Hey, guys. Well, it looks like it's time. We will kick things off. Thank you guys for joining the MediaAlpha presentation. Adam Klauber. Just quick, if you want to see our disclaimers, they'll be on our website, please. MediaAlpha is potentially the top player in a very cool and developing market, as it's ups and downs sometimes. Right now it's a lot more up than down, right Steve? By some metrics, yeah. I think what's really interesting, and Steve being on the leading edge will give us some insight that I think there's a lot of potential changes and different ways this market can go in the next two, three years or so. I think it's a great presentation to listen to. Steve, founder. All right. Well, great. Listen, we'll try to go through the presentation pretty quickly. Please feel free to interrupt me with any questions, or we'll have Q&A at the end. Let's see. A quick word about our mission. Our mission is really just to connect insurance carriers with online shoppers. It sounds like a really simple mission, but when we started the company 15 years ago, I think you just have to keep in mind that these carriers were just very old, had antiquated technology. Very few were actually leveraging the internet to acquire customers. It seemed like a basic thing at the time, but the reason we started the company was we figured that, hey, there's a lot of money being spent in advertising, particularly with personal lines insurance, like personal auto and homeowners insurance, by companies who primarily would close policies offline. We saw early companies like GEICO and Progressive obviously selling policies online, enrolling consumers entirely unassisted on an online basis, starting to really lean into online advertising and in our space, in particular lead generation advertising to acquire customers. We figured, hey, the State Farm and Farmers and American Family, all the legacy carriers will eventually start to adopt direct-to-consumer channels and then hence, online customer acquisition channels. Fast-forward 15-16 years later, they're finally starting to do that. We're very happy that we picked this mission. It's certainly working out for us very well, and things are unfolding for us as we expected, probably 10 years later than we thought they would. The industry doesn't move at light speed, does it? It does not move at light speed. Absolutely not. Just at a quick glance, fast-forward from when we founded the company in 2011, we did about $1.2 billion in revenue over the last 12 months. P&C advertising spend has gone from, I think when we started, maybe $3 billion or $4 billion a year to about $14 billion last year. That's just personal auto, I think personal lines advertising, so GEICO and Progressive, the general companies like that. The thing is that even though they spend a lot of money in advertising, a couple of things. One is that they severely under-index for digital channels. Even though across all industries, about 80% of all ad dollars are spent online, within the personal lines auto insurance space, that's only about 40%. In addition to that, something we'll touch on a little bit later, too, there's about $20- 25 billion in commissions that are paid out to agents that as carriers like Farmers and State Farm start to adopt direct-to-consumer channels and pay less in commissions to the policies that they acquire directly, you're going to start to see a conversion of a lot of those commission dollars into ad dollars, to provide tailwind into the overall ad spend in the space. I'll say that we generated over $100 million in adjusted EBITDA over the past 12 months. As Pat will address, our CFO. I'm sorry, I didn't introduce myself. I'm Steve Yi, Co-Founder, CEO. I just jumped right in. Sorry. We have given a lot of this capital back to shareholders, particularly this past year, because of where our stock price is. We feel like that's the best use of our money right now. Very happy to be able to do that and show faith in our company and our future cash flows. I think the metric that I'm most proud of here is that we're still 160 or so people. We were 80 people when we went public six years ago. Our LTM Q1 2026 revenue is about almost $7.5 million per employee. It's a number that we're really proud of. To recap some of the market opportunity, you're seeing here, just the growth in the overall P&C insurance advertising spend from 2021 to 2025, spend close to 10% a year. As I mentioned before, it's an industry that really under-indexes to digital channels, and again, as the legacy agent-based carriers start to go direct-to-consumer, you're going to increasingly see a lot of advertising spend going from sports sponsorships and billboards and TV channels to really online digital customer acquisition channels. In terms of our overall ecosystem, what we do is we create a marketplace for publishers, which we call supply partners here, and demand partners, which we also call advertisers. On the supply side, what you have are insurance comparison sites, companies you might be familiar with, like Insurify and The Zebra, which offer a rate-based comparison experience for auto insurance. Think of them as Kayak for auto insurance. You have financial apps like Credit Karma, financial websites like NerdWallet that offer insurance shopping experiences. Again, typically personal auto, but also home as well. You have lead generators that will buy traffic on Google or social media, convert it into a form, someone filling out a form, and then match them to advertisers. You also have carriers who we work with who will make an intelligent decision when someone's on their site looking for a policy. If they feel like, "Hey, Sam's not going to convert into a policy sale. Well, I'm going to show him ads from some of my competitors to make $50 or $60 from Sam being on my website, because I know I'm not going to close him, and so I'm not going to sell him a policy." Either he goes back to Google and clicks on another ad, or he clicks on an ad on my site. That's a business model that we've pioneered, and we work with over 50 carriers to do. That's the suite of publishers that we work with, and we work with several hundred publishers. We aggregate the insurance shopping inventory that they have on their sites and their apps, we connect them through one marketplace and one media buying platform, mainly to insurance carriers. Progressive is a big buyer. Allstate is a big buyer. State Farm, et cetera. We also work directly with brokers and agents as well. We work with several thousand State Farm agents, Allstate agents, and now recently, Farmers agents to sell them mostly leads and calls in media that they can work with because they don't have websites where they can convert a policy sale, so they can't buy clicks. Predominantly, our marketplace is cost per click media that the big carriers are buying from all of the publishers in our ecosystem. Any questions about that? My favorite key pillars of our technology platform. Massive scale. We're the biggest player in the industry by multiple factors, and so we have just a ton of data. We have millions of shoppers coming in every month, transacting, clicking on ads, getting a quote from an insurance carrier, buying a policy from an insurance carrier. We have access to all of that data across the whole ecosystem. Really what that means is we can apply AI to optimize carrier spend to the nth degree better than anyone else in the industry can. One thing about our channel is that this is about real-time customer acquisition. Your carriers are able to reach consumers right at the point of sale. I mentioned to you that use case where insurance carriers will have someone shopping for insurance on their site, and they make a real-time determination that, "Hey, this person's not going to buy a policy from me because my rate's too high," or, "I can't underwrite this consumer." They're at the point of purchase, and that's when an ad is being served to that consumer. It's very bottom-of-funnel traffic, very high intent, very transactional intent consumers that we're creating a marketplace for. Multiple touch points. I touched up on that already. Carriers, typically, who can sell policies and enroll consumers directly online, they're buying click traffic. That's what, 90%, 85% of the- 90%+ of the media value within our marketplace. Increasingly, we're working directly with insurance agents and brokers who typically will require a lead or a call because they need to close a consumer on the phone, usually. We offer multiple touch points to all carriers and brokers, depending on exactly how they want to interact with consumers. Trust and transparency. We started off as a transparent advertising exchange where Progressive coming onto our site could buy traffic from, again, one of several hundred publishers, but then they could do so transparently knowing exactly which part of a publisher site that they were buying from. Before we created that transparency, it was all just one black box. You were just buying traffic from a network like QuinStreet, and you were able to maybe differentiate pricing based on state, but that was really about it. You couldn't pay a different price for a consumer coming from Connecticut who was a homeowner, coming from NerdWallet versus someone who's coming from Insurify or someone who's coming from insurance carrier site. As you can imagine, the intent is very different from consumers depending on what website they're coming from and what the upstream media channel was to acquire that consumer to that original publisher site. Where that consumer is coming from and what website it's coming from or what part of the website they're coming from is a really important intent signal. It's a really important pricing signal that we introduced to the industry and one of the reasons that our overall ecosystem has multiplied over the 15 years that we've been in business. That's really what the transparency brought to the space. In addition to that also happened to engender a ton of trust in us as an intermediary. Typically, because we're the largest player, we end up getting a lot of partnerships and proprietary partnerships from large insurance carriers that no one else can match. For example, Farmers recently, earlier this last year, picked us as the exclusive click buying platform for all of Farmers' direct buying. Whether they're buying media, a click from EverQuote or within our marketplace, they're using our technology platform to do so. In addition to that, we power the Farmers lead marketplace for their agents. It's a multifaceted exclusive partnership with Farmers. That's really because of the trust that we've engendered within the industry through our transparent approach. One of the hallmarks of our channel is really the amount of data that's available for targeting purposes and for pricing purposes. Because these consumers are shopping for insurance, you know a lot about them because to shop for auto insurance, for example, you need to enter 35 pieces of information on a lead generation site or on a carrier site or on a price comparison site. All of that data's available for pricing purposes. Versus Google where you bid for a keyword like auto insurance quotes versus cheap auto insurance. Yeah, there's a different price for those. The level of granularity that you have versus Google is so much superior in our channel because you can pay a different price for someone who's married, who's between 35 and 45, who's a homeowner. You don't know those things when you're bidding on Google, typically. You also know exactly what publisher site or app that user got a quote or did a search. You can price based on any number of those things. You can actually pull in third-party data and use that for targeting purposes and pricing purposes. The ability to actually leverage all of the data that you have access to because the user is in the middle of buying or deeply researching an insurance policy is unparalleled at this channel versus any other channel. That's why when insurance carriers want to acquire new policies, this is really where they come, right? Increasingly, with all of this data, what we're able to do is apply AI to do optimizations across all of this data. Right now is really when we're able to leverage our scale advantage and the fact that we have more data than any other marketplace, to our advantage, to really extend our lead over other competitors who have a fraction of the data that we do. What that means is more efficiency for advertisers and then higher yield for publishers. There's a virtuous cycle that's really happening now, and it's really taken afoot over the last year or so. We're focused just on insurance primarily because that's where so much of the advertising spend is in property and casualty insurance, which primarily is within personal auto and some personal home or homeowners. We do have an important presence within the health insurance vertical with Medicare Advantage, which is a half a trillion dollar vertical with major carriers like UnitedHealthcare. Let's see, I guess Molina and Humana, who are just starting to actually come online, just starting to go direct to consumer, not just relying on brokers to sell their policies. We see that as potentially a huge market opportunity that's going to rival the size of the auto insurance opportunity maybe in five to seven years. Right now, it's a difficult market within Medicare Advantage. What we're investing in is really the evolution of that vertical to becoming something like what auto insurance is now. Because of our experience within the auto insurance vertical and knowing exactly sort of the online customer acquisition, I guess, adoption cycle that these auto insurance carriers have gone through, we can really predict what those needs are that a UnitedHealthcare is going to have. We can pilot programs like an online enrollment platform program that we have with UnitedHealthcare, where we're not just selling them a click and a consumer from our marketplace. We're actually providing them the technology infrastructure to help them convert that user into a policy sale and ultimately managing that process. Ultimately, with a partnership like that, we can probably get paid on a per policy basis, once we actually finish our pilot program with them. It's really about understanding where the marketplace is going from our experience within auto insurance to really provide much more of the customer acquisition technology platform-based solution to carriers like UnitedHealthcare and Humana in a way that we're not doing to a Progressive or an Allstate. That type of an opportunity also exists with a lot of secondary and tertiary carriers within auto insurance. We can convert policies or we convert a consumer from a click to a quote far better than most carriers can themselves, other than like a Progressive or Allstate. We're also increasingly working with these carriers to host parts of the conversion process. We're excited about those opportunities and really the depth of partnerships that we believe that we can form with a lot of carriers who again, are newer to online customer acquisition than an Allstate and a Progressive are. Yeah. Do you have a question? Yeah. Just on that, it seems like you're providing a lot of value to these customers. How do you evaluate whether you're earning a fair return for the value you're providing carriers? That's a very good question. Let's see. I think first it's negotiated with publishers. Typically we have a much higher margin on our open exchange, which is where we're actually optimizing and managing the advertising spend on behalf of carriers. The carriers aren't working directly with some of our largest publishers through a private marketplace where we're much more of just a technology platform. To the extent that these additional services keep those carriers in our open exchange and buying more through our open exchange, because these types of services are only available through our open exchange, we're naturally going to get several times the economics than if that carrier was executing that spend outside of our open exchange in our private marketplace. It's a really good question. As we do these partnerships, it'll be interesting to figure out how we get the value that we deserve by taking on a lot of the conversion risks, et cetera. Some of these partnerships we see as being structured on a back-end payment. For hosting the enrollment experience for, let's say, UHC, they're going to pay us and we're going to negotiate a cost per policy-based payment. We can actually bid whatever we want for the media, even within our own marketplace or outside of our marketplace. There, we'd be able to set really effectively our own margins, right? Because we're buying media and then arbitraging that to an ultimate cost per policy payout that one of our carriers is going to give us. We'll be able to control whatever level of margins that we're able to keep. That will be dependent upon how good we are at media buying, both within our marketplace and outside of our marketplace, and how well we can convert that consumer. As commission dollars in this will migrate to ad spend, how much influence do you have in directing carriers to open exchanges than direct? It depends on the partnership, but like a partnership like Farmers, who I think we have a lot of influence there. I think the closer we work with a lot of our carrier partners, then the more influence we have in keeping that spend within the open exchange because they know just a lot of the services that we offer aren't going to be available if they work directly with one of our large publishers. I think the private marketplace is a very good offering for a small number of advertisers who spend a lot with a handful of our largest publishers. I think for the vast majority of other advertisers and publishers, it's really not the ideal product, and they need us through the open exchange to really help make an efficient market between those sets of participants. Anything to add there? No. Okay. I think that was a good answer, and a good question. Yeah, it's a great question. This is the last slide, at least in my section. This just gives you an overview of really where the industry's been. Essentially what happened in 2021 and 2022 is that you had an erosion of combined ratios as inflationary pressures really spiked the cost of auto repair. As people started to drive again after pandemic lockdowns, they started to get into more accidents, and those accidents became far costlier to address or fix than before. Auto insurance rates, I think, went up since pre-COVID, maybe 50% or so across the board. Of course, when repair costs go up by that much, car insurance companies, their profit margins start to get eroded, and they can't instantaneously increase their rates. It takes time for them to increase their rates. In a period like that, which is referred to as a hard market cycle, they tend to pull back on advertising. You see here the hard markets of 2021, 2022, and 2023, and the impact that it had on the advertising spend. Now that profitability's been restored and the industry's in a good spot, you see that advertising spend is starting to go up again, and that's really where we are. Now, we're certainly happy about the soft market cycle and tailwinds that it's creating, but ultimately it's getting us back to where we really should have been had there not been this third generational hard market that severely depressed advertising spend in 2022, 2023, and parts of 2024. If you see what the growth rates were between 2017 and 2021, online auto insurance advertising spend went up by about 11% a year. Right. If you look at 2021 to 2025, even though it feels like it's been a tremendous tailwind over the last few years, and it has been, and we've certainly been the beneficiary of that and taken market share in this up cycle, it's still just getting us back to where we would've been had there not been this disruptive three-year hard market. If you look at the CAGR between 2021 and 2025, it's actually lower than what it was in 2017 to 2021. Certainly we're appreciative of the tailwinds that we have and the cyclical turnaround that we've seen, but what it really means is that all the secular trend that carriers have to really adopting online advertising and pouring more into advertising and less into commissions for agents and brokers, that is what's going to continue to provide tailwinds over the next several years. Insurify made what I know is embedding their platform into ChatGPT. That's probably going to be a new distribution method and probably a whole supply policy within ChatGPT. How does that impact your business? Yeah. I think that, ultimately, just to pull back a little bit, I think that the fears that people have, not fears, but the prediction, the fiction I would say, you can see where my answer's going to go, that people see about what AI's going to do to insurance shopping is that everyone's going to use ChatGPT, just as a shorthand for LLMs. To pull quotes from every single carrier, and you're going to be able to compare rates from Geico and Progressive and State Farm and everyone else all in one place, this magical solution. That's just not going to happen, right? The most you can do, I think most you'll be able to do, is maybe pull in rates from independent agency carriers, which are carriers who distribute the policies through independent agents. What that excludes is State Farm and Allstate, Geico, Progressive, either the direct-to-consumer carriers or the carriers who sell policies through captive agents. You're not going to be able to aggregate rates from most of the major carriers out there, only the ones, again, who sell through independent agents, who are typically the secondary and tertiary brands in the space. Steve, cut in for a second? That's a big point. Why is that? Why can't ChatGPT pull State Farm? Sure. Because the carriers won't let them, right? This isn't new technology. Monitor different. There have been companies that have tried to say, "Hey, we're going to be the Kayak for auto insurance and show you every single rate that's out there. You're going to put in your information once and we're going to crawl every carrier's website and pull in the rates." Well, there've been dozens of those types of startups and they've all failed. They've all failed because the carriers shut them down almost immediately if they get any kind of scale. That's because GEICO, Progressive, Allstate, State Farm, and other carriers invest billions of dollars on brand advertising. The last thing that they want to do is have State Farm with a $150 per month rate show up next to some carrier no one's ever heard of who's offering $145, because any consumer's going to typically go to that no-name carrier and buy the cheaper policy. State Farm knows this. GEICO knows this. Progressive knows this. They'll never let their rates be shown next to other rates on a comparison site like that. That's sort of fiction number one, and that's one of the fears that people have about AI, which is that it's going to enable this perfect price comparison. As a consumer, I would love that. Right? Unfortunately, because of the vested interest that most of the major carriers have in not allowing for that type of just pure rate comparison, it's just never going to happen, other than with a secondary set of carriers. That experience is already available directly on Insurify and Zebra and other price comparison sites. Does that make sense? It does, yeah. Okay. Progressive's the biggest carrier within independent agents and in GEICO. Yeah. Yes, they have a drive product. Progressive has a different product called Progressive Snapshot, where those rates are able to be shown on those types of websites and quoted through independent agents. It's not as good of a product maybe as what they sell directly. I know it's like half the business. It's a little less than half, but it's probably not the best price that you can get from Progressive. You're absolutely right about that. Okay. The reality is you're never going to get Progressive's direct rate. You're never going to get GEICO. You're never going to get USAA, State Farm, Allstate. We've just named carriers that represent about 75% of the universe right there. Is there efforts to. Do you think there's going to be ad loads within these LLMs in similar ways to? Well, I think so. If you look at how a company like Insurify and Zebra monetize all the traffic that they're sending to their website, that's exactly. What the consumer sees are rates from a lot of these independent agency writers, like a Dairyland and other carriers like that. Then you're seeing ads from a lot of these national carriers that won't let their rates be shown but are happy to advertise in and around those rate tables. What you'll see is, you'll see a Progressive ad, no rate. You'll see a GEICO ad, no rate. You'll see a State Farm ad, no rate. Those ads are served by us for Insurify and Zebra. Then you'll see Dairyland and some other secondary, tertiary carriers with their rates. They'll make most of their revenue from clicks that consumers make on those non-rated ads. We foresee that the LLMs would move to an experience like that where the ad platform is going to be a much more important revenue source than anything they can sell through the rates that they show through the LLMs. Yeah. To add to that, I think ChatGPT has put numbers out there publicly around $100 billion ad business and the like. While insurance isn't the largest vertical in search in terms of monetization, it is a meaningful one, and I just can't imagine they wouldn't try to capitalize on it because it's obviously a fertile business for Google today. I'm sure they know that. Well, you all may know Google tried to do this five or six or seven years ago, like Google Compare. They said, "Hey. We're going to be like Kayak for auto insurance. We're going to pull in every rate from everyone." The major carriers just told them to pound sand. They showed some rates from the independent agency writers. It just took up too much real estate, and they were just losing too much money from insurance advertisers. That was maybe a six to nine-month experiment. Independent agents that are going to try to allow digital binding as other competitive threat? No, the agents, the independent agents or like the independent agency carriers. You said it spent $50 million trying to bind digitally without humans. Say that one more time, sorry. Goosehead Insurance. I'm sorry. Goosehead Insurance. Oh, Goosehead Insurance. Yeah. Others like them, large scale. If they do, that'd be great because they'll be advertisers in our marketplace. Insurify is both a publisher and a major advertiser within our marketplace. They need to get traffic to those digital experiences that replicate what they're able to do through Goosehead Agents. We would love for Goosehead to actually have that digital rating system and a digital binding system because that would mean that would just be another major advertiser within our marketplace. The problem is, on the binding side, the independent agency carriers are just technologically, it's tough to have a seamless online buying process. Typically, after you get those rates, there's a quoting system, you're going to have to call in to actually buy that policy. Insurify has a big call center of agents that people have to call in to actually buy a policy from one of the rates that they see on Insurify and Zebra. Unfortunately, that online experience isn't quite as seamless, but once it is, that'll just mean that those independent agents become really good online advertisers or can become more productive online advertisers. Ultimately, I think that's a good thing for us. When you're talking to these carriers, are you helping them with auto versus home? We are because there's homeowner traffic within our marketplace and auto traffic as well. Again, most peak consumers are shopping for auto. The way that it goes is that they'll buy auto and then the carriers will pay a lot more when it's an auto policy being purchased by someone who's a homeowner because there's a bundling opportunity there that makes that expected lifetime value much higher than someone who's just a single renter. Thank you. you. Is EverQuote and QuinStreet, are they partners or competitors? They're kind of both. QuinStreet I would say is more of a direct competitor because they work with third-party publishers and try to create their own marketplace. I think our market share is far, far, far higher than theirs. They were the legacy advertising network, the black box network that we worked at this intermediary when we first came into this space. EverQuote is different because they are a lead generator, they don't create a marketplace. They buy media, acquire consumer, have consumers come to their website, and they convert that consumer into a click for a carrier or a lead for an agent. They have their own agent network and work with carriers on the cost per click side on their own. They're kind of like their own ecosystem. We do work together in a few ways. They're in theory a competitor, but more kind of like a partner. What's that word where they're both a competitor and a partner? A frenemy? Frenemy, sure. Yeah. More friend than enemy, though, I would say. This session is ending, but great discussion. We'll continue in a breakout room. Okay. Thank you, Steve. Pat, sorry to catch you up here. That's all right.