The acknowledgment that handing over your data and your money to Google, and hoping for the best, and especially when that is a critical part of your future, is increasingly viewed as a risky strategy that people have to take their own fate in their own hands. And that’s one of the things that I think is so compelling about our offering right now is that, we are not saying trust us instead of them, and we will do the same thing they do just with more focus because we don’t own YouTube. That is not what we do. We actually tell them we will give you the details of all of your performance. It’s your data, you take it with you, you own it. And that way, you learn and you always own your future. That part where advertisers want to own their own future, it feels like that is more important to them than it ever has been, and I do believe that the regulatory scrutiny and all that — there are a lot of people that have read the Texas Attorney General’s complaint, and have thought about the effects that that has on the ecosystem and it does make them want to be more deliberate about where they spend and it does make them, in many cases, I think a better partner for us, and it helps us to see what kind of partner we want to be to them.
But I do believe it has contributed to our growth, but it’s really hard to quantify is the short answer. Thanks for the question, Mark.
Mark Mahaney: Thank you, Jeff.
Chris Toth: Thanks, Mark. And then one last question, John.
Operator: And our last question comes from Matt Swanson with RBC Capital Markets. Please proceed, Matt.
Matt Swanson: Yeah, great. Thank you so much for squeezing me in. Jeff, I feel like we’ve spent a lot of time on the call kind of thinking through CTV publishers and why strategically it makes sense for them to open up more, but I guess thinking of it from the advertiser side, as CTV continues to scale and as the complexity of buying gets larger, how important is it for them to get back to a single pane of glass? And you’ve used this term currency a bunch in terms of data consistency and kind of how can that drive more programmatic versus direct as maybe advertisers start to pressure those publishers?
Jeff Green: When you say a single pane of glass, can you elaborate? What — do you mean just spending on CTV?
Matt Swanson: Yeah, sorry. Yeah, so in CTV, as opposed to the idea of when your budgets are small, direct might seem more feasible. And as CTV budgets grow, and the complexity grows, and the number of suppliers grow, how much more important it is to them to start to create more automated processes?
Jeff Green: I see. I love this question. Thank you. So when you — it wasn’t that long ago that as consumers, we were just using one or two apps on a Roku, where at least five, six, seven, maybe 10 years ago, I just used the Amazon and Netflix. And now, there’s a lot more options and almost all of them have ads. It wasn’t that long ago that it was one or two, and then it was only a few others, and then most of them had limited ads, and now there’s a lot more and they all have ads. So, if you’re an advertiser, you can’t just go to one company and say, I want to buy some ads, and then have an understanding of the way frequency caps in particular will be used. You have to be thinking across all of these apps and you have to think about how many times am I showing the same user this ad irrespective of what show or what profile or what app they’re using to watch it on.
And so, as the number of options goes up, and the amount of ad inventory goes up, the need to automate and be data-driven, and have a persistent sense of anonymized identity is greater than it’s ever been before. And that’s partly because the ad prices haven’t gone down. And in fact, for the premium stuff, for the things they really want, they’ve gone up. And that’s not necessarily any longer because of scarcity. The scarcity has actually gone away. The amount of inventory has gone up, but there is scarcity when it relates to having all the metadata that you want, in order to make an informed decision. And there will, to some extent, always be scarcity around the exact audience that people want to reach. And so, by making that more available, that’s how you get the premium.
And so, all of the streamers have figured this out. This is the way to get the premium. And I think they’re all on a path — that to me makes sense, like, all of them are doing the right things. And that is one of the things that we have said about CTV really from the beginning is that it’s perfectly fragmented. It is fragmented enough that no one could be draconian and create a walled garden. People doubted us when we said that initially and I think that’s proven to be true, but it also is consolidated enough that you have very smart people running those and they’re going to be hyper-rational, and as a result, we’re seeing them all do, in my view, what is the right thing. Some of them are different parts of the sort of adoption or innovation curve.
They’re on different parts of the journey, different places in the journey, but they’re all on the right path. So, I’m very excited about the state of CTV. I really do think it has huge implications onto the — on the entire open Internet. I do think it’s leading the open Internet as it relates to the premium content, and I’m optimistic that digital audio is right behind it. There are lots of leaders in digital audio that are doing more than what CTV has done, but there’s still a lot of catching up to do as well, and I’m super optimistic about what that means for things like journalism as they’re really starting to think about it the right way. But very optimistic about the open Internet led by CTV. Really appreciate the question.
Chris Toth: Thanks so much, Matt. You can close out the call now, John. Thank you.
Operator: Thank you. This concludes today’s conference and you may disconnect your lines at this time.
