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 can review all questions submitted today, and we'll publish those responses where it's appropriate to do so on the Investor Meet Company platform. Before we begin, I would like to submit the following poll, which will just appear on your screens now. And if you could give that your kind attention. I'm sure the company would be most grateful. And I would now like to hand you over to CEO, Stuart Last, Stuart, good afternoon, sir.

Thank you, Jake. Good afternoon, good morning, actually, from a snowy New York City. I'm here in the Audioboom U.S. office, just a block or two from the Empire building. And it's really great to be back with you all Happy New Year. I hope that you have enjoyed our recent trading update that we put out on Monday, and I hope you agree that it was a positive trading update with an exciting year ahead that will reflect on in this presentation over the next hour, but we'll jump right into it. We have a lot of new names, I think, on the attendee list today. So we'll kick off just by introducing ourselves and talking a little bit about our business model. and the podcast industry, then we'll look back at the most recent quarter and talk about our performance and our results that you know a little about and go into some more detail there. We'll look ahead into 2024 and what our focus is for the upcoming year, and then we'll end the presentation today with a Q&A. So as Jake said at the top, get those questions here, and then we will pick at as many as we can and get through as many as we can towards the end of the presentation. But as I said, just to kind of kick things off for people that are new to the company, new investors, new shareholders, my name is Stuart Last. I'm the CEO of Audioboom, I've been the CEO for the last few years, the last 4 years, but have been at Audioboom for around 10 years now, launched the U.S. business back in 2015. Before Audioboom, I was as an executive at another podcast ad tech company here in New York prior to coming to America ran digital audio and podcasting at Radio 2 and Radio 1, part of the BBC in the U.S. So many years deep in podcasting. But I believe that podcasting has an incredible future ahead of it and I'm pleased to be leading Audioboom boom into that future.

Hi, everyone. I'm Brad Clarke, shareholder here at Audioboom. Been here since March 2018. So briefly, that's gone on for 6 years. I have over 15 years' experience of working in various different media companies, in various different financial roles based in London. And yes, looking forward to speaking to you a bit later about very thing can be focused on OpEx, working capital and cash within the section later on.

Thank you, Brad. So as I said, yes, we'll kick off with a look at the industry that we work in and the business model and the role we play within podcasting. I think -- the first thing here that I'm just really keen to highlight particularly after 2022 and 2023 is the positivity around the industry and the growing industry that is there is a structural growth happening in podcasting. And you may not know that and you may not understand that if you've been reading headlines about the industry over the past year. Yes, the industry has been at the mercy of an ad market recession that's been happening and those macroeconomic headwinds. And you've probably been hearing about companies, big companies like Spotify, who have spent a lot of money in podcasting, but I haven't seen the returns on their investment. They've had to lay off staff. They have had to restructure their podcast businesses. So a lot of negative headlines, I think, over the last 1.5 years. But that's not the reality of this industry. This industry is growing. Companies like audio boom are pushing this industry forward. And the industry is set to grow and is set to quadruple over the next 7 years. So right now, the kind of total addressable market in podcast is around $4 billion globally and that's set to get to $16 billion by 2030. So strong revenue growth within podcasting projected over the next 7 years, and that's being driven by audience growth. People love podcasting, people are coming to podcasting very quickly, and it's becoming a key part of their media consumption. So just to break that down in the last 3 years, the number of podcast listeners in the U.S. has grown by 25%. I think more importantly, the amount of time that those podcast listeners spend listening to podcasting has doubled. So we have 25% more podcast listeners and everyone is listening to double the number of podcast. Double the amount of time spent listening to podcast that they did 3 years ago. So that total consumption has increased by 150% in 3 years. That's leading to brands and advertisers wanting to be in this space. And that, in turn, is leading to that quadrupling of podcast revenue over the next 7 years. So a great industry to be part of a very fast-growing part of the media. And let's move on from the negative headlines, I think of the past 1.5 years, podcasting is a good place. The structural growth continues. I think Audioboom is positioned to take maximum advantage of that structural growth over the coming years. and this is really highlighting the position that the Audioboom takes in the podcast industry. We are a creator led business. We're focused on bringing value to creators, independent podcast producers. And what the Audioboom platform does is pull together 3 key elements that create value. So we connect through our platform at scale in a very, very efficient way the creators and the content that they are making. We connect them with their audience and then we connect them with advertisers. So bringing those 3 elements together really creates that value. We are the heartbeat of that creator sector of the podcast space without us bringing those 3 elements together, there really is no value creators can have a big audience. But if they can't find brands and advertisers to monetize the audience, then there is no value there. Creators can access advertising, but if they don't have a large audience, the value of the advertising is diminished. So by bringing those 3 key elements together, doing it at scale, doing it very efficiently and very well. Audioboom a lot of value to the podcast space. And that model has been proven out over the recent years since 2017. That model has delivered very, very strong revenue growth, 65% average annual growth over the years between 2017 and 2022. So that model is proven. We took the business from GBP 6 million of revenue to GBP 75 of revenue in moved into a profitable space in 2022. So that model works. It's a strong model. It will continue to be strong as we refine it and build it. And as I said here, the model is proven and brings a lot of value. to podcasting and we'll continue to do so in the future as we look to take market share, and we're kind of primed to capture as much of that quadrupling of podcast revenue globally as we possibly can. So hopefully, that just gives anyone that's new to the Audioboom boom business, a quick overview of what we do, where we're placed in the industry and what opportunity there is ahead of us. But I think very quickly, I want to get into a performance update to look back at the numbers that we provided on Monday in our Q4 trading update to reflect on those a little bit to give you some more detail into that performance. And I think the messaging that I was keen to put across and many of you will have seen that on X that we're back into a place of revenue growth, we're back into a place of EBITDA positivity for the quarter, and we're generating cash again. So we've -- the way we've done that is to improve the business to push on through the weak advertising market over the last 18 months, make those improvements really drive the company forward. And that will also set us up for a very strong 2024. But let's break down those numbers a little bit. Firstly, that revenue number. So in Q4 of 2023, we delivered $19.2 million of revenue. And as I said before, this was a return to revenue growth. We were up 5% on Q4 2022 revenue. So that year-on-year quarterly growth was a 5% improvement on 2022. And a big jump from Q3. Q3 was really the bottom of that advertising market, and we grew revenue in Q4 by 37% over that summer period in 2023. And this was our strongest revenue quarter for 18 months since Q2 of 2022, so the pre ad market recession. So improvements that we've made in the business are working combined with some improving sentiment in the ad market, took us to that $90.2 million of revenue in Q4. At the same time, Q4 delivered EBITDA profitability, $200,000 of profitability in Q4 and that's from being a loss-making position earlier on in 2023. So that higher revenue combined again with the operational improvements drives us into that position of profitability in Q4. Now that EBITDA is impacted, as we know, by the ad market impact on revenue. But as I said, higher revenue has delivered our profitability again. And then it's also reduced by our minimum guarantee payments that we have to make to podcasters on our platform. And we'll get into that a little bit later, but we're making improvements to those minimum guarantees. We're restructuring deals to remove some of those obligations and that higher revenue and the removal of those minimum guarantee obligations is helping us to get back to that place of profitability and then the final number here, $3.7 million of cash. That's up $700,000 from our position at the 30th of September 2023. So during the quarter, we generated several hundred thousand dollars of cash after burning cash earlier in the year. So that return to cash generation is fantastic for this business. And I think as we always say here, we're in a good position going forward with that money in the bank, but we also have access to another $1.8 million as an overdraft facility, something that we've never needed to touch, but it's there in the background if we need that. So we're well positioned in terms of cash. So for me, just -- it was a super pleasing trading update that we put out on Monday, it really was the result of, I think, some early recognition of the weakening ad market and then the changes that we made to the business. We'll go into some detail in the coming slides, but really the recognition of that weak in the ad market and then the changes that we made to get through that, that came together to deliver a very strong Q4 2023. This is a slide I show you sometimes, but I think it's -- I don't show you this to you every quarter, but I think a good one to show you today. This breaks down our 3 main revenue streams in the business, but also highlight a couple of changes that are really taking place within with Audioboom. So the top section here is highlighting the contribution of each of those revenue sources to our overall group revenue. And then the bottom section is highlighting the revenue share, how much revenue audio boom keeps of the gross monetization that we have. We revenue share with the content creators and that we keep a percentage. So the two kind of key changes I think I want to highlight here really is just the growth of showcase, we'll talk more about showcase in detail as we go. Showcases our marketplace are a tech driven advertising product. And that has been growing fast, and we've been building that product very quickly over the last 2 years. And that's moved from contributing around 15% of our revenue in 2022 to almost a quarter of our revenue last year, and we expect continued good growth from showcase. As a result of that, we've seen our premium ad product, which is traditionally the highest contributor dropped from around 71% to 55% over that time just because of that growth was showcased and some growth in Sonic as well. So the balance of revenue is evening in our -- across the business as we build our other products out. The second change that I really wanted to highlight, and this is one of our kind of key operational improvements here, is the revenue share that we have in the business. So blending the revenue shares from the various revenue lines and sources that we have here. Our group revenue share in 2023 was 24%, and that's a marked improvement from 20% in 2022. We've gone from 20% in 2022, up to 24% last year. The more of those -- more of that revenue that we retain, the stronger our revenue share. Obviously, the more that flows through the P&L and put us in a much stronger position. So we've done a great job within the business of improving our contracts with our creators and our podcasters and restructuring those deals to improve that revenue share and also, obviously, the growth of Showcase which has a higher revenue share on that showcase revenue source has done that, too. So a vast improvement there on the group revenue share as showcase becomes a bigger part of the Audioboom business. The key drivers for that strong Q4 performance. Well, I just mentioned one of them there. It's the second point on here, and that showcase record monthly revenue in November of $1.5 million. So we've really grown showcase from maybe less than $100,000 a month a couple of years ago into a place where it's delivering $1.5 million of revenue per month. So very strong growth this year. Overall showcase grew 35% in terms of revenue in 2023 versus 2022, and we'll continue to grow showcase. But that was a key driver of that Q4 strong performance. The second kind of key driver, the first one on the list here is the growth of our inventory. You may have seen an RNS reach that we put out in November highlighting this key milestone of 1 billion advertising impressions in October. So in October, we created for sale that we could sell to our brands and advertising customers 1 billion advertising impressions that's a huge volume, huge scale. And the key to that, generating that number, again, has been to create and expand how many advertising impressions, we are able to get from each episode or from each download. So in 2022, for every episode, maybe an episode is an hour long on average, we were able to create 5 ad slots for sale within that episode. By working with our content creators and our partners we've been able to increase that number very quickly to 8 ad slots per download. So even if we are not adding new downloads, which obviously we did during the time, even if we were not to not add new downloads to the network in that time, we're now generating way more available advertising impressions. 8 versus 5 per episode from that content. So a real case of some operational leverage there from the content that we operate. Third key driver was Sonic, our brand platform, record monthly revenue in December for Sonic of $2 million. So again, strong growth from 2023. We really are delivering some great ROI for the brands that work with the Sonic platform highlights the strength of podcasting as a medium for advertisers and I think good sentiment on the brand and advertiser side going into 2024 is worth noting. And then finally, the expansion of our customer base. So earlier on in the year, we launched a new unit, and I'll go into more detail on this later in the presentation, but we launched a new unit that was tasked with expanding that customer base going into the bigger advertising agencies in the U.S. and the U.K. and creating new relationships with blue chip brands to bring those into podcasts and they haven't been traditionally podcast advertisers. But now we are in there and creating those relationships and those partnerships and bringing more customers into podcasting and into Audioboom. And very quickly, we're seeing some good traction there. We are now working with 8 of the top 15 advertising agencies in the U.S. when it comes to digital spend. So these are major advertising agencies that look after global blue-chip clients, and we are seeing some good traction there, as we said, and money coming in from those ad agencies since launching that new unit in the middle of last year. And that performance is reflected again in our 3 KPIs that we put out each quarter and really kind of highlight the change in the growth in the business. The first one of those KPIs is something we call eCPM, it's our effective CPM. That's an optimization metric highlights how much money we make from every 1,000 downloads across the platform. And we hear a new record number for that eCPM in Q4 of 2023, that record number of just under $59 and you can see the dip on that chart on the left-hand side through that weaker advertising market over the past year. You see that number dip down to low 40s. We were only able to generate $40 per 1,000 downloads. And we've moved back to a position of strong revenue generation there, $59 per 1,000 downloads in the final quarter. And again, showcase being a key part of that, the marketplace and how that marketplace functions is highlighted on the right-hand side here. Showcase really sits in the middle and Connects supply and demand of our advertising inventory. It's advertising tech based. It does this efficiently at scale. It's very kind of low touch from the Audioboom side and has seen 35% year-over-year growth. So we have a very strong supply going into that marketplace, as I said before, we did a total of billion available impressions in October. October, much of that supply at 600 million or so of those impressions were pushed into showcase from our 8,000 podcasts on the platform once since I showcase all of that supply gets exposed to the demand side that advertisers and brands on the demand side. We Connect both the brands with the supply, and we monetize that way. So very strong growth of showcase that has led and helped lead to that strong $59 record eCPM in Q4 of 2023. Our second KPI is our brand count. And here, I can break down a little bit of what I was talking about earlier around customer expansion. You'll see on the left-hand side, that brand count growth has been extraordinary over the past 4 years, going from 2,200 brands, advertising with us 4 years ago, 3 years ago to over 8,000 in the most recent quarter and another record number of $8,400 per month in Q4 2023. And that's reflective of our growth as a platform, the amount of inventory that we have to sell, the partnerships that we are creating on the revenue side of the business and the ease of access that those brands have because of that showcase marketplace. It's very easy for them to come in and test podcasting and spend low levels of money to make sure that the podcasting works for their brand, but these KPIs are not really just about the number of brands. It needs to be about the quality of brands. And this is something that we recognized very early on in the ad market recession. We very early on recognized that -- the brands that we were working for, were working with, we're very exposed to macroeconomic changes. So the types of brands that we were working with are what we call performance brands or the direct response brands. They are generally direct-to-consumer companies. They're disrupting the space that they work with and what they're looking for from podcast advertising is very measurable return on investment. So you'll have heard ads for this type of advertiser, they generally come with a special code that the consumer can use when they are purchasing products from that company that allows the company to see where that customer came from so that they can see which podcasts are delivering performance for them but they are very exposed, as I said, to those macroeconomics. So once inflation got high, once consumers stop spending, these brands cut back their advertising very, very quickly. We recognize that, and we made a pretty quick move to launch and then build a new brand that was targeting awareness brands. So the difference here is that the brands that they -- new unit is targeting these awareness brands. They're not looking for that direct ROI. They're more established brands, bigger names. You can see them here, Ford motor cars, Nike, Pepsi. Those are examples of those bigger blue-chip awareness brands. Their advertising strategy is very different. They're less impacted by those economic headwinds. And we had very few of those as customers of Audioboom in 2022. And our new unit is building partnerships and bring in money from those bigger blue-chip brands now. So we made great traction there, as I said earlier, working with 8 of the top 15 U.S. digital advertising agencies and starting to capture some of that revenue from those more established brands, and that will help us not only widen our customer base and increase our revenue, but it will protect us from future weakness in the advertising market that we saw through those performance brands. So these performance brands will remain a strong part of podcasting by widening out that customer base, it just puts us in a much less risky and stronger position going forward. Our third KPI is our downloads count. And this is -- this represents the size of our network, the more downloads that we have within our network generally, the bigger and stronger the shows are on the Audioboom network, the more inventory that we have to sell, the more monetization opportunity that we have. This is an interesting number this quarter, and it's going to take a little explaining from me. to kind of talk you through it. So you'll see on that chart on the left-hand side, we've had strong download growth over the past 4 years, and we kind of doubled the size of our network and our monthly downloads between early 2020 and the middle of 2023 moving from 63 million a month up to 127 million a month downloads, which was great progress and was really built by bringing new top-tier podcasts into the Audioboom network. What you've seen in Q4 is a dip. So we've gone from 127 million a month in Q3 to 110 million a month in Q4, and then on the surface may look like a strange change because we've told you about new podcasts that we brought to the network, major podcasts that bring audience with them and should grow that downloads number. But in September of last year, Apple released the new iOS, iOS 17, and the podcast app within Apple that was responsible for around 50% of the industry's consumption, around 50% of consumption of listeners comes through that Apple podcast app. That app changed the way that it downloads content. So previously, it would auto download back catalog content even if you were not listening to recent episodes from a podcast, it will continue to download back catalog episodes, unlistened episodes of that podcast to your device and that would count as a download. In the new iOS 17, it stopped doing that. So it no longer downloads those archive or back catalog episodes and that is impacting our overall download number, as you can see here. Now across the industry, and this is an industry-wide impact. This is not just something that is happening to Audioboom. Across the industry, we are seeing anywhere between 10% and 12% interruption and impact to download numbers because of that iOS update. And Audioboom is not impacted to that level as much. If you look year-on-year, we've gone from around 110 million a year ago and we're still at 110 million now. So the overall growth of our network is really offsetting the changes and the impact that the iOS update is making, and we'll keep you abreast of any further changes and any further impact of the iOS update as we go forward. I think one thing I'm keen to express and it was in the trading update is that the iOS change and the stopping of those back catalog episodes being downloaded, doesn't impact our revenue. So our premium advertising product is really focused around that first window, the first 90 days of consumption. And so the numbers that we can sell against for that premium advertising product are not impacted by the lack of back catalog downloading that's coming there. So on one hand, yes, you're going to see this number at a lower level, this download number at a lower level than you had previously, although that will come back up as we continue to add more shows into our network, but it's not going to impact our revenue significantly because the majority of our revenue is being attached to those front catalog or first window episodes and downloads. But that's a complex one. Please do drop me an e-mail or let me know if you want any further information on that. And as I said, we'll keep you updated on it. Despite that little drop off because of the iOS update in the numbers, we are still maintaining our position as a leading podcast publisher in the U.S. when it comes to consumption and audience reach. And you'll see from the two podcast rankers on the right-hand side here that we are in fourth or fifth position when it comes to the largest podcast publishers in the U.S. So again, something I'm most proud of, when you look at the list of names on the right-hand side there above us, we're really only behind these giants of media and giants of tech, in terms of Spotify, Sirius, iHeart and Amazon. And so to be fifth there. It was a fantastic achievement. And I think I think we should be very proud of the growth that we've seen to our network and our position there in those rankers. And I will pass you over to Brad now for a few slides, but is going to go a little deeper on our finances, and I'll come back to you in a couple of minutes.

Great. Thanks, [indiscernible]. So let's go through a few financings give you a full year view of OpEx, working capital cash. As Stuart said, it's great to see that return to revenue growth in the final quarter of this year, we've delivered exactly on what we said we would do in that final quarter when we updated you last in October, so that's great to be able to report that. Q4, best quarter since Q2 of 2022. That market downturn started, and there's lots of lots of positive revenue metrics delivered in that quarter. It was actually a question earlier on the session asked by SA relating to how much higher Q4 revenue is versus Q3, well we can see the answer here, let's say, in terms of the growth in 2021 was 21%. 2022 was 15%, 37% growth as we've shown this year. So the average of those 3 years is 24% higher this year because of that softer Q3 that we had this year and our second highest Q4 ever behind 2021. So, the answer to your question there, but this slide that will be online after the presentation, so you can take those quarterly figures from there. On the revenue rate [indiscernible] standout revenue stats like Showcase, Showcase revenue increasing 35% [indiscernible], up 20% year-on-year, but a [indiscernible] some having record quarters in Q4. So that sets us up well for between '24 and all the operational work that Stuart has been talking to throughout the last couple of sessions. That's really, I view that we all view that and the company is a real positive. We're able to drive that significant increase in performance despite the softer conditions, macro conditions in 2023. Important point on this slide. We always talk about the control of the OpEx base, but we've got 3 years' worth of data there in terms of the OpEx and it doesn't really move materially. It's very, very well controlled, very well disciplined. This year, 2023 average OpEx per quarter of $2.6 million, a monthly average of $0.9 million per month, and that average of $0.9 million if you roll back the last couple of years, that's the average OpEx over the last 3 years, $0.9 million. So again, that's shown that control and discipline within the OpEx base despite those inflationary macro pressures. The OpEx this year is 1% lower than last year. So again, when looking at this company, it's really important to consider that. And once that top line revenue number starts to push on again. We'll see that gearing and go through to EBITDA because the OpEx base is, as I say, very well controlled and is not forecast to increase overly significantly over the next couple of years. How have we done that this year despite those inflationary pressures, well at the start of last year. In January, we took the difficult decision to reduce our head count. The average head count this year at 39 versus 45 in 2022. So we reduced our exposure on original productions and focused on what we do best, which is selling advertising. So that restructure is implemented at the start of the year. So we've recognized full year savings on that. But again, it's 39 is a very lean company in terms of head count the reductions that we were able to implement. They were offset by increases significantly so on within technology costs. So [technology] cost our second biggest cost expenditure behind salary commissions. The material increases in technology was the higher volume of ad impressions in bandwidth this year. So we actually recognized a 24% increase on that specific cost that was around $3 million for this year. But that cost was actually 9% lower than it could have been if we hadn't renegotiated the cost of that contract. We actually saved around $200,000 for that specific cost, which was good work from Lance and the team to renegotiate that. So yes, always stay in for the new viewers that are joining us today. As I said already, it's an extremely lean business prime for further growth, pride our sales and automation within the company. We don't need to take on significant numbers of additional staff or increase our salary cost to increase that top line performance and we're focused, very focused on delivering the growth this year. So yes, that should give you a good overview of the OpEx within the company. On to working capital. The cash, the headline for this the fourth quarter. Is the cash increased by $0.7 million between [indiscernible], which was very, very pleasing given the pressure that's been on that cash number this year. Year-on-year, that cash number did decrease from $8.2 million down to $3.7 million. Reasons for that, very straightforward in terms of the reduced revenue recognized this year, softer ad marketing conditions, no morbid podcast and the fact that we've wondered all contractual minimum guarantees in the period. So let's put that downward pressure on that cash number, but it's obviously very pleasing to be able to increase that in the fourth quarter. Lots of work went into ensuring that we did that invoicing and cash collection process continues to be first class. Within the company, we actually collected 99% revenue recognized in 2023, our full year average is 94%. So we're starting to grow a real good data set now in terms of our performance over the last few years and actually give confidence to investors in terms of that side of the business as well. January started well as well. So technically in the $300,000 today. So it's $2.5 million for the month, and we expect to significantly in the second half of this month as well. So that cycle just continues to go, which is great. And I think as well that on the collection side, the invoicing side, we're actually, you provided for around $100,000 of potential bad debt provisions within the year. So that's less 0.1% revenue. So again, that should give everyone comfort with the processes that we have very well entrenched and [indiscernible] the business from a cash perspective very well during this year. And once we start to see any kind of improvement in macro conditions, we'll see that flow through on the top line but also into cash as well, which happened in 2022 as is usual now, we did have a couple of material customers appearing to hold payment over the year-end and I do refer to that when we do this quarterly presentation. I refer to because it's never consistently the same customer, it's the same one you could eliminate that from analysis, but it does vary from quarter-to-quarter. So I do think that impacts the cash balance held particularly referring to a $0.5 million payment we received in the first over days of this year. Other information on cash and yearly servie, we serviced $2.3 million of advance payments in the year. That was $0.5 million up on the prior year. As I said, we made full payment for all quarterly MGs as well including the onerous contract, which we detailed at the half year on the last quarterly update by approximately $1.6 million for advance scheduled for this year, 2024, so a reduction from 2.3. So further evidence of the improved contracts that we're signing good evidence of our good profile and expanding within the industry to get that number [indiscernible] reduced. In terms of cash, last time around, we spoke about the softer July and August revenue months, which impacted collections through Q3. Obviously, that increase in cash and in the final quarter. We've seen a stronger revenue months of September through November, improving that cash balance. I should also say, when I talk to you next time in as part of Q1 update, Q1 is there are forecasted material payments, which we make in the first quarter, including advances, commissions for the final quarter and start in 10 periods. They're offset in Q1, plus also settling all of the revenue shares for Q4 as well. So we need to be and we will be on our game in terms of collections to offset that pressure. Debtors that increased to 81 versus 68 last year. That's to be expected given the volume of revenue booked in the final quarter. Our target is always to get that below 90 and I've always said that our write-off provisions were immaterial. So although an increase, we're still comfortable with that number internally given the lower level of any write-offs in terms of debtors in the year. We still have our overdraft available to us, $1.8 million if we need it, good continuing endorsement from HSBC and as we said now, as we go into 2024, we've detailed the reduction in MG exposure, which will reduce the -- any pressure on cash delivery of our revenue targets this year. We'll ensure that cash reserves are maintained this year and then significantly looking towards 2025 when that MG pressure starts unwinding further, as those cash reserves start to increase again from that point onward. Yes, I think that's coupled all the main points there. I'll keep a [indiscernible] of questions that come in for [indiscernible]. Back to Stuart for a few slides.

Thanks, Brad. So I guess the last chance to get any questions in, so drop those questions in there, and we'll answer those in about 5 minutes. But I think just before we get to that, really looking ahead, right, looking forward to 2024 and walking you through our focus for what is set to be a very positive year for the business. So this is what we're looking at. This is what we're focused on building within the business. The first one is just that continued growth of the Audioboom creator network. You'll have seen a recent announcement that some of the signings, the show signings that we brought to the network in Q4 would provide or add another 5 million monthly downloads in 2024. So we're really focused on signing and partnering with real Tier 1 podcast creators, the biggest and best in the business. You've seen one of those announcements was that was Matt and Shane's secret podcast starring incredible comedian called [indiscernible] she's really the star of the U.S. comedy scene right now has a Netflix special has a really strong following a big audience. It's just fantastic to bring that show to the Audioboom network. Our new business pipeline, where we signed those shows and work with the talent agents -- the Hollywood talent agents to bring those shows to Audioboom. That pipeline is as strong as it's ever been. I think what we're seeing more than ever opportunity to bring podcasts to Audioboom where they are looking to work with a more stable network or a more robust network. Obviously, Audioboom's competitors, other Audioboom competitors have been hit hard, I think, by the weak ad market over the last 18 months. We've stayed strong within that. We've been resilient within that. Now the podcast that we're working with those other networks are looking to partner with a more robust company. So we're getting a lot of great opportunity there to continue to build that Audioboom creator network. The bigger that network gets, the more downloads we have, the more ad inventory, we can create the more monetization opportunity there is. Second point on here is the work that Sonic is doing on the brand platform. The great news there is that they have stronger budget commitments from their clients, their brand clients for 2024 than they did last year. So I think that's coming about because the U.S. is expecting consumer spending to increase. Inflation is down. There's a strong sentiment around the economic situation as soft landing is coming probably in the U.S. and so brands are committing to podcasting again and they are through Sonic and those budget commitments that we have there are kind of mirroring that improved sentiment in the ad market as a whole. That third point here, that new brand awareness unit that launched last year, we brought a fantastic guy called Danny Farman from SiriusXM and is really driving that unit forward. So we're going to continue to focus on brand awareness, expansion, working with more and more blue-chip customers. We'll invest into that sales operation. we'll expand the partnerships to even more of the top 15 U.S. advertising agencies. So that's a great area of focus for us. I touched on it before, but the market is improving. It's been in a pretty troublesome place over the last 18 months, but the ad market is definitely improving. It's not roaring back, but it's improving and we are seeing good sentiment within the industry. That has really fueled a positive kind of upfront booking season between October and December. We work with our biggest customers to create really great campaigns for them across 2024. And this year, we -- as of now, we have more than $47 million of revenue booked for 2024 with 11 months of the year to go. So that's a strong position to be in, and it really is a sign that ad brands and advertisers are feeling good about podcasting, for their -- good about life in general, I think I touched on it earlier, but we continue to improve those revenue shares that we have with our podcasters our partners new partnerships that are coming in, we are creating those deals on stronger and improved revenue shares for Audioboom. And the way we're able to do that is by ensuring that the other key services that Audioboom offers are part of those partnership agreements. So I think previously during the fast paced market of 2021 those partnerships, those agreements were really based around the commercial aspect, purely a commercial aspect, and that led to those weaker revenue share -- revenue shares for Audioboom. Now we are allowed to -- we're able, I think, to bring many more of our services to that partnership. So it's the distribution part of what we do, the ad tech part of what we do. the marketing part that we do our production services businesses. We can bring that to the partnership, and that gives us the ability to work in a -- with an improved stronger revenue share for Audioboom. And then the last point is something, again, I touched on earlier, but didn't go into a great deal of detail on really EBITDA for 2023 was impacted significantly by our minimum guarantee obligations. We had to pay our content partners, our obligated, guaranteed revenue. Whether we made that through advertising sales or not, we still have to pay that. So we would true up that would hit our profit margin. We are reducing those minimum guarantee exposures very, very quickly and through the restructuring and renewal of some of our top podcaster contracts we take $2 million away from that minimum guarantee exposure from January 1 this year. So $2 million reduced from January 1, and expecting to successfully restructure and renew further deals and partnerships across the year that will result in another $0.5 million coming off that minimum guarantee exposure. So those improvements go straight to the bottom line, and they will help us be profitable in 2024. So to sum up, I think the last slide from me before we do some Q&As. This is really what 2024 looks like. We're expecting strong network growth by signing top-tier podcasts, and we have that very strong pipeline of new business coming to the Audioboom creator network. We're expecting an ad market recovery. We know Showcase is growing strongly. We continue to build Showcase our marketplace adding to that, our new brand awareness unit is bringing in more and more blue-chip customers and creating strong partnerships with those major ad agencies, and then the brand budget commitments to Sonic are strong, too. So you add all of those key improvements and key positive areas together and that's taken us to a place where we are forecasting record revenue for 2024 of just under $79 million. So that's driving the revenue. And then the improved revenue shares that we've pulled together and work very hard to create plus those decreases and removal of those minimum guarantee obligations, more than $2.5 million in total by the end of the year, a minimum guarantee obligations. Those two things come together to improve that bottom line and will take us to a place where we are returning to full year adjusted EBITDA profit. So a very positive year ahead coming from those improvements that we've made to the business and then upside from ad market recovery as well. So I'm really excited about 2024. I hope you are, too. The Audioboom team are working very hard to make this a record year for the business. Back to you, Jake.