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Townsquare Media, Inc. Q1 FY2026 Earnings Call

Townsquare Media, Inc. (TSQ)

Earnings Call FY2026 Q1 Call date: 2026-05-11 Concluded

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Speaker-labelled transcript of the call.

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8-K earnings release

Item 2.02 release filed around the call (2026-05-11).

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10-Q filing

The quarterly report covering this quarter (filed 2026-05-11).

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Guidance

from the 8-K filed May 11, 2026
Metric Period Guided Actual
net revenue second quarter of 2026 $114M – $116M
Adjusted EBITDA second quarter of 2026 $24M – $25M
net revenue full year 2026 $420M – $440M
Adjusted EBITDA full year 2026 $87M – $93M

Transcript

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Operator

Good morning, and welcome to the Townsquare Media First Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. As a reminder, today's call is being recorded, and your participation implies consent to such recording. Operator provided instructions to participants. With that, I would like to introduce the first speaker for today's call, Claire Messner, Executive Vice President.

Speaker 1

Thank you, operator, and good morning to everyone. Thank you for joining us today. With me on the call are Bill Wilson, our CEO; and Stuart Rosenstein, our CFO and Executive Vice President. Please note that during this call, we may make statements that provide information other than historical information, including statements relating to the company's future expectations, plans and prospects. These statements are considered forward-looking statements under the safe harbor provision of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from these statements. These statements reflect the company's beliefs based on current conditions but are subject to certain risks and uncertainties, including those that are detailed in the company's annual report on Form 10-K filed with the SEC. During this call, we may reference certain non-GAAP financial measures, including adjusted EBITDA. Such non-GAAP financial measures should be used in conjunction with all the information contained in the quarterly, year-end and current reports available on our website. I would also encourage all participants to go to our corporate website and download our investor presentation, as Bill will reference some of those slides during our discussion this morning. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Bill Wilson.

Thank you, Claire, and thank you all for joining us today. It's great to speak with you this morning. We're pleased to share our first quarter results with you today, which demonstrate the strength of our digital advertising platform and validate our digital-first local media strategy with a focus on local markets outside of the Top 50. We are proud to share that our first quarter results met the guidance that we provided on our last call and that we're currently seeing ongoing improvement in digital advertising trends and pacing in Q2 and the back half of 2026. And as a result of our digital-first strategy, we are also reaffirming the full year net revenue and adjusted EBITDA guidance that we provided on our last earnings call. By now, it should be very clear that Townsquare has transformed from a legacy broadcast company into a Digital First Local Media Company and that our digital platform and digital execution set us apart from others in local media. In 2025, approximately 55% of our company's total net revenue and 56% of our total segment profit was generated from our digital solutions. In the first quarter of 2026, our digital revenue grew to be a very significant 59% of our total net revenue in the quarter, an all-time high. And as highlighted on Slide 10, it is roughly 2x our competitors, who on average have only 30% of their revenue coming from digital sources. Even more importantly, our digital profit contributed a very significant 63% of our total profit in the first quarter, also an all-time high. As we have consistently stated for many years, digital is and digital will continue to be Townsquare's growth engine and the area where we focus the bulk of our investment capital going forward, consistent with our strategy of being a Digital First Local Media Company focusing on markets outside the Top 50 in the United States and further differentiating us from others in local media. Now let's dive into our fastest-growing business, digital advertising, which we call Townsquare Ignite, the larger of our two digital segments. As I stated on our last call, our digital advertising net revenue increased high single digits in the first quarter, with revenue increasing plus 7% over the prior year, a significant improvement from 2025's digital advertising growth of approximately plus 2%. Our first quarter digital advertising revenue growth of plus 7% was driven by the same trends that we have seen for the past several quarters and have also discussed at length previously: strong digital advertising related to our direct-to-client sales and declines in our indirect revenue, also known as remnant revenue, which will moderate in Q3. The strong growth of our direct-to-client sales is made up of two revenue streams: number one, our programmatic digital advertising platform; and number two, the direct local sales of our owned and operated, or O&O, digital properties, both of which are performing quite well. First, our digital programmatic business, which made up approximately 65% of the Digital Advertising segment's 2025 revenue, delivered a very impressive and strong first quarter result of plus 21% year-over-year. We believe that this part of our business has very strong organic growth opportunities, supported by our best-in-class digital offering, strong industry tailwinds and an excellent leadership team. We expect it will continue to be our primary growth driver in 2026 and beyond. Our third-party media partnership model, which is a component of our programmatic business, has been progressing quite well since its beta launch in early 2024. This strategy will be a meaningful component of our digital advertising growth in future years. In 2025, media partnership revenue was approximately $6 million, and we had six local media partners. In Q1, we roughly doubled revenue from Q1 2025 and for the full year are on track to approximately double the $6 million we generated in 2025. As a reminder, through this capital-light model, we partner with other local media companies and handle all the major components of their digital advertising campaigns, including managing the creative, buying and optimizing the inventory, providing customer support for the digital campaigns and, importantly, training our partner sales teams to sell our solutions. Therefore, we can enter new markets to offer programmatic digital advertising solutions without having to acquire radio broadcast assets to do so, freeing up our capital for other purposes. I expect that in four years, this division will grow to be $50 million in revenue for Townsquare at an approximately 20% profit margin. Ultimately, our goal with this initiative is to become the chosen provider of digital programmatic advertising to broadcasters and digital agencies in local markets outside of major cities. On our last earnings call, we announced that we were up to 11 partners to start 2026, and I'm pleased to share that since then, we have added two more partners. Looking ahead to the second quarter, our programmatic digital advertising business continues to fire on all cylinders with revenue expected to be up over 20% year-over-year again. Our local teams are selling digital advertising better than ever, while at the same time, our media partnership division is performing extremely well, and as I noted previously, is on pace to nearly double revenue in 2026. Second, the direct sales of our local O&O digital assets, which includes our local salespeople selling the inventory of our own 400-plus local websites and mobile apps, was up plus 10% in Q1 2026 as expected and continues to show consistent and strong growth in Q2. We owe our success here to the sophisticated digital advertising solutions that have been developed by our skilled digital product and engineering team. The hard work of our local content teams is continuing to drive our audience even in the face of AI search traffic-related headwinds, and of course, the dedication of our local sales teams. Revenue generated from remnant inventory on our own mobile apps and websites, as I outlined on numerous previous earnings calls, declined negative 40% year-over-year to approximately $12 million in 2025 from approximately $20 million in 2024. Our expectation remains the same as we shared on our last call for the full year: remnant indirect revenue will decline from approximately $12 million in 2025 to approximately $9 million in 2026, with most of the year-over-year decline occurring in the first seven months of 2026. As a reminder, this approximately $3 million year-over-year revenue decline is close to 100% profit margin for Townsquare. I'd like to emphasize that remnant revenue represents a small portion, approximately 8% of our total digital advertising revenue today. In the first quarter of 2026, indirect remnant digital advertising revenue declined negative 37% year-over-year, but importantly, very importantly, grew sequentially over Q4 2025, a very positive and important development. Thankfully, our strong direct digital advertising revenue growth more than offset the declines in this quarter. Looking ahead to Q2, we expect similar year-over-year remnant revenue declines to Q1, yet, importantly, stability, if not slight growth, quarter-over-quarter in Q2. I'd like to take the time to highlight why we are seeing our digital audience stabilizing even in the face of lower search engine referrals. A meaningful portion of our audience and traffic is driven by social media as well as direct visits to our websites from our loyal audience, traffic from our local e-mail newsletters and our mobile app alerts and other sources of organic traffic. We're leaning into this, developing new traffic strategies, new audience strategies, building new content publishing tools and reinvigorating our team. We shared early promising signs on our last call that in January, unique visitors increased month-over-month, reaching our highest audience level since July of 2025. That trend, I'm happy to report, continued through the first quarter as our audience of 25 million unique visitors on average per month in Q1 was larger than our audience in Q4, which was approximately 20 million. This is an early proof point that even with the impact of AI on search engine traffic, we are in a very differentiated position given our focus on hyperlocal content, coupled with the power of social media platforms to stop the decline and, we believe, grow our online audience once more, just like we have in Q1. As I highlighted earlier, the majority of our digital advertising segment is our programmatic business. In addition to directly selling our owned and operated properties, which continues to deliver very strong and healthy profitable revenue margins, we expect Q2 digital advertising revenue overall will continue to perform incredibly well with growth accelerating from Q1's plus 7%, all due to the strength of the results from our direct local sales teams. We are still very confident in our full year digital advertising revenue forecast of high single-digit growth given our momentum today. At Townsquare Interactive, our Subscription Digital Marketing Solutions business, we once again delivered very strong profit margins in the first quarter despite anticipated revenue declines. In the first quarter, Townsquare Interactive revenue declined exactly as I expected and outlined on our last call at negative 8% year-over-year, driven by slower overall sales velocity due to a smaller sales force. However, first quarter segment profit margins expanded by 1.5 percentage points year-over-year, driven largely by three factors: one, the restructuring of our customer service model in 2023 that allows us to grow more efficiently; two, changes to our sales structure at the end of 2024 and early 2025 that have led both to a temporarily smaller sales team, but importantly, a more productive sales team with much higher ROI; and three, efficiencies gained from AI. We are very proud of how our Townsquare Interactive team has embraced AI and leveraged its usage for meaningful cost savings and improvements in efficiency across the business, from helping to create websites to assisting with customer service. In the meantime, we remain committed to our plan to rebuild our sales team to prior levels, but acknowledge that it will take some time to do so. We expect Q2 revenue at Townsquare Interactive will decline in line with Q1's performance at approximately negative 8% year-over-year. Yet, importantly, quarter-over-quarter, the revenue decline will be much smaller and expected to be in the low single digits at approximately negative 2% quarter-over-quarter. We are also reiterating our belief that based on our current forecast, we may see a return to month-over-month revenue growth as early as Q3 2026, which I shared on our last call as well. In the meantime, we expect that strong profit margins will continue throughout 2026, just as we delivered in 2025. Importantly, we believe the addressable market for Townsquare Interactive, which in our estimation is nearly 9 million target customers, remains as attractive as ever. Now turning to our third and final business segment, Broadcast Radio. As you are all aware, at Townsquare, we view local radio as an extremely valuable asset with significant cash flow properties, unparalleled consumer reach and an important local connection to our audience and our clients. However, radio is not a growth driver for Townsquare. In 2025, broadcast advertising net revenue, excluding political, declined negative 8% year-over-year. We saw a slight moderation in those declines in the first quarter, with broadcast net revenue declining negative 6.9%, excluding political, and negative 6.6% in total. In Q2 2026, we are currently forecasting similar year-over-year declines for ex-political broadcast revenue. Despite broadcast revenue declines, we outperformed the industry in our broadcast business again in the first quarter, gaining local and national broadcast market share according to Miller Kaplan estimates. With our differentiated local content and strong local brands, we believe that we will continue to gain broadcast and total market share across our market footprint, while also generating a solid profit as we carefully manage expenses to maintain a strong broadcast profit margin. In the long term, it is our belief that our differentiated digital platform will deliver strong growth to offset future core broadcast revenue declines. And now I'll hand it over to Stu to discuss our financial results and guidance in more detail. All yours, Stu, take it away.

Thank you, Bill, and good morning, everyone. It's great to speak to you today. We're very pleased to report that our first quarter results met our revenue and adjusted EBITDA guidance. And as Bill highlighted, in Q1, 63% of our segment profit was generated from our two digital divisions, the highest profit percentage ever for Townsquare. First quarter net revenue declined 1.9% year-over-year to net revenue of $96.8 million within our guidance range of $96 million to $98 million. First quarter adjusted EBITDA declined 9.7% year-over-year to $16.4 million, which was also within our guidance range of $16 million to $17 million. We had a very impressive quarter at Townsquare Ignite, our digital advertising segment, where revenue growth rates rebounded sequentially very significantly from a slight year-over-year decline in Q4 2025 to strong year-over-year revenue growth of 6.8% in Q1 of 2026. As Bill noted, looking ahead to the second quarter, we expect digital advertising revenue growth to further strengthen and be even higher than Q1's growth rate. As expected and as we previously projected, Townsquare Interactive, our Subscription Digital Marketing Solutions segment's Q1 net revenue declined 7.9% year-over-year. We are pleased to share that as expected and consistent with recent performance, Townsquare Interactive segment profit margins increased year-over-year to 33.7%. We remain very confident in our expectation that profit margins will be in line with 2025 profit margins for the remainder of 2026 due to the efficiencies and cost savings that have been implemented. Broadcast advertising net revenue declines moderated slightly in the first quarter as we foreshadowed on our last earnings call. In the first quarter, total broadcast revenue declined 6.6% and 6.9%, excluding political revenue, each as compared to the prior year. We believe that this trend will continue in the second quarter as well. This is compared to the consistent negative 8% ex-political broadcast revenue declines we experienced in each quarter of 2025. Broadcast segment profit margins dipped to approximately 19% in the first quarter, in part due to revenue declines and in part due to seasonality. Our first quarter broadcast profit margins are typically the lowest for the year. We expect that our Broadcast segment profit margins will return to the mid- to high-20s for the remainder of the year, averaging out to the mid-20s for the full year, consistent with 2025 profit margins. Our first quarter net income was $3 million or $0.16 per diluted share as compared to a net loss of $0.12 per diluted share in the prior year period. We'd like to remind you that any benefit or provision for income taxes included in the face of the income statement is for GAAP financial statement purposes only. We maintained significant tax attributes, including approximately $121 million of federal NOL carryforwards and other substantial tax shields related to the tax amortization of our intangible assets. We continue to believe that we will not be a material cash taxpayer until approximately the end of 2028. One of our business model's strongest attributes is our consistent cash flow generation. In the first quarter, we generated $4.2 million of cash flow from operations, more than the cash flow from operations generated in the first quarters of both 2025 and 2024. We ended the quarter with $457 million of debt outstanding and $2 million of cash on our balance sheet. As of March 31, our net leverage was 5.27x. I'd like to remind you that since our term loan is a floating rate instrument, each 0.25 percentage point interest cut translates to roughly $1.1 million of annualized interest reduction based on our current debt balance. As always, our number one priority is to invest in our local businesses through organic internal investments that support our revenue and profit growth, particularly our digital growth engine. We plan to continue to invest in our digital product technology, sales, content and support teams, specifically in our Townsquare Interactive and Townsquare Ignite businesses to maintain our strong competitive advantage in markets outside the Top 50 cities. In addition, we plan to use our excess cash flow to reduce our debt through both mandatory and voluntary debt repayments and, of course, support our high-yielding dividend. Our Board has approved our next quarterly dividend payable on August 3 to shareholders of record as of July 27. The dividend of $0.20 per share equates to $0.80 per share on an annualized basis and implies an annual payment of approximately $14 million based on the share count and a dividend yield of approximately 12% based on our current share price. As we mentioned on our last earnings call, it is both management's and the Board's belief that our current share price does not reflect the inherent value of Townsquare. Therefore, we are not concerned about the implied dividend yield as we believe it will come down as and when our business is better understood by investors and our business returns to growth. Turning now to the second quarter. We expect second quarter net revenue to be between $114 million and $116 million, which at the midpoint is approximately flat on a year-over-year basis. We expect second quarter adjusted EBITDA to be between $24 million and $25 million. For the full year, we are reaffirming our expectations that our revenue will be between $420 million and $440 million and that adjusted EBITDA will be between $87 million and $93 million. Embedded in this guidance is forecasted political revenue of approximately $8 million, which is in line with the $7.5 million of political revenue we received during the 2022 election cycle. And with that, I will now turn the call back over to Bill.

Thank you, Stu, and thanks to everyone for taking the time to be updated on Townsquare's first quarter results this morning. We greatly appreciate it. Each and every year, our business mix continues to shift to be a greater percentage of both digital profit and revenue, as I highlighted earlier. In Q1, 59% of our total revenue was generated from our differentiated digital solutions and, importantly, 63% of our total profit was digital profit, each our highest percentages ever. We want to reiterate that we are very confident in the future success of our differentiated digital platform, including the following highlights to start 2026. Number one, our digital advertising revenue has returned to high single-digit revenue growth in Q1 and will only strengthen throughout the year due to the consistent strength of our programmatic offering and the success of our media partnership division as well as the strong revenue growth of the direct sales of our local digital O&O properties and the stabilization of our online audience and remnant revenue that I outlined earlier. Number two, Townsquare Interactive's very strong profit margins, coupled with our current forecast of sequential revenue improvement in the back half of the year. And number three, lastly and most importantly, we are confident in our ability to build shareholder value for our investors through long-term net revenue, profit and cash flow growth, net leverage reduction and consistent future quarterly dividend payments at the current rate. Our success is a direct result of the passion, creativity and relentless execution of our team members across the company. From our local market teams who continue to build deep connections with their communities and deliver results for our clients to our digital product and engineering teams who are driving innovation and advancing our platform forward each day, I am continually impressed by what this team accomplishes together. We remain confident in our strategy, focused on execution and are very excited about the opportunities ahead. With that, operator, at this time, please open the line for any and all questions.

Operator

Operator provided instructions to participants. Your first question comes from Patrick Sholl with Barrington Research.

Speaker 4

I was just wondering if you could dive into a little bit more on some of the drivers that you see contributing to potentially improving month-over-month revenue in Interactive starting, I guess, in the second half of the year.

Patrick, thank you for the question. Yes, I actually just spent a week down with the team in Charlotte for Townsquare Interactive, where they're headquartered along with their secondary office in Phoenix. As I talked about eight weeks ago on our prior call for year-end 2025, we're seeing continued improvement in our churn. So our churn, as I mentioned on our last call, was returning to our historically low levels and has only improved in Q1 from last year. And as we're sitting here today in Q2, it's pacing even better than Q1. That's extremely good. As we outlined on our last call, the team is deploying a lot of internal tools for efficiency that are utilizing AI, so that's helping our profit margin. As I said earlier, our profit margin in Q1 expanded to 33.7% versus Q1 of 2025 of 32.5%. So we're able to scale more effectively. We're really serving our customers better than we ever have. Therefore, the churn is coming down. Our only hurdle, which I've outlined over the last several calls, is getting back to the prior level of our sales personnel at Townsquare Interactive. We outlined the changes we made at the beginning of 2025 which created a lot more revenue per salesperson, but we shrunk our sales team over the course of 2025. We're now building that up, but it is going to take time. So the combination of lower churn, greater efficiency in utilizing AI tools and growing back our sales team, we expect to see month-over-month revenue growth in the back half of 2026. As I outlined in the prepared remarks, in Q2, we expect to decline again about negative 8% year-over-year as we did in Q1 from a revenue perspective. But on a sequential quarter-over-quarter basis, you'll see improvement to about negative 2% revenue decline quarter-over-quarter. So hopefully that gives you a sense, Patrick, why we're so confident. I definitely walked away from that trip last week incredibly confident not only about the back half of this year, but more importantly, as we look over the next three to five years for Townsquare Interactive. I'll turn it back to you for any follow-up questions.

Speaker 4

Sure. I was curious about the reduction in churn that you mentioned. Can you talk about what you're seeing with regard to the macro environment, such as increases in energy prices? Also, I realize that you're utilizing AI tools in the selling process, but to what extent can potential clients utilize AI tools for some of the services and how is that contributing to churn as well?

Yes. So, as you know, but for the benefit of everyone on the call, we redid our entire customer service model starting in 2023 that really bled into and continued in 2024. Our satisfaction rate from our customers—the speed and quality with which we complete tasks they request—has improved. The marketing we're doing includes a lot more outbound e-mail and text-based marketing, even digital advertising, utilizing the data they capture in the CRM that we deployed a few years ago. All of those components are helping customer satisfaction, which is bringing down churn. We moved from a one-to-one model to a pooled model. That was disruptive in the beginning and churn spiked in 2023 and 2024, but now we're back to historically low levels. Q1 churn was better than 2025 and as we're sitting here in May, Q2 is pacing to be even lower than Q1. Regarding the macro environment: clearly it's having an impact, particularly in advertising. We're seeing advertising being placed later in the month or booked for shorter runs. That's apparent to us in the broadcast side as well as our digital advertising side. Even though our digital advertising is going very well from a direct-sold perspective, energy price increases are impacting small- and medium-sized businesses, and we're seeing that. With all of that said, we mentioned on the broadcast side we had slight moderation in the decline. Last year, we declined negative 8% ex-political throughout the year, and that moderated to negative 6.9% ex-political in Q1. We are hearing from our customers—particularly as the conflict in the Middle East continues and gas prices continue to rise month-over-month—that they are watching advertising budgets and expenses overall. They're still spending, but they may be booking closer to the flight time and spending for shorter durations. We certainly hope that a resolution to the conflict would be a tailwind for our advertising businesses. It really hasn't meaningfully affected Townsquare Interactive. The advertising component is quite different from the digital marketing solutions component. We expect that, if the macro environment stabilizes, it would be a tailwind particularly for our advertising business, both digital and broadcast. I'll turn it back to you, Patrick.

Operator

Operator provided instructions to participants. Your next question comes from Michael Kupinski with NOBLE Capital Markets.

Michael Kupinski Analyst — Noble Capital Markets

A couple of questions here. Your white-label digital media partnership business seems to have gained some traction, but so far it's been with some smaller operators. Do you believe that the service could be attractive to larger station groups? Or do you think it's more likely that you will see more singles and doubles from that partnership arrangement?

Thank you, Michael. Yes, we couldn't be more proud of our programmatic business. As we outlined, 65% of our total digital advertising is programmatic, and in Q1 that grew 21% year-over-year. Even excluding media partnerships, we'd be close to 20% growth. Shaun, who has been leading that with Todd, has done an amazing job. We had six partners in 2025; last year we grew from $1 million in 2024 to $6 million in 2025 from partnerships. Based on current pacing, I think we'll more than double that $6 million in 2026, and we operate that at roughly a 20% profit margin. As you noted, many of the partners to date are smaller operators. Some of them are in Top 50 markets, which are not the footprint of our owned stations and digital footprints, and we've had great success in those Top 50 markets with partners. Confidentially, we can't discuss all conversations, but our pipeline is dozens of local media companies—primarily radio, but also television, outdoor, print and other legacy media companies—who have seen what we've done and heard from partners about the results. So our inbound interest has grown nicely. To your question about larger media companies: yes, there are opportunities. Our solutions work for all sizes of operators. While we haven't announced a very large partner with 70-plus properties, the platform and solutions we're deploying for smaller operators clearly work for larger operators too. We're excited about Q2 pacing: programmatic is up over 20% again and our direct-sold owned-and-operated business, which was up 10% in Q1, is trending nicely in Q2 as well. So our digital advertising is firing on all cylinders, and we couldn't be more excited about media partnerships as well as our own organic efforts in that space. I'll turn it back to you, Michael.

Michael Kupinski Analyst — Noble Capital Markets

Yes. Bill, you indicated that you're in the Top 50 markets now via partnerships, and historically you've said you wouldn't play in that area. Can you tell us more about the opportunities you're seeing in some of the Top 50 markets? Is that now an area you feel comfortable playing in?

Yes. Thank you, Michael. You're correct that historically we focused on markets outside the Top 50 for our owned footprint. However, the partners we've worked with in Top 50 markets—like Steel City and others—have seen strong penetration and digital growth attributable to our programmatic solutions. In larger markets we sometimes see larger average client spends per month than in smaller markets, so obviously that's attractive. Our solutions work in Top 50 markets, and they have worked well for partners there. From an acquisition standpoint, our stance remains that we prefer markets outside the Top 50 where we feel more differentiated across local radio, our O&O digital content and Townsquare Interactive solutions. So we are comfortable serving Top 50 partners and seeing success there, but we remain selective on acquisitions and will focus on markets outside the Top 50 for potential station acquisitions. I hope that provides color. I'll turn it back to you, Michael.

Michael Kupinski Analyst — Noble Capital Markets

First of all, congratulations on executing your digital strategy. On your O&O digital advertising in Q1 and outlook, it's pretty impressive given reports that digital advertising is slowing for some radio operators. How much visibility do you have into the second half on digital advertising demand trends, particularly from your local advertisers?

I appreciate that, Michael. We're quite pleased with our digital advertising growth. For the back half of the year, we're seeing even greater strength in Q2 than Q1 across programmatic and owned-and-operated channels. As I mentioned earlier, our online audience grew from approximately 20 million unique visitors in Q4 to 25 million unique visitors in Q1, which has helped our performance. That improvement also helped mitigate remnant decline headwinds, though remnant remains a small portion of digital advertising revenue. We project owned-and-operated digital growth to be substantially higher in the back half of the year than the front half, which supports overall digital advertising growth. We expect to be stronger in Q2 and the back half of the year than Q1, despite Q1's plus 7% growth—a real acceleration versus last year's average 2% growth. So we have good visibility and momentum into the back half of 2026.

Michael Kupinski Analyst — Noble Capital Markets

If I could slip one more in: on Townsquare Interactive, where are you in terms of getting your sales force to your steady-state level? What percent of your goal are you at this point?

We still have quite a ways to go. We recently increased the size of our recruiting team. At our low point, our sales force was down roughly 40% versus historical levels. We expect not to get back to prior levels until 2027. That said, we are incrementally rebuilding the sales team, churn has improved, and revenue per sales rep remains higher than historical norms. Because of that combination—lower churn, improving sales headcount and greater rep productivity—we have the opportunity in the back half of 2026 to see month-over-month revenue growth. I'm very confident about the next three to five years for Townsquare Interactive. We expect to see more of that performance evident in 2027 and beyond. Also, as you know, 63% of our total profit is currently driven by our two digital businesses and 59% of total revenue comes from them—both the highest ever. We're feeling very well positioned from an organic standpoint and excited about the pipeline of media partners and our momentum right now.

Operator

There are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call over to Bill for closing remarks.

Thank you, operator, and thank you all for joining us this morning to hear about not only our Q1 results, but importantly, how we're looking at the full year as well as the next few years. As Stu said, we had more cash flow from operations in Q1 2026 than we did in Q1 2025 or Q1 2024. We're feeling quite confident about how well we're situated for not only this year but the next several years. I'm really proud of our Townsquare team. The innovation, the momentum and the excitement that the team is building is remarkable. I just want to thank them and thank you for joining us this morning and look forward to regrouping in a few months and updating you on the back half of the year and how that's coming together for us. Feeling quite confident. I hope everybody has a great day.

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes your conference call for today. We thank you for participating and ask that you please disconnect your lines.