Doug Valenti: It is. It absolutely is. We have very good incremental margins right now across the board except in insurance, where the incremental margins are fine and accretive, but not yet where they will be as we get more top line out of that vertical and more media efficiency out of that vertical with the participation of more and more carriers. That’s kind of the gist of it really pretty mathematically simple and not complicated. That’s exactly what’s going on. And we’ve said this all last year, we said listen, we €“ I think we said it, the year before. We were not going to stop investing in long-term growth and big initiatives during the insurance downturn, because they knew it was transitory, and we wanted to be ready for the other side.
And this is the other side. And as I said, I think we kind of — from our perspective, given the size and the attractiveness of the opportunities we have in front of us, we feel like it was pretty optimally done. Again, we did it even in December, which was a very soft quarter from every angle with a lot going on seasonally from — insurance went down. They got down again because of the late season winter storm. And then you had — we had started to see some impacts along the edges, on low-income consumers and we still drove $1 million of adjusted EBITDA. And you said this last call, we know how to make money. And so despite, all that despite spending very aggressively, but in a QuinStreet kind of disciplined way on big opportunities, we still made money.
So you know we’re going to make money, and we expect to just make more and more money in coming quarters, as we continue to get more back in insurance.
John Campbell: Okay. Makes a lot of sense. And then also on the consumer credit-driven verticals, there’s a lot of fear out there around kind of deteriorating consumer balance sheets. That’s not necessarily bad, for some of those businesses I guess, maybe personal loans, if you can go, a little bit deeper down the spectrum. But I’m looking for a little bit of commentary or just some color around, how that progressed in the quarter, maybe start of the quarter and maybe even up until January, kind of what you guys are seeing in that channel, what the consumer appetite looks like versus the sources of credit.
Doug Valenti: Sure. Let’s start with credit cards, which is one of — is a big business for us and good business for us. We’re seeing very strong consumer demand, particularly for travel-related cards, which is what we’re — we have the most leverage to. That’s the biggest part of our mix. And particularly in travel-related cards with prime and near-prime consumers, which is a dominant consumer base that we serve in our credit cards business. As far as the issuers go, and their credit standards we have seen almost no timing. Strong demand, enthusiasm, very successful limited time offers. Any adjustments that we’ve seen have been very incremental on the edges and probably represent less than 5% impact, on the aperture of their marketing appetite.
So, it’s kind of full steam ahead, with the big banks and the credit card issuers and we serve all big credit card issuers. And so we’re keeping a close eye on it. They’re keeping a close eye on it, but their balance sheets are in great shape. The consumers are not even yet back to pre-pandemic card balances or delinquency rates. And so we’re — the consumer, is in very good shape there. Where we are seeing some deterioration of credit, and it’s been — and it’s fully incorporated into our outlook and offset as you said, by other things we do in the same business, is in personal loans. A little bit more of tightening than credit cards, as the lower income consumer is under more pressure, understandably from inflation than those prime and near-prime consumers.
