Michael L. Blend
Thanks, Kyle. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining System1 on our Q2 earnings call. I'm happy to report Q2 was a very solid quarter for System1 with solid execution driven by our company-wide adoption of Agentic coding. Our adjusted EBITDA came in at $11.7 million, up 18% year-over-year. Second quarter revenue was approximately $78 million and adjusted gross profit was $41 million, representing a 6% year-over-year increase. Our Owned & Operated products continue to perform well and had a particularly strong Q2. Revenue increased 34% year-over-year and 8% sequentially. We saw great performance from each of our major products, which includes Startpage, our private search engine, MapQuest, our mapping solution and CouponFollow, our leading promo code service. We have strong momentum across the entire product portfolio. Our teams are rolling out regular product improvements and in turn, consumers are responding very favorably. In our marketing business lines, we continue to see volatility at our largest revenue source, which is Google. While the overall Google advertising market is relatively stable, the Google Partner Network we work with is going through significant changes. And while our team is doing a nice job navigating the Google volatility, our marketing businesses are not yet back in growth mode. On the technology front, our heavy investment in AI-powered Agentic coding is paying off. We set an ambitious road map for product development and platform expansion in 2025, and we've been executing ahead of schedule on everything. We believe that our investments are going to drive revenue growth while at the same time improving margins. I want to talk briefly about the skill set we have developed around Agentic coding. While many companies talk about engineering efficiencies gained from Agentic coding, System1 is one of the few that is using it to rebuild a sophisticated legacy technology platform. Now this is a very complex project as we have to essentially keep our trains running while rebuilding the engine and tracks at the same time. Looking forward, I think there's a real opportunity to leverage our early adopter Agentic coding skill set to help other companies in a similar way. There are literally thousands of legacy technology platforms that can benefit from this skill set, and there are several ways System1 can participate in the upside of modernizing their platforms. We intend to pursue this opportunity pretty aggressively in the future. Now let's get into more details on our products segment, which, as I mentioned, is on a strong run. We feel it is really important for investors to understand our products business as management believes this segment alone is worth significantly more than investors currently value our entire company. Products revenue was $24 million, up 34% year-over-year and 8% sequentially. Adjusted gross profit was $22.7 million, up 32% year-over-year and up 8% sequentially. This segment is performing very well and is well positioned to sustain this momentum going forward. I'd like to spend some time on each of our major product lines as I know many of our investors have been focused on our marketing segment and may not be as familiar with our product segment. Let's start first with CouponFollow, our promo code and couponing service. CouponFollow is comprised of 3 major product segments. First, we have our CouponFollow website, which is a leading couponing and promo code service in Google's organic rankings. Consumers visit our CouponFollow website when they're looking to find a promo code as they are completing online purchases. In addition to our website, we also have our [ Sinley ] browser extension, which is a patent protected solution that automatically inserts promo codes at checkout when shoppers are on a shopping site. [ Sinley ] operates under its own brand and also powers B2B promo code solutions for third-party web browsers. And finally, CouponFollow offers a nascent cashback shopping business that consumers use to obtain cash rebates when they shop online. Combined, all these businesses are on a roll and Coupon user sessions are up over 40% year-over-year. Now let's talk about Startpage, our private search engine that competes with DuckDuckGo. Startpage offers a search solution that enables consumers to search the Internet while maintaining their privacy. Our Startpage search technology is a sophisticated combination of search results from Google and Bing, proprietary search widgets like mapping and a privacy solution that protects our users' online identity and search history. Similar to CouponFollow, Startpage comprises several business lines. We have our core Startpage search engine, desktop browser extensions and a suite of private mobile browsers that integrate our search engine and maintain users' privacy while they're browsing the Internet. Startpage is growing very quickly, and our users are up 30% year-over-year. In addition to our core search engine, we recently introduced 2 new products in the search and AI space. First, we just launched a new AI privacy product called Vanish Private AI by Startpage. Vanish is a mobile app that allows people to maintain their user privacy while using a variety of popular AI chat bots like ChatGPT. We also recently leveraged our Startpage search engine technology to launch ONE.org, our new charitable search engine. ONE.org lets users support charitable causes like hunger relief and animal welfare just by searching the web. While we don't expect Vanish to displace ChatGPT or ONE.org to overtake Google, the search market is so huge and profitable that a small market share translates into meaningful high-margin revenue. We have shown that with Startpage, and we look to replicate our success with our newer offerings. Our last major product line is MapQuest, the OG of online mapping that I'm sure many of you have fond memories of. We acquired MapQuest several years ago from Verizon, and frankly, the brand was in significant decline when we acquired it. I'm really pleased that we've been able to turn around MapQuest and get it back into growth mode. MapQuest is made up of several complementary businesses. The most well known is our original MapQuest consumer-facing service, which includes both our website and a suite of mobile apps. MapQuest also offers a B2B mapping service where we power mapping for other companies and get paid a usage-based license fee. And finally, we operate a subscription-based mobile app called RoadWarrior, where we help delivery drivers more efficiently plan their driving routes. Like our other products, MapQuest usage is surging and visits from Google are up over 40% annually. Overall, our products business is doing really well. If you're a current System1 investor or considering investing in our company, it's very important that you understand this business segment. Our products business requires low CapEx and low OpEx, and as a result, it is highly cash generative. On a stand-alone basis, and this is important, we believe our combined product businesses are worth significantly more than the current enterprise value of the entire company. An investor in our current market price, you effectively are buying our products segment at a significant discount while holding an option on the upside as our marketing business rebounds. You should also remember that as a result of a corporate reorganization we did last summer, our products business segment is not collateral securing our credit agreement. Overall, we think that the market does not appreciate the true value of our product segment, particularly when you understand our overall corporate and capital structure. All right. Now let's go on into more detail on our marketing segment, which includes both our Owned & operated and partner marketing businesses. As you know, marketing has been going through a rough patch, but remains a significant profit generator. Overall revenue came in at $54 million, reflecting a 29% year-over-year decline, but we did see a 4% increase sequentially. The annual decline primarily was driven by a 36% decrease in our advertising spend. Adjusted gross profit was $20 million, down 17% year-over-year and down 10% sequentially. The sequential decline was driven by a lower return on TAC, or traffic acquisition costs, driven by volatility from the O&O businesses. Advertising spend was up 13% from Q1, but our return on spend decreased significantly. The decline in our marketing segment is solely related to issues in our O&O marketing business that we attribute to volatility in the Google Search Partner Network. O&O revenue has been a significant decline over the past couple of years with both revenue and gross profit down significantly year- over-year. While the decline in this business line has masked our success in our products group, we anticipate the recent declines in our O&O marketing business will begin leveling off over the next couple of quarters, and we're going to have some positive comps going forward. On a positive note, our partner marketing business has been performing quite well throughout the volatility. In our partner business, we work with Google Bing and Yahoo!, and that diversification has helped us weather the Google storm. The partner business continues to remain focused on moving partners to Google's new RSOC product, and we're seeing really good success with that migration effort. In Q2, average revenue per partner increased 29% sequentially, and we had approximately 220 active partners in Q2. While we wait for the Google volatility to stabilize, we've been busy using Agentic coding to re-architect and scale our proprietary marketing platform. These efforts are working. We have connected RAMP into more buy-side networks, and we continue to make large strides on advertising campaign automation. In Q2, we launched over 82,000 marketing campaigns, up 100% from Q1. This marketing campaign automation is going to be a critical part of going forward when we look to start scaling our O&O marketing business again. We are well positioned to capitalize once the Google volatility stabilizes over the next couple of quarters. Looking ahead to the rest of 2025, we remain cautiously optimistic. Our Owned & Operated products continue to show strong fundamentals, and we've been making large strides with our Agentic coding efforts. Our biggest challenge over the next couple of quarters is related to continued volatility with Google, which remains our largest revenue partner. That said, we're putting ourselves in a good position to capitalize on the marketing side as we see stability from Google. Overall, I believe System1 is really well positioned for the medium and long term. As I mentioned earlier, our product segment is growing, high margin and generates a lot of cash. As a result, we believe that segment alone is worth more than the value the market currently places on all of System1. And as the O&O marketing business stabilizes and starts growing again, I'm confident smart investors will realize how undervalued our business is. System1's leadership team remains fully aligned with our shareholders and as a group, we remain one of the company's largest stakeholders. Last quarter, I significantly added to my family's ownership stake in System1, and I continue to believe our equity is significantly undervalued. As System1 continues our transition back to growth mode, we appreciate your continued support and look forward to delivering long-term value. With that, I'll hand it over to Tridi to go over our financials. Take it away, Tridi.