Ziff Davis at Citi’s 2025 Global TMT Conference: Strategic Growth Insights

On Wednesday, 03 September 2025, Ziff Davis (NASDAQ:ZD) presented at Citi’s 2025 Global TMT Conference. The company, led by CEO Vivek Shah, highlighted its strategic segmentation and financial performance, while also addressing challenges posed by emerging technologies. Despite a dip in stock price, the company’s diversified business model and acquisition strategy reflect a positive outlook.

Key Takeaways

• Ziff Davis reported a 10% increase in Q2 revenue and a 12% rise in adjusted EBITDA.
• The Health and Wellness segment, led by Dan Stone, showed strong growth with a 16% increase in Q2.
• The company is actively pursuing acquisitions and share buybacks, leveraging $600 million in cash and $700 million in borrowing capacity.
• Ziff Davis aims for mid-single-digit growth in the second half of 2025, with a focus on leveraging GenAI in digital publishing.
• The company maintains a diversified monetization model to mitigate risks from zero-click search.

Financial Results

• Q2 revenue grew by 10% year-over-year.
• Adjusted EBITDA increased by 12% year-over-year.
• Health and Wellness segment reported LTM revenue of approximately $380 million, with an EBITDA of $142 million, representing a 37%+ margin.
• Ziff Davis has completed over 70 acquisitions, integrating them into five operating divisions.
• The company has $600 million in cash and investments and $700 million in borrowing capacity.
• Annual free cash flow is approximately $250 million, with 10% of the company repurchased since 2024.

Operational Updates

• Ziff Davis operates through five segments: Health and Wellness, Connectivity, Tech and Shopping, Cybersecurity and Martech, and Gaming and Entertainment.
• The Everyday Health Group focuses on pharma commercialization and digital health, utilizing AI in products like the Lose It app.
• The company uses first-party audience signals and AI to enhance advertising outcomes across its platforms.

Future Outlook

• The company expects mid-single-digit growth in the second half of the year and targets double-digit revenue growth in the future.
• Ziff Davis is actively seeking M&A opportunities across all segments, focusing on strong brands and value-driven acquisitions.
• The company is buying back shares, believing its stock is undervalued, and targets 20% cash-on-cash returns on acquisitions.

Q&A Highlights

• CEO Vivek Shah views the current market as a prime opportunity for acquiring digital media assets amidst AI-related fears.
• Ziff Davis is committed to using its cash and borrowing capacity for strategic acquisitions and enhancing shareholder returns.

In conclusion, Ziff Davis remains focused on strategic growth and innovation, leveraging its strong financial position. For more details, readers can refer to the full transcript.

Full transcript - Citi’s 2025 Global TMT Conference:

Rudy, Citi Internet Team, Citi: One for today. Thanks everyone for joining. You got Rudy in on the Citi Internet team. Really pleased to end off the day with Ziff Davis CEO, Vivek Shah. We’ve got Dan Stone, the president of health and wellness, joining us today too.

So we’ll dig into that segment Yeah. A little bit more. Thanks for being here with us today. We’ll have some, q and a also at the end, for anyone that wants to, ask a question. So, yeah, thank you for being here.

It’s

Vivek Shah, CEO, Ziff Davis: great to

Rudy, Citi Internet Team, Citi: be here. I think usually the way we do this is we kinda let you kinda kick off the story and, walk walk through the the Ziff Davis story. One thing that may be different this time, you know, a couple quarters ago, you resegmented the business Yep. Give some new segment break break segment breakouts. So maybe let’s start from there.

Why you did that? What you want investors to know from that and helping understand the story and just kind of, like, key drivers of the story for Yeah.

Vivek Shah, CEO, Ziff Davis: No. So so as you know, Ziff Davis is a serial acquirer of digital media, Internet, and software businesses. And so, like, over the last ten years, we’ve done a little over 70 acquisitions, but all of those acquisitions have been integrated into one of five operating divisions. So those five operating divisions each has a president. Dan Stone is president of the health and wellness operating division, which is our biggest division.

And so the idea here was, really, we wanted to give to the investment community insight into how we run the business and in terms of how the business is organized. And what we’re hoping is that investors will take some time to study each one of these businesses in some depth. They have differing growth characteristics and margin profiles and opportunities. They’re in different market spaces. There may be different valuation dynamics with the hope that what ultimately happens is as you assess each of these, you get to a really clear view of the intrinsic value of the company.

And when we think about these five, and I’ll talk about each just for a second and just to level set. I’ll start with the health and wellness segment. It’s an HCIT platform that does pharma commercialization and digital health and wellness. It’s an exciting business, Dan will talk about it. But I think from the outside until you spend time looking into the dynamics, you may not get a full appreciation of what it actually does.

We have our connectivity division, which is anchored by the Ookla Group and this is a data and analytics business that sits really at the center of the broadband world. So cellular networks, wireless networks really do rely on the solutions, the data and the tool set of the Ookla business. We have our tech and shopping business, which has CNET and RetailMeNot as the anchor brands. Think of that as really a driver of e commerce and driving a ton of affiliate sales. We have our cybersecurity and business.

And the cybersecurity and Martech business is a collection of software businesses, high recurring revenue, great margin profile, and particularly on the cyber security side, some interesting emerging growth characteristics. And then last but certainly not least is our gaming and entertainment business anchored by IGN, which I would argue is the leading brand in gaming, and gaming is the fastest growing segment of the entertainment industry. So similarities, but a lot of differences. And so I think one would be rewarded spending time kind of looking at each of the pieces. And so the other thing that we’re committed to doing and that’s why Dan is here with me today and this is the first time we’ve done this, is to bring out the various executives that we have.

They’re a world class team, introduce them to the investment community and have them tell more of the story.

Rudy, Citi Internet Team, Citi: We’ll rotate one per year for the next five years. Is that the I don’t know if I’ll be here that long, but, okay. So you had a good 2Q, nice improvement in 2Q. Revenues were up 10%, adjusted EBITDA was up 12%. Really the strongest quarter you’ve had in a little while.

Can you talk about the drivers of that and the outlook into the second half, of the sustainability of that improvement?

Vivek Shah, CEO, Ziff Davis: Yes. So we talked about the five segments. Four of the five grew, that’s important. The fifth that didn’t grow was essentially flat, which is Cyber and Martech. So we need everything pointing in the right direction.

So four out of five was good for us just given some of the more recent history. Two of the segments were sensational. Dan grew 16% in the quarter in Health and Wellness, and Connectivity grew 14%. Now that’s not new. These if you look back, and we’ve disclosed a fair amount of historical financials at the segment level, you look at the multiyear CAGR, these are been good growers.

This was particularly exceptional quarter for both of them, but these have been consistent growers. So this hasn’t been just a single quarter for them. But so they helped drive a lot of the growth we saw in the quarter. EBITDA was great. Everybody was 5% to 20% -ish EBITDA growth across each one of the segments.

So as you know, we have very much a bottom line orientation and a free cash flow orientation. So in many ways, I’m prouder of that dynamic. Organic growth, which as you know, we are a total growth mindset. We look for growth organically from the businesses we own. We look for inorganic growth through acquisition.

We look to create value and unlock value through those acquisitions. And so that combination, know, I think came together really nicely. So it was a great quarter.

Rudy, Citi Internet Team, Citi: Right. Good. And sustainability of that and the outlook for for 2H?

Vivek Shah, CEO, Ziff Davis: Yeah. So look, I think, you know, I mean, you know, if you look at our guidance, we’re looking at mid single digit growth in the second half. We feel comfortable with at the midpoint, which we feel comfortable with. Q4 will probably be a little bit better than Q3 seasonally the stronger quarter as you know. So no, we feel good and it’s just that it is that combination of making sure that the businesses we own are performing.

And then obviously the businesses we’ve recently acquired are growing according to plan. And then if there are acquisitions that aren’t within the guidance range, that represent some upside.

Rudy, Citi Internet Team, Citi: Okay, great. Alright. Shifting to Gen AI, big topic. I think I asked you this probably a little too much, but I’ll be forced to keep asking you as long as

Vivek Shah, CEO, Ziff Davis: Everyone asks everyone’s asking you.

Rudy, Citi Internet Team, Citi: People are asking me about it. So, GenAI impact GenAI search impact on traffic to publishers been one of the largest topics we’ve heard from hearing from investors and Wall Street and, really the whole the digital advertising space, as well. And there’s clearly been some impact there. You’ve given some frameworks for how that’s impacted your properties. I’ll let you speak to it, but you’ve got a good amount of non search revenue organic and how that plays out.

So what are you seeing? Maybe you start from kind of the market as a whole and the digital publishing ecosystem, for Ziff Davis in particular. And then how do you think this evolves in the coming years?

Vivek Shah, CEO, Ziff Davis: Yeah. So I mean, I think the first thing I would do is connect this question to the first one, which is when you hear what the company actually does, much of it doesn’t apply to this question. So that that’s the thing that, I just wanna reinforce, which is a business. We have multiple monetization models. We have advertising for sure.

We have performance marketing. We have subscriptions. We have licensing. And that selling ads on web traffic, which is what everyone is talking about, isn’t the majority of what our company does. And so as I’ve disclosed, 35% roughly of the company’s revenue, I would put into the category of being web traffic dependent.

So that’s where this question may reside. Within that, 40% of that traffic comes from search. And so there’s absolutely so 15%. So there’s absolutely no question that there’s a bunch of things happening in search, lots of search engine result page SERP volatility, Some owing to generative AI and AI overviews, others owing to just changes that Google is making in in the search

Rudy, Citi Internet Team, Citi: UX. Which has been the case for forever.

Vivek Shah, CEO, Ziff Davis: And the thing that I point out is what we’re all talking about is zero click search. Right? So this is where a user enters a query and clicks on nothing. This is not new. Five years ago, I was talking about this.

No one was listening five years ago, 65% of search queries five years ago resulted in zero clicks. Ten years ago, that statistic was zero. So from ten years ago to five years ago, that world changed. We changed ahead of it, with it. And so now that that 65% is 70%, that’s not to me a big change.

The big change already happened. And the way that you, I think, react to that change tells you a lot. For us, it was diversification of business. For us, it was the diversification of engagement. So app based businesses, Ookla, Baby Center, these are app we lose it.

These are app based businesses. Email, getting into inbox. We’re very much an email oriented entity. Social, what are you doing on Facebook and what are you doing on Instagram and what are you doing on TikTok and what are you doing on Snap and how are you cultivating audiences and monetizing those events? I mean, are a series of things that we’ve been doing well before zero click search entered, I guess, the investment mindset.

But so I don’t view any of this as new. And the fact that we don’t have the exposure that you’re hearing about and being asked about, I think is really important because I think most don’t see that. And I think a lot of the issues that we confront as a company, particularly from a valuation point of view, is the idea that all of those risks that they’re seeing have a undue impact and and and area of concern for us. So, look, obviously, there’s a lot of change. I think the ruling yesterday is interesting, the Google ruling.

In many ways, I think that’s favorable because in the end, what was at stake were were basically the default engines of the two largest browsers in the world, Chrome and Safari. They’re not browsers anymore. Those are search appliances. The first thing you do, none of you type in a URL. You type in a query into the Omnibod.

And that in the hands of Google to me is better. Because Google for all of the issues that publishers may express has always understood there needs to be a value exchange. We crawl this content, there needs to be a value exchange. And so they’ve always been focused on delivering traffic. Yes, there’s volatility, there have been changes, they will tell you the gross amount of traffic they send goes up every year while the percentage of zero click goes up, which means there are more query volume.

Rudy, Citi Internet Team, Citi: Okay. You’re leading me on a little bit just on the topic of LLM partnerships. There have been two approaches. One is to partner, one has been to not, and you guys have chosen the latter. No.

No. No. We would love to partner. Okay. So go ahead.

I’ll I’ll I’ll leave it there, and you Yeah. I mean, Your approach has been and Yeah.

Vivek Shah, CEO, Ziff Davis: No. I mean, look. Obviously, we’re engaged in a lawsuit against OpenAI relating to what we believe is violation of copyright, violation of trademark dilution and violations of DMCA Act. That is not though, that wasn’t without trying to at least come to some amicable resolution around compensation for our content. We believe that we should be compensated for all uses of our content, not just for what’s referred to as RAG, but also for training.

They do the same things, it’s just different points in time, but there seems to be this bifurcation in the market of maybe we pay for RAG and we’re not going to pay for training and we believe fundamentally both need to be compensated for. So that’s a difference of opinion and we’ll need the courts to ultimately weigh in. But the second thing that we’re doing and we’re certainly not alone and I give flare a ton of credit. Cloudflare has developed a technology to allow at the CDN level blocking of AI crawlers and bots. And so we’ve engaged those as well.

And so those the garbage in garbage out phenomenon that’s well known in computer science, I think applies here. I think if the LLMs are deprived of quality content, then that’s also going to be, I think, a forcing function to have serious discussions around compensation. So no mistake, I view this as a business opportunity. I just think it needs to be fair compensation.

Dan Stone, President of Health and Wellness, Ziff Davis: Got it.

Rudy, Citi Internet Team, Citi: Okay. Let’s move on from that. And let’s talk a little bit more about Health and Wellness segment. Just maybe kick things off with a broader overview of Everyday Health Group and its properties. Sure.

So Health and Wellness is the largest of the

Dan Stone, President of Health and Wellness, Ziff Davis: five segments. Our trade name is the Everyday Health Group. And our mission is to help improve health and clinical outcomes on the back of our trusted brands, content, data analytics, and we serve two audiences, healthcare professionals and wellness seeking consumers. And as I talk more about our business model, that’s really important to do both. And we’re one of the few people who actually do both.

In terms of size, as you know, we just started reporting and our LTM revenue is about $380,000,000 to about GBP 142,000,000 in EBITDA on that, which is we generated in the 37% plus EBITDA margin range. Our CAGR since 2020 on the top line is about nine a little over 9% a year. And as Vivek mentioned last quarter, we were happy with the 16% growth for the quarter. We look at the market in three verticals, three healthcare verticals. We have pharma commercialization, which is helping pharma bring drugs to market and sell their drugs.

We have digital health and wellness, which was generally dealing with consumers in conjunction with pharma or independent of that, getting healthy, which is a booming market. And the third is provider services, which is providing services directly to providers. The first two, pharma commercialization and digital health and wellness, are by far our two biggest, and that’s what I’m going spend the most time talking about. And then in terms of the way we’re organized, we’re organized by market platforms. We have a professional market platform whose job it is to engage with health care professionals.

There are 1,000,000 doctors and there are 2,500,000 more registered nurses in Allied Health. Then we have a consumer business, which is general consumer wellness. And then we separate out pregnancy and parenting, we kind of own that vertical with our what to expect in baby center apps and other products in that vertical. So that’s how we go to market.

Rudy, Citi Internet Team, Citi: Got it. Okay. And how is EHG positioned to win in the markets you compete in? So in particular, expand on pharma commercialization. Vivek, I think you expanded on that on your last earnings call, so feels Sure.

More

Dan Stone, President of Health and Wellness, Ziff Davis: So let’s start with what the pain points are for our pharma clients. It’s not gotten any cheaper to actually develop drugs, yet the way to be successful is getting narrower and narrower. It’s harder and harder. They go through all the clinical trials. They spend all that money, yet now they’re dealing with formularies at insurance companies that they’re either in or they’re out.

The windows of exclusivity are narrowing. So they have a pretty short window to engage the right customer. And that’s what we’re good at. So the model goes is we target, we engage, and then pharma is very good at measuring. They use third parties to measure the degree of engagement with the right target audience.

And then we have deep analytical resources that basically creates a virtuous cycle where we refine our targeting based on the results of our clients and our ability to deliver them the audience they need. So this is cuts across a lot of different types of products. We have one in the it’s called clinical studies space for our pregnancy and parenting business. So we reach virtually ninety percent plus of pregnant women in The US at any given time. It’s over to the it’s an evergreen audience.

And we have a clinical studies business, we’re working with contract research organizations, know, large publicly traded companies, who are asked by pharma companies to identify pregnant women to do what are called pregnancy exposure registries, to ensure that drugs post approval are safe for pregnant women. And they’re doing this on an ongoing basis. So they came to us to help identify two women in different trimesters for them to do these studies on. So we work with them. It’s just an example of, because we’re so targeted and because we know how to engage our target audience, we’re very valuable to them.

Another trend in the industry is for pharma companies to develop plans to reach, to link their approach to healthcare professionals with consumers. So they have campaigns and try to see how it interacts, because they need to educate the health care professionals to, on their drug, on their treatment, and then they need to educate consumers to ask their doctors to use it. And we’re one of the few companies that has both of those assets, very strong assets to reach both professionals and consumers. It’s an increasingly in demand and increasingly separates us. And I’d like to expand on the comment that Vivek was talking about, no click search and stuff.

It’s funny because as you’re asking the question, it’s something I don’t think about because my job is to target an audience and engage them and then have it measured. And there’s so many different ways we do that. If it’s not one way, it’s another. We’re really more focused on the goals. So I read about it all the time, but it actually is not the way we think about every day.

The world changes in so many different ways that we just we evolve with it.

Rudy, Citi Internet Team, Citi: Okay, got it. Maybe then just to kind of come back on that on how you’re leveraging AI or Gen AI within your business, whether it’s customer facing or internally?

Dan Stone, President of Health and Wellness, Ziff Davis: Sure. So I should also mention the second big part of our business is digital health and wellness. So we have the Baby Center app, the What to Expect app, so the pregnancy trackers. We had a very successful acquisition in 2022 of Lose It, which is a weight loss app, which by the way, when the GLP-one drugs that everyone reads about started to become popular, we were concerned that weight loss was passe. But as it turns out, for anyone who is familiar with GLP-one drug, it’s really good at getting to stop eating.

It’s not really good at telling you what to eat when you do eat. So you can eat popcorn and it will make you full. So that business has never been stronger. And it’s a perfect example of the use of AI. So it used to be essentially, you’re creating you’re tracking all your calories based on what you eat.

So if you have a plate of food, you go to a Mexican restaurant, you have beans and rice and tortilla, etcetera, it takes a long time to log all that and figure out how each of it weighs. AI. You take a picture of it and the AI converts it to a calorie count, which is incredible and which has really just juiced that product and just made it easier for everybody. That’s a customer facing example. Another customer facing example I have with a product called Halo.

We literally take RFPs from pharma companies and insert them into this AI bot. And then it looks at all the audience across all of Everyday Health and across Ziff Davis, develops immediately develops profiles of what the profile is, It uses Susan as a profile, it describes the target audience. And then we can deliver it shows how much we can deliver in terms of impressions at any given time. And that is just hitting the market. We’re actually there’s First Pharma Conference in Boston next week, and we have a luncheon that we’re rolling it out.

And it’s a huge success of customer facing product. On the inside, our editorial teams, we don’t use AI to write editorial, but it helps us develop headlines, it helps us develop keywords, it helps develop summaries, it just makes the process more efficient. And then we use it, we have internal e commerce businesses and subscription businesses. And in real time, we can test ad copy to drive customer purchases and customers to our products and change it out immediately based on its performance using an AI model.

Rudy, Citi Internet Team, Citi: Are you is that available to the other businesses also? Or that’s just

Vivek Shah, CEO, Ziff Davis: a Yes. So I talked a little bit about this, I think, in the last call. So HALO is the first implementation of the technology. The technology was actually developed corporately. And there will be implementations at

Rudy, Citi Internet Team, Citi: it. So the thing you guys were talking about

Vivek Shah, CEO, Ziff Davis: Within IGN Entertainment. Got it. And then within CNET Group and RetailMeNot.

Rudy, Citi Internet Team, Citi: I see. Okay. So but Halo is the EHG version of that. Yes.

Vivek Shah, CEO, Ziff Davis: And and one thing to just say on that, not to interrupt, but there are a couple of things. One, it’s leveraging first party audience signals, of which we have a lot across lots of properties. Two, it is then leveraging inventory across the pool of Ziff Davis. But then, three, it is unlocking the Internet’s inventory. So this will be creating audience segments off domain.

Right? That’s nearly infinite in terms of what you could do across Meta’s inventory, Trade Desk inventory, Google Ad Exchange inventory, YouTube inventory, etcetera. So as we think about first party addressability, use of AI to drive out ad outcomes, this is actually I’m excited for this.

Rudy, Citi Internet Team, Citi: And and that is across everything,

Dan Stone, President of Health and Wellness, Ziff Davis: the OZ platform. Yes. Got it. Sorry.

Rudy, Citi Internet Team, Citi: By the way, popcorn is very high high in fiber, so it’s actually really good at keeping

Dan Stone, President of Health and Wellness, Ziff Davis: you Well, it probably is insufficient in Yeah.

Vivek Shah, CEO, Ziff Davis: We’re gonna get we’ll get you a loser.

Rudy, Citi Internet Team, Citi: Different topic, but yeah. So paying I’m paying attention to the stuff you guys are publishing. M and A, I guess this kind of can across both, but maybe within your group and you Vivek, you want

Dan Stone, President of Health and Wellness, Ziff Davis: to We’re part of the total growth strategy at Ziff Davis and we’ve been successful. Part of the model is our operating team gets involved with our small corporate development team to evaluate the deals, so that the onboarding is that much more effective. Luzit, as I mentioned, is a perfect example. We talked about multiple doors into these products and multiple monetization models. Luzit was 100% subscription.

We’ve since built what we call a web funnel into it, which can acquire customers for free essentially from the web traffic. It also allows us to evade with new court rulings, the 30% Apple Store commissions when they come in through our web funnel. The AI team that sits at our Everyday Health Group corporate came out of Lose It to serve the entire division. We have an affiliate commerce business, which is one of the core businesses from Ziff Davis over time, that when you come into Lose It, have nutrition counseling services, we have testing services. So we’re getting more rents for every subscriber who comes in that door.

And it’s just a perfect example of how acquisitions work well here.

Rudy, Citi Internet Team, Citi: Got it. One last question, this comes up a lot, in all of our advertising, coverage, but just the potential regulation around pharma advertising. You think that’s something that How much time do we have? I guess Look, I’ve

Dan Stone, President of Health and Wellness, Ziff Davis: been in this business a long time. I’ve been lobbyists knocking my door every year saying the world’s coming to an end. And it never quite does for a lot of good reasons. So there’s a lot of noise. We don’t see anything on the horizon that’s fundamentally going to impact our business.

There are First Amendment issues associated with any ban on DTC advertising. And if there were a ban on DTC advertising, they’re largely going go after broadcast because the complaint is that they bring in a lot of people who otherwise would never be eligible for the drug. Well, that’s not the case with targeted digital products. We know the Head of the FDA used to work for us. And as it relates to the drug pipeline has never been stronger.

And in terms of drug prices, I think most of the pressure is going to be felt by the PBMs, and pharma will find their way around it and still need our services as much as they ever did before. So nothing keeps me up at night despite all the noise.

Rudy, Citi Internet Team, Citi: Got it. Okay. Vivek, so Dan hit on some of the ways AI is helping in everyday health. Maybe can you talk about it as if Davis level? And just as you’re talking about about some of these things, I’m kinda curious.

And does does product, including AI, start at a parent level? Does if Davis level kinda work its way down? Or do things start in certain groups and kind of spread around? I’d be interested to hear how that works.

Vivek Shah, CEO, Ziff Davis: Yeah. No. So and but before I get to that, I mean, just to to put a bow on everything Dan said. So you’ve got this this health care business that does pharma commercialization, digital health, growing 9% on a compounded basis with a mid-30s margin at reasonable scale, 140,000,000 of EBITDA. It’s a valuable business.

Like, right there, full stop, end of story, that’s a great business. And that’s one thing that I just hope we start to be better at communicating, to the marketplace. To answer your question on on AI, no. I would say, like most things, most things are actually getting developed within divisions, and we’re trying to move things around. 4,000 people in the company, about a 100 working corporate.

So there’s just so much that corporate’s gonna be able to do, and a lot of those functions are public company functions. Right? So I would say that a lot of the energy and a lot of the resources happen within the divisions. We do a very good job of taking ideas from one place and planting them in other places. With respect to AI, the first thing I’ll say is lots of workforce training.

We’ve standardized actually around Gemini’s suite, Google Suite of AI. So that’s Gemini 2.5, that’s Notebook, that’s Gem. We did that because there are so many AI systems and models. It’s confusing. It’s tough.

And getting to a standard where we can train everybody on how to fly one plane, we thought made a lot of sense. It doesn’t mean that we don’t use other things. They are used for various things, but across the workforce, lots of training in Gemini. It also is built in a way for us that meets our data privacy and security concerns, which are major concerns. And you’re seeing it more recently, Anthropic just announced that all of a sudden everything you ingest in there will be retained and trained and so you have to be careful.

And so lots of workforce training and enablement around AI. I think there are two areas that we focus on. Dan talked a lot about product, things that improve the consumer or user facing experience. And so there are multiple examples of that. We’ve done a number of things at Viper, and we’ve done a number of things at Ookla.

And with each one of the businesses as examples like Dan has described, and then productivity. So product and productivity are the two vectors. On the productivity side, it’s just everyone being able to do their jobs better and faster. And we’ve seen this all in our careers. I mean, I’m old enough to know I started without an email, And it’s almost impossible to imagine doing work without email.

But when you think about the productivity gain that that presented, but this is so much more. So I would say that we view putting aside some of the disputes we have around the use of our content, we are major believers in the power of AI to drive experiences and to drive productivity gains inside of the company.

Rudy, Citi Internet Team, Citi: Got it. Luckily, I’m not old enough for this, but the old DOR tell stories about our earnings releases used to come through fax machine. Yeah. We have to wait for the fax.

Vivek Shah, CEO, Ziff Davis: Yeah. We used to own the fax business. A lot of them.

Rudy, Citi Internet Team, Citi: Old school. Okay. So Brett’s not here. So I’m going to to ask you some Brett questions. Yeah.

Sure. Hopefully, you’ll be able to fill in. Yeah. So you’ve talked about the double digit total revenue growth, half from M and A, half from organic. Organic growth, again, stepped up nicely in 2Q.

How do you feel about this outlook? Maybe so particularly M and A side, what’s the outlook and kind of what are you seeing there?

Vivek Shah, CEO, Ziff Davis: Yeah. I mean, listen, I think we’re in the crawl walk run, we’re in the walk. So last year, we grew the business top line 3%. This year, midpoint of our guidance is 5%. So we’re not quite to the double digit percentages that we target.

And so we’re hoping we can get into the more of the run phase going into next year. But we’re moving in the right direction. That I think that’s the first thing. With respect to just M and A as a contributor to that, you know, I think Dan illustrated, you know, within his business, are certain themes that he’s looking for. Each one of our five segments has different themes.

So it’s not necessarily they’re all the same themes. But here, meaning thematic investing themes, but there are criteria that are consistent. We want strong durable brands. Strong durable brands that can transcend technological shifts. We have brands that have seen the shift from print to digital, that have seen the shift from desktop to mobile, that have seen the shift from search to social, from from app from web to apps.

Like, there’s there have been a lot of shifts, and AI is yet another one of those shifts. But great brands seem to navigate those walls. That’s the first thing. I think the second thing is that we do look for we’re very value driven in our buying. We’re very patient.

We’re very disciplined. We are fairly unemotional in in the way we look and and do deal making. And so I think we always look for price value, a clear and differentiated and, we think, unique path to value creation. So what can we do that no one else can do? So it can’t just be it’s a good business at a good price.

It has to be those things. But what is it that we uniquely are situated to do? Because we have platform. We have technology. We have people.

We have synergy. We have something inside of our system that will unlock value that allows us to have a lot of confidence in the underwriting. So that is, I think, a really, really critical piece. And then mathematically, you’ve heard me say this 20% cash on cash returns. The only other thing I would add that we don’t talk about as much, but is often a big part of the internal dialogue is data.

We love data intensive businesses. Dan’s got a data intensive business. The amount of nutrition data and information that he gets through the database that is lose it alone extraordinary. The amount of data that Speedtest sees across three to 400,000,000 installs of that app on phones worldwide is enormous. Often, just think of data as being a competitive advantage in the context of the business as they are today.

As we think about the AI future and what fuels AI, it will be differentiated data. Data everyone has, that’s the commodity. Data that not everyone has, I think, becomes a point of differentiation. So that is another piece that we look for, which are what are their data assets.

Rudy, Citi Internet Team, Citi: So is there m and a that could sit above the the kind of specific segments at a parent level? Does that make sense, like, in a world of AI? Or would you think about expanding into a new vertical? Or you New vertical, yes.

Vivek Shah, CEO, Ziff Davis: Thinking. I wouldn’t I wouldn’t probably look to buy a business that sits within corporate that corporate manages. We have found businesses that we think have value to the corporation and will convince one of our businesses, and we did one recently like that, that we put into one of our operating units. Because, look, I don’t want corporate running these businesses day to day. I think it’s a detraction.

We’re largely in the capital allocation function, right? And that’s an important point to make, too. I mean, have $600,000,000 of cash and investments. The balance sheet, if you take our what we have talked a lot about, which is our three times gross debt over EBITDA kind of cap. We have another $700,000,000 of borrowing capacity and then free cash flow of roughly $250,000,000 a year.

So we’ve got a fair amount of capacity to do a lot of things.

Rudy, Citi Internet Team, Citi: Does that mean well, so how comfortable do you get levering up then? Sounds like you are comfortable. Does that mean you would make more of the smaller acquisitions, or you could potentially reach out and buy something that’s Listen.

Vivek Shah, CEO, Ziff Davis: The bigger it gets, the the, you know, the higher our conviction needs to be. I tend to prefer deals that are more tuck in size that fit within businesses like Dan’s, generally speaking. But look, the other piece of this is, obviously, we’ve been an active buyer of our shares. Right? We bought in 10% of the company over you know, since the beginning, I guess, of ’24, so I think about, you know, 5,000,000 shares.

We got 4 and a half million in our share authorization. We’re buyers right now. The stock is obviously not where we think it should be, not anywhere close to it. So using our using the shareholders’ capital to do that is very important too. I think we have capacity to do both.

Rudy, Citi Internet Team, Citi: Would you lever up to buy back stock?

Vivek Shah, CEO, Ziff Davis: I think we have cash sitting on the balance sheet. We’re gonna put the cash to work.

Rudy, Citi Internet Team, Citi: Yeah. K. Any questions from the from the audience?

Dan Stone, President of Health and Wellness, Ziff Davis: Go in here. And

Unidentified speaker: with the stock trading at, you know, one times EV to rev, less than four times EV to EBITDA, you know, what gives you the confidence in going out and making acquisitions rather than just taking all that cash and returning it to shareholders?

Vivek Shah, CEO, Ziff Davis: Look. I think there’s I think there’s room as I said, I think there’s room for both. I think in the end, you know, I I get this question all the time, which is, hey. Look. If you can’t buy it under, you know, four times or whatever trading multiples, why would you buy?

I think in the end, if the cash on cash returns make sense, I think over time, I think the market starts to to reevaluate the company and we get a recovery in the share price. But I don’t think it’s either or. I I think that the opportunity for us to create value both ways is there. I think in this particular moment, particularly from an acquisition point of view, the very things that I think are weighing on particularly a lot of digital media assets, I think the market for those acquisitions is quite interesting. I think this is an incredibly interesting buying time, buying of the fear.

There’s an enormous amount of fear right now with respect to anything that is open web, anything that is browser, anything that is advertising, anything that is content. Because right now, I think the overly simplistic view is AI is an existential threat to those businesses. We think in some cases, maybe, but but in many cases, no. And that’s where I think we see a pretty interesting buying opportunity in the moment.

Rudy, Citi Internet Team, Citi: Alright. That’s our time. Miguel, thank you. Good note to close off on. Yeah.

And that that’s the day. Thanks everyone for joining. Thank you guys for being here, closing off our day. It’s always a pleasure. Appreciate it.

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