Outbrain Inc. (NASDAQ:OB) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

The newer stuff of image upsizing and all that, that is still available to a limited number of testers.

Dan Day: Okay. Great. Thanks. Just to turn it quickly to gross revenue and take rates, if we look beyond 2023, like I know there were some pressures from minimum guarantee deals that you did on sort of the take rate year-over-year in 2023. As we look to ’24 and put our model together, like just to make it easy, if we were to assume gross revenue is flat, is there any reason we’d think that take rate would expand just from whether it’s minimum guarantees rolling off or anything other puts and takes there on take rate for ’24 relative to ’23?

Jason Kiviat: Yeah. So, we don’t have a specific number for you or anything like that. Obviously, kind of always when the take rates come up, I mentioned that we focus on ex-TAC dollars and not really the take rate percentage, especially of the total portfolio. But there’s certainly obviously as the rates kind of come up these last couple quarters, we’ve been focused on some of the things we talked about actually when it was coming down in the quarters before that, which are optimizing deal performance and scaling some of our new supply and existing supply to drive higher rates, and we’ve had some success there. We continue to focus on that. It’s one of our — one of the main things we do, both manually optimizing and AI optimizing, learning the audience of our partners and serving them better.

So, the kind of thing that we do feel gets better in time and it typically takes several quarters. But mix is always a factor as well. It could be a positive or negative factor to even a point in a given quarter. So, it’s hard to say. Obviously, it depends also on the demand environment and some of the things that we are doing with Onyx and the expansion of video we see as margin lifters going forward as well. So obviously, our goal is to drive it back up.

Dan Day: Understood. Thanks, guys.

Operator: Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Our next question will be from Ygal Arounian of Citigroup. Please go ahead.

Ygal Arounian: Hey, good morning, guys. Hope you are all doing well, and families and employees back in Israel as well. Just maybe on Onyx, if we could expand on that a little bit? Looks to be ramping well. And I know that one specifically is geared more towards brand budgets. And with the impact you’re seeing on brand, it feels like maybe you’re not seeing it on Onyx, but maybe it’s doing better than expected. Just some of the puts and takes around as that launches in the current macro will be helpful to understand.

David Kostman: Hey, Ygal. First, thanks for your kind words. It’s David. So, Onyx launched in [indiscernible], as I said. It’s been a successful launch. It helped us position the company, Outbrain, in dialogues with the big six hold companies in a very different way where we can broaden the value proposition and really offer a full-funnel offering that we think is quite unique in the open web. So, we work with brands from performance up to consideration and awareness. The formats are different than our traditional native formats. So, it’s really focused on primarily video and it ties to the acquisition of video intelligence and pushing us more into in-stream video that is more relevant for Onyx-type campaigns. We have High-Impact Display that relies a lot on our brand studio where we take existing creatives and help the brands work on them to generate better levels of attention and impact from those.

Number-wise, when we launched in Q3, I mean, these budgets are normally determined sort of ahead of time. We were relatively, what we think, conservative in our assumptions of the $10 million to $20 million. It was a broad range. We still stand behind that. We feel very comfortable about where we’re tracking. It’s pipeline, month-over-month growth, it’s very strong. Current environment is not very helpful, as Jason mentioned. Part of the impact we see generally on Q4 is brand budgets pulling back from, for example, news-related pages and general macro environment is very volatile. So, we’re taking that into account when we talk about the guidance for Q4, but we’re very excited about it. When we look at it strategically, it really changes the whole value proposition for us, to our advertisers, our positioning in the market.