Barry Jonas : Hey guys. Ohio just raised its gaming tax. Curious if that has had any indirect effect on you guys so far, or if you would expect anything there. Thanks.
Charles Gillespie : It’s definitely not helpful, obviously, when the states raise the tax rates, it directly impacts the operators and essentially how much a player’s worth to them. It doesn’t get directly passed on to us. But it’s not a helpful dynamic either. So, at the same time, our rates and relationships and everything else in Ohio remain extremely healthy. It’s not having any sort of material impact.
Jeff Stantial: Great that’s helpful. And then I guess just sort of a high-level question on the M&A environment just curious, how you’d characterize the pipeline here and your appetite at the moment?
Charles Gillespie: The pipeline is very good. We’ve got lots of conversations happening at the moment. There’s been a few new things that have entered, the scope of what we are considering. So, as ever really busy spending a lot of time on it, doing a lot of work, and I’d be hopeful that we’ll be able to announce something not imminently. But assuming these conversations go well over the next six, nine months. We obviously have the balance sheet to do something and that’s the purpose of our cash, is to enable us to take on the right M&A opportunity when the stars line up. But as ever we are super picky. We’re not going to do a deal just to do a deal. We’ll walk away from any a great deal for a number of reasons. You know, we can grow this business without M&A as we are demonstrating every single quarter. So, for us to pull the trigger, it’s got to really pass all the tests.
Jeff Stantial: Great, Thanks a lot.
Operator: Our next question is from Ryan Sigdahl with Craig-Hallum Capital Group. Please proceed.
Ryan Sigdahl: Hey Charles. Curious how the media pipeline looks like internationally, you have the independent, but as you look at whether it’s the top 10 or whatever the right number is, but what type of opportunity is there?
Charles Gillespie: I think there’s a lot of opportunities there. I mean, obviously, there’s a lot of markets around the world that have regulated online gambling. If you think about the U.S. we’re in a good place, right? We’ve done two of the biggest media partnerships that have ever been done in the U.S. So, we’re not really looking for a third. In the UK, we’re now in a very good place. So, to the extent we did anything else, it would probably be in a third market. But at the same time, having announced so many important media partnerships, we are now very, very focused on simply delivering for our partners. So, there’s really no rush to do another one, and internal teams are, are very focused on simply executing on the partnerships that we’ve got.
Ryan Sigdahl: And then you mentioned Kentucky, and North Carolina, but Vermont, and Maine, also coming here, you have the bet state domains in both of those states. Curious, are those included in the guidance, and how do you think about those albeit relatively smaller market opportunities?
Charles Gillespie: So, our view is that we talk about, and we enter these states where we think there’ll be a viable market where there’s multiple operators, reasonable taxes, et cetera. At this point, we don’t think those states will have any meaningful impact on our North American business, and if that changes in the future, we’ll talk about it some more.
Ryan Sigdahl: Great. Thanks, guys. Good luck.
Operator: Our next question is from Clark Lampen with BTIG. Please proceed.
Clark Lampen: Thanks. Morning. I wanted to start with the North American IgA commentary that was in the presentation deck. It sounds like performance has been improving and you guys are capturing some share. Could you share a little bit more around what’s sort of driving that strength and how you’re thinking about momentum for that business in the back half of the year?
Charles Gillespie: Sure. Yeah, so, you know, in our heart of hearts, we’re casino people. We like to pursue the online casino performance marketing business before the sports betting performance marketing business. But of course, in the U.S. you’ve had many more states regulate sports betting than casinos somewhat kind of ironically for us. When we broke through in the U.S. we broke through with sports betting. We had, we created a very nice sports betting business for ourselves before casino really gained momentum. And finally, this year, both in Q1 and Q2 we’ve kind of broken through on the casino side. So, that’s really New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. And you know, what’s changed is we’ve simply been able to capture this high-intent traffic, better than we did in prior quarters. So, that means better search rankings, better conversion rates, better engagement, and more inventory, if you will, to sell to the operators.
Clark Lampen: That’s super helpful. And I guess as we think about sort of the drivers of improved guidance over the balance of the year, Charles, in your prepared remarks, you sort of talked about share and media partnerships as important sort of contributors alongside new launches. Could you help us think about, you know, maybe what’s sort of embedded or contemplated for the back half, you know, from a directional standpoint, maybe as it pertains to share and operator spend? Is it expected to be stable in increasing any color there you could provide would be useful?
