The Exchanges

Q over the past 18 months, if you've got 30 people signed up at a minimum of 10 grand a month, you went from nothing to a 300,000 dollar a month revenue stream or three million in AR pretty quickly. I mean, that's good growth. What was the base that you were moving away from? Was it that CPM kind of selling your, you know, your audience in an anonymous way?

A So we are moving away from the, uh, the media model of selling the data and the media together, um, to just focusing on, on making the data available to clients. Uh, and then they use, you know, more or less their own media. And so it wasn't just high margin. It really was where we found the sweet spot in terms of the quality of the data. We call it sharing intelligence. For 10 years, we've been collecting all of this data around consumers' interests and, and the content they share. Um, and all around global from global sites. And so it was really a strategic move to recognize the real value that we had was the data and the media was a value add, but it's really all about the data.

AI assessment note: “we are moving away from the, uh, the media model of selling the data”

Q here. Well guys, you guys, part of what's happened in the space that Kurt is in, there are loads of copycats. So it's tricky to tell sometimes just from a UI perspective, what is share this and what is not Kurt. I'm talking about maybe WordPress plugins, other little widgets that someone built in their basement. How do you differentiate? What's your mode? What's unique about what you guys do?

A So our tools have always been, we are one of the leaders in the market. The tools are simple. Um, and we continue to innovate and offer new plugins, new tools, new, uh, layouts of the tools. Um, we have email notifications that publishers can use. We have, uh, ability to test articles in Facebook very quickly and figure out which one is going the most viral. So it's a series of tools that we continue to launch. When you see competitors, sometimes it's just using our logo because the logo is sort of open source. So you can see people to share this widget. Um, and that couldn't be us. That could be someone else, as you notice. So it's, um, we differentiate by our simplicity and our focus on publishers.

AI assessment note: “we differentiate by our simplicity and our focus on publishers.”

Q Yep. Now, now, 90% annual retention? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Now, on the flip side of that, revenue expansion, I imagine, it's only been around 18 months. That's not really something that you probably have a good, you know, sample size for yet either, right?

A Uh, exactly. But, you know, when we look out at this business, um, You know, we can see clear paths to 25, fifty, hundred million in revenue, um, and a lot of that is just continuing to penetrate large accounts, as well as to continue penetrating around the world, uh, into different markets. Um, the, the US data market is hardly saturated, but there's a lot of players, there's a lot of companies in that. In Europe, in Latin America, Asian Pacific, there's not a lot of Of companies in the market at all, and there's not a lot of companies that can offer a global player the ability to get into all four of those markets at the same time. So that's another big advantage of what we do is you don't have to Find someone in APAC to work with, or find someone in media to work with. You can work with us, or we can target globally for you.

AI assessment note: “Uh, exactly. But, you know, when we look out at this business”

Q Well, so give me an example of that. So when you use the word publisher, just so my audience understands I could be a publisher. Anyone listening is a publisher with a blog that uses share this on their blog. Is that accurate?

A Yeah. So from a publisher point of view, we work with publishers like TMZ and USA Today at the top, But the vast majority of our publishers are small blogs that are looking for, uh, uh, a solution, uh, for the readers. And, you know, someone asked me about this the other day, like, what kind of sites are in your network? You know, do you have certain skews this way or that way? And we really don't, right? You know, and sort of the analogy I use, it's not like, uh, gun control people use add this and, um, Uh, and NRA people use share this, right? It's just very, very, uh, up to the publishers in terms of what tools they want to offer their audience.

AI assessment note: “we work with publishers like TMZ and USA Today at the top, But the vast majority”

Q And then fast forward to today. So you've been doing this for the past six years. How many customers just on like the live ramp type of customer are you guys serving now?

A So we have about 30 direct customers on the data, um, and we have been investing our resources and our time into building that data business, um, mostly over the last 18 months, and it's going really well. Um, you know, we have, you know, the, the, the strains of our data is it's global reach. It's very scalable. Uh, it's very recent and ongoing data, um, thought fast moving data because people are sharing and clicking on content all the time. A lot of his recent data in the market is some of that old school data, you know, household income, demographics, cars, you don't change that very often, right? You don't buy a new car every month, you don't buy a new house every year, um, things like that. So our data has been, um, a great addition to the market.

AI assessment note: “we have about 30 direct customers on the data”

Q And if you had to pick one of those and label it your most important revenue stream, which one would it be the fixed fee or the CPM basis?

A It's a great question. The fixed fee ultimately is, um, the, the, the SaaS business model that we've been working hard to get on. The, the, um, the variable though has global distribution, um, and we get it out there in a lot of different ways, a lot of different, Uh, endpoints. As our head of product says, you know, one of the goals of the company is share this data everywhere. So that no matter what your use case is or where you're located, um, you know, you can find these sort of data. Now, the other thing that's really, um, our moat, so to speak, is that 70% of the publishers and the data is non-US, um, which is surprising to a lot of people, right? I mean, it's surprising to me because share this, you know, we don't have anyone in India or Australia or Brazil, And yet there's thousands of publishers each month that go to in those countries that go to share this.com or WordPress and download our tools. So it's quite an interesting global distribution play.

AI assessment note: “The, the, um, the variable though has global distribution”