Future plc (FUTR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning. I'm delighted to be here today at our offices in London, and I look forward to seeing some of you in person or virtually over the next few weeks. First, I want to take the opportunity to introduce myself and share some thoughts, and then I will hand it over to Penny to go through the first half results. I will then come back to share some closing remarks and give an exciting demo on how we are using AI on our sites before turning to Q&A. Turning to Slide 4. I'm incredibly proud and excited to join the company. What drew me to Future was its specialist content that allows people to find answers to their passions and research the products and services they need to enjoy their lives. The companies thrives in the creation and distribution of high-intent media, and advertisers and affiliate partners love this reach and this kind of audience. Future is one of the largest publishers on the web and has enormous diversified revenues and high cash flow conversion. The business is strong and unique, and I view becoming the next CEO as a one-in-one opportunity. I view Future as simply one of the best digital media and print businesses in the market, and I'm passionate about the opportunity ahead and my ability to lead the team. A little about me. My career really started at Google where I did partnership deals. I then moved to Buzzfeed and became its first President and 15th employee. In my 4 years there, we grew to over 500 employees and revenue from nearly $0 to $100 million. I spent 1.5 years at DailyMail as its North America's CEO, where we recorded significant revenue growth of 45% and double direct advertising. I then founded Cheddar, a live digital video news company with mid-8-figure revenues at the time of its sale to Altice for $200 million. At Altice, I became President of News & Advertising where we had double-digit growth in my 3-year tenure to $550 million in revenue in 2021. I love content. I love technology. I love innovation. I love growth. This is what gets me up in the morning. Turning to Slide 5. I've been at Future only 6 weeks. So thank you all for coming today. And let me share with you my first impressions. This is a company that I've been watching and admiring from the other side of the Atlantic, and I'm excited to now be at the helm and living in London. There are 3 things that are paramount for me: content, audience and monetization. Starting with content. It is part of our purpose and at the heart of everything we do. It is our biggest cost center and for good reason. And I'm a true admirer of many of our brands, such as TechRadar, Tom's Guide, The Week, Marie Claire, Decanter and Who What Wear. Number two, on audience, we need to lean into diversification of traffic sources in order to find new avenues of high-quality audience growth. This can be done through building up homepages, social traffic, e-mail and new platforms like Apple News and off-platform audience growth in short-form video, which I was actually just talking to one of you about a moment ago. On monetization, as you know, at Future, we like growth. We love growth. But not any growth. We like profitable growth that translates into cash. These financial characteristics are paramount and virtuous. We can do this through existing products and new ones like vouchers and our ramping branded content business. Future's diversification also offers a significant advantage. The company is diversified across content with 4 main verticals, geographies and monetization with 3 routes, 3 key revenue streams, advertising, affiliate and magazine. Being passionate about technology and innovation, I've really enjoyed my first few weeks, learning more about our fantastic tech stack. I am truly convinced that part of future secret sauce resides in the value of the superb tech stack, creating scalability, operating leverage and agility. The platform effect works. Finally, one of the deciding factors for me joining Future is the opportunity ahead, notably in the U.S., which is where my experience, knowledge and network are. We are leaders in consumer tech, and we have all the ingredients to replicate this success in fashion and beauty, homes and wealth and turbocharge the growth through white labeling of e-commerce services. This is a tough market, but people would kill for the assets we have to navigate it. And with that, I will now hand it over to Penny, who will cover the first half results.

Thank you. Thank you, Jon. So good morning. So it's hugely exciting to be presenting our first half year results this morning alongside a new partner. This is a very strong set of results given the market challenges we're facing. In order to explain the results this morning, I'm first just going to set the context of how we're expecting to drive growth over the medium term, our current progress against those strategic objectives. I want to then talk a bit about audience and how we're evolving our audiences, and then this will provide some context before I drill into the financial performance in the period. So if you can turn to Slide 7. You'll all be really familiar with the strategy slide. So as you know, we have 2 strategic objectives: one, to grow volume through audience; and two, to grow yield through diversification. Moving to Slide 8, though. I've included the slide that we used at our Capital Markets Day last September, which explains how we go about achieving these 2 objectives. So step 1, we build audiences by expanding the number of verticals in which we operate and built, moving into a market leadership position. Step 2 and 3, market leadership is table stakes for being eligible for direct digital advertising campaigns, which, when combined with the customer and agency relationships and an experienced sales team, allows us to monetize our inventory at a much higher rate. In consumer technology, this was the strategy that we followed over the last 5 years. We're following the same plan in a number of our other verticals, particularly homes, women's fashion and beauty and wealth, which are large and hugely attractive markets. So moving to Slide 9. As Jon noted earlier, a core part of our strategy is diversification. And over the last few years, we've been looking to diversify both the mix of audiences between online users and other audiences and the customer acquisition channel for our online audiences. In the chart on the left-hand side here, you can see that we've seen huge growth in audiences off platform that is on social platforms, Apple News and e-mail newsletter subscribers. A number of the recent acquisitions have been in support of this goal and have significantly helped our performance here, with GoCompare bringing expertise in paid marketing and Who What Wear importantly bringing expertise in social but monetizable audiences. In the chart on the right-hand side, you can also see that we've increased the mix of online users coming to our sites, both directly and from other channels such as social to almost 40%, an 8 percentage point increase since '19. Organic search, which is the red section on the donut, on the right-hand side, remains an important channel for us because it's one of the most efficient customer acquisition channels, not least because the evergreen nature of our content means that much of our content continues to attract an audience month-after-month and even year-after-year. Moving to Slide 10. This year has very much reinforced the importance of this diversification strategy and multiple brand strategy. We've maintained or improved our market leadership positions, although we've experienced a decline in online users across our 2 largest verticals. This has been driven by a number of factors. So firstly, a reduction in consumer demand, particularly in consumer tech, which is translating into a reduction in the overall market. The impact of Google algorithm, these are part of every day for us and we generally see puts and takes across the different brands. Last year's algo changes saw a bigger number of takes. And then finally, some of what we call audience whales driving spikes in audience in the comparative period and particularly in gaming, entertainment and knowledge. For example, in the first half of '22, we saw the release of ELDEN RING, a hugely popular game, which drove a spike in audience. And in half 2, we're expecting a notable impact from lapping the Amber Heard-Johny Depp trial, which created a huge spike in audience. The 19% reduction in online users clearly has an impact on revenue, although these are often the lower-value audiences. The previous slide set out the absolute audience movements across our key verticals, and this slide sets out our relative importance performance. The important message is that we've maintained or improved our leadership positions in all of our key strategic categories, which is a tremendous result, especially when you look at the other players in the market. In consumer tech, whilst the overall market is down, we've retained our #1 position in both the U.K. and the U.S. In Homes, we remain #1 in the U.K., and we've moved into a #4 position in the U.S. In women's fashion and beauty, we're #4 in the U.K. and #7 in the U.S. In wealth, we're still very nascent, but it's good to see momentum building. As I mentioned, this is very much table stakes for being in the conversation of digital advertising campaigns, and so we're really pleased with our performance in the key strategic verticals. So with this context, I'll move on to look at the revenue picture on Slide 12. You can see here that overall revenue remained flat year-on-year and down 10% on an organic basis. The table shows our 3 main revenue streams, which will have different dynamics. So digital advertising and other media was up 10%, reflecting the inclusion of Who What Wear and ActualTech acquisitions. On an organic basis, revenue was down 15%, reflecting the audience performance we've just seen. Although you can see the yield resilience here, we also benefited from a good recovery in events. Affiliates was down 4% on a reported basis and 10% organically. This performance is a result of consumer challenges and affiliate products, notably in tech, although the early diversification into services has been really beneficial with the growth in affiliate services of 4% and the rollout of our proprietary voucher technology in our -- across our content sites, providing mitigating growth. As we roll this out across all our sites, we see an exciting market opportunity here. And then finally, Magazines, down 4% on a reported basis and 5% organically. This performance was much better than our historical secular decline rate, reflecting the strength of our portfolio and the beneficial mix of subscriptions. Moving to Slide 13. We can see the drivers more clearly is there's a clear difference in the geographical performance. Despite the audience declines, the U.K. performance has been really robust with an organic decline of just 5% versus a U.S. decline of 17%. This gives us confidence in the U.S. opportunity and the effectiveness of our strategy over the medium term as we look to increase our market presence in the U.S. The U.K. is further advanced on our diversification strategy. And therefore, you can see here the benefit of the favorable mix of magazines and the growth of affiliate services. We'll look at this in a bit more detail on the next slide, but the one thing I did want to pull out here was the strong magazine performance in the U.S. as a result of the strong subscription growth here. Moving to Slide 14. We can see more clearly the differential in performance as the table shows online users, digital advertising and affiliate revenue split between the U.K. and the U.S. As you can see, we've experienced user decline in both markets, but the advertising performance is quite different. The U.K. advertising performance has been particularly strong due to the greater mix of direct and branded content. And as we invest in our presence in the U.S. market, we hope to replicate this. In the U.S., whilst we have some market leadership positions, particularly in consumer tech, we're not as established a brand as we are and some others in the market. We don't have the same range and depth of client base as we have in the U.K. Despite this, though, we've seen overall yield growth. In Affiliate, we see a similar trend with Affiliates in the U.S. down roughly in line with audience, but the U.K. performance was more robust as further diversified. What I want you to take away from this slide is that whilst overall audience is important, relative and valuable audiences are the utmost importance. So just to conclude on revenue, on Slide 15, I thought it would be helpful to detail the revenue by vertical in terms of the overall mix and the year-on-year performance. We can see here the value of diversification and the strong performance in LKN, Lifestyle, Knowledge and News, and Wealth & Savings verticals. Whilst the short-term macro is clearly having an impact, the diversification of geography and vertical market provides resilience and provides us with confidence for the future. Moving to Slide 16. I want to spend a little bit of time just on our cost base and how it's evolved year-on-year. The operating costs include our 3 main categories of costs, representing around GBP 260 million cost of sales, direct costs on sales and marketing editorial and then the overheads. As you can see, total costs have increased GBP 4 million year-on-year. So let me just take you through the moving parts. The GBP 16 million increase relates to the pro forma cost base of the acquisitions gross of cost synergies of GBP 2 million. GBP 8 million reflects -- relates to inflation, broadly equally split between salaries and cost of sales from MAGs in line with our expectations. The cost savings relate to the prior year bonus accrual release, not repeated in this year of GBP 8.5 million, and other cost savings of GBP 9.5 million, including efficiencies in property through consolidation of offices and some further efficiencies in our back office, particularly as we continue on to the migrations onto our tech stack, which both optimizes the front end but also allows us to drop off legacy tech costs. In order to navigate the tougher macroeconomic backdrop, we've protected profit whilst making sure we double down on the things that matter, expert content, the strategic sales force and effective marketing spend whilst benefiting from synergies across other areas. So moving to Slide 17, we can see the overall P&L for the period and evidencing performance I've just talked you through and the power of the model and our actions to protect profitability. As a result, adjusted EBITDA margin is down just 1 percentage point year-on-year with EBITDA of GBP 141.9 million. The adjusted operating profit declined by 3%, translating into a 12% decline in adjusted EPS, reflecting the impact of previously communicated higher interest and tax rates. So just moving on to our cash flow on Slide 18. We've seen a continued strong cash performance in '23. We generated GBP 130 million of adjusted free cash flow. And whilst this reduction year-on-year is in line with our profit performance, it's pleasing to see adjusted operating profit converting at 100% to adjusted free cash flows. Working capital was excellent in the period at neutral despite paying the prior year bonus in the half as well as we had a strong improvement in collection of receivables. Given the market environment, we have further increased our focus on paying our suppliers promptly. Whilst we do expect to see some working capital outflow in half 2, we're comfortable this is the right approach to take. We remain capital light with CapEx representing 1.5% of revenue. Exceptional items relate to nonrecurring items on acquisitions and some restructuring in order to reduce our cost base. Interest is higher year-on-year, reflecting the cost of debt used to fund acquisitions and the higher base interest rates. And then tax paid was also higher, driven by the increase in the underlying tax rate. By design, we're highly cash generative capital light business, and it's a great focus for us to ensure the profit converts to cash and a testament to the continued strength of the business. Moving on to Slide 19. I thought it would be helpful to do a couple of case studies on acquisitions. As you know, M&A is a core part of our strategy. However, we don't do M&A for the sake of doing M&A. We acquire businesses, which help us to accelerate the strategic objective and generate a strong return on capital. So I wanted to share some of the extrapolated performance from two of our more transformative acquisitions. So starting with TI Media. To recap on the strategic rationale, we wanted to enter a new vertical, women's fashion and beauty, and bolster existing ones, homes and cycling with all 3 verticals identified as attractive with ample opportunities. TI Media was largely a magazine's business, therefore, transitioning into a media business using our tech stack and know-how was key to the rationale. So fast forward in 3 years, how have we done? So revenue has been remarkably resilient despite the strong percentage of revenue magazine -- of magazines, which are in secular decline. Media revenue, a key strategic initiative, has grown by over 30% year-after-year despite the challenging macro and doubled as a percentage of the mix. And then as you know, we focus on profitable growth and we've driven an increase in margin of 15 percentage points through a combination of the GBP 20 million of cost synergies and better mix. We're really pleased with the progress of the acquisition. It's delivered on the strategic and financial case, and the market presence has brought us, has helped us to continue that journey in the U.S. and allowed us to acquire Marie Claire U.S. and Who What Wear business and further develop our market share. Moving to GoCo on Slide 20. We're just over 2 years into the acquisition and delighted with the progress and the diversification it's provided the group with. Despite the market changes, revenue is growing and the benefit of marketing efficiencies and the integration into the platform has allowed us to generate significant growth in EBITDA. The business is also contributing to the platform effect across the business with the rich first-party data feeding into our data platform leveraged by the sales team, and we've created a center of excellence around the paid marketing team. It's still relatively early days with the acquisition with the replatforming still in train, and so we remain excited about the continued further opportunities. So we've just reviewed 2 acquisitions out of the 19 we've done since '18. As you know, acquisitions come in different shapes and sizes and similar betterments are seen across our acquisitions, which we can see on Slide 21. I prevented this slide a couple of times, but I thought I'd include it because Jon has said that it was his favorite Slide. So just to explain the chart on the right-hand side, it shows the growth in EBITDA over the last 4 years split into, number one, what we opened with the EBITDA we reported in 2018; number two, what we've acquired, that's the pro forma EBITDA of the acquisitions; and then number three is the delta, the mix of organic growth, synergies, platform effect. So to put it differently, the value we've created, which shows that we've been able to more than equal the acquired profits through the mix of organic and platform effect. It demonstrates the value we create through the strategy of our mix of organic and M&A. In the first half, you've seen us make 3 further small acquisitions, ShortList Media, ActualTech and Gardening Know How, which we bought at attractive multiples, and these are performing well. This brings me nicely on to capital allocation on Slide 22. As a Board, we regularly review our capital allocation to ensure it's effective and creates the greatest value for our stakeholders in the long term. We have strong cash flow conversion from operating profit, and our approach is to focus on organic growth as a priority and then, where appropriate, to leverage our strong cash flows to create value through M&A. We continue to see good opportunities and have an active pipeline and believe this remains a core strategic lever for the group going forward. Given our share price though, we've naturally been asked about shareholder returns, and so I wanted to run through our capital allocation approach. Clearly, at these multiples, buying back our stock would have an attractive return on an EPS basis. We believe that provided we can execute on strategic deals, which meet our price hurdle, M&A is the greater long-term value creation opportunity for shareholders. However, to the extent that we're unable to execute on such transactions, we would look to deploy our excess free cash flows and returning cash to shareholders. So finally, just turning to Slide 23 for the outlook for the rest of the year. The macro environment and audience performance remains challenging with foreign exchange turning into a headwind in the second half and some investment in U.S. growth. So we're not expecting an improvement in half 2. Our financial characteristics, namely our cost agility, our strong balance sheet and exceptional cash generation position us well though to navigate the short term, invest for future growth to create long-term opportunities. And with that, I'll hand over to Jon, who can share a bit more on the plans.

Thank you. Okay. Thank you. Turning to Slide 25. The short term is challenging, but we should not lose sight of the medium and longer-term opportunities. You'll be familiar with our current strategy on this page. And as I mentioned in my introduction, there are 3 things that are paramount for me for a media company to excel. Turning to Slide 26. I often think of media as a 3-legged stool: Audience, which needs to be diversified and of high intent; content, which needs to be ever-evolving and of high quality; and monetization, which needs to grow in new and existing ways. You can see these stool legs in the navy boxes, and so my philosophy of the 3 legged media stool was already on the future strategy slide, very much in line with my belief that my leadership of future will be evolutionary and not revolutionary. The organic and M&A-driven growth that Penny laid out works, and I intend to build on it and create even more growth. Turning to Slide 27. I thought it would be helpful for me to show you how I've been focused and what I've been up to over the past few weeks. My first 6 weeks have been dedicated to meeting my colleagues across London, Bath, Cardiff and New York. During these meetings, I have focused my time on understanding what is working and what is not working. These meetings have been a fantastic to gain insight, and I've been positively surprised by the depth of talent and the dedication and enthusiasm of our people. Our team is overwhelmingly committed to navigating the tough environment and seeking out innovation and growth content and products. I've also had a deep dive on various aspects of our diversified business from audience to technology to editorial to content verticals. So my knowledge of the group has significantly ramped, and this has bolstered my belief in the future opportunities, which leads me nicely into what I'm going to be focusing on now. As I mentioned in my introduction, my background comes with a strong U.S. address book. So I'm building relationships for future with advertisers and partners. I'm also focused on building the future brand into something that stands for a one-stop shop for advertisers and agencies. Growing U.S. revenue through strengthened agency and brand direct relationships and programmatic trading relationships with the major media agencies is the top of my priority list. In fact, we closed a preferred programmatic trading relationship with a major holding company just last week. We will continue to invest here as building robust trading relationships takes some time. The U.S. should then follow the same pattern of stages we've seen in the U.K., which is audience, number one; number two, trading relationships; number three, monetization. Product sits at the core of everything we do. This means focusing on quality content, improved user experiences and leveraging new technologies for consumption and distribution of our content in text and video. I'm focused on audience. As I mentioned, we continue to study and optimize research, but are also looking for new distribution channels for our content. Both driving traffic to our sites as well as pushing our content out through syndication and video distribution off platform will play into this effort. Finally, talent is paramount as success is only built collectively. We've announced the hire of a Chief Operating Officer, Eric Harris, with whom I have worked for 10 years; and Kev, our long-standing CTO, has been promoted to lead product. We have a strong team at the executive level and beyond, and I look forward to incrementally bolstering it in the coming months. Our shareholders and analyst coverage are also an important constituency. And in the short term, I will be meeting with many of you either face-to-face or virtually. Turning to Slide 28. While we are facing audience challenges and macroeconomic headwinds, we will adapt to the changing landscape and navigate it through innovation. Our diversified model ensures resilience in a challenging macroeconomic environment with the business leaning into areas of demand as consumer and client needs change, such as price comparison and vouchers. Our business model has repeatedly proven itself resilient and scalable, delivering strong margin despite inflationary pressures that Penny mentioned. We've seen green shoots on new platforms like Apple News, social and we'll continue to investigate and double down on new platforms when it makes sense. We will also continue to study the Google algorithm changes and look to continue to launch experiments around search engine optimization. Our yields have been strong testament to our overall high-value, high-intent audience. Advertisers continue to seek out and pay up for our audiences. We've maintained or grown our comScore positions, including keeping tech at #1, suggesting we have maintained share against our largest competitors. We are one of few scaled print and digital media companies and will continue to be sought out by advertisers seeking to reach a high-intent audience. We have a unique technology stack that creates a true platform effect and exceptional cash generation that provides fuel for generating shareholder returns. We are well positioned to navigate what is undoubtedly a tough environment in the short term and seize the long-term opportunities when these pressures abate. Turning to Slide 29. Media is fascinating and ever evolving in an ever-changing industry, which is what makes it so interesting. I caught the media bug very early in my career and have seen the landscape evolve, creating opportunities to be disruptive and drive outperformance. You can only drive this outperformance if you have the mindset to adapt and build the business with high agility, flexibility and speed, but you can only thrive in this industry if you have the entrepreneurial mindset and the willingness to innovate. I view each technology transformation as an opportunity to ask how can we leverage this change? Today, we debut a new AI chatbot on Tom's Hardware that has been the work of a rapid prototype since I arrived. We asked how can we use AI on our sites to improve the user experience. And I'd like to do a little demo for you now. Okay, here we go. And I'll let you, guys, ask questions, too, so make sure you're thinking of them, okay? But let me show you one right now. And every time it answers it, it answers it differently. So I'm going to ask, should -- and there are hardware questions, obviously, it's Tom's Hardware. Should I build or buy a PC? What it's doing is it's going through all of our Tom's Guide -- Tom's Hardware content using that as the taxonomy and providing an answer. And let's see what article. So it provides a text dancer like you would normally get in chat, and then it provides best PC builds for gaming and how to build a PC, best gaming PC. So you can see these articles are all relevant, and you can click through to them. Let's ask another specific question. What graphics card should I get for a PC I'm building? So you can see it's a very specific answer. It's literally telling me for a custom-built PC, what I need to do, related articles. And then sometimes the Hawk Widget appears. Let's see if we get a Hawk Widget this time. No, we didn't get it. But sometimes you get a Hawk Widget, that part's experimental. Okay. I'm going to refresh, so it clears out its memory. And now who's got a question? I have to have you guys do a question to show that, like I'm not just picking ones that I know the answers to. No one has any questions?

I'll ask a question.

Please.

[indiscernible] best budget gaming laptop.

What is the best budget gaming -- oh, I gotta move my mouse. That's not above. What is the best budget gaming laptop? And so right now, this is integrated in an article on Tom's Hardware, and it will soon be pinned as a little box, and then we'll look to deploy this to other sites as well, too. So it gives you this, and there's the Acer Nitro 5. And you can go to it, and we would probably get an affiliate commission if you bought it there. All right, you guys are too shy to do this. That's fine. You can go to bot.tomshardware.com and try it yourself and prove out your own experience. Okay, let's go back to the slides. Okay. Turning to Slide 31. Finally, before opening the floor for questions, I just want to reiterate how excited I am to be part of Future and to create the next phase of growth for the group with a team here. We have a diversified model, attractive verticals and agile mindset, a strong balance sheet and cash generation that will serve our growth desires. On culture, I want 1,000 flowers to bloom across Future. I want our colleagues to feel empowered to make data-driven recommendations on content, product and rapidly bring these ideas to their supervisors for go or no go. Through our team, we will navigate the challenging market as one Future, navigating the short term while also focusing on the attractive long-term opportunities that the business has. As I mentioned earlier, others would kill for the assets we have. I feel privileged to have them as CEO, and I'm excited for the road ahead. Thank you for listening. And with that, we'll go to questions.

Yes, in the back.

Yes, it's Nick Dempsey from Barclays. So first question, for the parts of your business that are proving volatile, especially online ads, can you talk to us about the visibility you have at the moment and therefore, how we can build confidence that, that trajectory that's weakened a bit compared to what we thought a few months ago doesn't weaken again? Second question, when we look at the growth of ad agencies, which are, I guess, a kind of proxy for global advertising as a whole, they're doing pretty well. U.S. online ads for a number of players a week, you acknowledge yourselves. Is there a share shift going on here towards retail media, TikTok, something else, which actually isn't to do with macro but more of a structural shift? And the last question, just on AI. If you think of parts of Future's business as a journey from Google to Amazon, if ChatGPT-style interfaces change that journey, to what extent do we have to worry about that as a big threat to your traffic?

Okay. A lot of questions. All right. Let's do ads first, okay? On ads, we have a 23% organic decline in audience, but digital ads only declined by 18%. RPU, revenue per user, was actually up double digits. And we moved 10% of our mix from open auction to more premium forms of advertising like branded content. And so everything is working, except for the traffic at this point in time, okay? So I have supreme confidence that our high-intent media advertisers will continue to pay a premium for because they have paid a premium for it during this very volatile period of time. Our highest margin, advertising, our high -- excuse me, our highest RPU, advertising, is in women's lifestyle. The reason for that is because they do a lot of branded content in Who What Wear. What that means is we need to find traffic sources, like you were mentioning TikTok in the other question, TikTok, Reels, YouTube Shorts. We need to pump our content out on to these platforms and monetize with branded content and follow the beacon that has actually been laid out by Who What Wear. So I have confidence that we have the right yields, and we have the ability to define traffic in new and innovative ways. And so I'm very confident in that. On the ad agencies, it's funny, Penny and I were actually looking at Publicis' results last night. The technology category even for Publicis was actually negative during the period. And so I think what you're seeing is other categories where we don't have exposure like autos, for example, are coming back, but technology is still really struggling. 3/4 of our audience decline were in the GETs category. The largest part of that being the technology sub vertical, and the largest part of that being TechRadar. And so what we're really seeing is a mix of algorithm and then also a pullback in technology interest that are both colliding at the same point in time. Ultimately, I have confidence that we will find new audiences on distributed content and distributed platforms. That's what I did at Buzzfeed and Cheddar, so I feel confident I can run that playbook here as well. And then on your final question, here's -- there are 2 visions of how this AI thing could work. You could put your -- and by the way, most of the AI experiences now include links. If you do the Bing AI experience or even the one that Google debuted last week has a series of links that appear on the right. There's 2 scenarios. One scenario is you put a question into a chat box, you get a paragraph answer and you're done. I mean, I don't know what you do after that. I guess you could walk down the street to Best Buy, but that seems like highly unlikely that somebody would end their discovery journey at that point. I think more likely than not, you open up another tab and need to do more research. I don't think people are -- and we've been contending, by the way, with Google putting shopping results at the top of search results in the SERPs for years. But we know that people want to do more research than just get a simple answer and click and buy a 1,300-pound e-bike, right? So I think that AI will evolve. And finally, we do need to have conversations with Google and Microsoft about this. And Barry Diller, who I consider a mentor and a friend, has been very outspoken on this, as you all know. We've been less outspoken, and I think we will probably be less aggressive. But I cannot imagine that search players rolling out some versions of the experience that they've shown to date that use our content and those of our peers in the ways that they use it without providing links back and some kind of hybrid search AI experience. So I think that answers the 3 questions. Okay, next?

Gareth Davies from Numis. Three from me as well. The first one, U.S. investment, you call it out within the outlook statement. I wondered if you can kind of elaborate and expand a little on that. And sort of -- is that all incorporated in the consensus as it stands? What kind of pockets of specific investment have you got there and just some thoughts around that? Secondly, on GoCo, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about GoCo performance, the success you're having, moving beyond car insurance. And then also sort of Jon's thoughts on GoCo as a business and how it fits within the group. And then the final one is just on B2B. Again, really a question for Jon. Any thoughts there? I mean you've come from a consumer background as opposed necessarily to a B2B-focused background. Do you see that as core going forward?

Okay. So what I'll do is, I'll do number one, then I'll throw it to you to add some additional comments, and then I'll come back and do 2 and 3. The U.S. investment is very much around sales force and sales support. The U.S. actually has higher average yields than U.K. That's probably very surprising to all of you. The issue is we're not selling enough in the U.S. We have a nascent sales force there, a lot of which has been hired in the past 6 months, and it takes time for these sales forces and the trading relationships to ramp. We just did our first preferred programmatic relationship with a holding company. That's table stakes to be able to do real trading with a holding company. We've had those in the U.K. for years. So it's around sales force and sales support. Penny, do you want to enter on the consensus portion?

Yes. So we factored in an assumption that -- of the ramp period for a new sales team and some investment in PR and assume that, that ramp period is longer. I think the reality is that we're doing investment, which we would expect to drive incremental revenue growth. And therefore, to the extent that we want to double down, we've put in further investment, but you would also see that seeing the top line. So the kind of the -- what we're putting at risk, that's factored in.

Okay. On to your second question, GoCo. We're happy and proud of the diversification of GoCo. So GoCo grew at 4% during the period, and we moved 3 percentage points of product share out of car insurance into other categories. Travel insurance was actually up 100% during the period. So 35%, we think is nice movement around GoCo. For GoCo to really fulfill its destiny, we need to further integrate it throughout our sites. And so one of the first actions I've taken or one of many first actions I've taken is I have really accelerated the push for the team to do widgetization, creating widgets that we can put on our sites so that we will not be as reliant on PPC, and we have the ability to drive traffic from our hundreds of millions of sessions to GoCo. The first category that we will do that in will be in homes because homes are ranking well in comScore. Homes actually is one of the few bright spots of traffic during the period. Homes, you'll remember was up 12% during the period. We're going to do home insurance widgets on that. And I'm hoping we can get that done in the next few months. So that will really fulfill the destiny and the vision of what we always had for GoCompare. Finally, on B2B. We had a really nice problem last week. One of our B2C advertising salespeople collided with our B2B team that was trying to sell B2B offerings to the same advertiser. Some people might be upset about that. I was super excited. We have the opportunity to sell ActualTech webinars, smart brief e-mails and display and custom-branded content advertising solutions all to the same brand and all to the same client. And so I've always felt that B2B, when it's the right B2B products, have enormous leverage interplaying with the B2C products. So I would also point out that ActualTech was up 23% on a pro forma basis during the half year. And so ActualTech is performing really well and is opening a lot of doors to clients and brands that we don't have. Okay, next?

It's Lara Simpson from JPMorgan. I just wanted to come back to the question on top line visibility, both into the second half of the year and 2024. I mean, clearly, yields are holding up and you're improving monetization. But could you just talk a bit more about the declines in online audiences? I mean, is it really -- you've spoken about algos, is it really weaker demand and subtle sentiment? Or are you actually losing audiences that might not come back? And if so, how can you curve that? And I suppose looking forward, is the audience growth really about tapping into new verticals? Or can you grow the audience in your core verticals to sort of taken entertainment? And then my next question would just be to come back to capital allocation. I know management has become a bit more vocal about deploying cash to shareholders over the last 6 months. But clearly, the priority is still M&A. So I think it would be helpful if you could just talk a bit more about the M&A pipeline as you see it over the next 6 to 12 months, both in terms of asset availability and also pricing.

Okay. I'll do number one. Do you want to do number two? Perfect. Audience. So a few things about the audience give me confidence. First, we kept or grew the comScore positions during this period. We are still #1 in tech. We did well in homes. We did well in fashion and beauty. We didn't go backwards in terms of any of them. So that means against the large players, we didn't lose share. It was smaller players that were snipping off little pieces of audience during that period. Also, the fact that so much of the decline was in the tech category points to the fact that there have really been no new products, nothing exciting, and the consumer still did pull forward from COVID, all of their purchase and technology research activity. So I think the audience will come back. And I think with most of these algorithm changes, there have been puts and takes. This was a case where we had a particularly uniform algorithm change that impacted us. Finally, and I just gave -- we just did a strategy session with the Board yesterday where I kind of went through this, we will find audiences in new ways. And I was talking to one of you before about this. Short-form video is a mega trend. Short-form video is basically the only thing on the social platforms. We have 180 million followers on social now. It is on us to figure out ways to pump that content into the short-form video platforms and monetize with branded content in those places. So actually, if you say that our all-time high, we were at about 500 million sessions a month, my 3-year strategic plan is to get us back there. Now I can't tell you that it will all be O&O traffic. It probably won't be O&O traffic because the world has changed, but we will find these people in the new places where they're going to consume content in the new format that they're consuming content in.

In terms of M&A pipeline, we -- as I mentioned, we have an active pipeline. I think there is good availability, particularly of private vendors and things which are in more trouble situation. So you would largely have seen the news about Vice, for example, in the last few weeks. So it's a good example of kind of the change in the macro providing opportunities for us. And as a consequence of that, then the pricing starts to reflect much more kind of the current environment rather than sort of trading off the performance of '21 and '22 now.