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Operator
Greeting.
Welcome to the j2 Global fourth quarter and year-end earnings conference call.
At this time all participants are in a listen-only mode.
A brief question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation.
If anyone should require any operator assistance during this conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad.
It is my pleasure to introduce your host, Mr. Scott Turicchi, President of j2 Global.
Thank you Mr. Turicchi, you may now begin.
Scott Turicchi - President, CFO
Thank you very much.
Good afternoon and welcome to j2 Global's investor conference call for the first fiscal quarter of 2015.
As Mike, our operator, just mentioned, I'm Scott Turicchi, the President and CFO of j2 Global and with me today is Hemi Zucker, our Chief Executive Officer.
We're very excited and proud of our accomplishments in the first fiscal quarter of this year and we will discuss in detail new developments at j2, a review of our business units, as well as an update to our guidance.
Performance was strong in both our cloud and media segments.
And as a result, our Board has increased the quarterly dividend to $0.30 a share.
I might remind you that we started the dividend only about 15 quarters ago and it was $0.20 per share.
And in the aggregate we will now have distributed, upon payment of this dividend, $186 million of dividends to shareholders in that timeframe.
We'll use the presentation for today's call, a copy of which is available at our web site.
When you launch the webcast, there is a button on the viewer, on the right hand side which will allow you to expand the slide so they're more easily readable.
In addition, if you've not yet received a copy of the press release, you can access it through our corporate web site at j2global.com\press.
In addition, you will be able to access the webcast from this site.
After we've completed our formal remarks, we'll conduct a Q&A session.
The operator at the time will instruct you regarding the procedures for asking a question.
I would remind you may email questions at any time at investor@j2global.com.
Before beginning our prepared remarks, I will read the Safe Harbor language.
As you know, this call and webcast does include forward-looking statements.
Such statements do involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from the anticipated results.
Some of those risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, the risk factors that we have disclosed in our various SEC filings, including our 10-K filings, recent 10-Q filings, various proxy statements and 8-K filings as well as additional risk factors that we have included as part of the slide show for the webcast.
We refer you to discussions in those documents regarding Safe Harbor language, as well as forward-looking statements.
I would now ask you to turn to Slide 5, where I'll give a quick overview of the results and then turn the call over to Hemi.
Q1 was a record for us for any quarter in the Company's history but Q4, which as you know was seasonally good because of our media business.
We had record revenue in Q1 of $161.3 million, up about 20% or approximately $27 million.
This is in light of the fact that foreign currencies hurt our revenue versus Q1 of 2014, by approximately $4.7 million in revenue, $4.2 million of which is attributed to our cloud business, and $500,000 to our media business.
Foreign currencies also affected sequential performance from Q4 of 2014 to Q1 of 2015, by $2.3 million.
As we've talked about on these calls on numerous occasions, M&A is an important part of our overall business strategy, in terms of how we grow our businesses and scale them.
During the first fiscal quarter, we completed nine acquisitions, at a total cost of approximately $75 million.
I would note that since our M&A program began, in early 2000, we have completed 109 transactions, and spent $1.1 billion.
So as you can see, our average deal is about $10 million.
We do many of them.
But we're able to find them at the right price.
Our Business Cloud Services had an all-time record cloud revenue for any quarter in the Company's history of $118 million.
Q1 revenue was up $17 million or 17% versus the prior year, with our other cloud services, meaning our non-fax invoice, up $16 million or 120% versus the prior year.
Media had another strong quarter, with revenues up $10 million in Q1 of 2015, versus Q1 of 2014.
As importantly, though, there was margin expansion from 26% to 32%, resulting in 52% flow-through of incremental revenue to EBITDA.
I would now turn your attention to Slide 6, which will give you a little bit more detail on our reporting by segment.
I'll remind you we have the cloud segment, which consists of two pieces.
Our Cloud Services business, as well as our IP licensing.
So our services business was up 16.5% in revenues Q1 of 2015 to Q1 of 2014.
And EBITDA was up approximately 15%.
What I would note is that in our cloud services business, we had about 43% flow-through of incremental revenue from Q1 of 2014 to Q1 of 2015 to EBITDA, which is ahead of the margin that we have in our non-fax and voice businesses, and substantially all of that revenue increase came in that category.
Our IP licensing through the settlement of one case during the quarter was able to surpass the revenue in 2014 by about $300,000, but had somewhat lower EBITDA, as I've reminded you on the last several calls, because we continue to make investments in the portfolio, that later this year we will begin to assert.
The addition of our Cloud Services business and our IP licensing roll together in what is called total cloud, which had a revenue increase of 16.5%, and EBITDA margins of 47.1%.
Media, as I mentioned, had a growth of approximately $10 million in revenue year-over-year and a little over $5 million increase in EBITDA and expansion of the EBITDA margin from 26 to 32%.
Those two pieces added together give us j2 Global Consolidated, which resulted in $0.85 a share in non-GAAP earnings, and $0.45 a share in GAAP earnings.
I would remind you the primary delta between the GAAP and the non-GAAP is our non-cash interest expense on our converts, which is new in Q1 of 2015 versus Q1 of 2014, and the amortization costs for the nine deals that were concluded in Q1 of 2015, as well as the nine deals concluded in Q4 of 2014, which were not existent in Q1 of 2014.
At this time I will turn the presentation over to Hemi, who will walk through the various business units.
Hemi Zucker - CEO
Thank you, Scott.
And great afternoon for everybody.
Before I start I want to talk with you and get your attention to the quote when I say, Q1 was very strong.
It is very hard to explain it in a short call.
But let me tell you why Q1 is so strong.
There are three main reasons.
Reason number one, our growth was planned to be 16% to 17% at our midpoint, in our outlook, but actually we already surpassed the rate of 20%.
Reason number two.
Media, which is at its weakest point in Q1, and is getting better in Q2 and Q3 and significantly larger in Q4, grew 23% quarter-over-quarter and as we get deeper into the year, and we get into Q4, we get the strongest contribution not only on revenue, but also on the bottom line.
And reason number three, when we planned the year and we made our outlook, we were planning also to have some M&A deals.
Our M&A deals, during the quarter, were planned originally to be slower and smaller.
But actually we achieved all the deals in the first quarter.
They happened faster and we grew a great revenue.
And actually as we talked, to be honest, up to Friday last week, we had already four signed LOIs and four additional LOIs are in signing process.
And on top of it, we have more than $100 million deal in the earliest stage.
I would not book on those.
But I'm just telling you that this is the way we counted.
So very good upside in the beginning of the year.
Let's go to page five and talk about Business Cloud Services.
Sorry.
Page 7 and then page 8. Page 8 is titled our revenue mix by services.
Our revenue mix both in media and in cloud services is increasing.
Media is now 27%, it was 25%.
In our other cloud services, also called the new cloud services, moved from 11% to 20%.
Fax and voice, which we call Cloud Connect, went down in percentage, but steady in revenue.
Our customer count grew this quarter a quarter over quarter by 240,000 units.
10% of them approximately are fax and voice and 90% of them are mostly backup units that came from a mix of acquisition, including SugarSync.
Our first quarter cancel rate is better than it was in Q1 of last year.
It was 2.3%, now down to 2.2%.
Main reason for our cancel rate improvement is that we have more mix, better mix of corporate customers.
They signed for longer contracts and we have more premium customers that take the higher priced units and those people also have longer longevity.
Fax is now 45% of our total revenue.
The fax is not down in revenue, but most of the -- mostly it is because the other part of our business are growing faster than fax.
Page number 9. Cloud Connect.
As you see our premium brands of eFax, eFax Corporate, eVoice Receptionist, and now City Numbers are now all consolidated into a new Cloud Connect dedicated team that we have built.
We have created this team to focus on our fax and voice services.
This dedicated team is led by our newly appointed President Harmeet, who was promoted from the FuseMail business.
They will focus on the new venue creation through organic growth mainly voice and moving up to the premium brands and to new connectivity in mobile services.
For example, we can enter into collaboration, mobile, and document management services, M&A.
We've already done one M&A deal for them in France and we have another one in LOI.
And improving of margins, most of the improvements of the margins will come through continued consolidation of the infrastructure of this business.
Premium fax and voice brand service revenue grew, as I mentioned.
And another positive on this quarter, the fixed proportion of the revenue continues to increase, which decreased our dependency on usage.
Foreign currency, as Scott said, had negative impact on this business.
And I just checked before the call and it seems that the Euro started to improve and actually is a little bit higher than our plan at this time, which is positive to us.
Integration of our firstly RTE business is completed as scheduled.
The RTCO, James Harvey, was visiting us today.
He's now heading the entire European organization and all his team from the other side of Dublin is now moved into our Santry office and they're working together.
Page number 10.
Cloud backup.
Cloud backup had very strong quarter-over-quarter growth of 68%.
As we said, the revenue is plus-minus $17 million.
EBITDA continued to grow.
At full integration, which we'll reach very soon, it's about 40% EBITDA margins.
We have a new LiveDrive deal, which we signed with Carphone Warehouse UK.
They are basically a company that just merged with Dixons.
And they're branding the service as Geek Squad Backup.
They have 700 stores which will deploy our services and this business deal has commitment of minimum revenue, so this deal will add to our revenue as they launch it through the year.
We have bought SugarSync, Backup, Sync and Collaboration all integration in one service.
SugarSync office is in San Mateo.
We are integrating them already are -- the R&D teams of both LiveDrive and SugarSync will be one.
And the products for LiveDrive, SugarSync and KeepItSafe will be headed by management that we brought up into j2 from SugarSync.
Page 11.
Email Security update.
As we talked about promoting Hameet we brought in a new managing director [ Arian Gunderson] to join us in March.
Arian is already traveling to all of the offices related to the FuseMail business.
The near term focus is to integrate the recent acquisitions Stay Secure from Sweden and Comendo from Denmark.
And to continue to integrate the acquisition for Excel Micro.
This business represents approximately $50 million.
Of those $25 million [Other is] Excel Micro and $25 million is the rest.
Most of the newly acquired revenue from Stay Secure and Comendo came as non-profitable business or unprofitable business and was reflected in the low price that we paid for it.
The EBITDA of the total business is 25%, but it is 40% without the Nordics, and once we integrate Stay Secure, Comendo, we expect it to go to 40% level plus.
Next page Campaigner.
Email marketing update.
Campaigner has accelerated growth.
They grew 63% quarterly year-over-year and 20% for Q4 2014.
We just acquired email marketing company called EmailDirect.
EmailDirect brought to us, besides the revenue and everything else, also strong lead generation team, which impacts the organic growth of Campaigner and Campaigner is growing now in double-digit growth.
We have started to integrate the new acquisition for Excel Micro, which is called Nuvotera and we continue to integrate all of the other acquired businesses.
We launched Campaigner White Label, added new feature for email.
The main focus that I want you to focus on when you think about Campaigner, email marketing is typified by -- rarely do companies buy and integrate other companies into the infrastructure.
It is not an easy task.
We have developed this Campaigner, strong engineering team and product team that are capable to buy companies and integrate them.
Why am I excited about this?
This can become a rollout machine, because there are many companies, you know, with relatively low revenues of $5 million, $10 million, $15 million and $20 million that are not being shopped and we don't see a lot of competition when we buy them because of the hardship of integrating them.
But we are able to integrate all of them, we're integrating them also all to one system.
So we're not like buying and running multiple systems.
We are integrating into one system.
So very exciting here.
Let's go and talk about Digital Media.
Page 14.
Here are the highlights as I said, Q1 is one of the weakest in the media business, but still we had a very strong quarter.
Revenue of $43 million.
30% here versus the quarter-over-quarter.
EBITDA of approximately $14 million, up significantly, 61% higher than Q1 of 2014.
EBITDA margin grew to 32% versus 26% last year.
And revenue per thousand visits of $45 versus $56 before the acquisition of Ookla.
Ookla is the most profitable part of our Ziff Davis business, but they are a different mix of customers and they brought the revenue per thousand to $45, a significant improvement due to the profitability of the bottom line.
The visits to our owned and operated site are up 61% year-over-year with 956 million visits.
Now IGN.
IGN continues to expand into an investing video.
IGN video views are up 30%.
IGN YouTube channels saw biggest gross, reaching 6.5 million subscribers.
IGN launched new apps for Xbox One and FireTV.
IGN app installs across all the consoles and over the top devices now are at 12 million units, which is 52% year-over-year growth.
IGN, AskMen and PC Magazine passed the 15.6 million social followers mark, which is 99%, or 100% almost year-over-year growth.
Let's go to the next page, 15.
And I will talk about speed tests for Ookla.
We acquired Ookla only in December.
Integration of Ookla is going on as planned.
Total speed tests hit a new all-time high of 463 million tests, which is 20% year-over-year.
Since inception, there were 7 billion tests created on the infrastructure of Ookla.
For those of you who don't understand, Ookla is a business of testing the speed of the Internet speeds.
The opportunity is very big, because those people that test, they test for a reason, usually because they're not happy.
When they are not happy, it's a great opportunity for us to introduce competition and be paid for advertising them.
Ookla mobile surpassed 135 million tests.
Installations, sorry.
135 installations, which is 51% year-over-year growth.
And lastly international expansion of our media division.
We expand the PC Magazine into Asia, IGN into Hungary, IGN into France, and IGN to Brazil.
With that I will pass it to Scott, who will discuss our outlook.
Scott Turicchi - President, CFO
Thank you, Hemi.
On slide 17 we are reaffirming our guidance of both revenues and non-GAAP EPS.
I will remind that on the revenue side, that is for full fiscal year revenues of between $690 million and $710 million.
And for non-GAAP EPS between $3.73 a share and $3.97.
I would draw your attention that both in the first fiscal quarter, as well as our view for the year, we believe that our tax rate will be at the higher end of the 27% to 29% range.
In Q1, our tax rate was 28.9%.
And we think that is a realistic rate going forward, in large part because some of the M&A has been more US centric than non-US centric.
And so we are seeing a shift in income into US tax domicile versus foreign tax domiciles.
And with that I would encourage the operator to come back on and inform you how to queue for questions.
Operator
Thank you.
(Operator Instructions).
Our first question comes from the line of Daniel Ives with FBR.
Please proceed with your question.
Daniel Ives - Analyst
Thanks, guys.
Great quarter.
So can you just talk about in terms of the cloud business, if you're seeing any changing buying dynamics in the field maybe over the last few months, or maybe compare and contrast where we were six months ago.
Scott Turicchi - President, CFO
Yes.
You were a little bit muffled, Dan.
You said have we noticed any difference in with what respect to the cloud environment?
Daniel Ives - Analyst
Yes, in terms of the cloud business.
Maybe you could talk about buying behaviors and any changes one way or another that you're seeing there this quarter.
Hemi Zucker - CEO
It's not the same across the board.
So let's start with our backup.
Backup is growing.
Businesses are adopting it.
Businesses accumulate data.
And we see basically organic growth that comes through each bill is bigger than before, because customers are increasing the data.
And we have seen easier time in introducing the concept of storing in the cloud versus storing in hardware.
On the cloud business of our Campaigner, we have seen now that we are able to sell to larger customers.
And less and less customers are attracted to smaller web site, do it yourself type, they prefer to go and talk versus buy online.
And what we are seeing is increasing ARPU, especially, as I said, on the container side.
And we started to generate leads by calling customers and new generation versus straight to site, profit there is higher.
On the email security we are actually rolling up resellers that are -- were excited to join the cloud, but now they realize they are too small to deal directly.
And they prefer to do it through us.
So j2 in the cloud is increasing its bank of resellers, which basically lowers our competition.
So people -- we have less people to compete with, because the resellers are on our site.
I hope I answered your question, Dan.
Daniel Ives - Analyst
Yes.
That's good.
In terms of acquisitions (inaudible), you're just giving now a sort of [closed Carbonite] -- can you maybe talk about how we should think about things going just second half of the year?
Hemi Zucker - CEO
Yes.
So as I indicated, we have some relatively large deals.
Two of them are large, in the $40 million each.
One is larger than $30 million.
They are all in the backup early stage.
But they are shopped around.
And I think that there will be more consolidation which is something that we really specialize and are experts in.
And I actually am very bullish about it, because j2 is the ultimate M&A machine and we have more and more discussion.
Companies that a year ago were saying we're going all the way to the IPO.
Now they're going all the way to j2.
Basically that's what I see in the market.
Scott Turicchi - President, CFO
The other thing I would add to that, it's not M&A related.
But if you look to the balance of the year and certainly into 2016, even with these margins, we have a drag, probably more on the cloud side and the media side, because 17 of the last 18 deals have been on the cloud.
Some of them have been already integrated.
But some of them are still in a very early stage of integration.
So I'm very happy that in the year-over-year period, we got a 43% flow-through of incremental revenue to EBITDA on the cloud side.
That's a primary focus for the business units for which assets have been acquired, primarily in the email security area, and the backup area.
Hemi Zucker - CEO
Another thing.
We sometimes buy companies that they already acquired other companies and we find, even though that they are small, they actually bought another company, but not really integrated it and they are running multiple systems.
This is not the way we operate.
We just integrate it and we have built our systems to be strong with API and strong with everything.
That's why we are able to generate this high EBITDA.
We go and seek companies that have not perfected their pricing, their costs, the integration.
And, therefore, they cannot make it to the finish line and they're happy to shove the company to us.
And on the organic side, as I said, it becomes easier to sell.
Our name becomes more prominent.
J2 is led by strong brands.
We have now acquired SugarSync, which is a very strong brand.
We have LiveDrive, we have in every country a brand that is in the top shelf brand, which always was our philosophy because you have to spend a lot of advertising money unless you have a recognized brand.
Daniel Ives - Analyst
Great answer.
Thanks a lot, guys.
Scott Turicchi - President, CFO
Thanks, Dan.
Hemi Zucker - CEO
All the best.
Operator
Thank you.
And our next question comes from the line of Greg Burns with Sidoti & Co.
Please proceed with your question.
Greg Burns - Analyst
Good afternoon.
I missed the prepared remarks.
So forgive me if you touched on some of this.
In terms of Carbonite, I know you're still interested in some portion of their business.
What percent of their total revenue does that make up?
And do you have any -- well, what is your intent for your equity stake in Carbonite, are you going to hold on or liquidate?
Scott Turicchi - President, CFO
Two things.
First of all, everything that you have just said on our intent is outlined in our 13D filings.
And when, as and if our intent changes you will see an update to the 13D filing.
So to remind everybody of a couple of facts -- and no, we didn't address in the prepared remarks so it is a fresh question -- the last communication was an interest in what's called the end point business of Carbonite.
We're not at liberty to disclose the amount of revenues that that constitutes.
That's a question for them to answer.
Hemi Zucker - CEO
But it is a legacy service.
Scott Turicchi - President, CFO
Yes.
And then as it relates to any activity vis-a-vis Carbonite, they terminated the process.
We have a standstill with them that runs through June 30 of this year.
And so come July 1, we will be free to do what we think is appropriate for j2, whether it's regarding the Company as a whole, pieces of the business or our own shares.
Greg Burns - Analyst
Okay.
And on the media business, looks like very nice page view and traffic volume growth there.
Was that all organic or how much of that was organic versus inorganic and are you doing anything in particular?
Scott Turicchi - President, CFO
No.
Big chunk of the visits and the views came from the acquisition of Ookla.
And as Hemi mentioned, which you didn't hear in the prepared remarks, the revenue per 1,000 visits declined from $56 in Q1 of 2014 to $45.
And what is happening there is we've got all of these additional visits and page views from Ookla and they're not yet optimized.
Very similar to what happened -- We bought IGN and almost every one of the properties we've added into Digital Media.
So you can think of it as sort of reset that metric.
Now as we put our programs in place to optimize the revenue productivity of Ookla, we would expect to see that number go back up.
Hemi Zucker - CEO
Greg, let me add, that's correct about visits to the site.
But video and YouTube are products or services that are not included in Ookla.
And they've grown also significantly.
I said, for instance, social followers, doubling.
I said that we have 52% more installs.
We have 30% more video.
Those are organic.
They are not tied to the Ookla, because Ookla does not provide those type of services.
Scott Turicchi - President, CFO
But they do provide visits.
Hemi Zucker - CEO
They provide visits.
But they don't provide video views and things like that.
Greg Burns - Analyst
Okay.
Thank you.
Hemi Zucker - CEO
You're welcome.
Operator
Thank you.
And our next question comes from the line of James Breen with William Blair & Company.
Please proceed with your question.
James Breen - Analyst
Thanks for taking the questions.
Just a couple.
You just answered the one on the page view spike and the business spike.
So that's great.
Does the acquisition there of Ookla change the breakdown in terms of how EBITDA progresses throughout the year within media?
It tended to be more back-end loaded.
I'm just wondering if that has an impact.
Scott Turicchi - President, CFO
No.
(Multiple speakers) what business -- If you segmented it out or pieced it out, it's not going to have the same degree of back-end strength that our core properties do.
So in that sense it can tamper or temper a little bit the ways the revenues and EBITDA flows.
However, since we bought Ookla in December, that was already baked in to our seasonality for 2015.
And as you may recall last quarter, when we announced the guidance and gave the subcomponents to it, we're still expecting 30% plus of the total revenue of media to come in Q4 of this year.
Hemi Zucker - CEO
Hi, James.
So Ookla is drive by people testing the band width.
I don't think the people test the band width more at Christmas time, but they do shop other products.
So that's basically.
And Ookla, as I said, James, has very high EBITDA.
It's very profitable.
So it gives good support through the year.
James Breen - Analyst
Okay, Scott, I think you just said 30% of media revenue.
You meant 30% of media EBITDA in the fourth quarter?
Scott Turicchi - President, CFO
No.
Revenue.
James Breen - Analyst
30% of revenue.
Okay.
And then, from a margin and free cash flow perspective --
Scott Turicchi - President, CFO
there will be more of EBITDA, just to clarify.
That represents an even higher amount of total EBITDA for the year for media.
So, if you're 30% plus in revs, it's even higher share of EBITDA.
James Breen - Analyst
Okay.
Great.
And then you talked a little bit about working through some of these acquisitions.
Your EBITDA margins in cloud was 47% this quarter, the same as it was a year ago.
What's the high end of that range?
Can you get to 50% or 51%, or because it's some of the mix now you're probably going to stay in the high 40% range?
Hemi Zucker - CEO
No.
It should go up because as I said through the call we are consolidating newly acquired companies in the Nordic, newly acquired company in the backup and newly acquired company in FuseMail.
All of those companies in the beginning tend to deliver weaker EBITDA, and they continue to improve as we continue to consolidate.
Scott Turicchi - President, CFO
I think on a more longer term arc, I think, with the exception of web hosting, which still remains an asset that we are incubating in the Australian markets, the Web24 assets, I think each of the core business elements that we are in or business services that we are in, when they reach scale, will be 50% or better EBITDA margin businesses.
In fact, in some cases we're already honing in on that.
In other cases the revenue stream is just not large enough today.
It probably needs to be, in our judgment, for most of these services $100 million of revenue or more.
Hemi Zucker - CEO
You know, in general, we just made a focused theme on Cloud Connect, which is $340 million.
And we have a focused theme on media which is north of $200 million.
My job and focus now, including everything, is also to take those other division and help them and aid them and bring them to the scale of $100 million plus, where they can really reach EBITDAs of 50% on the cloud side.
This is what is our new focus now.
James Breen - Analyst
Great.
And then just one last question, Scott.
You said you spent about $75 million on the nine transactions this quarter.
Scott Turicchi - President, CFO
Yes.
James Breen - Analyst
Any indication in terms of how much of that revenue showed up in the quarter, or were most of those toward the end of the quarter?
Scott Turicchi - President, CFO
I think that of the nine, most were in March.
One was in February.
Hemi Zucker - CEO
The largest one, which as you know, tailing everything around it, is SugarSync and they were end of quarter.
James Breen - Analyst
Okay.
Great.
Hemi Zucker - CEO
It's the largest of them.
James Breen - Analyst
Perfect.
Thank you very much.
Scott Turicchi - President, CFO
You're welcome.
Hemi Zucker - CEO
Okay.
Operator
Thank you.
And our next question comes from the line of Walter Pritchard with Citi Research.
Please proceed with your question.
Unidentified Participant - Analyst
Good afternoon, Hemi.
It's actually Jim on for Walter.
And thanks for the questions.
Hemi Zucker - CEO
Jim, nice name, Walter.
All right.
Go ahead.
Scott Turicchi - President, CFO
Alright.
Go ahead.
Unidentified Participant - Analyst
So kind of going back on the last question, maybe perhaps another way that we can ask this is, can you talk about the gross adds this quarter that came in [BCS] from the M&A that you had as opposed to just the revenue?
Scott Turicchi - President, CFO
I don't have it.
Hemi Zucker - CEO
Gross as to what?
Unidentified Participant - Analyst
The gross adds from, yes.
Scott Turicchi - President, CFO
Yes.
Of the total -- of the total adds, units.
Hemi Zucker - CEO
Units.
Right.
The 240,000 units that I said.
Scott Turicchi - President, CFO
Those are the net adds.
Hemi Zucker - CEO
Those are the net adds.
Scott Turicchi - President, CFO
Those are the net adds.
Not the gross adds.
Unidentified Participant - Analyst
Okay.
Hemi Zucker - CEO
So 240 are net.
And you can calculate that the churn is 2.3%.
I mean, it's hard for me to do it on the fly.
But you can basically reverse engineer it to the gross adds.
I can tell you that our marketing and cost per acquisitions are all same or better.
I also indicated that we get some new boost to our sales through lead generation, which was not something that we have seen so well in the past.
Our Google search and everything is optimized and j2 is very disciplined.
So if we don't get what we want, we are not trying to climb the glass wall.
If it doesn't work, we look for another alternative, not to keep the money in the bank.
So costs of acquisition are managed well.
We are seeing more lead generation, we're seeing some affiliates coming in, in Japan and we have more reseller than we ever had before, selling on three or four, almost all of our products now have some level of reseller.
Some the resellers are very high, like the Backup and the fax is low.
But basically those are new channels that you pay only for success.
Unidentified Participant - Analyst
Okay.
Thanks for that.
And then on media, can you refresh us on the monetization strategies for that business that enabled you to actually have margins that appear to be higher than the rest of the Digital Media appears.
Scott Turicchi - President, CFO
Yes.
At a high level, if you go back actually now, a couple of years ago, shortly after we acquired Ziff Davis, we had an Analyst Day in New York in July of 2013.
I believe that -- it's not on our website anymore.
But I believe that that presentation is still available through SEC.gov because I think it was filed.
But I'd say the key to our Digital Media strategy is multiple streams of monetization of the traffic and marrying that traffic with data analytics to get premium pricing.
In a nutshell, that's really what's going on.
So we have the content that is -- for the most part are owned and operated across a variety of web properties in the tech games and men's lifestyle area.
Traffic is showing up basically on an organic basis.
So we don't have large, if any really, traffic acquisition costs.
They're nil.
They're nonexistent.
And then we have to monetize that traffic.
So, there's different theories and methods of how you do it.
We have straight display monetization, we have performance-based marketing.
We have high-quality leads we call it, which is our B2B program for basically medium to large enterprise and we have licensing programs.
Hemi mentioned at the end of the prepared remarks about taking some of the intellectual property and content and in non-English speaking countries releasing those websites for which we receive certain fees.
Hemi Zucker - CEO
Also I used or we used to mention last year in the earning calls the position of Ziff Davis and IGN as being number one or number two, most of the time number one player in the place.
So if you're number one in tech and you're number one in video --
Scott Turicchi - President, CFO
In games.
Hemi Zucker - CEO
Sorry, in games, people have to come to you.
You don't have to spend so much money like the others and the margins are higher.
Everybody with number one just sits there and waits for people to come to him, because nobody can just go and launch a campaign, ignoring the number one or the number two.
So that's also a big contributor to our position and profitability.
And j2 all the time is trying to become the lead brand in its space or one of them, which always, always drives to higher EBITDA.
I hope I answered you.
Unidentified Participant - Analyst
You did.
Thanks.
Thanks for that color there, Hemi.
And I guess just one last one for me.
It's just with the media vertical pullback in the markets pretty much, is there anything out there from a domain perspective that looks interesting to you guys?
Hemi Zucker - CEO
Yes.
We don't want to disclose what exactly.
But we are looking into additional verticals all the time.
We have an internal scale of what we like and what we don't.
You know, like sports, we think is less attractive to us than other verticals.
We are looking and, with our discipline, once we find the right one, we will take it.
Scott Turicchi - President, CFO
If you look at the core of the content that we have today, and particularly this hones in on the tech and games area, it is content that aids in decision making for a purchase.
So, people are coming because they want to find out about the latest games, platforms, tech gear, software services.
And so that engagement is important because there is, in many instances, an intent to want to own whatever it is that they are researching and investigating.
And that's why, like as Hemi mentioned, in the sports category, although there are some that do it very well and make a lot of money, that doesn't fit as well into our overall philosophy.
Hemi Zucker - CEO
Yes.
And Ookla, on the other side, a decision to potentially move to another provider, which is the name of the game there.
You know, you want to make a purchase decision, it's a long-term commitment, subscription.
Those that are trying to move subscribers to their network are willing to pay to justify the fact that Ookla is number one in the space in the world.
Unidentified Participant - Analyst
Great.
Thanks, guys.
Hemi Zucker - CEO
All the best.
Scott Turicchi - President, CFO
Thanks, Jim.
Operator
Thank you.
We have no other questions in the queue at this time.
I would like now to turn the call back over to Scott Turicchi for any closing comments.
Scott Turicchi - President, CFO
Thank you very much.
We appreciate your time and attention today for listening to our Q1 earnings call.
Tomorrow or Monday we'll be putting out a press release regarding the upcoming conferences, at which we'll be presenting over the next couple of months.
And we look forward to seeing you at one of those conferences or if you have follow-up questions, just reach out and contact us.
Otherwise our next regularly scheduled call will be in early August to report Q2 results.
Thank you.
Hemi Zucker - CEO
Thank you, everybody.
And bye-bye.
Operator
Thank you.
This does conclude today's teleconference.
You may disconnect your lines at this time and we thank all of you for your participation.