System1 Inc (SST) 2022 Q2 法說會逐字稿

Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Second Quarter 2022 Earnings Call and Webcast for System1. Joining me today to discuss System1's operational and financial results are Co-Founder and CEO, Michael Blend; and our Chief Financial Officer, Tridivesh Kidambi. A recording of this conference call will be available on our Investor Relations website at ir.system1.com shortly after this call has ended.

I'd like to take this opportunity to remind you that during the call, we will be making forward-looking statements. This includes statements relating to the operational performance of our business. Future financial results and guidance, strategy, long-term growth and overall future prospects. We may also make statements regarding regulatory or compliance matters. These statements are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those projected that are implied during this call.

In particular, those described in our risk factors included in our registration statement on Form S-1 filed on April 13, 2022, in our Form 10-K for fiscal year 2021 filed on March 31, 2022 and in our Form 10-Q for the second quarter of 2022 to be filed shortly as well as the current uncertainty and unpredictability in our business, the markets and the global economy, generally. You should not rely on our forward-looking statements as predictions of future events. All forward-looking statements that we make on this call are based on assumptions and beliefs as of the date hereof and System1 disclaims any obligation to update any forward-looking statements except as required by law.

Our discussion today will include non-GAAP financial measures, including pro forma revenue, pro forma gross profit and pro forma adjusted EBITDA. These non-GAAP measures should be considered in addition to and not as a substitute for or in isolation from our GAAP results. Information regarding our non-GAAP financial results, including a reconciliation of our historical GAAP to non-GAAP results may be found in our earnings release, which was furnished with our Form 8-K filed today with the SEC, may also be found on our Investor Relations website.

I would now like to turn the conference call over to System1's Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Michael Blend.

Thanks Kyle. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining us on our Q2 earnings call. Together with me on this call is Tridivesh Kidambi, our long time CFO. We're pleased to report a good Q2 which Tridi will go into in detail. I would like to begin with an overview of some of our operating priorities and then describe our view of the current digital marketing landscape. We've made considerable progress on key priorities that will enable us to triple our marketing scale over the next few years.

First, let's give a quick update on RAMP, which as you remember, is our end-to-end marketing platform and a key growth driver. our RAMP is already 1 of the largest marketing platforms, we have ambitious plans to 3x our scale to $2 billion of marketing spend. Handling this kind of scale entail substantial behind the scenes advances in our technology, particularly in the areas of automation and machine learning. We've been hard at work on these advances and much of our engineering product team have been focused on this since last year.

We started the transition to our next-generation RAMP in Q2, while we are in the early stages of migrating traffic over, the early data looks very promising. By, next quarter, I should be able to point to specific improvements from these efforts. Our biggest challenge remains hiring great engineers and product managers in a competitive hiring environment, but as other tech companies slow or freeze hiring, we are starting to see the market loosen a bit. We remain focused on adding great engineers and product managers.

Shifting to M&A, we've made very good progress integrating our RoadWarrior, CouponFollow and our most recent Answers.com acquisition. On RoadWarrior, we have started using RAMP to profitably acquire new subscribers and we are in the process of integrating our CMS platform to handle all the billing and customer communication. With CouponFollow, we recently soft launched our brand new cash back shopping program and already have over 500 participating merchants. We also began integrating the CouponFollow coupon data with our start page search engine and we expect to further integrate this data throughout our network of O&O properties.

And finally on Answers.com, we've fully migrated the site to our tech stack and have seen an immediate 30% monetization lift. We are also starting to see in-paid traffic to Answers.com, early signs are really positive and we remain active in the M&A front and are evaluating a few interesting opportunities. As always, we're looking for strategic deals where we can inject growth into the companies via RAMP, while we are not bargain hunters, we do expect that overall market conditions could lead to lower pricing for acquisitions.

Now I want to move on to our business performance, where the advertising business overall was solid in Q2. Our owned and operated business was in line with expectations, including our volume of marketing spend and our partner network, which has been flat the last couple of years as we've focused on owned and operated is showing accelerated growth. This is a result of RAMP improvements we have made to support that business combined with excellent execution by our partnership team. The 1 negative in our advertising business was a one-time occurrence when advertising networks and its fraudulent traffic, beginning earlier this year, we began scaling our marketing spend with the Microsoft Bing partner advertising network.

However, in June, we discovered that we have been paying for fraudulent traffic that did not convert for our advertisers, the fraudulent traffic went undetected by the most sophisticated compliance platforms in the world, including the largest ad networks and our own system. This was an exceedingly rare occurrence and we have identified the publishers responsible for the traffic. Tridi is going to go into details of this event during his remarks. Despite this setback, our relationship with Bing remained strong. In fact, today, we are happy to announce a 3-year extension of our strategic partnership with Bing that's going to go through 2025. We look forward to putting this episode behind us, scaling back up our marketing on Bing and continuing to work very closely with them in the future.

Now looking towards the rest of 2022 in advertising, we're starting to see some of the same macro trends reported by our peers in the digital space. In our case, we're starting to see advertising demand soften towards the end of Q2 and particularly the beginning of Q3. Typically, demand is lower in the summer months, the market recess downward in July and then bounces back towards the end of summer. This July, the drop is more pronounced than it has been in recent years and the markets recovering more slowly than typical.

We believe this is due to inflation affecting buying habits and potentially from increased summer travel, while we do have the ability to get more aggressive on the buy side during a downturn, we've decided to stay a bit cautious so far this quarter. We're keeping a close eye on the ad markets and are beginning to see things stabilize and rebound as they always do. As the market moves, we are shifting market into the most in-demand verticals and increasing our buy side efforts on native and social networks, and as we are continuing to push our international expansion.

Now moving on to our subscription business, we saw a nice performance in Q2. We continue to see improved retention in upsell metrics from our flagship antivirus product TotalAV. We added 319,000 new subscribers (inaudible) more than a 100,000 from our newer Total AdBlock product. We also launched a new product, a Browser Booster, which is a browser extension that speeds up a user's browsing experience and we have more products set to launch later this year. The subscription team continues to be focused on retaining existing customers, opening new customer acquisition channels and launching new products. The team is doing a great job and I'm really excited about our near-term and long-term opportunities in subscription.

Overall, we remain very bullish. We're going to keep investing in product and engineering and we do not expect our investing to slow down. Our management team has been through macro headwinds several times, including 2008 and of course the onset of COVID-19 in 2020. Each time, we have invested through these cycles and each time it has paid off. Times like these are when the diversification of our business model really shines. As areas like online shopping dip a bit, other advertising verticals like consumer finance open up.

And at the same time, digital advertising overall is facing headwinds, we're seeing opportunities open up in our subscription business. So while we are keeping a close eye on the short-term macro trends, we are playing for the long-term. I'm confident in our technology advantage, our diversification and our long-term growth story.

I'll now hand things off Tridi to discuss this quarter's results and updated guidance. Take it away, Tridi.

Thanks Michael. As previously mentioned, we are excited about the results we delivered in Q2, and despite any short-term headwinds, we might see for the rest of this year, we remain very bullish about the business.

To start, I want to provide more color on the fraudulent traffic issue Michael mentioned earlier. Since Q1, we have been significantly growing our marketing spend with Microsoft's Bing advertising partner network. Late in Q2, it was identified that this network was sending System1 material amounts of fraudulent traffic. In plain English, we were paying for clicks that were generated by bots not humans, our now shows that these fraudulent clicks originated from websites owned by 2 large publishers on the Bing partner network, IAC and CBS Interactive.

As a result of this fraudulent traffic, our revenue was impacted by $11 million, which is the amount refunded to our advertising partners. The impact to gross profit, net of any refunds received from Microsoft in Q2 of 2022 was $6 million. In this specific event, while Microsoft has acknowledged the fraudulent traffic and issued us a credit, our analysis shows that we have not yet been made whole. This type of event is rare, and even more rare as the advertising network not providing a full refund, our data strongly shows that we are doing incremental ad credit for Microsoft and we are committed to pursuing all avenues available to us to be made whole. As a result, we've added back the net impact of this issue in our reported adjusted gross profit and adjusted EBITDA metrics for this quarter.

Before diving into the rest of our Q2 results, I wanted to start with a reminder of our operating philosophy. Gross profit dollar generation is the ultimate metric we use to measure the effectiveness of our RAMP platform. We see RAMP as the key to growth by enabling more marketing spend and driving operating leverage through optimizations. Also, when I talk about our financial performance, and specifically, year-over-year results, in every case, I will be referring to pro forma financial metrics inclusive of Protected.net's results in prior periods. For a reconciliation of these metrics to our GAAP financials, please refer to the reconciliation tables in the earnings release issued earlier today.

Let's move onto Q2 results. Revenue was $220 million as compared to $206 million last year, a 7% year-over-year increase on a pro forma basis. Adjusted gross profit was $74 million, an increase of 31% compared to last year's pro forma gross profit of $56 million, with all segments of the business contributing to that increase. Adjusted EBITDA was $41 million versus $34 million last year and above the high-end of guidance by $3 million.

In general, similar to what we've seen in moments of dislocation in the past, as advertisers pulled back overall spend, the last dollars they pull are in the pay for performance categories where RAMP excels. We were able to take advantage of this trend in Q2 ahead of the larger macro pullback for the back half of the year, and it lends further validation to our business model and the platform in the long-term.

On the advertising front, we acquired over a billion sessions to our owned and operated advertising properties in the quarter, reflecting a 32% increase year-over-year. Our cost per session was $0.12 with corresponding monetization of $0.16 per session, which maintains our spread of $0.04 sequentially and represents a spread of 35%. Excluding the impact of the fraudulent ad traffic issue, our cost per session was $0.11 and our spread would have been 42%. Our network advertising business also delivered a strong quarter, with revenue up 52%, network RPS up 41% and network sessions up 8% year-over-year. Overall, advertising revenue less advertising spend was up 21% year-over-year.

The subscription business performed well with revenue up 19% and segment profit up 26% year-over-year. We continue to benefit from the shift to renewing customers and our ability to retain and upsell the large TotalAV user base. Subscriber ARPU was $20.17 in the quarter versus $18.76 last year. Total subscribers were up 1% sequentially and 5% year-over-year. Change in deferred revenue, which represents the delta between GAAP subscription revenue and billings was $3.5 million in the quarter, and our guidance for the year, we assume change in deferred revenue remains flat with a similar seasonal spread through the quarters as last year.

Operating expenses net of ad-backs were $32.5 million for the second quarter of 2022 compared to $21.7 million last year. The year-over-year increase is reflective of our continued investment in RAMP, increased headcount from our transition to a public company and increased public company costs. Operating expenses as a percentage of adjusted gross profit was 44% for the second quarter of 2022 compared to 50% last quarter.

With respect to liquidity, we ended the quarter with $37 million of cash on the balance sheet. Gross debt was $444 million, which includes the $49 million revolver drawdown to finance to CouponFollow acquisition. As of June 30th, LTM billings-based EBITDA, as defined by our credit facility, was $159 million, resulting in a net leverage ratio of 2.55 times. We plan to actively pay down the revolver via our operating cash flow over the second half of the year.

Now onto guidance. Through the first 6 weeks of Q3 and consistent with the earnings announcements of our peers, we have seen a significant softening in the advertising market driven by the macroeconomic environment. Despite the choppy start to the quarter, we believe the current trends are temporary. We expect advertising dollars and volume to come back to the market, and consistent with historic trends, we expect those dollars to come back first to performance-based advertising platforms. As we've seen in the past, when ad markets rebound, we have historically seen acceleration in our business. Our overall views on our business model remain unchanged, our management team has been through many of these cycles in the past.

Our guidance also reflects the financial impact of the marketing we previously had planned to do with Bing. Due to the fraudulent traffic issues I discussed earlier, we currently have materially reduced our advertising spend with Bing. Because this is a higher volume but lower margin business for us, the result is substantially lower gross revenue combined with higher gross margins. Additionally, we are seeing several pockets of new subscriber growth in our subscription business. While this is very positive, the short-term effect of increased customer acquisition is upfront marketing spend ahead of increased renewals and profitability next year.

As a result of the combination of these internal trends, coupled with macroeconomic trends we discussed earlier, we have determined it is more appropriate to provide full year guidance versus specific Q3 guidance. This gives us the flexibility to pull acquisition levers as we deem necessary to take advantage of new sources of subscriber growth. We will provide an update on both of these trends during our next earnings announcement.

For the full year, we expect revenue to be between 900 and $930 million, representing 10% growth at the midpoint. Adjusted gross profit to be between 285 and $295 million, representing 36% growth at the midpoint and adjusted EBITDA to be between 155 and $165 million, representing 26% year-over-year growth at the midpoint. Our lower revenue guidance reflects our currently reduced marketing spend with Bing as well as a conservative view on buy-side spending as ad market stabilize.

The adjusted EBITDA guidance reflects a forecast of limited recovery in the macro environment as well as our desire to maintain optionality to increase customer acquisition spend through the end of the year. Finally, I'm excited to announce that our Board of Directors has approved a repurchase program for both common shares and public warrants of up to $25 million. This program reflects both the companies and the Board's confidence in our business model and platform.

I want to reiterate that while the macro conditions have caused us to reduce our full year outlook, we view this as a temporary change as markets stabilize. Ultimately, this is a business that's going to conservatively grow gross profit by more than 35% and EBITDA by more than 20% at the low end of the range. We have a proven platform that thrives in these environments and a plethora of opportunities in front of us, both organic and via M&A. We are excited about our prospects and bullish about the opportunity.

Thank you for joining us today, and now let's go to questions.

Thank you, Tridi. We will now go to live Q&A. The first question is from Shweta Khajuria with Evercore ISI. Shweta?

First is, so with Bing, it sounds like you are pulling back on spends, would you offset that pull back by diverting back to perhaps Google or someplace else, and if not, why not? And second as you said, you're staying cautious on the buy side, but if you are managing to gross profit dollars, then I would imagine that if you are optimizing it for gross profit. So if there is, I'm trying to understand why your gross profit annual guide would be lower if the spread remains the same?

Yes, sure. So I'll handle the first question Shweta. Good to see you. And then Tridi the second. So related to our Bing spend, we've pulled back substantially in that network almost to zero. We are watching it very closely so we can get confidence to scale back up on the Bing side and our guidance does reflect not scaling back up with Bing, although that we hope to be able to. In regards to moving spend around, I think of Bing as just another source for us, all of our other sources we are continuing to maximize as much as we can right now. Market has been pretty choppy and volatile for the past few weeks. Certainly, reset pretty heavily in July as we mentioned and we are seeing things stabilize pretty good amount the last couple of weeks, but we didn't want it in our guidance, for our guidance to count on that. But we are seeing some green shoots, I would say in the market.

And Tridi, do you want to handle the second question.

Sure, really just piggybacking off of what Michael just said, the choppiness in the ad markets really is what's driving the cautiousness both in our guidance and just how we're operating in the marketplace right now, so while we are maintaining that spread, our algorithms as advertisers are moving in and out and demand is moving around, it takes us some time to kind of learn and execute against that. So really what you're seeing in the guidance, Shweta is just our conservatism around waiting for the market to stabilize, which as Michael just said, we started to see very recently, and as that happens and algorithms learn, we'd expect to be able to ramp back up our spend, and to your point, continue to drive that gross profit and maintain that spread.

Our next question comes from Victoria James with D.A. Davidson.

So I have 1 and 1 follow -up, but I will ask them 1 at a time. So my first question then is, how should investors think about System1's ability to take advantage of the disruption in the digital advertising market such as with Apple's focus on privacy and then Google eventually moving with this?

Yes, thanks, and thanks for calling in. So we do like disruptions in the marketplaces. So in terms of things related to the Apple changes and things getting more private, that's good for our system. July was actually pretty volatile overall, it was pretty similar to, I would say, April 2020, when the ad markets had a pretty big reset right around when COVID hit. So in that case, and if you go back to April 2020, we stated market pretty heavily and had, in April, had a pretty down in April in 2020. We learned from that experience, and so when we saw the, particularly the paper click markets reset in July, we decided to be much more cautious this time. So I think that answers your question.

If I could just add to that, Victoria, just 2 other points. 1 is, we did have, as those markets or as the advertisers started to pull out of the market towards the end of Q2, we just had a really good Q2 in terms of, as we saw ad spend really retreat to the performance marketplaces, where RAMP shines. And secondly, just I think you mentioned specifically going Google going cookie-less, that's also, to Michael's point, another place where we expect our platform to really outperform there as well. So we don't rely on cookies, we're specifically first-party data, so that's another opportunity for us when it happens.

All right. And then my other question, I feel like we've touched on a little bit in your answer here and maybe a bit in your opening remarks, but I just wanted to ask a little bit more explicitly. So for investors who may be were not following the story in 2008 or 2020, can you talk a little bit more about what is allowing you to outperform during those times of market downturn?

Yes, so our system's set up to take advantages of dislocation between markets. Think of what we're doing on specifically on the advertising side, what we're doing is, we're typically buying on 1 market and finding a place to sell on the other market to advertise at a higher price. And so as markets are moving around and like display markets, if they're dropping in pricing and pay-per-click markets are increasing, we're going to move heavily into this display and sell to our pay per click providers, in this particular case. So that's how things work normally, 99% of the time, in this particular case, in July, specifically the first 4 or 5 weeks of the quarter, what we saw is pay per click markets overall in almost every category that we're in became depressed relatively quickly when the markets reset in July.

And then on our buy side, we've been seeing a bit of volatility. As I mentioned, we don't necessarily need up markets or down markets, we can take advantage of our spread in most markets, but we do look for some level of stability that allows us to figure out the ad verticals that are going to be most profitable for us, and also the buy side and sell side places that are going to increase our spread the most.

So anyway, and we have a history of doing this, most recently, it was 2020, where there was a dislocation like no one's ever seen before. And we stated market, it took us about 6 or 8 weeks to figure out where the pockets were. And as I've said, we're starting to see that, we did not put -- we really based our guidance of what we've seen so far in the quarter and our guidance is also combined with, as we've mentioned, we're seeing some pretty good pockets of opportunity on the subscription side to go in and acquire customers at a larger scale while maintaining our cost to acquire goals.

The next question comes from Nat Schindler with BofA.

Couple of questions. One, and I think you've been touching on this the whole time and everybody is asking about it, but more explicitly, because you're in both the buy side and the sell side of any advertising transaction, how quickly can your systems learn so that you can protect profit in advertising recession. And do you think over, as long as you're giving some time to figure it out that you could actually maintain the same level of profitability regardless of the macro movement as long as it is in too abrupt? And I have some other follow-up questions.

Yes, thanks for joining. So we have historically over -- really since our founding being able to maintain that spread through good markets and bad markets. We're looking for stability, as I said, we're starting to see it in the markets on the advertising side. So we're highly confident in treaty, reported good spread, we're continuing to see that on our advertising side. But what we've been is a bit conservative as we are seeing the markets fluctuate with the quarter reset, we decided to be a little bit more conservative, but we're still maintaining spread as we always have.

One just interesting little tidbit which has affected us more on that, where you're looking at our gross revenue -- our total revenue projections, we play on the -- desktop and mobile are the 2 major areas where we play. On the desktop side, we're seeing a bit of reduced consumer queries, particularly commercial queries on desktop. Desktops are higher revenue lower margin business for us, so you see that play out in our numbers with lower projected revenue, but margins going up, but that's just an anecdote that we're seeing, we think it's because combination of both people having more normalized work schedules. But also particularly this summer, we believe travel's affecting that as well, people are traveling not in front of their desktop, computers and doing more searches on mobile.

That's actually very interesting, because that goes into my next question. I wanted to ask why in particular Bing you described as a higher dollar lower margin business. I'd assume that's compared to Google, which is the obvious compare for Bing, is that because what you just mentioned that Bing is not playing very much on mobile and mobile tended to be lower dollars higher margin?

So Bing would shift, it would be a little bit more heavily desktop, where we specifically were scaling up our business with Bing was more on the desktop side. So as we scale that back, we scale that pretty heavily since around the middle of Q1 rolling into Q2. As we pull that back, we still have some buys going on Bing just to make sure that we are highly confident in the quality of the traffic coming from there. But as we pull that back, you're seeing the immediate effect, because that was a heavy desktop business for us and, as I mentioned, that's why we're bringing down our total revenue guidance substantially, but if it does coming down just a little bit.

(inaudible) from this earning season, a pretty severe de-sell from the socials, talking to the DSPs, they saw things go down in connected television and alike, can you give any more just overarching thoughts about where in the online ad landscape things are being impacted where dollars are shifting and how quickly and how you see them just coming out given that you're playing across the role?

Yes. So I would say 2 different areas. As I said, at least our view on the CPCs and performance advertising, those look to have been pretty relatively depressed from what we would have expected. We mentioned in our earlier remarks, when things always reset in July, our systems are ready for that. It's really almost at the end of every quarter when literally the next day rolls into Q1, ad markets reset, and then they, over the first month in a quarter, generally tend to rebound. We saw things rebound much more slowly. And so we're seeing that on the sell side, that's primarily where our revenue is coming from is the pay per click marketing side.

We're seeing a little bit more depressed consumer queries, so we don't -- that's not going to be a long-term, over the long-term, obviously people are using the Internet more and more, specifically as we're rolling towards the end of Q2 and early in Q3, it looks to us and now we don't have a perfect view of the entire market, so this is our view of the market, it looks to us like commercial query volume was a little bit lower in general. And what we would suspect and we flagged this in our remarks, we suspect that's a combination of, certainly on the shopping side, we've seen things be depressed, there's probably some macroeconomic headwinds in there, where we think it has something to do with a bit of increased summer travel as well which we have a natural effect, you hear a lot about revenge travel this summer.

So we're seeing things just a little bit depressed on the consumer side as well. But that said, as I mentioned, as summer is starting to get to the end of summer and maybe consumers are feeling a little bit better about things, we're starting to see things stabilize.

Yes, I think one thing to add there is that we mentioned in the remarks as well, but we think the advertising dollars when they do come back following this consumer queries, they'll come to the performance marketplaces first, and that's certainly as we looked at some of the stabilization, we've seen in recent days or weeks even that's what we're seeing as well. So again, we feel pretty well positioned to take advantage of that as it kind of returns.

And last thing I would say, we get a lot, obviously a lot of discussion about the advertising side. On the subscription side, things are opening up for us a bit. So, I can give you some real-time data, our July customer acquisition was materially higher than our June customer, number of customers acquired. So that points to that, we consider to be the beauty of our diversification. So you get the advertising side being a little bit depressed, we went through July with super choppy, things are going to stabilize on advertising, our system figures it out and exploit where the pockets of profitability are, but also macro advertising being down makes us a more affected advertising on the subscription side. So we've got that nice balance as well.

We will now go back to Victoria James for a follow-up question.

So my question is with valuations just down across the market, can you give your updated thoughts on future M&A?

Yes, thanks. So we are remaining active in the M&A market. We think there's a lot of opportunities out there. We're maintaining our discipline, we haven't seen valuations, it takes a little bit of time for sellers to adjust to the new normal. So we're being a little bit conservative. We're only going to do M&A that we have a very high level of confidence is going to be accretive and we can inject growth into it, but we are seeing people, companies that normally, let's say, weren't as interested are coming back and unsolicited inquiring with us, if we're still interested in deals. So we're starting to see the market move a little bit, I mentioned in our earlier remarks, we're not discount buyers so we're not trying, we like deals that they were highly confident we can inject growth into. But it's feeling to us like valuations are coming down a bit and hopefully that'll be reflected when we do buy, when we do our next M&A that will come into perhaps a lower price than it would have 4 months ago.

The next question is from Dan Kurnos with Benchmark.

Michael, Tridi, good to see you guys. Just to your point on subscription, maybe we can just talk through a couple of things here. So maybe we can also parlay to the auto business as well, you guys have always thrived when there's disruption in the marketplace. And while obviously that's not helpful to your advertising business at the moment. Can you just talk a little bit about tech trends and what you're seeing, and if you're able to toggle back right now? And Michael, you say that July customer acquisition subscription is good, obviously your products fits into a different nature bucket than maybe some of the cost guys or some of the really expensive guys that are out there that are seeing some challenges, and if we go towards the recession getting consumers to sign up, I know it's really [hard for you], but just help us think through your ability to continue to grow through any economic pressure on that thoughts?

Yes, sure. So I think there's a few questions in there. So we've got a mix of products at this point. We've got our TotalAV product, which is our flagship, that's starting to, I wouldn't say, that's hitting maturity, but that's starting to hit the point where it's going to be leveling off and we'll be reaping the profitability from that. We've got our Total AdBlock product, which we mentioned is achieving really nice scale and then we've got another product that we released in Q2 that we mentioned, actually another product which is going to be coming out of here in the next couple of weeks.

And so for us, we haven't seen any consumer macro headwinds start to affect our business. In fact, as we're finding pockets of opportunity for increased customer acquisition, we typically are not going to go bring down our CAC on that, what we're going to do is buy, acquire as many subscribers as we can at an acceptable return for us, that's where we do remain pretty disciplined. So instead of spending less per customer, our goal would be to spend up to the level that we're comfortable paying per customer and gives me customers as we possibly can.

And so for us, we're seeing good opportunity there. That's also reflected in our annual guidance. We tried to be, leave ourselves some room both on the advertising side. We're making assumptions pretty conservative, relatively conservative assumptions that the market is not going to recover, we're basing our forward-looking advertising in the quarter so far. But we're also leaving ourselves room for increased customer acquisition on the subscription side and I think everybody on the call knows how that works, on the customer acquisition side because we're paying upfront for the subscribers that typically is going to come at a negative EBITDA for this year and then increase the growth for next year. And so our guidance for this year, we want to give ourselves some cover in case the opportunities we're seeing right now continue throughout the entire year.

If I could just add, I think Dan you mentioned CAC trends in general on the subscription side. So we did CAC go up in Q2 over Q1. That's really a function of the trends that Michael talked about which is specifically on the AdBlock product. We're seeing really nice LTV specifically, you'll recall, we launched that product at the beginning of last year, and as those annual renewals are coming in and we're continuing to see the month lease, very bullish on the return profile of the LTV to CAC metrics that are there. And so, per Michael's point, we're willing to take up what we're going to spend to get those customers and because the return is there. So that's what's driving some of that upward trend on the CAC that you're seeing.

Great, got it. That's helpful. And then just a quick follow-up and I apologize if this was asked earlier, but around international I know CPMs continue to be pressured by what's going on, we all know what's going on, and APAC has been probably a little softer, but it's not quite as bad maybe as some pockets, I know, international, we talked about it on the fringes, but just help us think through in this market again, disruptions opportunity challenges. Just maybe talk to that a little bit?

Yes, we're very bullish on international, we are not seeing any -- I know some of the other advertising-based companies have talked about international challenges. We continue to see the opportunity there. We're not changed. That's also an area where we haven't talked much more about our new platform that we're moving to which is substantial upgrade from where we are now on our RAMP platform, early data on there, which we can't promise anything yet because we're talking very early data, that scenario where international looks like it's got increased opportunity via some technical upgrades we've made on our platform.

At this point. There are no further questions. So we'll turn it back to Michael Blend for closing remarks.

Okay, well, I want to thank everyone for taking the time to join us today. We're happy to announce our Q2 earnings. We look forward to you joining us again in Q3. We're very proud of the team for executing on our initiatives in Q2. We are very happy, we've got a diversified business model that carries us through these times. We've got opportunities on advertising and opportunities on subscription as well. And look forward to speaking with you again in Q3. Thank you.