Digitalbox (LSE:DBOX) — Results for the twelve months to 31 December 2025

0:00 Good morning, and welcome to the DIGITALBOX PLC investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged and could be submitted at any time via the Q and A tab situated on the right hand corner of your screen. Simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to chair, Marcus Rich. Good morning, sir. Good morning. Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the DIGITALBOX twenty twenty five annual results presentation. I am Marcus Rich, the nonexecutive chairman. I will be joined by James Carter, CEO, Jim Douglas, COO, and Richard Spillsbury, CFO, who will take you through the 2025 results in detail.

0:56 This was a year of momentum and strategic progression for DIGITALBOX PLC. Building on the positive results of 2024, the group has moved decisively into its next phase of development, scaling its operations, strengthening its monetization capabilities, and further validating its buy and build strategy. Adjusted EBITDA was up year on year from 624 k to 679 k, and EBITDA 324 k. This after investing 700,000, 10 times more than last year, in new product development and acquisitions to grow the business. Revenue was up to 3,900,000, up 7% year on year, and the cash in the bank of 1,800,000.

1:49 The digital media environment continues to evolve at pace. AI driven content discovery, platform algorithm adjustments, and competitive shifts in advertising allocation have reshaped audience flows and monetization dynamics. Against this backdrop, DIGITALBOX has again demonstrated both resilience and adaptability. While online sessions moderated to 256,000,000, unique users increased by 3%, and both page views and revenue grew year on year. Notably, social followers increased by 31%, materially the group's owned and distributed reach. A notable strength of the group is that all acquisitions to date have delivered profitable outcomes and a cumulative payback within twenty four months or less.

2:46 The focus in '25 has been organic vertical launches, including Royal Insider and Reality Shrine. These have further deepened the group's authority and specialist entertainment segments and support its scalable platform strategy. Capital allocation discipline remains central to our governance framework. The group maintains a strong balance sheet and robust cash generation profile, providing both resilience and strategic flexibility. We will continue to deploy capital selectively where acquisitions or organic investments meet our return thresholds and align with our entertainment focused strategy. We remain active on both fronts in 2026.

3:34 The board believes the group is well positioned to capitalize on structural consolidation within digital publishing and to continue delivering sustainable long term shareholder returns. I will now pass you over to James Carter, CEO, to go through the 2025 results in more detail. James? Thank you, Marcus. And, again, welcome to everyone to the DIGITALBOX twenty twenty five results presentation. We're glad you're able to join us. The first first few few slides really are to give anyone unfamiliar with the DIGITALBOX business an insight. So DIGITALBOX is a pure play digital media company with a pedigree in emerging technologies.

4:23 We're We're a 100% digital and mobile focused with our core editorial delivery in the entertainment sector. We've grown through a buy and build strategy and transforming the acquisitions we've made delivering fast returns on investments over the period we've been undertaking this activity. We operate 10 brands. And just to run through those, the poke, as shown to the left of the screen in the mobile handset is best described as a humor aggregator, serving out some of the funniest moments to hit the web. Entertainment Daily, to your right, is an entertainment and TV celebrity news site, one of the biggest in The UK.

5:17 Royal Insider, news of the portfolio in the past year, are really it's quite a simple proposition for those that want to keep abreast of the latest news on the UK royal family. The Daily Mash, The UK's leading news satire site. The TAB, The UK's leading student youth culture site, driven by an army of student journalists across more than 30 campus based subsites around The UK. Reality Shrine, again, we launched last year, which documents the latest twists and turns from the world's biggest reality TV shows and operates quite in a US centric mode, really, getting a lot of US audience.

6:06 TV Guide, a linear TV Guide, which was established over twenty years ago, is one of the big players in that sector alongside Radio Times, and we've done quite a lot to develop that in the past year as well as part of our MPD process over the past twelve months. And we then have the insider, Emodile insider sites in the soap sector, Coronation Street and EastEnders, which are all fairly self explanatory, but for those that want to keep abreast of the latest news on those big UK soaps. We have a board made up of some fairly significant PLC experience. So we have EMAP PLC experience. We have future PLC experience, Reach PLC, and Bauer Media as well. So there's a real breadth of knowledge across the board and really well equipped to drive the business forwards.

7:11 And the executive team are well invested with approaching 20% of the business. The presentation, before I get into that, just to run through the highlights. Marcus has covered some of these, but revenues were driven up 7% year on year, which is on the back of an ad market, a digital ad market that was most certainly behind that figure. Total page views were up 7%. Social followers, again, strategically, we grew because the increased importance of playing within the walled gardens of major platforms, they were up 31%. And our adjusted EBITDA figure was up 10%.

8:00 So this expansion helped us grow on platform revenue by over 100% and overachieve the EBITDA figure that was put into the market with approaching 330,000 EBITDA. So presentation breaks down into five sections. I'll take you through some highlights within the media landscape, the kind of conditions that we're faced with as a digital media business. Richard will take you through the financial performance of the business in detail. I'll talk about some strategic developments that we've made over the past year. Jim will take you through the portfolio developments in detail, and I'll sum up really with a view of the future.

8:49 So let's take a look at the media landscape. So looking at the last ten years, we're always in the process of experiencing change. And the team, the executive team have been through this change from running very successful magazine businesses in two thousands to having to pivot to desktop orientated businesses to creating mobile led businesses in 2016 and really really moving with The Times throughout that timeline between thousand and six and today. And the next few years really are no different. We have AI coming into play as a major factor to inform how we best publish.

9:43 And it's a factor that we'll embrace and a factor that will lead to a different future for sure than the historic twenty years. Ready to take on that challenge and move with the times. We put this chart together some time ago. This is a couple of years old, actually. But this this graphic tries to illustrate how users access the Internet through the central zone of this ellipsoid shape in what we labeled the discovery mode. So looking for content or looking for information about certain topics. And this discovery zone really typically led people to a deeper dive to the left of the screen into a website experience or to a deeper dive to the right of the screen to an on platform experience, perhaps consuming greater volumes of video about a particular topic.

10:49 That historically, really, for about ten years has been the shape of consumer behavior within the media market. But with AI's introduction a couple of years ago or it being unleashed by OpenAI and impacting the market, we, at the time, took a view that this would significantly change consumer behavior. And not just consumer behavior, but platform behavior as well. And this is beginning to play out or has played out to an extent as we envisage through this chart. So users are coming into the market and coming into consuming the Internet through the Discovery Zone and increasingly being served by AI discovery.

11:39 So obviously, Google has shortened the amount of volume of clicks going out to websites through the introduction of Gemini results within its search feed. And this whole central zone of discovery has expanded with AI increasingly being used as a default solution by consumers. So as we move forwards, we're seeing people take two very distinct directions, one either through on platform experiences and the other through pure website experiences. And looking towards the the platforms and the competition that's in play in terms of how they will bring consumers away from other platforms, we can see battles taking place.

12:38 We can see TikTok had a major impact. TikTok obviously triggered YouTube into producing its Shorts channel. There's a big battle there in terms of how to compensate creators on the platforms. And that is, without question, playing out in real time as we speak. Facebook, a few years ago, had no creator program or monetization opportunities that were were of any significance to those putting content onto its platform. And it's now a major source of income for creators and publishers alike. In addition, the platforms are moving away from what historically used to be a dependence upon the number of subscribers or followers that you had on a particular platform.

13:37 And this is an illustration really of the reach that is being delivered from one of our websites. This particular one, I think, is Royal Insider. But it gives you an idea over a period of time of how much reach is coming from those that follow your page or your your publication and that the content is pushed out to. So the dark blue line is followers, and the light blue line are those that the platform deems fit to put your content in front of. So So you can see there, there's significant amplification beyond follower bases and subscriber bases taking place, and that is beginning to take place across all major platforms.

14:25 So the key benchmark really for getting any reach at all on YouTube used to be whether or not you had sufficient subscribers. But the algorithm is moving to a point where they're optimizing content that has the most value for the platform and for consumers, which opens up further opportunities. There are challenges that the platforms face without question. There's been a tsunami of contents that has been put into these walled gardens as a result of AI. Limitless content being produced, some fake, some just low quality AI orientated productions.

15:12 But there's a challenge to both the platforms and publishers really to differentiate between false or fake content that is being channeled through these walled gardens and also ensuring that what you produce stands out and is verified and rises to the top because it is genuine content. And as a result of that, we see media brands having a positive future as recognized ambassadors within those walled gardens. So verification, we see is becoming increasingly important in order to ensure that content is distributed widely enough.

16:06 And we see the policing of unverified content become increasingly important for the platforms in order to maintain a level of trust from consumers. Let's take a quick look at the advertising market. Well, the advertising market digital advertising market in 2025 grew to approaching GBP 800,000,000,000. And over the next couple of years, the global advertising market is forecast to hit GBP 1,000,000,000,000. So this really is where we operate, and it's where the major platforms operate, with Meta and Alphabet taking 86% of their revenues from the ad market. So it's gonna grow.

16:53 We're confident it's gonna grow over the next couple of years in this kind of shape. And I think, obviously, 1,000,000,000,000 is a pretty significant market to be part of. This snapshot just illustrates really how we've performed at DIGITALBOX within The UK market. The bar charts at the top compare 2024 with 2025, where you can see we've grown 7%, whilst the index at the bottom of the graphic compares 24% with 25%. And it looks to be a 5% or 10% reduction in absolute terms for prices paid across The UK market for digital programmatic advertising.

17:46 So a 7% increase in performance is a pretty good position for us to be in. And we operate, in addition, in a pretty positive ad market. Really, the majority of our audience is UK and US, where we have a fairly significant chunk of US audience on the tab and Reality Shrine. And as you can see there, the ad spend per head in The US on on digital advertising is $860 in The UK, $5.65. So much, much better markets than Japan or France or China, as an example.

18:32 So hopefully, that gives you bit of a backdrop to what's going on in the media landscape in The UK. But we thought this quote from Charles Darwin was particularly relevant to our position as a relatively agile business, but it came from the origin of the species and published in 1859. But it is not the strongest or most vigorous species that survive, but the ones which are most able to adapt and adjust to the changing environment. And we see ourselves as a very adaptable business, able to deal with change and able to embrace change as we move forwards. Over to you, Richard.

19:18 Thank you, James, and good morning, everyone. As you are aware, many comparable digital publishers have shown lower growth or declining revenues in the last year due to changes in the digital media landscape and an uncertain macroeconomic environment. Last year, we reported the conclusion of the strategic review with a renewed commitment to growth. I'm pleased to be able to report that DIGITALBOX has demonstrated it has a growing and resilient business model with the agility and ambition to find growth. And therefore, I will be able to report that the group has, first, driven revenue growth from organic growth and bolt on acquisitions two, diversify the portfolio to take advantage of market trends three, maintained historically high profit margins before planned new product development investment in a challenging market context.

20:23 And finally, invested 700,000 in the business and yet maintained a highly resilient balance sheet to support future acquisitive and organic growth. I'll explain those points further over the next five slides. Before you see our income statement, the income statement represents the trading performance of the enlarged group, includes assets we acquired towards the end of twenty twenty four and during 2025 and launched in 2025. In overall terms, revenue increased by 7% building on the 31% growth achieved in 2024. We've invested NOK 355,000 organically in the portfolio by launching five new websites in 2025.

21:16 It is normal for trading losses to be incurred before websites become profitable, and we have defined the net loss after the revenue earned for those websites before a website becomes profitable from those launches as new product development, also known as NPD. We have disclosed NPD separately to provide information about the levels of investment and to report on the underlying performance of the rest of the portfolio. Consistent with prior year and our half year reporting, we have reported adjusted EBITDA, which is the operating profit after adding back noncash items such as amortization, depreciation, share based payments and nonrecurring items such as the cost of one off projects and NPD.

22:13 Additionally, we have reported EBITDA as a measure of profitability, which is post NPD to align with analyst commentaries and avoid readers of the accounts having to perform their own reconciliations. Excluding NPD investment, gross profit margins fell only slightly from 84.9% to 81%. Administrative costs in total were up 9%, reflecting our investment program. Excluding nonrecurring and noncash items, administrative costs were only up 1% year on year. Our head office costs, excluding add backs for nonrecurring and noncash items, were down 29%, reflecting a reduction in our operating leverage.

23:06 Head office costs include governance costs associated with our listing on AIM. As a result, adjusted EBITDA increased to 679,000 with a respectable margin of 17%, which is slightly up on the previous year driven by central cost savings. We believe adjusted EBITDA encapsulates the underlying profitability of the group, giving you greater visibility of trading once we take into account value measurement changes such as depreciation, amortization and impairment, although there were no impairment charges this year, and share based payments. And also adding back investments in new product development being the vertical strategy we announced last year and platform improvements to TV Guide, and finally, one off projects relating to trade not relating to trading.

24:07 Our segmental revenue is in front of you now. At the half year, we changed the presentation of segmental analysis to show three segments, namely entertainment, youth, and humor, which is set out in further detail in these results. This grouping is consistent with board level analysis of performance. The segmental analysis of revenues showed growth in all three segments with 8% in entertainment, 15% in humor, and 3% in youth. Entertainment is the largest segment, nearly double the size of youth and four times the size of humor. We continue to develop our more established brands as appropriate in the current market, And this has led to adjusted EBITDA fall margin falling in entertainment from 54% to 42% and in youth from 54 to 38%.

25:05 And and we have, towards the end of 2025, introduced productivity improvements, particularly around content production and distribution. Margin in humans improved from 25 to 31%. Quarterly year on year changes in revenue showed a variable market environment, which underlines the needs for need for diligent data driven decision making and agility, which continues to be a core part of our DNA. Operating cash flows and cash generation. Despite the significant organic investments made in the year, the group was cash generative. Good working capital management is evident in the year on year increase in cash inflows from trade and other receivables, offset by the release of accruals from 2024.

26:02 Last year, we reported aggregate cash flows over the last two years to better understand underlying cash conversion, and now I've done so again to be consistent. This shows average cash conversion of 45% despite significant organic investment to increase shareholder value. Cash utilization. This slide summarizes how we have managed our cash reserves, which were CHF 2,100,000,000 at the start of the year and CHF 1,800,000,000 at the end of the year. We have used cash generation to: one, repay loans, which were we have fully repaid our COVID bounce back loan in 2025.

26:49 And secondly, to purchase intangible assets, which are providing an excellent cash payback. We continue to hold significant cash reserves at year end and are mindful of the need for robust working capital management so that we are in a position to invest in growth both acquisitively and organically. While a significant proportion of our revenues are earned in US dollars, we use forward exchange contracts and convert US dollar funds into sterling every quarter to manage foreign currency risk. We continue to review receivable interest rates regularly to obtain competitive rates, balancing working capital management and opportunities for more significant acquisitions.

27:39 Finally, our financial position, which continues to be strong and puts us in a good position to exploit opportunities for growth in the digital media market. Our largest asset category are the intangible assets, mainly arising from consolidation accounting of acquisitions. Along with all our intangible assets, we have performed a sensitized impairment review and no additional impairments are required. We are not a capital intensive business, and that is seen in the low value of our fixed assets. Our deferred tax asset represents the highly likely recovery of tax losses in future trading periods, which has already started and will benefit our future effective rate of tax.

28:29 Net current assets have increased, and we repaid the bank loan in full this year. Our strong financial position gave us the opportunity to undertake a number of rapid acquisitions in the last year as well as invest in new launches. Your board will continue to focus on maximizing value through the expansion of the group's current model. We will continue to develop its business through launching new products and remain alive to acquisition and merger opportunities, both bolt on and more transformative, that can maximize shareholder value. Okay. Thank you, Richard. Okay. So when looking forwards, it's always important to reflect on your strengths. And here are a few that we've surfaced on this chart.

29:25 We're very good at creating engaging content. We're great at getting people to visit our websites from various channels in which we push our content through. We're very efficient revenue generation and really delivering a programmatic model that really works for our business through the graphene ad stack. We've got adapting to changes, as I've already said. So we're an agile business that moves with the times, and we've got push media skills that are pretty much second to none. And return on acquisitions has been pretty strong as well. We're running at an average probably of about eighteen months on most things that we've bought, give or take possibly a few weeks, but that's been the consistent result of our fairly stringent process of screening acquisitions along the way.

30:32 And we're very good at cash generation. So that informs what we've done over the past year. So first of all, looking at how we're harnessing AI, we're very mindful of the impact of AI within the industry, for sure. But it's not really a case of us looking to default to the algorithms to produce our content. We're very much putting humans and the human brain at the center of our creation process. And this graphic provides an example of how we do that. This is Royal Insider, where we have a content creator on one of our brands who produces an editorial proposition.

31:20 It gets turned into an article on the open web at the top, which you can see published via mobile device. It also gets scripted into a video format that can be presented by the person that you see in the video screen to the right. And it also gets produced in an email format, so it can be consumed by one of our 40,000 newsletter subscribers on Royal Insider. So that's really a way in which AI has helped drive efficiency and drive really an improved result from the creation of a single piece of content. So getting three outcomes from one creative initiative has been key to how we've developed in the past year. In addition to this, we're also using AI to help us accelerate distribution of content across more than one brand as well as more than one channel within a particular brand.

32:36 I mentioned the disciplined M and A process, and this points towards the assets that we bought from social chain a couple of years ago, but we paid 480,000 back in H2 'twenty three. And by December 2025, those assets had generated over £730,000 of net income extra income for the business as a result of having acquired them. So very successful, and we're continuing to screen assets moving forwards this year. And in fact, Jim will cover off something that we bought recently, which is in the smaller end of the social products that we've bought in the past couple of years, but nonetheless important to our strategic development in the youth market.

33:35 Our pick and mix approach to M and A has worked well. So some of you may recall, we bought some assets, Reality Tidbit, Celebrity Tidbit from a company called GRV Media a couple of a year or so ago, and used some of these assets to create Reality Shrine and also Royal Insider. And increasingly, we're looking towards this method of launching new products where we can strap together some disparate opportunities to create a single proposition and success within the business. Social and operating within the walled gardens, again, already mentioned increasingly important.

34:26 But you can see here how we've developed from just over 1,500,000 to 2,000,000 followers since we listed in 2019 to over 27,000,000 at the end of the period in 2025. The key thing here is it's not just having followers, it's having reach that goes to those followers. And over a six month period, we measured reach within meta specifically at 718,000,000. So significant opportunity really for engaging audiences created by this increased volume of followers that we've developed and engagement with those followers that we have developed.

35:12 Diversification is also key. If you look to the left in 2019, you can see the blue segments represent two brands, Entertainment Daily and The Daily Mash, but really solely around programmatic advertising revenues coming into the business. And as you can see to the right, in 2025, it's a much more colorful mix with the green being direct consumer revenues and the red being on platform revenues. It's a much, much greater mix than we had when we set about building the business. And that's really important as we move forwards because it will give us a much more robust model as we develop.

36:04 In addition, the 100% consumer or sorry, on platform revenues that we've developed in 2025, they have, as you can see, grown in this shape. So the dark blue line being monthly revenue performance over the past year, and you can see how it compares with the on platform revenues developed in the previous year. So 100% growth in total there. This area of the business is becoming increasingly important to us. And we'll develop that and invest in that area moving into the coming years.

36:52 Now over to you, Jim, for the portfolio. Thank you, James. So I'll just run us through our three publishing groups, which Richard and James have already mentioned. Entertainment is the home of Entertainment Daily, obviously, but also Royal Insider and our three soap sites. In terms of development across this part of the portfolio, our ongoing investment in TV Guide continues to deliver. We've been building on the core TV listings functionality and adding editorial features and explainer articles over the year. We're also testing some AI led enhancements to add value around that content, particularly our best ofs.

37:38 So our aim is always to start with strong editorial recommendation, like best dramas on BBC iPlayer, but then be able to slice and dice that content and create multiple additional lists without needing to start from scratch. So users who want to go on more of a discovery journey can more easily get to more content about the actors or the directors they like or other shows or films to watch. So, basically, what we're trying to do here is generate higher margin additional page views through better recirculation and increasing dwell time. So at the moment, we're working on that project, working out the most effective way to take that forward. Also on TV Guide, we are adding in we've recently not in the period, but more recently added in some enhanced football TV discovery, which enables users to instantly find any match, which is available to watch in the coming days, whether that's by searching on a their favorite team or a particular league or channels that they have access to. So that's some additional functionality that we've recently added.

38:38 Beyond TV Guide, in terms of product development, as I mentioned, we're leveraging the the skills and expertise of the team to diversify beyond the websites themselves. So James showed this on the Royal Insider site where AI has taken enhanced editorial output, and we've grown that base. In in the period, I think, as you can see on the slide here, we closed 2025 with 15,000 email subscribers on Royal Insider. As James mentioned, that's now grown to 40,000, and we're also monetizing the Royal Insider email with e in email advertising. As part of our vertical strategy, we also launched Coronation Street Insider, which you can see alongside its stable mates, Emmerdale Insider and EastEnders Insider.

39:29 And as well as giving people great content to read on the websites, on platform engagement is becoming increasingly important for the entertainment group where we've got real scale. So we've got 10,000,000 social followers, as you can see on the slide here, and we think that that combination of scale plus laser focused output from the expert team will really enable the on platform component to continue to grow. Moving on to Humor, which comprises the daily Mash and the Poke. Here, we've seen an uptick of paying subscribers on one hand and ad yield on the other combining to give us a 15% revenue growth that Richard mentioned. The mass subscriber number at the end of the year was 4,800 paying subscribers.

40:16 During the period, we tested some paid marketing to look at the ROI on accelerating that, but the acquisition costs were not really making sense. So for now, we're gonna maintain this level maintain organic management of the Mash subscriber base while we while we recalibrate that paid for approach. On the commercial revenue side, we saw the poke grow very strongly with this outperformance largely being driven by further optimization of the graphene ad stack. And in terms of product development, we have AI workflows generating newsletters on the MASH, and we're increasing our on platform presence by aligning two of the media chain assets that we bought back in June to this group. So one asset's been aligned with the Daily Mash and one for for for the poke.

41:12 And lastly, as you can imagine, given the go global news flow at the moment, there's plenty of rich editorial opportunities coming out of The US. So this year, we're investing further by appointing some US based social experts to support that area starting with the poke. And depending on how well that goes, we may look to expand across the group. And then the final group is our youth group, currently consisting of the Tab and Reality Shrine. One of the factors contributing to the growth here is the combination of editorial personality and immediacy engaging with the audience. The team being able to latch onto a viral news story and give a fresh distinctive take within minutes.

41:59 You often see quite a lot of quite utilitarian explainer articles around big breaking news stories. But whether it's in a search environment or a social environment, we think audiences are gravitating towards and will gravitate even more towards stories from brands with a real voice and an editorial tone that they can relate to, and you particularly see this in the editorial output of these sites. As well as the gen general audience growth that we've seen, one of the most encouraging things is how Reality Shrine has managed to develop within The US. So 60% of the traffic on Reality Shrine is US based. And that's encouraging for us because, obviously, you've got the enormous potential scale of that market to try and grow further, but also US traffic tends to monetize at a premium for us.

42:56 Part of the team's ability to keep their output fresh comes from this constant flow of raw talent coming through the brand. So we've got a a national network of student writers that James mentioned, and we're also running a grad program. So that gives us a great way of keeping the the content and the tone fresh and relevant for the audience. So it's been a really good year for the youth group, and we want to continue in 2026 with our new launch, which is on the next slide. Sorry. Film Shrine. It's a new launch we're working on at the moment. It's moving beyond the realm of reality TV, as the name suggests, but it's gonna take that similar editorial approach that we've been talking about to deliver sharp takes on essential cinematic entertainment, whether it's mainstream blockbusters or independent gems.

43:50 The team is being assembled now. We're getting the site ready. And earlier this month, we acquired social assets with more than a million followers that we're gonna leverage to support the launch of this site, which will be delivered by the group's expanded social team. And we're aiming to get this site up and live before the end of April. That's it from me. Thank you very much, Jim. So that's the first public unveiling of Film Shrine, soon to be something much more real than a slide. But let's look to the future. Our mission is very much to become an entertainment powerhouse through the diversification and and expansion of our current model.

44:39 So increasingly, we're looking beyond owned operated assets or traditionally owned operated assets like websites. And we're looking to on platform plays to complement our position as being an entertainment powerhouse. We've grown the number of assets, as I've already said, to 10 in 2025. And we aim to continue to grow our operating assets into 2026. These won't all necessarily be websites like Film Shine, the one you just looked at, but we'll continue to put the right mix together to strengthen the business to achieve its objectives.

45:34 And moving forward, it's probably worth adding this in because it is becoming increasingly important that we start to the measure the business around a different set of KPIs. Traditionally, we look to web traffic and session volumes and session values that we got for each of those visits. So it was quite a simple model. You could calculate that around £10 a thousand for the 200 and something million visits each year and calculate where we're going to go. But increasingly, it's becoming more diverse than that. And moving forwards, we're looking to measure reach and social interactions by volume as a key component of our performance metrics going into this year and next year.

46:38 More brands, increased revenue and audience diversity will give us more stability than we've previously had. So a big hit to Entertainment Daily in one of our previous years, caused a significant shift in our EBITDA delivery for that year. This more diverse model will avoid those kind of issues as we build the business. We're operating in a strong ad market. I think we've covered this many times, but The UK is particularly strong alongside The US. But UK adults spend nearly four times as much time online on smartphones than on computers. So we're operating through the right channels with the most efficient monetization plans in place.

47:32 And we're looking to The UK or the sorry, the global ad market to be up to GBP 200,000,000,000 bigger by 2028. So positive place to play in. So in summary, we're in a fast evolving media landscape. We have a proven ability to adapt within these moving media landscapes. AI is being leveraged on our terms to increase our efficiency as a business. We're growing the portfolio, so the increased diversity of our content areas and also our operating assets, a mix of assets will strengthen the business as we move forwards.

48:19 Our increased on platform presence has really been beneficial this year with 27,000,000 followers helping us grow towards GBP 1,000,000 worth of on platform revenue. And our EBITDA was ahead of expectations for 2025. And growth this year into the first quarter has been in line with those plans that have been laid out to the market. And the first quarter has traded pretty well. So momentum continues towards 2027. And we'll increasingly looking to build the business through a more diversified model.

49:09 So thank you. I think we're now gonna move on to questions. That's great. Thank you very much for your presentation. And if I may just bring back up your cameras. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions just by using the q and a tab situated on the right hand corner of your screen. Just while the company take a few moments to review those questions submitted today, I'd like to remind you that recording of this presentation along with a copy of the slides and the published q and a can be accessed via investor dashboard. You can see, we have received number of questions throughout today's presentation. Can I please ask you to read out the questions and keep responses where appropriate to do so, and I'll pick up from you at the end? Okay. Thank you. The first couple, Richard, I'm afraid I'm going to pass to you. I'm not afraid. You'll be pleased. I'm gonna pass to you.

49:56 Adjusted EBITDA before head office costs was more than double the reported adjusted EBITDA. I'm not sure if it's can you see the the question? Question? I'm not sure if it's a confused question, actually. Surely, would be a no brainer for an acquirer to make an offer for the company, eliminate head office costs and immediately double the value of the cash generating assets. Thank you, James. That would definitely be an option for an acquirer. We've always set out our results very clearly so people are able to see the overhead costs and the contribution that the business makes. And and as per the strategic review we had last year and we're listed on AIM, that's an option available to anyone at any one time to take advantage of that very smart opportunity.

50:54 Okay. There's another question about you say gross cash is 1,820,000, but this this does not seem to to be any interest bearing debt. Is therefore net cash 1,820,000? Because we repaid the bank loan during the year at the end of twenty twenty five, gross cash is the same as net cash. Okay. We have another question. Maybe this is one for you, Jim. Could you talk us through the demand for non AI content from both consumers and advertisers?

51:43 Yeah. Sure. I think that we as James mentioned, we're looking to try and enhance our human originated content via AI. There's no there's no question that particularly in terms of rewriting and repurposing, that works well for us in terms of being able to drive more value out of the content that we're creating and avoiding some of the problems to do with hallucinations. So I think I think there have been a number of different studies done asking people's attitudes to whether they like they they want more content or they want less less content that's that's got an AI component. I think what people I think it's very difficult for people to answer that question sensibly because there's a bit of a knee jerk response, which is I don't want it.

52:32 I think what people really want is good content. And I think our our approach is to try and start with some content that has some value often created by an expert in the first case and then iterate from that. So a good example is something like, Emmerdale Insider, where we've got very, very strong, writers who know that soap inside out on back to front. And so they'll write for that particular audience, but then we can then repurpose that content in a slightly broader way for the entertainment daily audience who may not necessarily need that kind of that kind of depth. So I think it's I think it's it's difficult in in all honesty to put to put a figure on how much appetite there is for AI generated content in in particular.

53:26 And some content in some spaces, that's just pure entertainment for the sake of entertainment. AI does a perfectly good job, but that's not particularly where we are. Okay. Thanks, Jim. Question here. With a good record of payback returns on acquisitions, are you looking at anything to log greater scale? And if you do so, do you think you can generate same profile, same returns profile, I think, they're talking about? Well, we're definitely looking at bigger acquisition opportunities than we've currently transacted and opportunities that will greater strength in our sector as declared as the objective.

54:20 I think the same returns profile seems possible, but it depends on the obviously, very much depends on the situation that the vendor is in. And we won't choose to overpay. Let's put it that way. So we'll try and keep as close to our existing profile as possible. There's a question here about new product development. With the new product development spend, when do you expect to start to see returns, Richard? Is that one for you? Yep. We're already seeing returns. So what we've disclosed is net position. Position, and we'll continue to see returns going forward. And as a result of that, we're expecting new product development to to decline in 2026 and going forward.

55:14 So we'll be reporting on that and expect that to help trading. Okay. Thanks, Richard. There is another question, I think, for either Richard or Marcus here. But the market clearly doesn't believe your forecast numbers, perhaps due to recent statutory losses. What action can the company take to build market confidence that has a much brighter future ahead? Shall I point that to you, Markus? Is that Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

56:01 I think the the primary action is to continue to hit our numbers, to overperform, to hit the guidance notes. I think we'll communicate more in 2025, particularly around acquisitions and updates. And I think that will continue to build confidence, allowing people to continue to communicate with the board on future prospects will also help. But the most important thing is to hit the numbers and beat the forecasts and beat the guidance numbers. Okay. Thank you, Marcus. A question about social followers. So social followers grew very well.

56:51 How are you converting the audience into greater revenue, and opportunity from here? Well, in simple terms, if you publish content within certain wall gardens, whether this is TikTok or Facebook or Instagram, various channels, including YouTube, then you get rewarded for the value of your content and the level of engagement that your content generates. So it could be that a picture post from Entertainment Daily generates a huge amount of interactions and sharing and stickiness for consumers to stay within the walled gardens on that particular platform, you may get rewarded for that.

57:45 But I think what's worth noting is we've been quite heavily orientated towards what we would label perhaps more traditional content being the source of our revenue within the ward gardens on platform through pictures and and standard editorial posts and memes, etcetera. And so there is an opportunity equally for video, although video has been down ranked in value within these platforms. But there's there's definitely an opportunity for us to increase the output that we have to increasingly get rewarded for other content formats, which is where the revenue will come from.

58:36 Next question at the top of the page. Pamio Liberum are forecasting the company to deliver 1.2p EPS in financial year twenty twenty seven with net cash to build towards £3,900,000 This compares very favorably to the current £5,000,000 market cap. How confident are you that you can deliver on financial year twenty seven forecast? We remain confident that our plans are developing effectively and in line with the guidance that's in place in the market. There's no question the business could look very different in the next year and particularly looking towards acquisitions.

59:22 We may have a differently shaped business to that envisaged at the beginning of our development process a year and a half ago. So I don't think you can sit here and say the business will be, without question, a particular shape by the end of twenty twenty seven because the media market is much faster moving than that at present. One question about revenue. What is your degree of satisfaction with 7% revenue growth? Is this representative for aims and expectations looking forward if M and A is excluded?

1:00:15 Yeah. We're trading I mean, the the 7% revenue growth year on year should be taken in context perhaps with the chart that I tried to draw a comparison with. But the digital market in The UK actually declined last year. So compared to the market, I think we grew probably about 15% in absolute terms. But looking at this year, the market looks like it's returned to a more positive position. And I would expect us to keep advantage ahead of the market. Our monetization practices are delivering a premium ahead of how the market is traveling.

1:01:06 So we'd expect to see that as we move forward into this year. I'm not sure there's any further questions that we've One last I think one last question here. Has the market for acquisitions seen from the view of potential acquirer improved in the last three months, I. Have prices come down? Yes. Prices to acquire certain assets have come down, but equally, because the prices are low, it has taken some assets out of the mix where vendors have decided it's not actually worth selling at this point in time with valuations being too low. So there's a kind of mixed result of that scenario.

1:02:13 But some organizations will be compelled to remove a headache. Some will be compelled to carry on trading because it's quite simply their bank account that benefits more by continued trading. So it's a mixed bag, really, of opportunity. Sorry. I think that's it on questions. Yeah? That's great. Thank you for answering all those questions you care from investors. And of course, the company can review all questions submitted today, and we'll publish publish those those responses on the Investor Meet company platform. Just before redirecting investors to provide you with their feedback, which is particularly important to the company, James, could I please just ask you for a few closing comments? Yeah, really, it's to reflect, I suppose, on where we've been over the past year. But we've developed the business.

1:03:04 We've now got 10 assets. So we're an increasingly diverse business, which is great for our future. We've had a good start to 2026, and we're about to launch another product. We remain agile as a business, so ready to move on fresh opportunity in both cash terms and in both areas in which we're operating. And we're growing in a pretty tough market. So for me, that bodes pretty well for the future. Without question, we're focused on being where the consumers are existing. So increasingly looking towards on platform monetization strategies is the right thing for us to do.

1:03:54 And it bodes well for a pretty exciting future as we move into 2027. Thank you. That's great. Thank you for updating investors today. Can I please ask investors not to close the session as you now be automatically redirected provide your feedback in order that the management team can better understand your views and expectations? This will only take a few moments to complete and I'm sure will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good morning to you all.