Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the 2021 Ziff Davis Analyst Day. Following today's presentation, there will be a Q and A session where you will have the opportunity to ask the Ziff Davis management team your question. Instructions for dialing into the Q and A queue will be shown on screen. There will be a 1 minute intermission between the presentation and Q and A session, you may dial in to the Q and A queue during the intermission or at any point during the Q and A session, please do not dial in until the presentation concludes. It is now my pleasure to turn the floor over to Vivek Shah, CEO of J2 Global.
Good morning. I'm Vivek Shah, the CEO of J2 Global, and it's my great pleasure to welcome you to our first ever Ziff Davis Analyst Day. As we announced in April, J2 is planning to separate into 2 publicly traded companies. One called Consensus, which will be led by Scott Pariecki, J2's current CFO and the other Ziff Davis, which I'll have the privilege to lead. Today, we will review Ziff Davis' strategy, business model and priorities while hearing from the team that's leading the company.
Please make note of the Safe Harbor language. As you know, this presentation will include forward looking statements. Such statements may involve risks and uncertainties that would cause actual results to differ materially from the anticipated results. Some of those risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, the risk factors that we've disclosed in our various SEC filings, including our 10 ks filings, recent 10 Q filings, various proxy statements and 8 ks filings, as well as the additional risk factors we've included here. Now let's turn to the agenda.
The entire presentation including Q and A should last approximately 2 hours. I'll begin by giving an overview of Ziff Davis and our investment highlights. I'll be followed by Sean Alford, our SVP of Corporate Development will provide a deeper view into our acquisition system. Following Sean, each of our 3 divisional presidents, Steve Horowitz, Dan Stone and Nate Simmons will share their strategies for their respective vertical markets. Then our new VP of Sustainability and responsibility, Dara Feldman will share an update on our ESG efforts and progress.
We'll conclude with a live Q and A session where all of today's speakers will be available to answer questions. I hope that at the conclusion of this event, we will have succeeded in conveying a handful of key takeaways about Ziff Davis. 1st and foremost, we are a buyer and operator of digital media and Internet businesses and we understand and have harnessed the power of verticals. We create value through digital transformation either through the reinvention of businesses that have struggled digitization or accelerating those on the right path. The resurrection of Ziff Davis itself is probably one of the most celebrated digital transformation stories in our industry.
We have built a highly resilient business model with enviable revenue retention, low churn and strong visibility. We recognize that great capital allocation yields great shareholder returns and believe our track record is exceptional. The heart of our capital allocation are acquisitions and our systematic and programmatic approach has enabled outstanding returns. As a result, our growth, profitability and free cash flow fundamentals are strong. Nearly all of the businesses that comprise Ziff Davis today were acquired within the last decade.
Remember in 2012, J2 entered the digital media and Internet space with its acquisition of Ziff Davis, which also brought me to the company. With the spin off of consensus, which contains j2's original CloudFAX business and the disposal of other assets, the portfolio that is now Ziff Davis has been assembled over the past decade by the leadership team presenting to you today. And the vertical markets in which we've chosen to participate to borrow Willie Sutton's logic are where the money is. These are some of the fastest growing verticals representing $148,000,000,000 TAM. They represent half of the U.
S. Digital media ad spend and 2 of the most important software categories for small and medium businesses. When we think about the kinds of assets that we acquire and operate in these verticals, we look for those in which the forces of digitization are strong, we've constructed our portfolio to address the shifts in how we shop, consume entertainment and use technology in our lives. And what we've demonstrated is the ability to monetize audiences with innovations in advertising formats and pricing models. Our proficiency in extracting multiple rents from audiences is core to our value creation formula as is our ability to leverage proprietary technology, including our customer data platform, our commerce engine and content management system.
We're also excellent resource allocators and view all capital deployments, both financial capital and human capital as being returns based and empirically driven. We seek to eradicate waste wherever we see it and continually optimize our resources. Finally, our decentralized organizational structure, the Business Unit General Manager ensures that we have a deep bench of digital executives focused on their operating results and competing for the company's capital. Our corporate team represents only about 1% of the company's headcount. The rest are working inside of each of the business units.
In our company, the products are either content or tools and we believe we're best in class in each. We're an organization filled with typists. We type content and we type code. What really emerges is a community of world class creators. Our content creators focus on informing important decisions, often buying decisions in some of the most important verticals.
Our software creators develop tools that address the fundamentals of a digital world, better broadband, protection from cyber threats and online marketing. Finally the brands that we've assembled are well established leaders with enviable reach and engagement. Our business model is robust, balanced and versatile. We make money in 2 ways, Advertising and subscriptions. The advertising business is about 60% of revenues.
We have a broad range of ad products that span multiple formats from display to video to contextual links to sponsorships as well as a range of pricing models including CPM, CPC, CPL and CPA. And because we operate in verticals, a large number of our advertisers view us as a must buy and therefore are repeat buyers. The subscription and licensing business is about 40% of our revenues. Our subscription and licensing products are consumers and businesses. These are sticky solutions which see low revenue churn and sit adjacent to the content verticals in which we operate.
More on that in a moment. Intent is everything in the advertising business. Understanding the users' needs is critical. We also believe that contextual relevance drives performance and that explains the power of our advertising platform. Our audiences come to us for answers, is advice and help, which establishes clear intent.
Our ad products are intended to match that intent in real time and organically integrated into the experience. For instance, reading about baby strollers at babycenter and integrating links to purchasing a stroller demonstrates the power of intent and context. With this practice of integrating Purchase Links, we generate $4,500,000,000 we generally avoid using 3rd party data to target ads a practice called behavioral advertising, which we believe has meaningful challenges and headwinds. Our ads are matched to content and our content is consumed by users who are deep into the consideration funnel. I'll also point out that while the large ad platforms have a long tail of 10,000,000 advertisers, our business consists of about 2,100 large enterprise ad buyers who spend an average of about $350,000 per year with us.
These are largely endemic ad budgets, which means the ad content is related and relevant to the edit content. That's different from the advertising that is generally done on large platforms where they are targeting a user, not a natural and relevant Adjacency. Our ad business has fantastic sustained growth and the kind of net revenue retention you would see at leading SaaS companies. Again, because we're in verticals which attract endemics with ad products that produce performance, we're able to see net ad revenue retention of 106%. We define net ad revenue retention in the classic manner.
We take the amount spent by the prior year's advertisers and compare it to their spend in the current year. Growth on top of that comes in the form of new advertisers to our platform. Earlier, I spoke about how we're able to pick the vertical markets in which we want to participate and the assets we want to acquire. The same can be said about how we approach subscription businesses. We look for subscription based Internet businesses that leverage 1 or more of our core competencies, our significant audience reach, the traffic insights which emerge from all of the billions of interactions we have with our audience and domain expertise in our vertical markets, we refer to these opportunities as subscription adjacencies.
For instance, we acquired Viper and IPVantage, which constitute the backbone of our cybersecurity suite. Based on the demand we saw at our content sites and the success we were having generating customers for others in the space, we acquired Humblebund based on insights into the PC gaming space at IGN and have been able to leverage our position in the industry to successfully launch new game titles. From an end user point of view, our subscription services are sold to small and medium businesses as well as consumers. We have approximately 2,400,000 subscribers at an average monthly revenue per subscriber of approximately $16 that blends lower priced high volume services like Humble Bundle and IPVanish with higher priced low volume services like Ookla and Viper. We like the diversification of markets and price points, which further serves to derisk the business.
The subscription business has been a steady growth engine and like the advertising business, the stickiness of the revenue is important. With a low churn rate, we are well positioned to have subscriber adds and revenue expansion from existing customers drive overall revenue growth. As you've heard me say on prior earnings calls, we believe we have an opportunity to invest in customer acquisition to accelerate our subscriber adds. We historically constrained ourselves to pretty conservative CAC to LTV ratios, which capped growth. We are committed to investing the marketing dollars to accelerate Capital allocation is our North Star at Ziff Davis.
We generally view ourselves as having 3 choices for our shareholders' capital: capital expenditures, acquisitions and share repurchases. All capital allocation options are weighed against each other, both in terms of risk and return and we allocate based on the most promising options that we believe will clear our 20% IRR hurdle rate. You can see that historically acquisitions have garnered approximately 80% of our capital, which speaks to the quality of our acquisition system and the fruitfulness of the markets we target. Having said that, we believe our CapEx has been important to the organic growth at Ziff Davis. Our share repurchases over the past few years allowed us to buy in 4,400,000 JCOM shares at an average price of under $73 What's made our acquisition program so successful is its foundation in some core principles.
We seek digital transformation opportunities in the best Internet verticals where we uniquely can create value. That's a fundamental concept. It can't just be a good investment. We have to see a clear path to leveraging our platforms to unlock incremental value. We also measure success on free cash flow above all else.
It ensures continued funding of our capital allocation system. I'd also say that while we thrive in the lower middle market, which we define as deals under $200,000,000 in value, we are nonetheless always looking for more transformative deals such as the Everyday Health acquisition in 2016 and RetailMeNot in 2020. Finally, we pride ourselves on our patience and discipline, which also requires shareholders to maintain a long term orientation. Here are our historical pro form a financials. This removes the impact of the consensus, AKA CloudFAX Business, the 2021 figures represent the midpoint of Ziff Davis' guidance, the revenue and adjusted EBITDA growth have been extraordinary.
You can see that margins hover in the mid-30s, which we believe is the right profile for the company. Obviously, J2's margins were roughly 40%, which were aided by Cloudfax' 60 plus percent contribution margin. To the first half of this year, revenues are up 36% with 15% growth in organic revenue. This is a new disaggregation of revenue which is worth explaining. We have removed an asset's revenues in the organic revenue line, if the asset was not owned by us in the prior period, that revenue is placed in the acquired revenue line.
Once we have a full month to compare an asset on a year over year basis, then those revenues are moved into the organic revenue line. We view this as a conservative approach and we don't take any credit in the organic revenue line for outperformance of an acquired asset in its 1st year of ownership. At the same time, expect to see those have a dilutive effect. We continue to believe that total revenue growth and increasing EBITDA and free cash flow is the best way to evaluate Ziff Davis. And on that mark, we believe the margin expansion we've seen this year has been sensational.
With respect to our 2021 guidance, we've provided a bridge from the JCOM guidance we provided last month, which I will remind you was our 2nd successive guidance raise. Therefore, adjusting for consensus, you see that Ziff Davis' 2021 revenue range is $1,375,000,000 to $1,389,000,000 which compares favorably to the range we shared in April of $1,297,000,000 to 1,334,000,000 on adjusted EBITDA, there are $9,000,000 of costs that resided in JCOM overhead, which are moving to consensus. Our adjusted EBITDA range for 2021 is $484,000,000 to 492,000,000 Let me close with what we believe is a snapshot of Ziff Davis' capitalization following the effectuation of the spin, which should occur in the coming weeks, we expect to have approximately $360,000,000 of cash on the balance sheet as well as investments including our retained stake and consensus, the value of our B2B backup business, OCV and WealthTalk worth approximately $340,000,000 We also expect to have a little over $1,000,000,000 of gross debt, resulting in a gross leverage ratio of 2.1 times and a net leverage including investments of about 0.6 times. This gives us plenty of dry powder for our acquisition system, which Sean Alford, our SVP of Corporate Development will discuss with you next.
Thank you.
Thanks, Vivek, and good morning, everyone. As Vivek mentioned, my name is Sean Alford, I'm Senior Vice President of Corporate Development at Ziff Davis, where I'm responsible for our M and A program. I've been with the company since 2017 and have been lucky to be a part of such a dynamic evolution over a relatively short period of time. I'm excited to update you today on our acquisition system. There are a few things I hope to accomplish today.
First, I want to illustrate that the M and A program at Ziff Davis post spin will be a seamless continuation of the M and A program that existed at j2 prior to spin. We will have the same M and A team, the same philosophy, the same core principles and the same playbook going forward. The only thing that will change will be our balance sheet. As Vivek pointed out, following the spin, we will be positioned better than ever to execute on our M and A program with access to over $1,000,000,000 of capacity. 2nd, I will share a refresh on our philosophy, our M and A toolkit and a formula that will continue to play a central role in the total growth of Ziff Davis.
3rd, I will provide an overview of our track record. We will take a look at a sampling of specific deals and also zoom out to look at the results of the overall Omid program. Our company is built around a cash flywheel. This virtuous cycle informs how we acquire, how we integrate, how we operate and how we think about building a long term highly durable portfolio. Many of you are deeply familiar with our philosophy and have witnessed its virtues firsthand as an investor or an analyst.
For those of you who are new to Ziff Davis, this is something you will consistently see from us in the future and represents much of the core of why we believe we are such an attractive vehicle for long term investment. Our formula is simple. We believe in investing in profitable businesses that can generate predictable growing free cash flow over long Horizons. As that cash accumulates, we recycle it into future investments of the same nature, businesses that can generate predictable and growing free cash flow over long horizons. We've built this portfolio through M and A in a very deliberate, methodical and consistent way.
Vivek highlighted the core principles behind our M and A philosophy in his opening remarks. On this page, you see a few extensions of those principles and how we apply them in practice. I will reiterate that predictable recurring free cash flow is our North Star. We will always prioritize acquisitions where we see a business with a profitable and durable core that we are uniquely positioned to grow. We've applied this philosophy and our M and A expertise across a wide variety of transaction types and situations, we have acquired closely held founder controlled companies, Private Equity and Venture backed Companies.
We have been a buyer of corporate carve outs. We have also acquired public companies like Everyday Health. We have found that our playbook also works across a variety of situations from growth stage opportunities where we can accelerate the trajectory of a business that is already growing to situations of distress where we are uniquely positioned to help a struggling business return to growth and profitability. When you couple our philosophy and focus with our M and A toolkit, you can begin to understand how we leverage M and A as a strategic advantage. Over the last year, we evaluated over 500 opportunities.
Sourcing prioritizing and executing against such a high volume of opportunities requires several key ingredients in a thoughtfully designed system. At Ziff Davis, we refer to those ingredients in that system as our M and A toolkit, which is comprised of a combination of proprietary processes, technologies, know how and resources, an important thing to understand about our M and A toolkit is that it has been purposefully built to support our decentralized operating philosophy, we have multiple M and A programs within Zafis. There is a parent M and A program focused primarily on large platform acquisitions like Everyday Health and RetailMeNot. There are division level eminent programs focused on adjacency opportunities within the verticals that Steve, Dan and Nate oversee. You will hear each of them speak today about some of the historical adjacency acquisitions The day of Pursuit and how they think about their M and A programs at the division level.
And finally, there are M and A programs within each of our business units led by general managers who are focused on tuck in acquisitions that uniquely complement their existing businesses. All of these programs are built with a common fabric that includes consistent analytical frameworks, structured deal processes and access to technical expertise from a variety of functional areas, every deal at Ziff Davis requires collaboration between an operating sponsor, who has industry expertise and drives the commercial thesis and integration planning for opportunity and a corporate development sponsor who focuses on investment fundamentals and deal terms and ensures consistency in our process and the IRR Driven Analytical Framework. We have found this formula to be extraordinarily productive Inefficient. It translates into an ecosystem that supports dozens of executives who regularly surface acquisition opportunities and a regimented process that allows us to close transactions within 4 to 6 weeks of LOI. The experience and expertise of our deal sponsors, the speed and efficiency of our system and our reputation for decisiveness
make us
a buyer of choice for many sellers, perhaps most importantly, our system has created an environment that allows Vivek and the Board to quickly and efficiently allocate capital to the best opportunities. For those of you who have followed our story for a long time, you appreciate our emphasis on consistently investing in businesses at prices that through growth and optimization end up being around or below 5 times annual EBITDA contribution of that business within about 24 months of acquisition. This slide gives a small snapshot of examples of our philosophy in action over the last 7 years, what you see next to each acquisition is a multiple that reflects the purchase price for the acquisition divided by 2020 EBITDA contribution of the acquired business. These are not purchase price multiples at the time of acquisition. In fact, many of the acquisitions on this page were acquired at a premium EBITDA multiple at the time of the transaction.
The point to take home on this slide is that through growth and synergy that we bring post close, we have consistently generated outsized EBITDA results from the capital we deploy on M and A. And importantly this illustrates that we have done so on some of our most significant acquisitions. It also reinforces that our playbook works across multiple verticals and multiple transaction types. These transactions represent 6 distinct verticals: technology, shopping, health and wellness, entertainment, cybersecurity and martech. They also represent a variety of transaction types.
On this page, you have a founder backed business in Ookla, a public company acquisition in everyday health, a venture backed acquisition in Humble Bundle and the corporate carve out in iContact. Over the last decade, I think you will be hard pressed to find any company that has been a more active acquirer of lower middle market Internet businesses than Ziff Davis. We have to keep in mind is that the portfolio we are presenting to you today was really spawned by J2's acquisition of Ziff Davis in late 2012. Since then and including that acquisition, we have deployed $2,700,000,000 of capital on M and A. It has created this collection of vertically focused Internet businesses that in I'll conclude by quickly highlighting our activity since last year's Analyst Day.
As I know there have been some questions around whether the pace of our M and A has in this environment. Since our Analyst Day in March of 2020, we have deployed over $600,000,000 of capital on 13 acquisitions across 7 of the 9 verticals that will remain a part of Ziff Davis post spin. We have done this while also successfully divesting of 3 businesses and orchestrating and executing the spin of consensus. This has been one of the most active and productive 18 month stretches in the history of our company, all against one of the most volatile and challenging economic backdrops we've ever seen. We are all energized by the momentum on our side and excited to continue to execute our M and A program with a fresh new brand and war chest of dry powder that we can put to work using the same philosophy and playbook that have contributed to our success today.
With that, I will turn the presentation over to Steve Horowitz. Thank you.
Good morning. I'm Steve Horowitz, President of the Technology, Shopping and Entertainment Division of Ziff Davis. I've had the great pleasure of working for Vivek and being at Ziff Davis for over 10 years. My 11th year anniversary will be this fall. It's a rare situation that after 10 years at one company, I feel that our most exciting days lie ahead of us rather than our rearview mirror.
Today, my goal is to provide you with greater insight about our focus and priorities along with our operating principles and rationale. We'll achieve this by reviewing the key verticals we cover, how we monetize them, how we approach M and A, details on our growth and why we believe it's sustainable. So first, let's start with the headline numbers. At $681,000,000 of trailing 12 months revenue and $283,000,000 of trailing 12 months adjusted EBITDA, we are one of the top vertical players in the digital media landscape. The figure I'm most proud of is our 25% CAGR since 2013, both top and bottom line, as former coach Bill Parcells once said, you are what your record says you are.
We've had a very strong track record for some time now. We wisely put our efforts into 3 key verticals, they represent close to 50% of all digital ad spending in the United States and a very sizable TAM of about 83,000,000,000 Thankfully, my colleague, Dan Sohn, who will be speaking directly after me, covers the health category, giving Ziff Davis impressive coverage of the most important sectors in advertising. Some of the important commonalities to note across these three four categories are the high intent of these audiences, important and expensive decisions are being made here. Yes, even in entertainment, which console should I buy, how many streaming services should I pay for, where to spend discretionary money and time are important as most people have less of both these days. 2, the requirement of decision based editorial and The incredible shift in spending to digital over the past decade for both consumers and in the ad categories and the pace continues to grow up and to the right and should do so for the foreseeable future.
And then lastly, the considerable depth of MVCs, what we call most valuable categories within these verticals, we can call them sub verticals. They can range from high volume interest and purchase intent, but at lower transaction values and commission rates such as say the sale of laptops, to low volume interest and purchases, but at a much higher transaction value and a much higher commission rate to us on the sale or on the lead, such as, say, a home security system, given the multiyear LTV of those customers as opposed to a one time sale of a consumer electronics product. As Vivek previously covered, Ziff Davis has established platform and playbook takes advantage of the secular shift from analog to digital. All these verticals have and continue to be battlegrounds of digital transformation, Another callback to Vivek from earlier in the presentation, we make money 2 ways, advertising subscriptions, excuse me, simple. In our advertising business, we have nearly quadrupled our revenues as we've expanded our ad capabilities to include display and video formats as well as performance marketing solutions, which is continuing to scale up.
In our subscription business, we have gone from basically nothing 2 quarter of our revenue derived from subscription and licensing products. We actively seek opportunities to extend into subscription adjacencies for both consumer and enterprise customers. I'll touch upon that a little bit further in the presentation. We've executed on this balanced approach the tune of a 25% revenue growth CAGR over the last 8 years, while maintaining a very high EBITDA margin over this time. I've used the form of this analogy before.
We have a strong track record of parallel parking in 18 wheeler between revenue and EBITDA in downtown Manhattan. It's not easy to do, but it's very important that we are between both revenue and EBITDA. We don't over index 1 or the other. Pretty easy to pull forward vertically in a parking lot in the suburbs if you're just focused on revenue. But to commit to both growth of revenue at high margins takes a lot of skill and a lot of commitment.
It's also important to note our balanced multi rent approach provides greater visibility into the business because of our annuity like revenue, it's basically allowing us to see more, which allows us to internally invest more to support organic growth. And given the growth of our subscription businesses over the last 2 years, this growth and this internal investment has only increased. Consistency of execution over a prolonged period of time, in my opinion, is the greatest measure of repeatable future growth. An example of this would be the New York Jets or an example that is not this would be the New York Jets. Since 2013, the Jets have started at 11 quarterbacks, certainly not the model of consistency at the most important position.
Not surprisingly, this yields one of the worst records in football during this time and as importantly, no confidence of winning anytime soon. As you can tell, I'm a Giants fan. Enjoy the edge we trust. Let's take a minute to break down the advertising piece. You can see the growth and the equation in the chart.
I'll focus on ad products at yield. 1st, ad products. It comes down to 2 basic models: CPM, which we charge for served ad impressions, whether it be display or video ads and in the case of video ads, it's typically pre roll and performance, where we earn a commission on a sale or charge for a lead. Performance has been a key driver of growth As it has access to always on budgets, meaning there is no limit to the advertiser spend as long as we can stay within their CAC allowables or their customer acquisition costs. Over the past 12 months, we've been paid commissions on over $4,800,000,000 of gross merchandise value, making us a leading source of e commerce sales in the industry.
We also primarily deliver our performance on owned and operated properties, which contributes to our high EBITDA margins. We simply don't have the traffic acquisition costs that many of our peers do. Now on a yield. Our strong net advertising revenue retention and ARPA are clear reflection of our high intent owned and operated audience merged with our industry leading editorial tools. Mashable, IGN, PCMag, RetailMeNot, SpiceWorks and certainly we shouldn't forget Down Detector and Speedtest, tools that level the playing field between consumers and carriers by providing transparent performance measurement.
Also worth noting, it doesn't take 100 of 1000 or 1000000 of advertisers to drive our ad business. Our scale and performance commands large spends from the category leading endemic advertisers. We're a must buy. Let's take a minute now to break down the subscription piece. Again, you can see on the slide the growth in the equation.
I'll focus again on the products and the yield. First products, we serve a wide range of consumer and enterprise clients, including a gaming subscription service at Humble to data and brand licensing offerings at Ookla Nika App. Our subscriber count is over 80% Humble Choice, our indie gaming consumer subscription service, excuse me. The remainder is predominantly enterprise based data, subscription and brand licensing offerings provided across our cellular and Wi Fi measurement and performance products and brands. This is yet another example of a balanced portfolio within a balanced portfolio.
Let's spend a little time on what we mean by subscription adjacencies and how they develop. 1st, let's take a look at PCMag and Ookla. PCMag started as an Ookla client for our fastest mobile network research report, which was just released which we just released its results on August 24, marking the 12th annual publishing of this information. Given we started as a business partner with Ookla, we were uniquely positioned to see an engaged and growing audience at Speedtest and an audience who has an insatiable desire to use their mobile devices for more and more activities than were typically handled on their desktop or offline for that matter. This created the opportunity to translate the audience and industry interest in connectivity into a bigger multi rent business for Ookla as it has moved from almost 100% advertising business when we acquired it to a predominantly subscription based business that exists today.
On IGN's on the IGN side, the IGN audience demonstrated the insatiable appetite for gaming and entertainment content discovery. As we owned IDN, it became apparent though that a subsection of gaming, indie gaming, a $14,000,000,000 market in itself, it's a pretty nice subsection, suffer from content discovery issues by even a larger degree given the sheer volume of indie games published a year. There are about 10,000 or over 10,000 games published on Steam each year. And if you don't know what Steam is, think iTunes for PC gaming. Through this lens we found Humble and were able to blend the content discovery with a subscription business model and it's been a great success for us.
And you can see from these slides too that each of these two examples have added branches to their tree in the form of either subsequent M and A in the case of Ookla or new product lines in the case of Humble. Humble Publishing has been a big runaway hit for us. We've built a strong playbook for M and A Azella's requisite mindset and rigor to execute that game plan. As another great coach, John Wooden once said, the score will take care of itself when you take care of the effort that precedes the score. In addition to our effort and endurance that we put into M and A, here are a few guiding principles we use.
Solely focused on decision based high intent audiences. We are not looking for general interest or passive behavior. And where these audience exists, so is the requisite authoritative content and tools to be of service to them. Direct ownership of supply and demand, owned and operated in every sense of the word. We And as privacy and cookie restrictions grow in the future, those that have and nurture their supply should continue to see their market share rise, either driven by increased volume, higher rates or both.
We're possessive about demand as well. We like to represent ourselves and negotiate rates directly for our commissions and our leads. While most of our peers take market rates or don't have the technical capabilities to support direct relationships with thousands of retailers. Additionally, even though we have high margins, we do not sacrifice sales organization investment at the business unit level. Each business unit is equipped with their own dedicated sales team to drive organic revenue growth, while we manage other areas of the business to maintain a cost basis which yields our high EBITDA margins.
Subscription adjacencies when and where possible. We love our multiple rents. I aspire to be the Ralph Furley of the Internet. Subscription rents are as good as it gets and we'll continue to seek those directly and through adjacencies. Engine, chassis or both, To me, it's one of the biggest fundamentals to identify early relative to rationale for a deal.
It helps us define and put parameters against time, effort, strategic or tuck in, value of what we're willing to pay for an asset. For example, our tuck in deals usually fit the chassis profile. Our acquired Black Friday sites had a great audience profiles and content. However, they were yielding a lot less than if we had owned them due to the performance based economics that we would typically receive versus what they receive. Our scale and negotiating power and our history of performance provides a much greater economic engine that when put inside of that chassis adds significant horsepower right out of the gate.
Heavy lean into performance based always on budgets. But we'll certainly do that within the boundaries of markets that are only require 1,000, 2,000 advertisers to run them to be successful rather than 1,000,000. Timing and laddering of deals is important. It's what affords us the ability to take on all shapes and sizes of M and A, especially renovation M and A Because we still need to maintain those margins even though we're taking on significantly undervalued assets. In closing, I believe we are in rarified air as a digital media only business, achieving 55% revenue growth and 90% EBITDA dollar growth since 2018.
And we've done this while improving EBITDA margin with over 40% EBITDA margins in the trailing 12 months. I'll leave a football I'll leave football for a second and move on to a baseball metaphor. What we've been delivering in my opinion is Cal Ripken esque dependability in both scale and profitability. And one of the key ingredients to do this is simple, performance. We perform.
We perform for our users and we perform for our customers. We continue to gain greater visibility in our business Through our performance for advertisers and retention of our subscribers, which is truly creating a well balanced portfolio that has an optimal balance of capital allocation in both organic growth and M and A. It's this visibility, set of existing assets and access to capital that has been more excited about what's to come versus what's been accomplished thus far. I want to thank you for your time today and allowing me to expound upon the virtues of our business. Like our motto for ESG, which Daryl will go over later In this presentation, we certainly believe in doing versus talking.
So given all of what I've covered, I'll leave you with one more a quote from a coach, this is from the great Bo Walsh. It's the quality of your actions rather than the magnitude of your declarations. Our actions in the form of growth performance speaks loudly and continues to do so for the foreseeable future. And now I'd like to introduce my colleague, Dan Stone, the President of Everyday Health Group.
Good morning. I am Dan Stone, the President of the Everyday Health Group, responsible for our Health and Wellness vertical. I joined Ziff Davis as President of Everyday Health in April 2018 with a 35 year career in traditional and then digital media businesses, the last 9 years focused on health and wellness. My digital media career began at Turner Broadcasting, where I was on the ground floor of Turner's entry into the digital media world with cnn.com and was one of the founding board members of the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Directly prior to joining Ziff Davis, I'm the CEO of Accent Health, a PE backed point of care healthcare media company with highly targeted, condition specific ad supported media in doctors' offices across the country.
At Everyday Health, our mission is to drive better clinical and health outcomes through decision making informed by highly relevant information, data and analytics. Everyday Health goes to market with premium content and world class brands such as Everyday Health, Mayo Clinic, AV Center, MedPage Today and Castle Conley, which power 3 advertising platforms serving healthcare consumers broadly, moms and parents specifically and healthcare providers or HCPs. Across these markets, we offer highly targeted reach at massive scale. Every month we reach 59,000,000 U. S.
Consumers and 890,000 HCPs. And at any given time, over 75% of pregnant moms in the U. S. Are registered on one or both of our What to Expect in BabyCenter platforms. On a trailing 12 month basis, we achieved $285,000,000 in revenue with 21% compound annual growth since 2018.
Health and wellness is a perfect representation of the vertical market strategy at Ziff Davis. The health and wellness market is massive a shift towards digital pharma promotion. Over $4,000,000,000,000 is spent on healthcare in the U. S. Funded by both consumers and government, with over $514,000,000,000 in pharma revenue supported by approximately $18,000,000,000 in healthcare advertising per year, much of the pharma spend is focused on drugs with increasingly narrow patient populations, which require highly targeted reach.
Big pharma has historically been slow to adapt to digital advertising, slower than the other verticals Vivek referenced, but this has changed as digital now provides both reach and targeting within the health and wellness space. U. S. Digital healthcare and pharma ad spend has been growing 17% annually since 2017, and this rapid growth is expected to continue, driven by a strong pharma drug pipeline we have projected double digit growth in Pharma Revenues. As a result, the digital share of healthcare advertising is expected to continue to rise.
On the consumer side, the digital direct to consumer or DTC advertising market has been increasing its share relative to TV and magazines as over 165,000,000 U. S. Adults now search for health information online. Consumers are increasingly comfortable with telemedicine and online bookings as well. The larger HCP advertising market is particularly valuable as each physician on average drives over $4,500,000 in annual healthcare spend.
The growth in digital HCP advertising is buoyed by a decline in the largest segment of HCP marketing, which is dollar spent on live sales reps visiting doctors' offices, our practice that is known in the industry as detailing. There has been a long standing decline in detailing, driven by resistance from doctors' offices to take time away from their increasingly packed patient schedules to meet with pharma reps. Prior to the pandemic, less than 50% of doctor's office still allow rep visits. The pandemic has clearly accelerated this trend. Many of the sales rep directed dollars have shifted to digital vehicles like our MedPage today, which is enjoying rapid growth in ad spend.
In the Pregnancy and Parenting segment, there is over $120,000,000,000 spent annually on pregnancy and newborn care in support of the approximately 5,000,000 U. S. Pregnancies and 3,600,000 live births per year. This spend has been risen has been rising, driven by the skyrocketing cost of delivering a baby. U.
S. Spend for baby care and maternity products, which forms much of our core pregnancy and parenting advertising base, is approximately $12,000,000,000 The forces of digitization in the health and wellness vertical satisfies the attractive vertical attributes outlined earlier by Vivek. Our editorial content is all about informing important decisions where understanding users' needs and gaining their confidence is critical. Our content literally deals with life invest situations. We make substantial investments in original content, which is reviewed by a team of Board certified medical reviewers.
In addition, we provide our advertising clients with exclusive access to the most highly trusted third party content sources such as mayoclinic.org, the most highly searched of all medical center digital media are the properties. Everyday Health has a long standing exclusive advertising representation agreement with the Mayo Clinic. The high degree of regulation and privacy focus driven by HIPAA in the health and wellness space makes the business more complex than other verticals content brands. As an example, the presence of user generated content and the concerns of implied endorsements in social media limits pharma media spend on social platforms. Everyday Health Group advertising platforms provide marketers with highly targeted reach at massive scale, we tap into existing endemic ad budgets with a variety of ad formats.
We are experts in engaging, guiding and educating highly targeted audiences of consumers, patients, caregivers and HCPs with authoritative current incredible endemic content delivered where and when it's most conveniently consumed. With highly contextual original content and tools, we have direct access to first party data as we do not rely on cookie driven behavioral targeting to drive advertiser performance. We offer a wide variety of custom ad formats, including native advertising and a variety of pricing structures, including CPL, cost per lead CPE cost per engagement, CPUV cost per unique visitor and CPDUV cost per diagnosed unique visitor as well as the traditional CPM metric. In the Healthcare Consumer segment, we reached an estimated 59,000,000 monthly unique visitors. We reached 45,000,000 monthly followers via social channels influential and react to firm advertising.
And with our recent acquisition, Migrate, again, we are the number one destination for migrating to Sunfirs. In the moms and parents segment, we own the number one and number 2 pregnancy app we reach 52,000,000 monthly unique visitors, comprised of 91% reach of first time loans, and at any given time, 76% of U. S. Pregnancies are registered on our platform. In the Healthcare Providers segment, we reach 4,800,000 monthly active users, comprised of 890,000 U.
S. Physicians, with 80% reach in over 30 medical specialties, our Healthy Careers brand has served 1,200,000 job seeking HCPs with our online job boards, in each year we recognize 60,000 HCPs as prestigious Castle Colony top doctors, doctors who are nominated by their peers, a digital replication of the trusted but analog process of traditional physician referrals. At Areda Health Group, we have demonstrated superior net advertising revenue retention rates, which is greater than 100% and rising. Successful retention is derived from highly targeted and contextual audiences, creative and flexible advertising solutions, a base of patent protected farmer brands, superior operational execution, and most importantly, superior and measurable customer ROI performance, which drives renewals. We have a steady stable of world class pharma, retail and consumer product brand clients.
These are very sophisticated clients we return year after year based on the quality of our products and measurable results we deliver for them. Our large share of our health and wellness advertisers consider our brands to be must buys. In addition to our core advertising supported media products, we have been successful in leveraging our audience and advertiser client bases to enter compelling adjacencies such as online learning and self help tools from our recently acquired daily home business, online HCP job boards from our healthy careers business and premier continuing medical education for HCPs from our prime education business. The formula for successful growth in the health and wellness vertical is based on 4 primary tenants, which drives both our M and A and internal growth strategies. 1, we look to expand our addressable market, which we then leverage with our we will
continue to focus on our digital capabilities and client
base 2, we use our contextual content and data assets to be able to deliver narrower audience populations 3, we expand ways to monetize our audiences, whether in advertising or new subscription based products. And 4, as I just discussed, we are always looking for compelling adjacencies, which leverage our audience and advertiser client bases. We have successfully executed accretive M and A across this entire growth spectrum. Our 2019 BabyCenter acquisition was a unique opportunity to acquire a market leading international brand and to secure Everyday Health Group as the clear market leader in the pregnancy space. The combined businesses are flourishing as we were quickly able to achieve sales results of 1 plus 1 is greater than 2 across most major accounts.
Our 2020 acquisition of Migraine Again was a perfect example of building depth of audience in an important chronic condition space. Our Migrate Again site is the number one destination for migraine sufferers. Our 2018 acquisition of Prime Education give us a strategic foothold in the continuing medical education or CME space, providing access to a distinct set of pharma client budgets different than the advertising budgets. Prime Education is frequently recognized by the leading CME Association for its superior quality. Our 2017 acquisition of Healthy Careers, a leading HCP job listing site, gave us the opportunity to enter a compelling adjacency we are taking advantage of our internal cross promotional capabilities.
We have a successful record of business and product innovation, which has driven strong organic growth as well. In fact, the majority of our growth over the last 24 months has been organic. Here are some examples. For our consumer advertising clients, we created the Well Innovation Lab and Studio, a brand studio focused on helping health care brands connect with our consumer audiences in a more continuity driven and personally connected way, driving an estimated 3 times engagement performance over longer durations and multiple touch points. Our brand innovation platform combined with our core product investment capability is a real differentiator versus our digital health and wellness competitors.
The well created Tippie, a personal advice sharing platform and content engine that generates highly specific health and wellness tips curated from patients, caregivers and related specialty HCPs, over 10 Tippie product franchises have been launched to date. And in total, custom consumer program revenue like Tippie is up 23% year over year in the trailing 12 months ending this past June. For moms and parents, we created a bespoke baby registry affiliate commerce experience in which individual users specify a series of shopping and parenting preferences to generate a personalized set of baby registry retailers and product recommendations as curated by our editorial experts. Once the registry building process is complete, expecting parents to have one convenient place to manage and share their multiple retailer registries. And for pharma clients, we have utilized the power of our pregnancy platform to target and enroll relevant candidates for active clinical studies focused on improving maternal and child health outcomes.
In fact, 2 of the major COVID-nineteen vaccine manufacturers are currently utilizing our platform Our moms and parents platform is uniquely positioned to recruit for studies targeting this demographic due to our proven ability to register moms early in their pregnancies. And in the Healthcare Provider segment, we are enhancing our content sites like MedPage Today and developing new media products based on a proprietary machine learning engine called Sonar. HCPs have a very limited time to consume media, so efficiently engaging HCPs with relevant information is critical. Equally vital in this time and trust constrained environment is demand from both doctors and patients for quality interactions, that leverage our CastleConley peer nominated top doctors community along with our personalized assessment and expert Q and A engines. Experiences can range from highly targeted and relevant contextual messaging to more immersive specialty specific care and visit prep with our check-in and check out product line.
All these products and capabilities improve audience engagement the direct benefit of our advertising clients. This drives our competitive wallet share and revenue retention, which drives our overall organic revenue growth. Our combined M and A and organic growth approach applied to our health and wellness vertical has led to rapid revenue growth with increasing margins on a balanced mix of M and A and organic growth. Since 2018, we have produced a 20% CAGR on revenue and 34% CAGR on EBITDA. As a result, our EBITDA margin has grown 10 points from 32% to 42% over the same period, so by expanding our advertising platforms for our clients and creating business adjacencies, we take advantage of tremendous operating leverage.
To date, our Health and Wellness business is primarily in advertising business with 85% display and video advertising and 13% performance marketing. However, it's important to note that the vast majority of our display and video advertising business is held to objective standards by our advertising clients. Due to the sensitive nature of the information, this often involves a 3rd party measurement firm like an IQVIA or Crossic, we attribute Pharma product sales to their various media vehicles. Our 100% plus revenue retention rate is a tangible demonstration that our ad products produce performance for our clients and their products. In summary, Ziff Davis' health and wellness vertical is highly profitable and fast growing with very positive secular trends.
Our Health and Wellness business enjoys a large and growing addressable market with favorable secular trends, with leading editorial brands that deliver authoritative and trustworthy content, driving recurring relationships with global pharma and health and wellness advertisers with compelling adjacencies to core advertising categories. We have proven growth platforms for innovation and accretive M and A resulting in an attractive financial profile with significant operating leverage. Thank you. And now I'd like to introduce my colleague, Nate Simmons, President of the Cybersecurity and MarkTek Division.
Thank you. Good morning. I'm Nate Simmons, President of the Cybersecurity and Martech Division at Ziff Davis. I'm very excited to be here today to share an overview of our business in these two verticals. I joined Ziff Davis in 2019.
And over the past 2 years, I've worked with our team to transform our cloud services operating segment into the cybersecurity and Martech division. At a high level, this transformation has involved 3 phases. First has been the effort to unlock value in the consensus cloud facts business. Over several years, we've invested in consensus to build an enterprise grade healthcare data exchange platform. And we believe we've put the right team in place and the right operating cadence in place for consensus to successfully execute against the healthcare focused strategy.
This end in the Q2 of this year, consensus grew its revenue 9% year over year with an EBITDA margin well above 50%. This quarter's expected spin out of consensus as an independent public company is a huge milestone for Ziff Davis. And while consensus will no longer be part of Ziff Davis, I'm very excited to be joining the Board of Directors of the new company and to continue supporting that team and its mission. 2nd phase of our transformation has been a rigorous portfolio optimization process. Over the past 14 months, we've completed 4 acquisitions and 3 divestitures.
We've divested businesses that do not leverage Ziff Davis' is vertical market positions and expertise, and we've acquired businesses that expanded our offerings and grew our addressable markets in either cybersecurity or martech. This process has involved a ton of work for our team, but it's led us to a more cohesive set of businesses and a clear focus on building scale in Cybersecurity and Martech. The final phase of this transformation kicked off in Q1 of this year with increased investment across cybersecurity and Martech in the areas of sales, performance marketing and product. Our objective is to drive more organic subscription revenue growth. We're very early in this phase of transformation, and we believe the benefit to our bottom lines where our top and bottom lines should build in the coming years.
Over the trailing 12 months, we generated $290,000,000 in revenue and $101,000,000 in EBITDA in Cybersecurity and Martech. Our revenue grew at a compound annual rate of 22% since 2018, we see very promising opportunities to continue to grow. As Vivek shared in his presentation, we look for subscription based Internet businesses that leverage insights from the billions of interactions we have with our vertical audiences at Ziff Davis. Both cybersecurity and Martech fit this description. They are subscription adjacencies to the technology and shopping verticals at Ziff Davis.
In our technology vertical, our audience traffic and engagement at properties such as PCMag and Ookla give us insights into cybersecurity trends. Across our properties in the technology vertical, we've generated 100 of thousands of customers Digital Security and Privacy Providers. This unique perspective informed our acquisitions of Vypr Security in 2018 and IPVanish in 2019, which is the backbone of our cybersecurity business. Today, the Vypr Security Group protects millions of customers from threats on the Internet. In our shopping vertical, Ziff Davis connects businesses with high intent buyers for their products and services.
The Moz Group does something very adjacent. We provide businesses with email, search and messaging technologies that enable them to connect directly with their customers and to connect directly with high intent buyers on the Internet. Our investment to grow the Moz Group has been informed by the online shopping expertise at Ziff Davis and insights from our client marketer relationships. Cybersecurity and martech are 2 of the most important software categories, especially for small and mid sized businesses. Both categories are fueled by the growing role of the Internet in our lives.
Cyber threats are one of the most prevalent are in cybersecurity based on the array of solutions we offer. This TAM has grown at 14% annually in recent years and will continue to grow as the migration of our lives to the Internet is accelerated due to the pandemic. With this accelerated online migration comes increased vulnerabilities for both consumers and businesses. On the consumer side, a recent poll found that 65% of people are spending more time online than ever, 88% of people have actively taken steps to hide their online footprints. Our IPVanish virtual private network encrypts Internet activity and helps people stay anonymous while online.
And we also offer malware protection and secure backup to consumer and home office buyers. On the business side, 55% of business leaders plan to increase their security budgets in the next year. Email is one of the top attack vectors for malware and ransomware and other threats. It's estimated we've seen a 64% increase in email based attacks in the past year. It's critical that businesses prepare their employees for these kinds of threats.
It's estimated that 84% of data breaches involve a human element such as an employee falling victim to a phishing email and evolving confidential data or logging credentials. The VIPER Group is well positioned for this landscape, as we provide advanced email threat protection and security awareness training for our business customers. Smartech is a key enabler of the digital transformation that Vivek talked about earlier. Marketing technology tools are essential for any business selling products online and engaging with their customers digitally. We have a total addressable market of $21,000,000,000 in Martech, which has grown 12% annually in recent years.
Similar to cybersecurity, this market will continue to grow as Internet usage grows. In particular, Martech is fueled by the growth of online shopping and commerce. This has dramatically accelerated during the pandemic. Consider some of these data points. It's estimated that global e commerce sales will reach $4,200,000,000,000 this year, with almost 40% year over year growth already in Q1.
There are over 2,000,000,000,000 Google searches annually, many of which lead to purchases and there are 4,000,000,000 active daily email users. A recent survey found that 27% of marketing budgets are allocated to MarTech 69% of marketers expect to increase their MarTech spend in the next year. 72% of small businesses use email to communicate with their customers. At the Moz Group, with our foundation in email based marketing and search engine optimization, we're very well positioned help businesses grow their customer bases and grow their revenue. At the heart of our ability to grow our revenue are the solutions and the value we provide to our customers.
At Viper, we have a diverse customer base across multiple segments. First, we have individuals and families who are worried about their personal information and worried about being tracked online. These consumers want virus protection and increasingly they want online privacy. 2nd, we have small businesses with fewer than 100 employees. These businesses want basic security with malware protection at the heart of it.
And third, we serve medium sized businesses who have more financial risk and who employ more sophisticated IT. These customers want more advanced threat protection, but they're still very focused on price and value. Our Vypr platform provides comprehensive solutions for these segments. Vypr endpoint security protects over a 1000000 business endpoints from malware, are ransomware and other threats. We provide real time threat intelligence to help our customers protect their networks.
Piper Email Security spans over 14,000,000,000 business emails annually, protecting customers from malware and phishing, helping make sure sensitive data does not leave their organizations by email. Our LiveDirect solution encrypts or secures over 50 petabytes of data keeping people's activity anonymous and private. Altogether, devices, email, data and Internet connections form the basis of digital life and digital work. At the center of it all are people. In 2020, we acquired Inspired Learning, an award winning provider of security awareness and compliance training.
Inspiree Learning solution is provisioned to over 6,000,000 employees across our customer base. We are helping these employees protect their organizations against cybercrime.
At the
Moz Group, we serve a similarly diverse set of customers. We serve 100 of 1000 of small businesses and sole proprietors with fewer than 5 employees. These professionals need basic tools that enable 1 to 1 communications with their customers and to a lesser extent they need basic email marketing. We also serve small and midsized businesses who rely on email to communicate with their customers. These businesses also primarily use email, online search and social media to attract new buyers.
Finally, performance marketing agencies utilize our solutions on behalf of their clients and sometimes resell our tools as part of their professional services packages. The Moz Group has been built to serve the key needs of these marketers. The Moz and STAT Analytics search engine optimization tools and content are used by over 2,000,000 marketers to increase the online visibility of their brands. The iContact and Campaigner solutions enable targeted and automated email and SMS marketing campaigns. SMTP powers high volume transactional emails that are essential to digital commerce.
These are things like payment confirmation, account creation and service update emails. Across the iContact, Campaigner and SMPP solutions, we enabled our customers to send over 60,000,000,000 emails in 2020. And finally, our Line 2 and Evoice solutions enable small business proprietors to add business grade voice communication and text messaging to their computers, personal phones or other devices. Our growth strategy and our philosophy towards M and A are straightforward. Number 1, we aim to build more scale in both cybersecurity and martech.
We're focused on growing organically, we're actively looking for acquisitions that expand our addressable markets. Our acquisition in Moz in June of this year is a great example. We added the multibillion dollar market for search engine optimization tools to our existing addressable markets in email and voice based solutions. 2nd, we look for subscription based businesses with strong recurring revenue. We're attracted to the predictability and resilience of subscriptions, we focused our organization around this business model.
3rd, we're focused on home office and small and midsized business customers. The need to defend against cyber risks and to mobilize around online shopping and commerce are more urgent than ever for these businesses. We do have enterprise customers for our point solutions such as Moz Pro and Inspire e Learning. But our primary focus is on building comprehensive solutions for the SMB segment. In addition, in cybersecurity, we're focused on digital safety and privacy for consumers and families.
Growing our average revenue per account and increasing our customer retention are critical to growing revenue efficiently. We think about M and A, we look for acquisitions that offer robust bundling and product integration opportunities. This 4th point is particularly important. So here are some examples of what this looks like in practice. In Q2 of this year, we launched cybersecurity all in one protection for small and midsized businesses.
These packages bundle email and endpoint protection with business VPN and with security awareness training. Our initial value proposition with this bundle is an attractive price and value equation. Looking forward, we're working to layer in product integrations that further enhance customer value. You can imagine a scenario where Viper protects an organization from a malicious attachment that includes ransomware or malware that was received in an email. And then we automatically enroll the employee who opened the email and the attachment in the appropriate course of learning and remediation.
In Martech, we've added a steady stream of new features to our email solutions over the past year through both internal development and M and A. In Q3 of 2020, we acquired the Kickbox Email Verification solution, which improves email delivery rates by verifying that emails are true emails and not junk room. By verifying these emails, Kickbox helps marketers improve their campaign performance. Within 6 months, we integrated the Kickbox solution into the SMTP solution and began offering enhanced services to our SMTP customers. The response has been great.
In the first half of twenty twenty one, 2 thirds of new customers signing up for SMTP enrolled in a premium tier of service that included Kickbox email verification. And we've seen strong adoption within the SMTP install base as well. In the Q4 of this year, we plan to integrate Kickbox email verification into the campaigner and iContact as well. In the trailing 12 months, we generated $290,000,000 in revenue in these two verticals, representing a 22% compound annual growth rate since 2018. Our EBITDA has grown at a compound rate of 18% over the same period, rising to $101,000,000 in the trailing 12 months.
Our revenue is subscription based and highly predictable. We have 1,800,000 paid accounts across a very diverse customer base. We have opportunities to grow efficiently by increasing our retention and our average revenue per account. We talked quite a bit about bundling and product integration just now, usage growth is a powerful lever. In our email business, for example, we've seen a 25% increase in emails sent by our customers over the past 12 months.
Many of these customers upgraded to higher tiers of service in order to support their business needs, increasing our revenue from those accounts. And we're investing to grow. Our 2021 operating plan includes approximately $10,000,000 in incremental while we're still actively engaged in M and A, per the approach I outlined earlier, we're investing in organic growth strike the kind of balanced total growth that Vivek seeks for all of Ziff Davis. Long term, we envision our EBITDA margins in this business we've leveraged technology and shopping expertise at Ziff Davis to build subscription businesses in cybersecurity and martech, which are large and growing addressable markets. The VIPER Group protects millions of consumers and businesses from cyber threats with advanced email and endpoint security, employee training and private Internet connections.
The Moz Group empowers businesses to engage their customers digitally and to grow revenue using email, online search and 1 to 1 voice communication. We've achieved strong financial growth with predictable recurring revenue and an established approach to growth and M and A. Thank you for your time today. Next, you'll hear from Dara Feldman, our Vice President of Sustainability.
Hello, everyone. I'm Dara Feldman, Cive Davis' new VP of Sustainability and Responsibility. I joined the company in June in this newly created role and I have over 20 years of social impact and marketing experience. I'd like to begin today with Ziff Davis' 5 pillars of purpose, which is the company's framework for its purpose driven agenda. Our 5 pillars are diversity, sustainability, community, data and governance.
We are committed to being best in class in each of these areas and have made important headway over the last year. And overarching these pillars, the principle, the ethos, if you will, that doing is greater than talking. So here are just some highlights which exemplify what we've been doing in the last year. In the area of diversity, we've made incredible progress. We recently published our 2nd annual diversity report, which contains detailed data and statistics around our workforce representation, hiring, senior leadership and Board meeting.
I'd like to just point out a highlight from the report, which is that in a year, when over 2,000,000 American women have dropped out of the workforce, we increased our number of female employees by 3% for a total of 44% of our overall employee base. We also launched our Diversity Council, a diverse group of employees who develop recommendations for the company across employee recruiting, mentorship and advancement, we launched 5 employee resource groups, which increase opportunities for networking, learning and development and access to senior leadership for these groups, their allies and advocates. Sustainability is one of the areas which I've personally been focused on. From paperless martech products reducing the need for direct mail to magazines being published entirely online, Ziff Davis Businesses help millions of clients and customers shift from analog to digital and away from associated paper, energy and work life. The company has made a concerted effort to reduce its environmental footprint by encouraging employees to work remotely and limit business travel, which will continue post pandemic.
Our expectation is that at least 25% of our population will permanently work remotely with the balance adopting a hybrid approach. We also have a goal of reducing our square footage by 25% by the end of this year as compared to the beginning of 2020. And when business travel resumes, we aim to reduce miles flown by 50% from pre pandemic levels. In terms of community, so many of our brands make a meaningful impact within our communities throughout the world through significant fundraising and other socially responsible initiatives. From Humble Bundle and IGN's Charity Bundles and Streams to OOPLIF for Good to Mashable's Amplify content series.
And from a corporate wide perspective, earlier this year, we watched our volunteer time off program, where employees can sign up for volunteer opportunities and are given 16 hours of volunteer time off each year. In terms of data and privacy, the company has comprehensive privacy policies and internal processes for every business unit, encompassing rights provided to individuals regarding the control of their data. We deploy sophisticated mechanisms to ensure user consent relating to all tracking from advertising. We have internal and external audits of information security policies and systems at least annually as well as annual cybersecurity training for all full time employees, including sporadic unannounced evaluations of their readiness. Our corporate security team, data security incident response team and data privacy team recognize that maintaining the security of our data and the privacy of data entrusted to us is imperative.
And finally, in terms of governance, we've made significant headway here as well. 30% of J2's Board members are women and 30% are people of color. The last five additions to the Board were all women and or people of color and as of February, our Lead Independent Director is female. Also pertaining to governance, we've updated and enhanced dozens of policies we will review them annually to ensure we are on the front lines of compliance. As a result of all of these efforts and many that I do not have time to cover, the ESG rating segments are taking note and the scores are reflective of that.
While these scores are for J2 Global, they should travel with Ziff Davis after the spin off of Kinesis. Our Sustainability Index score improved from 26.4 to 16.6 year over year. The scale here by the way is 0 to 40 plus with the lower number the better. We went from the medium risk category to low risk, which is a significant leap. We also went from 74th percentile to 9th percentile in the software and services industry group.
And in the sub industry group with Internet software and we went from the 27th percentile to the 1st percentile. Our ISS scores also meaningfully improved. Their scale is from 1 to 10 with the lower numbers being better. We improved from a 7 to 4 in environment, A 9 to 1 in social and a 3 to 2 in governance. I'll just note that MSTI is the one major ratings agency with which we did not see an improvement, we remained unchanged to the B.
But we are confident that we will continue to see additional gains as we pursue further efforts in the coming months years. To that end, I'd like to take you through a few major initiatives we'll be working on in the coming months. 1st, we will be conducting a 2019, 2020 and 2021 Greenhouse Gaps or GHG Audit. Measuring GHG emissions is the critical starting point for several sustainability activities, including reporting, target setting and achieving reductions. The GHG audit will calculate our Scope 1 and 2 emissions and assess the materiality of our Scope 3 emissions.
Scope 1 emissions are direct GHG emissions, emissions from sources owned and controlled by Ziff Davis. Scope 2 emissions are indirect GHG emissions, emissions due to Ziff Davis activities that occur at sources owned or controlled by another company. Enscope's 3 emissions are indirect value chain emissions, emissions due to activities not owned or controlled by Ziff Davis, will be indirectly impacted in our value chain. Once the audit is completed at year end, we will assess science based targets and carbon neutral goals for the company. 2nd, we will be working on and expect to release the company's first ESG report in the Q1 of next year.
The findings from the GHG audit will be incorporated we will also align us with GRI, SaaS B and TCFD reporting standards. In conclusion, the GHG audit and ESG report, we believe, will put CIF Davis in a best of class category in terms of voluntary it is likely that the SEC will soon require some level of ESG related disclosures and reporting and proactive measures like these should put us ahead of the curve. The audit and report should enable Ziff Davis to gain more ground with the ESG ratings agencies and reflect the great work that we're doing. Thank you so much for your time today. Next on the agenda is the Q and A session.
There will now be a brief intermission of 1 minute. If you would like to ask a question, please dial in via the phone number displayed on screen and follow the operator prompts. Once again, there will be a brief intermission of 1 minute at this time, followed by the Q and A session with today's presenters. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Q and A session for the 2021 Ziff Davis Analyst Day. At this time, I would like to introduce your panel.
Vivek Shah, Chief Executive Officer Sean Alford, Senior Vice President of Corporate Development Steve Horowitz, President of the Technology, Shopping and Entertainment Division Dan Stone, President of the Everyday Health Group Nate Simmons, President of the Cybersecurity and Martech Division and Dara Feldman, Vice President of Sustainability and Responsibility. Your first question is coming from Cory Carpenter from JPMorgan. Cory, your line is live. Please pose your question.
Hey, thanks for the questions. I had 2, maybe first just for Steve, Dan and Nate. Hoping you could talk about the growth within your divisions that you're most excited about? And then maybe for Vivek, just kind of tying it all together, how do you think about the right level of sustainable growth and profit for the overall company going forward. Thanks.
Dan, you want to go first, you want me to jump in?
Why don't you start, Steve?
I'll follow.
Sure. So thanks, Corey. I appreciate the question. Kind of sort of like being asked to or what I call our connectivity group and that has me most excited because of just the size of the aperture for that. I mean and we play such an important role.
If you look at it between sort of there's designing and planning, there's measurement, there's troubleshooting, right, these three main parts. And then you have their cellular over here, you have fixed Wi Fi over here and then they sort of come together with 5 gs in the middle and we've become a real key player in that with our Ookla assets with Speedtest, with Ekahau on the especially on the Wi Fi most significant measurement and setup pieces in the industry right now. And we see a lot of M and A activity coming up and a lot of new products. So Very, very excited about that part of our division.
And I also have difficulty choosing among Different parts of the business because all three platforms that I presented earlier are firing on all cylinders. But a couple that stick out, our pharma Add business focus to healthcare professionals is really experiencing exceptionally strong growth. Secular trends are in its favor. I talked about the shift of digital toward digital away from live rep visits into the offices. There are relatively few doctors out there with very little time, so they have to choose their new sources carefully and luckily they often choose MedPage Day, which is our flagship brand.
And as I mentioned on average healthcare professionals influence about $4,500,000 of spend per year across the system which is incredible. So we expect to see substantial growth continuing within the HCP Pharma Ad business. The other area which really cuts across all three of our platforms is connecting the right doctors with the right patients at the right time with the right treatments, whether they're pharma based treatments or general well-being solutions. That connections theme which is why people are using digital health more and more is fundamental to so many different ways that we can monetize as we attract and engage audiences.
Great. And I will also reiterate, it's tough for me to pick just one thing, But we just acquired Moz, Moz Inc. In June and that was a transformational acquisition for our Martech business. So I'll focus a little bit more on Martech. Number 1, it's a fantastic category, fantastic market as I shared in my remarks.
It really goes hand in hand with e commerce and online shopping and digitization, which are just growing rapidly and great sectors. And Martech what we do, we help businesses engage digitally with their customers and shoppers. So that's a growth opportunity right along with that. Number 2, the acquisition of Moz, it significantly increased our addressable market within Martech. It's a multi $1,000,000,000 market for SEO tools.
And the estimates we see are that it's growing at about 20%. So that's great expansion of our TAM and Moz is a huge brand. It's an iconic brand in Martech. It's got millions of users across its paid products and content and free tools. And to that end, as you can see, we rebranded our Martech Group, the Moz Group and we're very excited about how Mas changes our positioning.
We target small and medium sized businesses. Email, search and social are key for these businesses. So, we're really primed to serve their needs. We've got great momentum in our MarTech Group. In addition to that M and A, we've released a steady stream of new products and features this year.
We added SMS to our e mail platforms, we launched a premium version of iContact, we've launched a deliverability suite to help our customers increase the performance of their campaigns. So that's a team that's separate from M and A on the organic side is really has a steady drum of new product releases and value for the market. And then finally MarTech's fragmented market. In the estimates we've seen there are over 8,000 MarTech So there is still significant M and A opportunities and we're particularly interested in social and content tools. So I'm optimistic about our opportunities there as well.
The only thing I'll add is the fact that everyone had difficulty picking just one. I do think speaks to the quality of the portfolio. The brands that are inside the business today are strong as really at any time that I've been involved with the company. And then Corey, just to answer your question around how to think about long term growth, I'd say that our target revenue growth rate is in the mid teens. Generally speaking, about half of that organic in the way that I described in the presentation and the other half through acquired revenue.
Now that ratio may change from time to time. Obviously, it depends Often on the nature of the acquisitions that we're doing and if it's heavy on shrink to grow acquisitions that might change that But generally speaking, I think mid teens top line and then from a margin point of view, from an adjusted EBITDA margin point of view, mid-30s, we may improve upon that in certain periods of time. But again, I think we look more for EBITDA growth that is consistent with the top line growth and trying to use any of the excess EBITDA to really reinvest in some of the growth opportunities that you've heard described earlier today. So that's how I would think about the company longer term.
Thank you. Your next question is coming from Shyam Patel from SIG. Shyam, your line is live. Please pose your question.
Hey, guys. Thanks for hosting the Analyst Day. It's very helpful. I had a couple of questions. First one, can you guys just maybe share your perspective on the M and A landscape?
I know, Sean, you talked about a little bit in your presentation, But with all the dry powder you now have, just what are you going to do? How are you thinking about deploying it, timeframe, size of deals, etcetera? And then second question on the consensus spin, what would make that spin off a successful one from your perspective? And Is this something that we should be thinking about as part of your game plan for other businesses that get to scale? Thank you, guys.
Sean, why don't you take the first question and I'll take the second.
Sure. So it's certainly been an active year. I think you can read in the press and the trades about the level of M and A activity over the last 12 months and it's been astounding and overwhelming. Activity is good for us, a lot of inbound opportunities. You do read about valuations that are creeping up.
We feel fortunate that a lot of that exuberance hasn't made its way into lower middle market where we spend a lot of time. Going forward, our program isn't going to change. We're going to execute the same M and A program. We're going to prioritize by risk and return, not by size. The fact we've got $1,000,000,000 of powder.
It doesn't mean that we're necessarily going to be doing larger transactions, but we're always on the lookout for transformative transactions. And we've got high confidence and conviction in opportunity, we will pursue it
on the larger side. Yes, look, I think just to add to what Sean said, this market has been this market for some time. And so we're used to operating with the relative froth, ultimately it is, if we have a unique path to value creation, we find that that's an actionable deal for us. Sean also rightly points out the lower middle market, I think is different than some of the other markets that are sort of dealing with SPAC and other type of frothiness. So look, I think we feel very confident our position in that landscape and it's shown over the last 12 18 months, we have been quite active.
In terms of the question around, Shyam, your question around how do we judge success and is this spin something we would look to replicate. Look, from a success point of view, I'd say really 2 things. 1 is, are we seeing enhanced results at the respective companies? We would expect that the focus and the independence should produce better operating results. So for me, that's what I'll be very focused from a Ziff Davis point of view and I know Scott will be very focused on from a consensus point of view.
I also believe When we have to give this time, but shareholder value creation in the end, these 2 separately when combined should perform appreciably better than the company is today in its current combined state. Obviously that is the simplest way of measuring success. And it sort of answers your corollary question. The interpretation of the spin off of consensus should be that we are absolutely serious about shareholder value creation. So any move, whether it's a spin off, any transactional move, any opportunity to create sustained shareholder value is absolutely something we would seriously consider.
And in the case of the spin of the consensus business, we believe that to be the case. And so it isn't that we look at it as a means toward the end and the end to shareholder value creation
Your next question is coming from Will Power from Baird. Will, your line is live. Please pose your question.
Okay, thanks. Yes, I guess a couple of questions. So first, Yes, I'd echo. Thanks for hosting this. And I'm guessing that Steve is ready for football season.
I guess, Let me maybe start this probably for Vivek, maybe Sean, but I guess I'd be curious how you think about leverage targets. I mean, it looks like out of the gate you're going to have a pretty low net leverage number and what that could mean for appetite and potentially opportunity for larger platform type deal. So just wondering what the landscape on that front looks like and how leverage might play into that?
Well, I'll start and then Sean, feel free to fill in. I think we've always said and we will continue to abide by the idea that our gross debt over EBITDA would be at a 3 times ratio. So that's not going to change. Obviously, at inception, we'll be less than that. And so we have therefore the capacity to take on more borrowings to pursue whatever capital allocation opportunities and choices are in front of us.
The degree to which when we think about larger more as we say transformational opportunities. As I've said in the past and this will continue to hold, the risk return ratio needs to be right. That equation needs to be right. And I think the larger the transaction, the more certain We need to be almost at perfect conviction on those. And so look, historically, the deals have really fit in the under $200,000,000 enterprise value range.
I don't think that's going to change. From time to time, we find things that are RetailMeNot and Everyday Health are 2 examples of that and have been really great acquisitions for us. In terms of what might be the limit, I've said this before, I continue to believe this is about the right level, but I think about I think if we're getting north of 20% of the enterprise value of the company, we're probably getting to a range that may be bigger than what we would do in our ordinary course. So, I'd say everything I've just said is consistent with where the way J2 thinks today in terms of the 3 times gross debt over EBITDA, the gross debt ratio, leverage ratio, as well as how we think about the profile of the acquisitions that we're looking at in our pipeline. Sean, anything you might add?
I think that covers it.
Okay. And if I could maybe just squeeze in one more. Thanks for the organic growth disclosure, so I guess, A, is that something you do plan to continue going forward to break that out? And then, I guess, B, any way to get kind of a breakout of organic growth across the 3 key verticals, at least Qualitatively, how the trends compare across the different segments on that front?
So, Will, just when I think about, You've heard me say this before. I'm going to reiterate it because I can't help myself. But look, when I think about how one should evaluate as company, I really do believe it's total revenue growth and I do believe it's EBITDA growth and I believe it's EBITDA margin and it's free cash flow, because that's the way we run the business. Having said that, I know that there's been real demand from shareholders on organic disclosure. And so we are providing it and we will continue to provide it in the way that I described and I think it's important that I reiterate a key point in this because I know it will come up in the future.
So I want to try to start to plant seeds at least right now. So the way we're doing this is we're not pro form a ing acquisitions as if we own them. We don't want to take credit for that growth in our organic growth rate calculation. So any sort of outperformance on acquisitions won't contribute At the same time and in the flip of it is that as you know, we have a number of shrink to grow acquisitions, which play out over 24 months. And because we will be including acquisitions after their 1st year when there is a year over year comp that will have a dilutive effect on organic growth rate, let's take a RetailMeNot.
RetailMeNot in the equation that I described will show up in the organic growth rate line in Q4 because we acquired it last Q4. Now the EBITDA growth is sensational, But the revenue growth may not be and that is more than 10% of the company's revenue. That will be dilutive of organic growth rate. So I just want to make sure that everyone understands the way in which we are creating this calculation and I know there are a bunch of different ways, but we chose to go with the most Conservative, as for breaking it down further at the vertical market level or the divisional level, our hesitation there is simple, which is the way we're doing this allows you to back into the revenue multiples we paid for specific acquisitions. And I don't think it's in the company's interest that we're advertising what we're paying for assets, because at that level of truncating or of disclosing that level of acquired revenue, you can hit against the cash we've done in a certain period and immediately back into the multiple.
So we're hesitant about that. But I think at the whole company level, To answer your question, we will continue to provide it. I view it as a neutral disclosure. I don't sit there and think one is better than the other. To me, as I like to say here, growth is growth, profits are profits, cash flow is cash flow, and that's what we're really focused on.
Your next question is coming from Jon Tanwanteng from CJS Securities. Jon, your line is live. Please pose your question.
Hey, good morning, everyone. Thank you for taking my questions and for hosting this. It was very helpful. I was wondering if you could start with giving An update on the sale of the backup assets, number 1. And maybe number 2, just a sense of how quickly you think more acquisitions will start crossing the finish line after you complete both that and the consensus spin, I think it was mentioned you were diluting about 5 opportunities in the past year.
Maybe just give us a sense of the size and the urgency in the pipeline as it stands today.
Thanks, John. I'm going to ask Sean to answer both questions.
So on the sale of backup, it's taking a little longer than we had hoped, but we're getting close. And we hope to have an update for you soon. In terms of the pipeline, again, the level of activity has It's been stunning. I credit a lot of that to the sourcing network across the portfolio. So what you got to keep in mind is that there are GMs and other executives across Ziff Davis who are out there meeting with companies, cultivating relationships.
So we see a lot in the funnel right now and we don't see any problem in terms of our ability to put capital to work. We think when you look at this year where we are now relative to where we were last year, we've done more deals at this point in the year than we had last year. So we're effectively putting capital to work, the pipeline is full and the program continues. Yes. The only
I'm sorry, I was just going to add just one thing on that, which is and I think it's important And Sean touches on this, but remember, the sources of deals come from a bunch of different places. We source deals at the corporate level, which is me, which is Sean and the corporate team and then each of the divisions, Steve, Nate, Dan, at the divisional level are sourcing deals, but then at the business unit level underneath each of the divisions sit these general managers. The general managers are also sourcing deals. And so the way the company operates highly decentralized from an operating point of view, everyone has the general managers have full P and L responsibility, full control of their product. We keep very little at corporate.
I think I mentioned, it's like 1% of the company is at corporate, the rest is distributed in terms of resources and people across the various business units. Those business units are generating their own acquisition ideas and generally that's where most of the acquisition activity happens, but you run your businesses, you generate your free cash flow, but the free cash flow comes upstairs, so that we can allocate that capital where we see the most exciting opportunities, where we think we're going to see the opportunities that will well exceed the hurdle rates that we have. So I think it's important to understand that you've got a lot of folks inside of the company Who are chasing that capital and usually the issue is, is how do you manage the disappointment, frankly more than anything else, because if you look at the number of deals that we actually look at and the number of deals that are argued for, the number that we actually transact on is very small. And so the hurdle that you have to clear for us to get a deal done is quite high. And so it requires that level of sourcing to have a really successful programmatic acquisition system.
Got it. Thank you for that color.
Do you have a follow-up, John?
I do, yes.
Please proceed.
Okay. Yes, I was wondering if you could help us To understand maybe if there is a better metric to understand the impact of privatization laws and things like do not track and cookie lift implementation How that impacts your advertising business and maybe is there a limit to that or how an estimate how long that runway may last for you? Just any more color on that aspect of regulation and consumer trend would be helpful.
I'll say one high level thing and then maybe Steve and Dan can jump in as the advertising businesses sit in their world. But look, as I've said is, we are contextual sellers of advertising, environments matter, it's how we monetize our audiences, the data that we use, are is first party data. So for us sort of this the regulatory and self regulatory dynamics that are going on, which really impact interest based advertising that relies on 3rd party cookies and 3rd party data, I don't think really impact us in any way and I think we're advantaged with where the industry is going. But Steve, Dan, if anything you wanted to add?
Yes, I'd just like to add that in addition to having the benefit of first party data, we have ad tech professionals within the company. A lot of these things things are changing all the time. And so adapting to the change in the adtech Ecosystem is just fundamental to being in the digital media business and we have professionals that can handle that. So as it's been shown in the past, if there are new hurdles from a technological standpoint, we can get around pretty quickly as does the rest of the industry. So none of the current challenges that have been posed are showstoppers for us in the way that we deliver
our data.
Thank you, guys.
I actually meant, was there a way to track the tailwind from that and how long that may last?
Yes. Look, I think that the benefit is going to play out over a pretty long term. I mean, these things don't unwind, nothing unwinds overnight. And I think that the momentum we're seeing in our ad businesses really aren't the reflection of this shift. I think it's the reflection of the strength of the verticals and the strength of our ad products, I don't think we've yet really started to participate in the movement the potential movement of advertising from 3rd party based Targeting to contextual and content premium environments in 1st party.
So I don't even think that started yet.
Your next question is coming from Joe Goodwin from JMP, Joe, your line is live. Please pose your question.
Great. Thank you so much today guys for all the information. It's super helpful. Vivek, maybe a little different question For you, but
I guess how do you think about culture of the overall portfolio? Is there and really your view of the importance
That's a great question. I'm glad you asked it. Culture is absolutely important. So I'll say a few things. First is, we do view ourselves as a culture of cultures and we do allow and encourage self determination because culture is often at a Brand level, department level, sometimes a regional level.
And so for us to have The ability for each of our businesses to express themselves in the way they'd like, I think is super important. And it goes down to, we don't Enforced if Davis handles on people's e mail addresses, you'll see Ookla e mail addresses, you'll see Maaz, you'll see VIPER. And that's great, because those are the brands with which they identified, but at a high level, the company and this is really what Dara went through, we put a lot of focus on financial value creation and social value creation. And I think everyone at the company understands that, that is our profits and purpose mandate and so profits and purpose to me is really the cultural rallying cry and shorthand for company and I think really embraces, you have to understand we have a relatively young workforce that really takes quite seriously both profit and social value creation and we're proud of the work that we've done in both areas and excited for we're what we're looking to do and some of the things that Dara talked about, but absolutely. So I and I think if you're an employee, you view the parent As really a benevolent parent that is interested in your success and interested in supporting the communities in which you reside.
The end of today's Q and A, I will now hand the call over to j2 Global CEO, Vivek Shah to conclude today's event.
Well, listen, I want to thank everyone for joining us. We know it's a really busy time this particular week and so we appreciate you being here. Just as a reminder, our colleagues at consensus are going to hold an investor call similar to this one on September 14. I believe it's at 4 pm Eastern Time. The details will be on j2.com.
We hope you can find some time to attend that as well. And we'll be at various conferences and I'm sure we'll see a number of you on the virtual road. Thank you.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This does conclude the 2021 Ziff Davis Analyst Day. Thank you for your participation and have a wonderful day.