Cinedigm Corp. (NASDAQ:CIDM) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Chris McGurk: Well, I think, the big thing to think about and I would love to compare us to in the same breath as Pluto. But keep in mind, Pluto has the might of Viacom, the combination of non-Pluto assets with — non-specific Pluto assets, the entire Viacom of interactive assets are in that mix and that they — looks like they had their first year-over-year revenue decline. That’s just simply the law of big numbers and them being at a much further along stage in their growth curve than we are. We are where Pluto was five years or six years ago in terms of the growth curve. So we have a lot more growth to go before we start to hit headwinds and hard year-over-year comps law big numbers type thing. So that’s number one. The second piece is, if you kind of look where we are in the value chain for streaming, I actually think we are very well positioned even with any sort of macro headwinds across advertising in general.

As players look and say, wow, expensive brand advertising at $35 to $60 CPMs, maybe not the most cost effective move for us, but how do we still stay top of mind and let’s look at more cost effective alternatives in the spot and programmatic markets. So that’s where parties can really make — hit 80 million people across our platform, premium connected TV inventory and a big swath of that and advertise against high quality movies and shows and brands that — and — but for far less than they would be paying to Via — to Paramount or Netflix or others. So we think, that said, that doesn’t mean that we still have a tremendous amount of headroom. We are in the low-teen CPMs on average. We think there’s 30% to 40% headroom improvement even with the macro conditions and still be competitive and that doesn’t even take into account we have made tremendous success on the direct sales side.

On the direct sales side, we had one of our best months ever in October just a few months after we launched the service. So we think those kinds of trends, all combined, make us poised very well to compete in an environment where some of the biggest players are crying uncle.

Brian Kinstlinger: Great. Those details are super helpful. Last question I have, it’s a smaller piece of your business, but nonetheless, a focus to grow and create and monetize 66 million downloads on podcasting is pretty impressive. I know it’s early. You have got 30 podcasts. Talk about where you hope to add content there? And how do I think about revenue from that — the contribution either on a go-forward basis or an existing basis on that type of downloads, if you are able to share?

Erick Opeka: Yeah. So we haven’t broken out that business specifically in terms of revenue. But I will tell you that, it’s now — at these volumes, it’s certainly at a full year run rate is a multimillion dollar business for us at this stage of the game. We think the implications — obviously, it’s an ad-based business today. We think two key ways of monetizing. In the short-term, obviously, it’s — and we are having a tremendous amount of success direct selling that inventory. What’s unique is, while we have connected TV inventory and people can hit it programmatically, if they want to do a 360 campaign of web app, connected TV, social and podcast in a specific content vertical, we have the ability to do that and that a great example is in this last quarter, while we were writing the horror wave it not flat forget there were tons of other fantastic horror movies as well and they were all advertising with us.