Operator
Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Taboola 2026 Second Quarter Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 11 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised.
To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. please be advised that today's conference is being recorded i would now like to turn the conference over to your first speaker today adam anwar head of investor relations thank you and good morning everyone welcome to tabula's second quarter 2026 earnings conference call i'm here with adam singolda tabula's founder and ceo and steve walker tabula cfo the company issued earnings materials today before market opened and they're available in the investor section of tabula's website. Now I'll quickly cover the safe harbor. Certain statements today include our expectations for future periods or forward-looking statements. They are not facts and are subject to material risks and uncertainties described in our SEC filings. These statements are based on currently available information and we undertake no duty to update them except as required by law. Today's discussion is also subject to forward-looking statement limitations in the earnings press release. Future events could differ materially and adversely from those anticipated. During this call, we will use terms defined in the earnings release and refer to non-GAAP financial measures. For definitions and reconciliations to GAAP, please refer to the non-GAAP tables in the earnings press release posted on our website. With that, I'll turn the call over to Adam.
Thanks, Adam. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. The second quarter was another important step forward for Taboola. We continue to execute and deliver results above our guidance across our key metrics despite dealing with two headwinds during the quarter. The first was a Google policy change that deprecated our Explore More product, and the second was our decision to remove low-quality publishers that were not delivering value for advertisers. Despite these two headwinds, I'm happy with our ability to beat our key metrics, accelerate growth, and repurchase a lot of shares. More importantly, we had some large strategic wins that demonstrates meaningful progress against our long-term vision. We expect these new wins to gradually begin contributing to our ex-tech in the fourth quarter and to ramp more considerably in 2027. These tailwinds give us the confidence to raise our full-year ex-tech guidance to 9%. What gives me confidence isn't just the financials. It's the validation we got this quarter that our strategy is working. We're continuing to offer advertisers a viable option beyond search and social, while investing in our tech to drive advertiser success and strengthening our relationship with some of the world's leading publishers. Together, these reinforce our confidence in our path forward sustainable double-digit aspect growth. Before getting into more detail, let me remind everyone who we are and how we compete. Taboola is one of the largest performance advertising companies outside of search and social, referred to as the open web. Similar to how Google and Meta understand intent within their own platforms, Taboola understands intent across the billions of consumers who read, watch, and engage within trusted OEMs, apps, and publishers across the open web. We then convert these signals into profitable and measurable outcomes for advertisers. That proprietary intent data and the AI-driven conversion machine we've built, that is Taboola. Now, in a world where AI is evolving so fast, I believe the winners will be those with either unique data that LLMs cannot get or access to unique supply and distribution. Taboola has both. Turning now into two strategic milestones that further validate our real-life strategy. First, we expect to announce a first-of-its-kind expansion with one of our largest existing publisher partners, a premier media and entertainment company. This marks an important evolution for us, expanding our role from monetizing individual bottom-of-article placements to monetizing everything, including display, vertical format, native, and more. To put this opportunity into perspective, we estimate that display advertising alone on this publisher represents two or three times the revenue of the traditional native placements we've historically monetized. This is important for three reasons. First, it's a validation of a realized product and strategy built with the purpose to expand wallet share within our publishers by moving beyond native ads to handle the full suite of ad placements needs. Second, we believe it will demonstrate how publishers can move away from relying on multiple ad tech providers and now consolidate it all into a single partner by doing this publishers can reduce complexity lower operational burden improve efficiency and drive stronger revenue outcomes lastly this will create an opportunity for our advertisers to take advantage of even more premium supply and we expect this to be a model for how things can be done with other publishers going forward. This partnership demonstrates that publishers increasingly value partners that can combine AI, proprietary data, and advertisers demand to drive better monetization. At the same time, we continue to see strong validation of our strategy through our ability to win some of the world's leading publishers. A great example is Fox News, one of the top five publishers in the US. We've already built a strong relationship with Fox local Fox Sports and Fox rather and the addition of Fox News represents a substantial growth opportunity and a significant expansion of our partnership across the Fox ecosystem we believe this win reflects the investments we're making in real life and our continued focus on helping premium publishers like Fox generates more value through performance advertising and AI we're encouraged by this highly competitive win and believe it will further validate our ability to continue taking share in the performance advertising market. Moving beyond our business wins, we've continued investing in our technology, particularly Realize, our performance advertising platform, driving greater scale, better signals, and stronger performance for advertisers. We believe the future of advertising will increasingly be powered by AI, moving from manual campaign management to intelligent systems that understand advertisers' goal, make decisions, and continuously optimize performance. That's the vision behind Realize Plus, our AI-powered optimization framework that brings to the open web the kind of automation advertisers have come to expect from solutions like Google Performance Max and Meta's Advantage Plus. Since launching Realize Plus beta, more than 300 advertisers have already adopted the platform and we're seeing encouraging early results as advertisers use AI to improve campaign efficiency and performance. We also believe AI will fundamentally change how advertisers interact with advertising platforms, particularly holding companies, agencies, and large advertisers. That is why we built our MCP and cloud integration, which enable advertisers and agencies to plan, launch, and optimize campaigns through natural language, conversations with AI. While so early, we're encouraged by the momentum, with a few millions of dollars of advertiser spend already flowing through the integration. We believe these investments position us well to lead the next generation of performance advertising and creates more value for advertisers across the open web. To wrap things up, we continued to execute across the business and raised our four-year ex-tech guidance. Importantly, we also delivered strategic wins that demonstrate progress against our long-term vision. We're also allocating capital with discipline. In the second quarter, we repurchased approximately 9 million shares for $41 million, continuing to return the majority of our free cash flow through buybacks. We've repurchased approximately 20% of our outstanding shares since the beginning of 2025, while maintaining the right balance between investing for growth and returning capital to shareholders. As we look ahead, we're excited about the momentum we're building, the actions we've taken, and the initiatives we're putting in place are positioning us well for the back half of the year and into 2027. We're building a stronger, more durable business and are excited about the path ahead as we continue building the leading performance advertising platform for the open web. And with that, I'll hand it over to Steve.
Thanks, Adam, and good morning, everyone. We're pleased with our performance in the second quarter. We continued to execute against our strategy and delivered results above our guidance across our key metrics. In the second quarter, revenues grew 2% year-over-year to $476.8 million. Revenue was below our guidance this quarter, primarily as a result of two factors. The first was our continuing effort to optimize supply quality. As part of our ongoing focus on improving the quality and performance of our publisher network, we took a more aggressive approach in the second quarter by exiting publisher relationships that did not meet our standards for advertiser success. Because this should improve advertiser success across our network, we believe this will improve long-term revenue, despite the negative impact on 2026 revenues. The second factor relates to the impact from Google's policy changes that affected our Explore More feature, as Adam described earlier. This feature enabled users to discover additional sponsored content from a publisher's site after they clicked on the back button. However, due to Google's policy change, we were no longer able to provide that product starting this quarter. Despite these headwinds, I was happy to see that the number of scaled advertisers on our network grew 2% year-over-year, though we did see an impact from the headwinds on our average revenue per scaled advertiser, which remained relatively flat. XTAC gross profit increased 12% year-over-year to $192.4 million in the second quarter. Growth in XTAC gross profit outpaced the growth in revenues due to a combination of factors. First, given the reduction in supply due to our network cleanup and the deprecation of ExploreMore, we saw an increase in ad rates, which drives higher XTAC margins. Second, we had a shift in the mix of our business towards higher margin areas, partially driven by those same cleanup efforts. Our strong XTAC growth also reflects the continued scaling of Realize, along with strong contributions from Tugula News. I would note that if it were not for the Google policy change that affected our Explore More product, we would have exceeded the high end of our XTAC gross profit guidance. gross profit for the quarter was $139.5 million up 3% year over year growth in XTAC gross profit contributed to this growth this growth was partially offset by a one time non-cash write down of approximately $12 million related to certain publisher prepayments that we no longer expect to recoup which obviously does not impact the long term economics of our business Net income for the quarter was $4.3 million, with non-GAAP net income coming in at $41.3 million. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $55.5 million, which was above the high end of our guidance and represented a margin of 29%. This reflects our ongoing discipline in expense management while continuing to invest in strategic priorities to support our long-term growth. Foreign exchange continues to be a headwind in 2026. On a constant currency basis, FX represented roughly a $7.5 million headwind to second quarter adjusted EBITDA. Excluding this impact, adjusted EBITDA would have been approximately $63 million, which would have represented an adjusted EBITDA margin of 33%. We expect FX to remain a headwind for the remainder of 2026. In terms of cash generation, we had $31.3 million in operating cash flow in the second quarter, and free cash flow of $17.3 million. We continue to expect to sustainably convert free cash flow from adjusted EBITDA at a 60% to 70% rate over any typical four-quarter period. Turning to the balance sheet, we remain in a strong financial position. We ended the first quarter with a net cash balance of $61.1 million. Cash and cash equivalents totaled $133.1 million, which more than offset our long-term debt of $72 million. As of June 30th, we had approximately $198 million of available liquidity under our $270 million revolving credit facility. In the second quarter, we repurchased approximately 9.4 million shares at an average price of $4.42 for a total consideration of $41.4 million. We have approximately $114 million remaining under our authorization and continue to view share repurchases as a compelling use of the majority of our free cash flow. Moving to guidance, for the third quarter, we expect revenues to be between $460 and $473 million, gross profit to be between $148 and $152 million, EXTAC gross profit to be $184 million to $190 million, adjusted EBITDA to range from $51.5 to $56.5 million, and non-GAAP net income to be $38 to $42 million. Reflecting continued momentum across the business, we are increasing our full-year outlook for EXTAC gross profit and adjusted EBITDA, while also updating our revenue, gross profit, and non-GAAP net income guidance. We now expect revenue of $1.93 billion to $1.96 billion and gross profit of $605 million to $615 million. Importantly, we are raising our EXTAC gross profit guidance by $7 million at the midpoint to $772 million to $783 million and raising the Just EBITDA guidance by $3 million at the midpoint to $273 million. 28 to $240 million. We expect non-GAAP net income to be between $168 and $176 million. Our updated revenue guidance incorporates forward-looking effects of the revenue impacts from our publisher network cleanup and the deprecation of our Explore More product due to Google's policy changes. I would also note that while there has been significant public discussion about the reduction of display ad impressions at open web publishers, our guidance reflects the impacts of these user behavior changes. Our raised XTAC gross profit guidance is notable, given that our outlook now incorporates the impact of the deprecation of Explore More, which was expected to contribute over $20 million of XTAC in the second half of 2026. In summary, we continue to make meaningful progress against our strategic priorities. This quarter, I was particularly excited about the strengthening of our publisher network. Adding Fox News demonstrates the continued strength and growth of our network of exclusive supply. Our soon-to-be-announced expansion with one of our larger existing publishers to full-page monetization is a significant validation of our realized strategy and our expansion beyond native advertising. While we are in the early stages of many of these initiatives, we are encouraged by the momentum we're seeing and believe our disciplined execution reinforces our confidence in returning to sustainable double-digit growth. With that, let's move to Q&A. Operator, can you please open the line for questions?
Operator
Thank you. At this time, we will conduct the Q&A session. As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star 1-1 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star 1-1 again. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Our first call comes from the line of Naved Khan of V. Riley Securities. Your line is now open.
Thanks a lot. Maybe just on the deeper dive, I think last time around you updated 7 million or so daily active users saying maybe just update us on how that user engagement looks like currently, which is the last update that you had. And then on Realize Plus, looks like a good number of advertisers have adopted it. Can you just maybe talk about the advertising budget allocation? And also, I think you mentioned superior ROI and efficiency and spending that goes through Realize Plus, but just maybe put some numbers around it and give us a sense of how that is. Thank you.
Yeah, good morning. Thanks for the question. I can start, Steve. So with regards to Deeper Dive, I would say a few things. First of all, we're about to cross the 10 million kind of users, which is really astonishing growth rates. We launched this product in September of last year, so this is really encouraging to see publishers adopting it, but even more so consumers using it when they come to visit publishers in a growing pace. We're seeing north of 10% of people using Deeper Dive when they land on publisher sites. So if you go to ESSA today, one in 10 or more will type a question or will click on a suggested question and then start engaging with an AI mode on a publisher site which has trusted content. What's even more interesting to me is that we see the reaction from the industry when publishers are thinking about the future. Publishers know that the future is not going to be driven by traditional page views. It's going to be driven by conversations and LLA monetization and a much deeper relationship with consumers that can grow the art pool of their business. And in that future, Taboola plays a much more strategic role because it's more than just a widget on a page. It's more than just visible CPMs and things, and it's more about revolution and AI engagement. So we're seeing publishers choosing Taboola. I mentioned Fox News, which is such an exciting competitive win for us, and there's so much more that are talking to us that I'm excited to share hopefully later in the year. So Deeper Dive is a differentiated kind of position for us in a company. And then when you talk to advertisers, LLM monetization is almost like the next CTV for them. CTV is a more mature market. LLM is at the beginning of it, and it's growing really, really fast. So for agencies and big advertisers to be part of the conversation and monetize that is really critical. And with Deeper Dive, we're getting in the room with agencies and advertisers, and the performance we're seeing for Deeper Dive is out of control. I always joke that I'm sure that when Google launched search ads, I don't know, 20 years ago, they probably were shocked by the gap between a traditional ad to a search ad, and that's what I'm seeing at Taboola. The gap between traditional kind of Taboola monetization, which is great, to what we're doing on Deeper Dive is quite significant. About Realize Plus, I think we shared about 300 advertisers using it, which is, again, good to see that more advertisers are playing with it. We believe, again, that's going to be a big part of our business in the future. if you compare that to Pemex and Advantage Plus for Meta and Google, we think advertisers want that product and the opportunity to improve ROI for them is more significant because we have full control over how it's been utilized. So too early to go much deeper than that, but I'm encouraged by the amount of advertisers using it, and I think much like Google and Meta, this will become a bigger portion of our business.
Operator
Thank you. Our next call is from Bartin Crockett of Rosenblatt. your line is now open.
Okay. Thanks for taking the question. I wanted to maybe explore more about Explore More. Could you tell us a little bit, you said 20 million impact. Is that revenues or extract gross profit or EBITDA? That's just one on the financial. And then second, you know, if you could just give us a sense of the degree to which you have other exposures to things that might be subject to Google kind of quality controls. I was thinking of you guys mainly doing ads on publisher websites not exposed to kind of traffic flows like this. So if you could elaborate on that, that would be helpful.
Yeah, so I can start with the product impact and then Steve, it's clear for the jump in. So we do think this is a one-time event from Google perspective. They made the decision to do it. They kind of executed it faster than we had anticipated. Usually, you know, Google at times will announce something and take months, years to actually do it. This one was faster. You know, I assume it impacted everyone, not just Taboola, but as it relates to us, we had a product that on publisher sites when consumers, you know, clicked back button, a certain experience would come up and show mostly content and some ads. Google deprecated that kind of experience, which impacted in our world something we called Explore More. We did come up with a new product, Next Engage, which is basically aiming to capture a lot of that revenue back in other ways within the policies of Google. So that's being rolled out, and I expect it to create growth in the future. I don't know if it's going to bring back 100% of the Explore More, but I think it has a chance of bringing a lot of it back. But it was a one-time event. It's in the guide, and I don't expect that type of thing to happen again, but of course it's Google.
And in terms of your question, that over $20 million in the second half, that was ex-tech.
And so we would have that in the second half and then in the first half of next year as well?
Correct. Yeah, I mean, that is over $20 million was the second half effect, so it will affect us in the first half from a comparison basis.
Okay. And you guys are also talking about cleaning up some of the secondary publishers. You didn't really size that. Is there any sense of the size, you know, revenue and or XTAC impact of that, or is it just much less material and so not really discrete breakout potential?
Well, I guess what we said is that between that and the ExploreMore, that made up the majority of the shortfall that we had on revenue. So you can kind of get a sense of the impact with what we've given on the ExploreMore plus that. But I think generally speaking, the way we think about that is that's a short-term hit, long-term gain, because ultimately if you have supply in your network that's not performing for advertisers, it hurts your overall advertiser performance, and you probably lose budget. Sometimes you don't even know that you're losing them because of that, but you're losing budget. So while it reduces the short-term revenue, we think it's a positive thing for our network over time, and therefore it should lead to better results in the longer term. So it's a, you know, kind of short-term pain, long-term gain type of situation.
Okay. Okay. And, you know, outside of these kind of discrete actions, just to reiterate, are you, you know, what's your sense of kind of the broader kind of macro support for kind of ad flow across your network, you know, as you look here into the fourth quarter? How are you feeling about the environment?
So generally speaking, the environment has remained relatively stable. So similar to what we've been saying in past quarters, it's not the most robust advertising market you're ever going to see, but it's fairly stable. Like investors, advertisers are looking every day to see if we're at war today or if we're not at war tomorrow and what's going on with inflation. And so there's a lot of, I would say, skittishness out there. But so far, advertisers, especially our performance advertisers, have continued to spend and continue to kind of operate their businesses as usual. So it's been fairly stable. But I think there's a lot of people just watching what's going on to make sure that they're not surprised by something.
All right. That's good for me. Thanks, Barton.
Operator
Thank you. Our next call is from Laura Martin of Needleman Company. Your line is now open. Yeah, just following up a little bit on Barton's traffic, why now?
Why cut this now? And is there more to go in the slow quality? That's my first one.
Yeah. Hi, Laura. So I think the why now is we really do this on an ongoing basis. We're always looking at our network and trying to find parts of the network that are not working for advertisers and cutting it. But Q2 was just a very unusual quarter in that we had a number of publishers grow really large very quickly that we had to cut because they just weren't working for advertisers. So it was an unusual quarter in terms of the volume of this. But the why now is we always try and do this as soon as we find pockets of non-performing supply because you just don't want to be harming your advertisers that way. So we always do it. This quarter was unusual just in terms of the volume because of how fast some of those publishers grew with us.
Okay, great. And then, you know, shares are weak right now, I think in part because of the dependence on Google. So can you just walk through when Google makes a policy change like this 20, really $40 million hit over the next four quarters on Explore More, It sounds, Adam, from your answer earlier that maybe they tell you this is going to happen and then you guys have some time to adjust, but this one just, they did much faster, so you couldn't adjust fast enough. Did I understand how the Google impact works in terms of timing?
Yeah, so you have that correct. So basically Google announced this in April, just before our previous earnings, and so we had heard about it. But usually, Google takes quarters upon quarters to actually implement these things, because usually they want comments from publishers, and they want to, you know, make sure that they're not harming somebody or having secondary effects that they don't, that they hadn't anticipated. So the example I'll give is third-party cookies, which Google announced, what was it, three or four years ago, they were going to eliminate, and then they delayed and delayed and delayed and eventually said they weren't going to. So we heard about it in April, didn't expect it to happen that quickly, so we didn't actually adjust our guidance or anything as a result of it, but then we were surprised, as Adam said, by how fast Google moved on this. So, yes, you're correct about kind of the timing and how that happened. Having said that, as Adam said earlier, I don't know of any other products we have that has that type of dependence on a Google policy. Obviously, our publishers have search traffic from Google, which is a Google dependency, but it's less than 5% of our U.S. page views, so there's less dependency there for us than most. So I'm not aware of any other kind of big exposures we have in that way.
Okay, okay, great. That's helpful. Thank you, guys.
Operator
Our next question comes from James Kopelman of TD Cowan. Your line is now open.
Hi, good morning, and thanks for taking the question. The first one is for Adam. I want to ask about deeper dive and the broader opportunity to capitalize on chatbot engagement. When you look at the broader trends with AI chatbots, how quickly are consumers adopting them or willing to adopt them directly on publisher sites? And what sort of timeline are you contemplating in terms of this new type of engagement becoming a significant driver of both time spent and monetization on publisher sites? It certainly seems like a huge opportunity, but I'm curious how quickly large publishers are moving on this. And are there some advertising verticals where you think publishers will move most quickly or most slowly?
Thanks for the question. So let me start from the end. If I could transition half of Taboola to Deeper Dive traffic now, I would do it. As much of Taboola's traffic, if I could move to Deeper Dive, I would do it, which I suspect is exactly what Google wants to do with Blue Links into Gemini. The CPM opportunity and the monetization opportunity today, and we just got started. This is before innovative advertising units, and this is even more allowing advertisers to target that in more sophisticated ways. It's already now in the realm of five to sometimes 10x. So every thousand impressions that Willis serves today on publisher sites versus every thousand impressions we get on Deeper Dive, it is uncomparable, and it's actually quite shocking. So one, for us and for the industry, I hope it moves as fast as possible. Advertisers wanted to move fast, publishers wanted to move fast, and we as the bridge wanted to move fast. In terms of what we're seeing already, like I mentioned, we're able to convert about 10% of the traffic into DeeperDive once we launch it, which creates immediately almost around 10% revenue growth. So it depends on the publisher. So it's already a creative to the revenue the publisher can make, but it's still small. Our operation now is just how fast can we adopt it, how fast can we move it. And because it's new and publishers are exploring, do they do it on their own? Do they work with us? Editorial concerns they have, it's still fairly new. So some move faster than others. But I already see the impact of us offering that. As an example, I've seen publishers choosing Taboola versus competitors. It's because they know the future is no longer widgets. So they want someone that can help them enter the future, monetize the future, and grow together. So I think it's already making a positive impact as well as the competitive kind of wins that we're having. And you'll see more, I hope, later in the year that we're advanced with. And that also relates to advertisers who want to monetize it. So fast, we were at 70 million users, I think, a few months ago, and now we're at 10 million. And we launched kind of like an ad network about a month ago. So it's a deeper dive kind of network for other LLMs. because we're getting requests from many utility apps and other companies that offer LLM to their users to want us to monetize it for them. You can imagine consumers are not going to have 50 subscriptions, so they want all these LLM services need ads, and nobody wants to put a banner under LLM. So we're unique in our ability to provide advertising that is native and beautiful and relevant and make high CPMs. So I think this can be big, But, you know, we're trying to be always conservative with investors and try to just kind of set expectations and see how it goes.
And then, thanks, Adam. And then I have a follow-up for Steve. I wanted to just go back to the AI topic. How are you thinking about the potential for agentic AI to help drive efficiency gains within Taboola among Taboola employees? I'm curious if you have any color there on any internal beta initiatives that how they may be progressing or what you're learning. And then I have a second question on the 2Q factors. I guess I'll just go ahead and ask that now. I'm just curious, could you separate and quantify the impact of what I would see as three factors? Obviously, you mentioned the Google policy change and the dropping of the underperforming publishers, but I think you also mentioned potentially the impact of search referral declines. I know those were in guidance. I'm just trying to tease out how much impact from each of those three factors and specifically on the search referral declines from AI. I'm curious if that trend worsened during the quarter versus what you saw when you issued 2Q guidance three months ago.
Yeah, so starting with the first question. So in terms of AI efficiency gains within TABUL, We have a lot of initiatives now where we're working on that. We have, you know, I forget what the exact percentage is, but a significantly high percentage of our code now is written or affected by AI. So, obviously, we're getting gains in terms of productivity in our R&D and product management groups from AI. We also have initiatives throughout the rest of the organization to work on automating and streamlining processes using AI. We have people centrally who are working on that with our groups, and we also have people individually within our teams helping to automate processes. So it's exciting. I mean, I do see real opportunities here to have significant efficiency gains, but I think it's a bit too early right now to talk about exactly where it gets to or to give you quantification on that. I'll also say that we're also trying to be cognizant of the fact that it's one thing to get efficiency gains from AI. It's a different thing if that only means that you're then paying Anthropic or somebody the same amount that you saved on your own people. So we're also trying to be smart there. So we're actually working on hosting our own models in-house and doing some things that will keep that cost mitigated because I think companies that aren't thinking about that could be in for a bit of a shock in the future. So working hard at it, I see huge opportunity there, but a bit too early to start talking about specific numbers. In terms of the second part, you mentioned quantifying the different impacts. I guess I'll kind of restate what we've said, and that's kind of all we're offering right now in terms of quantification of the different impacts. But what we said is, you know, if you look at the overall revenue impact or the reduction that we had in our guidance on revenue, the majority of that was from the two factors, Explore More deprecation or the Google policy change that deprecated our Explore More product plus the cleanup of our network. And then we also said that the Explore More was going to be over $20 million of XTAC in the second half. So you can also kind of do some back of the envelope math there to understand what the likely gross revenue on it was. I will tell you that that's a fairly high margin product. So it's not our 35 to 40% that the rest of our business sees. It's a bit higher than that. So when you do your kind of quantification of that, you can assume it's a bit higher margin. Those were the two big impacts. So the third impact that you mentioned, which is the impact on search traffic to publishers from, you know, agentic AI and LLMs, that's a smaller impact for us because, you know, we have seen or we've said in the past that less than 5% of our U.S. network, as an example, is from search. So it's a smaller impact. We are seeing an impact there. So I don't want to say it's nothing, but that's smaller than those other two factors.
Thanks a lot, Steve. I appreciate the color.
Operator
Thank you. Our next question comes from Tyler DiMatteo of VTIG. Your line is now open.
Thanks for taking the question, guys. Appreciate it. I wanted to come back to the publisher point. Can we just talk a little bit about, I guess, the nature of those publishers that you were talking about in the headwind comments and I guess the type and then secondarily I guess how do you kind of think about the mix of publishers here by vertical etc as you look to shift the more premium publishers like I guess obviously things are changing so I'm just curious how you think about that mix and type and then my second question is I if I just kind of look at the geo-breakdown of revenue. It seems like this is entirely an ex-US phenomenon in terms of where the revenue is coming lower. Is that correct? And is there anything else going on there in terms of the geographic breakdown?
Hi, Tyler. Okay, so starting with the first question, so those publishers that we basically removed from our network that we deemed to not have good advertiser performance. Those were international publishers. So they were, I think they were, a lot of them were in the China, greater China region. And, you know, generally speaking, what those publishers are is they have low performing traffic. Now that could be because they have bought traffic or other types of illegitimate traffic. It could also just be that the nature of their traffic is such that they don't have consumers who convert, because frankly, I don't care if it's fraud or if it's just a type of consumer that doesn't convert. If it doesn't work for our advertisers, we really don't want it on our network. So those publishers were international publishers, mostly, largely in the greater China region, and they were, again, low-performing for our network, so we removed them. In terms of your question about kind of the mix of publishers that we're looking for, we all we've always biased towards premium publishers we are always looking for kind of the biggest brand names i mean fox that's one of the reasons we're so excited about fox news because that is a great well i mean depends on where you are in the political spectrum but it's a great brand in the u.s it uh draws in consumers and it is uh it is something that uh you know it's it's a brand you want on your network so we always bias towards that that doesn't mean we always end up or that we never end up with lesser brand names or publishers that don't perform, and that's why we're always looking to clean up our network. In terms of the geo question that you had, like I did mention that the removed publishers were more international, but the impact that we're seeing kind of on revenue from Explore More, you know, the Google policy change, that one is more global, but the network cleanup was more international, if that answers your question.
Okay. Yeah, no, that's helpful. I appreciate you partitioning that for me, Steve. Thank you.
Operator
Thank you. Our next question comes from Brianna Diaz of Citizens. Your line is now open. Great. Thanks so much for taking my question.
So, just going back on the lower quality advertisers, how should we think about the impact of revenue per active advertiser and the number of advertisers in regards to 2Q and maybe if that contributed to the slowdown and in the growth from 1Q to 2Q and how we should be thinking about those two metrics going forward for the remainder of the year. And then just a second question, can you just elaborate on the strategic significance please stand by the program will resume shortly hello can you hear me yeah we can we can hear you I don't know what that was okay thank you the strategic significance of just expanding from individual article placements to monetizing the full suite of inventory feels like that's a big step change and what's the opportunity to expand that to other publishers down the line?
Yep, good question. Thanks. So, first of all, on the first question about scaled advertisers. So, yes, Q2, the growth of especially the average revenue per scaled advertiser, but frankly, also the number of scaled advertisers was impacted by the network cleanup that we did, as well as the Google policy change that deprecated our Explore More product. So, both of those were impacted. Obviously, when you intentionally decide to reduce revenue on your network by cleaning up and removing poor quality publishers, poor performing publishers, that is going to impact your average revenue per advertiser, so it did have an impact. I was pretty happy to see, though, that our number of scaled advertisers still grew 2% year over year because that's, as I've said in the past, having more scaled advertisers means we've got more relationships with advertisers that we can then continue to grow in the future. So it's good to see that. But both that number and the average revenue per scaled advertiser were impacted by those other two factors. Looking forward, what I want to see, and I've said this ever since we started releasing those metrics, I would like to see continued growth in the number. That is probably the best leading indicator for where we're going and how we're doing. so that one I want to see continuously growing. Average revenue per scaled advertiser, as long as it's stable around its current level and not declining a lot, I'm pretty happy with that as well because I've mentioned this in the past, as we add more scaled advertisers, they tend to drag down that average a bit because when they first scale up, they're usually at the small end and then hopefully over time we can grow them. So it's okay with me if that stays relatively stable. I don't want to see declines in it, but I'd like to see it relatively stable as long as we're growing the number of scaled advertisers. That's what I'd like to see as we go forward.
I can hear a second one. So the partnership that I hope to announce quite soon actually is one of our largest publishers in a name you know. And what's interesting to me is, you know, not only the growth, the financial growth, which I mentioned, it's in the realm of it, but three times bigger. It's more about, which basically means that we're sitting on this base of revenue that could be significantly higher, but just upselling up our existing relationship and trust with publishers for the last decade and do a lot more for them. What's interesting here is that you're seeing the industry, there's so much going on. You're seeing publishers basically wanting to have less partners, deeper relationships, less costs, less complexity and more revenue. And because we're already a significant portion of the revenue and we have a lot of direct demand and we have programmatic pipes that are connected, we're in such a unique position to just say, give us everything. In this case, it wasn't even our idea. They came to us. This is a relationship with a very senior person there who suggested that this might be a good idea for both of us and we engage in that, model that, and doing it. And interestingly enough, at the same time, We're now in conversation with other publishers. So I do think this could be an industry kind of change that publishers want to have less partners instead of having five to ten ATT&CK SSPs and DSPs and wrappers and all these names, have one that can just be in a monetization layer for the Internet, which is really my vision for the company. So much like Google owns Search and Facebook owns Social, if we can become the single most important partner for the open web and the monetization economically for the Internet, that's a big place for us to be. So I hope to continue to share those. It's financially meaningful, and we're starting with one of the best names we have as a company.
Helpful. Thank you so much.
Thank you. Your next question comes to a line of Mark Segurowicz with Benchmark. Your line is now open.
Thanks for taking the questions. This is Alex on for Mark. How much of your revenue that you're walking away from is minimum guarantee inventory that you've chosen not to renew? And what is your current revenue exposure to minimum guarantees?
Yeah, thanks for the question. So almost none of that revenue that we walked away from was minimum guarantee. We really use minimum guarantees mostly for premium brand name publishers that you would know, and that rarely ends up being bad traffic or poor performing traffic for our advertisers. So you usually when we do cleanup, it's not minimum guarantee. And in this case, that was true. It was almost no minimum guarantee traffic. And I think this past quarter, we said that about 13% of our attack was paid out under minimum guarantees. So that's where we are as of right now. And obviously, the trend is towards more rev share and less minimum guarantees.
Got it. Thank you. And then question on contribution X-TAC margin. As your revenue base indexes more towards more premium publishers, could you discuss the yield efficiencies you're capturing relative to the potential pressure you're seeing from shifting exposure towards these larger publishers?
Are you asking whether or not going towards premium publishers is going to impact X-TAC margin in some way? Or I guess, you know, how are you? Okay.
Yeah, relative to perhaps some of the yield improvements that you're seeing.
Yeah, understood. So first of all, I think what our belief is, is we've been in a kind of 35% to 40% XTAC margin range for a while. I think that is a good expectation for investors to have going forward is that we should be in that 35% to 40% range. Any given quarter, it could be a little bit higher, a little bit lower, depending on seasonality, affects that quarter, mix of business, et cetera. But I think that's a good expectation. I don't think that that I think first of all we are probably gaining competitiveness as we win publisher deals I think the Fox News signing is a pretty good indicator that we are winning more business from our competitors than we're losing and I think we're we're gaining competitiveness which is a good sign obviously for future exec margins because that is what impacts how much we have to pay to get a publisher is how competitive we are. And I think over time, we expect to become more and more competitive. So we think we have an ability to get higher extract margins in general over time. So now having said that, I still say expect 35 to 40% margins because we also have some business where we're newer. So for instance, the partnership that Adam mentioned with a publisher where we're going to start doing monetizing all of their ad units, all their display and vertical video and everything else versus just their native. That is, we don't know exactly what the margin on that's going to be. It's too early to really know where we're going to get to, but I don't expect it to be necessarily as high as our legacy business out of the gate. So we'll probably need some time to optimize that over time. But even having said that, it's, as Adam said, the gross revenue potential is two to five times what our native is, so even if it's a slightly lower margin, it still has an opportunity to more than double our X-TAC on most of those publishers. So I would say overall, the shift towards premium publishers is not the key factor in our long-term X-TAC margins. It's really how competitive we are, and we think we're gaining there, and we think, therefore, we have an opportunity to do better over time on our X-TAC margin.
Thank you. This concludes the question and answer session. I'd now like to turn it back to Adam Singolda for closing remarks.
Thanks for being us, everyone, this morning. This was an important quote for us. We raised our guidance, again, continue to validate our strategy through major strategic wins, and we're making meaningful progress against our long-term vision. We've bought back approximately 20% of our shares since 2025, and we intend to continue returning the majority of our free cash flow through Sherry purchases. Thank you for your support and we look forward to speaking with all of you and many of you in weeks ahead. Thank you.
Thank you. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect.
