We began to leverage the consolidated database, as Herve indicated, by launching new products against it. It’s pretty stunning to us because it’s not something Emerald had ever done before, but to stand up a new content product and within a few weeks, have almost 300,000 subscribers to that product that horizontally cuts across all of our sectors, as an example. And there’s massive opportunity then as we continue to refine the new approach to then monetize at a much higher level and in a much more consistent level with a bigger focus on leads. And so while it’s a disappointing year in the financial results of that business, it was actually a very successful year in the transformation of that business, and we’re really excited about the prospects of what that could mean in 2024 and ’25 and beyond.
Allen Klee: Thank you. Can you provide an update on your software business in terms of plans of expanding that to new verticals and how you’re thinking about the that shifting to profitability over time?
Herve Sedky: Absolutely. So the trends are similar to what we have shared in the past. We still see an average of $1 billion per month in gross merchandise value going through our platforms. We grew our customer base by 30% year-on-year. Our customer net revenue retention rate is at 110%. So we’re seeing some very strong metrics around retention, around acquisition of new customers. And while we are not going to give the details of our expansion into other sectors, I will say that we have made some very good progress with the signing — with recent signings, and others that are in the works to really penetrate new sectors from the ones that we’re in today. But today is not the day to announce that.
Allen Klee: Great. Thank you. And in your trade show business, I think last quarter, you talked about around — being at around 80% of where you had been. I’m just wondering, could you just give a comment on where you feel the attendance and the amount of exhibitors are and how you’re thinking about pricing and the opportunity to — what pricing has gone up and what the opportunity to potentially increase it in the future?
Herve Sedky: So the numbers we gave last quarter were our expectations for the year, and so that hasn’t changed generally on attendance and revenues versus the pre-pandemic period. So those numbers are consistent with our expectations. In the volatility on the guidance is related to the content side, not the event side. So it doesn’t change that progression that we spoke about before. We continue to see strong improvements in our overall yield. We’re pushing kind of 9%, 10% increases year-over-year right now, in yield in 2023. We surely expect that to moderate a little bit as we go forward. But we have a very significant focus on pricing here. We’ve talked before about creating a centralized and dedicated pricing function that brings science to pricing, that allows us to think about pricing to value and optimize overall yield.
And so when you think about optimizing overall yield, it becomes more of a function of where have we delivered more value to our customers, how do we price against that value so we get credit for it. Some areas may not have price increases, some areas may have prices go down. But in aggregate, overall yield is going up because customers are doing business with us on the terms that they want to do business with us. They’re buying the products and services and assigning value to those products and services and we could price against that value. And so we’ve made some really strong strides, a little bit of catch-up, admittedly in ’23, relative to what was being done before, but surely think that it’s a mid-single-digit opportunity for us annually going forward in optimizing the yield that we get out of our products and services.
