Audioboom Group plc (BOOM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Audioboom Group plc Investor Presentation. [Operator Instructions] The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company will review all of the questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I would like to submit the following poll. And if you could give that your kind attention, I'm sure the company would be most grateful. And I'd now like to hand you over to CEO, Stuart Last, afternoon, sir.

Thank you, Jake. Hi, everyone. Thank you again for joining Audioboom to get the lease update. It's good to see some familiar names and faces and also lots of new names here today as well. So welcome. And as I said, thank you for joining us. For those of you that are familiar with the way we present this each quarter, we'll start off with a section on our business model, the industry that we work within, how the company operates. And I think that will be a really good way to look at things for those that are new to Audioboom or a good recap for those of you that haven't been with the company too long. Section 2, we'll dive into the numbers and look at the information from the trading update that we released this morning, go a little deeper on the KPIs and the financials of the business. And then the third part of this, we'll look ahead at 2023, and we'll talk about where the company is focused, what we are working on, what we're planning and how 2023 is looking. And then as Jake said, right the end of this, we have time for a Q&A session. So we had some questions that came in advance. We have those. And we're also very happy to take some questions so you can add your questions in that area on the right-hand side of the screen as we go. So we will now get started with the presentation. And as I said, first thing to do, I think, is to introduce ourselves to those of you that need to Audioboom I'm Stuart Last, I'm the Chief Executive Officer. I've been the CEO of Audioboom for the past 3 years, and it's been a fantastic run of growth for the company. Before I was CEO, I run operations for Audioboom based here in New York City, and I've been with the company since 2014. Before Audioboom, I worked at a podcast ad tech company, now called Voxnest and a company based in New York, a very successful podcast ad tech company. And before that was at the BBC working on the digital audio plan, so 15 years deep in podcasting at this point and really excited, I think, to keep leading this business forward and taking it to new levels.

Hi, Everyone. I'm Brad Clarke, CFO here at Audioboom. I've been in this position since March 2018. So it will be 5 years very shortly. I've got around 15 years of experience in financial roles at 3 other organizations before Audioboom all focused on finance within media. So prior to Audioboom, I was at another company called Brave Bison. Prior to that, I have various financial roles at News UK, publisher of the Sun and the Times newspapers like qualified as a chartered accountant with Grant Thornton. So say it's a great company that we work for a great industry. Good trading update that we put out this morning. So yes, I look forward to speaking to you in a short while on some of the detail on the finances of the company. So back to you, Stuart.

Thank you, Brad. So yes, let's dive into the business model and the operations of the business. Really this first slide that I want to share you really just highlights what Audioboom does and the mission behind the business is actually the front page of our website. So if you have to go to audioboom.com is really out there for you all to see. We power podcasting for creators and then brands. So we deliver value to podcasters so they can continue doing their work and growing their audience. And we do have a value for brands, those advertisers and companies that want to connect to audience, they want to connect to talent and execute their advertising campaigns across podcasting. And we've been very successful with this mission. To date, we've delivered more than $150 million of value to our podcast creator partners, and we've delivered and executed more than $200 million of brand campaigns since 2018. So our mission is front and center of everything the team Audioboom is doing. We've been very successful in that, and we think there's a great future ahead in the fastest growing and the fastest part of the media industry. How Audioboom delivers that value is really key. And it's -- that value is delivered through our platform, which does 1 very important thing. Our platform connects audience, creators and advertisers. So those are the 3 key parts of any media organization. Creators working with advertisers is great, but unless there is audience connected to that for the advertisers to reach and there is very little value. Creators may have strong audience, but if they are not able to access advertisers and brands, again, there's very little value there. So Audioboom is integral to bringing these important parts together. We sit in the middle of our platform connects them. So wherever the audience is, whether the audience is listening through Spotify or YouTube, Apple Podcast, we're able to connect them to the 8,000-plus creators and podcast on Audioboom, and then we connect them with the advertisers to deliver value across all 3 parts. And this business model is really bought out of 3 core beliefs. One is that podcasting is a creative medium. So it's independent creator focused. It's not being taken over by major media businesses and producers of content and that is being proven out. We've seen just over the past year that many of the larger media organizations that have stepped into podcasting, however, pause work in podcast or have made layoffs such as at CNN recently. And the focus really has been on independent creators. So very open medium. Those independent creators are very authentic, very organic that you can connect to large audiences. And Audioboom does a fantastic job of delivering value for them. Our second belief in this business model is that this is an advertising funded medium. And again, that's been proven out. Very little use of subscription or payments for content audiences are used to having podcast content available for free and supported by advertising, and they are happiest using and consuming podcast in that way. There's very little driver for audiences to pay for content at this moment in podcasting. And thirdly, our core belief is that this is a distributed form of media. So Audioboom content and our partner content is available everywhere the audience exists again. So that's Spotify Youtube, Pandora, iHeartMedia, a host of listening apps. Our content will be in all of those. We believe that this is not a kind of a ring-fenced medium that the content should be out there. It should be reaching audience wherever they are consuming. So those 3 core beliefs drive the business model. The business model is about delivering value to the audience to creators and to advertisers. And we are delivering that value and making those connections between the 3 through the Audioboom platform. So to give you an overview of what that platform is, it's vertically integrated, it's a cloud-based engine, and it's very, very scalable. At the core of this platform is a content management system. That's where our creators will upload their podcasts. We will host that audio. We would distribute that audio with 1 click out all of those listening endpoints that I mentioned earlier. And then we gather the analytics from each of those listing apps back into Audio boom. We consolidate those in analytics dashboard, the podcaster, the creator. They can use those analytics to understand their audience and to get insights into how that consumption is happening to improve the quality of the content. And then our sales and our revenue teams can use that analytics dashboard to inform their sales strategy. So that's the core part of that platform is the CMS. On top of that, we have developed an advertising technology stack so that when we are distributing all of that content, our ad tech is finding the best pricing and delivering and executing that advertising very seamlessly and again, very much at scale. So we've developed an ad server that actually fires in adds in realtime into the -- into and around that content seamlessly. We have a Yield Ops system, a Yield Ops system is, as I said, finding the best pricing. So it's looking at all of the best, all of the buyers for that piece of advertising inventory in a split second that will decide where the best offer for that piece of advertising inventory comes from, and we'll sell it at that highest price. We have a tool called AdRip. This is a creative tool so that the creator can add new advertising inventory in the back catalog, we can continue to monetize the back catalog of content for creators. And we have Showcase which is our marketplace, our advertising marketplace, we make all of our advertising, all of our content supply available to advertisers all around the world, the biggest advertisers in the world through Showcase our advertising marketplace. So that ad tech stack sits on top of our content management system and begins the monetization process for us. And then lastly, on top of that ad tech stack is a system that we have called LIRICAL. It's a sales force based, a bespoke sales force-based build. And that's an inventory management system, it runs the ad execution. It automates the billing process. It's a business and sales intelligence tool, so we can understand our inventory levels, the fill rates across them, the pricing that we should be using to sell our content. As I said, it automates a whole billing process. So we're very lean on the finance side of the business. And that really just gives us really great intelligence into everything else that we do. So those are the 3 core parts of the Audioboom platform that's so integral to delivering value to our creators. And really, that is now driving some significant scale. So running through that platform, more than 8,000 podcasts or 8,000 podcast channels. That content being created in those 8,000 podcast channels is being downloaded 130 million times every single month. Obviously, the more downloads that are happening through that -- through our platform, the more ad inventory there is available for us to sell, and we're currently reaching more than 34 million unique listeners around the world. So some really great scale developing in that platform, and that's building every single month. This chart is really showing you how we view our creators and the content model in Audioboom, but really this also represents podcasting in general, I think, which is to say that to the left-hand side of this chart, you're seeing a very few podcasts delivering huge audiences and a very kind of quick drop off as you move to the right, a long tail of content effectively. More podcasts each delivering much smaller individual audiences, but coming together to put some very strong volume in place. So at Audioboom, we have our premium network, this is our biggest 200 podcasts that you'll see here on the left-hand side of this chart, 200 podcasts. Each one of them will deliver somewhere between 30,000 downloads to 2 million downloads per episode. So some huge individual shows within that premium network of podcasts. These are the shows that we focus on mostly through our advertising teams. We work with them on a revenue share basis. And the business development to sign those top-tier podcasts, those big podcasts. That comes through our relationships with the Hollywood talent agents, WME, UTA, CAA, the biggest 3 of those Hollywood talent agents. So opportunity to work with their clients and the large podcast that they represent, we put together a partnership deal with those large podcasts, and they come in and they come in as part of our premium podcast network. We also have all our Audioboom Studios, a smaller part of our business, just around 30 podcasts. Those shows deliver between 30,000 and 200,000 downloads per episode. A lot of that work in Audioboom Studios is to coproduce Podcasts and one of the biggest partnerships that you'll know about that we have there is with Formula 1. So Audioboom is the official partner of the Formula 1 podcast. We work with the team at F1 to co-produce 2 of their podcast beyond the grid and F1 Nation, and we provide recording and engineering of that audio, the post-production and the distribution and also commercial services there. So it's a very successful partnership and really represents what we do within Audioboom Studios. And then we have long tail network. That's the rest of the 8,000 podcasts that sit on our platform. These are much smaller shows. They have up to 30,000 downloads per episode. They actually -- many of them pay us a subscription fee of $10 or $20 a month in order to use our platform and to use our tool set, but they also take advertising within their content as well. We don't focus too much on the acquisition of those shows. That's happening organically. Those shows finding about our platform and coming to us and signing up for accounts with us. We're adding the added inventory to our platform to monetize as well. So yes, again, just an overview there, I think, that's helpful of our creative network our content model. So this is our revenue model within the business. This breaks down each of those key revenue strands. At the top, you're going to see the contribution that each of those revenue strands makes to our overall group revenue. And at the bottom, you are seeing the gross margin on each one of those revenue lines. So I'll just walk you through those. Audioboom Studios, I just talked about where we're coproducing or producing content in-house, 30 shows, as I said, and obviously, because of the small number of shows. It's a relatively small contribution to our overall revenue, 4% of our revenue contribution as you can see that that's remained steady over the past 2 years. We do have a stronger gross margin on our Audioboom Studios work of 27%. That's because, in many cases, we are controlling the production costs there. If we're working on a revenue share basis because we are adding the production as a service, we can create those relationships on more favorable terms than we can in other parts of the business. So that's Audioboom Studios. Our premium network, those top 200 shows they are always a big driver of Audioboom revenue. Over 60%, 61% of our revenue came through those top 200 premium shows in 2022. That's down a little on 2021. As you'll see, we have great successful year with Showcase and Sonic that began to deliver more of our revenue contribution. But premium sales, premium network, top 200 shows just remains the core part of our business going forward. Comes with a slimmer gross margin, 17% last year. Now that's slimmer than it has been before as we have in the weak ad market. We have had to pay some costs for minimum guarantees that were not achieved, and that's brought the gross margin down. So what I mean by that is for a handful of our bigger shows, we delivered them in annual minimum revenue payment. In this down ad market, which I'll talk to a little bit later in the presentation, we have on occasion missed some of those minimum guarantee payments. So we still make the to them with that minimum guarantee amount, but we haven't hit the required revenue. So that's weakened that gross margin on the premium ad model. But as the ad market improves over this coming year, we expect very quickly to get back to a place where we are delivering the full obligation on those -- on the revenue needed for those minimum revenue guarantees. Showcase is our automated ad tech part of the business that is the advertising that is delivered automatically through the ad tech. We open up all of our ad inventory into a marketplace and then buyers on the other side of that marketplace are buying and bidding to buy that ad inventory at scale, very, very efficient. And it's a really successful part of the Audioboom business over the past 2 to 3 years since we launched, Showcase's revenue is now making up for 14% of the group revenue, up from 11% in 2021 and a minimal percentage in 2020. So Showcase is growing fast, and we're very excited about the future of Showcase within the business. It also comes with a much stronger gross margin. Then our premium network. This is because we are using Showcase across the entire roster of 8,000 podcasts, not just those top 200. So what that means is that the top 200, those shows are being signed to Audioboom via those Hollywood talent agents of UTA and CAA and WME, they are able to deliver more favorable terms for their clients. whereas in Showcase and the remaining 8,000 pockets that use the platform, Audioboom has more favorable terms in those agreements. So that's why Showcase comes with that higher gross margin. And I'm pleased that, that is becoming a bigger part of the Audioboom business. Sonic is our platform for brands. It allows advertisers and brands to use a tool set to advertise in podcasts directly. So the work at Sonic is done directly with the brand and with the advertiser. Again, it's been a fast-growing part of the Audioboom business over the past 3 years, launched really in 2018 and is now at 20% of our overall revenue. So very pleased with the progress at Sonic. 14% gross margin on Sonic. And those of you who have joined us on previous presentations will have seen that gross margin lower in and around the 11% or 12% mark. So we worked really hard, I think, improving that gross margin in Sonic, and we feel like we're in a much better and happier place with the gross margin at Sonic. Our gross margin will always be a little lower than the creator side of the business because we're working directly with brands. And giving the brands a platform and a tool set to utilize podcasting, we are aligning the gross margin there much with a traditional ad agency commission or gross margin structure. So the gross margin there will always be a little lighter than the rest of the Audioboom business. But very, very pleased with the growth of Sonic over the past few years. And then for subscriptions, that's not subscriptions for audience to pay to listen to content. This is a subscription for a podcaster a creator to use the Audioboom platform and the Audioboom tool set. Again, very small part of our business in terms of the revenue that it generates, just 1% of revenue comes through those subscriptions. We're not actively marketing that platform, as I said before, the sign-ups, the podcast, the sign-ups for that subscription platform that's happening organically. But it doesn't have a high gross margin, 91% gross margin, very few costs associated with that subscription model apart from some bandwidth and distribution costs there. So hopefully, gives you a good overview of each of the revenue lines and some of the changes that are taking place across those revenue lines, particularly the growth of Showcase and Sonic and those 2 parts of the business becoming a bigger part of everything that we do. So a good overview, I think, of the business model, where we sit in the industry and everything that we do internally. Next, we will take a look at the performance over the past year and focused down on some of the detail that we put out in our trading update this morning. So I will start off by walking you through the key numbers in that trading update. Firstly, $75.5 million of revenue in 2022. This was a record revenue performance for the company, a growth of 25% over 2021, where we delivered just over $60 million. So that 25% annual growth was a significant outperformance of our competitors. We outperformed the wider podcast industry by 67%. The wider podcast industry was projected by PwC to grow at 15%. So once again, we've outperformed the wider industry. Now that growth, that 25% annual growth and that $75.5 million revenue number, we did see a significant impact on that by the ad market downturn caused by global macroeconomic conditions in the second half of the year. So we believe that the ad market downturn impacted our revenue potential by around 20% for 2022. Looking at the adjusted EBITDA profit for 2022. That profit stands at $3.6 million. So that's a record adjusted EBITDA profit for the business, 16% annual growth over 2021 when we delivered $3.1 million in profit. And that EBITDA, again, impacted by the ad market and the revenue impact that we saw because of the downturn in the ad market. But obviously, that growth in the EBITDA is lower than the revenue growth. So we're not seeing any type of gearing, and we're not seeing a full flow-through of that adjusted EBITDA growth. And Brad will talk a little bit more about that later on in the presentation. But Obviously, EBITDA is impacted by the light of revenue, but also those partner minimum guarantee payments that I mentioned before. So where we are paying the obligations that we have on their minimum guarantees. That's a direct impact on the adjusted EBITDA. And then also, we're obviously coping and managing inflationary pressures on our operating costs as well across -- particularly across the second half of the year. So $3.6 million of adjusted EBITDA, still a record number for us but impacted by some of those factors. And then finally, $8.1 million of cash at the end of 2022, which is a significant step forward from a year earlier. So we generated $5.1 million of cash during 2022, up from that $3 million a year ago. That's the highest cash position reported by the company. Obviously, critical at this time, in an uncertain world to have strong cash on hand. So I'm very pleased to report a record cash position of $8.1 million. It goes out saying that we're fully funded at this point for the current growth plans. And we have a further $1.8 million available to us in our overdraft facility as well. So access to around $10 million of cash puts us in a strong position. to cope with anything that's grown us going forward. So let's talk about some of the key points around that 2022 performance, both in terms of revenue and just overall operations. I think the first one to highlight, which we talked about a little earlier, was the Showcase performance, the revenue growth of Showcase that automated ad product was 70% in 2022. So while the wider business grew at 25%, Showcase on its own grew at 70% in 2022, which is a fantastic result. That is growing because of two things. One is the supply that we're putting into that marketplace. So last year, we made 4.1 billion ad impressions available within that marketplace. That number was enhanced really by 2 things. One, our tool called AdRip that we launched just over a year ago how our creators are now using that AdRip tool to create new ad inventory in that back catalog so that we can continue to monetize content that is 5 or 10 years old, and that's adding to the volume ad inventory that we make available there. And secondly, we are upgrading our creator contracts to ensure, a, that they use AdRip as a tool. We contract them now to use AdRip as a tool to make more ad inventory and also to use Showcase alongside the premium live read adds that shows that the shows take. So Showcase is becoming something that our creators love to use. They see the benefits of using Showcase. We're now contracting our creators to use Showcase. We're having them utilize our tools to create more ad inventory all the time. So it's the first driver Showcase performance. The second driver of the Showcase performance is what we do on the demand side and the buying side and the advertiser side. So we add new demand side partnerships in there, and we've added a host of new demand side partnerships this year from Amazon, to Spotify to the Trade Desk, to some international partnerships as well. That improves our fill rates to above 55% for the year. So on 1 side, on the supply side, we're adding inventory. And then on the demand side, we are adding monetization partners to buy that inventory from us. Second part -- and second key point, I think, is the further expansion of our creative network. So that's that premium creator network, those top 200 shows. We are continuing to add -- firstly, add new shows into there. So just last week, we announced 5 new top-tier shows that are joining our creator network, that the Tim Dillon Show is kind of a monsters of a show, one of the top comedy podcasts in the U.S. and delivers millions of downloads every single month. Myths & Legends, Nateland Podcast, Minds of Madness and Sinisterhood, all top-tier podcasts that come with a built-in audience that we can monetize from day 1. And then our second announcement just last week for that creator network was the renewal, the multiyear renewal of some of those key partnerships that we already have there, Mike Rowe, Relax, Two Hot Takes, 3 big shows, all in our top 15 bigger shows. We've now renewed those partnerships, and we'll continue to work with those shows for many years to come. So just expanding and consolidating that creator network remains a key focus for the business. And then finally, just on this section, I wanted to just mention the growth of Sonic, our brand platform as well, again, has grown faster than the wider Audioboom business, growth of 37% in terms of revenue in 2022. And Sonic is doing a fantastic job of scaling that business. So we're scaling through a focus there on premium clients, bigger brands that we can access that can come in and use that platform, brands who are spending more than $100,000 a month in podcasting and now utilizing that platform to access our inventory in podcasts globally. And the other thing that we're really doing with Sonic which is making some good strength is to align Sonic and Audioboom more through our ad tech. So Sonic is able to utilize the same ad tech the Audioboom utilizes to scale campaign reach, they're able to increase automation that just helps with the growth of Sonic and improve the ROI for their clients so that those clients' budgets can increase and we can just drive more revenue through the Sonic platform. So a great year for Sonic, a great year for Showcase, and I'm pleased that the creative network continues to grow quickly. I want to put some of the performance in those numbers into perspective. We know that they were impacted and restricted somewhat by the wider ad market conditions in 2022. But this chart on the left is showing Audioboom's growth over the past 5 years against the wider podcast market growth. And I touched a little bit before, but growing at 25% in 2022 was a significant outperformance against our competitors and against the wider industry. The wider industry only grew at 15%. So that's the fifth straight year that we have outperformed the industry, and we believe we will outperform the industry again in 2023 to do 6 years in a row of outperformance. In that time, we have taken market share, the Audioboom market share from less than 2% to greater than 6% across that time, which is some way I'm very immensely proud of, I think. And our target is to get to 7% over this next year. So continued outperformance of the industry despite those weak ad market conditions, I think, is a big achievement. And on the right-hand side here, this is a ranker of the largest podcast publishers in the U.S. That's a key market for us. As you'll see here, Audioboom is the fourth largest podcast publisher in the U.S. This ranker is from Edison Research. This is not an opt-in ranker, some of the podcasts rankers that are out there, the podcast companies need to opt in for this Edison research ranker measures all podcast consumption and all podcast businesses that are out there. So Audioboom very firmly here that the fourth largest podcast publisher in the U.S. for the past year. And again, if you look at the names that we're competing with here, we are doing something very special to be fourth around SiriusXM, Spotify, iHeartRadio, NPR, which is the BBC of the U.S. Wondery, which is an Amazon company, The New York Times. These are huge media companies with billions of dollars to spend. So the work that we are doing is I think is, as I said, very special and super proud of the team here for putting us into that fourth position in terms of U.S. podcast publishers. Let's slow down on those 3 KPIs that we update each quarter. These are really KPIs -- are really focused on the core part of the Audioboom business. The first of them is global downloads. Obviously, global downloads equals ad inventory. So the more downloads, the more ad inventory, we have to sell, the more revenue that we can drive. This chart looks a little different. You'll see 2 lines on this chart. The green line is the overall line. The pink line is the line that we have here measuring downloads when we remove Morbid. Morbid was a big show that was on the Audioboom platform until May of this year. It's one of the biggest shows in the world. Unfortunately, Morbid left the Audioboom network when it's contract came to an end in May. And so I want to show you this chart with that pink line in place because that really focuses the underlying growth of Audioboom. Obviously, the data between the 2 lines is what Morbid was delivering every single month. But if you focus on that pink line and then the route forward, you can see the underlying growth in Audioboom is good, that would be 20% year-on-year growth Q4 to Q4, with Morbid removed there. Also, I want to highlight, I think that Q4 had a 9% growth over Q3 of 2022. So download growth is heading in the right direction. The underlying growth has always been there. We would expect those new signings, those 5 new signs that I talked about on the last slide. To add around 8 million monthly downloads to this chart once they are fully up and running and fully in place on the Audioboom platform. And in total, across 2023, we're expecting somewhere around 1.6 billion downloads of Audioboom content across the year. So I'm pleased with the continued uptrend of that global downloads KPI. Brand count measures the number of customers that we have, the number of advertisers that are buying ad inventory through the Audioboom platform. And we have changed this metric a little since you last saw it. So because of that success of Showcase, we are now including Showcase advertisers in this brand cut number. Previously, we were only showing the advertisers, the customers that we deal directly with through our in-house sales team. Now this KPI will include the brands and advertisers that buy our content the Showcase marketplace. So that's why you'll see the change there. But I think the best thing about this is the sharp increase in the number of those customers, 47% annual growth in the number of brands, advertising across Audioboom. Now we will likely see a seasonal dip in Q1 of 2023. That's to be expected. You can see that actually on that chart last year, that dipped from 4,000 to 3,700, but we'll get that this year again. But all in all, just very fast growth on that brand count number on that KPI. And then finally, eCPM, that's our optimization metric. eCPM is the value that we are able to extract from every 1,000 downloads on our network. So really looking at optimization and value. We are extracting currently -- in Q4, we extracted $55 for every 1,000 downloads. So if you focus in really, I think, on the right-hand side of this chart, you'll see really strong growth through to the end of last year when we hit that number of $56 per 1,000 downloads. You then saw the Q1 seasonal drop-off. As to be expected, down to $51 per 1,000 downloads. Q2 of last year was a record number $57 per 1,000 downloads. And then the ad market downturn kicked in, in Q3. It reduced that number to $50, but I'm really pleased that things are heading back in that right direction at $55 for Q4, and that's because of that incremental -- not incremental, sorry -- that sequential revenue growth that we've seen from July onwards each month to grew in terms of revenue across the second half of last year, and that's reflected there with the $55 eCPM number. Like brand count, we'll see that drop off again in Q1, that's seasonality, and then we'll head back in the right direction in Q2 onwards in 2023. Also worth noting, I think that just on the eCPM number, we really are a premium business. We are extracting almost double the value from each 1,000 downloads that some of our competitors are extracting. We see that in -- from a couple of those companies that are public -- publicly traded. They release similar stats. And we see that we are extracting almost double the value per 1,000 downloads than our competitors. So I'm really pleased with the KPIs across this quarter and this past year. Apart from some seasonality in there and obviously, the impact in Q3 of last year of the weaker ad market, those KPIs are all heading in the right direction and setting us up for good growth in 2023 also. Brad, I'll let you pick up for a few slides here.

Okay. Thanks, Stuart. Hi, everyone, again. So our next few slides, some financial information, just to update everyone on the full year. Obviously done this through throughout last year every quarter as well, but the first one here, we can see our revenue and EBITDA progression over the last 5 years. So we position ourselves among the leading podcast companies in the world, recognize revenue growth, which is above the wider podcast industry for a fifth year in a row and increased our market share. We've transitioned this company from a loss-making position to one that now has recurring adjusted EBITDA profitability, and that's all been achieved with access to fairly limited resources, which is good performance from everyone in the company. 2022 was our strongest year yet. Revenue increasing by 25%. Adjusted EBITDA increasing by 16%, cash grew by over $5 million. So to be able to say that we're growing faster than our competitors, to be profitable with many other tech-based entities and many of our competitors are loss making to say that we're cash generative. We have a very healthy balance sheet, especially in this economic climate. There are some very good messages to be able to deliver to investors today. We said the results are initially what we expected when we came into this year, we set our expectations for this year, but it's a smart business that we've built. So when that top line doesn't quite get to where we expect it to, there's a cost base that flexes but we can come on to costs very shortly. So working to ensure 2023 will be another record-breaking year for the company. And we've announced today that we've made another strong start with our forward pipeline of advertising bookings as well. Going on to revenue and costs, we can see the revenue trend over the last couple of years, and it's encouraging that we've seen that recovery that we mentioned in Q3 that started in August and September flow through to the final quarter, where revenue increased by 14% quarter-on-quarter. In terms of growth across the revenue mix, while there's been an impressive growth statistics across that revenue mix, the categories that Stuart took you through earlier on the premium network growing by 16% and year-on-year, 70% growth is really good on marketplace and 37% growth within Sonic, and that entity has actually troubled its top line revenue in 24 months going from $5 million to $15 million in a couple of years, which is really good performance. Revenue grew at 25%, as we know, year-on-year, but OpEx increased at a slower rate of 8% year-on-year. Q4 2022 was 25% lower than Q4 of 2021. And 32% lower than the first 2 quarters of the year. So why you asking why? How have we done that? What is, as I've mentioned before, there's flexibility in that cost base. So material costs within Audioboom being staff and technology costs the material cost categories within the business. They do vary dependent on performance. So lower tax costs are incurred if there's lower bandwidth being utilized, which we saw in the second half of the year versus the first. Staff cost flex as well. So a lower revenue equals lower sales staff commissions and for non-sales staff remuneration as well, that also varies depending on results delivered in the year. So we've seen that cost reduction in the final quarter of the year. So if you are new to this business, it's not a business that's lumbered with high recurring costs or stock, for example. It doesn't have a high head count when there are those macroeconomic challenges, which we've seen this year, we're well placed to weather those. I think as well the benefit, if we were to go back to the previous slide, but the benefit of the company being in a loss-making position up until 2021 is that we've had to make this company work with constrained resources, with implemented excellent financial discipline within the company, good financial process as well that are able to support that growth. So as we that growth phase, that discipline in terms of cost control. Those are things that are well instilled within the company. But we -- with OpEx, we don't stand still. We're constantly reviewing that. Stuart will give a bit more detail on that. The small staffing changes that we made last week, but our head count as of now is 399 versus 45 as at the end of December. Those decisions -- those type of decisions that we make, there are ways done to make sure that our available resources are allocated to the areas that we expect will drive maximum growth for the business. In terms of working capital. So this is my favorite slide of the deck, the finance team -- our finance team and the business are relentless in their work to ensure we get maximum benefit out of the working capital cycle, again, another function of being that loss-making company a few years ago, that's installed really good discipline into the company as we go through that growth phase now, which is great. So this is the fifth successive quarter where I've said we've increased our cash reserves. At the end of December, we held $8.1 million in cash, $0.1 million up on Q3, $5.1 million up on a year ago. And the majority of our cash reserves held in dollars. Our company recognizes over 95% of its revenue in the U.S., we invoice and receive the majority of our billings in dollars. $8.1 million excludes a $1.5 million multicurrency overdraft that we have available to us as well. So we've got around $10 million available to utilize within the company as well. In terms of collections in -- particularly in December, last 2 weeks of the year, very, very strong. So it took us to $17.6 million for the quarter. Total collections were 52% up year-on-year. We averaged $6.4 million a month, and over the last 3 years. We've collected an average of 94% of revenue booked in the year. All those statistics are really good, really pleasing statistics. And it's really good as well that the growth we're recording has come without taking any unsustainable credit risk as well as a very low level of bad debt write-offs, very small relative provision for bad debt within the company as well. In the quarter, collections were $0.6 million higher than our payments. So in the quarter, material podcast payments were settled up to the end of November. Commissions were paid, advances totaled $0.1 million in the quarter, taking us to $2.1 million for recoupable advances in the year. That was up from $1.9 million in 2021. The strong collections enabled the debtor days to decrease to 68, 68 for December. So that's 26% lower than the 94 we reported in December of last year. That's particularly pleasing given we've invented a new accounting system in the year. We're now a 3-person finance team. So that implementation was challenging, but it's pleasing to see that has had an immediate positive impact with those process improvements immediately coming through within Audioboom, and we'll roll out those automated data chasing processes and a quicker payment runs into our subsidiary, Sonic in 2023 as well. So overall, when you're looking at this business, in summary, working capital cycle, that continues to function very well as it has done over the last few years, but even more so now. The company has more cash reserves than any other point in its history, fully funded for growth currently. Cost base reflects in part to the revenue and our impressions that we recognize grew faster than the wider podcast market. In summary, we're as well positioned as we could be heading 2023. So I leave it there. And then I'll hand back to Stuart for the final few slides.

Thanks, Brad. I think that also answered a few of the questions that have come in, but if there are any more questions, probably now is the time. I've got 2 more slides left and then we'll get to a few questions just before we end here in about 12 minutes. Future focus then, I think let's just talk about I think the ad market trends. Obviously, the ad market trends have played a big part in our performance over the past 6 months. We saw a very kind of quick weakening of the ad market back in June of last year. July was a revenue low point and then we saw month-to-month revenue growth across the rest of the year with December individually having the highest revenue since May. So revenue per month heading back obviously in the right direction. Q4 of last year, seasonality in the ad market. Q4 was buoyed by the NFL season, World Cup, Thanksgiving and Black Friday here in the U.S. and also Christmas. As I said before, Q1 is always seasonally softer. We see it every year Audioboom the Q1 is seasonally softer, so we will see that in Q1, again this year. In terms of wider trends, I do expect the U.K. advertising market to be slower in 2023. That has a bit of a lag, I think, over the U.S. market that was impacted first by global economics. But only 5% of the Audioboom revenue is exposed to U.K. advertising market. I think the positive part is that the U.S. advertising market will steadily recover over the years. It's not going to be an immediate early year recovery, but I expect to see steady recovery in the U.S. ad market across the year. And just as a reminder, 90% of our revenue is exposed to that market. Forecast industry outlook, PwC are projecting that U.S. podcast revenue will grow 8.1% in 2023. So again, we are targeting to outperform the industry for sixth straight year, targeting that growth in market share to 7%. And in terms of progress, we are making good progress there despite operating this year in a much weaker advertising market. So our current advertising bookings for 2023 are above $44 million at this point. You can do the math on this, but over the past 5 years, we've averaged at the end of January. Our bookings number has been 53% of the final revenue number at the end of the year. So I've seen a couple of questions just coming on that. So yes, we usually average 53% of the full year's final revenue number at the end of January. Right now, at this point, we're at $44 million. I think also just, so I think that is good progress to where we're going for this year and is certainly showing a route to some good growth again within the business. One discussion I saw on some of the message board, bulletin board this morning was suggesting that $44 million that we have booked is actually a red flag because we had $44 million booked at this point last year. So there was a suggestion that, that wasn't focused on growth well. If you think about last year, we had $44 million booked at the second half of the year decelerated and showed very little bookings growth in the second part of the year. This year, we are coming off that base of $44 million now, and we are seeing improvement in the ad market across the year. So we expect to see an acceleration in those bookings across the year. So that is a part to growth in this certainly not a red flag in any way. So I believe that progress at this early stage of the year, operating in a weaker ad market where brands are being more conservative and are not planning as far into the future as far into 2023 as they have done previous years, I think that's a good position and a very pleasing position to be in at the end of January. In terms of operations, the focus for this year, or Brad kind of touched on it, but we are very focused on the management of our operational costs this year, mainly to make sure that the resource that we do have is pushing in the right area. So last week, we did implement a head count reduction, 6 heads left the company. As Brad said, we are down to 39 heads, which is the lowest point in the company for some time but certainly doesn't impact operations in any way negatively. We've got a lot of automation into the company in that time. We figured out how to scale this business. So we continue to work with a lean head count, much leaner than many, many of our competitors who have head counts in the hundreds. So that was one step that we took last week. And I think kind of big one is really the renegotiation of some of third-party technology costs that we have, like ad servers, some ad tech, IT platforms. Those were successfully renegotiated and the savings across those two points there are more than $0.5 million. So we have definitely a focus there on our operational costs. Part of that head count restructure, I think, is giving us the ability to reinvest into one key part of our business, which is our sales organization. So Audioboom has a very small sales department again, compared to our competitors, we have a 7-person sales team split across the U.S. and the U.K. and they are very much focused on one particular type of advertising for podcasting. That's a direct response advertising with direct-to-consumer brands that can measure the ROI and the impact of their ad campaigns. They tend to be smaller, more disruptive brands with smaller budgets but have real core part over the last 5 or 6 years of podcast advertising revenue. The restructure allows us to refocus what we do on the sales side. So we will invest into that sales team, add to that ad sales team and build out a new sales unit that will now be focused on brand awareness. I'm going to talk about brand awareness, these are generally bigger, more established brands and advertisers much bigger budgets much more blue chip organizations. They are working with larger advertising agencies. And there are budgets that we have not been accessing. To this point, we haven't had the sales team focused on that type of advertising sales. So we developed that brand awareness sales team, and they will be tasked with capturing budgets from those larger brands and larger agencies. And to make that restructure work and to refocus what we do on the sales side, I'm kind of pleased to tell that you all know that Jenny Skaug, who was previously launched and was leading at Sonic, it has grown Sonic from a $0 business to a $16 million business over the past 3 or 4 years. She will be promoted to Chief Growth Officer. She will lead all of our revenue driving activity across Sonic and Audioboom in the future. So Jenny very closely with me over the past 3 or 4 years, and she's fantastic of what she does in podcasting. And I think we will also be able to do is have Jenny have a much kind of closer relationship with investors and shareholders, and we can have join one of these meetings in the future to talk about sales strategy and revenue growth strategy, which I think will be a great thing for us to be able to do. We're restructuring, and we're reinvesting into our sales organization to make the revenue-driving part of the business even stronger. Another kind of core focus is around the opportunity to increase our signings of Tier 1 podcast creators we announced a slate of new signings last week. But I think in this current market, there are fewer competitors. They are able to offer the best creators out there, guaranteed financial support and strong financial packages. So I think we are able to offer those shows, the talent, those creators good, strong financial packages. We'll be able to sign a higher number and a higher level of Tier 1 podcast creators than we have been able to, during the kind of upmarket of 2020 and the early part of 2021. So I expect to see some really strong growth this year in our creator network because of that opportunity. And then finally, here, I think just to say that one of those kind of cost management focuses is really the refocus of Audioboom Studios. We Have shift our approach around Audioboom business studios. We have been developing original content and original IP. That comes with higher up-front investment costs, very risky, high marketing cost to market and to launch those podcasts. We will shift the Audioboom Studios to be a production as a service, unit for audio. So if you think about the way that we work with Formula One, we are offering production to Formula One as part of a wider partnership with them. We produce their content, but we're also distributing that content and monetizing that content for them. So that will be the shift in focus of all the Audioboom Studios to remove those upfront, higher risk development and marketing costs in Audioboom Studios. So I think just to summarize. On 2023 and beyond, we expect steady improvement in the ad market in the U.S., we expect to outperform the wider podcast market once again for the sixth year in a row. We've made great progress there with $44 million booked today, and that's given us a good part to strong growth again this year. Focused on operational costs, restructuring and investing into sales to drive that revenue. And we think there's a great opportunity there as well to sign more and more top-tier podcast creators to the network. I know we've done a full hour, but we haven't had a chance to do any questions. So Jay, do you have possible, can we still fit in a couple of questions at the end here.

Stuart, absolutely and Brad as well. Thank you very much indeed for your presentation this afternoon. And Stuart, as you can see, we have had a number of questions throughout today's presentation, and thank you to all of those on the call for taking the time to submit their questions. So Stuart, if I may just hand back to you just to respond to those where it's appropriate to do so, and I'll pick up from you at the end.