In addition, to date, we have not experienced a material increase in customers’ cancellations, or requests for more favorable contractual terms, or concessions, and we have not experienced a significant deterioration in the collectability of our receivables or a material negative impact from our vendors and third-party service providers. Further, we have not incurred impairment losses in the carrying values of our assets as result of the pandemic and are not aware of any specific events or circumstances that would require a revision to the estimates reflected in our consolidated financial statements.
We have had sufficient liquidity and capital resources to continue to meet our operating needs and service our debt.
However, the severity, magnitude and duration of the current COVID-19 pandemic continues to be uncertain, rapidly changing, and hard to predict and depends on events beyond our knowledge or control. The COVID-19 pandemic could have the effect of heightening many of the risks described in the section entitled “Risk Factors” in our IPO prospectus, such as those relating to our reputation, product sales, results of operations or financial condition. We might not be able to predict or respond to all impacts on a timely basis to prevent near- or long-term adverse impacts to our results. As a result, we cannot at this time predict the ultimate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, but it could have a material adverse effect on our business, results of operations, financial condition and cash flows.
Key Factors Affecting Our Performance
Our historical financial performance has been, and we expect our financial performance in the future to be, driven by our ability to:
Innovate and Develop New Products for Key High-Growth Segments
| • | | . We aim to deliver transparency to programmatic ad buying via innovative solutions including contextual targeting and brand safety and suitability. |
| • | | We plan to develop deeper integrations with social platforms, also known as Walled Gardens, including feed-based brand safety and suitability, to be able to deliver continued transparency to our customers. |
| • | | We plan to continue to expand CTV-specific verification solutions and contextual capabilities to address the fast-growing connected TV segment. |
| • | | Adjacent product expansion. We aim to expand our platforms to address new areas of verification and measurement needs for our clients. For example, with the introduction of our pre-bid contextual capability in 2020, we not only enhanced our core verification offering, but we were also able to expand into contextual targeting addressing new needs and providing new value to our customers. Similarly, in 2019, our connected TV solution expanded our presence into this important and emerging digital channel. |
Increase Sales Within Our Existing Customer Base
We aim to increase the use of our products among existing customers across more campaigns and impressions. Given our comprehensive product portfolio, we believe we can cross-sell additional or new solutions to provide end-to-end coverage to more clients from pre-bid viewability to post-buy verification, fraud prevention, safety, suitability, and targeting.
Acquire New Customers and Increase Market Share
Our ability to acquire new customers and increase our market share is dependent upon a number of factors, including the effectiveness of our solutions, marketing and sales to drive new business prospects and execution, client digital marketing investment adoption, new products and feature offerings, global reach and the growth of the market for digital ad verification. There is a market opportunity to provide advertisers directly or through advertising agencies with verification services, specifically around ad viewability, ad fraud prevention and brand safety and suitability. Based on a March 2021 analysis by Frost & Sullivan, we estimate the global market opportunity for our ad verification solutions to be $9.5 billion and expect it to grow at a 16.2% CAGR from 2021 to 2025. We plan to work with the top 500 global advertisers by targeting high-spend verticals and brands with a natural sensitivity for brand safety, brand suitability, and ROAS needs. We believe we will increase our market share by strengthening our work with the leading social platforms, enhancing our programmatic solutions, deriving benefit from our broad global position, and leveraging our differentiated data science and market-leading contextual capabilities.
Expand Customer Base Internationally
Our ability to expand our customer base internationally is dependent upon a number of factors, including effectively implementing our business processes and go-to-market strategy, our ability to adapt to market or cultural differences, the general competitive landscape, our ability to invest in our sales and marketing channels, the maturity and growth trajectory of our services by region and our brand awareness and perception. Global marketers are becoming increasingly cognizant of the value of sophisticated verification strategies and, as such, we believe there is growing demand for our services internationally. Our investments in international markets resulted in an 18% growth in revenue year-over-year. We believe that Latin America and the APAC region may represent substantial growth opportunities, and we are investing in developing our business in those markets by way of expanded in-market customer service investment and by leveraging our global relationships. We aim to continue to grow outside the U.S. in Europe and other established markets such as Australia and Japan, and view ourselves as best positioned to continue penetrating these markets given our market-leading global footprint.
We experience fluctuations in revenue that coincide with seasonal fluctuations in the digital ad spending of our customers. The global advertising industry experiences seasonal trends that affect the vast majority of participants in the digital advertising ecosystem. Most notably, advertisers have historically spent relatively more in the fourth quarter of the calendar year to coincide with the holiday shopping season, and relatively less in the first quarter. We expect seasonality trends to continue, and our ability to manage our resources in anticipation of these trends will affect our operating results. Consequently, the fourth quarter usually reflects the highest level of measurement activity, and the first quarter reflects the lowest level of activity. Our revenue, cash flow, operating results and other key operating and performance metrics may vary from quarter to quarter due to the seasonal nature of our clients’ spending on advertising campaigns. While our revenue is highly re-occurring, seasonal fluctuations in ad spend may impact quarter-over-quarter results. We believe that the year-over-year comparison of results more appropriately reflects the overall performance of the business. See “Risk Factors—Certain of our operating results and financial metrics may be difficult to predict as a result of seasonality.”
In addition to our GAAP financial information, we review a number of operating and financial metrics, including the following key metrics, to evaluate our business, measure our performance, identify trends affecting our business, formulate business plans and make strategic decisions. The key business metrics are presented based on our advertising customers, as revenue from these customers represents substantially all the revenue.
The following table sets forth our key performance indicators for the periods set forth below:
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Net Revenue retention of advertising customers (%) (as of the end of the period) | | | 142 | % | | | 123 | % |
Total advertising customers (as of the end of the period) | | | 2,155 | | | | 1,836 | |
Total number of large advertising customers (as of the end of the period) | | | 187 | | | | 154 | |
Net revenue retention of advertising customers
We define net revenue retention of advertising customers as a metric to reflect the expansion or contraction of our advertising customers’ revenue by measuring the period-over-period change in trailing-twelve-month revenues from customers who were also advertising customers in the prior trailing twelve-month period. As such, this metric includes the impact of any churned, or lost, advertising customers from the prior trailing-twelve-month period as well as any increases or decreases in their spend, including the positive revenue impacts of selling new services to an existing advertising customer. The numerator and denominator include revenue from all advertising customers that we served and from which we recognized revenue in the earlier of the two trailing-twelve-month periods being compared. For purposes of discussing our key business metrics, we define an advertising customer as any advertiser account that spends at least $3,000 in the applicable trailing twelve-month period. We calculate our net revenue retention of advertising customers as follows:
The total revenue earned during the current trailing-twelve-month period from the cohort of advertising customers in the prior trailing-twelve-month period.
The total revenue earned during the immediately preceding trailing-twelve-month period from such cohort of advertising customers in such trailing-twelve-month period.
The quotient obtained from this calculation is our net revenue retention rate of advertising customers. We have generated strong historical net revenue retention rates of advertising customers, with 142% for the three months ended June 30, 2021 and 123% for the three months ended June 30, 2020.
Our calculation of net revenue retention of advertising customers may differ from similarly titled metrics presented by other companies.
Our net revenue retention of advertising customers increased from 123% as of June 30, 2020 to 142% as of June 30, 2021. The increase in the net revenue retention of advertising customers as of June 30, 2020 compared to June 30, 2021 was primarily due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which began in the second quarter of 2020 and impacted the remainder of the year ended December 31, 2020. In the quarters subsequent to the second quarter of 2020, the underlying demand for the Company’s services has stabilized. Revenue increased by 55% for the three months ended June 30, 2021 compared to the three months ended June 30, 2020.
Total advertising customers
We view the number of advertising customers as a key indicator of our scale and growth and the adoption of our platform. We determine our number of advertising customers by counting the total number of advertiser accounts who have spent at least $3,000 in the trailing twelve months. The total number of advertising customers has limitations as an operating metric as it does not reflect the product mix chosen by our advertising customers, the order frequency, or the purchasing behavior of our advertising customers. Because of these and other limitations, we consider, and you should consider, advertising customers in conjunction with our other metrics, including net revenue retention, net loss, Adjusted EBITDA, and average revenue per advertising customer.
Total number of large advertising customers
Historically our revenue has been driven primarily by a subset of large advertising customers who have leveraged our platform substantially from a usage standpoint. Increasing awareness of our solutions, further developing our sales and marketing expertise and partner ecosystem, and continuing to build solutions that address the unique identity needs of the top 500 global advertisers have increased our number of large advertising customers. We determine our number of large advertising customers by counting the total number of advertising accounts who have spent at least $200,000 per year. We believe the recruitment and cultivation of large advertising customers is critical to our long-term success. Our total number of large advertising customers increased from 154 as of June 30, 2020 to 187 as of June 30, 2021, primarily due to economic recoveries and improved macroeconomic conditions since the prior year. The second quarter of 2020 was largely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Components of Results of Operations
We derive revenue primarily from advertisers and programmatic services offered through a demand side platform to our customers across the digital advertising platform, which is our performance obligation. Fees associated with our contracts include impression-based fees driven by impression volume and a cost per thousand impressions (“CPM”).
We deliver our products and solutions to serve two customer types
(i) buy-side
(advertisers and agencies) and (ii) sell-side (publishers, advertising/audience networks, and supply side platforms). We generally generate revenue by charging a CPM based on the volume of purchased digital ads that we measure and optimize on behalf of these customers. There are no separate fees to access our platform. Depending on our customer needs, our contracts have (i) usage-based pricing, or (ii) monthly, quarterly or annual minimum commitments, or (iii) fixed fees. Usage based pricing is our primary contracting model. For minimum commitment contracts, the customer is billed based on usage. If usage is less than the minimum commitment, the shortfall is billed at the end of the contract term. Alternatively, a customer that uses more impressions than the minimum, would be billed based on actual usage including an then an overage fee if applicable is applied on such usage. Fixed fees contracts are recognized pro-rata over the contract term.
We recognize revenue when control of the promised services is transferred to customers. Revenue from the cloud-based technology platform is primarily recognized based on impressions delivered to customers. An “impression” is delivered when an advertisement appears on pages viewed by users. A significant majority (i.e., over 90%) of the Company’s contracts are usage-based contracts with no substantive minimum commitments. We have certain contracts for which pricing is variable through tiered pricing arrangements or include annual base fees that do not coincide with the calendar year, requiring an estimate of the transaction price attributable to each year. The majority of our contracts have a duration of one year or less.
. Cost of revenue consists of data center costs, hosting fees, revenue share with our DSP partners and personnel costs. Personnel costs include salaries, bonuses, stock-based compensation, and employee benefit costs, primarily attributable to our customer operations group. Our customer operations group is responsible for onboarding, integration of new clients and providing support for existing customers, including technical support for our technology platform and product offering. We allocate overhead such as rent and occupancy and information technology infrastructure charges based on headcount.
. Sales and marketing expense consists primarily of personnel costs, including salaries, bonuses, stock-based compensation, employee benefits costs and commission costs, for our sales and marketing personnel. Sales and marketing expense also includes costs for advertising, promotional and other marketing activities. We allocate overhead such as rent and occupancy and information technology infrastructure charges based on headcount. Sales commissions are expensed as incurred.
Technology and development
. Technology and development expense consists primarily of personnel costs of our engineering, product, and data sciences activities. Personnel costs including salaries, bonuses, stock-based compensation and employee benefits costs, third-party consultant costs associated with the ongoing development and maintenance of our technology platform and product offering. We allocate overhead such as rent and occupancy and information technology infrastructure charges based on headcount. Technology and development costs are expensed as incurred, except to the extent that such costs are associated with software development that qualifies for capitalization, which are then recorded as capitalized software development costs included in internal use software, net on our consolidated balance sheet.