exist. There was no real-time bidding. If I think about all of the industry transformations I have been through, desktop to mobile to now connected TV streaming devices, from display, there was no video back then, to video, from cookies to not cookies, from not real-time to real-time. It is a lot of technology revolutions or changes. Of course, there is going to be more to come. Over the years, we have really broadened our business.
Whereas initially, we were focused on publishers, over the past decade, we've transformed and diversified our revenue, where we now deliver a unified AI-powered end-to-end platform that scales advertising for the open internet much more broadly. We have four customer segments. We have streamers and publishers, where we work with the head of the market, almost 2,000 publishers in aggregate, 80% of the top 30 streaming companies globally on our platform. These are guys like Roku and Amazon, Fire TV apps, DirecTV, Spectrum, VIZIO, media buyers, so all the big old cos, number of brands, DSPs. Third is Commerce Media Network, so companies like Instacart, Kroger, Klarna, Intuit, Western Union. Lastly, data partners, so almost 200 data partners, Nielsen, Experian, Comscore, et cetera, that bring data to our platform.
We are really just focused on how do we enable all of these principles in digital advertising to conduct their transactions on our platform.
Yeah. I think differentiation is one of the questions that comes up a lot, right? I think you would describe a lot of what you just walked through as kind of differentiating. I was wondering if you could drill down into that a little bit. There's the data companies could partner with any number of SSPs. Why is that differentiating for you? You are providing kind of a unified kind of platform for accessing different types of media. How is that differentiating from what else is out there in terms of SSP alternatives?
Sure. Yeah. When you think about what are the needs of the largest content creators and the needs of the largest advertisers, there's a couple of things, right? They want omnichannel platforms. They want global platforms. Omnichannel in the sense of consumers consume media across a variety of different devices, right? They might consume media on a mobile app, in a mobile browser, streaming device, and a laptop. The buyer and seller, they need platforms that can cover all of that ground. At the same time, those businesses tend to be global. Let's think about Procter & Gamble as an advertiser, News Corp as a content creator or publisher. They're doing business in dozens of countries around the world.
It is not enough to say, "Oh, hey, I can meet your need in just the U.S. or just Germany." You have to be able to do business in the vast majority of the countries that those guys do business in. When you start to filter for who is omnichannel and who is global, you actually very quickly get down to just a couple of different companies. When you factor in independence and objectivity, which I think is only becoming more and more important, obviously, we have, which I am sure we will get into, the antitrust case against Google. A lot of big tech companies, Apple, Meta, Amazon, are involved in a variety of antitrust cases. I think more and more, the participants in our ecosystem are saying, "Hey, we want to sleep well at night.
We'll sleep better at night knowing that whoever we've partnered with is going to be around for the long run and is going to be independent and objective and looking after my interests. When you put all of that together, there's only a couple of different companies, I think, that actually meet those requirements. I think there's some further differentiation beyond that, right, which is we have a single platform to do all of this. We can connect all of these different participants across the globe, across all these devices in different ad formats in a single platform. That's important because the pace of innovation is higher. The cost to operate is lower. Your ability to tell a cohesive story to the consumer across all of their different touchpoints of media is enabled versus when you're working in different platforms.
Lastly, we own all of our own infrastructure. Obviously, everybody hears about public cloud and how so much compute is moving to the public cloud. Actually, if you also look at the stocks of the infrastructure providers, the companies running the data centers, they're actually doing very well. Part of the reason they're doing very well is once companies get to a certain scale, and I think particularly in digital advertising, which is real-time and very data-intensive, so there's a specific profile of the transaction that we're processing, it's actually far more cost-efficient to operate our own infrastructure. We actually own tens of thousands of servers in data centers around the world. We own the networking equipment, and then we're running our software in this private cloud infrastructure.
What we find is that we can generate significantly more free cash flow while also maintaining greater control over each auction or each transaction. That drives top line as well as bottom line. I think you see that in our P&L, where last quarter was our 36th consecutive quarter of profitability at adjusted EBITDA. We do significant share repurchases, and we have a healthy free cash flow generation.
Yeah. Thanks for that overview. Now, one of the questions I think that keeps coming up that I hear is this idea of DSPs and SSPs, right? The industry is very kind of bifurcated. There are DSPs and SSPs, and you guys are classified as an SSP. The question is, why does this need to be? Why do we need to have someone representing the buyer and the seller? Could that potentially change as this becomes much more of a CTV business with maybe fewer kind of publishers on the streaming video side than we have right now on the open internet websites?
Yeah. I mean, I think it is absolutely evolving. People have said the lines are blurring. I would agree with that. Historically, in our industry, as you said, Barton, right, there's SSPs and DSPs. It's kind of like the real estate transaction mentality, right, which is if you go to buy or sell a home, there's a buyer's agent and there's a seller's agent. It's a win-lose game, right, meaning one person's gain is another person's loss, right? The buyer wants to pay less, and the seller wants to get more. The price is going to be whatever it is. It's just a matter of shifting the pie between those two parties.
What we have focused on and what we've pioneered, we could talk about supply path optimization later, but we pioneered a different approach, which is, hey, actually, the sell-side platform, in delivering on its objective to drive more revenue for the publisher, if we can, in fact, deliver more return on ad spend to the advertiser, the advertiser will pay more, the publisher will generate more revenue, and both parties will be happy, right? That's exactly what we've proven out. We focus a lot on how can we use our position in the ecosystem and our platform to deliver higher ROAS or higher ROI to the buyer. When we do that, the buyer is going to say, "Hey, great, this is working." By the way, my choice isn't to shrink my budget.
It's actually I'm going to take money out of the non-digital advertising things that I'm doing. I'm going to take money out of linear TV, out of radio, out of billboards, out of all of those other things that every major marketer is also doing alongside digital, maybe out of social and search. I'm going to put more of that into digital, and I'm going to put more of it onto the PubMatic platform. That higher ROI will cause the buyer to consolidate their digital ad spend, grow that spend, and consolidate it onto our platform. Some of the drivers here of, I think, why the SSP, the sell-side, is coming more into prominence, first of all, there's a rise in the use of first-party data and insights for audience targeting and curation. The sell-side is actually where a lot more of that is available, right?
Because more and more data requires consent. That's happening in states around the U.S. I think now like 20 states have privacy bills or privacy laws in place, bills or laws. Obviously, all of Europe does. Australia does. Consent is sitting between the publisher and the consumer, and we're the technology system of record there. We have greater access to consent and rights to data. Second, buyers are demanding more efficiency and transparency. That can happen, I think, more so on the sell-side. We see all the bids across the ecosystem, whereas inside of the DSP, they only see a portion of the traffic, and they only see a limited view into the downstream auctions that are happening. That's a significant advantage that the sell-side has.
For example, a buyer on our platform can get full transparency into bids that they lost, what the winning bid amount was, so they can train their algorithms better, whereas a traditional DSP only knows that they lost the bid, but not all of the other telemetry around it. Finally, I think there's a significant challenge around traffic shaping in our ecosystem. With traffic shaping, we have over 800 billion ad impressions and growing on a daily basis. The average DSP can take a small fraction of that inventory. We have to decide which inventory, which impressions to send to the DSP. What that means is that the buyer inside of the DSP is getting a very fragmented look at the ecosystem, both the users and the impressions that are available to them.
If you move to targeting on the sell-side, then the buyer can see a lot broader set of the industry in terms of the users and the impressions. We have published many great case studies around this. IPG Mediab rands leverage our sell-side targeting technology to enhance advertiser ROI. We closed SPO deals recently with Coca-Cola, Haleon, and Mars. All great examples of companies that are moving targeting to the sell-side for all of the reasons that I mentioned.
Yeah. Maybe we can segue a little bit into Activate and Supply SPO. I think you guys are talking about the growth in this in the percentage of your mix. I was wondering if you could outline, I think it is over half, and you see it could be much bigger even over time. What is happening there? What are you doing kind of product-wise to help support that?
Yeah, absolutely. SPO is a big part of our business. It is over half of our business today, as you mentioned. It is up probably about 20 points in terms of mix from two years ago. Let me maybe just briefly define what SPO is for all the audience members. Supply path optimization is a process through which we go to a buyer, could be an advertiser, it could be an agency, and we make the case for why they should consolidate their spend on our platform. That case is usually around technology value proposition for efficiency or effectiveness and how we can make the buyer's ad budget more efficient or how we can help them grow effectiveness, maybe two sides of the same coin. As a result, they should consolidate spend on our platform. We have done many of these deals.
I just mentioned some of the brands. We have done it with every agency, Holdco, independent agencies as well. We view that absolutely as a way to grow the ecosystem and grow our business in terms of the efficiency and effectiveness that advertisers generate on our platform, but also the revenue that publishers can drive because that effectiveness drives a higher CPM and more revenue for that publisher. There were, I think, a couple of other aspects of the question that you asked, Barton. Maybe you can remind me.
Yeah, sure. I was just talking about the growth, and then I think you've had some product development that's been helpful for this.
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. We think, as you mentioned, we've stated that we think that can be 75% of the business over the long run. It is a key way for us to consolidate the ecosystem. Our most recent product capability here is something called Activate, which is an extension of our SPO strategy. We launched Activate about two years ago. The way to think about Activate is it's direct buying within the SSP. An advertiser or agency can buy, and it's really focused primarily on video, although there's value props in display as well, CTV, online video. They can buy that directly within our SSP. The benefits that we're going after are that a lot of video transactions, even today, are still insertion order-based. We want to bring that spend into the programmatic ecosystem.
There's a lot of benefits in terms of higher ROI when buyers move to programmatic transactions, to auction-based using data and automation. Activate allows them to do that. It solves all of the problems we talked about earlier with sell-side targeting. More data, full access to all of the inventory and the audiences. It's, of course, more efficient. There's two levels of efficiency there. One is operational. A lot of the challenges in our ecosystem today stem from when an ad impression is processed by an SSP and a DSP, we have to physically send the ad impression from our data center to the DSP's data center. That creates latency. It spreads data, which is against privacy regulations, can be against privacy regulations. It creates discrepancies. It creates operational overhead.
If a deal doesn't scale, then the buyer or the seller, they're trying to figure out, well, is the problem in the DSP? Is the problem in the SSP? Which system should I adjust? Okay, I've made an adjustment. Let me monitor it for 24 hours and then see what happens. There's a lot of operational efficiency that when you put all of that into one platform, now you don't have that request going. You don't have discrepancies. You don't have latency. You don't have the privacy concerns. The operational ease is much greater because you're in a single platform. There's no confusion over what the issue is. Of course, there can be fee efficiency by not having to process the ad impression multiple times. The cost to process is lower, and that benefit can be passed on to the end customer.
There is a lot of different benefits around that. Now, most recently, just a month ago, we announced an AI-enabled version of Activate. We have gone in and we have AI-enabled a lot of the core use cases: inventory planning and discovery, deal setup, deal optimization, reporting. These are now supercharged workflows where they are a lot more automated, a lot more efficient for the trader. WPP Media or GroupM Media is our launch partner in that product. We are super excited to launch that with them.
Yeah. So it sounds like you believe that in this kind of consolidation of the DSP and SSP functionalities, that that's something where you can be gaining share. What would you say to the kind of the response from the DSP side that the power ultimately lies with the ad buyer as their kind of defense in this environment?
Sure. I mean, I think that's true. I don't know that it's a defense in the sense that with SPO, right, the majority of spend on our platform, we're working directly with the ad buyer. I do think there's value in being very close to the ad buyer, and that's why we've been vigorously focused on SPO. I think one of the advantages that we have is we've been building up the publisher relationships and publisher base over almost two decades. We have almost 2,000 publishers. We focus on the head of the market, the most premium publishers. When I look at others that are approaching it from the buy side, and they publicly share these numbers, right, they might have 20 publishers integrated, 40 publishers, 100 publishers integrated.
If you want to take that efficiency value proposition out to your clients, it's only going to cover a small portion of the traffic, right? Whereas in our case, we've got 95% of the open internet. You can buy almost the entire open internet using Activate and our SSP within our platform. I think we have a significant advantage in terms of being able to deliver on that value proposition today.
Yeah. Now, there's one other issue that I'd like to talk about, and that is the question of mix and growth. I think when I talk to investors, there is this kind of knee-jerk belief that having more exposure to CTV is good and having more exposure to kind of display is not, given what's happening with LLMs and search. The reality, I think from your perspective, is a little bit subtler and more interesting. I was wondering if you could talk about your mix and how you would kind of respond to the idea that you automatically just want to have more CTV to get better growth.
Sure. Yeah. Let's start with our mix. Our mix, over 20% of our business is CTV. We have about 20% of our business in mobile app. Omnichannel video, which is a combination of online video, so that short-form video, as well as CTV, and of course, short-form video can be on a mobile device, it can be on a laptop, desktop browser, or it can be on a CTV device. Omnichannel video combined is about 40% of the business. Where we started, the desktop display business is less than 20% of our business today. It is small and growing, but shrinking as a share of our business. Our strategy in general is to be well-positioned in the fastest-growing ad formats. CTV is certainly one of them.
Commerce media is not an ad format, but let's say it's an ad business, and we're well-positioned there. Data and curation is another area that we've talked about that we're, I think, well-positioned there. We are positioned in all of these kind of areas. I think what we've seen is that it can be difficult to predict where exactly our advertisers are going to spend their ad budgets. When COVID hit, all of a sudden, it went to streaming almost overnight. People bought tablets and individual devices, and that scaled up very quickly. People are starting to come back to the office. Now we see trends where browser-based monetization on your laptop is growing faster than it did a year or two ago because people are coming back into the office, and their behaviors are changing.
I think CTV is absolutely a significant part of our future, a significant part of our business today with over 80% penetration of the top 30 streamers. I think it is important to be balanced because it's difficult to predict where exactly is the consumer going to want to consume media. I see a lot of omnichannel advertisers where they say, "Hey, if I augment my CTV buy with some display ad buying, I get disproportionate return on ad spend with the display." Having that mix puts a bit of a halo effect on my CTV investment. Omnichannel is the way to go. I think it's important to be diversified in all of the growth formats. Certainly, mobile app is a growth format. Commerce media is a growth environment, and CTV is growth.
Yeah. I also think the decision by Google to stick with cookies maybe lends a little bit more life under the display business. There is also this question of the LLMs and search. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that. I think your view is interesting there.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Let's get into the LLM. Obviously, there's, I guess, a question from investors around, "Hey, is search going to change where people no longer get a search result and link out to a website?" How might that affect our business? A couple of thoughts on that. First of all, 40% of our business and growing share is totally unaffected by search, which is CTV and mobile app, right? These are not search environments. That mix is only growing. Soon it'll be the majority of our business. Now, if we take the remaining 60%, first of all, industry data shows that 15% of a publisher's traffic is search referral traffic, the rest being direct navigation or social. It's not new that a search result doesn't take you to a publisher's page, right?
Publishers actually have been complaining about this for almost 10 years. If you go search Pacers, Wolves score, whatever, underscore, it's not going to take you to ESPN. It's going to give you the result, right? If you search the weather in Cannes next week, it's not going to take you to weather.com. It's going to give you the result right there. There is already a lot of searches where you do not go to the publisher's website. About 15% of traffic is search. Now, we deal with the biggest brands. That is our publisher market. It is probably less than 15%. We are talking about impressions. Browser monetization is actually lower than CTV, of course, and it is lower than mobile app. If we look at it on a revenue basis, it is lower still.
If you take 15% of 60 and then decrease that a little bit for the fact that we're dealing with big publisher brands and the browser monetization is a bit lower, you get to the mid-single digits. If search went away, it would be a mid-single digit revenue impact before any mitigation. Now, as much inventory as we process, we've got more inventory available to us from all of our publishers. We could fill our platform with impressions from non-search-oriented publishers or inventory sources. That would be one step of mitigation. I also think we're going to see the LLM companies drive an ad business, right? New formats like sponsored answers embedded within chatbot experiences. We hear from our publishers that they're getting more and more traffic from the likes of OpenAI or Perplexity.
I think Perplexity is already publicly talked about in ad business. I think all of these guys are going to move towards an ad business. There's one universal in life in the online world, and that is if it can support an ad, it will. Netflix talked for many years that they'd never do advertising. They are. What's different with Netflix than the LLM guys? The LLM guys burn a lot of money, right? Netflix generates a lot of free cash flow. The LLM guys will have to turn to advertising in order to not dilute their shareholders. That's kind of an inevitable for me.
Okay. Now, I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about Google and antitrust. I know you guys have spoken to kind of an opportunity from ShareShift, which seems to be consistent with what one of the other companies has said. I was wondering if you could articulate what that number is and how you kind of get to it and what your thinking is in terms of the timing. Really just not just the timing, but how confident are you that at the end of the day, you can start to see some of the fruits of this decision, given that there's an appeals process going on?
Sure. Yeah. We estimate Google is about a 60% share of the SSP/exchange market, and we're about a 4% market share player. With the guilty verdict, obviously, there's going to be a set of remedies that are put into place, behavioral first and then structural after, probably. We estimate every percent of share that we can pick up is $50 million-$75 million of revenue to us. The vast majority of that, meaning 80%-90% of that, should drop to the bottom line. The reason being that we have a heavy degree of publisher overlap with Google. We have 95% of the open internet, basically the same publisher bases as Google. We're already processing those publishers' inventory on our platform. We see that it's not going to be a lot of cost to process that inventory.
High flow through to the bottom line. I think the key question, Barton, as you mentioned, is what's the timing and certainty around it? It's not certain, right? Let me be the first to say that, right? The remedy phase of the trial is going to start in the fall. Google has appealed the underlying verdict. I suspect that the remedies will move forward in 2026 at some point, at least the behavioral remedies. Those would probably consist of some set of court-mandated changes to how Google operates that should level the playing field or open up the playing field. One way to think about that is we're 4% in the remaining 40% that Google doesn't have, right? If we consider that the kind of the level playing field part of the ecosystem, we're a 10% market share player in the level playing field.
Could we go to 10% across the entire ecosystem from our 4% position? Maybe that's a natural place for us to get to. I think whether we get to 6%, 7%, 8%, or 10%, it's significant upside ahead of us that could start as soon as next year. I think it's certainly not clear that that timing is what's going to stick. I do think regardless of the timing of the remedies, Barton, we do see that the publishers and advertisers and commerce media networks and data owners, they are increasingly looking to independent solution providers like PubMatic, right? I think they all see when I talk to them, one of the things they voice is, "Hey, if Google may be forced to divest of these assets in the future, is Google committed to investing in innovation, right?
What's their incentive to keep building these products and investing in these products? That then creates a question of, "What's my dependency? Is that dependency too high? Should I start to take steps now to reduce that dependency?" I think we can start to see benefits even before remedies start to take effect.
Yeah. That sounds like you believe, I think, that Google will not prevail in appeal. That seems to be, who knows, but that would seem to be where your belief is at this point pretty strongly.
Yeah. I mean, I guess it would take new information or finding that the judge made a significant error. And just in my own conversations and talking to a variety of industry and legal experts, I haven't seen or heard that either of those two things is the case. Obviously, it remains to be seen. Google thinks there's reasons to appeal. I don't know if that's purely a timing issue or they think that there's real grounds for the appeal, but that'll play out. I haven't heard of, A, either there's new information or that the judge made a significant error in their findings.
Yeah. We spoke about ShareShift on an operating basis. There is this question of the other kind of bite at the apple, right? There is potential civil liability. There is one company that has been suing Gannett in the publishing space. I think some question about whether SSPs, which are allied to publishers, have been damaged, whether there might be some litigation that could be at least considered. I do not know if that is something that you can talk about, but I wanted to see if we could raise it with you.
Sure. Yeah. I do not have anything specific to share on it. I think it is logical to conclude that SSPs, including PubMatic, have been damaged. I think the prosecution made that case, right? They showed multiple examples of Google's own data, right, due to changes that Google made, how individual SSPs were affected. I do not have anything to share specifically on that front, but I think it is an open question.
Okay. All right. We'll leave that one there. I wanted to talk a little bit about some of the relationships that you have. I think that you guys, we hear a lot from one of the other kind of public players in the SSP space about their relationships with people like Amazon, with people like Netflix, with people like Disney. How would you kind of stack up your relationships in the CTV world with what's available out there? How do you think that evolves over time?
Yeah. The Amazon Fire TV app one in particular is interesting. We've been actually monetizing the Amazon Fire TV apps for over a year. Maybe that other SSP you're referring to is just catching up. We are over 80% penetrated into the top 30 streaming companies globally. That is Roku, Amazon Fire TV apps, DirecTV, Spectrum, Vizio, Jio, Hotstar in India, so on and so forth. If we back up five years, we launched our CTV business about four years ago. I think maybe the public SSP that you're referring to, they acquired Telaria and then SpotX. At the point at which they acquired SpotX, they had infinitely more CTV publishers than we did. Now, I think there are two CTV publishers of scale that they have that we do not have. In the last four years, we've closed the gap from infinite to two.
I think both of those are opportunities for us in the future. I do not think there is any inventory advantage of significance or scale that our competitor has. In fact, I think the opportunity that we have is because we operate a single platform, and we talked about this already a little bit earlier, because we operate a single integrated platform, all formats, all devices, publishers and buyers can do things on our platform that they cannot do when it is multiple platforms. If you want to be able to make sure that you do not break a frequency cap and you send the right number of ads to a consumer in a 24-hour period across different devices, across different formats, then we are in a position to be able to do that for you.
If you want innovation where you have a new data parameter you can target or a new data partner and you want that as fast as possible, then we can do that in a single platform versus the buyer or the seller having to wait to have that integrated into multiple platforms. That, I think, in turn has led us to have what we believe is the industry's leading curation platform and a significant advantage in commerce media. All of these things are related to CTV, right? Because they do not exist in static. We have, for instance, data partners like Experian that can overlay data on top of streaming inventory and create unique advertising value propositions. Instacart data is available on our platform. Experian data is available on our platform. It is not available on other SSPs.
We can combine that with streaming inventory and create a value proposition for a particular advertiser or agency to be able to lay that data on top of the media and be able to facilitate transactions that cannot happen anywhere else. I think the power is really in a broad spectrum platform that brings together the inventory, the data, the commerce media networks, and enables them to transact and grow their businesses, and we in turn grow our business.
Okay. Now, I want to spend the last few minutes here just bringing these things down to kind of a little bit more kind of just what's happening right now with the business. Obviously, we're in kind of a crazy period of macro uncertainty, things that none of us has really seen before in our lifetime. It does seem like the ad market's been stabler than one might have thought at one point. I was wondering if you could talk to that and tell us what you're seeing.
Sure. Yeah, absolutely. I think there was a great deal of uncertainty earlier this year. I should just maybe caveat that my comments are as of our last earnings call, just in terms of the kind of the timing. I think in early April, there was a huge increase up in terms of the level of uncertainty, right, with the Liberation Day tariff announcements. I think since then, in April, in the first half of May, we've seen the market be quite resilient. We shared on our earnings call that we had a very strong March. The macro environment seemed strong to us, and those trends continued through the first half of Q2. I think that's because we saw that companies adjusted pretty quickly to the tariff environment. Some of the tariff antagonism ratcheted down, right? A couple of deals were announced.
The tariffs on China were lowered. There are negotiations happening. I think all that being said, we're still in an environment of uncertainty, right? There are these conversations happening between the U.S. and China and London. I think investors are kind of hanging on, what is the output? What's the outcome of those conversations? It is very possible that we wake up next week and we're back into a negative scenario or a scenario of greater uncertainty. It is very possible that a lot of that uncertainty gets lifted and there's a big breakthrough and something very positive. From our perspective, we are planning for the worst, but hoping for the best, right? What that means is that we make sure that we're delivering on our AI roadmap. I think AI is a significant disruptor in terms of being able to deliver both better outcomes.
It is a top-line growth driver as well as better efficiency. There are not a lot of technology transformations that come along that can do both of those things at the same time. We are also focused on bringing a high degree of focus on every line item of cost in our business. Making sure that every vendor, every employee, every partner, every line item cost is maximum productivity. We operate the business in the way that we have always operated, which is that in times of uncertainty, in times of change, the growth opportunities are going to shift. We want to invest behind the things that are going to be the new growth opportunities. It is data, it is commerce, it is CTV, and it is our Activate product, our buy-side solution.
It is making sure that we're funneling more and more of our investment into those areas. I think if we do all of those things, regardless of the economic outcome, we're going to deliver a combination of growth and profitability. Depending on exactly what we're seeing, it could be higher profitability, lower growth, or the opposite. I think our investors will be well rewarded.
Okay. All right. Just one kind of milestone you guys have coming up here. You've had a major DSP partner that you'll be lapping a transition here. You've just lapped it, I think, in May. I think you're looking at a third quarter that could be normalized growth, clearer growth than we've seen for a few quarters. I think you're looking for, in your guidance, you're looking for a pretty good growth rate.
Yeah. You just want me to comment on that?
Yeah, just comment. Just level set so we all understand.
Yeah, absolutely. As you mentioned, a large DSP made an ecosystem-wide change, which impacted us pretty significantly in May of last year, where they moved from first and second price auctions to first price auctions. We're just now lapping that change, which is great. That's now in the rearview mirror. As a result of that, we broke out, how is our underlying business doing? Underlying is our business without that DSP, as well as without the tailwind of political ad spend, which was pretty significant last year. We've been sharing that metric every quarter. Q3, that growth rate, underlying business was 17%. Q4 of last year was 16%. It accelerated to 21% in Q1. We set the expectation that it would be 15% plus on that basis for Q2 and onwards.
We feel like we're in a good position to be able to deliver that. The overall business will normalize with that DSP for the month of June and then for a full quarter in Q3. I think investors will start to see that underlying business growth rate normalize to be the full business growth rate. Hopefully, that'll be an unlock in terms of investor sentiment and multiple and those types of things. We feel good about how well we're positioned. Clearly, you can see that in the underlying growth. Just to that point, we increased our share repurchase in the last earnings call. I think we had about $40 million left of $175 million authorization. We increased that by an incremental $100 million. Now there's about $140 million. We've been hard at work with that new purchase.
Okay. All right. That's great. I think that's basically it. We're just about at the end of the time here. Is there anything else you wanted to leave for last word to think about, or?
Yeah. The last thing I'd just comment on is I think there's a great opportunity in our industry. There's two public SSP companies. And there's been a lot of, I think, questions, and rightfully so, from investors about how we differentiate against the other one. In reality, there's 90 points of the market outside of the two of us, right? There's Google. There's a long tail of SSPs, point solutions that are single format only or maybe one or two countries only. Our focus is really on that 90 points of market share and how to grow our business and take share from that 90 points. I think in that regard, there's a lot of upside. I don't think the industry is going to consolidate down to a single SSP.
I think I made the comment earlier in a smaller conversation, Barton, that would be like having one SSP would be like having one toothpaste factory for all of America. It could happen, but it's probably not a good idea. I think most buyers, they consolidate down to a couple. I think there's going to be a couple of winners long-term in our industry. I think we're really well positioned to be one of those winners.
Okay. That's great.
Thank you.
Thanks a ton, Rajiv. We really appreciate it.
Thank you.
Okay.