Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to J2 Global's Q1 2021 Earnings Call. My name is Paul, and I will be the operator assisting you today. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. If you wish to enter the Q&A queue now or at any time during the conference, please press star one on your telephone keypad. On this call will be Vivek Shah, CEO of J2 Global, and Scott Turicchi, President and CFO of J2. I will now turn the call over to Scott Turicchi, President and CFO of J2 Global. Thank you. You may begin.
Thank you. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the J2 Global Investor Conference Call for Q1 2021. As the operator mentioned, I am Scott Turicchi, President and CFO of J2 Global, and I'm joined by our CEO, Vivek Shah. A presentation is available for today's call. A copy of the presentation is available at our website. When you launch the webcast, there is a button on the viewer on the right-hand side, which will allow you to expand the slides. If you have not received a copy of the press release, you may access it through our corporate website at www.j2global.com. In addition, you will be able to access the webcast from this site. After completing the formal presentation, we will be conducting a Q&A session. The operator will instruct you at that time regarding the procedures for asking a question.
However, you may email us questions at any time at investor@j2global.com. Before we begin our prepared remarks, allow me to read the safe harbor language. As you know, this call and the webcast 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 have disclosed in our various SEC filings, including our 10-K filings, recent 10-Q filings, various proxy statements, and 8-K filings, as well as the additional risk factors that we've included as part of the slideshow for this webcast. We refer you to discussions in those documents regarding safe harbor language, as well as forward-looking statements. Now let me turn the call over to Vivek for his opening remarks.
Thank you, Scott, and good morning, everyone. We're obviously very pleased with our outstanding financial results in the first quarter as we continue to exceed our expectations and demonstrate the quality of our portfolio and the strong tailwinds that exist in our verticals. We're also increasing our guidance, which as far as I remember, has never happened at J2 without a major acquisition driving it. This momentum only adds to the considerable excitement at J2 as we work on separating the company into two pieces, a compelling HCIT business and a vertically-focused internet platform. Let me start by unpacking our pro forma Q1 results, which are adjusted to exclude the voice assets we've sold over the past three quarters, as well as our B2B backup business, which we expect to sell.
Total revenues grew over 23%, with nearly 40% growth in our digital media segment and almost 6% growth in our cloud services segment. Digital media's growth was a combination of low teens organic growth, coupled with acquisition-based revenues, mostly from RetailMeNot. Leading the pack were our broadband assets, Ookla and Ekahau, which together grew over 30% year-over-year. Ookla Speedtest set yet another record in Q1 with 1.9 billion tests, which is up nearly 60% from last year. We also launched video testing on Speedtest for iOS and revamped consumer coverage maps on Speedtest for Android, continuing to enhance user utility and network analytics. Ekahau's customers are seeing significant increases in Wi-Fi usage with more connected devices and more activity, straining networks. This should bode well for Ekahau, which offers products to help businesses create great Wi-Fi.
The Everyday Health Group continues to show strength with revenues up over 15% as consumer interest in health continues to grow and as pharma continues to shift away from traditional advertising vehicles to digital. Last week, we acquired a small but interesting asset called DailyOM, which sells health and wellness courses online. We believe we can leverage our significant audience reach to drive paid content. Our tech and gaming brands, including IGN, Spiceworks, Mashable, and PCMag, saw growth of close to 27% as the advertising market continues to strengthen. The RetailMeNot integration continues to exceed expectations with an improved go-to-market strategy, increased cross-promotional efforts among our brands, and cost efficiencies being realized earlier than planned. Our Deal Finder browser extension saw monthly active users increase 129% year-over-year through the combination of strong installs and increased merchant coverage.
Cloud services pro forma revenue growth was close to 6% in the quarter, one of its strongest growth quarters in recent memory, with Consensus, which is our cloud fax business that we're planning to spin off later this year, having another fantastic quarter. Consensus saw revenues grow by close to 7%, with the corporate fax portion growing by over 14%. While the web fax business has been modeled to slightly decline, we actually saw growth of nearly a point in web fax revenues. Given their respective growth rates, we anticipate that in a few quarters, corporate fax revenues will exceed web fax revenues. Customer usage has been very strong, with pages up 38% year-over-year. While we don't monetize all increased page volumes, it is an important indication of the utilization of the platform.
We also launched apps in two important marketplaces, Epic's App Orchard and Amazon Health, which has been part of our ongoing efforts at increasing our healthcare channel partnerships. The remainder of cloud services composed of our cybersecurity and SMB enablement verticals grew 4% in the quarter. As I described in our last call, we are directing investment dollars to cybersecurity and to our MarTech businesses to drive future organic growth. In cybersecurity, we recently launched our VIPRE All-in-One Solutions, which was developed to offer businesses complete protection with security awareness training, email and endpoint security, data loss prevention, and a business cloud VPN. In MarTech, we continue to see growing volumes across our email platforms, and we're focused on bringing new capabilities to our customers. For example, we recently added automated SMS marketing to Campaigner to enable multi-channel marketing within a single platform.
Notwithstanding those investments, our adjusted EBITDA margin was 39.3%, a 410 basis point improvement over last year, and adjusted EBITDA grew nearly 38%. This was a fantastic quarter from a top and bottom-line perspective. Given the strength of Q1, we are revising our guidance upward. As I said, when we've increased guidance in the past, it's been because of non-budgeted acquisitions. Being in a position to increase guidance, and guidance that I would point out was originally set at over 16% revenue growth at the midpoint, largely because of operating outperformance, is very exciting for the company. In our updated guidance, revenue growth at the midpoint is close to 19%, with adjusted EBITDA growth at over 14%. You'll also see that we've set the low end of our guidance to match the high end of our original guidance.
It's against this backdrop of strength that I'm pleased to report that we are making terrific progress in our efforts at spinning off the Consensus business as outlined in our April 20th call. As we've discussed in the past, we operate our businesses in a highly decentralized fashion, which is an advantage as we look at separating Consensus' business operations from J2. A full project team has been established and is fully operational to ensure a smooth and efficient separation. The team has already made significant progress, and I expect a clean execution on the timeline we shared. About 90% of the employees who will be moving with the Consensus business are already inside of the business unit, with the balance representing employees from shared services functions that substantially support the Consensus business. Therefore, we have a very clear delineation of human resources.
From a systems perspective, we've organized our deployments to help ensure the ability to create separate instances. From a facilities perspective, many of the Consensus employees work out of our downtown Los Angeles location and will remain there. We're also making good progress on effectuating the legal entity separation. We're anticipating our audits will be completed in the coming weeks and expect to file a Form 10 soon thereafter. We are still working through the respective capital structures of the two companies, but remain very confident that the cash on RemainCo's balance sheet at spin, along with its ongoing free cash flow, borrowing capacity, and its retained stake in Consensus, its various minority investments, and the disposition of non-core assets should give it ample dry powder to continue a level of M&A consistent with recent history.
At the same time, Consensus should have ample free cash flow of its own to allocate for the development of its interoperability platform and de-levering over time. From a governance perspective, we are working on ensuring that each company has the right board composition of experience, skill, diversity, tenure, and independence. Our goal is to have little, if any, overlap in the two boards, which will require both boards to seek new members. We view this as a valuable refreshment opportunity for the companies. One of the attractive aspects of this separation is the relative absence of dyssynergies. On the cost side, we are estimating less than $10 million of annual incremental recurring costs to separate the companies and make Consensus public company ready. This represents a less than 1% increase in total costs at J2.
On the revenue side, Consensus Cloud Fax offerings sat quite distinctly from the other cloud services offerings. There is little cross or upselling between Cloud Fax and our cybersecurity and SMB enablement offerings. Of course, we believe the value of the separation is in allowing each business to have focused resources, management, and balance sheets to pursue their respective growth strategies while giving investors two distinct investable companies, one with HCIT peers and the other with internet peers. We expect to hold analyst days along with deal roadshows ahead of the split to allow both companies an opportunity to more fully explain their standalone operations, capital structures, strategic priorities, and the transaction in general. Before I hand the call back to Scott, a few words about our ESG activities and progress.
We thought our ESG roadshows, at which we outlined the company's five pillars of purpose, which are DEI, sustainability, community, data, and governance, were very successful. We've also made great progress in enhancing our public disclosures. We delivered over 350 new disclosures and published policies and programs on our corporate website. We incorporated DEI goals into my compensation and those of our executive team. The results of our annual employment engagement survey were gratifying, with over 80% of employees being proud to work at J2 and would recommend us as an employer. The gap between our efforts and third-party ratings is beginning to close. At ISS, we saw our governance score, where lower is better, improved from four to two, our environment score improved from seven to four, and our social score improved from 10 to 1.
We are close to hiring a new head of sustainability and ESG, who should ensure we maintain our momentum and continue to seek ways in which we can create social value. With that, I will pass the call back to Scott.
Thank you, Vivek. I will provide an overview of both our non-GAAP and pro forma results for Q1 2021. As you'll recall from our previous earnings call, we have sold certain Australia and New Zealand voice assets in August 2020 and certain UK voice assets in February 2021, and we now have our B2B backup assets classified as assets held for sale. As a result, we will present our non-GAAP results, which include these operations for the periods owned, and our pro forma results, which exclude the contribution from these assets in all periods. As Vivek has highlighted, it was a stellar quarter, driven by organic growth throughout J2's businesses. We ended the quarter with approximately $500 million of cash and investments, including $372 million of cash. Let's review the summary quarterly financial results on slide four. Let's begin with revenues.
It was a record first fiscal quarter for J2. We had just shy of $400 million of revenue in the quarter and $385 million of revenue on a pro forma basis, representing approximately 20% and 23% growth respectively. Adjusted EBITDA was also a record for a fiscal quarter, with $156.3 million as reported and $151.5 million on a pro forma basis. The growth in EBITDA was 33.8% and 37.5% respectively, outpacing our revenue growth due to high-margin incremental revenue and judicious cost management. Growth in earnings per share was even stronger. In the Q1 , we had $2.18 of non-GAAP adjusted EPS and $2.11 of pro forma EPS, a growth of 55.8% and 60% respectively from Q1 2020. Turning to slide five, in Q1, we generated $152.5 million of free cash flow, an all-time record for J2, which was a 60.1% increase from Q1 2020.
I note that our strong free cash flow was driven by the excellent digital media results in Q4 2020, with the cash collections coming primarily in Q1 2021, as well as approximately $20 million of receivables acquired as part of the RetailMeNot acquisition that was also collected in the quarter. I would also remind those that are new to J2 that our EBITDA to free cash flow conversion is best measured over a rolling four-quarter basis and is typically in the mid to high 60% range. On a trailing 12-month basis, our adjusted EBITDA is $655 million and our free cash flow is $465 million, which at our current share price, represents an enterprise value to EBITDA multiple of just 10.1 times and an enterprise value to free cash flow multiple of 14.2 times respectively.
Let's turn to the two businesses, cloud and digital media for Q1, as outlined on slide six. The cloud business grew revenue 1% on a reported GAAP basis and 5.6% on a pro forma basis to $158.8 million. Adjusted EBITDA was $83.4 million as reported and $78.6 million on a pro forma basis, generating growth rates of 2.2% and 4.9% respectively. The digital media business revenue grew 39.5% to $226.8 million and experienced double-digit revenue growth exclusive of RetailMeNot. Adjusted EBITDA was up more than 94% to $84.4 million, and digital media margins expanded to 37.2%, increasing by more than 12 percentage points from Q1 2020. Before going to our question and answer session, I would like to turn your attention to our business outlook on slide eight. Due to the impressive organic Q1 results, we are raising our guidance that we provided in February of this year.
To remind you, at that time, we estimated on a pro forma basis that revenues would be between $1.63 billion and $1.676 billion, adjusted EBITDA between $646 million and $666 million, and non-GAAP adjusted EPS between $8.93 per share and $9.27 per share. The new range of guidance has the former high end as our new low end of guidance. For 2021, we now estimate on a pro forma basis revenues to be between $1.676 billion and $1.7 billion, adjusted EBITDA to be between $666 million and $680 million, and non-GAAP adjusted earnings per share to be between $9.27 per share and $9.51 per share. I would note that these earnings do not include any potential dilution that could occur from the calling of the 3.25% convertible notes later this year.
We continue to study the appropriate timing and method to effectuate the call in light of the separation of Consensus from J2. Following our business outlook slide are various metrics and reconciliation statements for the various non-GAAP measures to their nearest GAAP equivalent. I would now ask the operator to rejoin us to instruct you on how to queue for questions.
Thank you. We will now be conducting a question and answer session. The first question is coming from Cory Carpenter from JP Morgan. Cory, your line is live.
Great. Thanks for the questions. Vivek, just hoping you could talk a bit more about what's driving the outperformance in digital media, and how you think about the sustainability of it. I think the 40% growth this quarter was probably the strongest, perhaps in your history. Related to that, now that you're about six months into the RetailMeNot acquisition, hoping you could talk about some of your key learnings from the integration thus far. Thanks.
Great. Thanks, Cory, and good morning. I'll break it into two pieces on the digital media side, starting with the organic growth rate, which was, as we said, sort of mid double digits, kind of 13%-14% range. I think We had a bunch of tailwinds across all of the verticals. The tech vertical, the health vertical, the gaming vertical, all were very strong. The advertising environment continues to be quite favorable for premium properties. In a world where I think we're shifting from interest-based advertising to contextual-based advertising, I think we're seeing some significant benefit in that. I will also say, and it's a good segue to your second question, that within our shopping vertical and principally RetailMeNot, the execution has been fantastic. The pace at which we are incorporating both revenue, and expense synergy is ahead of schedule.
When we consummated the transaction, we had said and indicated that we thought that we could have a run rate of $80 million of EBITDA at a run rate level within 24 months. We believe we can achieve that within calendar 2021. That's a fairly substantial improvement over what we had planned. We're excited across the board for all the assets within the digital media segment, and we do believe it's sustainable. We think a lot of the shifts that are taking place in the marketplace are just acceleration of trends that were there. You see the way in which changes in the way in which we work, the way in which we consume content, the way in which we shop, those all are favorable, we believe, long-term trends for our portfolio.
Great. Thank you, and congrats on the quarter.
Thanks, Cory.
Thank you.
Thank you. The next question is coming from Shyam Patil from SIG. Shyam, your line is live.
Hey, guys. Congrats on the quarter and the outlook. I had a couple of questions. I guess first one, can you guys talk a little bit about what you're seeing right now with the M&A environment, your pipeline and what you're seeing in terms of valuation expectations? Second question, with the increase in guidance, any color you could offer us in terms of how to think about digital media versus cloud in the second quarter as well for the year?
Sure. Let me just start maybe on the M&A and then Scott can talk a little bit more color on our guidance. The M&A pipeline continues to be very strong. We're seeing a number of interesting opportunities across the board. What I should say, because I know this question exists for many, is that, is our process of spinning off Consensus in any way slowing down our M&A program? The answer to that question is no. Our sourcing and evaluating of deals continues at a pretty robust level. There are a few in the pipeline that are very interesting for us, both at Consensus and RemainCo, I should point out. I don't see anything different in the marketplace in terms of valuations, and I don't see anything that would impede our normal ordinary course of M&A.
As you know, it can be episodic. What seems to have happened, at least over the last couple of years, is there seems to be more M&A activity that picks up in the second half. It could just be that as we acquire assets like RetailMeNot, there is an integration period, and so those teams are probably more focused on that than possibly sourcing in those areas. It could just be that the distribution is a little bit random. We feel very good about it. I've been asked about SPAC activity, and the types of transactions that SPACs are looking at are really not the types of transactions that we're looking at.
In terms of our own M&A approach, where we're looking to create value, the categories we're in and the targets, we're not seeing the SPAC pressure that I think others may be seeing.
On the guidance question, Shyam, what I would say is for Q2, remember that's a quarter, of course, that we did not own RetailMeNot. Digital media should be in the high 30s growth year-over-year. Cloud should be in the mid-single-digit range on revenue. What I would note, and I'd remind everybody of, is, and you'll recall, we talked about this in the Q4 call, this is now beginning in Q2, our investment period. As Vivek highlighted in his opening remarks, we've seen both in Q1, and we even saw it really coming into this year, tremendous opportunities to invest, particularly in the areas of cybersecurity, MarTech, pregnancy and parenting, and gaming. You're going to see those investments begin.
They've already begun, actually, in Q2, such that while the revenue will grow sequentially from Q1 to Q2, I would expect the EBITDA to be somewhat in a similar range to Q1, because Q1 was very light by design on those investment activities. When we budgeted, they really began in Q2, and they then continued through the end of the year.
Great. Thank you, guys.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. The next question is coming from Will Power from Baird. Will, your line is live.
Okay, great. Yeah, I guess would echo the congratulations on the results. I guess, maybe first question, circling back to the strength in cloud services, I think close to five, six% pro forma growth. I wonder if we could get any more color just on the key drivers there within the business and sustainability.
I'm happy to say that a large chunk of that came from Consensus. As Vivek mentioned, the strength in the underlying business platform usage was really strong. Remember, we're comparing against a quarter, meaning Q1 2020, that really was not impacted in any material degree by COVID. I think what you're seeing in Consensus, and you may recall, Will, we talked about this over the last several years. A lot of the incremental customers coming on are very large enterprises. It takes a while to on-ramp them and for their usage to fully get up to speed. That's what we're beginning to see. This outperformance is driven by healthcare. It's driven by customers, actually, that we acquired as customers well over a year ago, but it is getting them fully onboarded to our platform.
That is one key element of it. The other key element that Vivek touched on in his opening remarks that I think is important is that the smaller end customer base, we call the web channel, which historically we've said that's a low single-digit decliner, actually had approximately 1% gain in Q1 2021 over 2020. There's a lot of factors that go into that. I think some of it is based on the evolving work from home environment and the hybrid model, even as people begin to return to work. I think improvement internally in our own sales and marketing efforts in that area. Those two things were key drivers for the whole cloud business. Vivek may want to comment on the other two areas, which would be our SMB enablement, really driven by MarTech and our cybersecurity.
No, Scott's right. The Consensus business really had a very strong quarter, and as you know, this is several quarters running now that it's demonstrating fairly sustained levels of organic growth, particularly on the corporate side. As I said in my remarks, we're going to get to the point pretty soon where the corporate business is larger than the web business, and therefore, its larger growth rate starts to show up even more in the aggregate growth rate. In terms of the non-Consensus portions of the cloud segment, they grew 4% in the quarter. Our view of those businesses, as I've said in the past, is we are really shifting from a profitability mindset. These businesses were really run for profit and not growth, and that's shifting.
In our own view, longer term, we're making investments now to really get that growth rate to accelerate because we're optimistic about our opportunities in cybersecurity and SMB enablement. It touches a little bit on, I think, the margin question that just preceded these sets of questions. What I will tell you, and as I've said many times in the past, we have a total growth orientation. We look at our investment choices in terms of returns on invested capital, whether that's in our acquisition program, whether that's investing in our existing businesses, whether that's repurchasing stock. We look at the competition for capital, and we'll deploy capital in the most promising areas.
What I can tell you, and as I've said, and I think as we're showing quarter after quarter, is that the organic growth opportunities inside of the existing portfolio are very strong, and we're going to feed them. That is what is implied in our guidance for the rest of the year. If I have only one regret about Q1 is that we didn't move quickly enough inside of the quarter to reinvest some of that excess EBITDA. Look, I think it's a great sign that we see in our total growth package, growth opportunities across every conceivable aspect of the company.
Okay. That's helpful. I guess maybe just a follow-up. I think you said that the tech media or the tech gaming segment up 27% year-over-year, which looked like strong growth. How is the gaming console cycle playing into that and how does that impact results through the balance of this year?
Yeah. Certainly, I think Q1 benefited at IGN from the strength relating to the console cycle and the refresh. Generally speaking, that's a multi-quarter type event. We see it continuing to sustain throughout the rest of the year. Just to be clear, we're seeing a lot of non-gaming strength in that tech and gaming basket of revenues. It is far more tech than it is gaming.
Okay, great. Thank you.
Thank you. The next question is coming from James Bennett from William Blair. James, your line is live.
Thanks for taking the question. Just on the digital media side, any comments around some of the sectors that you saw that were most impacted by COVID starting to reemerge? Thoughts just as you've expanded digital media business on other verticals, potentially moving into? Thanks.
Yeah. When we go back about a year ago and start to think about the businesses that were negatively impacted by the onset of the pandemic, Ekahau is probably one of the first businesses that comes to mind. Just as a reminder, Ekahau is in the business of selling tools to help businesses create great Wi-Fi. When you add the shift from office work to at-home work, that business suffered a bit. That business is now really doing well. It was a great driver in Q1 of growth, and we are very optimistic about it going forward. That is an example, I think, of a business inside of the digital media portfolio that had a negative impact from the pandemic that now is reversing course.
Outside of that, I would say that generally speaking, the pandemic did accelerate in a positive way, a bunch of trends in health and in shopping in particular, that were benefits early in the pandemic and continued to be kind of the new normal. In that way, we're very excited. As for new verticals, look, I think we're always interested in high-value verticals where we can find audiences with intent that allow us to have our multiple monetization business model put into play. There are certainly other high-value verticals beyond the verticals that we're in, but that's what we're looking for. Generally speaking, if we're going to enter into a new vertical, we would do it at scale. When we entered into the health media vertical, obviously Everyday Health Group provided us that scale.
While we were in the shopping vertical, the RetailMeNot acquisition certainly put us at a different order of magnitude. If you were to see us move into a new vertical, it would likely be with a larger acquisition.
Great. Thanks.
Thank you.
Thank you. The next question is coming from Saket Kalia from Barclays. Saket, your line is live.
Oh, hey, guys. Thanks for taking my question here, fitting me in. Vivek, maybe for you, can you just remind us what the split of the digital media business is between display and performance, sort of roughly speaking, and maybe how that might trend through the rest of the year?
Good morning, Saket . In Q1, if you look at the digital media segment in total, the display business was around 30% of the revenues, performance marketing was around 47% of the revenues, and the subscription business was around 22%. This is just for the digital media segment. To answer your question, it's interesting with respect to display advertising. We've had 10 consecutive quarters of growth in our display business, I can remember a time where there were some market concerns about display and where display was going. I do think that the shifts in the marketplace from interest-based advertising to contextual advertising and premium environments absolutely does benefit us. I also think that our orientation in high-value verticals with audiences with intent really devalue us. It's an important point.
While we make a distinction between display and performance marketing, which is really a pricing distinction, whereas display is cost per thousand impressions served and performance marketing is cost per acquisition lead or click. The reality is that our display advertising is measured by marketers on a performance basis. While we distinguish those in delineating of revenues, the marketer doesn't. The marketer is looking for dollars that perform, and there's positive ROI, whether it's CPM dollars or CPA dollars. I think on that basis, the aggregate of our advertising business is well-positioned because it's highly performing advertising in an environment where other historically well-performing advertising is likely to be challenged. I think that puts us in a very strong position.
Thanks.
I'll just add to that I think what you see, Saket, in terms of the Q1 representation of how we categorize the revenues in digital media, once again, assuming no further acquisition, is reasonably representative of the distribution of revenues for the year.
Very helpful. Thanks.
Thank you. The next question is coming from James Fish from Piper Sandler. James, your line is live.
Hey guys, congrats on the record quarter. Scott, maybe just help us bridge the guide here a little bit for the remainder of the year. Obviously, you guys extremely outperformed all of our expectations, but does guide include the impact of the higher operational costs related to the spin-out starting? I know you talked about investments, reinvesting in the business here. Second, it does kind of seem to imply a guide down for the remaining few quarters given the Q1 upside, just in aggregate. Is it just you being conservative or what are we missing here?
Yeah. A few things. First of all, as it relates to the spin, there are no material costs that flow through the guidance. The guidance is a consolidated guidance of J2 under the assumption that we stay together through the end of the year, which of course we believe is unlikely as we expect the spin to be effectuated in Q3. It's just to give you a sense of how the businesses operate combined. You may recall from the April 20th call that there will be approximately up to $10 million of costs as we split the two companies and create two public companies. Those will occur primarily as we get closer to the distribution date and be borne by the companies on a going-forward basis.
Those are independent of any actual fees that we will incur in terms of effectuating the separation, things like legal fees, banking fees, et cetera. That's one element. What we're talking about in the guide is $10 million-$15 million of incremental spend that otherwise would flow to EBITDA. Going back to those major categories that I referenced earlier in both the cloud and digital media businesses. In the cloud, you'll recall in the Q4 that we had in February, we talked about incremental investments primarily in marketing, because we've had very, very good, too good in fact, LTV to CAC ratios in both the MarTech business and cybersecurity. That's beginning to ramp up as we speak. In terms of your overall question on the guidance, it was a phenomenal Q1.
I think we're always a little reticent to extrapolate that out on a going forward basis. I would say that our guidance, particularly, in the area of the revenues, is maybe a little bit conservative. On the EBITDA, look, it is our intention to be able to spend all these incremental dollars. I think it'll be somewhat of a disappointment if we're not able to put all of that money to work, because that will be very good for both consolidated J2 as well as for the two companies when they split in terms of sustaining strong revenue growth going forward. I don't really want to see the EBITDAs flow through at the same degree they did in Q1.
I might just add, Scott, two things to that. Number one, in terms of the synergy costs, those are annualized costs. Certainly the impact in 2021 should be prorated.
That's correct.
in the context of our expense base, they're fairly small. I think that the other piece on this revised guidance is it does not contemplate any future M&A inside of J2, which would be unusual given our track record. There's certainly opportunities if and when that were to happen. I would most importantly reiterate that, I think we focused on the EBITDA guide. I think that's one aspect. The revenue guide, I think is very different. Again, we're seeing opportunities to put money to work to accelerate future growth. Those who have been close to the company for a while, we have not seen these levels of organic growth ever.
I think that's an important recognition for the marketplace, which is you have in our total growth strategy a very healthy quotient that is coming organically while we continue to look for inorganic opportunities. I think it's a very exciting combination and an important signal.
Yeah, that's very helpful. If I can sneak in one other. Are you guys still anticipating another 200,000, 300,000 subscriber churn for the divested backup business that's coming? Any sense to the timing, whether it's you guys are expecting kind of Q2 or back half of the year?
Yeah. Let me just note, I know what you're touching on here. First of all, just to explain the customer count decline in the cloud business, that is almost all related to either assets that we have divested, meaning the voice assets that existed, say, in prior periods for ANZ Voice and UK Voice, as well as some declines that have occurred in the B2B backup. I would note that those metrics in the back include those assets in the various periods in which they were owned. To your point, when we divest the B2B backup assets, yes, there will be a decline in customer counts, I would say in hopefully the lower end of that range that you referenced. We've made great progress. I'm a little reticent to give a specific timing, but I would say it certainly could occur in the second fiscal quarter.
It could also be early Q3. It's gonna be, I think, right on the cusp of either late Q2, early Q3. Obviously, if we maintain the assets through Q2, those customer counts will remain in our metrics until the asset is actually disposed.
Helpful, Scott. Congrats on the great organic growth, guys.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. The next question is coming from Jon Tanwanteng from CJS Securities. Jon, your line is live.
Good morning, guys. Thank you for taking my questions, and great quarter again. Most of my questions have been answered. I just have two of them. I was wondering if you could break out the growth expectations for Consensus within the guidance that you've provided. I know the mix is shifting over to the faster-growing corporate side. I'm just wondering, you have a number for the year, and then how that may accelerate going forward as that becomes bigger and bigger.
Yeah. Right now, Consensus looks like it is in that mid-single digit range, and that would basically be organic growth. It does not assume any M&A. The only M&A that affected last year's result was a deal we did very early in the year. It's almost irrelevant in the year-over-year growth. My own expectation is, and particularly once the separation occurs, is given the additional investments that we made in some of the Consensus products, that that would be sort of the low watermark for growth going forward, unaided by M&A. Obviously we need to get to the point of separation and refine those projections as we get closer to the distribution date.
Got it. What's driving the growth in web fax? Is that something you're measuring right now or attributable to something that you've done?
I think it's a combination of a couple of things. We do believe that the changing work environment aids in the need for having individual solutions available for employees who now work from home, either permanently or on a hybrid basis. We have made some changes in the way we market over the last two to three quarters. I think that is also aiding the improvement. It's hard to tease out which one is more important, but I think the synergy of both of those is moving the web channel in the right direction. My own belief is that we should not accept the fact that it is a low single-digit decline. I think that in the context of a very large portfolio, you'll obviously have pieces that maybe don't support the growth rate as strongly as other pieces.
As you start to think about separation, as you start to look at the individual pieces, particularly of a standalone company going forward, to me, that's just not necessarily an accepted assumption that we should live with. I think it's a little early, though, to say that the web is on an ascendancy and will become a contributor to growth. I think in the near to intermediate term, the goal would be stability to slight growth.
Got it. One more if I could. I was just wondering if you're able to measure the impact of Do Not Track features across some major mobile platforms, either in the past quarter or in this quarter as they've rolled out.
Again, because it's not part of what we do in our monetization mix, there's not an impact on us per se. However, I do think the pendulum that is swinging in the marketplace is saying, look, if the basis of the ad is not targeting the person in front of the screen, then the basis needs to be targeting the content and the environment that they are in and that they're looking at. A contextual versus an interest-based approach to targeting, which is historically how advertising has worked. It's only in the world of data collection and using programmatic inventory to retarget did we shift into this interest-based approach. We're now going back to contextual, and that's where we're seeing a benefit.
Got it. Thank you. Appreciate it, guys.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. There were no other questions in the queue. I would now like to hand the call back to Scott Turicchi of J2 Global for any closing remarks.
Paul, thank you very much. Thank you all for participating today in our Q1 Earnings Call. Just a couple of housekeeping announcements before we conclude. I would note, and we have a press release out on a series of virtual conferences that Rebecca and I will be participating in over the coming weeks. That'll give you an opportunity for additional color commentary as we proceed through the quarter. In some cases, there will be fireside chats or formal presentations. In other cases, only one-on-ones. I would also note from the overall spin perspective, the next major milestone will be the filing of the Form 10, which we expect to be in the month of June. That's the formal filing with the SEC, upon which they begin their process to review that document.
Once they declare it effective, then we can proceed with declaring the distribution and effectuating the actual spin-off, which we still anticipate to be in Q3. Thank you once again. If you do have any further questions, you can continue to email us at investor@j2.com. Thank you.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This does conclude today's conference call. You may disconnect your phone lines at this time, and have a wonderful day. Thank you for your participation.