MediaAlpha, Inc. (NYSE:MAX) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Pat Thompson: Yeah. And on the AR side, I think that, Q4 is a big quarter for us on the health side and so we have a number of folks that spent big in the final days of AEP and OEP, and so those were built at the end of the month and so we had some AR from that. We have had since no collection difficulties. From a revolver standpoint, just kind of walk through the chronology of it, we drew $25 million on it on April 1st to fund an acquisition. We have paid off $20 million of that over the course of 2022. We still have $5 million outstanding on it and we do not anticipate needing to draw on that going forward.

Daniel Grosslight: Got it. Thank you.

Steve Yi: Thanks, Dan.

Operator: We will take our next question from Mike Zaremski with BMO.

Mike Zaremski: Hey. Great. Good evening. Moving back to the Property & Casualty side of the business, I am curious, are you seeing your revenues more concentrated than in the past with a smaller subset and do you expect that to continue in the near-term? And if so, just curious, does that mean that transaction values per lead will remain a bit depressed, because you would need more just participants — meaningful participants in the marketplace to come back into kind of lift out transaction value levels as well?

Pat Thompson: Yeah. And Mike, this is Pat. I can take that one. So the — on the concentration on the P&C side, it has become more concentrated in Q1 versus Q4 and that is caused by one carrier pivoting to growth mode and spending more on that. So the number one spender in Q4 was a lower percentage than they were in — than they will be in Q1. Will that trend continue? I would say it will continue for a while until other carriers start to come back in a big way and then we would expect to see the concentration start to decline. And the real question is one of timing, which is when do other carriers start to come back in a big way? But when that happens, we have a high degree of confidence that the concentration will start to be a bit more dispersed.

On the second part of your question regarding transaction value per lead, the thing I can say is that it is up meaningfully in Q1 versus Q4 and I think the big reason for that is — two big reasons, one is one advertiser is generally more active and bidding more, and secondly, it’s coverage, which is some states may have been off or with very low bids and they have taken those up pretty considerably or turned it back on, which has had a positive impact to the overall marketplace.

Steve Yi: And I think the carriers in our marketplace, I think, recognized, because of the marketplace model and because of the supply partnerships that we have, that as pricing goes up, they will get more volume, even if they are the highest given bidder for a given consumer segment. And our past experience has been that it’s absolutely a competitive market environment will drive up pricing and we expect to see those competitive dynamics revert back to a more normalized situation as the year progresses. But it’s been also that our experience that you only need a small number of major carriers to be back in place to really replicate the competitive dynamics you need to start to get every advertiser really paying based on their expected return on ad spend independent of competitive considerations.

Mike Zaremski: Got it. That’s helpful. And second question is sticking with P&C, just curious if any changes in the marketplace in terms of home insurance and bundling or that’s still obviously a long-term growth driver? Just curious if anything is changing on that front?