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Operator
Hello everybody and welcome to the Perion Network, 3rd quarter 2025 earnings conference call. Today's conference call is being recorded and an archive of the webcast will be posted on the company website.
The press release detailing the financial results is available on the company's website at ww.perion.com.
Before we begin, I'd like to read the following Safe harbor statement.
Today's discussion includes forward-looking statements. These statements reflect the company's current views with respect to future events. These forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors, including those discussed under the heading risk factors and elsewhere in the company's annual reports on Form 20.
That may cause actual results, performance, or achievements to be materially different, and any future results, performance, or achievements anticipated or implied by these forward-looking statements.
The company does not undertake to update any forward-looking statements to reflect future events or circumstances. As in prior quarters, the results reported today will be analyzed both on a GAAP and a non-GAAP basis.
While mentoring EBITDA, we'll be referring to adjusted EBITTA.
We have provided a detailed reconciliation of the non-GAAP measures to the comparable GAAP measures on our earnings release, which is available on our website and has also been filed on Form 6k.
Hosting the call today are Tal Jacobson, Perion's Chief Executive Officer, and Ead Subury, Perian's Chief Financial Officer. I would now like to turn the call over to Tal Jacobson. Please go ahead.
Tal Jacobson - General Manager - CodeFuel
Good morning and thank you for joining us at the Peron's Earning Call for the third quarter of 2025. This quarter we continue to strengthen our foundation and execute our long-term strategy.
Our focus remains clear and disciplined, and the results we're sharing today reflects a solid progress across all parts of our business. We're building for sustainable growth for this year and for years ahead. This quarter we demonstrated progress across all aspects of our business. We delivered strong financial results, announced new products, initiated new partnerships to support our global expansion. And won industry awards.
Our key growth engines CTV, digital out of home, and retail media continue to expand and present healthy growth.
We are also expanding our share repurchase program to $200 million adding $75 million to the current program. This is pending regulatory approvals.
This decision was made after a deep analysis of our future capital needs that will support our growth, and it reflects our confidence in Perion's long-term value for investors and our ability to continue to generate cash.
On the innovation front, we introduced 3 strategic products under the Peron 1 vision.
Outmax, which unifies all our performance-driven AI algorithms for media outcomes across CTV, social, and open web.
This includes the green Bits algorithms and our new performance CTV capabilities.
By unifying all our AI algorithms for media outcomes under one product, we enable our global sales team to accelerate growth with a simple yet powerful holistic solution.
Soda, our AI for publisher, is our new next generation supply path optimization for smarter monetization that strengthen our supply side technology.
And our new digital out of home player, which completes the full stack marketing operation system for digital out of home and retail media.
It is designed to drive tremendous value for our digital at home partners and a high margin and recurring revenue for Peron.
We also advance strategic partnerships across retail media and digital of home, extending our reach throughout the US, Europe, and Asia. We continue to gain recognition in our industry with multiple awards, further validating our technology leadership and impact in performance-driven advertising.
These achievements highlight how Peron execute by focusing on today while building a strong foundation for sustainable, profitable growth in the future. All this progress aligns with one clear direction, our vision of becoming the platform of choice for modern CMOs and their teams.
While CROs rely on Salesforce and CTOs on Jira, CMOs still lack a unified platform that connects media, data, and outcomes.
Our Pon one strategy is the answer for this GAAP, a multi-channel AI powered platform that brings together creative data and media to deliver measurable business outcomes, a marketing operating system for modern marketers. Every product we develop and every partnership we form brings us closer to making Perion One the central system for marketing performance.
As we continue our journey towards this vision, we wanted to better understand how do CMOs view the challenges they face today. So, in partnership with advertiser perceptions, we surveyed CMOs across North America. And the findings were revealing. Research results proved that there is a strong need to solve the fragmentation between marketing and finance, highlighting the growing needs for the unified solution Billion1 provides. This validates why our mission matters, helping marketers connect creativity and data to measurable outcomes and bridging the divide between CMOs and CFOs.
You are welcome to view the full research report on Peron.com website.
One of our new strategic partnerships is with Albertson's Media Collective, a leading retail media network in the US. According to e-Marketer, retail media in the US is a $60 billion opportunity, growing at double-digit annual rates. This partnership gives Perion a strong foothold with one of the largest grocery retailers in the US.
By combining Albertson's first party data with our retail media technology, we deliver commerce connect measurable campaigns that align perfectly with where the market is moving.
A great example is Slima Water, a brand that wanted to drive product sales among Albertson's shoppers on the go. The campaign delivered over 5.5 million impressions and achieved a 5.5% sales lift. This demonstrates how Peron's technology directly connects ad exposure to measurable business outcomes. Let's take a look.
Campaigns like lima Water demonstrate how our creative data. And technology excellence translate into real business performance. Outmax takes that principle further, unifying all our outcome-driven AI algorithms under one solution, a solution designed to maximize outcomes by connecting creative intelligence with real-time optimization. Outmax is built to power results across every media environment. It represents the next step in Peron's evolution. Transforming AI driven algorithm and insights into measurable scalable growth. Outmax unifies optimization across CTV, social, and open web.
It also includes the Green Bits technology that we acquired earlier this year. What sets Outmax apart from all other solutions? Outmax continuously learns where the performance truly happens. The algorithm analyses multiple signals such as device, time and context to identify the most effective audience and inventory combination in real time. It then reallocates budgets toward those high performing segments, driving stronger ROI and more efficient media investment.
By connecting insights across CTV, social, and open web, Outmax creates one continuous optimization loop, improving results for advertisers, while enhancing eon scalability and growth potential.
We've already seen strong validation through recent case studies. Outmax optimized YouTube campaigns for Ford using carbonwa bidding, improving viewability by 12 points, lowering CPMs by 22%, and cutting carbone intensity by 33%, demonstrating how the Outmax algorithm delivers better results through advanced AI.
We're continuing to strengthen our supply side technology with the launch of Soda, our AI monetization engine for publishers. Soda combines Peon's multi-format bitter technology with an AI real-time algorithm that optimizes every impression path.
This drives higher yield, reduced waste, and provides better ad delivery, both for the publisher and for advertisers.
What's most exciting is that Soda makes Pelion an embedded technology partner within the publisher's stack. I'm confident that this will expand our recurring high margin revenue base.
It's a clear example of how we're executing and translating innovation directly into growth and operating leverage.
Another major milestone is the launch of the Peron digital out of home player. This completes the full stack marketing operating system for digital out of home and retail media.
The digital out of home player extends our full stack supply side technology, giving media owners and digital signage partners a single platform to manage both direct and programmatic campaigns. It replaces fragmented legacy systems with a dynamic, hardware agnostic solution, improving efficiency, transparency, and control across global signage networks.
The new Peron digital at home player is designed to drive tremendous value for our digital at home partners.
In a high margin recurring revenue for Peron.
This new product broadens our total addressable market by integrating with the digital out of home media owners and retailers.
It has the potential to generate high margin and a growing software income through embedded deployments over time. It also strengthened our role as a technology partner of choice within the digital out of home and retail media ecosystem.
Another important step in connecting the supply side and the pay on one platform.
As we look ahead, it's important to remember that everything we're delivering today is part of a broader long-term transformation.
After laying the foundation in 2024, we've spent this year activating the Peron One vision, unifying our technologies and brands on one platform, and streamlining our operations for improved efficiency and scalable growth.
The next phase, beginning in 2026 is about scaling the platform.
We are expanding Pion One across more channels, deepening adoption with global brands, and increasing recurring high margin revenue streams powered by AI, automation and self-service capabilities.
Each step brings us closer to our vision, a single intelligent platform that delivers better performance, faster decisions, and long-term value for marketers and shareholders.
To conclude, our message to investors is clear.
Peron is executing on its strategy and building for long-term value. We operate in high growth areas supported by proven track record of profitability and positive cash flow. We have a global team with deep high growth experience focused on building technology and accelerating our global go to market strategy for the AI first era in advertising.
With that, I'll now turn it over to Ela Tzubery, our CFO, who will walk you through the financial results for the 3rd quarter.
Elad Tzubery - Chief Financial Officer
Thank you, Tal, and thank you all for joining us on the call today.
Our 3rd quarter results mark another strong step forward in Peron's strategic transformation.
We are now seeing the tangible impact of the structural, operational and technological foundation we've built over the past 20 months.
During this quarter, we achieved our 1st year of year revenue and contribution X growth since the first quarter of 2024. This is a milestone that reflects our disciplined execution, and it's a direct result of our enhanced organizational structure, our continued adoption of unified Perion one platform, and a strong go to market strategy. Importantly, Our adjusted EBITDA increased 63% year over year to $12.1 million. This reflects the early results of our efficiency initiatives that are expected to fully materialize in 2026. Our core growth engines, CTV, retail media, and digital out of home are also among the strongest growing channels and market verticals in at tech.
All of them continued their momentum and delivered strong performances with a year over year growth of 75%, 40%, and 26% respectively. We also continued to execute our capital allocation plan with discipline. During the quarter. We repurchased 800,000 shares for $7.5 million. Due to our confidence in Perion's long-term growth and the strength of our cash generation.
We approved in principle an expansion of our share repurchase authorization by an additional $75 million to a total amount of $200 million.
It reflects the balance between returning capital to shareholders and continued investment in innovation and in strategic opportunities to strengthen our core businesses and drive sustainable growth.
Looking ahead, we are firmly establishing the infrastructure for sustained growth in 2026 and beyond.
This is supported by operational efficiency, scalable technology, and disciplined capital allocation.
Moving on to our key financial metrics for the third quarter, revenue accounted for $110.5 million representing 8% year over year growth. Contribution Xta came in at $51 million up 7% year over year, maintaining a healthy 46% margin.
Notably, this marks the first time since the first quarter of 2024 that we've achieved year over year growth in both revenue and contribution.
This is a testament to Perion's growing ability to deliver measurable outcomes for our customers, as well as the strong performance of our core growth engines and our disciplined operational execution.
We believe our revenue contribution, excluding TAC, represents a more accurate measure of our top-line performance than the revenue alone. Adjusted EBITA this quarter was $12.1 million. This represents a 63% year over year increase. Our exTAC margin was 24%, signifying and encouraging margin expansion.
Non-GAAP net income was $12.5 million resulting in a non-GAAP diluted earning per share of $0.28.
Cash flow from operations was $5.9 million bringing our year-to-date total to $20.1 million. This further demonstrates the strength of our underlying business model and our consistent ability to generate cash. Our growth engines continue to be the cornerstone of Peron's future growth. Both CTV and digital out of home channels are growing at a fast rate. They are continuously outpacing the overall market growth on an annual basis as projected by e-marketter.
This positioned Perian as a high growth player in two of the most dynamic segments in digital advertising. CTV continues its strong growth trajectory, with revenue up 75% year over year, driven by sustained demand for our advanced formats.
Looking ahead, we expect CTV revenue to continue outpacing the market, supported by the ongoing shift from linear to connected TV and growing customer adoption of our performance CTV solutions. Our digital out of home channel remains a highly strategic entry point into new markets. We continue to leverage its differentiated capabilities to position Perion for sustainable, profitable growth through cross-selling and product synergy. We recently launched our digital out of home player, an advanced solution that completes our full stack marketing operating system for digital out of home and retail media. The digital out of home player strengthens our customers' stickiness and recurring revenue streams, making our business model more predictable and scalable across this fast growing channel.
Our retail media market vertical continue to demonstrate strong momentum, with revenue up 40% year over year. Retail media remains one of the fastest growing verticals in advertising, projected to expand at a 14.7% keger through 2029. As new and existing customers continue to adopt our retail-focused solutions, we are well positioned to capture market share and outpace market growth.
Our 3rd quarter channel mix demonstrates the growing portion of CTV and digital out of home. These two channels combined represent 37% of revenue versus 28% in the same quarter last year.
Digital out of home increased by 26% year over year, reaching 22% of revenue, up from 19% last year. This reflects the continued global momentum with new partnerships across APEC, the US, and I.
CTV increased by 75% year over year, representing 15% of revenue compared to 9% last year.
This significant growth is a testament of increasing customer adoption of our full funnel solutions offering.
Web revenue declined by 11% year over year due to a continued trend of lower advertiser appetite for standard display and video formats. It is important to note that the comparison to the third quarter of 2024 is skewed due to the discontinuation of lower margin activities in late 2024 as previously announced this year.
Search increased by 9% year over year, representing 21% of revenue and continues the search business stabilization. While in this quarter we enjoyed strong growth across each of our core growth engines, Peron's platform is built to be channel agnostic. This structure enables us to seamlessly adapt as advertiser spends naturally shifts across channels.
This flexibility allows us to capture growth wherever demand emerges and helps to increase advertisers' spend and retention.
Contribution X in the third quarter grew by 7% year over year to $51 million representing a stable margin of 46%. As we move forward with our unified platform, we expect to grow our revenue contribution, excluding TAC at a faster pace compared to total revenue. This measure better represents our top-line performance than revenue alone. Adjusted EBITDA for the third quarter grew 63% year over year to $12.1 million representing 24% of contribution ext and 11% of total revenue. This significant margin expansion reflects our improved operational leverage. The efficiency initiative we've implemented this year continues to bear fruit and drive improved profitability. We continue to further optimize our cost structure to align with our unified operating model. We expect to benefit from these improvements throughout the remainder of 2025 and into 2026 as these efforts gain momentum.
On a GAAP basis, our third quarter net loss was $4.1 million or $0.10 per diluted share. On a non-GAAP basis, net income improved year over year to $12.5 million compared to $11.9 million in the third quarter of 2024.
This represents a non-GAAP diluted earning per share of $0.28 this quarter compared to $0.23 per diluted share last year, representing a 22% year over year increase.
In the third quarter of 2025, cash generated from operating activities was $5.9 million and our adjusted free cash flow was $4.8 million.
Looking ahead, we are confident that we will maintain a strong cash flow conversion rate of over 70% in 2025.
As of September 30th, our balance sheet includes $315 million in cash equivalents, short-term bank deposits, and marketable securities. Our strong cash position gives us the financial flexibility to support the broader capital allocation framework, pursuing our diversified growth strategy while continuing to return capital to shareholders.
During the quarter, we continued to execute our share buyback program. Due to regulatory volume restrictions, our repurchase activity was limited, leading to the repurchase of 800,000 shares for a total amount of $7.5 million.
As of September 30th, 2025, we have repurchased a cumulative total of 10.4 million shares for $94.2 million.
This continued buy the commitment underscored our confidence in Peron's long-term value proposition.
As of today, during the 4th quarter, we already purchased an additional 1 million shares and we expect to complete the current plan by the end of this year.
We are pleased to announce the principal approval of expansion of our previously authorized share repurchase program. Our confidence in Peron's future allows us to expand the program by an additional $75 million.
This increased the total program from $125 million to $200 million. The overall program represents an estimated shareholders' implied return of nearly 50% since initiation.
We believe our current share price is not reflective of the value and opportunities we have at Perion. The share buyback program, alongside disciplined investments in organic growth and in M&A opportunities, is the best use at present for our excess cash.
Turning to our financial outlook, we are reiterating our full year 2025 guidance with revenue at $430 to $450 million. And adjusted EBITDA at $44 million to $46 million.
The progress we made in Q3 from returning to year over year growth to expanding profitability underscores the strength of our transformation and the resilience of our model. As we continue consolidating our operations into the parent one platform, we are confident that we have established a strong foundation for sustainable growth and profitability heading into 2026. With that. I'll now turn it back to the operator to open the line for questions.
Thank you.
Operator
If you wish to ask the question, we ask that you please use the raise hand function at the bottom of your Zoom screen, or if you've dialed in, please press 9.
We'll take our first question from Andrew Morro with Raymond Jones. Please unmute your line and ask your question.
Andrew Morro - Anlayst
Hi, thanks for taking my questions, maybe one for Tal and one for Elad. Tal, if you could dive into some of the CTV strength drivers we saw in 3Q with the 75% growth, I know you had mentioned some spend shifts or budget shifts last quarter, out of 2Q into the second half, but any more specificity there would be appreciated. And then maybe on the guidance range, given that you're reiterating the guidance range, it does seem like a fairly wide range for 4Q. I guess, what should we be inferring from that in terms of what you're seeing to date in either October or expectations for the holiday season.
Thank you.
Tal Jacobson - General Manager - CodeFuel
Yeah, thanks for the question. So absolutely, on CTV I think what we see is that our performance CTV together with our new algorithm, Brim Bids, which we now call Outmax, are really performing well. We're seeing healthy pipeline and deals from our customers, and that's what drove a significant growth that we're seeing.
Andrew Morro - Anlayst
Tal, you want to answer the guidance.
Tal Jacobson - General Manager - CodeFuel
Yeah, sure. In terms of the guidance, the quarter right now, is trending in line with Our expectations.
So far, as we are entering to an important.
Holiday season. We feel very good with our ability to deliver within this range of guidance.
And we already, increased the guidance at the beginning of the year in May, and it was, important for us, of course, to make sure that we are delivering on everything that we are saying and maintaining the guidances, is, of course, but we do feel very confident in our ability to meet this. To meet those those numbers, as we see, overall, we do not see right now any slowdown I would say in the spend of the advertiser. It's just I, it's just a change of how, the, in terms of timelines of how the budget are, getting or spending within the month.
Yeah, so I'll just add to that that Eella said, we did raise our guidance within the year and we, and ever since then, we continue to build strong momentum.
And Ezella said, the quarter is aligned with our expectation, but we're waiting for the shopping season to see how that's going to evolved.
Andrew Morro - Anlayst
Understood.
Thank you.
Operator
Thank you.
We'll take our next question from Eric Martinuzzi from Lake Street. Please unmute your line and ask a question.
Eric Martinuzzi - Anlayst
Yeah, I kind of wanted to revisit the Q4 growth just based on the projections here. That growth rate would be down versus the growth you had in Q3. I realize we're early in the holiday spending season. Is it just conservatism that that sequential growth rate would be down?
Elad Tzubery - Chief Financial Officer
Yes, Eric, thank you. It's, I would say it's, it, it's a bit conservative as well. As we mentioned, we are Q4 is obviously the peak, the peak of the year in terms of advertising budget.
You just before the holiday season, it was important for us, to be cautious.
Eric Martinuzzi - Anlayst
Okay. And then for I know you haven't, you're not addressing 2026, but right now there's an expectation for double-digit growth there. I think the street consensus is at 11% growth in 2026. Should that be coming down based on this, what you're seeing for Q4?
Elad Tzubery - Chief Financial Officer
No, not at all. We haven't provided the outlook for 2026.
We are providing it as usual at the end of the year. I can do what I can tell you, by the way, is that we are aiming for next year to capture much more market share, and we are.
And we actually believe that we will be able to beat next year as well the street expectation and our growth engines will continue to outperform the market, and I believe that it will drive. Our growth going forward and we are, as much as we are focusing on the efficiency and we start to see this in terms of the numbers starting already for this que, we are also investing in our current business to allow us to scale and to grow, much faster also for next year.
Eric Martinuzzi - Anlayst
Understand and congratulations on the return to growth here in Q3.
Elad Tzubery - Chief Financial Officer
Thank you.
Thank you.
Operator
Our next question comes from Jason Hedstein with Oppenheimer. Please unmute your line and ask your question.
Jason Hedstein - Analyst
Thanks everybody. So I guess kind of following on to what you just said, you, it sounds like you know you're having more success now selling the package of services across the different disciplines. There's been a pretty significant investment in sales and marketing to kind of get here. Just how are you thinking about the investment needed, particularly as we go into next year on sales and. Marketing, is it still like another heavy lift or kind of can you harvest and then obviously the implied, kind of web business, I think it's down something like 11% year over year, give or take our math in the quarter, but it's still.
Roughly half of revenue. So obviously, CTV, digital out of home, some of the other areas are going to grow so meaningfully faster than that. Just how are you thinking about, like, those, again the puts and takes there, right? Web declining, everything else, or display really declining and everything else really growing as we're just thinking out over the next like two years.
Thank you.
Tal Jacobson - General Manager - CodeFuel
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for the question. So I'll divide it into a few parts. One, we think that web and search, is going to be totally aligned with human behavior. As AI agents or AI, chatbots are growing, less and less web search is going to happen.
And with this whole trend of zero clicks on Google, I think less traffic is going to go on the web. But that only means that a lot of the budgets are going to shift towards closed gardens, right? Meta, TikTok, Google, YouTube, out of home and CTV, which is exactly why we bought green Bits. That's exactly why we bought HiveStack, and this is exactly why we're investing in those areas, just because we think, this trend is going to continue, but we do think Our algorithm Omax, our CTV and out of home is going to outpace the growth of the market going forward. So that should, show good growth in the next year or the year after that.
In terms of sales and marketing, before I was going to go a bit on the numbers, but sales and marketing is now so much easier since we have Paleon one. We're seeing more and more and increasingly. Big number and it's increasing by the day of customers that are using more than one of our products. So we do have algorithm with CTV, we, customers, we have, CTV with out of home customers. So we're seeing synergies, even faster than what we could have imagined, at this time of stage, within the transformation.
But it also helps us with marketing since we're spending marketing very focused on to drive new customers to the platform, we're seeing great success there.
Jason Hedstein - Analyst
Do you want to add, yeah, I would add about the sales, the S&M investment that we are planning to do also for next year, to increase our ability to tap into more and more customers into the platform.
So, first of, and of course foremost, we were going to increase of course our marketing budget as well, because we are going to the market, we want to get a spread as possible when we are going into 2026. I mentioned 26 and 27 are years that we are aiming to scale one as much as possible, globally.
It's part of the transformation it's part of the changes also they are doing, we are increasing also the ability to sales team just to get more and more reach points, towards more customers and to be able, to showcase the one, capabilities into more customers. So definitely this is an area that we're going to increase our investments, next year. And also around, let's say, R&D as well. This is something that we are, planning.
Tal Jacobson - General Manager - CodeFuel
To increase, also some of our resources around, investing, about R&D in order to make sure that we are expediting our roadmap, coming to the streets, to our customers with more and more, solutions and ability, to spend more within this platform. So.
Operator
The next question comes from Jeff Martin with Roth. Please unmute your line and ask your question.
Jeff Martin - Analyst
Great, thank you. I was curious, you mentioned that there was a clouded comparison on web versus last year due to some low margin business that was exited. Could you give us an apples to apples comparison and then pair that with how web trended relative to your expectation? I know the last two quarters, you've talked about a bottoming out of that a little earlier than expected. So, just curious how that trended in the quarter relative to your internal expectations. Thanks.
Tal Jacobson - General Manager - CodeFuel
Yes, so, thanks for the question, Jeff. Actually, web acted exactly as we expected.
I would say even a bit better than our original, plans. As I said, and if you remember on February's call, we announced that we are, closing, some of our, previous technology that we need to web but they were all very low margin, and they will deffocused for current one strategy. And when we're, when we are comparing Q3 to Q3, major part of the decrease that you see in the web is because of this, of those, business lines that we decided we are, shutting down.
Well, compared to our expectations actually did better if you are removing those, terminated business.
Jeff Martin - Analyst
Great. And just one more if I could, you, you've talked in the past about, expanding the TA, dramatically.
Just curious if you could give us an update on, timing of that and how it's trended, so far this year. Thanks.
Elad Tzubery - Chief Financial Officer
Yeah, sure, So when we, when we boughtrim Bits, we got into YouTube and Meta.
Which is something that we never had the capability to do.
So now, every advertiser that spends money on YouTube, Google ads, and Meta can actually work with us and to trade us.
Now, we're in a, in the process of integrating this into more social platforms and more and more DSPs.
So that will continue to increase our town.
And you're going to see more and more growth out of that part, out of new channels. Hopefully next year, you're going to see more channels than just web and CTV and out of home.
Jeff Martin - Analyst
Thank you.
Operator
Our next question comes from Laura Martin with Needham. Please unmute your line and ask a question.
Laura Martin - Analyst
Hi guys. I need to ask the AI question. So, I'm really interested in how you're using AI internally, cause it sounds like you're still hiring people and it's our thesis that if you're a tech company, you're using AI and not people. So can you talk about internally how you're help using new tools with AI to replace people? And then secondly, I wanted to drill down, follow-up on some of my competitors' questions on web. I know T, you think sort of that the open web is going to lose share too, and that's why you've gone into digital at home and CTV, but then Elija said that a lot of the 11% decline in the quarter was attributable to actions you took in February, and therefore the declines would have been much less, which implies to me, Tal, that by February we anniversary those, let's call it self-harm that you decided to do. And that we could maybe return to growth in the open web, it sounds like. So, could you talk to me about how much of this web decline you think is structural cause it sounds like it's a lot less than the 11% decline that you reported in the web business in the quarter.
Thank you.
Elad Tzubery - Chief Financial Officer
Yeah, right. Thanks, Laura. So two things. So, as you said, I think you're absolutely right. With time and automation, the amount of people we would hire is going to be lower.
But as we build this company for scale, there are two parts where we do hire people. One, R&D to continue to build AI, driven products, because AI is everything and we're becoming more and more of a technology company than anything else.
And on the other part is sales. So which sales should bring, our new platform into more clients. So those are the areas where we look to hire more people. But everything else, we hired a new COO.
6 months ago, just for that to transform all our internal operation to be AI driven and more efficient. So less and less manual work, more and more automation to AI. That's on the internal part. Now, within when we built, we're building Pon1, also within that, everything is AI driven, even all.
Everything that we built within R&D is now supported with AI.
So we can actually say that 100% of our R&D work is supported now with AI.
So that's on the AI part.
On the web part, I'll just say, generally, and then I'll let the lad answer his part, but I'll just say, in as far as human behavior, I do not think editorial websites are going to see a huge growth in the future, and that's where what we call web. Having said that, we did a few things within in-house like releasing soda and other products for web.
And since we're such a small part of the web globally, even though it's, it can grow within us, it doesn't necessarily mean that humans are going to use more and more editorial websites as a general trend. I don't think that's going to be the future.
That anything you Want to add to that? I can just add this to make sure that I was clear. The expectation that we had when shutting down those businesses that we will, that the web will continue to decline more. Keep in mind, Lord, we are channel agnostic in a way.
And, our, that's right, that our growth engine, our digital out of home and CTZ, of course.
But it also allow us in a way to tap on the opportunity that's related also to web. I'm not expecting by the way, going to the future that I will see increase in web that, dramatically, but on a year to year comparison, as we will continue to increase the overall spend that will come through the system, I believe that, also, the web will capture some of those, spend yet.
Was that answering your question?
Laura Martin - Analyst
Well, so I think a lot of what would help me is of the 11% decline, you said that most of it was this decision you'd made in February. Was it 8% of the 11%? Like you would have only been down 3% in Webb if you hadn't taken the actions yourself in February. How much of the 11% decline was your actions in February?
Elad Tzubery - Chief Financial Officer
No, actually, more closely towards 13% was related to our action.
So overall, otherwise I would say that the web is increasing roughly 2%.
Laura Martin - Analyst
Okay. Well, that answer I like a lot, so thank you. That's perfect.
Elad Tzubery - Chief Financial Officer
Thank you.
Operator
Thank You.
Our last question comes from Jason Kreyer with Craig Hallum Capitale Group. Please unmute your line and ask your question.
Jason Kreyer - Analyst
Good, thank you guys, just one for me. So you'd highlighted how soda and the out of home player create more predictable revenue streams. Wondering if you can just size up those opportunities and give a little more detail on how you monetize those solutions. Thanks.
Tal Jacobson - General Manager - CodeFuel
Yeah, thank you, Jason. And first of all, welcome. We're very happy to have you with us.
So in terms of, soda and the digital phone player.
The thing is we're trying to be the operating system, the marketing operating system within the tech stack of the inventory part, right? So while Pion One is the operating system for marketers.
Soda and the digital at home player is the operating system for the inventory part, and we want to be as implemented as possible within their tech stack, so Soda for out of home and web publishers and obviously the digital out of home player can get a bigger chunk of all the spend that's going through the screens. What it means is a lot of the time when digital out of homes, screen owners, the budget that we're seeing through them is the programmatic part, but when we implement the digital of home player, we can actually benefit from all the budgets that are going through that, and that means direct and programmatic, that actually increases our town, quite dramatically, and it does, once that's going to be deployed in big scale, that will provide us better visibility and predictability into our revenue streams.
Does that answer your question?
Jason Kreyer - Analyst
Yes, that's perfect.
Thank you.
Operator
Thank you.
This now concludes the question-and-answer session. I'll now hand back to Tal Jacobson for closing remarks.
Tal Jacobson - General Manager - CodeFuel
Thank you everyone for joining us at the Q3 earnings goal. We're happy to show that we're making good progress on our P1 vision, and I hope to see you everyone at our next earning goal.
Thank you.
Operator
This concludes today's call.
Thank you everyone for joining, you may now disconnect.