Digital Turbine, Inc. (NASDAQ:APPS) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Timothy Horan: Can you give us a sense of how much of the 25% decline is from pricing and how much from volumes? And can you just talk about the trajectory on pricing because it sounds like you think pricing has stabilized at this point? Or maybe just talk like monthly what’s happened with pricing would be great.

Bill Stone: Yes. Sure, Tim. Let me kind of break out our on-device business from our ad tech business. What we’re seeing right now on pricing on the ad tech side is that’s the major driver more so than volumes. Volumes were relatively flat from quarter-over-quarter. So the pricing I referenced in my remarks, 10% to 20% is across the board regardless of ad type or pretty much regardless of geography, whether that’s banners, interstitials, videos or what have you. So, it’s primarily a pricing story on the demand side. On the ODS side, the major drivers is not pricing. Our revenue per device actually went up from December of this past year, December of the prior year. So that’s something we’re proud of that we’re able to hang in there on pricing. Issue there was much more around volumes on the device side. So, the reduction in volumes is really would hurt us from a macro perspective.

Timothy Horan: And just the trends on pricing, sorry, on both segments — or I guess, more on the ad tech side?

Bill Stone: Yes. So our expectation right now is we’re in the trough. Our expectation is we’re going to see some rebounding as we get into later parts of this year, but we’re dealing with at the beginning of the year, a lot of advertisers thinking about their ad spends for the year. We’re also seeing variations in verticals. I touched on some big brands that we’re spending more dollars with us in my remarks. We’re proud of that. But some of the gaming providers and gaming performance providers have pulled back and those kind of operating some headwinds and tailwinds against each other.

Operator: The next question will come from Dan Day with B. Riley. Please go ahead.

Dan Day: Yes. I didn’t hear anything. You talked a little bit about challenges with the prepaid content media. I didn’t hear anything on the update on the Verizon and AT&T content media partnerships that we’ve talked about. So just an update there and when you sort of expect to get that segment back to growth?

Bill Stone: Yes. So I’m not going to make any comment on one specific partner on the call, Dan, here today. What I’ll just say is we have some work to do. We’ve got a lot of interest from partners and doing a lot of different things on content media, but we’re not where we need to be right now. It’s a focus area for us to get improved. But at the same point in time, we’re not prioritizing that above other things like the potential of things like Games Hub and getting our alternative app store things launched. But we’ve got some work to do there. We’re not satisfied where we need to be and it needs to get better.

Dan Day: Yes. Understood. Another one I’ve heard from investors lately. And I’m just curious — and it’s mostly an issue for other ad tech companies, I think, but curious if you’re seeing any concerns. People are starting to talk more about the SDK run time changes and how that’s created some challenges for the kind of mobile ad tech networks out there. And that might be driving some of the weakness that we’ve seen in recent quarters. Just curious if you’re running into any challenges with that, as that gets rolled out to more and more devices or if there’s any I think it would be confined mostly with the legacy AdColony assets, but just curious in general, what you’re seeing anything there?

Bill Stone: Yes. So no, we’re not seeing that as a headwind on our business right now. As you mentioned on the AdColony side, we are in the process of consolidating our exchanges. And so given the overlap of publishers in some cases and not in other cases, that’s putting a little pressure on short-term revenues, but it’s the right thing to do for our partners, not to have to deal with multiple exchanges. So I think that’s something that will be a tailwind for us next year, but not right in the current quarter. What we’re actually doing though is putting in a lot of different type of ad tech enhancements, whether those are new renderings, new bidding methodologies and so on, and that started to bear some fruit for us. And that’s something I’m excited about because it’s commonplace in the industry.

And there are things that the legacy companies we acquired had not done. So our view right now is that will provide some nice thrust and opportunity for growth in our business.

Operator: Your next question will come from Anthony Stoss with Craig-Hallum. Please go ahead.

Anthony Stoss: I wanted to follow up on your comment about helping launch App Store. You said one is live and another one is going to go live sometime this quarter. Can you help us understand like perhaps your goals by the end of the year, how many you think are going to be up, how big a business this could become? And what’s the business model for apps to get paid on helping folks launch these app stores?