Audioboom Group plc (BOOM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Audioboom Group plc investor presentation. [Operator Instructions] Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to Stuart Last, CEO. Good afternoon to you sir.

Thanks, Alessandro. Hi, everyone. It's great to be with you again. I hope you will have a chance to see our trading update for Q1 that we released this morning. Lots of questions already kind of coming in about that. I'm pleased to be able to tell you more today. As Alessandro said, get those questions in, we'll try and get through as many as we can towards the end of the presentation. Already, I have questions about YouTube, about AI, about the share price, about AIM. So we'll get to all of those towards the end of the session. You can drop those questions into the dashboard now. But let's move forward and start to tell you more about the business, I think. First thing here before we get started is just to say hi and introduce ourselves to anyone that may be new to Audioboom. Many of you will already know Brad and myself, but for those that don't, I'm Stuart Last, I'm CEO of Audioboom. I've been with the business around 10 years, the last 4 as CEO, based out here in New York. As you know, much of our business comes from the U.S., and I'm here with the team in New York City. Before Audioboom, I worked at another podcast company in New York and previous to that worked at the BBC on their digital audio products. So I am 10, 12 years deep in podcasting and still continue to be super excited about the future of podcasting, about the future of Audioboom. And it's just fantastic to lead this really great business and the team at Audioboom forward.

Thanks, Stuart. Hi everyone. I'm Brad Clarke, CFO here at Audioboom based in London. Just through 6 years here at the company, having started in March 2018, Chartered Accountant, and 15 years of experience within media-related companies and their finance departments, companies including Brave Bison, News U.K., Grant Thornton. I'll be back a little later on to take you through revenue, cash and the hikes within the business. Thank you, Stuart.

Thanks, Brad. So we'll kick off today by looking at the podcast market and our business model and just giving you some updates on what's happening in the space right now. Then we'll dive a little deeper on that Q1 update and what's driving that performance. And then the final section before we get to those questions will just be about the future and what we're focused on and what we are currently working on. So I think just to kick things off, let's talk and update a little about the podcast market. Podcast market continues to thrive. We all know that last year was a tough year in the advertising space but the podcast industry that is predominantly fueled by advertising, revenue continues to grow strongly and has a quadrupling impact over the next 7 years. So between now and 2030, the total addressable market is expected to quadruple going from $4 billion of global revenue, up to $16 billion of global revenue by 2030. So structural growth happening, the industry building and 22% compounded growth over that time. And really what's driving that structural growth is audience and listening growth and the number of new listeners that are coming into podcasting and also the amount of listening that the audience is doing. So these stats here at the bottom are taken from the Edison Research, U.S. study. So it's studying everything, all listening and all consumption of audio that's happening in the U.S. And really, what you're seeing here on the chart on the left-hand side is the number of podcast listeners that has grown significantly over the last 4 years. So from 2019 to 2023, the number of podcast listeners in the U.S. grew by 47%. And then the amount of time that those people spend listening has also grown significantly. So the amount of time listening has grown from 6 hours a week to 9 hours a week in that same time span. So compounded the effect of both of those upticks has meant that total podcast consumption in that last 4 years has grown by more than 120% with more than 1 billion hours of podcast content consumed in the U.S. every single week. And obviously, where audience and people come, the money starts to follow and Audioboom is one of those companies that are figuring out how to continue to monetize podcasting and monetize podcasting in a more effective way. So we are perfectly positioned to start to take advantage and to take the opportunity that is ahead of us as this industry quadruples over the next 6 years. And our model is Audioboom that will make the most of the opportunity is based around connecting audience, advertisers and creators. So there's 3 parts to this marketplace that are essential for establishing value in podcasting. Our platform does this at scale and very, very efficiently. We work with creators and we take their content and on one side, we connect it to audience through our distribution, and we distribute with one click out to Spotify and YouTube and Apple Podcasts and many other listening destinations. And we also connect that content with brands and advertisers and linking those 3 things up allows us and allows our creator partners to extract real value from podcasting. What our Audioboom in the middle doing is through technology, doing it at scale for our creators, there really is no value -- you break one side of this connection and there's very little value there. So the Audioboom business model is based around the connecting of these 3 very important areas. And it works. And we've proven that this model works. And over the last 7 years, we've consistently delivered revenue growth, 1,200% revenue growth since 2017. That's 44.1% compounded average growth rate over that period. So we continue to step things forward on the revenue growth side of things. And you can see the opportunity here, right, if the industry grows a 22% CAGR over the next 6 years, we can see what that opportunity looks like for Audioboom over that time even if we just maintain our share of market. So the model works, has consistently worked in the past. We believe in that model. And as podcasting continues to grow, as that structural growth continues in podcasting, we think there's a fantastic opportunity ahead for the business. So we'll move into looking at the Audioboom trading update that was released this morning for Q1 of 2024. And I think the headline and the key thing that I want to get across is that we are exactly where we thought we would be at this stage of the year, and exactly where we need to be as well to deliver on our 2024 goals. And what that means and what you saw this morning is $17.1 million of revenue in Q1, and that's continued growth following our return to growth mode in the final quarter of last year. So we are continuing to grow after that ad market downturn across the second part of '22 and early 2023. Audioboom is back. We're growing again. And that growth rate was 11%. So $17.1 million, up 11% on a year ago. The Q4 growth rate was 5%. So we're starting to accelerate that growth rate, and we expect that growth rate to continue to accelerate across this year as we build up. Also, we know that Q1 is always the low point for revenue. There's a lot of seasonality in the ad market. So we know that Q1 is always the low point for revenue. So we continue to -- expect to kind of continue to accelerate that growth rate across the year. But yes, that revenue number is exactly where we need it to be for 2024. We had $100,000 of adjusted EBITDA profit in Q1 2024. So again, that's the second successive quarter of adjusted EBITDA profit after we moved back into a profitable place at the end of last year. Now I think the one thing that does gear and drive forward is this EBITDA number. As you know, and as Brad will talk you through later in the presentation, we have a very kind of fixed cost base. We have a cost base -- our operating costs just haven't really changed over the past few years because of all of the automation that we've built in because of the efficient technology that we have in the business. So that cost base stays pretty flat. So as we grow the revenue number across upcoming quarters, we do expect a gearing effect on that adjusted EBITDA number across 2024. And then cash, we ended the quarter on $3.1 million of cash, that's down slightly from the $3.7 million at the end of last year. Now that was fully expected. We expected that cash burn to happen. Again, the seasonality here means that we were paying content creators for their Q4 revenue, which is higher. We also have some seasonality in some of our other payments around commissions and staff bonuses, incentivization for staff there, too. So fully expected just to drop slightly on that cash number. I think one key point is that we continue to have a $1.8 million overdraw facility available to us on top of that cash number, so we have around $5 million of cash available to us. We've never used that overdraft that remains undrawn. So we're in a place that we're comfortable with on the cash side of the business. I think the next few slides will look in more detail on our 3 KPIs that we release every quarter. These really do show off the business, and they really show what is driving that financial performance. So we'll start with brand count. This is a KPI that highlights the number of advertisers that we have working with us on a monthly basis. And you'll see on the chart, on the left-hand side, we've just continued to see good growth on that brand count number over the past 3 years. You see a slight dip at the top there from the 8,400 in Q4 of last year, down to 8,100 in this most recent quarter. Again, that's just seasonality. We know that Q4 is by far the strongest demand part of the year. But when you look at it on an annual basis, the brand count increased by 23% in this most recent quarter versus Q1 of last year. Brands continue to put money into podcasting, Showcase our ad tech product really does allow brands, particularly over this last year when the ad market has been weaker, Showcase really does allow them an easy access route into podcast and they can do it efficiently with low levels of spend. We get them inside the platform, inside the Audioboom and then we really show off exactly what we can do for those brands. So our brand count number continues to grow. As I've talked about before, we've really launched a new initiative last year to widen our customer base, to widen the number -- really not the number, but the type of brands that we work with at Audioboom. So podcasting had traditionally been built on performance brands. These are smaller direct-to-consumer brands, the disruptors in their fields and brands that you can see here on this chart Simply Save, BetterHelp, HelloFresh. Those are those performance or direct response brands. And they have always been a majority part of the Audioboom and the wider podcast industry business, but they are more vulnerable to those macroeconomic headwinds. They are smaller brands. They are less robust. And certainly, over that past 18 months, we did see them being impacted more by global economics. So mid last year, we launched a new unit within Audioboom to grow our position and to grow our customer base with what we call awareness brands. So these are generally much bigger global blue-chip brands. They're more robust. They are advertising to consumers based around growing awareness of their products rather than needing direct sales attached to that advertising. And they're handled often by the big advertising agencies, their historic holding companies. And to this point, to recently, it's been a very small part of the Audioboom business and a small part of podcasting in general, has been driven by these awareness brands. So we launched a brand unit in the middle of last year, and we're seeing some really good success from that awareness brand unit. We're now doing business with 8 of the top 15 agencies in the U.S. with the digital advertising now -- there are a lot of barriers to entry here. We have to get inside these big agencies and show off what Audioboom can do and test the platform with their brands, and we're making very good progress there. And I'm really pleased that we're welcoming 2 very experienced new executives to Audioboom, Molly Harvey and Sean Wilson, they both joined the company today. So fantastic timing to have them on board. Sean Wilson, formerly of Spotify and Sony, is coming out as Vice President of U.K. sales, and Molly Harvey, a very experienced sales executive in the U.S., most previously at SiriusXM, will join us as Vice President of Brand sales based out of the Midwest here in the U.S. So those 2 alongside Danny Farman, who joined us at the end of last year will really focus on getting further into those agencies, doing more work with the brands and that will open up a much wider and more robust customer base for us as we go forward. The second KPI that we report on every quarter is downloads. Downloads is really kind of a proxy for consumption of podcast content and it allows us to not just show you the trends in our business and the growth of our network, but also to compare our business against competitive podcast networks as well. So I'll talk you through the numbers there, and we'll look at that in a little more detail. The monthly download number -- the average monthly down number in Q1 of 2024 was 110 million, so in line with the last quarter of last year, but down from the record number at the start of last year and we'll go into a little more depth on that, but that's linked to a change on the Apple Podcasts that I'll talk to you about more in just a moment. Audioboom across this time has grown versus our competitors. So in this last quarter, we've moved up the podcast publisher rankings. We're now the fourth largest podcast publisher in the U.S., just behind Wondery, which is effectively Amazon's podcast arm, MPR, which is the BBC of the U.S. and then SiriusXM, which as you may know, is just a giant radio and audio business here in the U.S. So a really great achievement for us to move up to fourth place. We now have our sites sell on third place. We've done that by signing new top-tier podcasts to the network. We recently announced a group of new podcasts that are joining the Audioboom creator network. Those podcasts, we expect them to add somewhere around 4 million monthly downloads. Now they are on the platform going forward. So we'll continue to focus on the growth of that network, and that's been a real driver to push us up those podcast publisher rankings. We also have a global presence in those rankings with the fourth largest publisher in Australia, the fourth largest in Canada, second in New Zealand. So a really strong global footprint. But here in the U.S., based around this table here, that's where we're seeing some fantastic results. But as I've kind of shown you here, there has been a challenge over this last 3 to 4 months around that global download number, and we have seen some erosion of those downloads down to 110 million. And that is connected to a change that Apple have made in their podcasts app when they released iOS 17 back in September. And I'll give you the basics on that. I won't give you the full detail, but effectively, the Apple Podcasts app was responsible for around 40-ish percent of all podcast consumption. And they made a change that stopped the automatic downloading of episodes to a user's phone. And what that has meant is that well, when Apple as a host has would previously have been just auto downloaded, they would have counted it as a download. Now the user, if they want to go back and find archived episodes or restart listening to a show and get those new episodes, they have to manually do that download. And that has impacted that consumption metric, that downloads metric. When I last talked to you around 3 months ago, we talked a little about this. And I think across the industry, we were seeing somewhere around 10% to 15% erosion of that download number. But that has progressed. And across the industry, that number now stands at average of 32% reduction. You'll see that on the chart on the top right here. So industry-wide, that change that Apple made has eroded that download number by around 32%. Audioboom, I'm pleased to say, has been much more resilient. You can see it here in the numbers on the right-hand side, that change column. Audioboom is down 12% year-on-year versus that 32% average. So we've been much more resilient to those pressures than our competitors. We've done that by signing new podcasts into the network. We are a go-to platform for podcasters as new shows are signing to the Audioboom creator network. And that has offset some of that download decrease, whereas competitors have not been as successful as doing that. And we also know that several of our competitors have taken revenue reductions linked to that decrease in consumption, but Audioboom has been resilient to that due to some of the initiatives that we have in the business. So while you're seeing that happen in the background and that erosion of downloads, I think the key message here is that we are way more resilient than our competitors. We've moved up the publisher rankings, and we are less impacted by anyone else in the space. And I think what you're going to see is that a leveling out of that impact. IOS 17 has now been adopted by more than 78% of iPhone users. And generally, it doesn't -- new iOS releases are not adopted by many more than that. So you're not going to see too much further impact there because of iOS 17, but it's certainly been a challenge, I think, for everyone in the space and Audioboom as well over the past few months. Final KPI is eCPM, effective CPM KPI. This measures how much value we extract from every 1,000 downloads across the network. And I think what you've seen over time, over the past 4 years, is us continuing to be more productive, to be more efficient for us to extract more value out of the downloads that are happening across Audioboom. This quarter, it was a record Q1 eCPM. We kind of look at this on a Q1 versus last Q1 basis because of that seasonality that we know of in the ad market. As you can see on the chart, right, we were at $59 in Q4 down to $52, but that $52 is a record, the $59 is because of that high demand Q4 season. So $52 is very much a record that we're proud of for Q1. We continue to extract more value from our network, up 27% on Q1 of last year, which is a strong improvement. And the growth of the eCPM is directly linked to showcase our advertising marketplace that we launched a few years ago and has made fantastic progress ever since. Showcase is a very efficient marketplace, ad tech based. We push our supply 1 billion-plus impressions now through that marketplace from 8,000 podcasts. We connect that to the demand side, the buy side, through advertising technology, and we do that very efficiently. Record revenue from Showcase in Q1, $3.8 million, up 21% on last year's Q1. So Showcase continues to grow, continues to be a bigger part of Audioboom's revenue, and it's fantastic because it has that efficiency built into it as well that allows us to optimize. But I think one part that I really want to show off today, and it speaks to that download number and how we have been resilient to that erosion of downloads is the inventory supply and what we are able to extract from those downloads. So this is a chart here that highlights the number of advertising impressions that we make available to ad buyers on a monthly basis. A year ago, that number was 860 million, that number in March of this year was 1.1 billion. So in a year, we've grown the number of available advertising impressions by 28% while in the background, the number of downloads, the amount of consumption fell away. So that's a fantastic effort, I think, and that has really been key to us being more resilient than the wider industry against that iOS update. We are now creating more than 10 available impressions per download versus 6.6 a year ago. So that's a really fantastic effort that comes from working with our partners to educate them about advertising, to restructure contracts around better advertising placements. A big piece of work which started last year and it's continuing now. So we're really extracting a lot of value out of each download now and that record 1.1 billion came in March, and that was a 10% jump on October, where we went through that 1 billion milestone, so continued strong growth on the available advertising impressions number in order to us -- for us to grow that eCPM and keep that eCPM heading upwards. A number in the 50s is the healthy place for that eCPM to be. When we're in the 50s, we know we're doing a good job and the ad market is supporting us. I do believe over the coming quarters, we can push that into the upper 50s and may even touch 60, I think, in the coming quarters, but very happy with where our KPIs. And I think with the detail that I've given you around those KPIs, I think you can see exactly how that drives our performance in this most recent period. And I'll let Brad jump in now, he's going to go into some more detail on the finances.

Thanks, Stuart, hi everyone again. Thanks for the questions that have been coming in. Keep those coming in. That's been a couple I can address directly as we talk through the next couple of slides. Thanks, Daniel, for those questions on OpEx, EBITDA and cash. So we'll get to those as we go through. But let's start with, obviously, revenue. Stuart is going to give you a headline for Q1. It's great to see the company follow up on Q4 of last year with a second successive quarter where revenue generated was higher than the comparative quarter 1 year ago. Obviously, we expect Q1 to be lower than Q4 due to seasonality of advertising spend. But as Stuart said earlier, we're exactly where we expected to be at this point of 2024. Q1, there's really strong performance from Sonic Integrated Marketing. Our podcast advertising agency subsidiary, in the quarter, Showcase, again very strong performance as we've reiterated our message over the last 18 months or so, our revenue was up 21%, and both Sonic and Showcase recorded record first quarters, which is really encouraging. It has contributed to March revenue of $6.7 million being the largest revenue month recognized since May 2022. So as a reminder, Q4 2023 was the best quarter since the second quarter of 2022. It's really encouraging that March had a higher revenue number than any month last year, including the seasonally stronger months in the fourth quarter. Advertising markets were challenging in 2023, but as Stuart said, the operational work we've done and continue to do so enable us to recognize that continued increase in performance over the last couple of quarters, and that's got to be viewed as a real positive about this company. But despite any macro headwinds, we're still able to drive that increase in performance and deliver increasing revenue numbers when we look back a year ago. The information we've put into the market over the last 3 months as well via RNS reach has also given those interested in the company a greater insight than usual into the work going on to drive that increased performance. New show signings, increase in ad inventory, investment into new hires and drive growth. So today's Q1 update is really very pleasing to be able to formalize some of the results of that work. If we look at OpEx, it's very pleasing again to be able to report another quarter of well-controlled OpEx at $2.7 million, that's comparable to OpEx incurred over the last couple of years, that's in line with the first quarter of last year. How do we do that? Well, in the first quarter of this year, staff costs have increased by 5% overall when we look at Q1 versus Q1. Our commission cost sales staff were higher because of the higher revenue number and we also implemented cost of living salary increases starting January 1 as well. So that side of the business, that cost bucket, that increased this year versus last year. We ended the quarter on 40 staff versus 39 a year ago. Head count now is at 42 with the 2 new sales hires recently announced, but there's no major head count changes planned for the rest of this year. If you look at us on an average revenue per employee basis, we're very, very competitive versus peers in the space as well. There's an increase there of 8% in Q1 this year versus last, $430,000 versus $400,000. The increase in staff costs largely offset with a reduction in our technology costs, which reduced 9% year-on-year. That's the second biggest cost category that we incur on a monthly basis. That decrease was mainly due to the impact of the changes in iOS 17, as Stuart referred to, static and dynamic bandwidth costs, which we incurred to serve advertising. That actually reduced by $60,000. So yes, while we look at the numbers having decreased year-on-year, remember as well from a cost perspective, that has a positive impact on our OpEx. We're paying less for that because they're less than as incurred. I always say this, but it's worth reiterating for our new viewers today. We remain an extremely lean business, primed for further growth, pride ourselves on automation and efficiency, and we don't need to take on significant numbers of additional staff to grow further. I think that addresses your question, Daniel. We don't need to incur significant amounts, new OpEx, to grow. What we would see is an increase in technology costs because you did assume with revenue growth, you'd be incurring more bandwidth and add impression costs, but no real material increase in OpEx to drive that revenue growth, and that will have a gearing impact down on to EBITDA. One other question that we've received today is on the adjusted EBITDA figures for last year. And obviously, we're talking to Q1 at the moment, but we've also released our 2023 results today as well. And that adjusted EBITDA figure for last year reduced from $1.5 million adjusted EBITDA loss to a $0.4 million adjusted EBITDA loss. The reason for that is because we've completed our audit, gone through the review of last year, and we have classified a second contract as being onerous last year. So the classification process that we have for those contracts is to separate the loss made from those contracts on that provision created from the rest of the business and they're isolated. The second contract recorded a $1 million loss in last year. So when we separate that out from the rest of the business, that has reduced our adjusted EBITDA loss from $1.5 million down to $0.4 million. There's an improvement there on that metric. And so hopefully, that addresses that question. Another question from Daniel is on onerous contracts. So just to give a bit more context on those, the 2 affected contracts were signed in the third part of 2022 when ad market conditions more buoyant, terms agreed to that point forecasted higher ad rates and are currently being achieved. So we've gone into 2024 with a $7.5 million provision on our balance sheet to offset the anticipated losses going forward. The loss provision created in 2023 mean that the future net losses will unwind against our provision on the balance sheet rather than go through the income statement and that's the one-off cost there. This comes with a caveat that provisions created are an estimate, actual performance could be better or worse than estimated, but it's important for [indiscernible] accounts to understand that $7.5 million of the loss incurred last year is due to creation of a provision, which will be unwound in 2024 and 2025. If anyone has any further questions there, feel free to email me and I can talk you through the accounting treatment on those. Happy to do that. Let's go to the next slide. And this one looks at our working capital cycle. So our cash balance reduced by $0.6 million between the end of December and the end of March. That drop was expected. In the first quarter, we settled our partner revenue share payments for the higher revenue quarter in Q4. We settled nonsales staff bonuses, and we also have paid $0.1 million of advances in the quarter. So we expect that our cash balance would reduce in the first quarter of this year, and I said as much in our January Investor Meet session as well to highlight those expected cash requirements in the first quarter. If you look back in the last 3 quarters, our case was relatively stable between Q3 of last year and Q1 of this year, around $3 million. The cash balance reduced through 2023 due to the reduced revenue recognized, ad market conditions and the fact we honored all contracted minimum guarantees during that period. So that reduced our cash balance during last year. The invoice and then cash collection process we have here is the first half, we collected 95% of revenue booked in the first quarter. That's in line -- bang in line with our full year average of 94%. As of today, we've collected another $3.5 million. Since the end of the quarter, our debtor days is 75, that's a bit lower than the 81 we reported for the full year last year. So that cycle still continues to work really very well. For advances, we paid $0.1 million of advances in the first quarter of this year. We have another $1.3 million of contractual advances required for the rest of the year, $1.4 million in total for this year. That will be $0.9 million less than the $2.3 million we paid last year. So further evidence of the contract restructuring we're implementing to reduce cash required for podcast selling contracts. As Stuart mentioned, we still have that $1.8 million overdraft, which hasn't been drawn and that's to assist our working capital if we need it. And as I said at the last update in January in relation to our cash balance, the processes we have to support the working capital cycle are excellent. We've reduced our exposure on MGs through contract restructuring. And today, we confirm that restructuring has reduced our exposure by $5 million, which is good. What we need to do now is deliver on what we have promised regarding revenue, with a focus obviously being on shows where we have a minimum guarantee. Delivery on the targets set will ensure that cash reserves will ultimately increase. So that gives you a bit of a flavor in terms of the areas of revenue, OpEx, cash. I think I've addressed a few questions, which have come in during the session, but keep those coming in, we'll address many more at the end of the session, but for now, back to you, Stuart.

Thank you, Brad. So it's just in this final section, we'll look ahead of us, what we're focusing on in the rest of this year. So probably 5 minutes or so on this. So this is really probably the last chance to get questions in. So submit any questions that you have over the next few minutes, and then we'll come to those soon. So I don't think anything too new here in this future focus section. We really are -- have recognized everything that we need to do to continue to be resilient to the ad market downturn, to continue to be resilient to the Apple Podcasts app changes and we know everything that we need to do here to get to our goals for the year, but I will talk you through them in some detail. I think the first one being network growth. We will continue to sign top tier shows. We have a good new business pipeline, more and more independent shows are looking to transition to stable networks. Brad touched on it just then, but we continue to be very stable when it comes to kind of working with our creator partners, paying our creative partners versus a number of networks over the last year that have not been able to honor those agreements with creators. We can do that. We have done that. And that means that we get brought new shows through the Hollywood talent agents who work with those shows, they bring us new opportunity. We know that those Q1 signings that we announced a couple of weeks back will deliver significant numbers to our network every single month, and we will sign more and more of those top-tier shows, grow the network and we have our eyes firmly on third place on that publisher rankings. But alongside that network growth, we really are focused on inventory creation from within that, and that will be the second part that offsets that Apple change. You've seen today how we've moved 6 ad slots per episode up to more than 10 over the past year. So we will continue to create more and more ad inventory per download across that time. And as I said before, I don't see too much further disruption through the Apple Podcasts app changes because the majority of users now have adopted iOS 17. We don't expect that to go to too much deeper. So I think the first part of our focus going forward is to grow that network through new signings and then new inventory creation from the podcasts that we work with. Second part, our focus is just our continued work around Showcase, that global automated ad marketplace that we have built out. The increased inventory levels that we're creating really does fuel Showcase. So we're pushing millions of available ad impressions into Showcase every single day, connecting them up with the buy side, with the demand side and advertisers are buying more and more of those impressions in Showcase. It's also driven -- Showcase is also driven by the work that our new team are doing around those bigger blue-chip brands. So that's Molly and Sean, who joined us today. They will be focused very much so on driving that customer base, expanding that customer base with the blue-chip brands and then, again, that advertising revenue flows through first to Showcase and keeps building that part of our business. So Showcase, we see a great future for. We've talked about it a lot I think, over the past 2 years, but we really do think -- really are confident in what Showcase will bring us over the coming years. We're in a good place with revenue. We talked, I think, earlier that we -- in terms of our Q1 revenue number, it's exactly where we wanted to be, exactly where we where expecting to be and the same can be said with our bookings number at this moment. So as of this point, we have more than $55 million of advertising revenue on the books. That's up from $11 million in the January trading update, maybe slightly lower than that. I'll correct that number, but it's up significantly from the January trading update. But it's at $55 million, which is, again, right where we need to be, to reach our goals for the year, $55 million of bookings right now. But I think I said this 3 months ago when we did this. If you compare that to previous years at this point, we're actually -- especially last year, we're actually, in relative terms, further ahead than that, right? Because last year, between April and July as the ad market declined, we saw a huge number of cancellations across the business. So last year's book number which was around $50 million actually went backwards for a while because of that downturn in the ad market. Obviously, we're not expecting that. This year, the ad market is more stable. And so in relative terms, we're further ahead, even further ahead than last year. So again, that number is right where we want it to be. And then I think the final point of continued focus Brad touched on 1 or 2 of the points here is just our work with our creators, both in the restructuring and renewing partnership contracts with those creators and then the new contracts that we make with creators going forward. I think, again, 3 months ago, we talked about us getting to the point where we had reduced our minimum guarantee obligations by around $2 million. We've had great traction in this first quarter, and we're now reducing that number by around $5 million versus last year. So the more of a decrease we can put on that minimum guarantee obligation, the more we derisk this business, particularly in weak advertising times. And we know that, that's a flow-through to the bottom line. So we continue to work to restructure and create more favorable deal terms for Audioboom. And then the same on the revenue share side of things. During 2021 and 2022, this was very much a seller's market. And those podcasts were signed on less favorable terms to Audioboom. We now are correcting that with each renewal or each new signing that comes through where we're signing those shows on more favorable revenue share terms. And as we do that and that rolls forward, again, more cash will flow through the business in that way, too. So making good progress on the creative deals and revenue exactly where we want it to be for the year. And that really does come together, it gives us a lot of confidence around achieving our goals for the year. So just to talk through it again, it's that network expansion, growing the creator network, adding that inventory, those ad slots per episode and getting -- extracting more value that goes through to the eCPM number, extracting more value from each one of those downloads, added to the work we're doing around Showcase and growing Showcase and expanding that out to more buyers plus the work of our new team to bring in those blue-chip customers, those major ad agencies, getting inside of those to create new partnerships. Those things come together gives us good confidence around our forecasted revenue number for the year. And then the work we're doing on those creator contracts, the improved revenue shares that we're putting into those and the restructuring that we're doing there, combined with that $5 million decrease in minimum guarantee obligation, again, that gives us confidence around our projections for EBITDA profit. We're very confident about that return to the full year EBITDA profit. So I hope you can really see again how each of those items that we're focused on, they come together to give us confidence around the revenue and that EBITDA number for the year. And we continue, as I said, to just be confident about achieving our goals. So that's it for me and give me a few minutes to look through some of the questions, and we'll be right back to you with the Q&A.