Russell Horowitz
Analyst · RBC
Thank you, Ethan. On today's call, I'm going to provide a quick business update. Mike will review our financial results, and then we'll open it up for Q&A.
Before we get into the business update, in thinking about Marchex as it is being valued today relative to both our assets and business opportunity. We think there's a real disconnect. For example, on an asset basis, over the last few years, we've sold a small portion of the more than 200,000 domains we own, for more than $30 million in cash cumulatively. It is largely been a reactive process based on unsolicited offers received on domains we own. We feel confident that the majority of our domain asset value has not been touched. So when we add up what we believe our domain assets are worth, along with the cash on our balance sheet and present value tax assets, we believe that our core mobile performance, call-driven business, is currently being valued at effectively 0. And this call-driven business is one that's currently more than $100 million in annualized revenue and is well positioned in an emerging mobile advertising market. This is one of the reasons why the company continues to buy back our stock and is also one of the reasons why today I, and certain other executives, announced our intent to personally purchase more Marchex shares in the open market.
Also, when looking at this $100 million call-driven revenue business, we've had 3 years of strong growth, but right now, we're working through some classic growing pains. We have a number of great success stories that demonstrate the value we provide our customers when we execute well, and we have some areas where we've underexecuted. Our focus now is to make sure we're replicating and institutionalizing best practices across our organization and operating in a way that enables our customers and products to succeed. We're committed to investing in the people, the products and processes that will help us accomplish these goals and put our growing pains in the rearview mirror. I believe that by approaching our challenges this way, it will allow us to deliver on what is a very meaningful long-term growth opportunity and enable us to get to the next level.
So now, let's talk about our core business in the mobile advertising market. Over the last several years, the rapid adoption of mobile devices has started a significant shift in the advertising landscape. Mobile advertising inventory is expanding and advertisers are following consumers into this market. Importantly, the mobile advertising market is in its early stages, and we believe it will continue to evolve and grow based on 3 fundamental trends. First, strong advertiser demand exists for connecting with new customers through the phone. Mobile devices and smartphones deliver the leads that many advertisers want most, which are phone calls from prospective new customers. In a mobile-dominated world, the call is the click. Second, the long-term Call Advertising opportunity is large. For the first time, mobile devices are outselling desktop PCs and the gap is expected to expand significantly in the coming years. As a result, mobile is becoming even more important to advertisers in terms of new customer acquisition strategies, and with this, they have a greater need for deep analytics and performance-based ad solutions that can help them accomplish this.
And third, education and technology are the current obstacles to growth, but they're evolving. Currently, advertisers are spending a majority of their ad dollars on mobile display as they gain initial exposure to the mobile market. At the same time, many advertisers are simply unaware of the opportunity to buy phone calls on a performance basis. As this market grows and performance-based customer acquisition becomes increasingly important to unlock the mobile opportunity, we believe that companies like Marchex, with strong technology platforms specifically tuned to the needs of mobile performance advertisers, will be positioned to benefit the most.
In response to these trends, Marchex has transitioned to a business that is leveraging the growth of mobile and focused on the call as the ultimate driver of performance in this medium. We believe we're creating a unique ecosystem with a technology platform comprised of the 3 critical components needed for long-term success in mobile performance advertising.
The first is Marchex Call Analytics, which we believe is the industry-leading Call Analytics platform. With Marchex Call Analytics, advertisers can analyze and optimize ad campaigns across mobile, online and off-line media, and publishers can understand the true value of their advertising inventory. Additionally, our Call Analytics platform is the foundation of all of our mobile and call-based advertising products.
The second component is our Digital Call Marketplace, which uses the phone to connect hundreds of millions of consumers who are searching for specific products or services with large national and smaller local advertisers across more than 100 different sources. The mass shift of consumers into mobile devices has unlocked an opportunity to drive new customers to the phone. We're very much in the early adopter phase of the shift of advertising dollars into mobile advertising. In the first quarter, we continued to add new advertisers, many of them are utilizing mobile performance advertising for the first time. A key part of our Digital Call Marketplace is our voice search platform for mobile carriers and consumers. Our voice search platform supports customizable, private label products that mobile carriers use to monetize many of the most common ways consumers find business information, including automated directory assistance and mobile search applications.
And the third component is Local Leads, which is an advertising platform designed to drive quality phone calls, clicks and other leads to small business advertisers at a lower cost per lead than any other industry alternative. Local Leads is a private label platform sold to our network of small-business resellers. Recently, we made progress here by adding Intuit as a new reseller partner while continuing to support existing customers such as a AT&T Interactive and YPG in Canada.
One quick note. As most folks know, AT&T Interactive is a large customer and partner of Marchex, and a private equity group is in the process of purchasing a majority stake in the subsidiary business from AT&T. Money transaction like this creates some questions, we believe that our multi-faceted relationship and capabilities remain valuable to AT&T Interactive and our ability to drive cost-effective quality leads to AT&T Interactive's customers, increasingly over the phone, is a competitive differentiator for us that should lay the groundwork for a continued positive relationship with AT&T Interactive going forward.
While there's still significant work to do as this mobile market evolves from its early stages, with this approach, over 3 short years, we have built a mobile and Call Advertising business and more than $100 million in annualized revenue and significant long-term growth potential. While we have paid to make it through the phase bumps in the road in the process of establishing early leadership in this emerging market, we believe this will be a meaningful long-term growth opportunity for our company and so we are continuing to invest for long-term growth. Additionally, we believe strongly that as a company, we are building unique intellectual property that solves real customer problems in what is a complex and exciting space. With that, I'll hand the call over to Mike.