Thank you everybody for joining us this morning for our fireside chat with USA TODAY. I'm Barton Crockett and I cover internet media. We're going to be joined today from USA TODAY by Mike Reed, Chairman, President, CEO of USA TODAY for 13 years, including predecessor companies through some mergers. He also happens to be listed among the top 20 holders of the stock with 3 million shares. We're also joined by Tricia Gosser, CFO, who's been at the company since 2007 and has moved into the CFO Chair for the past year. USA TODAY is a leading U.S. media company reaching half of Americans digitally and via print. Its top brands include, obviously, the USA TODAY newspaper.
It might surprise many on Wall Street to learn or know that USA TODAY, by some measures, including some readership surveys and measures of unique visitors, would rank as the second largest national newspaper in the U.S. That's via some survey work from Pew and also Comscore measures of unique visitors. Ahead of newspapers like The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, and just behind The New York Times. USA TODAY is also the U.S.'s top local newspaper publisher with 100+ leading local newspapers that lead local markets like Detroit, Phoenix, Milwaukee, Cincinnati. In the U.K., USA TODAY, their Newsquest unit is a top publisher in that market, in that country, with over 150 titles, over 53 million unique monthly visitors, mainly via a portfolio of small market local weeklies.
The company also has LocaliQ, which is a leading local digital marketing service provider with nearly 12,000 customers paying close to $2,800 a month for their services. The company now trades under the ticker TDAY and has a market cap of about $1.6 billion. Net debt near $655 million, excluding a little over $200 million of a 6% convertible that's now in the money. Our rating on the stock is a buy with a $10 price target. That's really composed of $5, in what we would argue is a conservative base case for the core business, six times enterprise value to EBITDA multiple. Plus we see $3 of net present value after tax for a presumed settlement with Google for antitrust damages that we assume pre-tax can approach $1 billion. We assume they get a settlement in, let's say, three years.
There's an argument that that can happen sooner. We also put another $2 of value for assumed net present value of licensing deals with major LLMs to come over the next three years. In that, we also assume a deal with Google where I think there's a lot to discuss. There could be upside to our price target, we would say from the core USA TODAY business, and the possibility that over time they could become more like The New York Times, which has very durable growth in the kind of high single digit, double-digit range in revenues, better than that at EBITDA, and a much stronger multiple as it has really been ahead of USA TODAY in the transition to majority digital, but that's a benchmark that USA TODAY expects to pass later this year.
With that kind of long intro to set the table here, Mike, let's start out with you. I laid out our framing of how we think about the value argument for USA TODAY. How would you frame it? How would you have investors think about the investment case for USA TODAY?
Thanks, Barton. First, let me just say thanks for having us this morning. We're excited to be here and thanks to anyone who has joined to listen to our story and our opportunity. Thank you for your time this morning. I will also say before I jump into answering that, Barton, is that we appreciate the coverage that you've done for us and the amount of work you've done to understand the company, the strategy, the opportunity here. We think you've framed it and laid it out very well in the reporting that you've done in your research. Thank you for that. What I would step back and say from an overall standpoint, from a strategy standpoint, Barton, is that at a high level, we create content every day at scale, both here in the U.S. and in the U.K.
We have one of the largest content-creating staffs here in the U.S. and the U.K., and we're growing an audience at scale. We're also focused on engaging with that audience and monetizing that audience across various digital revenue streams, primarily subscription, advertising, and commerce. Our audience is primarily digital today. The print part of our business is shrinking and is relatively small. Our audience is growing and is primarily digital today. We are, as you mentioned, close to an inflection point right now. Almost half, 48% of our revenue comes from our digital sources, and we do expect that to surpass 50% later this year. Ultimately, we have a goal of 60% over the next year or two coming from digital. We have been focused on growing profitability and expanding margin, as you mentioned.
At a very high level, our strategy is creating an audience at scale with differentiated, unique, valuable content that's not commoditized, engaging better with that audience and monetizing that audience. Then a very smart, disciplined capital allocation strategy, because we are profitable, we throw off a lot of cash. In fact, we've grown Adjusted EBITDA three of the last four years and expect to grow EBITDA again this year. Grew free cash flow the last four straight years, expect to grow it again this year. We've reduced leverage, first lien's down to a net of 2.3. We expect that to be around two at the end of the year with an ultimate goal over the next two years of getting to one. We've been allocating capital to debt repayment.
With a strategy of creating content that's differentiated and unique and valuable, engaging with a large-scale audience, and then being disciplined on capital allocation, we see several drivers of shareholder value over the next few quarters and the next few years. One is reaching that revenue inflection point where we're no longer declining, but we're a growing revenue company, and that happens as we continue to grow digital and be less exposed to print. Reaching 60% of our total revenue coming from digital sources, which really ensures the sustainability of the business and the growth, and we think enhances the multiple for which we trade at. Growing Adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow each year and expanding those margins, both EBITDA and free cash flow conversion margins, is important because your multiple is applied to those metrics.
That free cash flow is then used for debt repayment as well as investment in the business and continued deleveraging. Shifting value from the debt side of the equation to the equity side. Multiple expansion as we become a primarily digital company, growing the profitability of the company and expanding margins, and then continuing to delever, we think are the great value creators for the company over the next few years. Finally, there's optionality for shareholders who are interested in our opportunity, and that's a big litigation we have against Google that we filed over three years ago that we expect to actually have resolution on in the next, say, 12-ish months, by sometime maybe next summer.
While the damages are sealed and we can't talk specifically about damages, one thing we have said publicly is that over the time period that our lawsuit covers, our revenues have been interfered with by Google's antitrust violation behaviors by over $1 billion. It's quite a large opportunity for us. In an antitrust trial, most people know this, in an antitrust trial in front of a jury, there's treble damages, which are three times your claim. We think the opportunity there is quite large. That's just an additional opportunity in addition to what I talked about as the real levers of shareholder value creation that we see in front of us.
Okay. Thanks, Mike. I just want to say, I appreciate your comment about our coverage. For me, it's a pleasure. I was a journalist in the way back machine before I got into sell-side research. It's an area that interests me a great deal. After kind of the nice comments, let's get into some of the tougher stuff.
Yeah.
The elephant in the room, I think, is really search, Google's zero-click search, in terms of investor perception about the industry. How does USA TODAY, specifically, and the publishing industry generally, survive what Google is doing to Search? They've been moving to meld kind of AI Overviews into Search for some time. At their recent Google I/O, just a few weeks ago, they seemed to outline an even deeper move, to basically make their search box an AI box with extended questions and answers. Why would anyone click to a newspaper website if they can see the information in the Google search bar?
Yeah. It's a great question and it's a very complicated answer and discussion, Barton, as you can imagine. What I would start with saying is that it's in the headlines a lot, but it's not new, and we are not just starting to think about, "Wow, what if Google Search starts to go away, and what does that do to our business?" We actually have been preparing for this and working on this for the last few years, and we've been with an understanding that Google Search was going to go away, was going to be replaced as search by the AI platforms with their own search tools, which were not going to bring consumers back to publishers' platforms. We've been aware of that and planning for that over the last few years.
What we've done is really, I would start with, we create differentiated, unique content and we have very trusted brands. We create that every single day. We've been engaging directly with consumers, a heightened effort on engaging more directly with consumers as they reach our platform, engaging with them through newsletters, text alerts, email outreach to them so that we can develop that relationship with each consumer and bring them back without having to go through Google Search. We have also grown our presence on other platforms, social media platforms primarily, in order to be able to bring audience to us from other places other than Google Search, and we've been quite successful in that. I think the numbers speak for themselves.
If you go back a couple of years and listen to our earnings calls, the audience that we cite and the page views that we generate have been pretty consistent over the last two years. While many publishers have lost 50% or more of their traffic. We've been preparing for this, we've been working on it, and we've adhered our business to the changes in the overall search ecosystem. Having said that, I think what's really also very important to understand is we don't create commoditized information. We are the largest local news publisher in the country, and we're creating differentiated, valuable, but unique content that consumers are only going to be able to get from us. As search goes away, from specifically a Google standpoint, we'll block Google. We block the other AI search bots that don't have licensing deals with us, so they can't have our content.
The consumers that you mentioned, they won't get the answers that they want from our content on Google's platform. We do think the industry at large is starting to come around to blocking the AI bots. Google has been isolated because of search. It's been hard. You can't really block Google because of the search aspect. As search goes away, we'll be able to block Google as well. Another question, not the real question, another question is: how do those AI platforms, including Google's, how do they actually perform in an era where they only have commoditized and maybe not reliable content, maybe not even factual or true content? If that's really on our platform, then we believe Google and others will have to come and license our content in order to have that experience on their own platform.
We believe in delivering our content to consumers wherever they are, but we do create really valuable and unique content on a daily basis that is differentiated. In order for consumers to find our content somewhere else, that platform has to license it from us, and we believe that. We do have some licensing deals today, but not many. There's a lot more to do. We believe we're in a good position, and because of our strong, trusted brands and the fact that we can block, including blocking Google, we'll be in a good position for many years to come to drive consumers to our platform and/or to realize proper valuation from our content being displayed on somebody else's platform.
Okay. That's a bold statement that you can see a future where you could block Google.
Absolutely.
I wanted to drill into this a little bit. To start with, you guys have been not blocking Google to date, but blocking other LLMs. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what you've been doing there and what the LLMs have been trying to obtain. What is it that they want from you guys? I think there is one major LLM that you do have a license deal with, at least one, depending on how you define major, and that would be Meta. You have a smaller deal, I think, with Perplexity. Has blocking been helpful in terms of getting those deals?
Yeah. I would say that that blocking has certainly been one contributor to us getting deals done, especially the Meta deal. We do have small deals with Perplexity, with Microsoft, and with Amazon as well, and those deals are smaller in nature and for very specific products that those companies have. It's not for broad use, not for training use or things like that, but very specific use in AI products. What's been really interesting about blocking all of the AI companies and the AI bots, and it's not an easy task because those guys don't really play fair. There's not a lot of transparency. They create stealth ways with non-transparent bots that come in to try to take your content. We're blocking bots that we can see who they are, as well as all the unauthorized or unverified bots, I guess you would say.
Fastly and Cloudflare provide great technology that we're utilizing to block these. We're blocking a significant amount of bots, both verified and unverified every single month, trying to scrape our content. Barton, one thing that's really interesting about our experience in blocking, and it's almost a year now, we started last July. June is a full year of blocking, is that about 90% of the bots are trying to scrape our local content. They're not trying to scrape the national USA TODAY content, but it's really the local content. That's where we produce more local content at scale than anybody else in the U.S. and the U.K. by far. We're great content creators in local, and that's where there's real value, and we can tell there's real value to the AI companies because that's what they're trying to scrape.
We think that positions us well. We do think, we're not certain on timing, but we are positioned with continued blocking and being the largest provider of local content in two places that we have significant opportunities ahead. It's been an interesting thing to watch and develop. Again, we have to continuously try to focus on what unverified bots are attacking us, where they're trying to steal our content, and continuing to make sure we block. Right now, we block 99% of all verified and unverified bots on our platform, other than those who have a licensing deal with us, primarily Meta. We don't block Google today.
Yeah. It's interesting to me. I think there's many of us who would deeply understand why there's interest in local newspaper content. If you live in a community, if you're a parent, if you're a homeowner, you want to check out the high school sports, you want to hear about what's happening business-wise in your community that could affect the real estate market. Obviously you care about local politics and crime. It's understandable why there's an interest there. I think that my personal experience with, and I'm sure many of us share this experience, is you use a chatbot, you'll get answers. Sometimes they'll be linked to some third tertiary kind of website that's kind of scraping content from a named publisher, which is not good enough for professional purposes.
If I'm writing a report, I need to go to the source. It would be really important for many of us to see professional content licensed and appropriately presented and sourced as part of the chatbot kind of research function.
Sure.
This is one reason why I'm enthusiastic that over time this will play out. I think there's an argument also that the LLMs have a duty to support content because that's what makes their LLMs valuable, and if they're not supporting it, they're kind of eating their seed corn. There's an argument. Google hasn't gone there to date. There has been this proceeding in the U.K., which the industry, I think people are watching. I'm not sure how aware Wall Street is of this.
The CMA there, the regulatory body, has had a proceeding where they've identified what they say is an unfair practice by Google, which has been basically Google has been to date forcing publishers to allow their content to be basically sucked into the AI kind of infrastructure, the training and the results, as basically a trade-off that you have to offer in order to also be indexed in search. Because everyone wants to be in search to date, that's why people like you haven't been blocking Google from AI. The thing that the U.K. CMA did is they said, "Well, no, you can't do that. We think that's unfair to publishers." They've published a series of rules that will allow publishers to opt out of inclusion in AI, but continue to be indexed in search without having their search results kind of deprecated.
At least that's the goal. Google, around the time this order came out, came out with a blog post saying essentially they intend to abide by that, is the way you could read it at a surface level. Obviously Google's got some history, some proven kind of history of unfair anti-competitive practice, deception within that. What do you think about these movements? Is this it? Is this what you need to be able to block and license? Where are we right now?
I would say the development in the U.K. is a good thing. The ability for publishers to opt out of their content appearing in Google's AI products while still being allowed to show up in search is a good thing for the business today, as long as it's implemented within Google in a way that doesn't penalize publishers in the traditional search model if you do opt out of AI. We all know that the traditional search model is going away, so it's a very short-term reprieve, in my opinion, to be able to opt out of the AI part and be able to continue to stay in search because search is going away.
Ultimately it does put us in a stronger position to negotiate licensing deals with Google if they can't utilize our content on the AI side because as their AI search product develops, they're going to need real trusted current information in order to be able to deliver a great product for consumers, and our content's going to be critical to that. The U.K. has been more advanced in terms of their government supporting publishers than our government here in the U.S. Unfortunately, we've seen the government in Australia and Canada do a lot more for their publishers as well. It's nice to see this, the U.K. government pushing this, and it's nice to see Google thinking about creating a way to adhere by giving this opt-out mechanism.
Overall, Barton, we think it's good, where we want to see Google implement it in a fair way, and that will help us, all publishers in the short term in the U.K. In the long term, it gives us more leverage to negotiate a deal on the AI side as well because traditional search is going to continue to go away.
To reiterate, today you are not blocking Google.
That's correct.
You could see that happening in the future. You're not being specific about that at this point.
Yeah. It's hard to say what level of search traffic to us is incidental enough for us to say, "Okay, let's block. We don't really care about that.
Yeah.
We're not there yet. Our reliance on Google Search has come down dramatically over the last couple of years. The amount of traffic we're driving from social and from direct has grown significantly to mitigate that, but we're not at a point today where I would say it's a good business trade to start to block Google.
Yeah. It sounds like you're not trusting enough yet of the order and Google's compliance to take the step to say, "Okay, we can block and have confidence that our search is okay." You're not there yet.
Yeah.
You're really waiting for Thursday.
No, we're not. I think Google's behaviors have not warranted that trust. The antitrust violations they were found guilty of with search here over a year ago, not much has changed as a result of that. They've found guilty of antitrust violations on the ad tech side last summer. No behavior's changed yet there. That's the basis of our lawsuit.
History doesn't favor Google in terms of them creating a fair and balanced anything.
Okay. All right. One other thing with that is, obviously you mentioned your antitrust litigation, your hope for a settlement with Google, potentially in the next year. I wonder if you think there's a possibility that licensing could be part of a settlement with Google.
Yeah. We would welcome that discussion for sure. I think, from Google's standpoint, it would make sense, I think, to say, "Hey, we're going to do a deal with the largest content creator in the U.S. and the U.K., and we're going to wrap these two things together," both wrapping up the lawsuit for the already proven antitrust violations that we've had over the past decade or more, and also wrap that into a licensing deal. I think it's important to note that we would be seeking fair value for both. It wouldn't be a trade where we get less value in one or the other because we do a combination deal. We would want to be compensated fairly on both sides, both valuation for licensing as well as the antitrust violations on the advertising ecosystem.
It would make sense to me if it was one deal that all came together, and we'd love to see that, if that becomes a discussion point Google wants to have.
Okay. I want to switch gears a little bit. Tricia, I was wondering if we could talk a little bit more deeply about some of the numbers you guys are reporting. In particular, drilling into digital, obviously a key part of the growth story. In aggregate in the first quarter, your digital revenues grew, I think 5% same store to about 48% of the total. You guys have outlined this opportunity for digital to become a majority of revenues, more than a majority over time, 60% you've offered. What is the road to digital becoming that majority? Within digital, you have different buckets of revenues between AI licensing, subscription, advertising. Do you see all of those growing or are some parts more important than others? How do you kind of break it down?
Can you be a little bit more specific on, maybe not at this point, but when do you expect it to hit that majority, early in the year, late in the year? Curious about that.
Yeah, absolutely. Good morning, everyone. Our expectation is that digital is going to surpass that 50% mark during the second half of this year, so very soon. To your question of how do we become a predominantly digital company, it's really building on the strategy that we've been executing on. It's what Mike said. We've built this really large audience that's based on unique content. We're deepening the engagement of the users on our platform. What we do is we maximize the revenue opportunity of every single interaction we have with the consumer engaging with our content on our platform. We've talked a lot about AI content licensing this morning, that's certainly a growth opportunity for us.
Really, the digital footprint of USA TODAY comes from the millions of interactions we have with consumers and with our advertisers every single day on our platform. That's providing content that is driving increasingly high ARPUs in our digital subscription business. It comes from providing a known and quality audience to advertisers at scale. We complement that with our digital marketing solutions business that serves the needs of the small and the medium-sized businesses in the communities where we are, hundreds of communities across the U.S. and the U.K. When you think about what drives growth, not every revenue stream needs to be growing at the same time. We have the ability to lean into revenue streams depending on the macroeconomic backdrop, what's happening in our audience, what's happening in search and traffic referrals.
Overall, it's really about maximizing that revenue opportunity for everybody that visits our platform. We feel really good about the trajectory. We think we'll cross that 50% in the back half of the year. Again, as Mike said, we continue to expand that digital mix as we increase the engagement, the monetization on our ARPU, all moving in the right direction.
Okay. One of the things I think that's interesting is subscription opportunity.
Certainly, we've seen The New York Times pursue a strategy of layering multiple subscriptions, right? I'll subscribe to The New York Times, the newspaper online. I'll pay extra for The Athletic. As a family, we'll pay extra for cooking. There's a couple of people that like to play Wordle, it all stacks up to a number that's probably larger than I'd like, but we're paying it. Now, you guys within your subscription, in the first quarter, revenues grew 6%, I think year-over-year, to 18% of digital. There was some pullback in the subscriber volume, down 51,000 sequentially to 1.461 million. ARPU was up a lot, I mean, 43% year-over-year. Can you talk through what's happening there?
Going forward, do you think there's an opportunity for you guys to follow The New York Times down this road of kind of stacking subscriptions? I know you've made a push into Play, that I think is still early days, how do you see that kind of evolving?
Yes, absolutely. We've been really disciplined. We've been really intentional around, over the past year, our pricing, the promotional activity on our sites, and the types of subscribers that we're bringing into our ecosystem. We've moved away from heavily discounted introductory offers, and we're increasingly focused on attracting and retaining those high-value, long-term subscribers. You do see that playing out in our numbers. We have fewer subscribers today than we did a year ago, our revenue is much stronger. As you mentioned, our digital subscription revenue grew 5%, 6%. Our ARPU was up considerably to a record of $10.30, we still see a lot of headroom on that pricing. I don't think we've found the ceiling yet, particularly around annual subscription offers, where we see really great retention as well.
Long term, absolutely, volumes are going to be an important part of the story, I do think the trends that we saw in Q1 are encouraging. We saw declines, but they've slowed materially in the quarter, we're starting to see the signals that the actions that we took in 2025 are working. We have a much more stable subscriber base, I think from there we can start to return to growth. I'd say our priority remains revenue growth, it needs to be repeatable, predictable, quality revenue growth, we think we have the base of subscribers and the pricing levers to make that happen. Going forward, that revenue growth, we expect it to continue, and to accelerate, and it's going to come from both ARPU and volume.
I think short term it will be ARPU, longer term it will be more of a balance of ARPU and volume. To your point on stacked products, stacked products is going to be a piece of it. We're still in very early days. We only have a very small fraction of our base stacking products. We think that there's a lot of opportunity here, already in that small base, we see higher engagement, we see better retention, we do see overall better revenue. I think as we add more products to the mix, there's a really great opportunity for us here.
You can think about in our portfolio, you might live in Phoenix for half the year and Milwaukee for half the year, you care about both communities, you'll want to stack those two subscriptions, you're going to add in USA TODAY that, as you mentioned, you might add in Play. Over time, you could add in something like a sports product. We have Golfweek, for example. That's great for a Phoenix subscriber or our markets in Florida. Again, I think short term, you're going to see the growth come from ARPU, we do think there's a great opportunity to balance out that ARPU and volume growth over time.
Okay. All right. I appreciate if there's an opportunity for people to ask questions, there are a couple in the queue here. I think one of them is kind of relevant to the point we're on right now. I think I'll reframe the question a little bit. I think that there's some desire to hear a little bit more about the per-subscriber kind of economics of your business. We've spoken about the volume and the ARPU, how can we think about churn and customer acquisition cost and kind of the lifetime value of a subscriber and how that's trending?
I think we're very fortunate in that we don't have to have a very expensive cost to acquire a customer, right? We have people who are coming to our sites, 180 million average unique monthly visitors across our platform every month. That's a huge organic audience to put subscription offers in front of, to collect data, to understand when the right moment is to put the subscription offer in front of a customer. We have actually very low acquisition costs. Our acquisition cost is our content. It is our brand. We are very focused on churn. I think we don't disclose churn metrics, but I would say our churn metrics are very much within industry standards. We have been very focused on retaining the customers that we have.
You do that from smart pricing in the right markets, and continuing to provide more value to the subscribers, whether it is continuing to invest in the type of content that they have access to, adding in features like a Play, for example. I think we're very fortunate that we have this incredibly large audience that we can market to on a regular basis to drive some of that expected volume growth that I was just talking about.
Okay. All right. I do want to encourage people, there is a button at the top of your screen where you can type in a question, and we'll try to work them in. Just probing a little bit more on the digital part of the business. After growing 2% in 2025, I think your digital advertising dipped 3%, I think, in the first quarter. You were citing some softness in page views, not really so much from Google Search, but from some other kind of adjustments, and programmatic revenue. I was wondering if you could talk through what's happening there, and how do you feel about the digital ad trend moving past the first quarter?
I think one of the more impactful items that we saw in Q1, we referenced this, was a shift in Google Discover. We found that it just surfaced less local content in Q1 than it had in prior quarters. We also took deliberate actions to make sure that we were increasing the paywall encounters. We saw the opportunity there, and we were able to shift traffic towards higher value monetizable experiences like subscription. As we've said, we've been eyes wide open for several years. That reliance on any one traffic source, on any one algorithm, on any one platform isn't sustainable. It's not predictable. We've been taking those actions to build engagement, and we're really adept at navigating changing environments on these platforms. We believe advertising is a growth category for us. I think there's a lot of opportunities.
You can look at the long-term one, in particular around the antitrust remedies as that process plays out. I don't know what the outcome will be. I don't want to get ahead of that outcome, but we do certainly believe that a more competitive ecosystem is going to benefit the publishers, including USA TODAY Co. We also are leaning into video. We think video is a real opportunity in how consumers are going to engage with our content, how consumers are going to engage around AI chatbots, and the value that they're going to see in video. We have the right type of content, sports, entertainment, that consumers want via video, and I think we know that that comes with higher CPMs.
That engagement that we're building with our consumers, it not only creates that direct relationship, but it helps us grow our first-party data capabilities, and Play is a great example of that. It's a low-friction way to engage users to create habits, but also to collect that first-party data that helps us better understand our audience, connect them to the more relevant experience, that next click, and it also allows us to have more relevant e-commerce opportunities, and advertising makes our audience more valuable to advertising. The more direct relationships we have, the better positioned we are to monetize our audience through premium advertising and the programmatic channels. You take a look at our audience, our increasing first-party data, video, and also potential industry tailwinds, I think we see a lot of upside in advertising ahead of us.
Okay. I wanted to ask a question about the LocaliQ part of the business.
Where you have close to, I think, 12,000 customers, paying close to $2,800, I think, a month. What I'm curious about is, there has been some pressure in that line, in recent quarters, and it comes in an environment where I think a lot of what that group was involved in is helping local companies market themselves locally, which would include an element of search engine optimization historically, where that business is in deep transition, as we've been discussing. What is it that's caused the pressure? Is it tied at all to change in search from Google's side? What do you think needs to happen for that business to turn around to be a growth contributor?
I certainly think search is a factor there. Search has been part of that product suite, certainly search behavior is changing, and that impacts the DMS business as well. Just like on the media side of our business, we've been aware that this change in habit is coming, we've been building tools and a product suite that help us navigate that. We've intentionally leaned into social, where we're seeing good results for our advertisers. We've leaned into areas like our owned and operated inventory in that product suite. Certainly as we build out that first-party data, that becomes even more valuable in that funnel. Also things like Dash, which is allowing the customers that we have on our platform to follow up on leads in a much quicker and more efficient path using AI tools to answer calls, schedule appointments.
We've really been working in the DMS or the LocaliQ space as well to reduce our reliance on search and to provide more value for our advertisers. You're right. It's a line of business that's going through transition, we think we've taken the steps to make that a resilient and growing business over time as well.
Obviously, we're in a world that's full of all kinds of news on the macro perspective, from the geopolitical perspective, gas prices elevated. To what degree is the macro impacting your business in terms of consumer paying for subscriptions, retaining subscriptions, marketers spending on advertising, digital marketing services? What are you seeing, if anything, out there from what's happening in the world?
I imagine you're hearing this from other folks as well, for us, the ad market and the macroeconomic environment has been surprisingly resilient. I'd say over the last 12-18 months, we've seen the economy continue to perform really well, despite a number of the widely discussed headwinds that I think you're referring to. We keep having constructive conversations with our advertisers. We're not seeing a material change in their behavior. Certainly, the longer that these headwinds persist, the greater the potential impact is on advertisers and on consumers, we're absolutely watching it closely. Right now, the environment remains really stable and resilient. When you think about it in terms of our subscribers, and that line of business, we tend to have people on our platform that skew to higher average household income. Certainly, that's the case in our subscriber base as well.
Certainly we're seeing that high-income consumers are continuing to spend with confidence. We're not seeing the impact on our consumer or subscription business at this point either.
Okay. All right. I'm going to turn again to the questions that are in the queue, there's one that's so simple, I want to put it out there, Mike or Tricia, either of you can address this, whoever wants to stand up on this one, the question is quite simply, what gives you a sustainable competitive advantage? How would you frame that?
I'll jump in, Tricia, add your thoughts as well. First of all, it's creating unique, differentiated content that's relevant to people's lives every single day, doing that at scale across the country. We're, from a local perspective, in close to about 45 states, with the USA TODAY, we're in 50 states, and we're the second-largest publisher in the U.K. as well. Creating that valuable, relevant, but unique content every single day that's valuable to people's lives because it's local and it impacts your day-to-day living, creating that is the competitive advantage we have that's sustainable over the long term. We've been in business in most of our markets for close to 200 years because of that type of content that we create. That's really our single biggest competitive advantage.
Okay. Last kind of broad sweep, just kind of nuts and bolts here. We are very focused, obviously, on seeing what develops, transpires with your Google interactions. Just where are we in the process with the litigation that you highlighted, what leads you to kind of talk about maybe by the summer is an opportunity for some resolution potentially?
With our case specifically, Barton, we filed over three years ago. Last year when the DOJ won their case against Google, many of the points that the DOJ won on are in our litigation as well. We filed for summary judgment to have the judge grant us that ruling that the DOJ won so that we could move our case from proving wrongdoing to damages discussion. We won that summary judgment with the judge. Google turned around in the first quarter of this year and filed summary judgment, and the judge should rule on that in the next couple of months. We feel very strongly that the judge will rule in our favor based on the facts of the case, but also the previous DOJ ruling. Once that summary judgment is ruled upon, we think a trial date will get set.
We're going to push for a trial date as soon as possible, that trial date, Barton, is really the trigger, I think, for hopefully discussions.
Okay. All right, great. I think we're right at the end of time. Mike, Tricia, thank you guys very, very much for getting up this morning and talking with us about USA TODAY. We really appreciate it.
Thanks for having us, Barton.
All right. Take care.
Yeah. Thank you, Barton.