System1 - Earnings Call - Q4 2024

Executive Summary

• Q4 revenue declined 21% year over year to $75.6M while GAAP gross profit rose 28% to $31.8M; Adjusted Gross Profit grew 19% to $44.7M and Adjusted EBITDA surged 79% to $17.9M, reflecting mix shift toward higher-margin owned-and-operated (O&O) products and disciplined spend.
• Sequentially, revenue fell 15% vs Q3 ($88.8M → $75.6M), but Adjusted EBITDA nearly doubled ($10.3M → $17.9M), evidencing strong operating leverage and AI-driven efficiency in RAMP despite Google Search Partner Network volatility.
• Management issued Q1 2025 guidance calling for revenue of $69–71M, Adjusted Gross Profit of $38–40M, and Adjusted EBITDA of $9–11M; interest expense $7.0–7.5M, D&A $20.5–21.0M, and acquisition/restructuring costs $2.5–3.0M; no full-year guide due to ongoing Google ecosystem changes.
• Strategic catalysts: (1) transition from Google AFD to RSOC where System1 is a leading partner, (2) continued O&O product momentum (CouponFollow, Startpage, MapQuest), and (3) AI automation (22k campaigns launched; goal 130k/quarter), all positioning for medium-term margin resilience and growth.

What Went Well and What Went Wrong

• What Went Well

  • O&O products outperformed: revenue +60% YoY and +30% QoQ to $27.1M; O&O Adjusted Gross Profit rose to $32M, up 20% YoY and 21% QoQ, powering margin expansion despite lower revenue.
  • AI-driven scale in RAMP: >500% YoY increase in campaign launches; 22,000 campaigns in Q4 with a medium-term target of 130,000 per quarter; 3.8B sessions processed by RAMP in Q4.
  • Renewed both Google advertising arrangements (Oct-2024 and Feb-2025) running through 2027; CouponFollow organic sessions +129% YoY; Startpage and MapQuest user growth continuing.
  • Quote: “Adjusted EBITDA came in at $17.9 million, which was a 79% year-over-year increase…primarily driven by our owned and operated products” – Michael Blend.

• What Went Wrong

  • Google Search Partner Network volatility pressured marketing-driven businesses: RPS down 55% YoY and CPS down 65% YoY; ad spend cut 26% sequentially to preserve profitability.
  • Imminent Google AFD opt-outs create near-term disruption; System1 is shifting traffic to RSOC but expects short-term revenue pressure during the transition.
  • Leverage remains elevated: ~$280M term loan outstanding; net consolidated leverage ~5.6x at year-end, above management’s comfort level (working toward optimization/refinance over 2.5 years).

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the fourth quarter 2024 earnings conference call for System1. Joining me today to discuss System1's business and financial results are our Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Michael Blend and Chief Financial Officer Tridivesh Kidambi. A recording of this conference call will be available on our investor relations website shortly after this call has ended. I'd like to take this opportunity to remind you that during the call, we will be making certain forward-looking statements.

This includes statements relating to the operating 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 or implied during this call.

In particular, those described in our risk factors included in our annual report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year 2024 filed on March 10, 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 management's 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 adjusted EBITDA and adjusted gross profit. These non-GAAP measures should be considered in addition to, and not as a substitute for, or in isolation from our GAAP results. Historical performance and future estimates provided during this call exclude results from Total Security.

Information regarding our non-GAAP financial measures, including a reconciliation of our non-GAAP financial measures to our most comparable historical GAAP financial measures, may 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.

Michael Blend (CEO and Co-founder)

Thanks, Kyle. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining System1 on our Q4 2024 earnings call. We wrapped up the year with solid execution across the business. For the fourth quarter, System1 delivered $76 million in revenue and $45 million in gross profit. Adjusted EBITDA came in at $17.9 million, which was a 79% year-over-year increase. It is good to see our financial performance starting to reflect all the hard work and progress by our team over the past year.

Although we performed well overall, our strong results were primarily driven by our owned and operated products, with revenue increasing 30% sequentially from Q3 and 60% compared to Q4 last year. Our products like StartPage, MapQuest, and CouponFollow had higher engagement, benefiting from improvements in SEO, user experience, and product expansion. In contrast, our marketing-driven businesses continue to be negatively affected by fluctuations in our Google-related business.

As I discussed during my remarks last quarter, we continue to see ongoing volatility due to changes enacted by Google in their search partner network. These changes have the longer-term goal of improving advertiser conversions and traffic quality to the Google partner network. However, in the short term, they continue to cause significant volatility and lower payments by Google to Google partners like System1.

As Google pays out less for traffic, System1 makes corresponding adjustments to the amount we pay for traffic in order to ensure our marketing businesses remain profitable. Consequently, lower monetization from Google caused our advertising spend to decline 26% sequentially. Google has been implementing rapid-fire changes to its search partner network products over the last 18 to 24 months, and frankly, keeping up with these changes has been a challenging process for our team. That said, we remain steadfast in our Google partnership.

We've continued to invest heavily in our RAMP platform, and we have strategically positioned ourselves for when the Google network ultimately rebounds. On the technology front, our investment in AI-powered automation within RAMP has yielded very promising results. It's been increasing efficiency and scale across all of our marketing operations. In 2025, we are strengthening our focus on AI integrations across all facets of RAMP and our overall organization, and we expect to see continued improved efficiency.

Now, let's go into more detail on our owned and operated segment, which includes both our marketing-driven businesses and our owned and operated properties. Total owned and operated revenue reached $65 million, reflecting a 19% year-over-year decline and a 9% sequential decrease. This decline was driven by a 40% year-over-year revenue decline in our marketing businesses, offset by a 60% increase in our owned and operated products.

While revenue declined, adjusted gross profit was up at $32 million. This marks a 20% year-over-year increase and a 21% sequential rise from the Q3. The gross profit expansion, despite a revenue decline, highlights our ability to drive efficiency and margin growth within this segment, as well as the higher gross profit margins of our owned and operated products. Sessions across our owned and operated properties total 1.9 billion, down 8% from Q3 due to reduced ad spend, but up 79% year-over-year. Our year-over-year growth reflects the increased scale of campaigns being run on RAMP, as well as growth in our owned and operated products. International markets remain a key driver, with international revenue representing 36% of total owned and operated revenue, up from 26% in Q4 2023. In Q4, we launched over 22,000 marketing campaigns, a 5-times year-over-year increase.

This huge increase in marketing campaigns simply would not have been possible prior to our embrace of AI. Our medium-term goal for scaling marketing campaign launches is 130,000 per quarter for launching a new marketing campaign every minute of every day around the clock. As I mentioned, while we are confident in RAMP's ability to scale, we are being limited by fluctuations in the Google SPN performance. One recent change made by Google is worth highlighting, as it helps explain how Google changes directly impact our business. A few weeks ago, System1 was informed by Google that they plan to automatically opt out advertisers on a rolling basis from participating in their AdSense for Domains product known as AFD, beginning later this month.

The practical effect of Google's pending change is that AFD monetization is likely to materially decline, making it significantly more difficult to profitably send acquired traffic to AFD-powered websites. This AFD change will be both a short-term negative and medium-term positive for System1. In the short term, both our owned and operated and partner network lines do substantial AFD-related business, and we expect that business to decline as Google rolls out this change on its AFD product. On the flip side, Google is making this change to AFD to encourage adoption of its newer Related Search on Content product, which is known in the industry as RSoC. Our company is well-positioned to navigate this transition to RSoC, as System1 has been allocating significant resources into our RSoC efforts for both owned and operated and network partners over the last 24 months.

System1 is a leading partner with Google on this new and exciting product. While we believe System1 is among the best positioned in the market to navigate this change from AFD to RSoC, Google's decision to opt out advertisers from AFD will likely cause significant business and product disruption. We are rapidly shifting our remaining owned and operated and partner network AFD businesses over to the newer RSoC product while also keeping pace with rapid changes Google is making to RSoC as it continues to roll out this product offering. Ultimately, we welcome this disruption to the Google Search Partner Network. It is aimed at weeding out bad actors from the ecosystem and ultimately is going to benefit the technology-driven companies who are focused on high-quality consumer and advertiser experiences.

While we expect the stormy weather will continue for a bit longer, we're looking forward to the sunny days ahead where we can return our focus on scaling our Google business back up. With that, let's move on to some highlights from our products group, which, as I mentioned, is on a stellar run. First, let's go ahead and start with CouponFollow, our leading couponing and promo code service. CouponFollow had a very strong holiday shopping season and a great fourth quarter, with the site continuing to perform well following Google's search algorithm updates in 2024. Our focus on a high-quality user experience and delivering verified, real-time promotional codes continues to pay off. Organic sessions rose more than 20% sequentially from Q3, and sessions were up 129% year-over-year. In addition to our growth in site traffic, our browser extension users have more than doubled year-over-year.

We have a very nice flywheel going with CouponFollow. As our usage increases, we get better signals on which promo codes are currently working for users. That enables a higher quality experience for users because the promo codes that the users try actually work. This, in turn, brings in more users and more data and so on. As CouponFollow continues to scale, we're able to land more direct deals with brands, which in turn improves the accuracy in deals found on CouponFollow. In 2025, we're going to aggressively capitalize on these great trends and with a continued focus on providing a better experience for both consumers and merchants. Now I'm going to move on to StartPage, our privacy-focused search engine. StartPage continues to gain traction as global concerns around online privacy and data security show no signs of letting up. As regulations like GDPR in Europe and evolving U.S. privacy laws place greater emphasis on consumer data protection, StartPage is very well-positioned to provide an alternative to mainstream search engines.

StartPage user sessions grew over 20% year-over-year as more users seek private search. In addition, the StartPage private browser apps we launched last year already had more than 200,000 downloads across both Android and iOS. As usage and revenues grow on StartPage as more mainstream users seek private search engines, our 2025 is going to be about continuing to add the bells and whistles these users expect when they switch from Google or Bing or DuckDuckGo over to StartPage. We also intend to make AI integration a major focus of StartPage in 2025. Lastly, let's talk about MapQuest, everybody's favorite "Oh, that still exists" internet service. I am happy to let you know that MapQuest is back.

MapQuest continues to experience strong engagement with user sessions growing more than 45% year-over-year. The demand for alternative mapping and navigation solutions remains strong, especially as users seek more privacy-conscious and feature-rich alternatives to dominant platforms. Our team has revitalized MapQuest by introducing new functionality, enhancing our mobile experience, and optimizing local mapping capabilities. Recently, we relaunched Private Maps, offering users enhanced control over their location data.

All these efforts are paying off, and the renewed MapQuest recently went viral all over social media, and MapQuest was called out in segments on CNN and Stephen Colbert. Now, I'll move on to our partner network performance. Partner network revenue was $11 million, and adjusted gross profit was $14 million, up 10% both year-over-year and sequentially. Our partner network results included an accounting revenue adjustment, which lowered both revenue and COGS and had no impact on gross profit.

We will be excluding the adjustment as we make comparisons to prior periods and report business metrics. Without the adjustment, revenue was $18 million, which represents an 8% year-over-year increase. In Q4, average revenue per partner decreased 6% versus the Q3, while active and scaled partners increased. Total active partners increased 6% from Q3 to over 300 partners. At the end of Q4, we had 65 scaled partners, a 12% increase from the Q3. As a reminder, we consider a platform customer to be a scaled partner when they are generating at least $50,000 of revenue per quarter on RAMP. Now, similar to our owned and operated business, our partner network team has had to navigate the rapidly changing Google landscape. The team has done a great job handling the volatility, and we are very well-positioned as we shift business over to the new Google RSoC product.

Looking forward to the rest of 2025, we remain cautiously optimistic. Our owned and operated products continue to demonstrate strong fundamentals, and I'm excited to see us expand on our core platforms in couponing, private search, and mapping. On the marketing side, our investments in AI-driven optimizations are positioning us well for future growth. I'm very glad we made the early decision to invest heavily in the new Google RSoC product. To close, I want to reiterate, as I always do, System1's leadership team remains fully aligned with our shareholders, and as a group, we remain one of the company's largest shareholder bases. As we continue our transition back to growth mode, we very much appreciate your continued support, and we look forward to delivering long-term value. With that, I'll hand it over to Tridivesh to go over our financials and provide Q1 guidance. Take it away, Tridivesh.

Tridivesh Kidambi (CFO)

Overall, we are pleased with our fourth quarter financial results, with the highlight being our $17.9 million of adjusted EBITDA, representing year-over-year growth of 79% and quarter-over-quarter growth of 73%. For the year, we generated $38.6 million of adjusted EBITDA, representing year-over-year growth of 32% and demonstrating our ability to grow through a challenged marketplace. Now, let's dive into our operating results. Q4 revenue was $75.6 million, representing a 21% year-over-year decrease and sequential decline of 15%.

Owned and operated advertising revenue was $64.7 million, down 19% year-over-year and 9% sequentially. The decrease in revenue is directly related to an $11.6 million sequential decline in advertising spend. Within the owned and operated advertising segment, our O&O products business generated $27.1 million of revenue, up 60% year-over-year and 30% sequentially, as to be expected in a seasonally strong Q4.

Our fourth quarter RPS was $0.03, and in line with the Q3, CPS was $0.07, down 20% from $0.02 in the Q3. As we lowered our advertising spend, we were able to shift towards lower CPS traffic sources. Overall, RPS and CPS were both down significantly year-over-year, as throughout the year we have culled certain acquisition channels that had both higher RPS and higher CPS. RPS was down 55% year-over-year, and CPS was down 65% year-over-year. The spread between RPS and CPS in Q4 was $0.07, or 98% margin, compared to $0.03, or 59% in Q3. Network revenue was $10.9 million, but adjusted for our net revenue adjustment was $18 million, which is up 8% year-over-year and in line with Q3. Total sessions were $1.9 billion, up 46% year-over-year and down 20% sequentially.

Partner network RPS, after adjusting for the out-of-period revenue adjustment, decreased 26% year-over-year but increased 24% quarter-over-quarter. Adjusted gross profit was $44.7 million, up 19% year-over-year and sequentially. Revenue-less advertising spend for our O&O advertising segment increased 21% sequentially to $32 million. Revenue-less advertising spend for our O&O products was $25.6 million, up 62% year-over-year and 27% sequentially. Network revenue-less agency fees was $14.4 million, up 10% year-over-year and sequentially.

Total sessions processed by RAMP in the most recent quarter was $3.8 billion, up 61% year-over-year and down 14% sequentially. On to operating expenses and EBITDA. In Q4, operating expenses net of advance was $26.8 million, down $0.5 million quarter-over-quarter and down $700,000 year-over-year. We continue to focus on reducing OPEX to create operating leverage. Adjusted EBITDA was $17.9 million in Q4 versus $10 million in the same quarter last year, representing a 79% year-over-year increase.

With respect to liquidity, we ended the quarter with $63.6 million of unrestricted cash on our balance sheet and an outstanding balance of $280 million of term loan debt under our credit agreement. Our net consolidated leverage at quarter end was approximately 5.6 times. Now on to Q1 guidance. We are estimating Q1 revenue to come in between $69 million and $71 million, down 18% year-over-year at the midpoint.

Despite the revenue decline guidance, we are estimating adjusted gross profit to grow 25% year-over-year at the midpoint and come in between $38 million and $40 million. We estimate Q1 adjusted EBITDA to come in between $9 million and $11 million, up over $9.5 million year-over-year at the midpoint. The adjusted EBITDA guidance also assumes a benefit from the reversal of the majority of the prior period partner payment balances related to fraudulent traffic on our network from Q2 of last year.

For the reasons outlined by Michael during his remarks, specifically around Google volatility, we will not be providing full-year guidance at this time. As we mentioned during our last earnings call, we have continued to see significant volatility in our marketing-driven businesses due to ongoing sell-side product and policy updates. However, our core product utilities, such as private search, mapping, and couponing, provide a strong foundation that allow us to navigate these challenges effectively. Looking ahead, 2025 presents an opportunity to further scale these products, driving consistent user acquisition and engagement. By continuing to attract and retain users through differentiated, high-value services, we not only mitigate market fluctuations but also create sustained monetization opportunities. Additionally, our RAMP platform remains instrumental in generating gross profit and EBITDA.

As we refine our AI-driven strategies to optimize traffic quality and advertising yield, AI-driven advancements to our platform and processes will also allow us to continue to optimize our operating expenses throughout the year. Our ability to balance growth and owned and operated with a disciplined approach to our marketing businesses will be a key focus in the year ahead. Thank you for joining us today.

Operator (participant)

Thank you, Tridivesh. We're now going to open the line for some questions. The first question comes from Tom Forte with the Maxim Group. Go ahead, Tom.

Tom Forte (Managing Director and Senior Consumer Internet Analyst)

Great. First off, Michael and Tridivesh, I hope you and your colleagues are okay when it comes to the California wildfires. Second, congrats on the improvement in the adjusted EBITDA for both the fourth quarter and full year. I have three questions. I'll go one at a time. Michael, as experts on AI and one of the early users of the technology to advance your business, would love your thoughts on DeepSeek and, in general, your ability to invest in RAMP at much lower CapEx than your tech peers.

Michael Blend (CEO and Co-founder)

Thanks, Tom. Thanks for joining and for the questions. Good to see you. I would say, as far as DeepSeek goes, I don't have a specific opinion about what they're doing, except that it's been very nice to see that DeepSeek, along with a lot of some of the other open-source providers, as well as just general competition in the AI marketplace, is really bringing costs down substantially for us. What we're seeing is that the price to use these tools has been coming down really every couple of weeks or so.

We're also seeing advances in a lot of the code assist tools that we're building, where we've been quite heavy users of AI, and I'll talk about that in just a second. What we're seeing is, like every two weeks, people are leapfrogging the other products. The level of pace at which these tools are developing is pretty extraordinary. The way that AI is specifically affecting our business here at System1, a couple of different ways. First of all, as we've discussed, I think on our last few quarterly earnings calls, AI is really perfectly built for a lot of the marketing that we do. Just tactically doing things like producing better ads, using AI and machine learning to do things like really rapidly change bid pricing on our advertising, but also produce better taglines, make better advertisements, better content.

Our entire advertising flow has been improved. On the first side, you've got AI really helping our operations, which has been good. What I would say more recently is what we're seeing are some really dramatic changes in the way that we're able to do product and engineering at our company. What we're seeing is that as engineers and product folks are adopting the AI tools, we're seeing like two- to four-time improvements in efficiency and productivity from our team. We made the decision relatively early, as the code assist tools have been coming out and maturing, to really go full force into them. We're able to do that, given the size of our company and how adaptive our engineering and product teams are. We're seeing just really great efficiency improvements. Also, I want to wrap up on the business side.

Some really cool things are happening as well. We're pushing not only the product and engineers, but also our entire company to adopt these tools. We're seeing our people on the business side that have never developed code, never written a line of software in their lives, are actually turning out products themselves. One interesting thing that we had, kind of a fun thing a few weeks ago, one of our business heads on the MapQuest side, for instance, came up with an idea for just an interesting fun little product one night a few weeks ago, worked on it that night, built it himself. The next morning, I worked with one of our engineers to productize it. I think about 14-15 hours from business concept, we had a product launched.

A few days later, that product, it was a fun little viral product, got featured on Stephen Colbert and CNN. That kind of stuff would have never happened before without these code assist tools, where someone can come up with a product and build them at a pace that we've really never seen before. AI, at least at our company, is increasing our efficiency and productivity, but it's also kind of unleashing creativity, which is nice to see.

Tom Forte (Managing Director and Senior Consumer Internet Analyst)

Excellent. All right. My second question is the question I get most often from investors. Can you talk about, at least at a high level, your balance sheet and your efforts to improve your capital structure, including managing your debt?

Michael Blend (CEO and Co-founder)

Sure. Something we focus on quite carefully. Tridivesh, you want to go ahead and answer that question?

Tridivesh Kidambi (CFO)

Sure. Hey, Tom, how are you doing? Thanks for being here. Thanks for the question. Obviously, we think about our balance sheet and capital structure a fair amount. In August of this past year, we did some work around our corporate restructuring that aligned our corporate structure with how we actually manage the business and think about our owned and operated business specifically between the advertising and the products businesses. That being said, as I mentioned in my prepared remarks, our net leverage at the end of the year was 5.6 times, which, frankly, is higher than we'd like it to be, probably higher than our lenders would like it to be, and definitely higher than we thought it would be when we started down the path a couple of years ago.

That being said, for all the reasons that we talked about in our prepared remarks that Michael just mentioned around AI, we feel very bullish about the prospects of the business to continue to grow and for us to grow into a net leverage position that we're more comfortable with. Specifically, we still have about two and a half years left on the term of our credit agreement, and we believe we'll be in a strong position to refinance that when we get there.

Tom Forte (Managing Director and Senior Consumer Internet Analyst)

Great. All right. My last question. That was very helpful, Tridivesh. I appreciate that. Michael, can you remind me of how periods of heavy political advertising spending impact your business model like we had essentially all of 2024? Now that we're on the other side of the presidential election, can I assume it's a much easier operating environment for you?

Michael Blend (CEO and Co-founder)

Yeah. Good question, Tom. We are a little bit contra to a lot of the advertising businesses out there where in Q4, when political was pretty hot. What that does for us is it affects the buy side. It drives up pricing a bit for us when we are buying our advertising. We actually are happy that the political quarter has passed us. For us, the buy side opens up a bit, and we see pricing come down a little bit. It is a good question. As I said, and as you mentioned, the political season being behind us is a favorable thing for System1.

Tom Forte (Managing Director and Senior Consumer Internet Analyst)

Great. Thanks for taking my questions.

Michael Blend (CEO and Co-founder)

Thanks, Tom. Appreciate it.

Operator (participant)

The next question is from Daniel Kurnos with Benchmark. Daniel , go ahead. Great.

Daniel Kurnos (Equity Research Analyst)

Thanks. Good afternoon, guys. Michael, there is a lot to unpack in here. Maybe at the expense of potentially getting a little deeper in the weeds on the RSoC shift, I'm just curious, maybe at a higher level for investors, how well you're positioned. You already talked about investing in the shift. It sounds like you're ahead of the curve. We've been talking to a lot of the other premium publishers and some of the agencies about this. It's going to be interesting to see when this happens because I don't think they're going to be ready. Can you just talk about your readiness and kind of where you still need to invest? Obviously, it's going to create some havoc in the marketplace, which we thought was going to happen with the cookie deprecation. We're getting this instead. Maybe just kind of talk through what you're seeing and where you guys are positioning yourselves as we make this pretty big shift.

Michael Blend (CEO and Co-founder)

Yeah, sure, Daniel . Also, good to see you. It's a little bit in the weeds for people, but because Google is such a major part of our business on the revenue side, probably worth expanding a little bit. Essentially, just to reiterate from my earlier remarks, Google's got a few different products, a few different advertising products that we use and people in kind of the Google partner ecosystem use to monetize their traffic. One of them historically was a product called AFD. Another one is a product called AFS. Related to AFS is a product called RSOC. I don't know, 18 months ago or so, Google introduced this new product called RSOC.

It was a pretty small product at the time, not one that had a lot of revenue on it. Google was putting a fair amount of focus on it internally. We made the decision at System1 to really invest pretty heavily in it. I think we made the right decision because fast forward 18 months, Google has kind of informed us and informed the advertising market that we would expect that the AFD product that they offer over time is going to be a much less important product for Google and that they're going to be shifting a lot of their emphasis into having Google partners such as ourselves promote the RSoC product, which stands for Related Search on Content. As I said, we've been putting a lot of our product and engineering efforts behind this, a lot of our marketing efforts behind RSoC.

We think we're quite well positioned. We believe we're the market leader in this product, or at least certainly we're one of the market leaders in the product. In the short term, we expect to see some bumpiness as AFD, the revenue that we generate from AFD, kind of begins shifting over more heavily to RSoC. Over the medium to long term, we're actually quite supportive of it. RSoC, we think, is a really good product for consumers and for advertisers. It happens to be one that we're quite well positioned for here at System1. We're happy to see the shift happening a little bit more quickly than I think anybody in the market would have expected. We think that we're in the right position for it. I think you're on mute, Daniel .

Daniel Kurnos (Equity Research Analyst)

There we go. Sorry about that. Tricky in the back end here. No, Michael, super helpful. Appreciate it. I can confirm you guys are definitely leading the charge on RSoC, at least based on my conversations. We will see how that plays out. To what you guys guided in Q1, your, let's just call it revenue ex-tac, which is basically what it is, is you've guided it up pretty strongly. I know a lot of that's due to your O&O properties. Can you guys just talk through, I mean, the spread is huge in Q4. You guys crushed it on spread. I'm just curious how you guys are thinking about your ability to grow in this uneven environment, adjusted gross profit, revenue ex-tac, whatever you want to call it.

Michael Blend (CEO and Co-founder)

Let's start with that, Tridivesh, and then I'll take over if you want.

Tridivesh Kidambi (CFO)

Yeah. No, I mean, again, we are guiding to some growth this year. Again, it comes down to we've seen a little bit of stability in the marketplace here to start the year. When we see stability, that's good for us. That's kind of what RAMP is built to take advantage of. Sitting here, kind of again, in the third month of the quarter, we feel pretty good about our guidance and how the quarter is going to end up. It's a function of RAMP working the way that it's supposed to work. Yeah, I mean, there isn't much more to say other than it's execution.

Michael Blend (CEO and Co-founder)

Yeah. I would say that in general, as we've kind of mentioned in our earlier remarks, our organic products are doing quite well. We're seeing nice growth there. We probably would have a little bit more confidence about the overall year if we were not faced with this product transition on the Google side. We are really waiting to see how that plays out. I think back half of the year, we are going to have a lot more confidence in what numbers are going to look like. For now, we feel good. We are coming off 2024, which I think was a year in which we started turning the corner. We are, I think, starting to feel increasingly confident about 2025.

Daniel Kurnos (Equity Research Analyst)

I know, Michael, you would be mad at me if I did not ask you my standard international question. It was obviously a good quarter for international. It is clearly moving ahead. We continue to hear, actually, some pretty good things at APAC. Europe's kind of coming back up a little bit, although we maybe hit a little bit of a bump now. It seems like a real greenfield opportunity for you guys. I know you kind of keep pushing me off saying, "Hey, we're attacking it. It's 36% now." How are you thinking about the TAM there? How do you think about that contributing to growth this year?

Michael Blend (CEO and Co-founder)

I mean, I think we're making pretty good progress. Year over year, you're seeing an increasing percentage of our revenue coming internationally. We are feeling really good. Our efforts are pretty focused. We are split domestic and international, our internal efforts. One thing that our AI tools have enabled us to do is very quickly move into international markets.

It's actually been doing things like translation, making sure images are better, advertising copy is better internationally has become much, much easier for us. We also have, we think, some growth in our shopping vertical with CouponFollow has very little international presence. MapQuest has almost no international presence. If you look on the organic product side, those are a couple of areas where we could be going international as well. We're not going to slow down. TAM's obviously huge domestically, but we've got a huge TAM international as well. What I suspect is that you're going to continue seeing an increasing percentage of our gross profit come international.

Daniel Kurnos (Equity Research Analyst)

Got it. I'll bug you with one more, and I'll take the rest offline because I have plenty. Maybe just for Tridivesh, you called out items in Q1 just around the adjusted EBITDA margin. How should we just think about the trajectory for adjusted EBITDA margin this year? Should we be up? If you're calling for some growth in adjusted gross profit, and I know there's no crystal ball here, just how do we think about your ability to generate incremental leverage going forward?

Tridivesh Kidambi (CFO)

Yeah. I would expect kind of the bulk of our gross profit to flow through down to adjusted EBITDA. As I mentioned, we're continuing to look at OPEX, be very maniacal about making sure kind of every dollar we spend, we're getting a good ROI on it. We would expect that our gross profit growth throughout the year should flow down at a very high flow-through, which should lead to expanded EBITDA margins as a percentage of gross profit.

Michael Blend (CEO and Co-founder)

Yeah. I would reiterate too that what we're seeing from our team is, going back to the question, Tom, how the ability of our team to execute on the engineering and product and business side, a lot of it driven by the new AI-related products that we've been using, is pretty impressive. We would expect that we're going to be able to continue with, around our current OPEX levels, execute better, roll out more products quicker with relatively stable OPEX. You should see, as our gross profit expands, a lot of leverage from that.

Daniel Kurnos (Equity Research Analyst)

Got it. Super helpful. Thank you for the color, guys. It was a lot of fun playing with the Gulf of America on MapQuest. Thank you.

Michael Blend (CEO and Co-founder)

Glad you enjoyed it. We had a few hundred thousand other people enjoy that as well.

Operator (participant)

I think that is all of our questions, I believe. I want to thank everybody for joining us this quarter. We look forward to chatting with you next quarter where we hope to have some good news then. Thank you very much.