Item 1. Business
Item 1. Business
Overview
Magnite, Inc., formerly known as The Rubicon Project, Inc. ("we," or "us"), provides technology solutions to automate the purchase and sale of digital advertising inventory.
On April 1, 2020, we completed a stock-for-stock merger with Telaria, Inc. ("Telaria" and such merger the "Telaria Merger"), a leading provider of connected television ("CTV") technology, on April 30, 2021, we completed the acquisition of SpotX, Inc. ("SpotX" and such acquisition the "SpotX Acquisition"), a leading platform shaping CTV and video advertising globally, and on July 1, 2021, we acquired SpringServe, LLC ("SpringServe"), a leading ad serving platform for CTV.
Following these transactions, we believe that we are the world's largest independent omni-channel sell-side advertising platform ("SSP"), offering a single partner for transacting globally across all channels, formats and auction types, and the largest independent programmatic CTV marketplace, making it easier for buyers to reach CTV audiences at scale from industry-leading streaming content providers, broadcasters, platforms and device manufacturers.
Our platform features applications and services for sellers of digital advertising inventory, or publishers, that own and operate CTV channels, applications, websites and other digital media properties, to manage and monetize their inventory; applications and services for buyers, including advertisers, agencies, agency trading desks, and demand side platforms, ("DSPs"), to buy digital advertising inventory; and a transparent, independent marketplace that brings buyers and sellers together and facilitates intelligent decision making and automated transaction execution at scale. Our clients include many of the world’s leading buyers and sellers of digital advertising inventory. Our platform processes trillions of ad requests per month allowing buyers access to a global, scaled, independent alternative to "walled gardens," who both own and sell inventory and maintain control on the demand side.
We provide a full suite of tools for sellers to control their advertising business and protect the consumer viewing experience. These tools are particularly important to CTV sellers who need to ensure a TV-like viewing and advertising experience for consumers. On February 7, 2023, we introduced our unified CTV platform Magnite Streaming, which merges leading technology from the legacy Magnite CTV and SpotX CTV platforms. The platform enables CTV sellers to maximize their advertising yield holistically across live and video on demand ("VOD") inventory, addressable linear, CTV and other over-the-top environments such as mobile. Magnite Streaming unites sophisticated end-to-end features within a single platform and user interface, including: comprehensive seller deal management capabilities to monetize across all deal types, whether reserved or sold upfront; advanced curation and brand safety tools built for streaming video, such as ad-podding, a tool analogous to commercial breaks that allows a seller to manage business rules around competitive separation, audio normalization tools to control for the volume of an ad relative to content, frequency capping to avoid exposing viewers to repetitive ad placements, and creative review so that a publisher can review and approve the ad units being served to its properties; multi-faceted audience activation features including seller defined audiences, third-party data integrations, and secure data matching; responsive real-time reporting and dashboards; and innovative technology to help sellers optimize live inventory.
In addition to these programmatic platform capabilities, our ad serving technology manages video advertising across both programmatic and direct-sold inventory, including forecasting, routing, and creating customized ad units. The integration of SpringServe’s ad serving technology with our existing programmatic SSP capabilities provides CTV publishers a holistic yield management solution that dynamically allocates between direct-sold and programmatic inventory to drive value.
Buyers leverage our platform to manage their advertising spend and reach their target audiences on brand-safe premium inventory, simplify order management and campaign tracking, obtain actionable insights into audiences for their advertising, and access impression-level purchasing from thousands of sellers. We believe that our scale, platform features, and omni-channel offering makes us an essential partner for buyers.
We operate our business on a worldwide basis, with an established operating presence in North America, Australia and Europe, and a developing presence in Asia and South America. Our non-U.S. subsidiaries and operations perform primarily sales, marketing, and service functions.
Industry Trends
Continued Shift Toward Digital Advertising
Consumers are rapidly shifting their viewing habits towards digital mediums and expect to be able to consume content seamlessly across multiple devices, including computers, tablets, smartphones, and CTVs whenever and wherever they want.
6
Table of Contents
As digital content consumption continues to proliferate, we believe the percentage of advertising dollars spent through digital channels will continue to grow.
Automation of Buying and Selling
Due to the size and complexity of the advertising ecosystem and purchasing process, manual processes cannot effectively manage digital advertising inventory at scale. In addition, both buyers and sellers are demanding more transparency, better controls and more relevant insights from their advertising inventory purchases and sales. This has created a need for software solutions, known as programmatic advertising, that automate the process for planning, buying, selling and measuring digital advertising across screens. Programmatic advertising allows buyers and sellers to transact on an impression-by-impression basis through the use of real-time bidding technology, and allows for the use of advanced data and identity solutions to better target ad campaigns. Programmatic transactions include open auctions, where multiple buyers bid against each other in a real-time auction for the right to purchase a publisher's inventory, as well as reserve auctions, where publishers establish direct deals or private marketplaces with select buyers. Programmatic is the dominant method of transacting for desktop, CTV, and mobile inventory.
Convergence of TV and Digital
CTV viewership is growing rapidly and the pace of adoption is accelerating the transition of linear television to CTV programming. As the number of CTV channels continues to proliferate, we believe that ad-supported models or hybrid models that rely on a combination of subscription fees and advertising revenue will continue to gain traction. In turn, we believe brand advertisers looking to engage with streaming viewers will continue to shift their budgets from linear to CTV. Furthermore, as the CTV market continues to mature, we believe that a greater percentage of CTV advertising inventory will be sold programmatically, similar to trends that occurred in desktop and mobile. As such, we expect CTV to be a significant driver of our revenue growth for the foreseeable future.
Identity Solutions
A number of participants in the advertising technology ecosystem have taken or are expected to take action to eliminate or restrict the use of third-party cookies and other primary identifiers that have historically been used to deliver targeted advertisements. We believe that the elimination of third-party cookies has the potential to shift the programmatic ecosystem from an identity model powered by buyers that are able to aggregate and target audiences through cookies to one enabled by sellers that have direct relationships with consumers and are therefore better positioned to obtain user data and consent for implementing first party identifiers.
We believe that our platform and scale position us well to take a leadership position in advancing this shift and creating additional value opportunities for our clients. Accordingly, we have invested and intend to further invest in the development and enhancement of industry leading identity and audience solutions. In furtherance of this goal, in December 2021, we acquired Nth Party, Ltd. ("Nth Party"), a developer of cryptographic software for secure audience data sharing and analysis, and in February 2022, we acquired Carbon (AI) Limited ("Carbon"), a platform that enables publishers to measure, manage, and monetize audience segments.
We support industry privacy initiatives and believe that the next generation of identity solutions need to be open and ubiquitous, with consumer privacy, transparency and control at the core. We further believe that these solutions will ultimately lead to greater trust and consumer confidence in digital advertising, which will be positive for the advertising ecosystem in the long term. In the short term, however, these changes could create some variability in our revenue across certain buyers or sellers, depending on the timing of changes and developed solutions.
Supply Path Optimization
Supply Path Optimization ("SPO") refers to efforts by buyers to consolidate the number of vendors with which they work to find the most effective and cost-efficient paths to procure media. SPO is important to buyers because it can increase the proportion of their advertising ultimately spent on working media, with the goal of increasing return on their advertising spend, and can help them gain efficiencies by reducing the number of vendors with which they work in a complex ecosystem. We believe we are well positioned to benefit from SPO in the long run as a result of our transparency, our broad and unique inventory supply across all channels and formats, including CTV, buyer tools, such as traffic shaping that reduce the cost of working with us, and our brand safety measures.
Header Bidding and Data Processing
Header bidding is a programmatic technique by which sellers offer inventory to multiple ad exchanges and supply side platforms, such as our platform, simultaneously. Header bidding has been rapidly adopted in recent years in the desktop and mobile channels and has experienced modest adoption in CTV. The adoption of header bidding has created a number of challenges and technical complexities for both sellers and buyers, which require sophisticated tools to manage. Header bidding has led to a significant increase in the number of ad impressions to be processed and analyzed through our platform as well as
7
Table of Contents
by DSPs, which can lead to increased costs if not properly addressed. We have invested in technology solutions, such as Demand Manager, to help publishers manage their header-bidding inventory.
How We Generate Revenue
Digital advertising inventory is created when consumers access sellers' content. Sellers provide digital advertising inventory to our platform in the form of advertising requests, or ad requests. When we receive ad requests from sellers, we send bid requests to buyers, which enable buyers to bid on sellers’ digital advertising inventory. Winning bids can create advertising, or paid impressions, for the seller to present to the consumer. The price that buyers pay for each thousand paid impressions purchased is measured in units referred to as CPM, or cost per thousand, and the total volume of spending between buyers and sellers on our platform is referred to as advertising spend.
We generate revenue from the use of our platform for the purchase and sale of digital advertising inventory. Generally, our revenue is based on a percentage of the ad spend that runs through our platform, although for certain clients or transaction types we may receive a fixed CPM for each impression sold, and for advertising campaigns that are transacted through insertion orders, we earn revenue based on the full amount of ad spend that runs through our platform. We also generate revenue from our ad server and Demand Manager header-bidding product, where fees are either based on the number of impressions processed or a percentage of ad spend. In addition, we may receive certain fixed monthly fees for the use of our platforms or products.
Magnite: Competitive Strengths of Our Platform. Key competitive strengths of our platform include:
Leadership in CTV
Our Magnite Steaming platform has been strategically built to meet the unique requirements of CTV sellers. Many of these sellers have their roots in linear television and it is important that established business practices in television advertising can be translated to programmatic advertising. For instance, our ad-pod feature provides long-form content sellers with a tool analogous to commercial breaks in traditional linear television, so that they can request and manage several ads at once from different demand sources to control for competitive separation, in a single ad-pod. In addition, we provide dynamic ad insertion to serve live streaming events, audio normalization tools to control the volume of an ad relative to content, frequency capping to avoid exposing viewers to repetitive ad placements, and creative review so that a publisher can review and approve the ad units being served to its properties.
We have invested significant time and resources cultivating relationships with CTV sellers and have built a specialized team of CTV experts across our engineering and sales functions to support our clients and evangelize the benefits of CTV advertising. In addition, for certain larger CTV sellers, we may build custom features or functionality to help drive deeper adoption.
Scaled Omni-Channel Platform
We offer a scaled omni-channel platform that brings value to both buyers and sellers of ad inventory. For buyers, we offer a single omni-channel partner to reach target audiences globally across all channels, including CTV, mobile, desktop, and digital out-of-home, and formats, including video, display, and audio. For sellers, we partner as a one stop shop where they can sell digital advertising across all of their properties, regardless of device or format, and gain instant access to the world’s largest automated digital advertising buyers with the flexibility to sell their advertising inventory in an automated fashion on an impression-by-impression basis. We believe large numbers of diverse sellers on our platform attract more buyers and vice versa, resulting in a self-reinforcing network effect that adds value for all our clients and creates a stickier platform solution.
Reserve Auctions
A significant portion of premium inventory, in particular with respect to CTV, is purchased and sold through reserve auctions where the seller establishes a direct deal with a buyer or group of buyers. These transaction types allow the seller to maintain tighter control over their advertising allocation and are often used by sellers that maintain a direct sales force but still want to experience the benefits of automation to improve pricing, matching, and dynamic ad placement and to automate manual operations such as ad trafficking, quality assurance, and billing and collections. Our deal management and curation tools support sales functions rather than replacing them, which eliminates friction in the sales process. Buyers and sellers can also leverage their first-party data assets and third-party data assets in our platform to increase the value of sellers' inventory and the precision of buyers' targeting efforts.
Big Data Analytics and Machine-Learning Algorithms; Bid Filtering
A core aspect of our value proposition is our big data and machine-learning platform that is able to discover unique insights from our massive data repositories. Our systems collect and analyze a myriad of information such as historical clearing prices, bid responses, buyer preferences, ad formats, user location, buyer audience preferences, how many ads the user has seen,
8
Table of Contents
browser or device information, and sellers’ first party data about users. Our access to data puts us in a unique position to develop differentiated insights to help both buyers and sellers. Our solution is constantly self-improving as we process more volume and accumulate more data, which in turn helps make our machine-learning algorithms more intelligent and contributes to higher-quality matching between buyers and sellers. This data also fuels our bid filtering technology, allowing us to more aggressively block traffic that is not likely to monetize. We believe that our traffic optimization coupled with bid filtering improves return on investment for buyers and increases revenue for sellers, which in turn attracts more buyers and sellers to our platform creating a dual network effect that makes our platform stickier. These capabilities also help us manage the costs associated with the high volumes of ad requests we receive.
Identity Solutions
We offer identity solutions that help buyers and sellers create better matches and increase advertising ROI and the value of the underlying impression. Our tools enable sellers to create audience segments based on first-party data, which makes their advertising inventory more valuable to buyers looking to achieve specific campaign goals. In addition, our technology is integrated with a number of third party data, attribution and identity vendors, allowing buyers and sellers to leverage these solutions directly through our platform without the need for multiple vendor contracts.
Integrated Video Ad Server and SSP
On July 1, 2021, we acquired SpringServe, a leading ad serving platform for CTV and online video. The SpringServe ad server manages multiple aspects of video advertising for both programmatic transactions and inventory sold directly by the publisher, including forecasting, routing, customized ad experiences, and advanced podding logic. Combined with our SSP, the SpringServe ad server provides publishers a holistic yield management solution that works across their entire video advertising business to drive value. This is of particular importance for CTV publishers, who still sell a large percentage of their inventory through their direct sales team. We believe the acquisition of SpringServe is highly strategic as it allows us to offer publishers an independent full-stack solution to the walled gardens, which can be leveraged across their entire video advertising business.
Header Bidding and Demand Manager Solutions
We are integrated with all of the major header-bidding standards, including Prebid.org, which we co-founded, as well as the solutions offered by Google and Amazon. We believe the various header bidding alternatives we offer, our buyer reach and scale, our buying efficiency, and our machine-learning capabilities put us in a strong position to compete for seller impressions monetized through header-bidding solutions, and we expect these header bidding solutions to deliver a meaningful volume of impressions. We also provide a software solution called Demand Manager that helps desktop and mobile sellers manage all of their header-bidding advertising inventory, regardless of who wins the impression, for a fee based on a percentage of that advertising spending. We believe that adoption and proliferation of these tools will further strengthen our relationship with sellers and contribute to our future revenue growth.
Transparency and Controls
We generate revenue each time an impression is monetized on our platform based on a simple and transparent fee structure established with our publisher partners. Our clients direct the sale and management of ad inventory through our platform, including the ability to define supply hierarchies and demand tiers, set minimum price floors, and establish advertiser and category level blocked and allowed lists. We provide sellers with detailed analytics, which allows them to effectively monitor buying patterns and make real-time changes to take advantage of market dynamics and maximize their yield.
Self-Service Model
We offer a self-service model that lets sellers access our platform without extensive involvement by our personnel. This model allows us to scale efficiently and grow our business at a faster pace than the growth of our sales and support organization. As a result, we are able to achieve a high degree of operating leverage, which positions our business for growing profitability.
Buyer Tools
We provide a suite of buyer tools designed to help buyers curate inventory, append data and improve ROI in order to meet their campaign strategies. Our curation tools include Express Lane and Marketplace technology that enable agency holding companies and major brands to create their own private label marketplaces and establish direct connections with sellers. Custom auction packages give all buyers a versatile and cost-effective way to curate and target open market inventory, using categories such as audience, context, and viewability, while our deal discovery platform allows buyers to connect directly with sellers to arrange direct reserve auctions. Our audience tools enable buyers to append data in order to reach their target
9
Table of Contents
audience, and are often used in combination with our curation solutions. Finally, Estimated Market Rate, our innovative bid shading technology, helps buyers bid more effectively in our environment.
Independence
We are fully aligned with the interests of our publisher clients. Unlike some large industry participants, we do not have our own media properties that compete for advertising spending with our sellers. Therefore, we are agnostic and have no preference towards delivering demand to any specific publisher. In addition, because we do not offer a demand side platform, we are able to avoid inherent conflicts of interest that exist when serving both the buy- and sell-side.
Magnite: Growth Strategies. The key elements to our long-term growth strategy include:
Focus on CTV
We expect CTV to be the biggest driver of our growth. As streaming video continues to become mainstream and ad-supported models become more prevalent, we believe brand advertisers will continue to shift their budgets from linear television to CTV. We plan to invest significant resources in technology, sales and support related to our CTV growth initiatives. Consistent with this growth objective, in February 2023, we introduced Magnite Streaming, which merges leading technology from our legacy Magnite CTV and SpotX CTV platforms.
Supply Path Optimization
As described above, SPO refers to efforts by buyers to consolidate the number of vendors with which they work to find the most effective and cost-efficient paths to procure media. We believe we are well positioned to benefit from SPO due to the factors described above and that it presents an opportunity for us to capture market share and increase the volume of advertising spend on our platform. To capitalize on SPO opportunities, we have invested in our buyer focused sales team to pursue more direct relationships with advertisers and agencies.
Identity Solutions
We believe that the elimination of third party cookies has the potential to shift the programmatic ecosystem from an identity model powered by buyers that are able to aggregate and target audiences through cookies to one enabled by sellers that have direct relationships with consumers and are therefore better positioned to obtain user data and consent for implementing first party identifiers. In CTV, this identity model already largely exists with publishers more tightly controlling access to identifiers and user data, while offering proprietary first party data segments for reaching desired audiences. As the largest independent supply side platform, we believe we are well positioned to take a leadership role in advancing the shift to a first party identity model and creating additional value opportunities for our clients. Accordingly, we have invested and intend to further invest in the development and enhancement of industry leading identity and audience solutions. In furtherance of this goal, in December 2021, we acquired Nth Party, a developer of cryptographic software for secure audience data sharing and analysis, and in February 2022, we acquired Carbon, a platform that enables publishers to measure, manage, and monetize audience segments, which have been integrated with our platforms.
Increase Efficiencies on our Exchange
We aim to increase the operational efficiency of our platform, so as to enable buyers and sellers to achieve their campaign and monetization objectives in a cost-effective manner. Our solution is constantly self-improving as we process more volume and accumulate more data, which in turn helps make our machine-learning algorithms more intelligent and contributes to higher quality matching between buyers and sellers. We are continuing to invest in traffic optimization and bid filtering technology to allow us to monetize a higher proportion of the ad requests on our platform, which reduces costs for us as well as the process costs for buyers. We believe these cost savings make our platform more attractive to buyers, which in turn improves revenue opportunities for sellers.
Increasing Seller Inventory
In order to increase transaction volume we are continuously looking to add new high quality sellers to our platform and to expand our existing relationships with sellers to increase our share of their inventory, in particular in the CTV and OTT space where inventory is controlled by fewer sellers. Our plan for increasing our inventory volumes includes establishing and deepening our direct relationships with sellers, including through custom integrations, expanding our seller tools, capitalizing on our omni-channel capabilities, and leveraging our header bidding integrations, including through Demand Manager. In addition, our acquisition of the SpringServe ad server provides us with access to inventory that is directly sold by a publisher's
10
Table of Contents
sales force by enabling a unified auction that selects an ideal ad set, considering both direct and programmatic deal priority and yield.
Expand our International Footprint
With established operating presence in North America, Australia and Europe, and a developing presence in Asia and South America, we serve buyers and sellers on a global basis. We plan to continue to expand our international presence and make additional investments in sales, marketing and infrastructure to support our long-term growth and to position ourselves for expected increases in the penetration of programmatic advertising globally. We expect programmatic advertising to grow at different rates in different geographic markets, and are constantly evaluating new markets with a strategy to use our existing infrastructure and adjacent sales offices or by expanding our infrastructure footprint and placing personnel directly in those markets.
Continue to Innovate and Enhance our Platform
We are working on a number of platform innovations and enhancements designed to improve the value to our clients, such as our recently announced Magnite Streaming platform. We intend to invest in new features that facilitate the creation of first-party publisher segments, improve upon our traffic optimization and bid filtering, enhance our brand safety controls, and help sellers to optimize their yield across both programmatic and directly sold inventory.
Technology and Development
To support a majority of our non-CTV transactions, we have developed a globally distributed infrastructure hosted at data centers in the U.S., Europe, and Asia that run our proprietary software. Our CTV transactions run primarily on a hybrid infrastructure. We believe these two approaches optimize the type of traffic we handle - hosted data centers for high-frequency, low-latency transactions and cloud-supported for lower frequency transactions subject to more volatile viewing patterns, for example CTV prime-time viewing spikes.
Our approach supports the volume, diversity, and complexity of buyers’ bidding patterns, which increases market liquidity. Bid efficiency algorithms provide bid prediction (i.e., which buyers are most likely to bid on a given impression) and throttling (i.e., the volume of bid requests a given buyer can process), to improve infrastructure load and execute transactions efficiently by only sending bid requests to those buyers of advertising inventory who can handle the volume and are likely to respond.
This infrastructure is supported by real-time data pipelines, a system that quickly moves volumes of data generated by our business into reporting and machine-learning systems that allow usage both internally and by buyers and sellers. It also is supported by a 24-hour Network Operations Center, which provides failure protection by monitoring and rerouting traffic in the event of equipment failure or network performance issues between buyers and our marketplace, and our core technology and development team, which is responsible for the design, development, operation, and maintenance of our platform, and employs an agile development process that emphasizes frequent, iterative, and incremental development cycles.
We believe that continued investment in our platform, including its technologies and functionalities, is critical to our success and long-term growth.
Sales and Marketing
We market our solution to buyers and sellers through global sales teams that operate from various locations around the world. These teams leverage market knowledge and expertise to demonstrate the benefits of advertising automation and our solution to buyers and sellers. We deploy a professional services team with each seller integration to assist sellers in getting the most value from our solution. Our buyer team, which is separately managed, focuses on collaborating with and increasing spend from DSPs, agencies, and brands, and our client services teams work closely with clients to support and execute campaigns. Our marketing initiatives are focused on managing our brand, increasing market awareness, and driving advertising spend to our platform. We often present at industry conferences, create custom events, and invest in public relations. In addition, our marketing team advertises online, in print, and in other forms of media, creates case studies, sponsors research, writes whitepapers, publishes marketing collateral, generates blog posts, and undertakes client research studies.
Competition
Our industry is highly competitive. Overall digital advertising spending is highly concentrated in a small number of very large companies that have their own inventory, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Comcast, and Amazon, with which we compete for digital advertising inventory and demand. These companies are formidable competitors due to their huge resources and direct user relationships, and could become even more dominant as third-party cookie use decreases. Despite the
11
Table of Contents
dominance of large companies, there is still a large addressable market that is highly fragmented and includes many providers of transaction services with which we compete, including supply side platforms, video ad servers, and advertising exchanges. As we introduce new offerings, as our existing offerings evolve, or as other companies introduce new products and services, we may be subject to additional competition. There has been rapid evolution and consolidation in the advertising technology industry, and we expect these trends to continue, thereby increasing the capabilities and competitive posture of larger companies, particularly those that are already dominant in various ways, and enabling new or stronger competitors to emerge. There are many ways for buyers and sellers of digital advertising inventory to connect and transact, including directly and through many other exchanges, and buyers are increasingly demanding more transparency and lower transaction costs and establishing relationships directly with sellers of advertising inventory, which puts significant pressure on us. Our offering must remain competitive in scope, ease of use, scalability, speed, data access, price, inventory quality, brand security, customer service, identity protection and other technological features that help sellers monetize their inventory and buyers increase the return on their advertising investment. While our industry is evolving rapidly and becoming increasingly competitive, we believe that our solution enables us to compete favorably on these factors. In addition, we believe we enjoy a number of competitive strengths, as further detailed above.
Human Capital: Our Team and Culture
Our team draws from a broad spectrum of experience, including data science, machine-learning algorithms, infrastructure, software development, and from experienced leadership on the seller and buyer sides, including CTV, mobile and video. In addition to the United States, we have personnel and operations in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, in order to service buyers and sellers on a global scale.
Culture
We strive to build a culture that is high-performing and results-oriented while emphasizing transparency, collaboration and innovation. Our recruitment team seeks individuals that are committed to seeing the big picture and being catalysts of change. We ask our employees to empower others, make a difference and help make our company a great place to work, not just a "job."
Diversity , Equity and Inclusion
Our Magnify Council, a group of internal employees, rotating yearly, is focused on enhancing diversity, equity and inclusion. Our objectives, through the support of the Magnify Council, are to create an exceptional employee experience, continually deploy programs to develop diverse talent, and support external partners that emphasize the global promotion of diversity, equity and inclusion.
Talent Retention
We reward team and individual excellence and are committed to creating an exceptional workplace environment in which we seek feedback from our employees in bi-annual engagement surveys. We believe in continual feedback on performance. Our employees set goals at a regular cadence throughout the year and managers provide achievement ratings at year-end. We continue to invest in learning and leadership development by expanding our dedicated resources for these functions. Our primary focus is to provide foundational skill development for the professional growth of employees, and
12
Table of Contents
cohesive training for our global people managers. Additionally, we routinely analyze voluntary employee turnover to understand and address trends. We give equity to our employees to promote alignment and ownership.
Employee Wellness and Safety
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, our global workforce maintained a work from home policy from March 2020 through October 2022. We have since returned to offices on a hybrid basis. We have approached our return to offices with caution to prioritize the safety and health of our employees, and continue to monitor best practices and guidance.
We recognize that stressful circumstances require us to provide additional care for our employees. We encourage our employees to focus on mental health by providing quarterly mental health days, a global employee assistance program, and a digital platform with access to live classes and discussions supporting wellness.
Conduct
We are committed to promoting high standards of honest and ethical business conduct and compliance in alignment with our cultural values. We do not tolerate harassment or discrimination. Our employees are required to take annual harassment and discrimination training as well as acknowledge our Code of Business and Ethics Policy.
As of December 31, 2022, we had 947 full-time employees.
Our Intellectual Property
Our proprietary technologies are important and we rely upon trade secret, trademark, copyright, and patent laws in the United States and abroad to establish and protect our intellectual property and protect our proprietary technologies.
We have several issued patents and pending patent applications, some of which may ultimately be abandoned if we determine that the cost of prosecution or maintenance does not justify the utility of receiving the patent. None of these patents has been litigated and we do not believe that any individual patent or patent application is material to our business. Their importance to our business is uncertain and there are no guarantees that any of the patents will serve as protection for our technology or market in the United States or any other country in which an application has been filed.
We register certain domain names, trademarks and service marks in the United States and in certain locations outside the United States. We also rely upon common law protection for certain trademarks. We generally enter into confidentiality and invention assignment agreements with our employees and contractors, and confidentiality agreements with parties with whom we conduct business, in order to limit access to, and disclosure and use of, our proprietary information. We also use measures designed to control access to our technology and proprietary information. We view our trade secrets and know-how as a significant component of our intellectual property assets, which we believe differentiate us from our competitors.
Any impairment of our intellectual property rights, or any unauthorized disclosure or use of our intellectual property or technology, could harm our business, our ability to compete and our operating results.
Client Dynamics
Sellers
Sellers own or operate media properties, websites and applications through which advertisements can be delivered to consumers as they navigate across screens. Sellers use our platform to monetize and manage their advertising inventory.
While we work with many clients, a relatively small number of them provide a large share of the unique user audiences accessible by buyers. This is particularly true in CTV, where sellers tend to be larger compared to other online sellers. Given the limited number of CTV sellers, we are focused on building deeper, long-term strategic partnerships with these clients through a full-service business development strategy. We have invested significant resources in identifying and cultivating these relationships and our sales executives and account managers often serve a consultative role within a client’s sales organization to help establish best practices and evangelize the benefits of programmatic advertising. This team is further supported by our product and engineering team with deep technical expertise, and for larger clients, we may build out custom features or functionality to help drive deeper adoption of our platform.
In the mobile channel, many of the application providers that make inventory available through our platform utilize system development kits ("SDKs") and other proprietary technology of third parties, such as aggregators, and it is those third parties, not the application providers themselves, that contract with us to help monetize the inventory. Termination or diminution of our relationships with these third parties could result in a material reduction of the amount of mobile inventory
13
Table of Contents
available through our platform. We encourage application developers to use our own SDK when appropriate, but it is difficult to displace existing SDKs.
Buyers
On the buy-side of our business, we maintain close relationships with brand advertisers and agencies, as well as the technological intermediaries through which they transact on our platform, principally DSPs.
These DSPs are directly connected to our technology through server-to-server integrations and are responsible for bidding on and purchasing advertising inventory on our platform pursuant to master service agreements. We have relationships with almost all of the major DSPs, and because ad spend is highly concentrated among relatively few DSPs, each of these relationships is important to us and represents a source of demand that could be difficult for us to replace.
We maintain close relationships with DSPs to maximize the amount of spend being transacted through our platform. For instance, our sales team collaborates with DSPs to create custom private marketplaces that fit specific targeting criteria for a given campaign and our team of technical account managers continually monitors DSP bidding activities and provides recommendations that inform their trading practices.
While the DSP is directly responsible for purchasing advertising inventory programmatically through our platform, the overall direction of an advertising campaign is typically determined by the advertiser or advertising agency that has engaged the DSP, and for certain reserve auctions, the specific parameters of a campaign may be negotiated directly with the advertiser or agency without involvement of a DSP.
In addition to transacting through DSPs, we also offer brands and agencies the ability to access our platform directly on a managed service basis through the use of insertion orders. For these campaigns, our team of specialists manages the delivery and execution of the campaign according to an agreed set of objectives with the advertiser or agency, at a negotiated fixed price.
Accordingly, in order to increase the amount of spend transacted on our platform, and in furtherance of our SPO efforts, we expend significant resources establishing and expanding relationships directly with brand advertisers and agencies as well as with DSPs.
Geographic Scope of Our Operations
The growth of programmatic advertising is expanding into geographic markets outside of the United States, and in some markets, the adoption rate of programmatic digital advertising is greater than in the United States. We face staffing challenges, including difficulty in recruiting, retaining, and managing a diverse and distributed workforce across time zones, cultures, and languages. We must also adapt our practices to satisfy local requirements and standards (including differing privacy requirements that are sometimes more stringent than in the U.S.), and manage the effects of global and regional pandemics, recessions and economic and political instability. Transactions denominated in various non-U.S. currencies expose us to potentially unfavorable changes in exchange rates and added transaction costs. Foreign operations expose us to potentially adverse tax consequences in the United States and abroad and costs and restrictions affecting the repatriation of funds to the United States. For detailed information regarding our revenue and property and equipment, net by geographical region, see Note 4 and Note 6 of the "Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements."
Regulation
Our business is highly susceptible to existing and emerging privacy regulations and oversight concerning the collection, use and sharing of data. Data protection authorities in the United States and around the world have focused on the advertising technology ecosystem. Because we, and our clients, rely upon large volumes of such data, it is essential that we monitor developments in this area domestically and globally, and engage in responsible privacy practices.
We do n ot collect information that can be used directly to identify a real person, such as name, address, or phone number, and we take steps to avoid collecting and storing such information. Instead, we rely on pseudonymous forms of data such as IP addresses, general geo-location information, and persistent identifiers about Internet users and do not attempt to associate this data with other data that can be used to identify real people. Increasingly, this type of information is considered "personal" across various jurisdictions and is therefore governed by consumer privacy laws and may be the subject of future legislation or regulation. The definition of personal data varies by country, and now even by U.S. state, and continues to evolve in ways that may require us to adapt our practices to avoid violating laws or regulations related to the collection, storage, and use of consumer data. As a result, our technology platform and business practices must be assessed regularly in each country in which we do business.
There are also a number of specific laws and regulations governing the collection and use of certain types of consumer data relevant to our business. For example, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act ("COPPA"), imposes restrictions on
14
Table of Contents
the collection and use of data about users of child-directed websites. With respect to COPPA compliance, we have taken various steps to implement a system that: (i) flags seller-identified child-directed sites to buyers, (ii) limits advertisers’ ability to serve personalized advertisements on child-directed sites, (iii) helps limit the types of information that our advertisers have access to when placing advertisements on child-directed sites, and (iv) limits the data that we collect and use on such child-directed sites.
The use and transfer of personal data in the European Economic Area ("EEA") member states and the United Kingdom (“UK”) is currently governed by the General Data Protection Regulation and the UK General Data Protection Regulation (the "GDPR" and "UK GDPR"). The GDPR and UK GDPR set out significant potential liabilities for certain data protection violations and establish significant regulatory requirements resulting in a greater compliance burden for us in the course of delivering our solution in the EEA and UK. While data protection authorities have clarified certain requirements under GDPR and UK GDPR, inconsistent interpretations of the regulations and how to comply with them remain across individual countries.
In addition to the GDPR and UK GDPR, a number of recent privacy regulations will or have already come into effect in the United States. California was the first state to enact an omnibus consumer privacy law in 2018, the California Consumer Privacy Act ("CCPA"), which became effective January 1, 2020. This law imposes substantial obligations on businesses that handle the personal information of California residents. The obligations imposed require us to maintain ongoing significant resources for compliance purposes. In addition, amendments to the CCPA, along with broad-based consumer privacy laws in Connecticut, Colorado, Virginia, and Utah, will all take effect by the end of 2023 and impose obligations that are similar to the CCPA. These new laws will cause us to incur additional compliance costs and impose additional restrictions on us and on our industry partners. In addition, other privacy bills have been introduced at both the state and federal level and certain international territories are imposing new or expanded privacy obligations. In the coming years, we expect further consumer privacy regulation worldwide.
The GDPR and UK GDPR also prohibit the transfer of personal data of EU and UK subjects outside of the EEA and the UK, unless the party exporting the data from the EU or UK implements a compliance mechanism designed to ensure that the receiving party will adequately protect such data. We have historically relied on certain compliance mechanisms that have since been invalidated, and had to shift our business practices to rely on other legally sufficient compliance measures. However, guidance on exactly what measures must be taken to allow the lawful transfer of personal data to the United States remains unclear. It is important to note that the EU and the US have agreed on a successor framework that is supposed to enter into force by the end of 2023 at the latest. The new framework may not address all issues raised by the European Court of Justice and may be challenged in court, too. Until that time, we remain subject to regulatory enforcement by data protection authorities located in the EU, UK, and the United States, so we will continue to interpret the guidance and explore the additional measures that can be implemented to protect personal data that is transferred to us in the United States. By relying on these compliance measures, we risk becoming the subject of regulatory investigations in any of the individual jurisdictions in which we operate. Each such investigation could cost us significant time and resources, and could potentially result in fines, criminal prosecution, or other penalties. Further, to the extent any new guidance emerges to these compliance measures, it could further invalidate our approach to data export from the EEA and UK. It may take us significant time, resources, and effort to restructure our business and/or rely on another legally sufficient compliance measure.
Additionally, our compliance with our privacy policies and our general consumer privacy practices are also subject to review by the Federal Trade Commission, which may bring enforcement actions to challenge allegedly unfair and deceptive trade practices, including the violation of privacy policies and representations therein. Certain State Attorneys General may also bring enforcement actions based on comparable state laws or federal laws that permit state-level enforcement. Outside of the United States, our privacy and data practices are subject to regulation by data protection authorities and other regulators in the countries in which we do business.
Beyond laws and regulations, we are members of self-regulatory bodies that impose additional requirements related to the collection, use, and disclosure of consumer data, including the Internet Advertising Bureau ("IAB"), the Digital Advertising Alliance, the Network Advertising Initiative, and the Europe Interactive Digital Advertising Alliance. Under the requirements of these self-regulatory bodies, in addition to other compliance obligations, we provide consumers with notice via our privacy policy about our use of cookies and other technologies to collect consumer data, and of our collection and use of consumer data to deliver personalized advertisements. We allow consumers to opt-out from the use of data we collect for purposes of behavioral advertising through a mechanism on our website, linked through our privacy policy as well as through portals maintained by some of these self-regulatory bodies.
We support privacy initiatives and believe they will be beneficial to consumers' confidence in advertising technology, which will ultimately be positive for the advertising ecosystem in the long term. However, until prevailing compliance practices
15
Table of Contents
standardize, the impact of worldwide privacy regulations on our business and, consequently, our revenue could be negatively impacted.
For additional information regarding regulatory risks to our business, see "Item 1A. Risk Factors."
Seasonality
Our advertising spend, revenue, cash flow from operations, Adjusted EBITDA, operating results, and other key operating and financial measures may vary from quarter to quarter due to the seasonal nature of buyer spending. For example, many buyers devote a disproportionate amount of their advertising budgets to the fourth quarter of the calendar year to coincide with increased holiday purchasing. We expect our revenue, cash flow, operating results and other key operating and financial measures to fluctuate based on seasonal factors from period to period and expect these measures to be higher in the fourth quarter than in other quarters.
Available Information
The Company is subject to the reporting requirements of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, or the Exchange Act, and accordingly files Annual Reports on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K, proxy statements, and related amendments and other information with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, or the SEC, pursuant to Sections 13(a) and 15(d) of the Exchange Act. Information filed by the Company with the SEC is available free of charge on the Company’s website at investor.magnite.com as soon as reasonably practicable after such materials are filed with or furnished to the SEC.