CuriosityStream Inc. (NASDAQ:CURI) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

And so the most obvious example of that is the bundled distribution deal that we elected not to renew in mid-2022 where even if it had revenue and gross margin associated with it, when you took the whole package into consideration, particularly very substantial marketing commitments that went alongside it, marketing commitments that we needed to make to that partner, overall those deals just didn’t make sense. And so obviously, when you look at the Q1 guidance, you are seeing a lower number, but improvement — ultimately, it’s going to be improvements on the bottomline, improvements on the cash and the adjusted cash flow and position us to, as Clint suggests, grow from there.

Laura Martin: Yeah. That makes a ton of sense. And then I want to stay on this marketing point, because I think it’s super interesting. So you did $9.1 million in the quarter of advertising and marketing. It sounds like you had this massive commitment maybe $40 million on its way to $20 million. If we are going to go into the FAST and AVOD business, the issue with those platforms is they are cluttered and you do have to spend a bunch of marketing dollars and ad dollars to drive discovery that you wouldn’t have had in the past. So can you speak to why you think you are going to be able to save so much money on that line if we are starting a whole new revenue stream that you never — that CuriosityStream has never done in the past?

Clint Stinchcomb: I think it’s a great question, Laura. So as it relates to and you hit it on the head. We have run off almost all of our obligated marketing expenses as of, and as Peter said in his comments, we paid for some of those in January that were for fourth quarter. So going forward, we are going virtually 100%, not quite there yet, but getting close to that on performance-based marketing. And so that’s with certain — that’s around our direct business, that’s with certain key partners in the direct space. But to your point, like, okay, how are you going to maximize your AVOD and FAST initiatives, and what became real clear to me in looking at this over the last handful of months is you have to have the right partners.

You just — once you are — as you said, unless you are positioned well with the top six providers and unless you are committing some level of promotion, you are not going to — you risk yelling into the wind or just making a fraction of what’s possible. And so it takes longer to create these types of alliances, but that’s what we are focused on. We don’t want to just — I mean, we dipped our toe in the water with some of the kind of secondary in size FAST platforms and we learned a fair bit from that. And obviously, we have done some work with our owned and own platforms in front of the paywall. But what I will say is that as it relates to the amount of money that needs to be spent to grow those services, that’s all a consideration in the way that we create our alliances in a go-to-market strategy with the larger platforms.

Does that make sense, Laura?

Laura Martin: Yeah. Super helpful. Thanks, guys. Thank you very much.

Operator: Next we will hear from Darren Aftahi, ROTH.

Dillon Heslin: Hey. This is Dillon on for Darren. Thanks for taking the questions. So I wanted to follow up on the FAST side. Could you sort of share what percentage of revenue is coming from the FAST channels themselves?