Good afternoon. Thank you for attending today's Informa TechTarget Third Quarter 2025 Financial Results Conference Call. My name is Tamia, and I will be your moderator for today's call. All eyes will be muted during the presentation portion of the call with an opportunity for questions and answers at the end. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. I would now like to pass the conference over to your host, Charlie Rennick, General Counsel. You may proceed.

Thank you, and good afternoon, everyone. The speakers joining us here today are Gary Nugent, our CEO, and Dan Norek, our CFO. Before turning the call over to Gary, we would like to remind everyone on the call of our earnings release process. As previously announced, in order to provide you with an update on our business in advance of the call, we posted a press release to the Investor Relations section of our website and furnished it on an 8K. You can also find these materials at the SEC free of charge at the SEC's website, www.sec.gov. A corresponding webcast, as well as a replay of this conference call, will be made available on the Investor Relations section of our website. Following Gary's remarks, the management team will be available to answer questions. Any statements made today by Informatec target that are not factual, including during the Q&A, may be considered forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements, which are subject to risks and uncertainties, are based on assumptions and are not guarantees of our future performance. Actual results may differ materially from our forecast and from these forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties, including those discussed in the risk factor section of our SEC filing. These statements speak only as of the date of this call, and informant a target undertakes no obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statements in order to reflect events that may arise after the conference call, except as required by law. Finally, we may also refer to certain financial measures not prepared in accordance with GAAP, a reconciliation of certain of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most comparable gap measure to the extent available without unreasonable effort accompanies our press release. With that I'll turn the call over to Gary.

Thank you Charlie and thank you all for joining our call today. I am pleased to report that Q3 of 2025 demonstrated the momentum that we had anticipated following our Q2 results and that we made good progress in unlocking the benefits. So anything to be viewed is a dynamic one. With artificial intelligence and cybersecurity and generally digital transformation, two drivers.

Begin the question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star follow up by one on your telephone keypad. If for any reason at all you would like to remove that question, please press star follow up by two. Again, to ask a question, please press star one. The first question comes from Joshua Riley with Needham. You may proceed.

All right, great. Thanks for taking my questions here, maybe just starting off on one of the last topics you were just talking about there and the whole concept of, you know, driving traffic via search engine optimization related to the AI LLMs. What are you seeing and what have you done? Maybe you can just expand on this a bit more as a company, as, you know, you obviously have to pivot from traditional SEO to the answer engine optimization concept. And, you know, how are you progressing in that? How much more work do you have to do? And what are you seeing in terms of the readership trends as customers or end users ultimately find more answers via the answer engine optimization versus traditional web search?

Yeah, Joshua, I'll obviously hear your voice, and thank you for the question. Well, I think the first thing I would say about that is that as a combined company, our strategy and tactics for attracting audiences and converting them to members are quite diverse. They're very diverse. Less than 50% of the kind of top of the funnel comes from search engines within the business. So we have an array of tactics that we use to drive audiences. And like I mentioned in my note, we've actually seen, although there is a dynamic in the marketplace at the moment, we're actually seeing our active membership increase modestly through the period, which obviously gives us... I think in terms of we're also seeing that the traffic flow is growing and I think we had over 77,000 citations. Interestingly enough, it's not just that we're seeing increased traffic coming from or coming to traffic that actually was not buyers that would have been valued to our membership. Does that make sense, Josh?

That's super helpful and interesting. All right, so moving on, maybe we could dive in on the quarterly progression of revenue that we've seen this year so far. So we know Q1 was depressed due to the integration process. Would you say that Q2 revenues and now Q3 are back to a normalized run rate for the combined business, or were they also depressed somewhat? And the angle I'm trying to get at here is if we look at the sequential implied increase from q3 to q4 for uh total revenue i believe it's roughly uh 15 sequential increase and if i remember correctly in the old days the normal tech target business would have about a 10 sequential increase from q3 to q4 so maybe you could just kind of help us understand uh what's gone on with the revenue trends here year to date i think i think we're i just i would use the kind of word progressive momentum um in the air first and foremost i think we are i mean you ask if it's the run rate i mean And I would say that we are aiming to improve that constantly over time.

But the other thing you need to remember, of course, is that within the combined company in Q4, there is revenue from our Canalys business, the Canalys Forums, which is a series of events that run. So that is also effectively explaining the delta between your traditional 10% and...

Got it. So you recognize the full amount of that revenue maybe for a year's subscription in Q4? Is that kind of the right way to think about it? Or is there one-time, is that event-based revenue?

It's event-based revenue that is one-time and recognizes when the event flows.

Gotcha. Last question for me is, you know, obviously we're talking about AI as an opportunity for your business. Maybe you can speak to what specifically from a product perspective you're doing that could drive some tangible revenue over the next couple years. and really, you know, help us understand better, what are you doing to productize ultimately the AI opportunity for the new tech target?

Yeah, I touched upon this in my opening comments, and I described it as conversational interfaces into our market data and our proprietary audience data, or sorry, our permissioned audience data. And if you think about this, it's really a way we're offering our customers the opportunity to interrogate our data in a way that's a natural language way and what that does is it makes it more actionable it makes it more accessible especially when you're then transitioning from the marketing persona to the sales persona so what you will see increasingly from us and we actually have demonstrations of this is that is how you can actually through a natural language interface through a conversational ai interface interrogate for example our intent data and in And interrogating that intent data, it then gives you a greater sense of the context behind why that particular company or that particular prospect is somebody you should be focusing your attention on and actioning. And that we see as being a major way to make the ability to extract value from our data and lower the barriers to our data.

Understood. All righty. Well, thank you very much.

Thank you. Next question comes from Jason Cryer with Craig Hallam Capital Group. Proceed.

Thank you. This is Cal on for Jason tonight. So, you know, maybe you kind of touched on the call a little bit about seeing some longer and some larger deals, but just curious broadly how you'd characterize the backlog in the pipeline and how that kind of plays into your confidence for some of the accelerating growth trends here in Q4.

Well, I mean, certainly, I mean, on both, you know, given that we've reaffirmed the guidance for the year, So both the pipeline and the backlog supports that, you know, supports that outlook for the year. And generally speaking, we feel confident that we will roll into 2026 with a healthier backlog, given the profile of bookings and revenue through the fourth quarter. I would say both of those are true.

Great. And then, you know, just as a follow-up, can you just kind of provide an update on sort of the unified go-to-market strategy you've had and the success that you're seeing tapping into more spend with your existing large customer base?

This is effectively us organizing ourselves around the largest customers in the industry. I think I've mentioned in the past that about 100, depending upon how you look at it, between 150 and 200 end customers represent about half of the addressable market in the marketplace. Now, we're not focusing on all 150 to 200 at present. We've taken a cross-section of that to prove out this concept, and we've built, effectively, intact teams across the organization. So not just sales, not just SDR, not just customer success, but all of the capability, field marketing and penetrating has some progress.

Thank you.

As a quick reminder, if you'd like to ask a question, please press star one telephone keypad the next question comes from bruce goldfarb with lake street capital markets hey congratulations on the results um just a couple questions from me um are you seeing any changes in sales cycle duration or deal size within priority engine or your subscription subscription offerings as we move into year-end budgets?

Thank you. It's good to hear your voice. I would say no, nothing material changing either in terms of the cycle time on deals or on the average values at that sort of transactional level. No material change.

Thank you. And then can you comment on the pipeline for potential tuck-in acquisitions? Are there adjacencies either in data or workflow tools that could accelerate growth in 26?

At this stage, we are very focused on the aligning and integrating the existing assets within the business and bringing that to bear in the market. That's really our focus is to ensure that we do that well, we do it quickly, we do it well, and that we build a platform for the future. I think it won't be until we roll in.

Great, thank you. Thanks for taking my questions.

Thank you. There are no more questions waiting at this time. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your line.