Audioboom Group plc (BOOM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. 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 questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so, and these will be available via your Investor Meet company dashboard. Before we begin, I would like to submit the following poll. And I'd now like to hand you over to the executive management team from Audioboom Group plc, Stuart, Brad. Good afternoon.

Thanks, Jake. Welcome, everyone, to our Q3 update -- positive update today in terms of the future of this business. Audioboom is in a strong place moving forward, and we're pleased to present the business to you today. We will do this in a slightly different order to what many of you may be used to seeing. First of all, we'll dive right in. We'll take a look at financial performance, the operational performance so far in 2023 and how we're building for the future and how we expect Q4 of this year to be in a very positive place. And of course, as you'll have seen in today's trading update, we really focused on that record revenue in 2024. After that, we'll step back a little bit. We'll recap the business model, talk about the company and the industry, and that's the space that we're operating in. For those of you that might be new to Audioboom in the Podcast space. And then after that, we'll take a look at the future focus areas that we're focused on building this business around and what we're expecting through 2024 and beyond. And then at the end, we will do that Q&A. So get any questions in that you have now. We have a few questions that were submitted ahead of time on the Investor Meet platform. We'll answer those and plenty of time, hopefully, at the end to answer a few more that you submit today. So we'll get into things in just a second, but as a way of introduction for, again, any of you that are new to Audioboom, a quick intro for myself and Brad. I am Stuart Last, I'm the CEO of Audioboom. I have been CEO for the past 4 years and have managed the company through a very strong period of growth and success. I've been with Audioboom for 10 years, leading out the U.S. growth of the business since 2014 and 2015 and previously at the BBC driving their digital audio and radio business when I was based back in London before coming here to New York. But very excited about the future. I'm very positive about where this business is going and very pleased to be leading the company forward.

Thank you. Everyone. I'm Brad Clarke, CFO here at Audioboom. I have been here since March 2018. So currently for 6 years, chartered accountant with over 15 years of experience of financial roles at media organizations prior to Audioboom, News UK and other [indiscernible] Brave Bison. I'll be back a little bit later on to take you through some updates on revenue, OpEx, working capital and cash, but I will speak to you shortly.

Thank you, Brad. All right. So let's jump into the performance and operational update. As I said, we'll get to that look at the model a little bit later. Many of you, I think, will have seen these numbers from today's trading update that look at Q3 and our year-to-date performance. So I'll walk you through those, and then we'll go a little deeper on some of the key points here. So year-to-date through to the end of September, Audioboom delivered $45.8 million of revenue, as you'll see here, that's down on our position at this point last year, but up significantly on the previous year that slide back in the year-to-date revenue is due to 2 key factors: 2 key factors that we've talked about a lot in these presentations over the past year. The first one is that advertising market weakness. So in early 2022, we saw a deterioration of the Ad Market, and that Ad Market weakness has continued through 2023. And we think that Ad Market weakness has impacted our revenue by around 20% this year so far. The second key point in that drop in revenue is the loss of the Morbid Podcast from the Audioboom network. That's a very large, very successful podcast that we worked with for a number of years. And that podcast contributed revenue last year until it left the network midway through the year. And that has obviously led to a drop in revenues. Also Morbid a top 5 podcast in the world. So a massive podcast with a huge audience and strong revenue attached to it while we were working with that show. So those are the 2 kind of key factor in that revenue drop, and we'll talk about the improvements that we're making to deliver maximum revenue going forward in just a moment. In terms of profitability, our adjusted EBITDA number year-to-date through the end of September, is a loss of $1.7 million. So we've moved into a loss-making territory off the back of that Ad Market impact on revenue. So EBITDA is being impacted by 2 key factors here. Firstly, the Ad Market impact, lower revenue allows us to push through less to that EBITDA line, and that's been key in this first 9 months. But the second point here as well is impacting negatively EBITDA, and that is partner minimum guarantee payments. So as you know, to sign the top-tier podcasts in the world, we create a partnership package for them. Some of those involve a minimum guarantee. We have to pay that partner, that create a minimum amount. And when revenue is low and revenue is impacted by this weaker Ad Market, we have to still pay that creator their minimum guarantee, and we have continued to do that, unlike several of our competitors in the space who have been unable to continue to pay that talent. We have continued to invest and pay our minimum guarantee obligations, and that has a direct impact on the EBITDA line. And again, we'll go into that in a little more detail, and I'll show you how we move away from that minimum guarantee exposure over the next few months. One key point here, and Brad will go deeper on this one on an upcoming slide, but I think it's just worth saying that we have really great cost controls within this business. We are continuing to be a very lean company. And our year-to-date operational expenditure of $7.9 million is down 10% on the previous year. So we have a really good handle on that by all the inflationary pressures that are around right now. We continue to operate in a very lean, very controlled manner there to -- last kind of key number here is the $3 million cash number at the end of September. We have since collected more than $2 million since that. So we continue to collect well. We utilized $1 million of cash in Q3 for advanced payments to our top-tier podcast as a contracted advanced payments, and those are then recoupable against their revenue over the course of their contract. So we've seen some cash burn there, a significant amount of that due to those upfront cash payments to podcasters, which is then recoupable. And just as a reminder, we do have access to another $1.8 million of cash through an overdraft facility that we've had for the past few years and has continued to be untouched to this point. So those are the numbers. I think we've had a challenging year at the company because of that ad market weakness and those minimum guarantee obligations that we are contracted to. But I think today is really about drawing a line in that and focusing on the future of this business, which is in a strong place because of the operational improvements that I'm going to walk you through in just a moment. To go a little deeper on that revenue. This slide, I think, helps you get a view on that. We have our 3 advertising products, our premium ad product, which is where the host of the podcast delivers the advertising in their voice and they endorse the product. It's a very premium product. We have Showcase, which is our ad tech delivered advertising business, very efficient, very scalable and is now delivering huge volume. And then we have our Sonic business, which is our creative agency business that works directly with brands around their advertising. So here you can see that the progress of those revenue lines. Our premium business now makes up much less of our overall revenue, 58% year-to-date in 2023, down from 71% last year. Showcase is the fastest-growing part of our business. We'll talk about that a lot more as we go through this presentation, but Showcase has grown 30% year-on-year, and is a really strong part of our business, and we expect Showcase to continue to grow strongly going forward. And then Sonic now makes up 19% of our revenue, albeit with that smaller revenue share between Sonic and its brands. And just to go a little deeper on that revenue share. You can see the revenue shares here, Premium at 22%, Showcase at 41% and Sonic at 15% combined and across the business, that gives us a group revenue share of 24%, and that's a vast improvement over last year at 20%. Now that's the kind of contracted on paper revenue share at 24%. We will talk about how we've improved that a little later in the presentation. But I think key point here, just to go back to the previous slide and the numbers on there is that, that 24% revenue share that is impacted by those minimum guarantee obligations. So we continue to have to pay those partners even if we are not delivering on the high enough revenue to take care of those minimum guarantee obligations, we still have to pay those. And that reduces that revenue share down, effectively creating a gross margin of around 14% for this year. So that's the key impact on gross margin and then EBITDA is those minimum guarantee obligations that we continue to pay. I just wanted to talk to you earlier about the state of the advertising market and the state of the business, so not [indiscernible] slide this one, but some key points on here just to walk you through. I think the first one is that the ad market does remain challenging. We have very weak demand in early summer -- unexpected weak demand in early summer. We were seeing some pickup in the advertising space as we got through the spring, but certainly weak demand with July as being a low point for revenue. Now we have since seeing month-on-month revenue growth since July. So August was higher revenue than July, September higher than August and October already ahead of September. So we're seeing good sequential revenue growth. July does appear to be very much the low point for revenue, and we are taking things forward from there. The operational improvements that I'll talk to you about in just a moment will result in strong Q4 performance. And as I said, October is already trending ahead of previous months for revenue. In Q4, we will get back to year-over-year revenue growth as well. So currently, we have $18 million of revenue booked for Q4. We've talked in our trading update today about going beyond $19 million, that will be back to year-to-year growth. Obviously that will be sequential quarterly growth as well. And I think the key point here is that will be the strongest revenue quarter since the ad market downturn. So the strongest revenue quarter in Q4 since early 2022 and that will be, I think, for me, a clear sign that the operational improvements that we have put in place are starting to kind of pay dividends and starting to get this business back in the right direction. Q4 and next year 2024, we are very clear that we will get back to an adjusted EBITDA profit position. That's due to those revenue increases that I've talked about and also due to lower minimum guarantee impact that we'll focus on shortly. One item here, I think that I don't have too much detail at this point, but we're starting the process right now is the 2024 upfront -- advertising upfront. This is where we work with the key advertising agencies to commit spend for next year. We're just starting that process now, but those advertising agencies are confident about the state of the advertising market. They are confident that the brands that they represent and run advertising campaigns for will have budget growth in 2024. So we like the look of the ad market. We think there's going to be improvement there in 2024 and I think just to reiterate here is that, again, we've maintained that guidance for 2024 at a record revenue level. So we expect to get back to record revenue next year, $78.8 million is the number that we're focused on and adjusted EBITDA profit of $1.3 million. So to sum that up, weak advertising market through to summer, strong revenue growth as our improvements come into play, and this is setting us up for a good Q4 and a record year in 2024. So you've heard me mention it a bunch of times already, but those operational improvements. What are they? How will they affect the business? I will talk through those in the next few slides because I think they are very much -- very key to drawing that line that I mentioned of a challenging kind of past and a very positive and bright future for this company. The first of those improvements is our network growth. How quickly and how strongly we are building our content network at Audioboom because the bigger and stronger we build that content network the more advertising inventory that we have to -- we have available to sell. And even in an ad market that isn't strong, it allows us to take market share, and it allows us to capture more of the advertising revenue that is available. So you'll see here, we announced in the trading update record monthly downloads just under 127 million downloads a month, and we expect continued growth into Q4 and to get that number around 130 million downloads per month. So you'll see that the chart there, we've had strong growth over the past 4 years as we bring in new shows into that network and build the size of our network. We now reach more than 36 million unique listeners every single month. So we have some real scale going through that network. And that's proven here on the right-hand side, you'll see 2 rankers. That's the Edison Research ranker, which ranks the reach, the audience levels of podcast publishers in the U.S. And on the far right-hand side here, you can see the Triton Digital podcast ranker and that one is measuring volume, effectively, how many downloads each of those podcast networks is producing every single month. And Audioboom has cemented its position as the fifth largest podcast publisher in the U.S. behind the likes of Spotify and iHeartMedia, Wondery Amazon giants of the audio space. So we continue to be very proud of that work and continue to be focused on moving higher up that ranker as we build out that network. I think it's also just worth saying that we rank fourth in Australia, fourth in Canada, second in New Zealand. There's no U.K. ranker, but if we did, we'd be in second or third place in the U.K. as well. So we have a strong global scale but really in that key U.S. market, we continue to build the size of our network and to be that large publisher with good influence in the U.S. And connected to that network growth, and I think one real key point here is how that -- the growth of that network is leading for us to have more inventory to sell on a monthly basis. In October, we hit a big milestone. This is a huge number for the podcast space. In October, we are making available more than 1 billion monthly ad impressions across the network. So again, talking about huge scale and strong growth, we now are creating 1 billion ad impressions to sell versus 675 million a year ago. So you can see the growth in the size of the network, and then you can see the growth in the number of ad impressions that we are generating. We are -- have been very focused over this last year of extracting more advertising inventory from each download that we have. We now extract 7 available ad impressions from every single download. A year ago, that number was 5. So we are creating more to sell from the same number of downloads, but we're also lifting the number of downloads in the background, too, and that has got us to that 1 billion number and we're doing that through signing new podcasts. These are just examples of some of the top tier shows that we've signed to the network just in Q3. These are all strong kind of top 200 podcasts in the U.S. and globally. We expect these shows to contribute more than 8 million monthly downloads to the network in 2024. And we have a strong business pipeline in place as well. So we've agreed terms with a handful of other podcast. We're just in the contracting phase on those and the new shows that we have agreed terms on and we'll sign in Q4 will also deliver significant growth to that network in 2024. So we're building the network, as I'll show you in a later slide, we're doing that on more favorable terms to Audioboom or [equitable] terms to Audioboom. And really, what these 2 slides are about showing you is that in the face of a weak advertising market, the improvements that we're making to the business will allow us to have more advertising inventory to sell and therefore, more revenue opportunity as we move forward. The second of those operational improvements is about how we then sell all of that new advertising inventory. We recognized pretty early on in this week advertising market that we need to create more supply. And then we need to do a better job of selling against that supply as well. So what you'll see here on the left-hand side is the work we've done to increase our brand count. These are the number of advertisers that spend money with Audioboom on a monthly basis. The total brand count has increased by 40% over the last year. And what they're showing is that brands continue to understand that podcasting is a good place for them to be, a good place for them to spend their money. In this weak advertising market, they are spending less money. They have smaller budgets. They are committing lower budgets to the space, but they do want access to podcasting. So that's a great platform to build off and our Showcase marketplace has been a big part of building that platform of brands that we work with. Showcase is our advertising marketplace. It's a product that we launched around 3 years ago, and it's been a fast moving part of the business now contributes more than 20% of our revenue every single month. And effectively, what Showcase does is through our advertising technology stack that we have in the business, it connects buyers and sellers effectively of advertising inventory at massive scale, fully automated. So on supply side at Showcase, we are putting around 675 million available ad impressions into Showcase from all of our podcasts from our 8,000 podcasts and 130 million downloads. We push all of that into the marketplace. And then we are bringing in demand monetization opportunities. So that's a programmatic ecosystem that we've built for automated ad buying. We have international sales partners in Australia, in Canada, in New Zealand, India and other key territories for us. They can come in to Showcase and they can buy against our inventory in Showcase. And then obviously, our internal teams can also sell into Showcase as well can bring monetization into Showcase. And that's led to 30% year-over-year revenue growth for this part of the business. So we think Showcase is a key area of focus for us. It's a key part of our business going forward and it will lead to us optimizing how we monetize that increased supply of advertising inventory that we have. On that demand side, that one is key for me, just how we continue to bolster the monetization in Showcase in Q3. We entered into a handful of new partnerships. DAX US is a big U.S. audio brand. Amazon Ads in the U.K., Bold Collective, you'll see them at the bottom there. These are all partnerships on the demand side. So those companies come in, they access our inventory that's in Showcase and they bring brands into buy against that inventory leading to higher fill rates and higher demand on Showcase and increase the revenue coming in through that source. So Showcase is in a good place. That's one key factor in improving how we monetize that advertising inventory. The second key factor is really expanding our customer base. And this is something many of you have heard me talking about over the last 6 months. While Showcase is growing, you can see this on the left-hand side, Showcase is growing in terms of the number of brands that advertise through Showcase. Our premium product, those host endorsements, those high-priced advertising units where the host of the podcast is delivering the advertising message, the number of brands that are spending in that area has lowered since the ad market downturn. And the key reason for that is that the majority of those brands that were utilizing the host endorsement and paying the premium prices to do so, those are what we call performance brands. Those are brands that directly measure the ROI of each ad and they build their businesses via the sales that they get from the advertising. So brands you can see here like SimpliSafe, Better Health, HelloFresh, they disrupt our brands, the direct-to-consumer brands. The advertising podcasting, they like the host of the podcast, delivering their messages. The audience trusts that host, the audience goes out and spends money on those products, and they can, they can track the ROI. Now they've been hit harder by the macroeconomic conditions, and they have pulled back on their spending. So everything very kind of clear, I think early to me that we needed to widen that customer base, we needed to start to attract blue-chip advertisers, those advertisers that are not advertising simply for immediate ROI. They are playing a longer game. They are building awareness of their brands. They're ensuring that when a customer wants to buy a new car, they first think of Ford motor cars. For example, when they need to buy new sportswear, they are first thinking of Nike. So we want to attract those awareness brands. We're doing the work to get into the major agencies that work with those awareness brands to build partnerships there. Earlier on this year, we launched the unit at Audioboom that will do this piece of work and we're making some good traction at this point. We're a few months in right now, and we are already now working with 6 of the top 15 agencies in the U.S. for digital advertising spend. So you'll see some examples there at the bottom that these are major advertising agencies they work with blue-chip companies. This is about widening the customer base and doing work through these major agencies. And it's a slow process, and there's some good initial traction there, and we will continue to kind of build this. And I think 2024, we'll see some significant spend out of these agencies for 2023. We do certainly have money coming in from all of these sources, and we've made those initial contacts and we've made those initial kind of test campaigns are coming through and pretty pleased with how that's gone in the first 6 months of this year. I think widening that customer base and really making relationships and building the right relationships at those key advertising agencies is a sign of kind of maturation of this business and also just good first step in taking this into a new stronger and bigger place for Audioboom. So just to recap, I've talked about the improvements that we've made to build our network and to build our supply of advertising inventory. I've also talked about how we then optimize the monetization of that supply. And then I think the third point is how we improve our work with talent so that this business becomes more profitable. And there's 2 kind of key points here that I want to make. The first one is around those contracted revenue share. So how much Audioboom retains from every dollar of advertising spend. In 2019, 2020, 2021, there was a lot of pressure on that revenue share talent agents, Hollywood with talent agents like WME, UTA, CAA, they were beginning to represent the top tier of podcast talent out there, and they were using their leverage to strike stronger deals for the talent that put pressure on the revenue share. And as you see here on the chart on the left-hand side, our revenue share across the business dropped to 21%, 20% in that time. In a healthy ad market, of course, when we're meeting all of our minimum revenue guarantee obligations, that revenue share is a proxy for gross margin in this business. There was that pressure on the revenue share that I've talked about. But now we are beginning to make very clear improvements in that revenue share when we are making new signings to the network, when we are renewing with existing partners. And I think the other key part is that we are now also being able to improve our revenue shares by offering deeper relationships with the talent. So we are now offering them services like distribution, further distribution, production services, marketing services, all things that are unique to the Audioboom platform, we are now able to offer as part of that package to the postcaster and as part of that, we were able to negotiate a stronger revenue share. In 2023, that contracted revenue share is up to 24%. So you can see the work that we're doing already making an impact. And in 2024, that contracted revenue share will be 25% or above. So I think the quality of the creative deals that we're making is already improving, as you'll see here, and as revenue improves, that will have a strong impact on both the gross margin and also our bottom line. The second part of these improved creative deals is our exposure to minimum guarantees. As I said, we have a number of podcast partnerships with the real top tier of podcasters that have a minimum revenue guarantee. If revenue is low, and we are not hitting those numbers, we still have to pay that minimum guarantee and that hurts gross margin that hurts EBITDA performance clearly. We have in that very buoyant podcast space, again, in 2020, 2021 and '22, there was a lot of pressure to create strong minimum guarantees to sign podcasts to the network. And there's -- since the advertising market has weakened, we've obviously been exposed to those minimum guarantees since then. But over the next few months, those minimum guarantees in those contracts that were signed at the height of the bubble, will drop away. They will be renewed on more favorable terms to Audioboom or they will churn completely outside out of the business. So in the next few months at the end of this quarter, we see a significant drop in our exposure to minimum guarantees across 2024, our exposure to those minimum guarantees will drop by around 75%. So that impact that we had this year on our EBITDA, that will drop by 70% -- 75%, I should say, over the next year. And then by January 2025, that minimum guarantee exposure will drop by 90%. So almost all of the pressure that we've had on our EBITDA number because of those minimum guaranteed true-ups will fall away by the end of 2024 as we renew these contracts on more favorable terms. So those 3 items combined the increased advertising inventory and the strong scaling of the advertising inventory, the creation of better and stronger advertising products to optimize the revenue attached to that advertising inventory and then the higher quality creative deals that we are making, that's standing us in great stead to go into a more positive place in Q4 to get back to year-on-year growth in Q4 in terms of revenue and then to achieve record revenue in 2024 and get back to EBITDA positivity. And we'll break there, and Brad will pick up now to give you a more in-depth view on the financials in the business.

Thank you, Stuart. See, we've got a couple of slides here, which looks at revenue and cost, and then we'll go on to our working capital and the cash update for the quarter. So firstly, on revenue, we can see here a challenging Q3 quarter at $40 million. They have the lowest revenue quarter since the second quarter of 2021. However, our expectation is that we bounced back in Q4 of this year with a revenue quarter, which will be the highest since the second quarter of 2022 at the start of the downturn. And $19 million, that will be 36% up on Q3 this year and 3% up on Q4 last year. So importantly, a return to growth. As Stuart said, $18 million is [indiscernible] $1 million to go before the end of the year to get through $19 million. Our markets continue to be challenging, but to reinforce what Stuart say the operational work we have done and continue to do will allow us to recognize that increase in performance that should be viewed as a positive when viewing this company is that we're able to drive a significant increase in performance despite those softer macro conditions. Showcase has performed really strongly this year, has done for the last 18 months or so, Q3 ending 30% up year-on-year, a more challenging quarter for Sonic at $2.3 million. However, 50% of that revenue was in September, and it continues to grow into Q4. We'll record a record quarter because of a material amount of spend in relation to the NFL season fantasy sports games around it. As I've said continually through these investor presentations, our OpEx base continues to be very well controlled at $2.4 million in Q3. That was our lowest OpEx quarter of the year despite those wider inflationary pressures, and we've done very well in the current climate to lower our OpEx cost by 10%, reducing from $8.8 million for the first 3 quarters of last year to $7.9 million for the first 3 quarters of this year. Headcount that stands at 38 and that's the lowest level since October of 2021. Total year-to-date salaries and commissions of $4.5 million. That's $1.2 million or 21% lower than the prior year. And of that $1.2 million $0.7 million due to lower salary costs and $0.5 million is due to lower commissions due to the lower revenue recognized this year. Technology costs, including costs incurred with bandwidth and ad impressions, which is a material cost within that cost bracket. That's 25% up from the prior year at $2.2 million year-to-date due to the higher volume of ad impressions and bandwidth this year. But the cost incurred is 9% lower than it would have been through contract negotiations early on this year to lower the rates partially [indiscernible] incurred. With our headcount of 38, we remain an extremely lean business prime for further growth, and we'll be able to recognize that growth in the final quarter this year and into next following the improvements made this year to create wide impressions, increasing the number and quality of content partners we work with reducing that minimum guarantee exposure, which Stuart outlined just now. It's very important. Further optimization of these things will enable recognition of further growth next year as and when there are further macro ad market improvements, that's obviously extremely difficult for customer macro conditions will improve. We'll see that as an upside to our expectations and forecast in the future. When that does happen, this company will continue to go from strength to strength of that increased gearing effect on our and bottom line because the OpEx base that we have is as optimized as it possibly could be. In terms of working capital, while the headline for the working up as cash has decreased by $2.3 million in the quarter to $3 million. So let's go through the reasons as to why that happened. Firstly, as we have done historically over the quarter end, customers we did with whole cash over the quarter end to preserve their own cash reserves, at least $0.5 million should have been received in September and has indicated a such a major customer, but that was withheld over the quarter end and was paid in the first week of October. So we have collected that we just delayed on the receipt. Secondly, contracted to pay $1 million in that front regroup advances in August, which Stuart mentioned earlier, that's obviously had a direct impact on the cash out in the quarter. In addition, we made a full payment of all creator minimum guarantees, including the onerous contract that was detailed in the half year report. Thirdly, July and August was softer revenue months and that's impacted the cash held through software collections in August and September. Many customers pay under 30 days now, especially in our subsidiary, Sonic relatively short turnaround in terms of the impact on cash. September collections of $3.5 million were lower than the year-to-date average of $5.3 million. On a year-to-date basis, we've collected $47.4 million, which is 104% to revenue booked versus our 3-year average of 94%. So simplistically outside of that delayed customer payment were approximately where we should be on collections and subsequently cash held. Year-to-date, bad debt write-offs and provisions in the P&L totaled approximately $60,000, which is 50% of a half year total due to good work on collecting previously provided for invoices so that balance remains immaterial as it has done historically as well. For cash, we are simply seeing the impact of lower revenue in the quarter plus the impact of servicing minimum guarantee true-up this year. We since collected another $2.3 million from our customers in October, having collected another $300,000 today. So that's an improvement on the $2 million went out with $7 million this morning. So due to the impressive -- the best days and the companies continue to be very impressive 67 days, as I say, many customers paying within 30 days. So we'll start to see the impact of the return to revenue growth through cash collections from this point onwards as we go through Q4. So as we said, sequentially, revenues increased from August to September and then into October collection for many customers being 30 days or less, we're going to start to see that cash going through the business very shortly. We still have our recently renewed overdraft, which Stuart mentioned earlier as when we need it, what we need to happen now is our minimum guarantee exposure to reduce, which Stuart explained earlier. We'll start to have them from January 2024 onwards. We did revenue projections we met for that revenue growth to flow through the cash collected. And we had our collections process remain on point as we go forward into next year and I'm confident in that process working because it's very efficient and has been for the last few years. So hopefully that's given you a good update of revenue, OpEx, cash in terms of where we stand at the moment and I will back in the Q&A at the end of today's session. Back to you, Stuart.

Thank you, Brad. Hopefully, that has given you some good insight into both performance year-to-date in 2023 and also really where we are focusing our operational focus on to move back into a positive place at the end of this year and into next year. But if you need any more detail on anything we've spoken about in the last few slides, put the question in now, there's still time to get questions in, and we'll answer some of those towards the end of this. The next section, the next few slides are really about our business model, and this is probably for anyone that's new to the business, it doesn't fully no Audioboom in the space that we operate in. So I'll walk you through that one, and then we'll get back to looking at 2024 and beyond Audioboom. So I think this is a key one, despite that ad market downturn, the podcast industry is growing fast and is expected to continue to grow pretty quickly revenue through podcasting, that's advertising as well as other forms of monetization is expected to quadruple over the next 7 years, moving from a $4 billion global revenue business, industry, I should say, to $16 billion in 2030. So strong growth is projected for the podcast space that we operate in. We are a leading independent podcast company. We're a pure-play podcast platform, and we're well positioned to maximize our capture of that value over the next 7 years. Our model is kind of very simple. We have a technology platform that sits at the heart of audience, advertisers and creators and connect all 3 of those. So without Audioboom sitting in the middle of that dynamic, there really is no value to capture Audioboom connect creators and content with advertisers distributes to audience. And you need all 3 elements to come together to have that value. And we do this at scale and we do this in a very strong and significant way and a very successful way over the past 5 or 6 years. And over that time, we have delivered very strong growth through that model. We've delivered average 65% revenue growth every single year since 2017 and that model does work. And as you've seen here, we are now enhancing and improving that model to take into account the weakened advertising market. So we continue to focus on making that model work in podcasting, and we feel we have a very significant part to play in podcasting going forward. So 3 very kind of simple slides, I think, there on the Audioboom model. We're part of a fast-growing industry that's going to quadruple over the coming 7 years. We play an important part in bringing creators, advertisers and audience together at scale through the platform and the model works and has worked and will continue to work in the future as we amend and refine that in the face of a weaker advertising market. So just a handful of more slides before we get on to the Q&A section. And these slides are really looking at where our focus is to build for the future. I've touched on many of these points as we've gone through the presentation, but I want to reiterate them because I really do believe that today is there's a line being drawn here between kind of a challenging period for the business because of macro and a very positive future for the business because of those improvements that we've been making here at Audioboom. So first focus for us is to continue to grow that Audioboom creator network. We know that the signings that we made in Q3 will add more than 8 million monthly downloads to the network in 2024, but it's the Q4 signings that we'll add on top of that as well. So we have terms agreed with some top-tier podcasts that hopefully we'll be able to announce in the coming weeks that will add a further 5 million monthly downloads to the network in 2024. So we're creating really good scale within that network. We have the strongest ever new business pipeline. We are continuing to work every day with key talent agents at CAA, WME and UTA. They bring us great opportunities to partner with their talent, with their creators. We're doing that on more favorable terms to Audioboom and that's helping us to build the size and the scale of our creative network as we go forward. And then point two here is really is the extraction of that inventory from the downloads that we have, and that will continue to scale very fast. I think this milestone of 1 billion advertising impressions in October is a real significant point for us. It's starting to get some real scale through the network. We are extracting more impressions per download that we ever have been. That's the real operational leverage that we have within this business to create more supply from each download. And next year and in Q4, in fact, and then again, next year, we do expect to see both record audience reach and also record download and inventory levels running through the platform. So size of the network will increase the amount of inventory that we have to sell will increase because of that work we are doing. Showcase, we talked about the success of Showcase and Brad touched on it too that 30% year-on-year growth. We expect Showcase to grow above 20% again next year. We keep adding those demand-side partnerships, and we keep adding more inventory and more advertising supply into Showcase and we believe the Showcase will be an important part of the business growing more than 20% in 2024. So not only are we creating more inventory, we are monetizing that inventory more effectively going forward. We've talked about that the expansion of that customer base that is clearly a key part of our focus right now. We launched a new team earlier in the year to focus on building partnerships and relationships with those blue-chip customers, some of the ones I highlighted earlier, like Ford Motor cars, Nike, Procter & Gamble. These big advertisers who are less impacted by macroeconomic conditions that work is ongoing. I'm really pleased just last week that Danny Farman joined Audioboom to lead our brand sales as a Vice President here in the U.S. He's previously of SiriusXM, a huge and radio and audio business in the U.S., and Danny will come in and lead some of those brand partnerships that we have and he will really drive that ad agency business going forward. As I highlighted earlier, we were already just in a short space of time since launching this part of Audioboom. We're already working with 6 of the top digital advertising agencies in the U.S. The work that Danny and the team will do there will develop that further and get us into more of those large advertising agencies and build campaigns those relationships even faster in 2024. Revenue share improvement is a key one. We talked about it a little earlier on how we'd improve that revenue share that we have from around 20% last year to 24% this year through more favorable contracts, being able to provide more services like distribution and marketing and production so that we can hold on to a higher share of that advertising revenue in those talent contracts. We'll continue to do that, and we will see further improvement in that revenue share in 2024, getting that to 25% and above. So the quality of our partnerships will improve significantly. And then finally, as I mentioned before, through those renewals, through those new signings and through new signings of podcast, we will reduce our exposure to those minimum guarantees that have impacted our profitability over this past 18 months. So as I said before, across next year, those minimum guaranteed true-ups that we've been making will fall away by around 75% and then by the first of January 2025, so just over a year away, they will fall away by 90% as we resign and renew contracts on more favorable terms to Audioboom. So less impact on that minimum guarantee. And what does that mean? Well, that means two things. I think that means first thing is in Q4 of this year, we will get back to year-on-year revenue growth. Q4 will be at least $19 million of revenue. any detailed us here on this last slide, I just don't want to get ahead of myself here, but I just want to show you this last slide. All of these factors come together, the 20% network growth, the 1 billion-plus monthly advertising impressions, the growth and the continued growth of Showcase that work we're doing with those blue-chip customers and then things like the seasonal demand that we get from the NFL and the holiday period, all of that comes together and that delivered $19 million of Q4 revenue back to year-on-year revenue growth, sequential quarterly revenue growth. And of course, that what we are really focused on at this point is 2024 and those things coming together, those improvements that we've made coming together will deliver record revenue in 2024 for Audioboom of $78.8 million. On top of that revenue, then we add in those improved revenue shares that we have. We add in the decrease in the minimum guarantee exposure and that improves the EBITDA numbers. So we get back to EBITDA profit in Q4 2023 and then obviously, we focus on full year adjusted EBITDA profit in 2024 as a result of those improvements. So to recap and to leave this today, I think we are kind of coming through and have had that challenging period for the business because of the ad market downturn. We recognized very early that we needed to put in a new strategy to improve the operations of the business in case the ad market did not improve. Those operational improvements are now coming through, and they will lead to a strong future for Audioboom.

Thank you very much indeed for your presentation this afternoon. [Operator Instructions]. But just while the team take a few moments to review those questions that were submitted already. I would like to remind you that a recording of this presentation along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A can be accessed via your investor dashboard. Brad and Stuart, as you did kind you mentioned at the start, we did receive a number of presubmitted questions ahead of today's event. As you can see there in the Q&A tab, we've also received a number of questions throughout your presentation this afternoon as well. So thank you to all of those on the call for taking the time to submit their questions. And Stuart, Brad, if I may just hand back to you just to read out those questions and give your responses where it's appropriate to do so, and then I'll pick up from you at the end.