CTV advertising continues to drive significant growth for Magnite.
That’s all thanks to “increasing programmatic adoption by the industry’s largest players,” CEO Michael Barrett told investors on the company’s Q3 earnings call this Thursday.
Magnite’s CTV revenue after traffic acquisition costs (ex-TAC) rose to $64.4 million this quarter, up 23% year-over-year.
In Q1, CTV revenue grew 18% YOY, and then growth slowed to 12% YOY in Q2, meaning the growth rate has almost doubled quarter-over-quarter.
Meanwhile, Magnite DV+, which includes display, video and other smaller formats like audio and OOH, contributed $85 million ex-TAC. That’s up 5% from the same period last year, but it’s also down from 7% YOY growth reported last quarter.
Overall, Magnite’s total revenue for Q3 grew 8% YOY to $162 million. Contribution ex-TAC, meanwhile, grew 12% to 149.4 million.
CTV Partnerships
Over the past few months, Magnite has scored a number of wins in its recent partnerships with Roku, Amazon Ads, French video provider TF1 PUB and even United Airlines.
Magnite’s deal with Netflix was of particular interest to callers, although Barrett was careful not to discuss the specifics. (“A lot of folks ask us a lot about Netflix to get a read-through on the Netflix ad business,” he said.) Still, he anticipates the streaming service may become one of Magnite’s biggest customers in 2025.
Disney also recently agreed to a new multiyear agreement in October, which will expand Magnite’s purview to include more Latin American inventory, live sports like college football and podcasts for ESPN and ABC News.
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Along with Roku, Warner Bros. Discovery and Hulu, Disney represented one of Magnite’s fastest-growing accounts this quarter. The majority of growth in CTV also came from Magnite’s SpringServe ad server.
“There aren’t too many folks that [can say] we aren’t their primary programmatic partner,” Barrett noted, saying the ultimate goal is to “ride the maturation of programmatic” with these other companies.
Curation
There’s another hot new trend sweeping the advertising industry that Magnite is ready to get in on: curation.
While the company’s sell-side audience aggregation capabilities are still in their “early days,” according to Barrett, so far they appear to be successful at driving growth.
To that end, Magnite’s revenue from curating publisher audiences has already grown over 100% year-over-year, although Barrett did not disclose an actual dollar amount on the call.
He also cited last week’s Forrester Sell-Side Wave report, which awarded Magnite the highest score possible for curation and its total current offering.
The reason that sell-side platforms haven’t completely taken over audience targeting, he said, is due to a lingering reliance on third-party cookies on the part of advertisers.
Once that completely goes away and the industry fully embraces first-party data, then “the signal loss goes away,” too, Barrett said. And Magnite will be there to partner with publishers and “participate in those economics.”
Correction 11/8/2024: This article has been updated to clarify the role of Magnite’s SpringServe ad server in CTV growth.
