Jason Kiviat: Sure. So maybe I’ll start on the demand trend that we’ve seen. So it’s been kind of more the same. I’d say we haven’t seen a material increase or decrease really for a couple quarters now. We did drive yield or RPM growth year-over-year for the second quarter in a row. So there is some, some strength there. Now, a lot of that’s coming, as I said, from, from breaking our previous highs on click-through rates, which comes obviously from improvements in our tech and our ability to predict, what to show to different users. And on the contrary, we’ve seen pricing or CPC remaining down year-over-year. So part of that is because we’re optimizing not for pricing, but for yields. Obviously, that’s what makes us in our partner’s money.
And so, driving higher click-through rates at the cost of pricing might be something that we’re — that’s inherent in our model here. So it’s hard to say that pricing down is a sign of anything deteriorating versus we’re able to drive higher yields from it. And as far as geographically in Europe, we’ve seen stronger trends in Spain, Italy, and Germany, Germany’s our second largest market have been showing really positive metrics over Q1 into Q2, relative to U.S., which has been flatter. And then, verticals, we don’t really overly kind of rely on any verticals. I mean, just for color, we’ve seen, strength and entertainment and health, all CPG retail and tech probably have been weaker verticals for us. But again, not overly meaningful to our results, those verticals.
David Kostman: And maybe in terms of, I’ll take the allocation question. So we have a very strong balance sheet. We are continuously looking to use some of this cash flow for acquisitions. And we think buyback is still an attractive opportunity. So we have an authorization and we still have around, I think, $8 million on that authorization.
Unidentified Analyst: Okay. Great. Thanks guys. Appreciate the call.
Operator: Thank you. [Operator Instructions] And we’ll take our next question from James Heaney from Jefferies. Please go ahead, James.
James Heaney: Great. Good morning and thanks for the question. So you saw 40% growth in ad spend on the Zemanta DSP. So curious if you could just talk about what’s driving the success from that channel, and also just how you’re balancing spend coming from third party DSPs? Thank you.
David Kostman: Hi, James. Sorry, I didn’t get the second part. I’ll start with the, with the first part on Zemanta. It’s really, we are strategically shifting some certain types of performance advertisers that have very large elastic budgets into that platform. So given a numerical example, if they spend with Outbrain, $100,000. Now they will shift it to Zemanta and they, since they can also buy a lot of third party supply as effectively and delivering ROAS. They will spend the same 100, hopefully, or close to that on Outbrain and will now spend total 150. We will also get a service fee on that like a DSP, and we will see increased and very effective spend in ROAS for that advertiser. So there’s certain types of segments, it’s very technical that were the Zemanta platform fits better and delivers better ROAS.
So we’re shifting some of those and that’s been very successful for us and for these advertisers. And I think that’s a great growth opportunity. And James can you repeat the second question on the DSP?
James Heaney: Yes. Sorry. The second part of the question was just about — just overall trends that you’re seeing from spend that’s coming from third party DSPs?
David Kostman: Okay. So we see I mean, on the bright side of the business good spend on that from our programmatic partners. It’s about, it’s a little less than 20% of our total business comes from, from a DSP into our network, but we’ve seen stable positive trends overall.
James Heaney: Great. And then maybe if I could just ask one more quick question on, you know, you talked about your AI creative tool that you’re giving customers. Just any sense for what some of these tools are? And then just any case studies of clients seeing success or improved return on investment from implementing these tools?
David Kostman: So this, and the use of this tool is very exciting when you see the — it allows customers to much faster test with different types of images and texts. And in real time, understand what’s working, what’s not working on which placement and iterate on it in a way that prior would require a lot of manual intervention. So I think the models are learning it and automatically updating. It’s allowed you to test thousands of variations which you couldn’t do before. We’ve seen increased adoption of it. And right now, it’s still early, we’re measuring ROAS that it’s definitely improving the ROAS for advertise, because it’s optimizes their campaigns. We see — right now, we’re really focused on adoption and working and analyzing that. So again, that’s, we, we mentioned that on the call. It’s a big part of our investments generally are now on AI, on text and images, and also on internal tools, leveraging AI to optimize our business.
James Heaney: Great. Thank you.
Operator: Thank you. And that concludes our question and answer session. I’d like to turn the floor back to management for closing remarks.
David Kostman: Thank you very much everyone for attending the call today. We are very excited about the growth opportunities we highlighted today. We think the open internet is a great opportunity. Being a player that can provide the full funnel solution is what we’re very, very focused on. Again, driving brand building consideration and performance. And look forward to updating you on our focus on our next call.
Operator: Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today’s teleconference. We thank you for your participation. You may disconnect your lines at this time and have a great day.
