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On Thursday, 04 September 2025, Magnite (NASDAQ:MGNI) presented at Citi’s 2025 Global TMT Conference, outlining its strategic transformation from a traditional supply-side platform (SSP) to a comprehensive solution catering to the streaming industry. CEO Michael Barrett discussed both opportunities and challenges, emphasizing Magnite’s adaptability and growth potential in the competitive landscape.
Key Takeaways
- Magnite has transitioned from a traditional SSP to a platform focusing on streaming (CTV) and digital video (DV+).
- Key client wins, such as Netflix, highlight the company’s modular and customizable offerings.
- International expansion and partnerships, notably with Amazon, are driving growth.
- The ongoing Google AdTech trial presents potential market share gains for Magnite.
- Magnite’s M&A strategy is focused on strategic acquisitions to enhance its product roadmap.
Evolution of Magnite
- Magnite has evolved from focusing on desktop websites to becoming a comprehensive platform for streaming clients.
- Strategic acquisitions, including Telaria, SpotX, and SpringServe, have enhanced its capabilities.
- The company secured significant deals with major streaming clients like Netflix by offering modular and customized solutions.
CTV and DV+ Business Segments
- Magnite’s platform serves both CTV and DV+ clients, with overlap seen in publishers like Disney and Paramount.
- Agencies are consolidating their spending on platforms like Magnite for comprehensive access to CTV and DV+ inventories.
Growth Drivers and Opportunities
- Magnite’s partnerships with major OEM players such as Roku and Samsung are driving CTV growth.
- The company is expanding globally, with international markets growing faster than the U.S.
- Potential outcomes of the Google AdTech trial could significantly increase Magnite’s market share and revenue.
Impact of GenAI and Internal Development
- GenAI’s impact on web traffic is mitigated by Magnite’s diverse portfolio, including audio and mobile web.
- Magnite is developing AI-powered tools to enhance client search and discovery capabilities, aiming for efficiencies and cost savings.
M&A Strategy and Financial Outlook
- Magnite’s M&A strategy focuses on strategic, not large-scale, acquisitions to advance its product initiatives.
- The company expects margins to exceed 40% in adjusted EBITDA by Q4, with strong free cash flow generation driven by existing infrastructure.
Partnerships and Market Position
- Magnite’s partnership with Amazon is expanding rapidly, encompassing DSP and publisher aspects.
- Agencies are leveraging Magnite’s platform to create curated marketplaces, focusing on safe and well-lit environments.
Magnite’s presentation at the Citi’s 2025 Global TMT Conference highlighted its strategic evolution and growth prospects. For a deeper understanding, refer to the full transcript below.
Full transcript - Citi’s 2025 Global TMT Conference:
Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining. Wrapping up the day here with Michael Barrett from Magnite. I’m looking forward to the conversation. Thanks for joining us.
Michael Barrett, From Magnite, Magnite: Thanks so much for having us.
Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: All right, let’s start with Magnite, typically thought of as a traditional SSP platform. The business has evolved into a lot more than that, I think, over the last few years. Just to start off with how it’s evolved, where you’re focused right now, the key business drivers, and where you see the business going from here.
Michael Barrett, From Magnite, Magnite: Yeah, so I think when people think of your traditional SSP, kind of born in the desktop era, you thread together tens of thousands of websites and plug in DSP demand, and you know one looks like the other. Pretty hard to differentiate in that world. What we saw was the streaming opportunity, CTV, and we were that SSP that I just described at Rubicon Project. We went through the traditional build-buy-partner scenario to try to get into the streaming business, and we decided the best path was buy. We acquired Telaria, then we acquired SpotX, and then we acquired SpringServe, the ad server. If you start to look at the assets that we have and the products that we have, it’s quite different than the SSP of old. What we are finding is the top streaming clients are looking for anything but the old SSP.
They’re looking for a new version of that. Some of them need ad serving. Great, we’ve got it. Some of them need elements of ad serving and an SSP platform. We got that. We’re finding it’s a very modular, customized, taking everything off the shelf that we have, but people want to utilize it slightly different. The ability for us to be able to do that has, in large part, won us a lot of these deals that we’ve announced, Netflix being a tentpole deal. It was because of our capability and our ability to be fast-sold in terms of how they think of us, how they can use us, as opposed to just being this dumb pipe that pipes in DSP demand.
Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Got it. If I just think about your business between the two segments in CTV and DV+, which we’ll dig into each, what’s the breakup in terms of clients? Are a lot of advertisers using both, or are they kind of CTV only or DV+ only? I don’t know, how should investors think about the growth rates, opportunities to take rates, and some of the financials around that? We’ll dig into some of the details.
Michael Barrett, From Magnite, Magnite: Yeah, no, really good question. There’s definitely overlap between the two platforms from a publisher perspective. If I’m Disney, I have a bunch of websites, I have online video, and I have all these streaming, they’ll use us for all that. So will Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery, et cetera. There will be exclusive DV+ clients that have no streaming business, and then streaming folks that have no legacy website business. I would say that the thesis of being able to be one platform that can house anything that can be bought or sold programmatic has played out. Particularly on the buy side, which again, we don’t get paid by buyers, but we have to run this robust marketplace, and it’s a two-sided marketplace. Agencies come to us and say, wow, I can get everything here.
I can get some of the exclusives you have, and I can get all the CTV I want, and I can get the DV+ I want. This is perfect. There are not many platforms that look like you. I will concentrate my spend on you. It’s really played out. This whole thesis of having a robust business across the board has really paid out on the buy side.
Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Got it. Okay, that makes sense. Let’s start with connected TV or dig into it a little bit more. Maybe just broadly, what the biggest growth drivers have been, that business has grown really nicely. What are the most important things to know? I want to dig into some of the partnerships and differentiation there.
Michael Barrett, From Magnite, Magnite: Certainly, account wins lead to the growth. We are the programmatic, preferred programmatic, or exclusive programmatic partner of all the top streamers. We also think of the connected TV world as just that, direct-to-consumer brands, the Disneys, Netflix, et cetera. There is this thriving, vibrant streaming business on the OEM side, so Roku, LG, Vizio, Samsung. We work very closely with them as well. We put ourselves in a position to prosper from the tailwinds, because we’re in early days of programmatic, early days of streaming, early days of streaming advertising, early days of streaming advertising programmatic. Just the growth of programmatic, the adoption of programmatic by existing customers, is going to be an immense tailwind for us in the out quarters.
Talk about the explosion of different advertiser profiles, like small to medium-sized businesses coming on. That will be a huge growth driver because it will port in more demand. More demand will be biddable. It will be a higher take rate for us because it’s biddable. We really think we’re positioned incredibly well. You’re not going to win in Netflix every year because there are not Netflix opportunities every year to win. I should mention also the global expansion of all of our partners. It all started in North America. It all started as U.S. only. Now you have Paramount going international, Warner Bros. Discovery going international, Disney going international, Netflix going international. We just go along for the ride. We already have a place there. We’ve been thriving in those markets in DV+. We have boots on the ground. We know the local DSPs.
We can just flip the switch and we’re live.
Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: What’s your international mix?
Michael Barrett, From Magnite, Magnite: 75-25, but international growing faster than U.S. right now.
Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Okay. Are there any roadblocks internationally? Like when you talk about, you know, biddable and more moving programmatic SMBs, whatever it is, like all these growth drivers in the U.S., are they similar internationally? Are they a few years behind?
Michael Barrett, From Magnite, Magnite: In some markets, more advanced. If you look at Australia, New Zealand, where we’ve been, we’re the programmatic ad server of choice in those markets. They’ve been early adopters of broadcasters, were early adopters of streaming. You look at other markets, they’re laggards. There were times we would look at a market and say, boy, I don’t think we’ll ever crack that. It’s three broadcasters. They really enjoy, you know, third to third to third market share. There’s no incentive for them to bring in outside tech. They’re very comfortable in the way they’re doing business. All of a sudden the party ends because Netflix crashes, Disney comes in, or Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery. All of a sudden they start to scramble and they’re like, oh God, we actually have to have a streaming strategy.
I think you see it playing out in a market like France where we had signed TF1 and now TF1’s been distributed by Netflix. There’s going to be strange bedfellows in these emerging areas, but I think we’re really well poised to take advantage of it.
Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Okay, let’s pull on this thread a little bit. I guess there’s been a thesis that SSPs would be disintermediated, particularly with some of the larger streamers that have their own tech stacks. You’ve made a number of partnerships with big tech players in the streaming side. What is it about what you’re bringing to them to help investors understand that Magnite plays that role with these larger players who have their own tech stack too? What do you bring to the table that’s allowed you to build those relationships?
Michael Barrett, From Magnite, Magnite: Yeah, and I think you have to look at it pragmatically. You know, we’re not a huge company, but we’re a thousand people. Regularly spend, you know, $60 to $80 million in R&D, whether it’s CapEx, software, capitalized software development, cloud costs, whatever the case might be. You know, have been at this for 15 years. It’d be kind of silly to think that you could hire 10 crack engineers and flip the switch and do what we do. I think that generally speaking, what folks have centered on is let’s do what we do really well. What is that? It’s the consumer experience. It’s the experience on the screen. If I want to do really cool special ads, I don’t want my vendor telling me, oh, my ad server doesn’t do that. Maybe I want to build my own ad server and I want to protect my data.
The last thing I want to do is have any data leakage. I want to keep that really close. If I’m going to go programmatic and I want to introduce global DSPs and I want to have, you know, 60 DSPs eventually when I’m up and going and build that layer of safety and build the brand safety and build all the tools, the collections, all that, yield optimization, running huge auctions, I think generally speaking, they say that’s where I feel as though I can have a valued partner. We haven’t seen anyone go that next step and very few can build an ad server. The vast majority, you know, I think Disney’s an outlier because of largely the acquisition of Hulu and that came with technology. Hulu as a standalone had to have technology. Netflix obviously is a huge technology shop itself.
I don’t know if you could look at a Fox or a Warner Bros. Discovery and say, oh yeah, they’re going to spend $100 million on building an ad server and justify that. I think that we feel very comfortable in the value that we provide and the fees that we charge to provide that.
Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Got it. Even with Netflix, which is a technology shop, you have a relationship there.
Michael Barrett, From Magnite, Magnite: Yes.
Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Tell us about that. I think it’s still early days in how they’re opening up their ad ecosystem. How’s that going, the role you’re playing, and how’s that relationship building up?
Michael Barrett, From Magnite, Magnite: Yeah, so it’s going swimmingly. I mean, we’re very cautious when we talk about partnerships, specifically Netflix. We always say it’s kind of their story to tell. Us parroting what’s already public, I think is fair game. We’ve walked people through the RFP process before. When they reached out to the industry, when they chose to switch from Microsoft to a new partner, they were very clear about what they were going to do and what they were good at. It was all the things I described before: consumer experience, ad experience. They needed to build the ad server to ensure that they were always going to be able to do what they want to do for the consumer. Don’t you come in and sell me an ad server. I need a programmatic partner that does the following.
Definitionally, I would say two-thirds of the questions in the RFP related to ad serving. If we didn’t have ad serving capability, it’s going back to the modularity of our offering. We wouldn’t have been able to win the RFP. We didn’t sell them an ad server. We sold them a platform, but it’s a platform that had programmatic ad serving capabilities. We have been at it for a couple of years. They hired tremendous talent. They build fast. We work very closely with them. We’ve gone into all the international markets with them. From a size perspective, we’ve said on many occasions that there’s a very good chance, likelihood that Netflix exits the year as our largest client, if not one of our largest clients on a run rate basis.
Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Got it. Okay, still early days with Netflix.
Michael Barrett, From Magnite, Magnite: Yeah, very much so.
Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Another large recent partner is Amazon. Can you tell us a little bit more about that relationship? Does that have the opportunity to be similar scale size as Netflix?
Michael Barrett, From Magnite, Magnite: Yeah, I mean, so already it is, but you have to look at Amazon not necessarily just as the publisher, but as the DSP. Amazon as the DSP historically had spent the majority of the dollars on Amazon owned and operated platforms. Then in the display area, they said, why don’t we follow these Amazon users when they go off Amazon, try to get them back, classic retargeting. They were very high bidders. If they knew the person, they knew what they abandoned in the shopping cart, they would be the highest bidder. They came to us and said, hey, can we work with you on your supply footprint so that we can buy Amazon users across the open web? They became quickly, and they only authorized, you know, a handful, three to be exact, platforms to do that with.
Of all the platforms, they chose us as one of the three. We get an outsized share of their spend. CTV rolls along and they say the exact same thing. All the big CPG advertisers are advertising through the Amazon DSP that are buying Amazon owned and operated, Prime, et cetera. They also want to buy a bigger footprint. Hey, we’ll come to you and we’ll buy your CTV inventory because you’re already an approved partner and we know you and can trust you guys. On the buy side, they’re one of our fastest growing, largest DSPs. On the publisher side, Amazon as a publisher, they’ve come to us and said, you know what, we probably could monetize your inventory by bringing in greater demand than just the Amazon DSP because traditionally it’s just the Amazon DSP where you can get their inventory.
Why don’t we start not with the top tier stuff, but we’ll start with the Amazon Fire inventory. We’ll start with the inventory piece of that that your partners, Magnite, the Peacocks of the world, the Maxes, they have inventory share. They have it over there. Why don’t we work with you for you to grab it and help them monetize that? We’re the only person that’s allowed to do that for them. Yeah, it’s a multifaceted partnership and growing very fast. Probably, you know, a bit of a stress to say that we’d become their in-house SSP and be their only SSP. Yeah, we enjoy the partnership we have.
Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: All of that is done programmatically.
Michael Barrett, From Magnite, Magnite: Yes.
Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: When you talk about that, the shift to programmatic, the Amazon Fire inventory that’s open.
Michael Barrett, From Magnite, Magnite: Yeah, they’re very much a programmatic-first shop. They probably have the highest % of programmatic activity than anyone in that space does.
Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Got it. Okay. Let’s shift slightly and talk about agency partnerships. Agencies are obviously a big part of this ecosystem as well. You’ve got some relationships there. I think you white label some data products for them. Can you talk about the kind of agency workflow and partnerships and what that opportunity is for you guys?
Michael Barrett, From Magnite, Magnite: Yeah, I think agencies have been on record as saying that they were a little casual in the early days of programmatic. That kind of eroded a lot of their value proposition. They used to be the guys that would help you plan your media, and they would bundle together your spend. You had $10 million to spend, I had $20 million to spend, that guy had $100 million. I’ll bring it to market as one and get the best deals. I’ll not only plan your media, I will also get the best priced media. That all blew up in the programmatic world because they kind of ceded it all to the DSP. They’re like, you know, DSPs are great, they can buy across 200 sites. Meanwhile, they were diluting the spend of each campaign, and the DSP was making all the decisions.
They were deciding what inventory to buy, they were deciding what price because it was open biddable. It really hurt their media planning businesses. They sat down and said, what’s a way to rectify this? They came to us and said, you know what? Why don’t I get in the exchange business? I’ll create the GroupM Exchange, WPP Media now, and I’ll curate it. I’ll get the best deals with those publishers because I know them all, and I’ll run the tech as if I’m running it, but you white label it to me so that I can then justify to my clients well-lit, curated, the household names that you know at the best rates. I will charge you a slight technology fee, just like you’d pay an SSP. Think of me as your SSP exchange.
These are kind of crawl, walk, run because there’s a whole level of trying to convince the client that it’s in their best interest. They’ve really taken off, and that model, that general model that I pictured or painted, is being applied across all the holding companies now.
Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Does that mean the holding companies are actively building their own DSPs and then leveraging you guys for this?
Michael Barrett, From Magnite, Magnite: No, they’ll still use the DSP. They’re building their own exchanges. They’ll still use whatever DSP they’ve licensed. The real value they’re bringing is this well-lit, curated, safe environment with really good media rates.
Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Okay. Shifting to DV+; I mean, that business is growing as well in a slower growth area of digital. Tell us about that business and what’s driving the strength there.
Michael Barrett, From Magnite, Magnite: I think a couple of things. I mean, account wins. You would think it’s super saturated, but every once in a while you get a new type of client, like maybe it’s an audio client, like a Spotify, or a social client, like a Pinterest, where all of a sudden you used to think, well, that’s not really open web, that’s not TV, but it is. You get that kind of momentum from client wins. You also get the impact of what we were talking about before in the supply path optimization. Those agency-curated marketplaces are the definition of supply path optimization. They’re telling their clients that they’re going to consolidate their spend on one platform. Now it’s labeled their platform, but it’s our platform that’s powering it.
When hundreds of millions of dollars get concentrated on one platform, all of a sudden there’s this virtuous cycle where publishers are then, well, I have to be on that platform if all that spend’s on that platform. If all that spend’s on that platform, it transacts. I think what you see is us gaining share because of those dynamics where we’re winning new accounts, but we also are consolidating the spend across the industry level. We have much more ad spend going through than our nearest competitor, and that just kind of starts a cycle of growth.
Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Okay, understood. Shifting a little bit more, talk about Google. Had a lot to say there. Maybe just to start with the news from the other day, if any thoughts on that, if that impacts you guys at all. I know the AdTech trial is the one that has more of an impact. What are your thoughts there, expectations? Are you kind of beginning to leverage that at all? Are you waiting to see what happens? What’s that opportunity? I know you put some numbers around it.
Michael Barrett, From Magnite, Magnite: Yeah, we think it’s real and it’s a substantial kind of generational opportunity. If you kind of look at it from a market share standpoint, the court documents gave us the greatest insight you’re ever going to get into the size of the business. It’s slightly dated because a lot of it’s 2022, et cetera. Their market share in the DV+ world, open internet if you will, is 60% and ours is 6%. We’re by far the largest second player and their biggest competitor. Quite a disparity. Anything falls off the truck, life is better than it is today. The search ruling is really quite distinct from the AdTech. Our outside counselors cautioned us to draw any lines of like, oh, they’re being lenient. They’re not going to do structural behavioral remedies in the AdTech. They’re quite different. In both cases, they were determined to be running a monopoly.
In one case, it was a legal monopoly, but had to be addressed. In the other case, an illegal monopoly. That’s the AdTech. Quite different. The remedy hearing starts in a couple of weeks and should last a couple of weeks with a ruling to be quickly handed down. It’s called the rocket docket for a reason. It moves fast and the judge there is phenomenal. There’s a good likelihood that by the end of the year, you kind of understand. If it’s structural, there’s no question there’ll be an appeals process. If the court dictates as remedy that you have to sell the ad server in the exchange and you got to get out of the business, they’ll definitely appeal. In the interim, we’ve been informed that in all likelihood, behavioral remedies are put in place during the appeals process. The behavioral remedies would level the playing field.
If you look at our business, we see all the impressions that they see. We take those impressions to auction just like they take them. We just win a lot less when they’re running the auction. If these behavioral remedies are put in place while they’re appealing structural, it should have the impact that we’re looking for for our business. As we said, every 1% shift in share is $50 million in contribution to the business at almost 100% margin flow through because we’re already doing the work. You don’t have to hire separate salespeople. You don’t have to build more boxes. It’s already there to be had in a higher win rate.
Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Are advertisers preparing for this in any way that you’re speaking to? Does any of this have an impact for YouTube as well? Do you think YouTube can open up, or it’s more just really on the traditional?
Michael Barrett, From Magnite, Magnite: Yeah, again, YouTube wouldn’t be a part of the argument about the tech monopoly. Would they be more persuaded to be more open? Perhaps. From an advertiser’s standpoint, I think that generally speaking, the advertisers that use DV360 are often concerned why $0.85 to their dollar is going to AdX and not to all the other exchanges. I think they’d probably applaud it. Publishers have intimated that, you know, we always think of our DV+ business in the open web as all auction-based, right? This crazy auction where we’re processing trillions of ad requests. It’s true, that’s the business. If you’re talking about a premium publisher like The New York Times or CNBC or Reuters, whomever, they have a really big chunk of their revenue in what they call deals business. It kind of owns programmatic guaranteed where it’s not biddable.
They create a deal ID and it’s always on and buyers buy it that way. Agencies buy it that way. That business is largely out of our control because it’s so much easier to do when the ad server is connected to the exchange. If that connection was decoupled or we were able to, from a behavioral remedy, be able to access the deals and make it easy for publishers, I would venture that the vast majority would switch because they’ve been trying to for years. It’s just too much friction in the process. There’s a fair amount of excitement around that as well.
Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: That’s the share gain opportunity you talk about, or is that in a?
Michael Barrett, From Magnite, Magnite: Yes, that in a fair auction really results in what should be not a 60% market share versus a 6%.
Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Okay. I think it was at earnings you mentioned a potential civil lawsuit as well. What’s that about? Anything you can share on that? I know that’s a sensitive topic.
Michael Barrett, From Magnite, Magnite: Yeah, no update there other than to say that we’ve seen others in this space file lawsuits, and we believe there’s merit in those lawsuits.
Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Okay. Let’s shift to GenAI for a little bit. Let’s start on the, again, I guess sticking to Google and just the impact from search and GenAI search and AI overviews, sending less traffic out to the open web. It’s a very regular question these days from investors on what that impact means for publishers and what it means for ad tech, what it means for you guys.
Michael Barrett, From Magnite, Magnite: Yeah, it’s going to be very real. You know, prior to these chat agents, the ChatGPTs of the world, Anthropic, Perplexity, Google used to spider your website. Every two times they spidered it, they would send you one search referral. Man’s down. That’s not too onerous, right? They would crawl your website, refresh their search results, and every second time they would send you a search referral traffic. Right now, with Gemini baked into Google Search, they spider your site 19 times and send you one search referral. It gets even worse. ChatGPT is like 60 to 1, and Anthropic and those guys are 600 and 900 to 1. They’ll spider your site 600 times and send you one search referral. It’s real, and they’re already feeling it. Where are the pockets that are going to feel it worse? Kind of the longer tail discovery places that aren’t bookmarked.
The bigger brands, the ones we tend to work with, have an audience, built an audience. People go to them with a regular habit. Sometimes they’re logged in, sometimes there’s usernames, passwords, and so they kind of will fare better. They won’t be immune from it. They could also have another leg in the revenue stool. The search engines, the answer engines, now the agentic search is now talking about compensating them on a license basis or a per query basis. They’re actually even talking about creating an auction where they’d beat against each other for a certain query and see who the highest payer wins would get to spider the New York Post that day. At any rate, it’s kind of encouraging that there could be another revenue stream because relying upon 100% in advertising hasn’t been great for them anyway.
We feel as though from our business, we can’t talk about AdTech in general, but we process so much inventory that if our inventory on the open web halved tomorrow and budgets remain the same, our win rate would just go up because we’d be bringing fewer impressions and it wouldn’t impact our business. To frame it, our, you know, desktop web exposure is 17% of the business. We’re not talking about half of our business here. Our DV+ portfolio includes audio, so that’s not search referral-based. Mobile app, not search referral-based. A lot of mobile web isn’t search referral-based. I think that we feel quite comfortable that we’ll fare well. That’s not to diminish the impact it could have on individual publishers, but I think because we have a broader portfolio and global kind of reach in nature, we’re kind of insulated a bit from that downdraft.
Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Okay, understood. Let’s shift to internal GenAI development products. Maybe some of the key things you guys are working on, how it’s impacted on the product and revenue generation side, and the other side that’s been talked about a lot is on driving efficiencies and cost savings and what you’re implementing and seeing there.
Michael Barrett, From Magnite, Magnite: Yeah, from the client-facing AI tools, we have several out today, more to come. Most of them fall in the category of search and discovery. Being able to identify audiences faster, assemble audience segments quicker, being able to more efficiently find things that normally would take much longer to do. Those are the heart of our curation products where folks are able to come in, assemble custom audiences quickly on the fly, and buyers are able to buy it quickly. We’re really excited about those tools and excited about the list that we have that will be coming out. I think that there’s also going to be wonderful opportunities from small, acqui-hire M&A, because this will lead into what we’re doing as an organization.
I don’t know about you guys at Citi or anyone else, but what we have found through our journey of trying to make the workforce more efficient and more productive is that the early stage startup guys that we found early on that had a particular service or product that the bigger guys didn’t have, six months later, the bigger guys had it. We do a lot of business with Amazon, a lot of business with Oracle, a lot of business with Salesforce, a lot of business with Microsoft, and we’re Amazon. We’re finding that these guys, if they don’t have it today, they’re going to have it tomorrow. It’s making our job a little bit easier in terms of testing. One of our biggest concerns is data and data leakage and the sanctity of our customers’ data.
If these big guys have already gone through that process and we can trust them explicitly, then we’re finding it a lot easier to adopt those big products as opposed to these bespoke boutique startups, which I don’t think is unimaginative. We’re just finding great value from those other products. I think it also creates, again, going back to acqui-hires, a lot of these folks will need to find a home. There’s great talent in those shops. I think we’re going to take full advantage of the balance sheet and the momentum of the company to be able to grow our AI presence that way too.
Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Okay. Yeah. Maybe just a follow-up on M&A. I was going to go there. It sounds like a real focus on AI. Any other areas where you’re focused on in M&A? I mean, kind of kicked off this conversation. You’re talking about Magnite being a roll-up of M&A products.
Michael Barrett, From Magnite, Magnite: Yeah, I think we’ve been pretty clear to investors for the last couple of years that the days for swinging for the fence are over. We have what we need. We can do it organically. It’s been a journey to put it all together. We never intended to buy it and let it all run separately. That journey is at its completion. Now it’s innovation time. It’s playing offense. That said, anything that can advance our product roadmap, if we have something on there that our customers desire, but it’s going to take three quarters to build, but the guy’s sitting right over there, we can buy the company and accelerate that. Those would be the kinds of initiatives I think you should look from us going forward, which won’t require increasing debt. It’ll all come out of cash flow. It won’t require equity.
I think that our M&A story is going to be a measured one going forward.
Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Okay. Any questions from the audience? Okay, let me just follow up on that and, if you can, just talk a little bit about kind of margin profile expectations, margin expansion, anything like that, how you get there, and kind of free cash flow generation. How should investors view that?
Michael Barrett, From Magnite, Magnite: Yeah, I think they should think of it as a highly leveraged business. That is, once we invest in the core infrastructure, the people, give everyone their raises every year, the simple fact is that it’s a business that if you drop $2 billion more in ad spend on top of it, and we’ve talked about all the drivers where that could come from, it doesn’t require a penny more of investment. We have the boxes, we have the capacity, we have the individuals, we have the relationships with the customers. It’s just processing more. If you look at ours, it’s a pretty seasonal business because it’s advertising. If you look at Q4, you start to see what that could look like, right? Margins always go over 40% in adjusted EBITDA, and the costs don’t go up. It’s just more revenue dropping on top of it.
I think we feel as though we’ve got what we need. It’s not going to require lockstep, $100 million investment to get the next billion in spend. It’s just going to, and we’re right at that cusp, right? We’re running ahead from analyst consensus on margins this year. I think the work that we do on taming cloud costs and bringing more on-prem, coupled with just the momentum we have in the business that will bring more spend to the platform, it becomes a really attractive story from a margin standpoint.
Unidentified speaker, Interviewer: Fantastic. That’s our time, and that’s the day. Thanks, Michael. Thanks. Thanks for the conversation. Really helpful.
Michael Barrett, From Magnite, Magnite: Appreciate it. Thank you.
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