Magnite at Bank of America Conference: Strategic Growth and Challenges

On Wednesday, 03 September 2025, Magnite (NASDAQ:MGNI) participated in the Bank of America 2025 Media, Communications & Entertainment Conference. CEO Michael Barrett provided insights into the company’s strategic positioning, highlighting growth in the Connected TV (CTV) sector and addressing challenges posed by ongoing legal proceedings. While Magnite’s strategic initiatives show promise, the company faces hurdles in navigating the complex legal landscape.

Key Takeaways

• Magnite anticipates benefits from potential behavioral remedies in the DOJ case.
• The company is experiencing share gains in the DBplus segment, driven by strategic partnerships.
• CTV growth is fueled by upselling and AI investments, enhancing ad spend and revenue.
• Netflix is expected to become Magnite’s largest client by the end of the year.
• Magnite is leveraging AI for audience segmentation and traffic analysis to boost CPMs.

DOJ Case and Legal Landscape

Magnite’s CEO, Michael Barrett, discussed the implications of the Department of Justice (DOJ) case, noting that while the case appears favorable to Google, the impact on the AdTech antitrust case remains uncertain. Barrett expressed optimism about the potential for behavioral remedies, which could positively affect Magnite in 2026. He emphasized that even if structural remedies are recommended, behavioral remedies might still be implemented during the appeals process.

DBplus and Open Web Segment

Magnite is gaining traction in the DBplus segment, attributed to vendor switching and increased ad spend. The company has secured significant accounts, including Pinterest, Spotify, and REMAX, leading to substantial shifts in advertising spend. Despite Google’s dominance with a 60% market share, Magnite’s share has reached 6%, thanks to strategic relationships with holding companies.

CTV Growth Drivers

The CTV sector is a focal point for Magnite, with ad spend growing faster than revenue. Barrett envisions a scenario where both metrics grow at comparable rates. The company is enhancing its customer upsell process, enabling programmatic advertising for major streamers and digital-first companies. Investments in AI are crucial, aiding in audience segmentation and improving CPMs. Magnite’s partnership with Netflix is a highlight, with Netflix expected to become the company’s largest client by year-end.

Sales and Investment Strategy

Magnite is maximizing its existing sales force while strategically opening new offices in select locations. The company is pulling forward infrastructure investments to transition traffic from the cloud to on-premises systems, enhancing the value of its supply-side platform (SSP) for publishers. This focus on demand facilitation is attracting new clients and increasing the overall spend through Magnite’s platform.

Innovation and AI

Magnite is integrating AI tools to analyze vast traffic data and create audience segments, benefiting both buyers and publishers. The rebranding of its CTV ad server as AllspringServe and the incorporation of ad-serving capabilities into the SSP provide a competitive edge. The addition of 50 curators specializing in unique ad units further strengthens Magnite’s position in the market.

Conclusion

For a comprehensive understanding of Magnite’s strategic initiatives and challenges, refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Bank of America 2025 Media, Communications & Entertainment Conference:

Sokie, Senior Analyst, US Internet team: Sokie, I’m a senior analyst in the US Internet team. I cover two sets of companies, video games and interactive entertainment as well as advertising technology. The ad tech stocks that I cover are AppLovin, DoubleVerify, Unity and Magnite which I’ve been very pleased to cover. And today I have the CEO of Magnite with me, Michael Barrett. So yes, we’ve been a fan of the stock for a while now and call seems to have been right.

I think investors are very happy with the stock performance as well. But today, we want to catch up with Michael about two things. We’re going to talk a little bit about like an update about the DD plus segment and the implications of the Department of Justice case. And then second, we’re going to take a little bit of a different tack and talk about growth drivers for CTV, things that Magnite in particular with its sales force has the capability to drive high growth for a very long time. So with that, I guess I’ll start questions.

Thank you. Thanks, Omar. Thanks, Mike, coming. So the results of the DOJ case came out last night and they seem somewhat favorable to Google. Is there any read through from that case to

Michael Barrett, CEO, Magnite: the AdTech antitrust case at all? Not that we can piece together different courts, different judges, kind of different remedies that they were looking to seek. I mean, both are the commonality is there’s some structural remedies being proposed by the DOJ, but I wouldn’t we’ve been racking our brains for the better part since the ruling came out from now, and we don’t see much of a read through. Okay. Nor does our outside counsel, which probably is more important than what I think.

Sokie, Senior Analyst, US Internet team: And, you know, obviously, since the last time we talked, it’s now a couple months later. I think the the behavioral remedies, the the case the case that pertains to Magnite and supply side platforms is going to be in September, like, later in September, if I’m not mistaken.

Michael Barrett, CEO, Magnite: Yes, the twenty second it begins, right? And the expectation there is that it’s called the Rocket Docket for a very complex murky world ad tech. So it wouldn’t be without reason to have a ruling come down. Obviously it’s been found guilty, so it’s not about whether it’s guilty or not guilty. It’s whether or not the remedy should be structural or behavioral.

And DOJ would like structural. Google has countered with we don’t have to break it up. We’ll behave this way and this should be fine for the industry. Frankly, don’t have a point of view because if the behavioral remedies are put in place it’s good news for Magnite. But even if structural is recommended from the bench, we’ve been told that it’s not without precedent that behavioral remedies are put in place during the appeals process which you can bet there’ll be an appeals process.

So instead of thinking about this as a two, three year payout when it finally settles, behavioral remedies light up the minute the ruling comes down We think that’s very beneficial to MAGNET.

Sokie, Senior Analyst, US Internet team: And since we last talked in June, have your thoughts about the timing of those behavioral remedies changed at all? No, I

Michael Barrett, CEO, Magnite: think it’s aggressive to think that it could be something that impacts the current year. But if behavioral remedies are put in place, it will definitely have an impact in 2026.

Sokie, Senior Analyst, US Internet team: And I’ve also noticed that there are a number of lawsuits now against Google, OpenX for example and then some civil litigation. What should investors read into from that?

Michael Barrett, CEO, Magnite: That there’s merit that we’ve looked at it closely that we believe there’s merit in those suits and that we reserve our judgment as to whether to proceed or not there. Got it.

Sokie, Senior Analyst, US Internet team: Okay. So DBplus your segment that focuses on the open web, There seems to have been some share gains recently and I was wondering if the share gains are more a function more of switching between vendors or more ad spend through Magnite or both?

Michael Barrett, CEO, Magnite: Yes, kind of begets one begets the other, right? You win big accounts like a Pinterest that excites advertisers to programmatic advertisers to run through Magnite because it’s the only way they can get the inventory, more dollars run through it. The next big publisher, Spotify or REMAX sees that. And so it’s just kind of cycle that we’ve been through. We’ve been beneficiaries of this supply path optimization where the big agencies, holding companies, all of which are here today, they basically want to work with fewer vendors and want to have more strategic relationships.

And so with every one of the holding companies, we have that kind of preferred relationship, which we’re not talking about a modest shift to spend, we’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars in shift. So if all of a sudden you have that dollar, if you have that spending power, that big density on your platform, it just begets more supply. So it’s just kind of virtuous cycle that we’ve been benefiting from over the last twenty four months. Got it.

Sokie, Senior Analyst, US Internet team: Very, very clear. Yes. So it sounds to me like the industry structure is consolidating a little bit, the long tail is coming on. Yes,

Michael Barrett, CEO, Magnite: there’s no question. If you look at our growth rate and the growth rate of the industry that we’re taking share. Some folks have said, oh, it’s already happening, you’re taking share from Google, but that hasn’t budged. Google share is still at 60%, we’re still at 6%. So the share is coming from the longer tail as you pointed out.

Sokie, Senior Analyst, US Internet team: So let me shift now to CTV, where I think a big, really big part of the thesis here, the long term growth thesis is although certainly your comments on open web are very positive. So I think on the last call, you continue to mention that CTV ad spend still grows faster than revenue, okay. But you’re seeing the gap narrow. So I want to maybe think out a little bit further couple of years. Do you see a world where CTV revenue growth could greatly exceed CTV ad spend?

Michael Barrett, CEO, Magnite: I could see a world where it would be on par. I don’t know if I want to see a world where our growth rate in ad spend is flattening and we’re making it back up on margin. I think that what we would look for in an ideal scenario is comparative growth rate that if ad spend is going at 15%, ad spend is going at 15%. So that it’s equalized in that respect.

Sokie, Senior Analyst, US Internet team: Okay. Correct me if I’m wrong, but the big part of the revenue growth would be upselling, right. It’s moving to higher take rate services and functionalities. So I’d like to dig into that a little bit. This leveling off or potentially slight outgrowth of revenue versus ad spend.

There are endogenous and exogenous factors that would compel your growth. And I’d like to dig into those a little bit. For example, these would be things like sales motion and innovation. So could you describe to us a little bit the customer up sell process both from your perspective as well as the customer’s perspective?

Michael Barrett, CEO, Magnite: Yes, sure. So we’re fortunate enough to have relationships with just about everyone other than YouTube in this space where they’re in most cases their primary or if not exclusive programmatic partner. And you have to think that the programmatic universe isn’t kind of as homogenous as the open web. You have your linear broadcast, legacy broadcast guys with streaming services. They have a different kind of complexion in terms of how they go to market, what they prioritize.

And then you have some of the digital first, more of the OEM guys, the Roku, Samsung, LG, Vizios. People I don’t think appreciate how much inventory that they have that they brought to market. And then of course you have Amazon and Netflix that are kind of digital first, but much more of a consumer oriented streaming service. With the big streamers, the Disney’s, the Paramount’s, Warner Brothers, they very much early days of programmatic and they probably think it’s early days right now, want to emulate the sales strategy that they have deployed for the last fifty years. And that is they have a very talented team of salespeople.

They have deep relationships with the top 500 leading national advertisers and they want to be able to pitch their dwindling linear along with the growing streaming to be able to yield maximize across the entire Disney portfolio, not necessarily top tick this impression on this show, on this programmatic channel. Where do we get involved in that in terms of helping them through that life cycle? Well, first off, the initial stages enabling programmatic. So plumbing, we’re a plumber. We come in, we make it happen so that if they want to do programmatic and they want to do it publisher sold, they are able to talk to their agency counterpart, set the price, set the targeting parameters and then we execute for them.

And that’s largely where we find ourselves with that cohort right now. But if you look at some of them, like for instance, know, Tubi at Fox, Pluto at Paramount, even Hulu at Disney, kind of different brands than the mothership, very much digital first and very fast growing. So much more open to hey what can programmatic do for me more than me trying to direct sell? Biddable. And they’re like no we’re not doing the open wild west like the web.

I’m not having some schlocky ad run-in my high produced content. So generally speaking, the first step is invitation only biddable. So invitation only auction. Those 80 advertisers, I’m comfortable with those 80. Let’s see if bidding real time on impressions yields greater than me selling at $15 because that’s historically what I sold it for.

And lo and behold, what they’re saying is, yes, it does, that there are some $70 impressions in there because that buyer knows that that person is in market for a European luxury automobile. So they’re going to bid higher. And then there are some that are below $15 but when it best settles, there’s better return on ARPU. And so getting customers comfortable to be able to break what has been a fifty year cycle of selling as much as I possibly can in the upfront and then worrying about the leftovers. Now holding back from the upfront deliberately to yield maximize downstream, that’s a journey.

And I think our sales team does a wonderful job with data, statistics, with the help of the DSP community because they want to do that as well, trying to educate them on what the right yield management is in terms of inventory management. Contrast that to the Digital First, the OEM guys, they’re very big and seditable. And our role there is as their principal programmatic partner is to make sure that we bring as much demand as possible for them.

Sokie, Senior Analyst, US Internet team: Okay, very interesting. So let me make sure I think I understood that correctly. So there’s a risk trade off essentially in the mind of the publisher. You’re used to doing one thing a certain way. They’re used to having a certain price knowing beforehand some kind of a guarantee.

Yet they still reserve some and they’re experimenting essentially. You’re enabling that experimentation and then there’s also a consultative process where trying to move them along into more programmatic direction.

Michael Barrett, CEO, Magnite: Yeah, that’s exactly right.

Sokie, Senior Analyst, US Internet team: Got it. Is there I guess any way that how would we think about the pace of that evolution of thought, maybe any particular publishers that you would consider leaders or laggards if you don’t want to mention them, right. Because I as a sell side analyst, I want to try to track the pace of movement here to try to figure out like eventually like how long it’s going be and eventually what kind of growth rate we

Michael Barrett, CEO, Magnite: can see. Yes, it’s a great question and without getting too much into specifics on individual media owners, you definitely see more experimentation when they have some flexibility on the brand. So in other words, I cited before Disney’s Hulu, which isn’t exactly equal to Pluto or Tubi being fast channels and Hulu being subscription, but certainly not by it certainly doesn’t have a legacy media brand associated with it, which I think gives them from a go to market more flexibility to say, okay, you want to do that, you can do that here. And they can learn from that and they can see, oh my Lord, we used to sell it for $15. Now we’re getting $17.50 for it if we do two thirds biddable, one third.

And so I think the evolution is in pace. You saw programmatic play a huge role in the upfronts this year. Every upfront presentation programmatic was front and center because that’s what the buyers want. The buyers will accelerate this as well. And that is we’re really just talking in this conversation, the traditional broadcast buyer.

What’s super exciting is there’s a world of advertisers that have never been able to advertise on linear on broadcast or cable because of the barriers to entry. These spots were too expensive, creating creative that can be accepted by the big broadcasters way too prohibitive. And so now you see with the utilization of technology, AI tools for creative, for tracking, for measurement, for attribution, you’re starting to see the growth of DSPs like Mountain, TV Scientific bringing social advertisers to TV. And that’s really where the rubber hits the road because they only are biddable. They don’t know how else to do it.

That’s their playbook from Instagram. So they want to take it over and apply it to TV. And because of the excess supply of inventory out there right now, the price points are low enough for those performance advertisers to be able to have a good experience. And so I think one of the stories of the next several years is going to be moving from an arena of 500 national advertisers to 10,000 advertisers, many of them SMBs that are advertising on TV for the first time.

Sokie, Senior Analyst, US Internet team: So I come back once again to sales. I guess how is Magnite kind of staff for that opportunity? Like I think when we look at your results, I think that the margin guidance you gave implied that you were going to be investing in the second half. How do you think about the size of your sales force and basically to kind of potentially push this opportunity and accelerate growth for you?

Michael Barrett, CEO, Magnite: Yes, I think we are fully leveraged on our sales team and that it’s not a question of adding more bodies. Rare instances we recently opened an office in MitraVid, we opened an office in India and we opened an office in Norway. Those are kind of rare examples because we’re very global as it is. So those are just some spots where we want our boots on the ground. But generally speaking, we have a buy side team, we call it demand facilitation that talks to agencies, that talks to marketers that have in house their programmatic, they talk to mid tier agencies in kind of the flyover states and they talk to the DSPs.

And so we are able to bring that demand with the current sales force that we have. The world that we’re talking about in three years from now, tens of thousands of advertisers, they’re going to be aggregated by DSPs, they’re going to be aggregated by merchant aggregators. And so it’s our job to make sure the plumbing is there for them, that it works, that they’re getting the right signals. We are not going to deploy an army of people chasing 10,000 advertisers. As it relates to increased investment in the second half of the year and we really haven’t signaled a number, but that relates more to infrastructure pulling forward infrastructure investments because of what we are seeing when we are able to take some of the traffic off the cloud and put it on our on prem.

So if we know it works and we know we have budgeted for 2025 X amount, why wouldn’t we pull over some that if that means the payoff is that much quicker for us.

Sokie, Senior Analyst, US Internet team: Got it. And so there are two sides to this market, the buy side and the supply side. I think you ran through a little bit of both. I still would like to better understand the connection like you don’t actually make any money off off of the the excuse I shouldn’t say it say it that way, but you

Michael Barrett, CEO, Magnite: don’t It’s true. They don’t pay us. Right. Have lot of people calling in people that don’t pay us. Right.

That’s right.

Sokie, Senior Analyst, US Internet team: I guess. I’m trying to get at you invest where you invest against which customers and you consider both sides of the market your customers to some sense, right? 100%.

Michael Barrett, CEO, Magnite: Yes, you have to in order to create this marketplace for our publishers to get our job is to make sure our publisher has access to all the demand that there is out there. And if we’re not doing our job, people aren’t going to just be a path to Magnite. And so we make sure when our publisher lights up that the world’s demand is bidding on their inventory.

Sokie, Senior Analyst, US Internet team: Got it. So the investment you make in facilitating demand helps increase the value of the SSD to the publisher.

Michael Barrett, CEO, Magnite: 100% and increases our new wins with new clients because they look at it and say wow, all that spend is they see public company, how much spend goes through our pipes on any given year like wow, that’s three times more than anyone else in your space. We can’t not be there.

Sokie, Senior Analyst, US Internet team: Got it. Well another driver of growth is innovation and maybe we could switch to that. So I noticed we had a quick chat in the hallway here and I was asking about the general availability of SpringSurf and you rebranded it, it sounds like and I thought that was an interesting anecdote about kind of customer perceptions in the sales process but touches a little bit on innovation as well. Why did you guys decide to do that?

Michael Barrett, CEO, Magnite: Yes, there were a number of reasons and just to back up a bit, SpringServ is our ad server in connected television. So it’s not a general ad server, it doesn’t compete with GAM, it competes with free will. So it just does streaming, I value video. And when we first brought it to market, we were like, hey, have an ad server and we have an SSP. If you don’t need an ad server, just pick this.

If you need an ad server, pick that. If you need an ad server and an SSP, pick them both. And it started to confuse people because a lot of the capabilities in the ad server were also some of the capabilities that we had in the streaming platform. So what we said was why don’t we just bring it together, call it AllspringServe. So it’s an SSP without serving capabilities.

And if you don’t want it as a primary ad server, just don’t flip that button. Just use it as an SSP. But what we found is, generally speaking, people use elements of the ad server even if they have an ad server because of what it can do, how it can increase monetization. And so it just made all the sense in the world to bring it together. It’s also a huge competitive advantage.

As I cited, FreeWheel is our largest competitor in that market. But if you look at any of the other SSPs, they don’t have that serving capabilities. And so by incorporating that into the SSP it kind of cuts the legs out from underneath them because now they have SSPs that do not have the feature set that we do. And we don’t have to argue about whether it’s ad serving or not any longer.

Sokie, Senior Analyst, US Internet team: Well that’s really interesting. So you’re putting a more powerful tool in the hands of your customers whether or not they use the entire functionality Which it sounds probably puts you in a better competitive position because they can

Michael Barrett, CEO, Magnite: Very unique competitive position. But in by going out there and signing as such, it really makes them ask harder questions of the competition as to why they would use them if they don’t have x y z feature. Very interesting. So

Sokie, Senior Analyst, US Internet team: maybe another one that I heard you talk about recently is some of your investments in artificial intelligence. And I’d like to maybe open discussion about how these new AI capabilities basically make your products more sticky. That’s potentially a very huge theme. Could you walk us through your thinking there?

Michael Barrett, CEO, Magnite: Yes, I think and there’s a slew more to come with the ones that we’ve kind of centered on kinda all fall in the same kinda neighborhood. And that is making traffic making sense of this vast amount of traffic that we have in the platform. Usually through the lens of, hey, I’m looking for a mom with young kids, help me do that. And so AI tools, agentic tools are able to spider the tens of thousands of sites that we have on the platform and be able to look for context. Oh, there’s an article about parenting.

That’s a good environment to put an ad in or a signal from that publisher that says, hey, it’s a mom with young kids because we’re a registered site and we know that profile. And being able to assemble that audience segment and put it in front of the buyer as fast as we can leads to better buying experience, leads to better monetization for our disparate publishers that couldn’t sell that segment on their own until we brought it together as one segment across 10,000 publishers. And we participate in the economics of an enhanced CPM if not an outright economics of a data deal that if we imported like ACR data and put it on it. So generally speaking, agentic work that we’re doing right now is in, we call it curation. It’s in building audience segments, discovering audiences for buyers to help them find it, buy more from us and we become that trusted source of where they want to buy from.

Does this apply to both CTV and Open Yes. Quarter alone we added 50 curators which we would have never, these are folks that specialize in doing that and then they go out to an advertiser and say hey would you like that and we actually process the transaction and participate in those economics. We couldn’t have it wouldn’t have been possible to do that on just one of the two platforms. It’s across both. Okay.

Sokie, Senior Analyst, US Internet team: And when you say you added 50 curators, I’m not sure I follow what what because I just don’t know the industry is.

Michael Barrett, CEO, Magnite: Yeah. It’s a it’s a funny term. Maybe think of it like this. Think of them as old school ad networks where they used to have to go door to door to sign up a publisher to accept the special ad unit. Like our ad unit is this, it’s non standard and it dances and jiggles.

And then publishers like, okay, sure. I’ll sign up to be part of your network. Then they’d have to go to the agencies and say, hey, I got this great network of this great ad, would you like to buy it? And that’s how it used to work. Today, that same person that is at Special Creative will just go to Magnite, put it in the marketplace, publishers will say, yeah, looks pretty cool.

Click click click click click. They’ll sign up a thousand publishers and then we’ll merchandise it to the buy side and they’ll they’re the technology piece to it. They made it happen because they came with the innovative technology, sound, motion, whatever it was. Mhmm. And they don’t have to hire a sales team for the supply.

They don’t have to hire a sales team for the demand because all the agencies are saying, hey. Hey. Great idea. Just work with Magnite and we’ll buy it off of Magnite because they’ve collapsed our partners to two partners. So that’s a big growing business for us which is nice.

But even more, I think impactful is that all that used to take place in the DSP. Right? That’s what the DSP used to do in a third party cookie world. Assemble your audiences in your DSP and then buy those audiences from an SSP. Now you’re buying the audience from SSP and assembling the audience on the SSP which we’ve been talking about for the last twenty four months.

That is a trend that is significant for Magnet and significant for the SSPs because we were always twenty four months ago, we were the dumb pipes and the DSP was the brains and we are commodities. And And I think little by little what you’re seeing is, wow, those guys are a lot more strategic than I thought. And I think you’re starting to see that reflected in the energy around the story. So

Sokie, Senior Analyst, US Internet team: I I when when I was listening to you now, I think, you know, I I heard you talk mostly about creatives and what what these curators create as as creatives. But I would does why does that make them curators because when I hear the word curator help me if I’m thinking about it incorrectly. It sounds to me like curation means you know you’re looking at the audience and assembling audiences on the film supply side. Correct. So that was the part that I’m missing.

Michael Barrett, CEO, Magnite: Yeah. I I the in some of them are technology companies that allow for they they they’re your video player. So they come in and they don’t don’t pay me for the video player. Give me the slug of your inventory. Where the curation comes in is you have this cool ad unit.

It’s across 10,000 publishers now. They’ve adopted it. But I don’t wanna just buy a cool ad unit. I wanna buy a cool ad unit that reaches moms with kids. So then the curation occurs on top of it that says That’s

Sokie, Senior Analyst, US Internet team: a collaborative process with the curator and the publisher. Yeah.

Michael Barrett, CEO, Magnite: They utilize our tools exactly to then slice it in and say, okay for $100,000 I got you all these moms. Very interesting. Yeah.

Sokie, Senior Analyst, US Internet team: Okay, that seems pretty powerful and you you said you signed up 50.

Michael Barrett, CEO, Magnite: Yeah.

Sokie, Senior Analyst, US Internet team: Right in a very short period of time.

Michael Barrett, CEO, Magnite: Yeah. So is how long is this ramp, essentially? You know, there’s always gonna be diminishing scale. I mean, goal is to sign up a thousand and have, you know, 500 rooms not delivering any revenue. Cause we’re literally getting people into business, we’re putting them into business.

So we’ll obviously focus on the folks that have real demand behind them like, hey, we proved this, the agency wants it, if enough publishers adopt it, they will spend on your platform. So we’re prioritizing it based upon how much spend we feel they can bring to Magnite. So that the number isn’t finite but it’s not infinite either.

Sokie, Senior Analyst, US Internet team: So we’ve covered a lot of things here and it seems to me that there’s a pretty strong trend of kind of value converging on the supply side and specifically on Magnite. And when a solution becomes industry standard and it becomes more sticky like it seems like you’re becoming, you would think that at some point you would have more pricing power. And I wonder like how that potentially looks. Is it purely like kind of an upsell mix process or what elements of pricing power does Magna have once it becomes such an entrenched player?

Michael Barrett, CEO, Magnite: Yes, so great question. And I think that if you look at the two businesses again, DBplus business very mature, legacy Rubicon started 02/2008, public in 2012 or 2013. So I think we celebrate in that business stable take rates. The idea is that our value has been earned over the years and that we don’t go through this savage cycle every year where people are trying to pound down the take rate. It’s a given.

So that to me is great because with all the spend that we’re adding on to it, it’s it’s just once you get to a certain point that’s ripping at 90% margin. CTV, it’s a story about sell and not necessarily pricing power, like just turning to Paramount and say, hey, your 3% is now 8%, take it or leave it. It is paramount. We’ve talked about the journey. You’re selling a lot of stuff programmatically direct.

Once you try biddable auction, we’ll rent it for you. We’ll only invite the same advertisers you want. Oh, for that service, we charge you X. So I think it’s more walking them up the programmatic food chain so that at the ultimate level the service that they’ll be using from us is significantly higher take rate than the service they’re using today.

Sokie, Senior Analyst, US Internet team: And, you know, do do take rates ever change at all? Right. I mean, like you said, at one time in the past, I guess, people tried to pound them down. But, you know, is there a potential that they would ever go up even if if for, like, a small minuscule amount? Is the goal generally just to kind of set a certain service level at a certain take rate and leave it

Michael Barrett, CEO, Magnite: there so it becomes industry standard and easy for people to transact on? I think for our strategic relationships we’re very pleased with where we are today and we’re not looking to the marketplace power of Magnet, walk it up much higher. A lot of publishers in our world are hurt. Don’t want to be the guy put the other nail in the coffin if you will. But when we aren’t used as a strategic partner and we’re just thrown in the mix as just another SSP, you know, the traditional header bidding web display browser based.

I’m always gonna keep eight guys in there, Magna, I don’t care what you say to me, you’re just another SSP. I’m gonna run you in competition in a unified auction against everyone else. That’s when we say to them, well, there’s no take rate then. Because if we win the auction, what do you really care if I’m taking 50% or not? It’s a unified auction.

And so we’ll we’ll monitor the take rate on our side with a with a variable take rate. Mhmm. If it’s a auction with low liquidity, we can take a higher take rate. If it’s an auction with high demand, we’ll take a lower take rate, but we’ll very well. And you’d be surprised at how many people are indifferent to take rates in that world.

They’re just like you’re right. It’s a unified auction, you win, you win. I wish I had the 50% take rate you took but you still won and so it’s the highest price that I could possibly get. So the marketplace is telling me take that offer.

Sokie, Senior Analyst, US Internet team: Interesting. Okay. Well, we have three minutes left here. And maybe I’ll just ask the last question here. You know, Netflix has been, you know, doing programmatic now for a couple months, I think.

Yes. Any early learnings that you have, you know, from your partnership there that you can let us know about?

Michael Barrett, CEO, Magnite: Yeah. So we’re very careful when we talk about specific partners and particularly in Netflix. So we always kind of say it’s their story to tell, but parodying what they’ve already said is I think fair game. And so the, it took a while for them to move off of the previous partner Microsoft onto our stack and their stack because they built their own ad server. Folks in North America first then went to EMEA and now in APAC.

And it’s been a tremendous relationship. They’ve hired some amazing talent on the technical side. We work extremely well and close to them. We’re onboarding more supply, more demand partners in international markets that aren’t necessarily just the same big guys that are in North America. And I think that they’re new to programmatic too.

Their ad business is two plus years old but it was never programmatic. They didn’t do anything, it was all direct. And so they’re kind of new to the programmatic rhythms and are being very careful about how they perceive the consumer experience, all that kind of stuff. But as we’ve said, based upon what we’re seeing, they’re gonna exit the year as our largest client, if not one of our largest clients.

Sokie, Senior Analyst, US Internet team: On a

Michael Barrett, CEO, Magnite: run rate basis. On a run rate basis. Correct.

Sokie, Senior Analyst, US Internet team: Okay. Well, look, lots to look forward to. Great potentially structural opportunity here. So thanks again, Michael, for for coming and appreciate it. I really enjoyed the the the interesting conversation.

Outstanding.

Michael Barrett, CEO, Magnite: Thanks, man.

Sokie, Senior Analyst, US Internet team: Alright.

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