The big adtech firms have released their Q2 earnings for 2023 and, while PubMatic’s revenue growth remained flat at around 0.4 per cent, Magnite, LiveRamp and The Trade Desk have all reported growth.
Updated 11/8: Corrected reporting regarding The Trade Desk’s profit.
The Trade Desk saw a 23 per cent bump in revenue in the three months ending 30 June compared to the same time in 2022. It also saw a 22 per cent revenue growth in the six months ended 30 June compared to the same period last year.
“With advances in areas such as CTV, retail and identity, we are helping the world’s largest brands buy media on the open internet with more precision and transparency than ever,” said Jeff Green, co-founder and CEO of The Trade Desk.
The Trade Desk returned US$33 million (just over AU$50 million) in profit — a US$52 million (almost $80 million) improvement year-over-year.
“With the launch of Kokai, we are surfacing that value more intuitively and putting data next to every decision,” said Green. Kokai is the company’s AI-powered media buying platform.
“We are helping our clients put their first-party data to work, we’re making it easier for partners to integrate with us, and we’re helping clients get the full value of AI as a co-pilot across many aspects of the campaign process. As a result of these innovations, I’m confident we will continue to gain share, especially in key growth markets such as CTV,” added Green.
Turning to Magnite, the story is similar. A 10.7 per cent jump in revenue but its cost of revenue almost doubled which led to its overall losses jumping by nearly 200 per cent. Strong 42 per cent growth across CTV and 39 per cent growth in mobile means that the company does not have to worry too much.
“We delivered a solid second quarter, with both total contribution ex-TAC and CTV contribution ex-TAC growing high single digits. We continue to grow our market share in both CTV and DV+, as well as launching new products and services to better serve our partners. We feel very good about how we’re positioned to assist the CTV market participants accelerate their transitions to programmatic CTV over the next several years,” said Michael G.
Barrett, president and CEO of Magnite.
Turning to LiveRamp, revenue was up 8 per cent year-over-year and an integration with Google Display & Video 360’s PAIR means that the company should be well set once third-party cookies disappear. It returned a US$2.3 million operating profit (around AU$3.5 million).
“We’re off to a strong start to the fiscal year, with first quarter revenue and operating income exceeding our expectations, operating margin expanding by double-digits and our first quarter ever with positive GAAP operating income,” said LiveRamp CEO Scott Howe.
“Our data collaboration platform remains in high demand with the world’s most sophisticated marketers, helping them deliver relevant messages and measure results across all addressable channels, including social networks, the open web, programmatic, retail media networks and connected TV.”
PubMatic, however, saw revenue stay nearly flat, climbing slightly from US$63 million to US$63.3 million (almost AU$97 million to almost AU$97.2 million).
Its technology and development and sales and market costs increased slightly but its general and administrative costs almost doubled. This, however, was due to MediaMath filing for bankruptcy, leaving PubMatic with a bad debt expense of US$5.7 million (AU$8.75 million).
“While macro factors are weighing on eCPMs, we continue to increase monetized impressions amongst a challenging environment for brand advertising. We are focused on the drivers of long-term market share gains: deeper relationships with publishers and ad buyers, TAM expansion through innovative new products like Activate and Convert, and increased revenue mix from higher growth drivers like CTV and SPO. With our focus on operational excellence and efficiency, we expect to deliver strong profitability and cash flow this year,” said Steve Pantelick, CFO at PubMatic.
The 30 per cent growth in CTV revenue and 13 per cent increase in publishers on the PubMatic platform mean that the company is far from in bad straits.
