Member Info for SP180

Hey Dawg, I’m well thanks, I hope you are too. I really should reach out to our friend Andy I haven’t spoken to him in years.
Rusty et al, thanks I hope you are all well.

As i’ve said I have continued to hold throughout, post YuMe was hard to stomach and then following the TAP acquisition it became a complete mattress stock for me. I didn’t rate the TAP business having seen commentary suggesting industry insiders couldn’t work out how it was achieving the performance metrics it was. As such I would speculate that there may have been some validity to the suit, having said that TAP has fast become an immaterial contributor to the revenue and suspect we are past the worst of the drop off there with the volumes having been drastically reduced.

The fact Ofer has managed to integrate multiple companies in a messy and distressed state while managing the decline of mobile performance revenue, pulling off the Unruly deal at a valuation that shocked the industry and doing so while keeping investor sentiment high is very respectable in my opinion and I look forward to seeing what he can achieve in smoother waters with revitalised optimism.

STT,

My post count was >200 but posts under RTHM have disappeared; a search on ADVFN will show other investors referencing posts I made in 2017. I had a small investment in BLNX in 2013 after the blatant bear raid I attended the 2014 AGM and every subsequent AGM to better understand the journey of the company and industry. I topped up along the way to the present day with a long term buy and hold strategy. Unlike you my M.O. is transparent. What's your point?

I don’t know why you have got such a hard-on for elections, other than ’20 where digital ad spend grew by low single digits, YOY since records began global digital ad spend has increased by a double digit %. Total global digital ad spend was predicted to be $330B as of June ’20.

The prediction for US political ad spend was $6.89B with TV taking $4.55B and digital $1.34B. Of that digital spend Facebook and Google were predicted to take 77.6% of that leaving $300MM for everyone else. Source eMarketer.

As it turned out spend beat expectations and was $8.5B with broadcast taking 49.3% and digital 24.5% ($2.82B), on the same assumed split between the duopoly and the rest it would leave $466MM for everyone else. Bottom line is ’20 US political digital ad spend was <1% of global digital ad spend in a year that saw slower growth due to the pandemic and spend has increased YOY regardless of elections.

YuMe, boy was that one ****ty deal. I said I wasn’t going to reminisce but I believe 1R investors could have got to where we are today with significantly less dilution and destruction. Investors close to the company can probably work out my views from the YuMe F4 timetable. I won’t say any more on that, it’s split milk under the bridge.

As Tricky highlighted you fail to comprehend that regulation and challenges are good for scaled players in an industry, it creates speed bumps but it also separates the wheat from the chaff and increases the boundaries to entry. Those left standing reap the rewards. Zuckerberg has been crying out for more regulation because he knows there is always the possibility another kid in their dorm room could come along to challenge him like he did to MySpace, regulation would make that much more difficult.

CTV is nascent and currently represents c. $8B out of $330B of digital spend. But it’s growing at 100% YOY relative to total spend that is predicted to grow at high single digits going forwards (as it continues to take market share from linear). It also commands significantly higher CPM’s between $20 and $40. With that, as it always has, fraud follows the money and therefore it’s vital the inventory is sold through PMP’s and programmatic direct where quality assurances are in place. Only a moron would buy CTV in the open marketplace.

If you stopped looking at this company and industry Q by Q you would see how the landscape is maturing. This isn’t jam it’s scotch and after a decade in the barrel the industry is starting to produce some fruity flavours

Hey All,

Nice to see there are still so many LTHs still posting and Dawg coming back over the pond.

I haven’t posted since the ‘18 AGM when Gordon Gekko had taken control and spent the AGM playing on his phone. Which in my opinion was real low point for 1R investors, I could elaborate on my views but they’re somewhat conjecture, likely highly controversial and probably don’t serve great purpose taking a trip down memory lane.

I do think Ofer has been fortunate or lucky in acquiring the scale of YuMe, RhythmOne and Tremor at a turning point for the industry though I think his focus and strategy of utilising and strengthening these assets as well as making them lean has so far been excellent. As standalone entities I believe all three would have struggled. Unruly was a fantastic complimentary deal.

Like many other posters I’m frustrated by STT’s acceleration of negative posting and repetitive drivel. Not that I have an issue with contrarian views I’d welcome more of them but STT has demonstrated he doesn’t understand the industry, he doesn’t understand the context of the ‘news flow’ he keeps posting and has grinded his axe so much he’s left holding the stub of the handle.

Each to their own regarding filtering him or anyone else but if investors wish to respond equally they should have the right to do so without criticism. All I know is that he once held a share certificate in RTHM which puts previous conjectures that he was a disgruntled employee ect to bed. While his drivel will make zero impact to the long term direction of the share price I also know that his opinions have affected sentiment of individual investors. Either he has been trading this short or he lost so much money he's deranged.

As far as discontinuing RTHM products, if he actually understood the companies statements he would realise that Ofer is not operating a holding company and has been quick to integrate all of the assets with Tremor being the DSP going forwards, Rhythm being the exchange and DMP and Unruly being the SSP. All too often adtech M&A results in companies running multiple platforms or attempting to stitch them together. Will be interesting to see how MGNI integrate SpotX.

I’ve put together my thoughts on the topics below in a 1500 word pdf as to not spam the board.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/6s4bm8htng15259/sp180-trmr.pdf?dl=0

- Ad tech Bubble or Consolidation & Spend Driving Revaluation
- Walled Gardens Vs Independents and the fall of DSPs
- Cookies, UID2, ICO
- Some interesting screen shots from the investor presentation

GW, Yeah I agree though it's not started to slow as yet... In Oct '14 Quantcast had Burst ranked at 7 in the US with a reach of 146M; my point is there's always been significant scale and my main take-away from the CMD was that the main opportunity was monetising more of the 80% of impressions that fell through the cracks (and selling more premium units in place of conventional). I completely agree with Shroder that it's great to see the stats climbing but ultimately the conversion is far more important. I generally don't pay that much attention to Comscore or Quantcast because I'm not convinced fluctuations have that much of a bearing on monetisation, that we can extract from the numbers anyway (though I must admit the trajectory in the scale at the minute is pretty significant). But I am more encouraged with what they have done with the exchange and the calibre of partners on the demand side they have signed up.

I refer back to the write-up I did and here are Dan's comments (from my notes) surrounding big data Multi-screen is the way Blinkx are increasingly selling today so they can follow a user group / segment across screens via data profiling, so for example a gender within an age profile with a specific interest, and Blinkx can use all of the formats to achieve the campaigns goals. Cross-Screen is following a specific individual across devices tracking them discretely from their mobile to desktop to connected TV etc, it is very nascent within the industry but is the direction of the industry and is the main focus from a product perspective that is in current development. From an objective stand point Dan feels they are well placed within the industry to achieve a true cross screen solution from a big data perspective though was not willing to go into specifics of what goes into the product for commercial reasons. Here's a old but none-the-less interesting white-paper on cookie duplication and people by Quantcast. https://www.quantcast.com/white-papers/quantcast-cookie-corrected-audience-white-paper.pdf But getting back to the original topic; personally I think Burst has always reached c. 130M US people, AllMedia added an additional c.25M US people (maybe some cross over) and that is what 1R has been reporting lately. The confusion IMO is coming from Quantcast referring to uniques in an untraditional manor (as multiple devices of a distinct user), where some people including me took uniques to refer to people. So the 160M people Quantcast state includes the 150M people 1R states; the overspill and continuing growth of people/unique-users is coming from the 3rd party supply that is going into the RMax exchange through partnerships. I don't believe what we are seeing is what management saw in August (most of it yes) while the recent upward trajectory has come from hidden data you have to add that back at the AGM a number of the integrations were at early stages with unknown time lines and these I believe have subsequently been filtering through. You can view the people numbers via a widget http://widget.quantcast.com/p-59TntzuqummDw/9?&timeWidth=30&daysOfData=30 I agree with Becky the page views are a better metric to follow from a monetisation perspective, but the metric that would be of benefit to investors following in real-time would be the number of impressions going through the exchange which we can't and even if we could we still wouldn't know the conversion rate or the price tag associated to the impression. I very much look forward to what Dan puts in his write up on Quantcast/ traffic measurement and the angles he takes. I wrote a lengthy email highlighting the areas of confusion surrounding Quantcast, how some of the metrics (from the company) are understood, arrived at and the value to the observer. Hopefully his post will cover some of the questions that have arisen.

I think there is quite possibly a loss in translation here between the way in which management and quantcast refer to as unquies. Quantcast refers to uniques as 'unique devices' opposed to 'unique users'. If you look at the RNS for AllMedia it states "25M unique users per month"; this is clearly referring to people. The RNS for Burst was "Burst's audience of over 130 million unique users (source: comScore Media Metrix December 2010)". Add the two together and you arrive at approx 150m unique USERS. This would bring us to the c. 50% reach of the US mentioned in the AGM and where it refers to '150M Uniques' on RMax it also states under it "significant owned and controlled inventory with first look control" so I would take that metric to be referring to the reach within the 1R Network (excluding 3rd party supply)? As Becky mentioned uniques would normally be understood as the number of distinct individuals visiting a site within a given period regardless of how often they visit. (that's not to say that analytics platforms have served the metric well more recently). I guess given the nature of the multi-device connected world today it makes that measurement more difficult/complicated. You could visit the BBC website on your phone app on the commute to work, on your desktop at work and your tablet when you get home. That's one unique USER but three visits from unique DEVICES and IOT is only going to make this more complicated. GA has counted multiple devices as different visitors but have recently rolled out a new feature called 'UserID' to combat the issue (of counting people more than once). I think the whole issue is similar to V&V where you have the respected heavy weights arguing over the definition of 'fraud' etc and the lack of clarity behind the methodology and algorithms used to arrive at their individual conclusions. And the result being different conclusions for the same metric, poor standards governing definitions and mass confusion. How accurate is the people measure? Who knows but they are pretty well placed to harness big data to make estimations, the very premise of cross-screen advertising is on the back of harnessing big data using a vast number of data points to follow distinct individuals across devises. It's obviously guess work but pretty sophisticated guess work. I'd be more inclined to question the accuracy of the demographic data; though having said that ComScore have had a number of lawsuits brought to them over privacy violations http://www.businessinsider.com/class-action-lawsuit-against-comscore-2013-6?IR=T

Hired https://www.linkedin.com/in/ken-napolitano-34b47a11 Courtesy of LCWA on ADVFN

Thanks Rusty, much appreciated.

One of the benefits of posting on a bulletin board is that it can be done instantly and doesn't require a dozen people signing off the content. It is also one of the draw backs. Speculation had risen that management were not intending to honour the commitment made in their August update and as such I emailed management on Tuesday night bringing this to their attention, In the middle of the afternoon on Wednesday (AM in NYC) I received a call from Dan stating what I had written and I quickly put a post onto the forum. The relevant part of my post (and the intention) was to clarify that the speculation they were not going to update the markets as promised was ill-founded. To suggest that my post in any way 'leaked' information is ludicrous, it simply clarified their intent to honour what they said they would in August. I had expected that there to be more substance to the update but didn't know anymore than I had posted. As far as auditors go; if you look at any of the trading updates they all clearly state they are based on unaudited figures. But management need to be pretty certain of what they are releasing because if the auditors discovered (at a later date) that information contained in a release was inaccurate there would be consequences. In the case of this update it is clear the auditors will need to validate that the company did achieve break-even on an adjusted* EBITDA basis during the Period. Anyone that has read my historic posts or made the effort to attend the AGM's would be in a position to make an educated guess at the legitimacy and sincerity of my post; and it is for those investors I chose to do so. I fully appreciate the need for scepticism but a simple call to call to FTI would have validated the content of my post. Why anyone would think I stand to gain anything from making it up is beyond me.

biffa, That's the time it takes to prep before release from the end of the quarter, which would suggest the update may be imminent.

Just spoken to Dan, He has confirmed they are absolutely intending to update the market on Q3 and isn't sure where the mis-infomation has come from. He also said that it takes 10-15 days post Q to produce as it has to be scrutinized by the auditors. They will continue to provide quarterly updates for as long as they see necessary and if they for any reason intend to change this policy they will notify the market.

Hey Pensioner, JavaScript and Java aren’t the same. JavaScript is built into your web browser which have their own JavaScript engines. Java is a plug-in produced by a single company. As the article you posted noted about 3% of user (for some bizarre reason) have JavaScript disabled. No browser is going to block JavaScript and it is used for GoogleAnalytics. But I still maintain that the Quantcast can't tell us very much of substance for reasons I've mentioned before and because there is a huge amount of 3rd supply going into RhythmMax that Quantcast wont account for. It was a perfectly good question at the AGM followed by a brief and inadequate response from Brian who should have explained the utility an investor could get from it as well as explaining that they were re-tagging the sites, explaining what the deal is with AdKarma etc... It could have saved a lot of confusion amongst us.

Hey BDC, That was part of my point and I think we're largely on the same page. Re dark pools; in 7 months they have picked up a third of the company in which time the SP has practically halved... And for large parts of that time the books have been somewhat illiquid. Lets not kid ourselves II's have ran a mile. Towards the end of AGM I was talking to Brian and Charles Palmer and Brian said they had realized (or were surprised) by the amount of stock held by PI's and to this end they needed to consider how they could better communicate with the wider investor base. Any serious gambler should aspire to leave emotion at the door, easier said than done and no doubt they have capitalized on that over the last 7 months.

Every morning I wake up I'm shaking my head for ignoring the obvious and riding this down like a never ending water slide (and for ever getting exposed to a small cap in an unregulated market), I'm tired of suspicious anomalies on L2 and being shafted by the analysts that pumped/glorified this at the back end of 13 and later ran a mile, the Gordon Gekko's and rocket scientists that have played this to perfection, their idiotic puppets and the so called journalists that can't even read a balance sheet. But I'm not willing (on the back of intra-day emotion) to give up on what appears to be a well thought out and carefully planned jam recipe just before its tasted for some lame premium based on 52 week highs or current fundamentals on what should be and I hope again will be a growth stock and story...

Code Validity With regards to the validity of the Code it was updated in September 2013 so the residency test (as I understand) is now only applicable where a company admitted to an unregulated market (AIM) is not incorporated within the UK, Isle of Man or Chanel Islands otherwise the residence of the directors and location of HQ are irrelevant. Offer Requirement As I read it the Code considers acquiring 30% of the voting rights of a company to be the level at which effective control is obtained and results (under rule 9.1) in the requirement to make a cash offer at the highest price paid within the last 12 months. The rule is exceptionally convoluted and primarily focuses on concert parties however I cannot see any justification to waiver this rule under these circumstances. (calculation and adjustment of highest price paid is 9.5 section 2-3). http://www.thetakeoverpanel.org.uk/the-code/download-code http://www.thetakeoverpanel.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/code.pdf 50p minimum The fact is the whole industry is going through a step change where Verification and Viability are big issues becoming more prominent by the day, the standards and definitions so far have been poor and the vast majority of the MRC accredited vendors are a waste of space in many people's opinions. There are far too many companies operating in this space most of which are marginal niche point players that either shouldn't exist or should be a product of a larger company; this has fragmented advertiser spend among more companies than they would like in order to fulfil their campaign requirements amongst all formats across all devices at scale. Advertisers are fed up of buying in silos, it's a fact, they want efficiency, centralised reporting and to harness big data effectively. Throw in the growing implementation of walled gardens and I can see why Terry Kawaja compared the chaos in the industry playing out like an episode of Game of Thrones. IMO you either believe management are capable over time of executing on the clearly enormous potential for RhythmOne and RhythmMax provided by the scale, partnerships, industry shifts and consolidation trends. Or you're think the odds are against them in which case inevitably over time they will continue to see revenue decline and burn through cash until there is practically nothing left. Either way IF an offer was to come forward AND acceptance be recommended by management 50p would be an unbelievably good or bad offer IMO. I believe Tosca see long term value in their investment, I don't and never will follow other investors into an investment or (to a large degree) allow their decisions to nullify my opinions because you don't know logic, motives, the value they see or their exit strategy but I struggle to see how Tosca could see value in this company without some form of return to growth and profitability.

Hey B, I hope you are well (as one can be under the circumstances). I was in hysterics when I saw your screen name on here; I knew it you instantly! It wasn't me who created the spread sheet it was two other investors that joined this BB recently... I just uploaded it. If I get the chance in the next few day I'll have a look at the changes in positions.

Lundon, Obviously the more impressions across the network the more opportunities there are to place ads against them. However I don't think that revenue generation can be linked to the performance metrics on Quantcast or Comscore because we don't know the % they have monetised or the split between premium and conventional within the periods. When Blinkx bought Burst it had 130m uniques (so this significant scale spoken of at the AGM isn't anything new - except the addition of AllMedia that added c.25m more uniques) and since we have monetised somewhere between 10-20% of the impressions with between 2.5-6% being premium. If Blinkx were to monetise a larger % of the opportunities or or sell a large % of premium within that 20% it could have a significant impact on the revenue and profibility even if the overall impressions across the network remained unchanged. And for this reason I think the Quantcast figures are as good as useless because without understanding additional metrics and factors it is impossible to draw any meaningful conclusion from the fluctuation of volumes. The opportunities and split between conventional and premium are in all of the earning preso's and Brian noted that we had a deficit of demand where 80% of the time we did not have an ad to show against an impression we saw. All the efforts by management to strengthen our position within the programmatic area (through M&A and R&D) have been with the aim of converting more opportunities (by having more demand liquidity) and selling more premium units within those opportunities. RhythmMax is bringing in some serious demand players into our ball court; the likes of DataXu, MediaMath and Turn etc which should then provide the liquidity we haven't had to convert and place ads against those impressions. Ex, I largely agree with all your sentiments but I don't see your point about demographics, 1R reaches over 60% of the US with controlled and O&O supply. Firstly 1R focus is on the larger brand advertisers and agencies that have large integrated budgets and where you're talking about companies such as McDonalds, Unilever, Nike etc I don't think ethnicity, a diploma or large bank balance is all that relevant. However where very granular targeting is required by a company or their campaign you have to consider that by starting off which 130m uniquies that even once you have whittled down to white, 25-50 year old males earning $50-100k with a college education you actually still have a significant enough footprint to run an ad against for BMW etc... if Burst had 25m uniques I would get where your coming from. And further on the point of target audience from the Influencer report - some of the featured companies and target audience Gap - Millennials Lego - Moms of children aged 1 to 4 Target - Millennials and Millennial-aged parents Paul Mitchell - Women aged 18 to 44 Payless ShoeSource - Budget-conscious moms and fashionistas Canon - Millen

Forging a path to premium programmatic - RhythmOne and Digiday 10-28-15 https://vimeo.com/143904442

There's been a lot of noise and speculation about Tosca, their increasing position and more to the point picking examples such as Daisy or Qunidell to draw conclusions on what their strategy, motivation or expectations are here. It is worth noting that it is not unusual for them to build large positions, please see pdf below for an overview of Tosca's holding since inception with their initial stake, last declared stake and dates. Hopefully it may offer a bit more perspective... It was put together by other investors - my gratitude to them, it may contain some errors but has been checked through. https://www.dropbox.com/s/dqoqvv6p01ak6e6/Tosca%20holding%20history.pdf?dl=0