ZDGE - AMEX

Please continue to hold, ladies and gentlemen. Your conference will begin momentarily. Please continue to hold. Good day, and welcome to

Thank you, operator. During today's call, Jonathan Reich,

Thank you, Brian. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today to discuss

Thank you, Jonathan. Total revenue returned to growth in the third quarter, up 1.3% to $7.8 million. Revenue growth was restrained due to the partial quarter of TikTok returning to the advertising market and the continued expected declines at GuruShots. Third-quarter subscription revenue was up 13.4% from last year, and our net active subscriber growth trend continued to improve, up 37% year over year and sequentially for the straight quarter. As Jonathan mentioned, we also saw a shift towards lifetime subscription, which provides a recurring revenue source for 2.5 years following sign-up. Our deferred revenue, of which the vast majority is related to our subscription revenue, was $4.9 million. Deferred revenue has grown by 111% over the past seven quarters and has a 100% gross margin.

We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then 1 on your touch-tone phone. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. To withdraw your question, please press star 2. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. Once again, please press star 1 if you have a question or a comment. The question comes from Allen Klee. Please proceed.

Yes. Hi. Good job on this quarter. Definitely. So congrats on that. Some questions. When I look at your advertising revenue that did well, and there are different pieces of that, is there a way to kind of say, like, if you had to rank the different pieces that go into that or how you would rank the ones that had the biggest impact?

Hi, Allen. It's Jonathan. Thanks so much for the congratulations. You know, we pursue advertising as a comprehensive effort on our part, so it's kind of hard to answer that question with precision. A recurring theme is that we consistently broadcast that we've got an outstanding team focused on optimizing CPMs, that is cost per thousand, the metric that is used to value our inventory.

Okay. But you said during you said that TikTok came back at some point during the quarter. Does it feel how much of the quarter because you had your best to advertise your best I'm gonna always say this wrong. AARP MAU. You've ever put up, and it was up, like, 33% year over year. But their support of the overall market wasn't there for the whole quarter. Could you give us a sense of how long it was there for? And are you hearing anything about like any because we are hearing from some other you know, that advertising might be a little challenged. But with just whatever you could tell us would be helpful. Thanks.

Well, as you recall, there was a ban of TikTok in the U.S. that was not lifted until mid-February. When it was lifted, it took a little bit more time for the numbers to come back for TikTok to get back and see market and so on. They are and continue to be in the market very present. I cannot venture to speak to whatever policy decisions are made in Washington. Having said that, they continue to buy in the market and remain ever-present across advertising and marketing and all of the other initiatives that they are involved in.

Okay. But I'm still not understanding why they came back, but they didn't come back for the full quarter. Maybe, you know, less than half. Remember, our quarter started February 1, but they were not in the market for the entire quarter because the ban was not lifted until mid-February.

So what had happened was both Google and Apple were not availing users of new installs of the TikTok app, and TikTok was therefore not investing marketing dollars in trying to get users to download their app. When the government reversed the ban, TikTok began to invest in user acquisition once again.

And that has such a big factor on the market. What is there a Yeah. I can't quantify specifically how much of this is TikTok, but TikTok is obviously one of the leading mobile apps in the market. They spend a lot of money on marketing. And

Yeah. I mean, when they come to my language, we added in addition to Flog, we added Fmod as our mediation platform. And we constantly test different FMOM and try to get higher CPM for inventory. I hope that answered your question. I mean, in addition to the reason why Jonathan mentioned.

Got it. Oh, okay. Thank you. That's good color. Then in terms of your monthly average monthly active users, what I mean, did we expect that to just to continue to kind of grind down, or is anything what what can you do to stabilize that and then and then grow it?

Great question. So we are working on stabilizing it, and the focus is really on the well-developed markets. We have seen some improvement. I think, May to May, year over year, we were flat. And we continue to refine and optimize our user acquisition spend to bring on high-value users in those markets. We love users from all markets, but clearly, we're prioritizing our focus. Users that can provide a disproportionate impact to our overall revenue stream from the well-developed markets. To that end, we have expanded our investment in user acquisition for the

Okay. Got it. In terms of I see you had written with the Mojipedia as one of the things was the new feature of the Mojipedia Sandbox. Could you comment on that? What that is? Yeah. What you're doing there?

Yeah. The Emojipedia has been testing new features such as create your own emoji with AI or some mini emoji games. We are really focused on the upcoming release of digital stickers, which will be an adjacent vertical, and we plan that for World Emoji Day, which takes place in July. It will be our foray into a brand new content type that is not emoji-driven. Our hope is that based upon the similarity in terms of use of emojis and stickers, that will drive additional interest, traffic, and engagement to the platform.

Okay. Great. In terms of

I'm sorry. It was hard to hear. Can you repeat the question?

Just commenting on your

Yeah. That sounds very powerful. In terms of the so for Dataseeds, just in when do you think I mean, you've announced the transaction, but how do you think about how this gets rolled out?

So we are actively in the market building relationships with prospective customers. In addition to that, we have also published a research paper in conjunction with Pearl.ai and Emmet Research demonstrating that our dataset has advantages for automated recognition systems, the visual recognition systems. That is a marketing effort clearly to get our name out there. We've been very highly ranked on Hugging Face since we published that paper. With any new B2B product, for us, this is really brand new. We're now seeding the market, no pun intended, and building those relationships so that we can meet these bespoke needs. One of the problems that we have come to recognize is that many of these foundational models are not able to source these unique needs that they have with materiality and in a short period of time. The promise we bring to the table is being able to fill that need. Clearly, if we just look at images on the GuruShots side of the house, if a model has a specific need of unique content that is not something that they can readily get their hands on, we can reach out. We can launch a competition or even engage with our photo enthusiasts in our community in order to amass volume associated with that particular need. Of course, we can't handle every request that is on the market. By way of example, we're not providing photographs of internal organs, which are really important for AI models and how diseases are recognized and discovered and so on. Yet there are many, many use cases. Just to mention one, we've come across an entity that's trying to build a model that will render shadows accurately. That's a very complex quest, you know, issue. Just take as by way of example. You're sitting in your office, the curtains are open, you've got overhead lighting. How are shadows rendered? That's the sort of stuff that we can generate lots and lots of images in a relatively short period of time in order to help refine that model.

That's very interesting. Okay. Thank you. In terms of your talked about rolling out an audio AI, what would that look like? Is that like a ringtone, or what how should that and when are you thinking that coming out?

I think it's somewhat near term. We're gonna be rolling it out on a limited basis before the end of June. Then we will scale. Based upon iterative feedback and so on, it will be a feature within the

So this would be and it would be somewhat of a premium price versus like, a Well or Yeah. The business model is something where I imagine that it will gonna be somewhat available in our subscription offering and for those users that do not subscribe, well, we may put up some sort of a paywall or advertising paywall. That's all being worked on, you know, as we speak.

Okay. But this could just help with the momentum you already have with subscriptions.

Yes. That's correct. In addition to that, from a timing perspective, audio is still rather nascent in this type of consumer offering in the marketplace. We are hopeful that we can benefit from entering at an early point in time, which could lead to more users coming to us to engage with this new feature. That's what we're hoping for.

Okay. That's great. So just what I heard you say, one of the things is you said you think year over year, improvement in bottom line metrics could become more visible next quarter with what you've done in the cost structure. Taking into account traditional seasonality, the next quarter, is it a little slower because of the summertime? Or and could you remind us what you said about the restructuring or the Uber retention cost that you said will happen in fiscal fourth quarter?

Sure. So for the specific numbers, I'm gonna have Yi answer your question. In terms of let's call it, seasonality in the business, as I think you know, typically, our Q4 is a little bit lighter because of the summer. It's the month of May, June, July, our fiscal year begins on August 1. At the same point in time, we are still very, very focused on making sure that we're growing the business.

When you say growing the biz, though, are you including the top line?

Yes. That's correct.

Okay. Great. And then But I'll just you know, I'll underscore you know, the obvious as was very clear from both Yi's comments and my comments. Our cash flow has and will continue to be outstanding. The restructuring certainly is helping us. I think that we've said that, you know, there could be up to another, like, $4 million of cash flow because of restructuring. The restructuring has unfolded very, very well. The fact that the GuruShots retention bonus is almost behind us from a payout perspective. The fact that we have tailed or not tailed, but cut back on user acquisition spend for GuruShots, while we get our hands around what GuruShots 2.0 will ultimately be, all of those are contributing to our improved cash flow. So from a cash flow perspective, I would underscore that we're doing really, really nicely. Yi, you may want to get some of the more specific numbers about the retention bonus and other.

Yes. Hi, Allen. My name is Patrick. Alan is interested. Right. So the tail end of the restructuring charges in Q4 would be about $325,000. This is because the accounting standard we can only expense and pay out during the period during the retention period. It's still with the company. So after July, it will be gone. In terms of charges, but it's seven payments would be paid throughout, you know, the next five months after year-end. In terms of retention bonus, we have charged everything to the P&L, but the cash payment the last payment was actually made in May. With the April payroll, if you will. Which was about $323,000. So Q4 accounting for cash flow will be about $600,000 related to retention bonus and related to restructuring charges. I hope that answers your question.

Yes. Thank you.

Okay.

I'm trying to think if I think I hit most of the things I wanted. I think those were my questions. Well, this was a very good quarter. So thank you, and congrats.

Thank you, Allen.