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Ibotta, Inc. (IBTA)

Q3 2024 Earnings Call· Wed, Nov 13, 2024

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Please stand by. The conference will be starting momentarily. Greetings, and welcome to the Ibotta Third Quarter 2024 Financial Results Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It's now my pleasure to introduce you to your host, Sean Suttel, Vice President, Investor Relations. Thank you, Sean. You may begin.

Sean Suttel

Management

Good afternoon, and welcome to Ibotta's Q3 2024 earnings conference call. With us today are Bryan Leach, Founder and CEO, and Sunit Patel, CFO. Today's press release and this call may contain forward-looking statements, including our guidance for Q4 2024, implementation of our Instacart relationship, and the potential impact of our product development efforts that are subject to inherent risks, uncertainties, and changes and reflect our current expectations and information currently available to us. Our actual results could differ materially. For more information, please refer to the risk factors in our recent SEC filings. In addition, our discussion today will include references to certain supplemental non-GAAP financial measures and should be considered in addition to and not as a substitute for our GAAP results. Reconciliations to the most comparable GAAP measures are available in today's earnings press release, which is available on our Investor Relations website at investors.ibotta.com. Also, during the call today, we will be referring to the slide deck posted on our website. Unless otherwise noted, revenue and adjusted EBITDA comparisons to prior periods are provided on a year-over-year basis. Lastly, references to non-GAAP revenue growth reflect the exclusion of one-time breakage revenue benefits in 2023. This is due to an update we made in 2023 to fix a software error to correctly charge maintenance fees to inactive direct-to-consumer redeemers, which resulted in a short-term benefit to GAAP revenue last year. Please see slide 24 in the appendix for more detail. With that, I will turn it over to Bryan.

Bryan Leach

Management

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us to discuss our third quarter results. We delivered revenue and adjusted EBITDA above the high end of the guidance range we provided on our second quarter earnings call. We are making progress in increasing the value we deliver to our three key constituencies: consumers, publishers, and clients. The total number of redeemers on the IPN continues to grow at a rapid pace, increasing 63% year over year and 12% sequentially from the second quarter. We successfully rolled out our digital offers on Schnucks properties in the third quarter, setting a new company record for shortest time to deploy. Subsequent to the quarter, we also successfully integrated our offers with their electronic shelf labels, providing a glimpse into the future of in-store shopping and offer redemption, which I will cover briefly later in my remarks. We also deployed our digital offers on Instacart as part of a testing phase and expect offers to be available to 100% of Instacart customers by the end of the year. Overall, our redemption revenue grew 32% year over year on a non-GAAP basis, evidence of the traction we saw with our CPG brand clients. I'll dive into all three of these areas in more detail. First, regarding consumers. The IPN is continuing to reach more and more consumers, setting a new record for redeemers at 15.3 million in Q3. Our redeemers redeem more than six times per quarter on average, resulting in nearly 100 million total redemptions in the third quarter, exceeding the record we previously set in Q4 of last year. According to a Bank of America Institute report published last month, approximately half of all Americans describe themselves as living paycheck to paycheck, while nearly a third of consumers are in fact spending 90% of…

Sunit Patel

Management

Thank you, Bryan, and good afternoon, everyone. We delivered strong revenue, adjusted EBITDA, and free cash flow growth, with revenue and adjusted EBITDA 5% and 22% above the midpoint of the guidance range we provided on our second quarter earnings call. We generated $36.7 million in free cash flow in the quarter, which brings our year-to-date free cash flow generation to $86.3 million. We saw healthy growth in third-party redeemers across the IPN on both a year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter basis, highlighting the unique and grand scale that we bring to our CPG clients. Revenue in the third quarter was $98.6 million, representing non-GAAP revenue growth of 19% year over year, exclusive of $2.1 million in one-time breakage revenue in the prior year period. We delivered Q3 adjusted EBITDA of $36.5 million, representing an adjusted EBITDA margin of 37%. Adjusting for the $2.1 million in one-time breakage revenue last year, this compares to 26% in Q3 of 2023, an implied 66% adjusted EBITDA growth. In Q3, redemption revenue comprised 86% of our total revenue, with ad products and other comprising the balance of 14%. This compares to 77% in Q3 of last year. Third-party publisher redemption revenue comprised 52% of total revenue, with D2C redemption revenue representing 34%. This compares to 27% and 50% for third-party publisher and D2C non-GAAP redemption revenue, respectively, in the third quarter of 2023. In Q3, our redemption revenue was $84.5 million, up 32% year over year on a non-GAAP basis. Our total redeemer and redemption growth and we continue to see very strong growth in our third-party publisher business, partially offset by softer performance in our D2C segment. Third-party publisher redemption revenue was $51.3 million, up 129% year over year, while D2C redemption revenue was $33.1 million, down 20% on a non-GAAP basis, excluding the…

Bryan Leach

Management

On the expense side, our EBITDA margin in Q4 will step down sequentially from Q3. We expect a typical increase in sequential marketing around the holidays, including our Thanksgiving program, and increased spend on R&D, specifically with regards to our targeting efforts as well as client analytics. In addition, we expect Instacart-specific costs, including Instacart launch costs, and a step-up in cost of revenue driven by the Instacart contract going live, pre-existing promotions business. We expect these cost items, aside from the holiday-related marketing spend, to have an impact on expenses in the first half of 2025. We anticipate a GAAP tax rate in the low to mid-thirties in Q4 before taking into account an expected $52 million to $56 million positive non-cash tax benefit from the release of a valuation allowance against the company's deferred tax assets, given the company's profitability and the greater likelihood that these deferred tax assets will be utilized. We continue to expect a GAAP tax rate of mid-twenties in 2025 and beyond. We expect our adjusted tax rate to be approximately low in Q4 and beyond. Lastly, with regards to free cash flow, keep in mind that the fourth quarter typically has a little higher working capital usage driven by greater cash charge for the holidays by D2C savers. In conclusion, we generated strong revenue growth with healthy adjusted EBITDA margins above the high end of our guidance range for Q3. For the reasons we mentioned, we expect the revenue growth trough in Q4 and accelerate significantly in 2025. With that, operator, let's please open up the call for Q&A.

Operator

Operator

A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. Participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset. Thank you. Our first question comes from the line of Andrew Maroque.

Andrew Maroque

Analyst

Hi. Thanks for taking my questions. Maybe if we could start on the commentary around the exhaustion of budgets. I guess maybe a simple question, but from the inside perspective of a brand, what are some of the blockers to allocating incremental spend to see out the rest of the year if this is a performance-based channel posting the ROI metrics that the brand wants to see?

Bryan Leach

Management

A great question, Andrew. Thank you. This goes to the heart of the temporary imbalance between supply and demand. Look, the CPG industry has, for a long time now, had an annual cadence for planning. And that is because the measurement process has typically taken a year to come in. So they use a system where they allocate budgets and then measure using a mixed media model or what have you, that's been the case for years and years and years. Planning in the context of paper promotion, for example, was often done six months in advance because you had to literally place it in a newspaper and so forth. We're going in and saying, look, we don't need a multi-year model to be able to prove the ROI. Here's how we look at the lift and so forth, and this is to when you're lagging your year-over-year comps. And we've had success doing that in many cases. As I mentioned, that was something that we did to accelerate our way through the budgets in the third quarter. And one of the reasons for the overperformance. I think what we sometimes encounter, though, is brands saying, look, our next annual plan has been baked. You guys are going live in January, and we have an annual calendar, a seasonal calendar, and we're aligned with you, and here's how much more we're spending. I mean, this year, the average amount was 60% more. And then that gets flighted against their key windows in the following year versus sort of this mindset of being more of an always-on as long as you like the cost per incremental unit. I think we're not quite there yet in terms of bringing to market the solution that I described where we're building this tool that allows for real-time or near real-time measurement of that ROI in terms of a cost per incremental dollar, cost per incremental sales. I believe from the early indications we have from some of our top clients that they're very excited about that idea. And that once that sort of takes hold, I think you will see a relaxation of this idea of annual planning in a much more agile allocation of dollars, and that's one of the reasons why we're doing it.

Andrew Maroque

Analyst

Thank you. I appreciate the color there. And maybe one more if I could that could tie into the product piece. So you mentioned the integrations with new publishers. That time to market is coming down pretty nicely. I guess, one, what's going on under the hood there that's driving that time to market down? And are there broader implications for the rest of your product org in terms of getting out products like your cost per incremental faster? Thank you.

Bryan Leach

Management

Yes. The time to market is coming down because we have better technical documentation. Because we've seen everything under the sun now or more under the sun in terms of requests that we get from a given publisher for something that is important to them that might have been sort of bespoke before is something that we built and built to be able to replicate in a future context. So that's now done. You know? So for example, there might be a different type of offer that they wanted to support that wasn't supported previously. Well, now it is. Right? Or we have the ability to launch beer, wine, and spirits for a given publisher. So the next time we want to launch beer, wine, and spirits, it's much easier to do that. I do think our technical team has become very efficient in helping guide publishers through this process. We were able to do this with a relatively small number of resources at the publisher in eighty-something days. That's a dramatic decrease, and I think that's just the learning curve primarily. I do think we want to continue to take that philosophy and apply it to other areas of our business. So, for example, the ability to launch offers much more quickly and easily is really important to making sure that our sellers spend as much time as possible selling. It's important to be able to have just a level of background demand coming in through a self-service platform. In the past, we've never allowed that because we didn't have the technological capability of campaign manager. And we've actually said no to many brands that were willing to spend, but we've had a minimum of, say, a $50,000 spend requirement that we've imposed. So we're excited about applying that philosophy of kind of a scalable piece of technology. And then, you know, we're always learning and when we make mistakes, you know, in terms of the previous rollouts, we're doing a post-mortem on those. We have better project management. Those sorts of operating efficiencies all go into under the hood why the time to market is coming down.

Andrew Maroque

Analyst

Great. Thank you.

Sunit Patel

Management

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Bernie McTernan with Needham and Company. Please proceed.

Bernie McTernan

Analyst · Needham and Company. Please proceed.

Great. Thanks for taking questions. Maybe just to start, especially with adding Instacart and we think there's still room to grow redeemers with Walmart, we think redeemers are gonna grow a lot over the next twelve to twenty-four months. Bryan, would love just to get your confidence so you're able to fill this demand or redeemer growth with budgets?

Bryan Leach

Management

Yeah. Absolutely. I think you're focused on the right thing, Bernie, which is the supply. Listen, in our history, we've been doing this for twelve years. There has never been a situation where we did not see supply catch up to demand. There haven't been that many situations where demand has grown in absolute dollars anywhere near this amount year over year. And so, you know, we expect that it is natural to expect that it'll take a cycle to catch up. But it has in every other context done so. And we're getting really good reviews from our clients, as I said, based on the client retention. And we believe that, you know, things like e-commerce budgets tend to be allocated separately from other budgets in many organizations. So when you come to something like Instacart, while you can't necessarily go from the time we announced that, you know, which was, what, the middle of August, until now has been a very short amount of time to be able to go out and talk to CPGs and say, hey, we need you to give us dollars for Instacart. But as those budgets reset and we're looking at a new year, we know there's a lot of interest in investing on Instacart. They just can't pull dollars out of programs that have been in flight and ready to go for the last three months. So I think a combination of factors give us that confidence. I think it goes back to the original question that Andrew asked as well, which is that we really want to move the industry to a place where you can simply go and say, I want to pay this cost for incremental dollar. I want this many units sold. I have this much money to…

Bernie McTernan

Analyst · Needham and Company. Please proceed.

Great. Thanks, Bryan. Appreciate all the color.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Curtis Nagle with Bank of America. Please proceed.

Curtis Nagle

Analyst · Bank of America. Please proceed.

Great. Thanks very much for taking the question. Maybe just in the same vein, one for you, Bryan. What gives you the confidence we're gonna see a larger re-up in brand budgets? Like, are you in the process of negotiating now, or is it just kind of more them telling you, you know, we're gonna spend more and then we like what we're seeing, but it's more kind of a wait-and-see?

Bryan Leach

Management

Yeah. It's a combination. I mean, we are absolutely aware of commitments that are being made right now. Plans are in place for a seasonal calendar for every brand that we work with, you know. So if someone might be planning on hitting resolution, as they call it, in January really hard with a lot of offer content. Someone else might be planning on Super Bowl, someone else might be planning on, you know, back to school. So we do have visibility into what we believe to be approximately 96% retention of our clients. And we are projecting the growth in the network and letting them know, listen, last year, we told you it was gonna grow by a lot, and you said, I will see it when I believe it. I can't just allocate budget and risk not being used. Well, this is how much you left on the table. This year, we're telling you it's gonna grow by this percent. You need to believe us and not miss out on the opportunity to get some of the most efficient marketing that you can get done. I also think there's a climate that we're increasingly aware of where people have tried things. You know, a lot of these companies took price a year ago, therefore, lapping really tough comps on the top line. And they're looking, you know, year-over-year declines, and that's causing a lot of stress and pressure. And so, you know, they're trying various tactics, and this is really separating the wheat from the chaff. You know, they're saying, well, my model told me that if I invested in this tactic, it would increase sales, but I don't see that. So how reliable is that model? Or, you know, I invested in this other way that I…

Curtis Nagle

Analyst · Bank of America. Please proceed.

Okay. And then just a follow-up through Bryan. So I think you defined rollout or kind of the gearing up of Instacart, you know, through next year as gradual, which I think makes sense. But just in terms of comparatives, kind of take your pick, maybe Walmart, you know, kind of how should we frame that in terms of, you know, how quickly or not or how quickly you can build revenue or not.

Bryan Leach

Management

Yeah. I mean, I think Walmart was no exception in the first 180 days. We saw a ramp that hadn't, you know, sort of controlling for offer quality. There was still a ramp as people became accustomed to knowing this program existed, looking out for the program, telling their friends about the program. Part of it is that we started out with Walmart Plus members only, of course, and there was still a ramp even within that. And then, you know, we rolled out to all of Walmart consumers, and that further enhanced the ramp. I think that allowed us the time that we needed to go and get the large enough budget that we would need to sort of sustain that kind of growth period that we saw over that time. And, you know, in this case, I expect there will be a comparable type of ramp. Part of that is contractual. I mean, we've learned that to move faster on the time to deploy, back to the question earlier, to move faster, part of that is chunking things out into phases. And so, contractually, our counterparties are not actually required to have kind of everything ready to go at day one. And so there are certain capabilities that we want to make sure we get, which are really important, but we don't absolutely have to have on day one. It's not just things like beer, wine, and spirits. They're fundamental to feeding into our measurement approach, for example, certain types of formats of data that we'll be getting. But there are also, yeah, just the marketing best practices, you know, are you sending out lifecycle marketing? Are you sending out, hey, we've now got a new type of offer? There's also changes in UX. So, is every change in UX delivered right away? You know, do you have a single gallery for your offers, for example? Can you see offers alongside temporary price reductions, or is that something that is enabled in the future? Do you have offer-led clipping? That's one that is common. For example, at Walmart, you didn't have the ability to group things as offer and then see the eligible items for that offer underneath. You'd kind of have to see an item, and then, you know, that item might be one of fifty flavors in that offer, and it would show up fifty different times instead of grouped by offer. These are things that we know have an impact on the usability and the repeat usage rate of programs. And so we just want to manage expectations that there is that ramp.

Curtis Nagle

Analyst · Bank of America. Please proceed.

Okay. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Eric Sheridan with Goldman Sachs. Please proceed.

Eric Sheridan

Analyst · Goldman Sachs. Please proceed.

Thanks so much for taking the question. Maybe two quick follow-ups on this topic we've been talking about. Could you identify how widespread the budget exhaustion theme is across clients? Is it concentrated to a handful, or is it widespread across the CPG landscape in its entirety, given maybe some dynamics around the marketing cadence of this year? And is there a way to sort of frame up a quantification of that headwind you're facing in Q4 and how much of it might have been pulled forward into Q3 versus now creating a headwind on Q4? That'd be number one. And then just sticking with this theme of moving towards always-on and direct response mentality in the industry, Martin, I just want to come back and just go a little deeper on what you see as the key unlock between either education of clients or capabilities on the tech side that you have to build so we can sort of from the outside in, look at how to assess the transition the industry is going to go through towards that type of landscape. Thanks so much.

Bryan Leach

Management

Great. Thanks, Eric. Let's take those in turn. I think the first question is, you know, this question of kind of how widespread is the budget exhaustion and to what extent is there a pull forward into the third quarter overperformance. There are two parts to that question. I mean, as far as how widespread it is, in some cases, there are dramatic increases in budgets from a client, and there is no exhaustion of those budgets. And we're working to get more clients in that bucket. In some cases, you know, they just didn't allocate nearly enough and now are realizing, gosh, I wish I'd allocated a whole lot more. It's not sort of a widespread phenomenon, I wouldn't say. I think that it can only be a matter of a small number of large clients needing to re-up that budget, that can have a pretty outsized effect because they have high-frequency, high-inventory score items. And so just being able to get them back in live makes a big difference. Right? So that I think when we can, and I mentioned the client that was in our office earlier this week, that's an example of one that if we can get them into this DR mindset, I think would dramatically affect the inventory score for the entire year. Right? And so I think that there's an awful lot of different campaigns running it. Ibotta with a hundred million redemptions in a single quarter. We have a lot of different clients. They're certainly not uniformly saying I'm out of budget. But I think generally speaking, it tends to be toward the end of the year when they're kind of running dry on these things, and you combine that with, you know, just the fact that some of them are kind…

Sunit Patel

Management

Thank you.

Eric Sheridan

Analyst · Goldman Sachs. Please proceed.

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Andrew Boone with JMP Securities. Please proceed.

Andrew Boone

Analyst · JMP Securities. Please proceed.

Thanks so much for taking my questions. I wanted to go back to D2C. So let's change the topic slightly. With the 15% or, you know, mid-teens kind of redemption revenue growth, that kind of implies a pretty significant decrease for D2C ad and other revenue. While D2C redemption revenue missed at least our estimate for this last quarter, so can you just talk about the balance of how you're viewing the D2C side versus third-party redeemers? And then if I look at Q4 EBITDA guidance, it implies a pretty significant step up in terms of OpEx. Sunit, can you just talk about where you guys are investing and how we should think about that cadence as we move forward? Thanks.

Sunit Patel

Management

Sure. I think on the D2C side, sequentially, anyway, the revenues have been stabilizing. You can see that. I don't think we see much of a change sequentially in the fourth quarter. The redeemers also are staying fairly level. The ad revenues, as we mentioned last quarter, are around $14 million a quarter. I think we still feel we're in the same place with respect to the fourth quarter. In terms of expenses, there are really kind of three things. One is we usually have a higher marketing expense for our Thanksgiving program, which has been very popular, and we get a lot of good publicity about it in terms of providing cashback during the Thanksgiving period, as we were featured on the Today Show just a couple of days ago. So that's an expense that several million dollars that's just once a year that steps away. Secondly, you know, with all the things Bryan has been talking about, we've been looking to add headcount in the technology side for targeting, for analytics. We didn't manage to do much of that in the third quarter, but we did add them on as we ended the third quarter. So some is just headcount expenses that'll go forward. And the third thing is Instacart that I talked about in my remarks, and obviously, that cost will continue. But again, those are more fixed-type costs, ramping up this year, this quarter, the fourth quarter, and then kind of leveling out in the first quarter, and then they don't really go up much. So those are things we are seeing on the expense side.

Andrew Boone

Analyst · JMP Securities. Please proceed.

Great. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Mark Mahaney with Evercore ISI. Please proceed.

Mark Mahaney

Analyst · Evercore ISI. Please proceed.

Hey, I'll just ask one question. Sunit, you talked about Q4, I'm sorry, being the trough in terms of year-over-year revenue growth and seeing acceleration next year. Just help us flesh that out a little bit. And you want to arrange what kind of acceleration we could see, and is it something that you think looking at the comps, thinking about the product rollouts, thinking about the customer, you know, the partner rollouts, deployments. Is that something that should steadily accelerate as you go through the year? Is there any reason to think that, or is it more like it could be jerky, but generally accelerating? So just give us a little more color on that comment. Thanks a lot.

Sunit Patel

Management

Sure. I think the main thing has to do with our comps, year-over-year comps in terms of what happened this year. So, I mean, if you look at this year, we've had negative comps on the D2C side and on the ad revenue side. As you switch into the first quarter, those negative comps recede. Like, on the ad side, don't see much change there. That remains fairly flat. Like we said, about $14 million a quarter. Similar on the D2C side. And then what we obviously see is continued add-on new publishers. We'll start getting more Instacart revenues going forward, continued strong growth in the third-party publisher business. So just as you work through the math of it, it's clear that we are crossing here in the fourth quarter and should accelerate pretty significantly next year.

Mark Mahaney

Analyst · Evercore ISI. Please proceed.

Okay. Thank you very much.

Andrew Boone

Analyst · Evercore ISI. Please proceed.

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Ron Josey with Citi. Please proceed.

Ron Josey

Analyst · Citi. Please proceed.

Great. Thanks for taking the question. Bryan, with Instacart now live, at least testing live, just wanted to hear a little bit more on the results you're seeing thus far, just given the visually native audience and sort of are you seeing greater usage of the coupons and everything. And then sticking to Instacart, Sunit, maybe following up on Andrew's comment, you talked about Instacart costs impacting COGS expenses in the first half of 2025. Little more insights on that would be helpful. Then that was Instacart. And maybe just one last one. You know, we saw third-party publisher redemptions per redeemer up 20% year over year. That's great to see. Just want to understand if you're seeing a broader mix of demand, you know, not in other verticals that you're offering. Thank you.

Bryan Leach

Management

Great. Hi, Ron. Thanks for the question. I'll tackle your first and third questions, then I'll hand it to Sunit to tackle the Instacart cost question. With regard to early indicators in Instacart, the good news is, you know, we believe that when we have offer inventory, we're gonna enjoy a very high redemption rate on Instacart in the same way that we do on e-commerce on Walmart because you are seeing it's a very easy way to redeem offers. You simply find them in the flow of discovering. You search for laundry detergent, you find a product that has an associated offer, you put it in your cart, you check out, you get your discount. In this case, it's a discount. So we're excited about, you know, it's very, very early. It's just a pilot. But we're excited about the redemption rates. I think, really, the key is just the inventory that we supply and needing to make sure we have a deep budget that overlaps with the kinds of products that are sold. On Instacart, it is also something that supports the growth of our general merchandise. As we think about the pipeline of retailers, we do want to focus on non-grocery retailers as well, things that give us access to an inventory of products that go beyond grocery. In that regard, Instacart is super helpful because it works in places like Costco and Lowe's and elsewhere. And so we believe that'll be a dimension in business. I also think the beer, wine, and spirits, you know, that's obviously a part of what happens when you get delivered items. You get those items delivered as well. And so, but that'll be an interesting thing. We haven't launched yet. We're gonna be paying close attention to that. I think,…

Sunit Patel

Management

Yeah. So on the Instacart cost question, just remember that that business is different from other publishers that we've added to the network. In this case, we were assuming we are assuming Instacart's, you know, existing promotions business. So there are certain costs that come with that. There's a little bit of a step up in the cost of revenue given our contract with them. So that's what I meant. But these costs are relatively fixed, except that the fourth quarter is a transition. First quarter, they'll generally be in place, which will continue in the second quarter. But after that, they don't ramp as much. So what that means is it impacts our margins in the short term, Q4 to some extent Q1, Q2, but after that, incrementally, the incremental margin expansion, the margin expansion story we've been talking about, you know, nothing's fundamentally changed with that.

Ron Josey

Analyst · Citi. Please proceed.

Got it. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Ken Gawrelski with Wells Fargo. Please proceed.

Ken Gawrelski

Analyst · Wells Fargo. Please proceed.

Thank you. Two questions, if I may. First, Bryan, how do you think about what point do you think you'll have confidence in the supply side of offers to fulfill, you know, what could be a very significant increase in demand in terms of the number of redeemers and as you add the Instacart demand to the platform? When will you have visibility into that? Will it be, you know, at year-end in January, February into annual budget renewals, or will it evolve over the course of the year? That's the first one. And the second one, could you just talk about how you how the how it's how D2C is prioritized versus relative to third-party? So when there's a supply-demand imbalance, more demand in the marketplace, which you have today, than can supply or promotions or supply of budgets. How does the third-party versus direct-to-consumer side get prioritized? Is that sub is the lack of supply driving some of the direct-to-consumer weakness we're seeing today? Thank you.

Bryan Leach

Management

Thanks, Ken. Both great questions. First one, look, we have confidence in the supply side of our business because, as I said, we have twelve years of history of watching it follow the growth in our network, and we've had a lot of conversations with our top clients to the effect of we're excited. We are so excited about Instacart coming aboard. We're gonna be ready to go in the beginning of the year. We're excited about the growth of your network, and there's just sort of a, well, you've earned the right to grow your budget by this percent. And so we have that visibility in, you know, we don't provide guidance out beyond this current quarter because we just haven't done that, and, you know, it is difficult to see an entire year of that, but we do have a lot of confidence in the rebound of our supply for the reasons that I cited earlier. And so I don't want to overstate it and make it seem like we're flying blind. I mean, we do have a lot of visibility into it. It's just that a lot of these brands are on an annual planning cadence where they reset at the beginning of the calendar year, and we think we're gonna do a better job of pacing that and making sure that we don't run out of inventory, you know, by the end of the year. And I think that that's only gonna be further enhanced by the improved measurement targeting that I discussed earlier, which gives me a lot more confidence. As far as the second question, it's pretty simple. We focus on overall redemption revenue. So we're not trying to steer content toward the D2C or the third-party, which means that if we have a…

Ken Gawrelski

Analyst · Wells Fargo. Please proceed.

Thank you, Bryan.

Bryan Leach

Management

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our last question comes from the line of Chris Kuntarich with UBS. Please proceed.

Chris Kuntarich

Analyst

Great. Thanks for taking the question. Bryan, I just want to go back to the comment you had made about a small number of large clients that need to re-up. Can you just talk about the consistency in the past either on a percentage basis or on a dollar basis, and which kind of over a multiyear period those budgets have stepped up? Are they consistent? Are they kind of growing incrementally each year? Thanks.

Bryan Leach

Management

Yeah. That's I wish I had all the data to answer that right now. I can follow up with you, Chris, if we have more of that data. But look, generally, what I can tell you is that, you know, we started out with an overall budget of maybe two million dollars, you know, and now we're in the hundreds of millions approaching the billions of dollars of total investment on the network. There has been a very consistent track record of stepping that up to match the, you know, to match the demand, and the gross billings have gone up 65% year over year, year to date, that's an average. In some cases, they've gone up 5x, 500%. I mean, I can think of one or two clients that are up, you know, even more than 5x. They're up 10x, 20x. And then some clients that have remained flat or have not kept up with the growth of the network, and so their percentage has declined relative to the available opportunity. When we go to these clients, we're very often have a slide that says, this is the percentage of the overall opportunity that you're taking advantage of right now. And it tends to be very, very low. Right? And so again, we could not grow by a single redeemer and still very substantially increase our revenue. And to be able to show them that and say, you're leaving this cost per incremental unit on the table, is very powerful. As far as empirically, how much is it are the large clients stepping up? I would say that generally speaking, you know, you have a couple of different kinds of clients. You have the clients that are more or less always on, and they're, you know, therefore, whatever level…

Chris Kuntarich

Analyst

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I'd like to pass the call back over to management for any closing remarks.

Bryan Leach

Management

Thank you very much to everyone who's joined us today. We appreciate all the great questions. And we look forward to engaging with you further.

Operator

Operator

This concludes today's teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.