Lou Schwartz: Yes, hey Jason! I could start and Tom, if you’d like to augment, feel free. I mean listen, the €“ we’ve seen continued improvement in our advertising business, because we’ve been really nimble and we’ve been efficient with the inventory that we’ve been managing on behalf of our publishing customers. And we’ve been able to offset some of the headwinds that some of our peers have experienced, because we’ve been able to partner with highly productive demand partners and that’s enabled us to offset, right, some of the traffic patterns that we’ve seen, particularly as we highlighted from some of the algorithmic changes you know from Google. But we’re certainly not seeing sort of some €“ anywhere near what some of the digital €“ other digital media sort of peers are seeing in terms of the material impact on CPM and RPM.
The demand partners really value the inventory and the safety sort of our network and have been able to sort of maintain premium values for the supply that we expose to their networks.
Tom Rogers: Yes, I think just supplementing that, the upgrade of the exchanges that we offer our inventory through has clearly given us an ability to raise price and the shifts increasingly in inventory to more video-oriented inventory has also contributed to that, and the combination of those upgrades and shifts have countered the somewhat downdraft in advertising that I think the market is more broadly experiencing. As Lou said, our greater challenge has been Google algorithmic changes which hit groups of publishers from time-to-time and making sure that we can adjust to those, which always takes a bit of time when algorithms are changed is really the more direct challenge we’ve seen and are operating in a tough advertising environment and being able to handle those headwinds.
Jason Tilchen: Thanks a lot, that’s really helpful. Just two other quick ones; One, when it comes to these blue-chip wins that we’ve seen, sort of the pace of those sort of accelerating over the past few quarters. Is it as simple as just a combination of Stream Hatchet and Sideqik that you’ve talked about a lot? Is there anything else that’s going on in regards to your go-to-market strategy, how you are approaching these brands? Are they coming to you? Maybe you could just touch on the success there.
Tom Rogers: Well, the brands, certainly we have a very formidable reputation in the gaming space, and what we’ve been increasingly looking to do is get the gaming sector to understand that the breadth that Sideqik brings in terms of tying the gaming and social media world where there’s fragmentation among gaming influencers that cross over between live streaming and social media. That’s a particular area that we’ve been able to talk to that is significantly differentiating for us. The other thing that I want to point to since we’ve talked about brands and we obviously have some really great blue chip clients here that are involved with us. Our social influencer or platform is really also tailored to having a self-served solution for small and medium-sized businesses.
They too are suffering some of the consequences of what’s going on in terms of targeting efficiency in the advertising world and being able to allocate their marketing resources increasingly towards social influencer spend, is an opportunity. Of course, that social influencer world for a smaller business is not easy to navigate. You really need to be able to really simply and easily have a platform that can discover for you and communicate and provide the payment capability to cut through the friction that would otherwise exist for a small marketing operation, and we have a lot of resource geared toward that, and so I don’t want to talk to our success, being one that is only focused on brands. That SMB community is a very important part of the building we’re doing.
