LiveRamp reported revenues totaling $83 million in the company’s quarterly earnings on Monday, up 32% from the period last year.
LiveRamp’s revenue is split into two buckets, the core data onboarding subscription product and a “Marketplace & Other” category, which includes one-off data sales and features upsold by the company, like ad metrics that attribute campaigns to store sales.
The company’s onboarding subscription revenue grew well. LiveRamp went from 585 direct subscription customers a year ago to more than 690 today. And the number of accounts with annual rates of more than $1 million per year rose from 32 to 45.
The Marketplace & Other category houses some of LiveRamp’s long-term growth opportunities, like data sales and advanced television revenue, but it is still digging its way out of a hole since Facebook’s policy change last year, when the platform removed third-party data for ad targeting. Marketplace & Other revenue grew 27% year over year: But excluding the loss of Facebook sales that growth rate would be 76%, said CEO Scott Howe.
LiveRamp’s purchase data product, which connects online audiences and impressions to actual store sales, is a flywheel that LiveRamp needs to start spinning in order to accelerate marketplace sales. The company has 15 retail, ecommerce and payment partners that integrate purchase data for campaign measurement, and more than 50 customers buying that data, Howe said.
The purchase data offering creates a virtuous cycle for the advertising and measurement business (as industry heavyweights Google and Amazon have demonstrated). And it presents additional avenues for LiveRamp to work directly with brands and to upsell current customers.
CTV growth also accrues partially to the marketplace, Howe said, because those campaigns include more data sales and post-campaign measurement investments. Data Plus Math, the TV analytics startup LiveRamp acquired for $150 million in June, won’t be incorporated into earnings results until next the end of 2019, but the CTV business grew by a third without the new business and “our expectations with Data Plus Math have skyrocketed,” he said.
And Amazon is an opportunity of its own for LiveRamp. The company has dozens of clients that use Amazon APIs and expects to integrate with the Amazon DSP by the end of this quarter, Howe said. “Moreover, anything that drives awareness of advanced TV is good for our business.”
