Zedge Reports Q3 2026 Results: Full Earnings Call Transcript

Zedge (AMEX:ZDGE) reported third-quarter financial results on Thursday. The transcript from the company's third-quarter earnings call has been provided below. This content is powered by Benzinga APIs. For comprehensive financial data and transcripts, visit https://www.benzinga.com/apis/. Access the full call at https://www.webcaster5.com/Webcast/Page/2205/53991 Summary Zedge Inc reported GAAP profitability for the quarter, with subscription revenue growing 32% year-over-year and active subscriptions increasing by 41% to nearly 1.3 million. DataSeeds fulfilled its first six-figure order and is seeing a growing pipeline, focusing on ethically sourced data sets for frontier model developers. The company signed significant music catalogs for Tape Deck, including Sync Music and Tough Gong Distribution, expanding its offerings for independent artists. Zedge launched two additional alpha products this quarter, aiming for six by year-end, emphasizing a framework that scales successful products and eliminates underperformers. Financial highlights include a 55% increase in free cash flow year-over-year, no debt, and a cash balance of $19.7 million, with an increased dividend and share repurchases reflecting confidence in the business. Full Transcript OPERATOR Good day and welcome to Zedge's earnings conference call for the third fiscal quarter of 2026. During management's prepared remarks, all participants will be in a listen only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the Star key followed by zero. After today's presentation by Zedge's management, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, please press Star then one on your touchtone phone. To withdraw your question, please press Star two. Also note that Zedge will be presenting at the Planet Microcap Conference next Wednesday at 2:30pm Eastern Time. I will now turn the call over to Brian Segal. Brian Segal Thank you Operator during today's call, Jonathan Wright, Zedge's Chief Executive Officer and Zedge's Chief Financial Officer, will discuss Zedge's financial and operational results that were reported today. Any forward looking statements made during this conference call, during the prepared remarks or in the question and answer session, whether general or specific in nature, are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results in the future to differ materially from those discussed on today's calls. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, specific risks and uncertainties disclosed in Zedge's periodic SEC filings. Zedge assumes no obligation to update any forward looking statements or to update the factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from those that they forecast. Please note that our earnings release is available on the Investor Relations page of the Zedge website and has also been filed on Form 8K with the SEC. Finally, on this call we will use non GAAP measures. Examples include non GAAP eps, non GAAP Net Income and adjusted ebitda. Please see our earnings release for an explanation of our use of these non GAAP measures. Now I'd like to turn the call over to Jonathan. Jonathan Reich Thank you Brian and good afternoon everyone. Let me start with what stood out to me this quarter. We continue to demonstrate that the core Zedge Marketplace business is resilient. This was a GAAP profitable quarter, which I think is worth noting, and the underlying monetization trends remain strong. Subscription revenue grew 32% year over year as active subscriptions reached nearly 1.3 million, up 41%, marking nine consecutive quarters of year over year growth, while Zedge Premium GTV increased 17%. This contributed to our record quarterly average revenue per monthly active user of nearly 12 cents. What those numbers collectively tell me is that our ongoing investment in acquiring and retaining higher value users continues to pay off. Even though overall monthly active users declined, the quality of engagement and the revenue we generate per user improved. Additionally, while advertising revenue declined slightly, the drop was entirely attributable to Emojipedia, which is being managed for profitability and cash generation in light of the structural changes Google made to its search results page within the Zedge Marketplace itself, advertising revenue was essentially flat year over year and I would characterize that as a resilient result, particularly given that the prior year benefited from a one time integration bonus from an ad platform partner within the Zedge Marketplace. I want to highlight one data point that I think reinforces our message about monetization quality. IOS revenue grew 35% year over year and now represents 6.5% of total Zedge marketplace revenue, up from 5.1% a year ago. IOS users are among our highest value users and that trend is moving in the right direction. Turning to Dataseeds this was a meaningful quarter for the business. We fulfilled our first six figure order stemming from an existing customer, a leading technology company. Successfully delivering a project of this size on spec within tight time frames is a meaningful milestone, validating our ability to secure larger, more complex orders, especially from existing customers. At the same time, our prospect pipeline is also growing. We are generating interest from leads interested in ethically sourced images, video and audio data sets. Our ability to tap into our deep experience in creating and operating consumer mobile apps and repurposing this knowledge for managed crowdsourced content creation that complies with regulatory frameworks is unique. We have said consistently that revenue will remain lumpy as we mature our offering, but each successful delivery strengthens our credibility in the enterprise market and that is what builds toward larger and more consistent deal flow over time. Turning to Tape Deck, our marketplace for independent music where artists earn royalties directly from their fans, we have been focusing on expanding the music catalog and I am excited to share that we recently signed Sync Music, Tough Gong Distribution and the BWL Entertainment catalog. Sync's roster includes artists like Jason Derulo and T.I. tough Gong was originally established by Bob and Rita Marley as a home for their own music and fellow independent artists, and BWL manages the estate of Betty Wright, a sole pioneer and the first woman to have a gold LP on an independent label. These are exactly the types of artists Tape Deck was designed to serve, and this progress increases our confidence in the direction of the catalog. Next, our product innovation team released an additional two Alpha products this quarter. We now have four live and remain on track to achieve our goal of six Alpha launches this fiscal year that will be zero to six in less than 12 months. What I want to emphasize about our framework is that it is designed to be highly efficient at scaling winners and killing losers. We pre validate before writing code, build fast, measure against clear KPIs, investors in the winners, and cut the losers. Each new launch compounds from prior releases by utilizing some of the development work, which shortens our time to market with every iteration. We are attached to the framework, not to any single product. That discipline is what allows us to take multiple shots on goal without putting meaningful pressure on the balance sheet. From a financial standpoint, free cash flow increased 55% year over year to 1.8% $2 million and is up 10% year to date. Cash and cash equivalents strengthened to $19.7 million and we continue to carry no debt. During the quarter, we increased our quarterly dividend by 25% to 2 cents per share, reflecting our confidence in the business and our ongoing free cash flow generation. We also opportunistically repurchased shares when market conditions warranted, continued to invest in DataSeeds and our innovation pipeline. All capital allocation priorities are being pursued concurrently and none of them is coming at the expense of the others or of the balance sheet stepping back Our priorities for the remainder of fiscal 2026 are continue strengthening monetization in the Zedge Marketplace, build data seeds deliberately and execute well on the opportunities we elect to pursue and advance our innovation pipeline in a disciplined way. With that, I will turn it over to E. E Thank you Jonathan. Total revenue for the third quarter was $8.0 million, up 3.0% from last year. Remember, historically, Q3 is our seasonally weakest quarter. There are a couple of items of note in the quarter. Consistent with Jonathan's comments. Emojipedia was a drag on overall top line growth rate. That said, Zedge Marketplace revenue continued to perform well given last year, our advertising revenue benefited from a one time $450,000 bonus from an ad partner. As a result of these two items, advertising revenue was down 4.0% for the quarter. ZedgePlus subscription revenue increased 31.9% year over year and our net active subscriber base grew 40.6%, reaching nearly 1.3 million subscribers. We continue to optimize our subscription plans and are seeing the benefits of those changes. Deferred revenue, which primarily represents subscription related revenue, reached $6.2 million, up 26% year over year. This is an important metric as it reflects future revenue that essentially carries a 100% gross margin. Zedge Premium GTV was up 16.6% from the year ago quarter and OPMAU increased 21.2% to 11.9 cents, continuing the shift toward higher value users and improved monetization efficiency. Regarding digital goods and services revenue, this line includes contribution from both GuruShots and DataSeats, with the majority still being generated by Guru Shots at this stage. Although this quarter DataSeeds benefited from the fulfillment of the six figure order Jonathan mentioned, SG&A was $6.2 million for the quarter, down 1.7% from last year. GAAP operating income was $1.1 million compared to $0.2 million last year. GAAP net income and diluted EPS were $0.9 million $0.07 compared to $0.2 million and $0.01 respectively. On a non GAAP basis, net income was $1.0 million and EPS was $0.07 compared to $0.9 million and $0.06 respectively. Free cash flow was $1.2 million for the quarter, up 55% from last year. Adjusted EBITDA was $1.3 million, up 1% from last year. From a liquidity perspective, we ended the quarter with $19.7 million in cash and cash equivalents and no debt. After quarter's end, our board added $2 million to our existing $5 million share repurchase authorization, which now has a total available capacity of approximately $2.2 million. To date, we repurchased about 1.5 million shares for roughly $4.8 million on the existing authorization. Thank you for listening to our third quarter earning call. We look forward to updating you again when we report results for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2026. Operator, please open the line for questions. OPERATOR We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press Star then one on your touchtone phone. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the Star keys. To withdraw your question, please press Star two. At this time we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. First question comes from Derek Greenberg with Maxim Group. Please proceed. Derek Greenberg (Equity Analyst) Hi. Thanks for taking my questions. My first is just on dataseeds and I wanted to revisit something you called out as a priority, which was to build that part of the business deliberately. I was wondering if maybe you could just expand upon this and talk about what that looks like, as well as maybe an update on some of the initiatives from the last call, such as building out the inbound and outbound as well as an off the shelf catalog. Jonathan Reich Derek, thanks so much for the question. So, as you know, DataSeeds is a B2B offering that provides multimodal that is audio, video and image data sets to frontier model developers. And we have several things going on with DataSeeds. In terms of pipeline, we have been developing our thesis around what is known as managed crowd content creation where we are able to turn to our creator community which is available through both the Zedge marketplace as well as the Guru Shots players and have them create content based upon the brief that we receive from prospective customers. With respect to the pipeline itself, we have been focused more heavily on working with aggregators as opposed to working through marketplaces. We find that the aggregators seem to have higher quality leads and developing those relationships in a fashion where the aggregators understand our offering, how we differentiate our ability to scale production according to plan and so on and so forth has been a major focus of ours. In terms of differentiating between inbound and outbound, we have been focusing more heavily on outbound, which is not only electronic outbound, but participating in conferences. By way of example, there's a very well established Computer Vision conference that had taken place in Denver, CVPR last week. I attended the conference and met with multiple prospects and ecosystem partners in order to further existing relationships as well as develop new relationships and that has resulted in are becoming more visible to prospects that are interested in multimodal data sets. And finally there is another piece of this not related to sales per se, but related to the product which is all of the technology layered around everything having to do with ensuring that the quality of the content that we are providing has been embedded through technology so that acceptance rates are high, ensuring that the metadata associated with the content complies with the customer's specifications, naming conventions and a whole set of other requirements that allow for the data to be accepted with a high acceptance rate. I hope that answers your question. Derek Greenberg (Equity Analyst) Yes, that's super helpful. And then I was wondering, obviously you had mentioned the deals are lumpy. Not a ton of visibility right now, but I was wondering if we could perhaps get a little bit more color in terms of the pipeline, the magnitude of the pipeline, or just in terms of how to think about the frequency of potential deals as we go forward. Maybe like annually or quarterly or how you think about that. Jonathan Reich Yeah, let me say, you know, obviously I think, you know, we are not at the point where we can project revenue with certainty. Having said that, we have seen more prospects in the pipeline spanning all modalities and the unique value proposition that we bring to the table is the fact that we are able to provide a managed crowd solution. The ability for us to benefit from our experience in the mobile app space, which spans everything from onboarding to ensuring that the content that is being created complies with a brief, ensuring that there is regulatory compliance and that means everything from privacy to ensuring that if there are humans in a particular brief, that there is model release biometric information, that there is compliance with laws around biometrics, and so on and so forth. That being just organically built into the product, coupled with a reward mechanism and the payment mechanism is something which really stands out and is capturing the attention of prospective customers. So that has been a major focus of ours over the course of the last quarter and we have had success in fulfilling both proof of concepts as well as orders with the maturation of our offering. So if you were to rewind two, three quarters ago, the precision by which we described how we were acquiring data has come a long way. And going back to what you had said earlier about asking about off the shelf and growing our catalog, we have focused less on off the shelf content because what we are seeing in the marketplace is that models need pre and post training based upon new data that doesn't exist. And our ability to go out and create those data sets at scale with compliance, ensuring that they are ethically sourced and that they can be delivered at scale is the direction that we are focusing on in terms of building out this portion of the business. Derek Greenberg (Equity Analyst) Okay, that makes a lot of sense. I want to turn to Tape Deck and it sounds like you've made a lot of good progress there. Before the deal is even announced, I was wondering maybe if you could just talk a little bit about how those agreements with the distributors, how those are structured and work as well as just a general update, I guess, on where your priorities lie. Now, if it's continuing to build up a catalog or if you're thinking about maybe user acquisition or just your bugs there, sure. Jonathan Reich So most of the effort has been around building out catalog as well as focusing on potential technology enhancements that will make Tape Deck more attractive to indie artists because of the ability to not only earn money, but also ease the burden that an indie artist has in terms of launching their music and gaining a broader following. In terms of the deals. These deals are deals where the generally speaking, we're working with indie labels, if you will, that are very, very much in support of the vision that we have where you can have indie artists get paid for every listen that any piece that they have in their catalog results in. As opposed to platforms like Spotify, where many artists do not or artists don't get paid, start getting paid until after there have been, let's say, 1,000 or more listens and then how they are paid is not necessarily transparent. And the rate at which they are paid is also not as transparent as it needs to be. Our minimum is saying, hey, there's a floor of a penny per listen. But the notion of Papedeck is really reaching out to, let's call it above average fans or hyper fans that really want to support their particular artists, their particular genres, and almost serve as a patron to those artists so they can thrive and continue to make a living with their art form. Derek Greenberg (Equity Analyst) That's really interesting. I wanted to turn now to the AI innovation, the alpha apps you been launching. You mentioned you have four live now. I was wondering if you seeing any traction or results from earlier launches or just any color you can provide in terms of the potential for these launches. Jonathan Reich Sure. So let me structurally talk about the harness. We're spinning up new products before we actually launch a product. We've done marketability testing to understand what the demand would be for the product, what the conversion rate would be, how much we feel it would cost to acquire a user. And going into that process, we have a set of ideas, we do some test marketing, and many of the ideas never make it past the test marketing phase. For the ones that do make it past the test marketing phase, what we have been doing is we have been building this harness which centralizes many attributes and functions associated with every new app that we roll out. And that will translate into an accelerated time frame for us to release new apps. In terms of specifics, we had announced Syncat was launched. It did not ultimately pass the thresholds that we had set in terms of revenue, KPIs, engagement, KPIs and so on and so forth. And with respect to the other three apps that are out there, there's one which is they're all early stage, of course, there's one which is trending in the right direction. The other two are too early in the pipeline to opine as to whether or not they're going to make it. And our expectation going into this is set the KPIs up. If the app is crossing the threshold, then continue to evolve those KPIs. And through that gating process, we're able to separate the wheat from the chaff, if you will. And the chaff is something that we will get rid of very quickly, whereas we will continue to invest in the wheat in order to see to it that we can make this a sizable portion of our business. I just say consistently, Rovio's Angry Birds Angry Bird game did not become successful until Rovio had failed at 50 earlier apps. So by and large most of these are not going to make it to, let's call it mainstream scalable. Our responsibility and our focus is to see to it that we are managing this in a fashion where we're investing our resources responsibly and then when we identify an opportunity that is delivering the performance that will ensure that it can scale to double down and continue to invest and iterate and develop so that we can have a brand new revenue stream in our business. Derek Greenberg (Equity Analyst) Got it. Thank you, that's helpful. My last question is just on maus. I know on the last call you kind of called out three separate buckets of initiatives that you were trying to implement to try and stabilize and improve MAUs. Between marketing and new product features and data science, I was wondering maybe if you could just talk about how those efforts are going Jonathan Reich first. So we continue to invest in all three of those. And if I were to describe our monthly active user base, generally speaking the quality of our user base is better than it was a year ago. And we are still iterating to not only see to it that the quality is there, but also to see to it that there is a growth opportunity in that domain and specifically focusing on the well developed markets where CPMs and disposable income are more accessible. And I would conclude by saying growth and the initiatives that we have to unlock that growth is, is not a static one time event, it is dynamic. There's not a day that goes by where the team is not exploring new opportunities to unlock growth opportunities for our user base. Derek Greenberg (Equity Analyst) That makes a lot of sense. Well, thank you for taking my question. Sure. Disclaimer: This transcript is provided for informational purposes only. While we strive for accuracy, there may be errors or omissions in this automated transcription. For official company statements and financial information, please refer to the company's SEC filings and official press releases. Corporate participants' and analysts' statements reflect their views as of the date of this call and are subject to change without notice.