All right, well, welcome to the Needham Growth Conference. My name is Josh Riley, and I'm an analyst on the enterprise software team. This morning, we are excited to have TechTarget with CEO Gary Nugent. So, Gary, maybe let's start with an overview of TechTarget for those less familiar and how the Informa Tech merger transformed the business.
Good morning, Josh. Let me start by talking a little bit about the business and what it does. I mean, first and foremost, we inform, we educate, and we connect the B2B technology industry. We do that through both our analyst capabilities but our editorial capabilities. Really, what we're doing is we are shaping the investment in technology on the buy side. Through that activity, we then offer a range of services to the sell side of the industry, the vendors, the technology innovators, to grow their business. It's all really about accelerating their growth, accelerating time to market, and accelerating time to revenue. We do that through an array of products and services that really connect the sell side to the buy side.
Got it. All right. So you've now been in the seat for over a year running the business. Can you rewind on some of the accomplishments you made in 2025, and maybe what are some of the strategic priorities for 2026?
Yeah, certainly, so, I mean, we brought, obviously, Informa Tech and TechTarget together to create Informa TechTarget. The two companies were very complementary, shared a common strategy, a common vision, and a common strategy and the piece parts were complementary, but we still needed to put them together. We spent a significant amount of 2025, the foundation year, doing that work, bringing the companies together. First and foremost, I would say, on the product portfolio side of the equation, so there was a process going through of us distilling and rationalizing the portfolio of products and services across the spectrum. I think we've made really good progress in that regard, and in particular, we've launched our new unified demand portfolio as part of that effort. Separate and distinct from that, there was a lot of work that needed to be done on processes and systems.
As you can imagine, you bring companies together. There are multiple ERPs, multiple CRMs, multiple fulfillment systems. We spent, invested a lot of time just distilling it down into a common stack so that we can be easy to do business with for our customers and actually so that we can make it easier for our colleagues to do their job, to do their business. Beyond that, a bit of work on brands. You'll have seen that we've consolidated brands in the marketplace so that we can put as much of our firepower behind a few brands. Obviously, Informa TechTarget is the lead company brand. But we did similar work with our intelligence and advisory brands so that we now go to market under the unified brand that is Omdia. And then maybe the last thing I would talk about is on the go-to-market front.
Generally, I believe that the business is not demand-constrained, nor are we supply-constrained. It's really about us intercepting the marketplace. So we've been shifting the emphasis of the resource base of the business towards go-to-market roles, investment in marketing, investment in sales coverage in the marketplace, investment in particular in serving the largest customers in the industry that we serve, which we reckon about 150-200 customers represent about half of the market that is addressable.
Got it. Okay. All right. So a lot of investors are familiar with the TechTarget assets and business, but maybe less so familiar with Informa Tech. How should investors think about the correlation of Informa Tech assets to TechTarget's legacy business in terms of growth profile, margins, seasonality, et cetera?
Like I say, the two companies were highly complementary and shared a similar strategy and a similar vision. Therefore, really, the margin profile, the seasonality is very similar. It doesn't really change the profile in that regard. Certainly, there were sort of relative strengths. If you think about the business really in sort of three component parts, so there's intelligence and advisory, brand and content, and then intent and demand. The Informa Tech brought more of the intelligence and advisory capabilities to the table, whereas the legacy TechTarget brought more of the intent and demand capabilities to the table. There were probably a bit of a kind of merger of equals in brand and content, effectively. Effectively, by bringing the two companies together, it really was about breadth and scale. We've effectively doubled the size of the business.
If you either doubled the size of the Informa Tech business or doubled the size of the TechTarget business, doubled the size in terms of the revenues, doubled the size in terms of the colleague base that supports that and the subject matter experts, and then just generally, it's about breadth and scale to compete in what is quite a fragmented marketplace.
Yep. No, that's super helpful. All right. So one of your stated goals is to double the business in five years through a balanced approach of market share gains, international growth, new market expansion, new products, and potentially M&A. How committed are you to following this growth strategy and hitting the stated goal? And maybe we'll start there, and then I got to follow up to that one.
Yeah, sure. Well, certainly, growth, it's a growth story. It's a top-line growth story, and so we're absolutely committed to that top-line growth story. In terms of the laying out, what we saw is the kind of value drivers, if you like, or the growth drivers. First and foremost, taking market share in the core market, which is the enterprise IT market in North America, and that in and of itself, it's about 60% of the addressable market, and the addressable market we estimate to be about a $20 billion market, and through really the combination and through achieving that breadth and scale, it's a market share gain game there, then what I would describe it as the next lever is international growth, taking the business internationally and addressing the technology, B2B technology market across the globe.
In particular, we see that the Middle East at the moment is a very buoyant market in that regard. And obviously, you've got the triangle that is China, Korea, and Japan really being the epicenter of an Asian technology market. Third area is technology vertical markets, industry vertical technology markets. So some technologies are genuinely horizontal in their nature. Every company requires them. All banks need databases. All banks need servers. All banks need storage. But obviously, there are some technologies which are genuinely vertical in their nature, so treasury systems for banks. And so there's an untapped vertical tech market that we then move into. And then you mentioned really product innovation. And in particular, leveraging the assets that are the event data that we get from our parent, which is Informa PLC, the largest B2B event producer, gives us an opportunity to expand the product portfolio.
And then, as we said, it's a highly fragmented marketplace. And therefore, over time, we also see the opportunity to roll up through mergers and acquisitions.
Got it. All right. So AI is clearly the hot topic right now with investors. Thus far, I would say it's maybe had a little positive or negative impact on your business. Can you just review over the last 18 months any impact that it has had? And then moving forward, kind of maybe what is your product strategy to capitalize on AI?
Yeah, sure. Well, certainly, we talk about AI in three or four ways. The first way, of course, is it's a market in and of itself. And that's what we do. We connect technology buyers to technology sellers. And so anybody who's in the market for artificial intelligence for their business is really in a target market for our business. And so we serve the market in and of itself. Still quite an early stage market. I mean, it's really interesting if you look at the data around AI investment in enterprises and in governments, less than 50% are really beyond the stage of evaluating and testing, et cetera, but an important market nonetheless. We estimate the end market to be about a $280 billion market by 2028. Separately and distinct from that, there really is the notion of AI as an enabler for our business.
I mean, a lot of what we do is data aggregation and analysis and insight. A lot of what we do is content creation and curation. AI is the core use case. Generative AI is a core use case there. We're applying AI extensively across our business to improve the efficiency and the effectiveness of our colleagues, and that's really bucket number two. We can talk about that. In particular, we talk and then on a product front, really, we're using it on what you would describe as the kind of conversational interfaces into our data and conversational interfaces into our content. We can talk a little bit more about that. Last thing really is maybe where people then regard the sort of slightly more, the disruption side of the equation, which is how do audiences, how do people, how do they discover knowledge? How do they consume that knowledge?
How do they then make their decisions on the basis of that? And certainly, we have seen, I mean, you've seen that. I'm sure you've seen it in many kind of media articles and industry articles around search, the kind of disruption of search as a vehicle for audiences to discover content. That's definitely, it's definitely a phenomenon in the marketplace. It's a dynamic. The beauty of our businesses is that we're incredibly diverse in terms of our audience development activities. And despite all of that, despite all of that disruption in the marketplace and change in the marketplace, actually, in 2025, we saw our active membership grow year -on -year. And so I think we're really, it's really that resilience is through the diversification of our audience development.
Got it. All right. So the legacy TechTarget business always had a healthy amount of seasonality and cyclicality based on the timing of tech spend and overall spending cycles. With the 2021 to 2023 cycle, probably the most pronounced up and downswing in spending, what does a normal market environment look like for the combined business moving forward, including an assessment of maybe like a reasonable growth rate?
I think that period that you quoted was really what you might call the COVID effect, the pandemic effect, right? I mean, there was a lot of what you would call physical marketing mediums like events and conferences and trade shows, et cetera, which simply were unable to operate through that period, and the money that used to be that would flow into that flowed into more digital marketing techniques, really, so that was a bit of a, that was a phenomenon in and of itself. I think you can certainly, I think, go back to prior years before that, pre-2019, 2020, where you would sort of say that was more what you would call normal, but actually, we rolled out of that, out of the COVID pandemic into the AI investment frenzy.
This is the interesting thing that I sort of observe when I talk to my customers. The first thing you observe when I talk to my customers is they're all actually doing incredibly well. My customers are enterprise technology vendors, industry vertical technology vendors. Generally speaking, the world of technology is in a good place. Revenues are growing. And actually, their margins are expanding as they do so. However, they are or they feel that they are in a bit of an AI R&D arms race at the moment. And so every sort of spare dollar is really being funneled into that R&D arms race to develop new products, to embed AI into existing products. And so that's really been what we've been experiencing maybe in the last 18 months to two years.
Rather than it being, our customers are concerned or their businesses are not doing quite so well and they're trying to tighten their belts. Actually, it's much more about business is good, but we can see this phenomenon on the horizon and we're having to invest or focus our money in R&D. Now, for our business, in the short term, that presents challenges in the short term, but actually, in the mid to long term, that's a really good thing for us. Because what then is there is a pent-up R&D output into products that then need to get launched and then they need to be sold, and that's how you get an ROI on your R&D.
Really, what I would expect is that over the next, and we see this with our analysts, is that that sort of groundswell of products coming to market in the next sort of 12-18 months will begin to be a marketplace that we can go in and serve.
Interesting. That's an interesting point there. All right. One of the unique items that happened with the last upswing along with what we were just talking about was a significant number of venture-backed customers came to TechTarget in 2021 and then were impacted, unfortunately, by the Silicon Valley Bank crisis and had to cut spending. Is there an opportunity for some of these hundreds of customers to potentially return to TechTarget moving forward?
I think actually that sort of phenomenon of companies was really all about how low interest rates were and how the cost of capital being what it was at the time and money flowing around the system in the way that it was. You saw during that period of time maybe a lot more speculative businesses than we see at the moment because of that. I really don't think that is going to return unless you see a similar capital environment, really, right? That would have been my observation about it. That doesn't mean to say that the technology industry still has an incredibly healthy startup and an incredibly healthy scale-up world. We serve that world. I mean, our business has over 7,000-7,500 customers, individual customers at present. It's clearly not just the 150 to 200 biggest players in the industry.
But I don't think you're going to see that incredibly long tail of speculative startups that we saw in that period.
Right. Yep. Gotcha. If we look at the registered member base and their engagement with the online content, whether it's webinars or white papers, curious any trends you can share in terms of time spent, average number of webinars viewed, and maybe how that's trended over the last few years?
Certainly, I mean, if I take you back to the distinction between traffic and membership, so traffic is the kind of the very, very top of our funnel, but as a business, we don't monetize traffic, and there are businesses out there who monetize anonymous traffic, but that's not our business model. Less than 5% of our revenue comes from the monetization of anonymous traffic. It's really all about conversion to membership. Once we have a known permissioned member in our business, that's really the asset, the data asset that fuels all of our products and services and that we monetize, and I mentioned earlier on, we're seeing membership actually grow over the period and engagement, active engagement grow as well over that period as well. I think one of the key things we're seeing is this notion of what is a trusted source of information.
We're definitely seeing the kind of early phases of research, the early phases of a buyer journey being influenced by artificial intelligence and answer engines. That is taking some of that traffic that used to come from search off the table. But then the traffic that's coming from those answer engines is slightly more qualified. It's converting to members at a much higher rate, about three to four times the rate at which search traffic would convert. And so what that really tells me is that we're now getting a much more qualified researcher coming to us. And that's really what the answer engine is doing. It's sort of helping us qualify out maybe the individuals that are just looking for information or knowledge or learning or education. And it's really qualified buyers that are coming. In terms of the mediums, I mean, obviously we get, you talked about webinar.
Certainly, I would say video consumption is on the up. We're definitely seeing the notion that the kind of next generation that's coming through of decision makers and influencers are much more comfortable with video mediums, both short-based and long-based video mediums, and less inclined to read, less inclined to read maybe. But actually, I looked at the data in advance of this. We also saw a growth in white paper downloads, which is so growth in webinars and growth in white paper downloads. So generally speaking, difficult to discern a pattern there or a trend there other than the appetite for trusted sources of information is just generally up.
Yeah. So maybe they're downloading the white paper, but not reading the whole thing, looking for sections that's relevant for what they're interested in.
That's definitely possible. But also, I just think that actually the definition of what's a white paper is changing as well. I remember back in my days of working for IBM. I mean, they used to have these things called the blue books and the white books and the red books. And they were this thick when they were published. You now see a typical white paper is a much more condensed distillation of the knowledge and the information. And so there's sort of shorter form versions of them. And there are different. It's less text heavy.
Would you consider so I read a lot of these articles from my own research. If you were to read an article on the TechTarget network called, say, "Five Trends for Unified Communications in 2026," is that considered a white paper or is that just considered a general public?
That would be more of an article. If you think about an editorial article.
That's not something you necessarily monetize?
We don't monetize articles, no. I mean, a huge amount of our content creation and curation is about informing and educating the buy side of the industry through those sort of articles. I mean, and it's really interesting. I was looking at the kind of what were the top articles or what were the top subject matters that the industry was interested in last year. I mean, as you can imagine, anything to do with AI was consumed voraciously as the buy side was trying to get their arms around what's the value proposition here, where should I be investing, how do I get a return on that investment. The next biggest thing was a direct linkage, anything to do with kind of macroeconomic policy and the administration's policies around tariffs and around supply chains, et cetera, et cetera.
Those were the kind of two really kind of the big things that was informing and educating last year.
Gotcha. That's interesting. Okay. So years ago, the priority for TechTarget was to increase the mix of annual-based contracts for the company to have greater predictability on spend. What is the thought for the new company in this regard? And are you going to be targeting getting a certain mix of annual versus quarterly contracts?
Well, I mean, first of all, I would say that my philosophy in all of this is you have to give the customer what they want. You have to give the marketplace what they want. And your commercial packaging of your product is really a feature of your product. It's no different from any other feature of your product. So I'm not going to try and force-fit a subscription model or a long-term contract model on a marketplace that doesn't want to buy that way. You have to sell the way the customers want to buy. Now, there are certainly certain products and services that lend themselves to being bought on a longer-term basis. And there are certain products and services that lend themselves to be bought on a subscription basis. So for example, if you take our intelligence products, they're almost entirely subscription-based, annual and advanced subscriptions.
If you take our intent products, they're also a subscription-based product, and the market is very comfortable buying those value propositions that way. If you then take, for example, our advisory products and our content products, they're more project-type buys. They're usually sort of six-month engagements, nine-month engagements. There are lots of milestones in the delivery to the client base as a result of that. We got very high visibility on that front. If you take demand, though, demand is something where the marketplace wants to kind of buy it really on a quarterly basis. They will look to buy their demand on a quarterly basis. They will see how their pipelines are. They will see how the market is responding, and they'll want to adjust their spend in that regard. Because that's kind of how they run their businesses at the end of the day.
What I would say, though, is there is definitely in the marketplace, if we talk to our customers about ease of doing business, there is definitely a desire in the marketplace for us to have maybe sort of more retainer-type commercial terms in that demand space so that customers can easily dial up and dial down, and not just dial up and dial down, but move it around as well. I've got more than enough demand in the North American marketplace. I need more demand in Japan. I need more demand in Korea, and so they want to have that flexibility and that agility.
I believe Priority Engine with the old TechTarget business was kind of the original driver push that the old TechTarget made to have more annual business. I know that's sold on both a quarterly and annual basis. Are you seeing more? What's the customer trend in terms of uptake?
That's what I meant by the intent market, just so we're clear. When I said the intent market lends itself to being a subscription-based product, that is, you would know that.
You see more annual.
You would know that as well. You would see that as more Priority Engine. I think what we also see there is that the intent market requires a level of sophistication in the customer, so you need to be quite a sophisticated marketer to adopt and extract value from intent as a data signal coming into your business, and what that means is that it's then highly integrated into their martech stacks, and once it's tightly integrated into those martech stacks, it then becomes something that remains that sustains within their business over a long period of time.
Yeah. And then they would almost mirror that contract structure to their marketing tech contract structures.
Correct. Yeah.
All right, so you now have the combined business split into three segments, as we've discussed. Why is this maybe the right operating model moving forward, and how does R&D and sales and marketing kind of flow between these segments?
Well, I mean, personally, I think it's the right model, obviously, because it aligns to our customers and how our customers run their businesses. All of our customers, they invariably run the business on the basis of what you would call their product roadmap. Their product roadmap starts within the product business units where they are in the business of understanding what markets to be in, understanding what products and services that they should produce, build the product roadmaps, and build those products and services. That's really where the intelligence and the advisory business plays with strategists and product management and product marketing. They then pass the ball.
When a product is ready to be launched or when an existing in-market product is getting a bit of a facelift, that then gets handed to the brand teams and the content marketing teams whose job it is to kind of signal to the marketplace that this is coming. So it's about thought leadership. It's about brand awareness. It's about reputation. That's where the brand and content products and services come into place. And then the final stage of that journey is we now need to sell this stuff. It's in-market. We now need to fill our pipelines and sell it. And that's when the baton gets passed to performance marketers, to field marketers, to field sales. And that's when the intent and the demand products and services come into play.
Effectively, we're lining our business up to face off to the way in which our customers run their business and to follow effectively the investment from R&D to ROI in our companies.
So is the right way to think about it that there's a large bucket of R&D and sales and marketing, and then it gets allocated across the three divisions? Or is there dedicated R&D and sales and marketing to each of the three business units?
You tend to find that I think the way I maybe more think about it is we run it holistically. We run it as one, and in terms of the capital allocation and in terms of investment in products and services, we look at it really as a whole, and what we're trying to do, of course, is we're trying to kind of anticipate what are our customers' requirements in each of those three phases, and we're trying to anticipate where there is market opportunity and we'll invest on that basis.
Gotcha. That's helpful. All right. So as we look at the competitive landscape, many of your competitors have had a tough time in the last few years, particularly the ABM vendors with your mid-single-digit revenue growth here currently. Do you see the market growth kind of below that level? And then I got a follow-up to that. We'll start with that.
Certainly, I would say I spent most of the fourth quarter visiting our customers and talking to them about their outlook for this year. The message I was getting was pretty much it's going to be a bit of a flat to single-digit inflation-led single-digit growth budget cycle. And again, the kind of refrain was very much because the company is focusing as much of its capital on R&D and AI as it possibly can. So that AI arms race was continuing. But from a growth perspective of our company, it's all about taking market share. I mean, we only have 2.5% market share. And therefore, there is plenty of growth to come from competing and winning in the marketplace. And I am competing and winning. You talked about, you mentioned the competition having a hard time. We are competing against relatively subscale players in the marketplace.
This is a story of breadth and scale through the combination, so that we have big customers. Those big customers have big problems and big requirements, and they really don't want to have to do business with 10-15 vendors to solve their big problems and big requirements. They want to reduce the number of companies that they're doing business with. They want to focus on a number of strategic partnerships, and with the breadth and scale that we have created, we have put ourselves in the box seat for those conversations.
Gotcha. And then just kind of a follow-up on that one is, without naming any specific names, what are the types of competitors that you see that you're taking market share from?
Actually, I would say you tend to put the competition into two boxes. We first have the competition who are running their business on the basis of a permissioned and known audience. Most of those companies tend to have been in some way, shape, or form, they have kind of a DNA and a history of content creation, content curation, of informing and educating the audience through some kind of publisher model, et cetera, et cetera. That's kind of one category of competitors. The other category of competitors are those who don't run the business on the back of an owned data set and a permissioned data set. It's usually a data set that they've either licensed from somebody or scraped from the world out there.
Actually, that marketplace, I think, is going to be challenged as we move forward in time because of increased data privacy, increased data protection, and customers really demanding to know what's the integrity of the source of the data that I'm using to run my business. And so you've got those are the kind of two big buckets that I would put them in. And we're very firmly a permissioned known audience business. And that's on the basis we compete and win.
Would you say that you're having more success against one of those two categories? Or is it kind of equal across the board?
Actually, I think there's no pattern, and the companies that we compete against all have their own individual issues and challenges, if you know what I mean. I wouldn't discern a pattern on the basis of the nature of their business.
Gotcha. That's helpful. All right. One of your focuses has been on targeting larger customers. I think you mentioned earlier 150 make a pretty large part of the market. Maybe just explain why is that the right move from a sales and marketing perspective and the best use of your kind of incremental dollar of investment?
I can't remember who. There was a famous American bank robber that when he was interviewed on the steps of the courthouse by a journalist who asked him, "Why do you rob banks?" The answer was, "Well, because that's where the money is." And that's true of the top 150-200 customers. Why are we focusing our efforts there? It's because that's where the money is. It's also where the scale requirements are. And I go back to my point that actually it's the breadth and scale of our business that is a competitive advantage. And that competitive advantage plays out in those larger customers who've got big problems to solve. If you're Google and you're growing at 20% year -on -year and you're a multi-billion dollar company, that's a lot of demand you've got to generate to continue to drive your business at 20% year -on -year.
So for both those reasons, that's why we're really focusing in on that market. Not to the exclusion of everything else by any stretch of the imagination, but it's about priority and it's about focus. And that's where we're looking to therefore develop the product portfolio, develop the customer service models, and to put our marketing and sales coverage in play.
Gotcha. And then maybe along those lines, how is the cross-sell progressing between the legacy TechTarget assets and the Informa Tech newcomer?
I think, look, I would say very well. 2025 was incredibly encouraging in this regard. We've talked about through 2025 about the fact that we're seeing really strong growth, for example, in the NetLine product, which was an Informa Tech asset, and that growth has largely come from the cadre of customers that were TechTarget customers. So that has been incredibly exciting. Similarly, we saw really good growth in the Industry Dive set of products and services. Again, a huge chunk of that has come from the cross-sell into the relationships that we have with customers that TechTarget were strong in. Actually, on the flip side of that, we've seen really good strong growth in the BrightTALK product and service, and again, that's actually coming from the reverse cross-sell. So in those three instances, we've seen really, really encouraging cross-sell.
Gotcha. That's helpful. All right. Just a couple of financial questions. We'll keep it simple there. As we look at the credit facility outstanding following the retirement of your convertible debt, are you comfortable with this capital structure moving forward? Or do you kind of foresee a change coming at some point?
I'm going to look at my CFO first and foremost. Are we comfortable? I think yes is the answer. We're comfortable with the capital structure. And actually, the business is in relative terms low leverage. And we're comfortable with that for the moment.
Okay. And then in terms of capital allocation, obviously, we know the free cash flow conversion is a bit limited this year due to integration costs. But moving forward, is the priority to build cash on the balance sheet to ultimately manage that outstanding credit facility? Or how should we think about the trade-off of investment versus building cash?
Well, I mean, certainly you're right to point out that the business is a good cash generator. You're also right to point out that in 2025 and a little bit in the first half of 2026, we've been investing some of that cash in the combination. A lot of that was in the processes and systems, in the fulfillment systems, in the marketing tech stack, in the CRM, in the ERP so that we can be one business to the marketplace, so that we are easy to do business with and we make it easier for our colleagues to do their job. And so that has had been a call on the cash, but that will eventually kind of really that will peter out as we go through 2026. Then I think you're going to see us be agile, I think, with the allocation.
I mean, obviously, the investment in products and services and in our own R&D and CapEx, actually. Obviously, then in the notion of share buy backs if that's appropriate, but also in the notion of M&A activity. I think from an M&A perspective, we will want to see ourselves through 2026. We will want to bed in that platform because part of that investment in processes and systems was also about building a platform into which we could then easily integrate and extract value from any M&A. So that's probably going to be more slightly out in the longer term.
All right. Great. All right. Well, with that, I think we can wrap it up, and thanks, Gary, for the time today.
Thank you, Josh. Appreciate it.