Item 1A. Risk Factors
The following description of risk factors includes changes to risk factors associated with the Company's business previously disclosed in our first quarter 2016 Form 10-Q under the heading "Risk Factors," and accordingly this description of risk factors should be considered most current. Investing in our common stock involves a high degree of risk, including the risks described below, each of which may be relevant to decisions regarding an investment in or ownership of our stock. The occurrence of any of these risks could have a significant adverse effect on our reputation, business, financial condition, revenue, results of operations, growth, or ability to accomplish our strategic objectives, and could cause the trading price of our common stock to decline. You should carefully consider the risks set forth below and the other information contained in this report, including our consolidated financial statements and related notes and Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations, before making investment decisions related to our common stock. However, this report cannot anticipate and fully address all possible risks of investing in our common stock, and the risks of investing in our common stock may change over time. Accordingly, you are advised to consider additional sources of information and exercise your own judgment in addition to the information we provide.
Risks Relating to Our Business, Growth Prospects and Operating Results
We must grow rapidly to remain a market leader and to accomplish our strategic objectives. If we fail to grow, or fail to manage our growth effectively, the value of our company may decline.
The advertising technology market is dynamic, and our success depends upon the continued adoption of advertising automation and our ability to develop innovative new technologies and solutions for the evolving needs of sellers of advertising, including websites, applications, and other digital media property owners, and buyers of advertising. We also need to grow significantly and expand the scope of our offering in order to keep pace with the growth and change in our market and to develop the market reach and scale necessary to compete effectively with large competitors. This growth depends to a significant degree upon the quality of our strategic vision and planning. The advertising market is evolving rapidly, and if we make strategic errors, there is a significant risk that we will lose our competitive position and be unable to recover and achieve our objectives. Our ability to grow requires access to, and prudent deployment of, capital for hiring, expansion of physical infrastructure to run our solution, acquisition of companies or technologies, and development and integration of supporting technical, sales, marketing, finance, administrative, and managerial infrastructure. Further, the rapid growth we are pursuing will itself strain the organization and our ability to continue that growth and to maintain the quality of our operations.
In order to meet our growth objectives, we will need to rely upon our ability to innovate, the continued adoption of our solution by buyers and sellers for higher value advertising inventory, the extension of the reach of our solution into evolving digital media, continued growth into new geographic markets, shift of our business mix to emphasize higher growth channels and ad units, and the implementation of new offerings.
Historically, real-time bidding, or RTB, open-market transactions, particularly for desktop display advertising, have provided most of the activity on our platform. However, other transaction types, such as private marketplace and guaranteed transactions, other channels, such as mobile and out-of-home, and other advertising units, such as video, have begun or are expected to grow faster than open-market RTB desktop display. We expect our historical open-market RTB desktop display advertising business to continue to be an important source of revenue for us, but consistent with market trends, growth in our RTB desktop display business has decelerated significantly and cannot be relied upon to drive the growth or our business. In order for us to grow and compete effectively, we must continue to increase our business in other areas of digital advertising. We must build upon our early momentum in private marketplace and guaranteed transactions and mobile and out-of-home channels and expand our business in other areas, particularly video. Our growth plans depend upon our ability to innovate, attract buyers and sellers to our solution for purposes of buying and selling higher value inventory, expand the scope of our solution and its use by buyers and sellers utilizing other digital media platforms and advertising units, many of which are outside the historical scope of business conducted by our large DSP buyer clients, and adapt the pricing and other terms we make available in response to changing market conditions. Our growth plans also depend on our ability to further increase our international business in existing and new markets, significantly expand the use of our private marketplace offerings, and effectively drive increasing automation in the advertising industry through implementation of new offerings. In order to innovate successfully, we must hire, train, motivate, and retain talented engineers in a competitive recruiting environment, and we must deploy them based on the development priorities we establish in light of our view of the future of our industry. Mobile, video, and other emerging digital platforms require different technology and business expertise than display advertising, and also present other challenges that may be difficult for us to overcome, including inventory quality issues. Many of our competitors in these emerging platforms have a significant head start in terms of technology, buyer or seller relationships, and the scope of their product offerings. Furthermore, a growing percentage of online and mobile advertising spending is captured by owned and operated sites (such as Facebook and Google), where we are unable to participate. Our business model may not translate well into higher-value advertising due to market resistance or other factors, and we may not be able to innovate quickly or successfully enough to compete effectively on new platforms, or to adapt our solution and infrastructure to international markets. New offerings may not correctly anticipate market demand, may not address demand as effectively as competing offerings, and may not deliver the results we expect.
Our technology development efforts may be inefficient or ineffective, which may impair our ability to attract buyers and sellers.
Our future success will depend in part upon our ability to enhance our existing solution, to develop and introduce competing new solutions in a timely manner with features and pricing that meet changing client and market requirements, and to persuade buyers and sellers to adopt our new solutions. New elements of our offering must compete with established competitors and may require significant investment in development and marketing to achieve parity, and buyers and sellers may not be ready to adopt new solutions we acquire or develop. We schedule and prioritize these development efforts according to a variety of factors, including our perceptions of market trends, client requirements, and resource availability. We face intense competition in the marketplace and are confronted by rapidly changing technology, evolving industry standards and consumer needs, and the frequent introduction of new solutions by our competitors that we must adapt and respond to. Our solutions are complex and can require a significant investment of time and resources to develop, test, introduce into use, and enhance. These activities can take longer than we expect. We may encounter unanticipated difficulties that require us to re-direct or scale back our efforts and we may need to modify our plans in response to changes in buyer and seller requirements, market demands, resource availability, regulatory requirements or other factors. If development of our solution becomes significantly more expensive due to changes in regulatory requirements or industry practices, or other factors, we may find ourselves at a disadvantage to larger competitors with more resources to devote to development. These factors place significant demands upon our engineering organization, require complex planning and decision making, and can result in acceleration of some initiatives and delay of others. If we do not manage our development efforts efficiently and effectively, we may fail to produce, or timely produce, solutions that respond appropriately to the needs of buyers and sellers, and competitors may develop offerings that more successfully anticipate market evolution and address market expectations. If our solution is not responsive and competitive, buyers and sellers can be expected to shift their business to competing solutions. Buyers and sellers may also resist adopting our new solutions for various reasons, including reluctance to disrupt existing relationships and business practices or to invest in necessary technological integration or preference for competitors' offerings or self-developed capabilities.
We must scale our technology infrastructure to support our growth and transaction volumes. If we fail to do so, we may lose buyers, sellers, and revenue from transactions.
When a user visits a website or uses an application where our auctions technology is integrated, our technology must process a transaction for that seller and conduct an auction within milliseconds. Our technology must scale to process all the advertising impressions from the collection of all visitors of all websites and applications offered on our platform. Additionally, for each individual advertising impression, our technology must be able to send bid requests to appropriate and available buyers. It must perform these transactions end-to-end at speeds often faster than the page or application loads for the user. The addition of new services, support of evolving advertising formats, handling and use of increasing amounts of data, and overall growth also place increasing demands upon our technology infrastructure. The growth of mobile device usage is significantly increasing volume demands on our infrastructure. We must be able to continue to increase the capacity of our platform in order to support substantial increases in the number of buyers and sellers, to support an increasing variety of advertising formats and platforms and to maintain a stable service infrastructure and reliable service delivery, all to support the network effect of our solution. If we are unable, for cost or other reasons, to effectively increase the scale of our platform to support and manage a substantial increase in the number of transactions, as well as a substantial increase in the amount of data we process, on a high-performance, cost-effective basis, the quality of our services could decline and our reputation and business could be seriously harmed. In addition, if we are not able to continue processing these transactions at fast enough speeds or if we are unable to support emerging advertising formats or services preferred by buyers, our revenue may be adversely affected by the inability to obtain new buyers or sellers, loss of existing buyers or sellers, or failure to process auction transactions in a timely manner. We expect to continue to invest in our platform in order to meet increasing demand. Such investment may negatively affect our profitability and results of operations, or cause dilution to our stockholders.
Our belief that there is significant and growing demand for private marketplaces and automated guaranteed solutions may be inaccurate, and we may not realize a return from our investments in that area.
We believe there is significant and growing demand for private marketplaces and automated guaranteed solutions, and we have made significant investments to meet that demand through internal development efforts and through acquisitions. We believe our technology will be embraced by the market and contribute in a meaningful way to our revenue growth. However, the market for these solutions is new and unproven and may not grow as we expect, or it could have slow adoption rates for various reasons, including reluctance of some sellers to substitute our solution for transactions they have historically handled themselves through direct dealings with buyers. It is our expectation that private marketplaces and automated guaranteed solutions may involve lower fees than we can charge for our real-time bidding services, which may not be fully offset by anticipated higher CPMs. In some cases, we have experienced fee pressure as we have built out our private marketplace offering, and we expect this fee pressure to increase as more competitors, including new entrants as well as sellers themselves, build their own technology and infrastructure to enter this business. Even if the market for these solutions develops as we anticipate, buyers and sellers might not embrace our offerings to the degree we expect due to various factors. For example, we may not be successful in building out these offerings consistent with our vision, or competitive offerings may be offered at lower prices or be perceived as having better features and functionality. Advertising agency buyers may require that their use of our automated guaranteed solution to make inventory purchases take place through established workflow applications they own or license from third parties, and if we are required to work with third parties to access agency demand, we will be required to pay them fees or share with them the revenue generated by transactions processed through their applications, reducing the profitability of this business for us. If those third-party applications are not compatible with our technology, or providers of the applications demand unreasonable terms to integrate, our ability to transact automated guaranteed purchases with those agencies may be limited, which could reduce the revenue we anticipate flowing through this solution. We may also be unable to scale our solution to markets outside of the United States due to local currency or other specific regulatory or operational requirements that we are unable to comply with. Even if the market for these solutions develops as we anticipate, and our buyers and sellers embrace our offerings, the positive effect of our private marketplace and automated guaranteed offerings on our results of operations may be negated by other adverse developments or by similar offerings from our competitors.
Our expectations regarding the growth prospects of our buyer offerings may be incorrect, and we may not realize a return from our investments in that area.
In order to increase the demand on our platform, we have made significant investments in our buyer offerings, including through our acquisition in April 2015 of Chango Inc. However, our intent marketing business has grown slower than anticipated, and performed below our expectations due to changes in the market, stronger offerings by competitors, pricing pressures, and other factors. As a result, we are adapting our buyer offerings based upon various assumptions and expectations, including market growth, acceleration in the development of our Orders business, and viability of our guaranteed audiences initiative. We compete for demand with well-established companies that have technological advantages stemming from their experience in the market, and we must continue to adapt and improve our demand technology to compete effectively. Client demands for transparency and pricing concessions have increased significantly, and more quickly than we previously expected, making it difficult for us to increase our business with some clients, causing others to reduce their spending, reducing our take rate in some transactions with demand sources, requiring us to provide less expensive self-service offerings and more transparent pricing alternatives. Buyers and sellers may not embrace our offering due to various factors, including the perception that competitors have superior technology or produce better results.
We have invested heavily in our mobile technology, which poses additional risks that did not affect our legacy display business. Mobile connected devices or any other devices, their operating systems, Internet browsers or content distribution channels, including those controlled by our competitors, may develop in ways that make it difficult for advertisements to be delivered to their users. Further, we rely upon relationships with third parties to provide our buyers with access to large numbers of mobile inventory sellers that utilize third-party technology to display ads. If our access to mobile inventory is limited by third-party technology or lack of direct relationships with mobile sellers, our ability to grow our business will be impaired.
Due to increased usage of mobile devices and resulting migration of ad spending to mobile platforms, we have invested heavily in our mobile technology and are relying to a significant degree on our mobile offerings to fuel our continued growth. The mobile advertising market is growing and changing quickly, and technological, market, or regulatory developments could render our solutions less competitive. Because mobile advertising uses different data-capture techniques and methods of recording payable transactions, caters to different buyer budgets, may require us to enter emerging markets in which we have less experience, including China and India, and involves development challenges imposed by differing technological requirements and standards, there can be no assurance that we will be successful in achieving our goals in this market. Moreover, buyers' spending to reach consumers through mobile advertising may evolve more slowly than expected, or not grow to levels we anticipate. Our mobile investment has been focused on real-time bidding of mobile impressions, and that market may not grow as we expect. Our mobile revenue growth is largely dependent on the success of our new Exchange API technology, and there can be no assurance that this technology will continue to work as anticipated, without costly bugs or errors. Our success in the mobile channel depends upon the ability of our technology solution to provide advertising for most mobile-connected devices, as well as the major operating systems or Internet browsers that run on them and the thousands of applications that are downloaded onto them. The design of mobile devices and operating systems, applications, or Internet browsers is controlled by third parties. These parties frequently introduce new devices and applications, and from time to time they may introduce new operating systems or Internet browsers or modify existing ones in ways that may significantly affect our business, such as by providing ad-blocking capabilities. Network carriers may also impact the ability to access specified content on mobile devices. If our solution is unable to work on these devices, operating systems, applications, or Internet browsers for any reason, our ability to generate revenue through mobile advertising could be significantly harmed.
Our growth depends upon our ability to attract and retain buyers and sellers and increase business with them. Buyers and sellers are free to direct their spending and inventory to competing sources of inventory and demand, and large competitors with direct mobile user relationships and proprietary first-party user data have invested early and heavily in mobile advertising solutions, have many established relationships with mobile buyers and sellers that may be difficult for us to replicate, and may provide more compelling solutions than we do. Most of the application providers selling inventory through our platform utilize software development kits, or SDKs, and other proprietary technology of third parties, such as aggregators, and it is those third parties, not the application providers themselves, that contract with us to provide exchange services to help monetize the inventory. Termination or diminution of our relationships with these third parties could result in rapid and significant reduction of the amount of mobile inventory available through our platform, which in turn would adversely affect our mobile managed revenue (advertising spending) and growth prospects.
Market pressure may result in a reduction in spending on our platform or a reduction in the fees or prices we charge on our platform, which could have a material adverse effect on our business and reduce our take rate.
A majority of our managed revenue (advertising spending) comes from demand side platform, or DSP, buyers purchasing advertising inventory in RTB transactions on our platform. Our proprietary auction algorithms include a buyer fee for use of our technology, and we have typically charged buyers a variable price for real-time bidding impressions without specifying the amount or method of determination of the fee that is included in the price. Like other industry participants, DSPs have come under growing pressure from their clients to reduce their fees and/or to provide fee transparency, and DSPs may in turn apply this pressure to us. We also charge fees to sellers for use of our technology, typically as a percentage of the cost of media. As is normal in most industries and companies, the introduction of new offerings requires different pricing rates or structures. Projecting a market's acceptance of a new price or structure is imperfect and we may price too high or too low, both of which may carry adverse consequences. Although we believe our pricing is competitive, we experience requests from buyers and sellers for discounts, fee concessions or revisions, rebates, and greater levels of pricing transparency and specificity. In addition, we may decide to offer discounts or other pricing concessions in order to attract more inventory or demand, or to compete effectively with other providers that have different or lower pricing structures and may be able to undercut our pricing due to greater scale or other factors. Further, in light of increasing market trends toward transparency, commodification of intermediary services, and disintermediation, we may voluntarily reduce our fees in an effort to be more competitive in attracting demand and capturing inventory.
In addition to the fee-based business we have historically conducted with buyers that purchase through our auction platform, and beginning in April 2015, we commenced an intent marketing offering by which we offer buyers dynamic CPM pricing for inventory acquisition in support of their advertising campaigns. In lieu of charging fees for this service, our model has been to attempt to acquire inventory for buyers at prices that satisfy their campaign objectives while allowing us to retain a margin. This business is more risky than our fee-based model but also offers opportunities for greater margins. However, as a result of competitive pressure and growing demands for pricing transparency and fee concessions throughout the advertising technology business, we have begun to experience some margin compression in this part of our business.
If large buyers or sellers, or large numbers of small buyers or sellers, are able to compel us to charge lower fees or provide fee concessions or refunds, or to reveal or reduce our margins in intent marketing transactions, we may not be able to maintain appropriate volumes of inventory supply and demand without agreeing to these concessions. We also may face the risk that, where a buyer is dissatisfied with the execution of a transaction on our platform, a buyer may request a refund from us of the managed revenue (advertising spending) on the transaction notwithstanding that we have only collected a fee on the transaction and may not have the ability to recover the full amount of spending associated with the transaction from the counter party. In addition, the fees we charge and margins we earn are likely to change in response to evolution in the market, customer demands, market opportunities, new products, or competitive pressure. If we cannot maintain and grow our revenue and profitability through volume increases that compensate for any price reductions, or if we are forced to make significant fee concessions or refunds, or if buyers reduce spending with us due to fee disputes or pricing issues, our revenue, take rate, the value of our business, and the price of our stock could be adversely affected.
We have a history of losses and may not achieve or sustain profitability in the future.
We reported net losses of
$0.4 million
and
$17.0 million
during the
six months ended
June 30, 2016
and
2015
, respectively. We reported net income of
$0.4 million
during the year ended
December 31, 2015
and incurred net losses of
$18.7 million
and
$9.2 million
during the years ended
December 31, 2014
and
2013
, respectively. As of
June 30, 2016
, we had an accumulated deficit of
$80.7 million
. We may not be able to sustain the revenue growth we have experienced in recent periods, and revenue may decrease due to competitive pressures, maturation of our business, or other factors. Our expenses have increased with our revenue growth, primarily due to substantial investments in our business. Our historical revenue growth should not be considered as indicative of our future performance. We expect our expenses to continue to increase substantially in the foreseeable future as we continue to expand our business, including by hiring engineering, sales, marketing, and related support employees, investing in our technology and infrastructure, and developing additional digital media platforms, such as mobile and video. Accordingly, we may not be able to achieve or sustain profitability in the future. If our revenue growth declines or our expenses exceed expectations, our financial performance will be adversely affected.
Our limited operating history makes it difficult to evaluate our business and prospects and may increase the risks associated with an investment in our common stock.
We were incorporated in 2007 and consequently have only a limited operating history upon which our business and future prospects may be evaluated. We may not be able to sustain the rate of growth we have achieved to date, or even maintain our current revenue levels. We have encountered and will continue to encounter risks and difficulties frequently experienced by growing companies in rapidly evolving industries, including allocating and making effective use of our limited resources; achieving market acceptance of our existing and future solutions; competing against companies with greater financial and technical resources; recruiting; integrating, motivating, and retaining qualified employees; developing relationships with buyers and sellers; developing new solutions; integrating new technologies or companies we acquire; and establishing and maintaining our corporate infrastructure, including internal controls relating to our financial and information technology systems. We must improve our current operational infrastructure and technology to support significant growth and to respond to the evolution of our market and competitors' developments. Our business prospects depend in large part on our ability to:
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build and maintain our reputation for innovation and solutions that meet the evolving needs of buyers and sellers;
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distinguish ourselves from the wide variety of solutions available in our industry;
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maintain and expand our relationships with buyers and sellers;
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respond to evolving industry standards and government regulations that impact our business, particularly in the areas of data collection and consumer privacy;
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prevent or otherwise mitigate failures or breaches of security or privacy;
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attract, hire, integrate and retain qualified employees;
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effectively execute upon our international expansion plans;
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evaluate new acquisition targets, and successfully integrate acquired companies' business and technologies;
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grow our share of online and mobile ad spending and the supply of advertising impressions available to us notwithstanding the growing share of online impressions that is controlled by owned and operated sites (such as Facebook and Google) who may not make their advertising inventory available to us;
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maintain our cloud-based technology solution continuously without interruption 24 hours a day, seven days a week; and
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anticipate and respond to varying product life cycles, regularly enhance our existing advertising solutions, and introduce new advertising solutions and pricing models on a timely basis, including by developing our capabilities in evolving areas of the business, such as mobile and video.
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There is no assurance that we will meet these and other challenges.
As a result of various factors, our operating results may fluctuate significantly, be difficult to predict, and fall below analysts' and investors' expectations.
Our operating results may be difficult to predict, particularly because we generally do not have long-term contracts with buyers or sellers. We have experienced significant variations in revenue and operating results from period to period. Our operating results may continue to fluctuate and be difficult to predict due to a number of factors, including:
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seasonality in demand for digital advertising;
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changes in pricing of advertising inventory or pricing for our solutions and our competitors' offerings, including potential reductions in our pricing and overall take rate as a result of competitive pressure, changes in supply, improvements in technology and extension of automation to higher-value inventory, uncertainty regarding rate of adoption, changes in the allocation of demand spend by buyers, changes in revenue mix, auction dynamics, pricing discussions or negotiations with clients and potential clients, and other factors;
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diversification of our revenue mix to include new services, some of which may have lower pricing than our historic lower-value inventory business or may cannibalize existing business;
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the addition or loss of buyers or sellers;
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changes in the advertising strategies or budgets or financial condition of advertisers;
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the performance of our technology and the cost, timeliness, and results of our technology innovation efforts;
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advertising technology and digital media industry conditions and the overall demand for advertising, or changes and uncertainty in the regulatory environment for us or buyers or sellers, including with respect to privacy regulation;
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the introduction of new technologies or service offerings by our competitors and market acceptance of such technologies or services;
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our level of expenses, including investment required to support our technology development, scale our technology infrastructure and business expansion efforts, including acquisitions, hiring and capital expenditures, or expenses related to litigation;
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the impact of changes in our stock price on valuation of stock-based compensation or other instruments that are marked to market;
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the effect of our efforts to maintain the quality of transactions on our platform, including the blocking of non-human inventory and traffic, which could cause a reduction in our revenue if there are fewer transactions consummated through our platform even though the overall quality of the transactions may have improved;
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the effectiveness of our financial and information technology infrastructure and controls;
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foreign exchange rate fluctuations; and
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changes in accounting policies and principles and the significant judgments and estimates made by management in the application of these policies and principles.
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Because significant portions of our expenses are relatively fixed, variation in our quarterly revenue could cause significant variations in operating results and resulting stock price volatility from period to period. In order to minimize adverse effects of pricing pressure on revenue, we must increase our scale and add more high-value inventory, which requires ongoing investment that can have an adverse effect at the expense of earnings and might ultimately be unsuccessful. Period-to-period comparisons of our historical results of operations are not necessarily meaningful, and historical operating results may not be indicative of future performance. If our revenue or operating results fall below the expectations of investors or securities analysts, or below any guidance we may provide to the market, the price of our common stock could decline substantially.
Our revenue and operating results are highly dependent on the overall demand for advertising. Factors that affect the amount of advertising spending, such as economic downturns, particularly in the fourth quarter, can make it difficult to predict our revenue and could adversely affect our business.
Our business depends on the overall demand for advertising and on the economic health of our current and prospective sellers and buyers. If advertisers reduce their overall advertising spending, our revenue and results of operations are directly affected. Economic downturns or instability in political or market conditions generally may cause current or new advertisers to reduce their advertising budgets. Reductions in inventory due to loss of sellers would make our solution less robust and attractive to buyers. Adverse economic conditions and general uncertainty about economic recovery or growth, particularly in North America and Europe, where we do most of our business, are likely to affect our business prospects. Many advertisers devote a disproportionate amount of their advertising budgets to the fourth quarter of the calendar year to coincide with increased holiday purchasing, and buyers may spend more in the fourth quarter for budget reasons. As a result, any events that reduce the amount of advertising spending during the fourth quarter, or reduce the amount of inventory available to buyers during that period, could have a disproportionate adverse effect on our revenue and operating results for that fiscal year. Moreover, any changes in the favorable tax treatment of advertising expenses and the deductibility thereof would likely cause a reduction in advertising demand. In addition, continued geopolitical turmoil in many parts of the world have and may continue to put pressure on global economic conditions, which could lead to reduced spending on advertising.
Seasonal fluctuations in digital advertising activity, which may historically have been less apparent due to our historical revenue growth, could adversely affect our cash flows and operating results.
Our revenue, non-GAAP net revenue, managed revenue (advertising spending), cash flow from operations, operating results, and other key performance measures may vary from quarter to quarter due to the seasonal nature of advertiser spending. For example, many advertisers devote a disproportionate amount of their advertising budgets to the fourth quarter of the calendar year to coincide with increased holiday purchasing. Moreover, advertising inventory in the fourth quarter may be more expensive due to increased demand for advertising inventory. Seasonal fluctuations historically have been less apparent due to our historical revenue growth, but if our growth rate declines or seasonal spending becomes more pronounced, seasonality could result in material fluctuations of our revenue, cash flow, operating results and other key performance measures from period to period.
Our corporate culture has contributed to our success, and if we cannot successfully maintain our culture as we assimilate new employees, we could lose the innovation, creativity and teamwork fostered by our culture.
We are undergoing rapid growth, including in our employee headcount. As of
June 30, 2016
, we had
652
employees. We expect that significant additional hiring will be necessary to support our strategic plans, including increased hiring in other countries. We have in the past added significant numbers of employees through acquisitions, including as a result of our acquisition of Chango in April 2015, and we may continue to do so. This rapid influx of large numbers of people from different business and geographic backgrounds may make it difficult for us to maintain our corporate culture. If our culture is negatively affected, our ability to support our growth and innovation may diminish.
Risks Related to the Advertising Technology Industry, Market, and Competition
The digital advertising market is relatively new, dependent on growth in various digital advertising channels, and vulnerable to adverse public perceptions and increased regulatory responses. If this market develops more slowly or differently than we expect, or if issues encountered by other participants or the industry generally are imputed to or affect us, our business, growth prospects and financial condition would be adversely affected.
The digital advertising market is relatively new and our solution may not achieve or sustain high levels of demand and market acceptance. While desktop display advertising has been used successfully for many years, marketing via new digital advertising channels, such as mobile and social media, and digital video advertising, is emerging and may evolve in unexpected ways, and our future growth will be constrained if we are not able to adapt successfully to market evolution. In addition, the success of our efforts to advance new solutions for increased advertising automation will depend upon adoption of our solution by personnel at buyers and sellers in lieu of their traditional methods of order placement. It is difficult to predict adoption rates, demand for our solution, the future growth rate and size of the digital advertising solutions market or the entry of competitive solutions.
Further, the digital advertising industry is relatively new and complex, and evolving, and there are relatively few publicly traded companies operating in the business. Consequently, the digital advertising industry may not be as widely followed or understood in the financial markets as more mature industries. The markets may not fully appreciate our particular place in the industry and our strengths and differentiating factors. Problems experienced by one industry participant (even private companies) or issues affecting a part of the business have the potential to have adverse effects on other participants in the industry or even the entire industry. Emerging understanding of how the digital advertising industry operates has spurred privacy concerns and misgivings about exploitation of consumer information and prompted regulatory responses that limit operational flexibility and impose compliance costs upon industry participants.
Any expansion of the market for digital advertising solutions depends on a number of factors, including social and regulatory acceptance, the growth of the digital advertising market, the growth of social, mobile and video as advertising channels, and the actual or perceived technological viability, quality, cost, performance and value associated with emerging digital advertising solutions. If demand for digital display advertising and adoption of automation does not continue to grow, or if digital advertising solutions or advertising automation do not achieve widespread adoption, or there is a reduction in demand for digital advertising caused by weakening economic conditions, decreases in corporate spending, quality, viewability, malware issues or other issues associated with buyers, advertising channels or inventory, negative perceptions of digital advertising, additional regulatory requirements, or other factors, or if we fail to develop or acquire capabilities to meet the evolving business and regulatory requirements and needs of buyers and sellers of multi-channel advertising, our competitive position will be weakened.
We operate in an intensely competitive market that includes companies that have greater financial, technical and marketing resources than we do.
We face intense competition in the marketplace. We are confronted by rapidly changing technology, evolving user needs and the frequent introduction by our competitors of new and enhanced solutions. We compete for advertising spending against competitors that, in some cases, are also buyers and/or sellers on our platform. We also compete for supply of advertising inventory against a variety of competitors. Some of our existing and potential competitors are better established, benefit from greater name recognition, may have offerings and technology that we do not have or that are more evolved and established than ours, and have significantly more financial, technical, sales, and marketing resources than we do. In addition, some competitors, particularly those with greater scale or a more diversified revenue base and a broader offering, may have greater flexibility than we do to compete aggressively on the basis of price and other contract terms, or to compete with us by including in their product offerings services that we may not provide. Some competitors are able or willing to agree to contract terms that expose them to risks that might be more appropriately allocated to buyers or sellers of advertising (including inventory risk and the risk of having to pay sellers for unsold advertising impressions), and in order to compete effectively we might need to accommodate risks that could be difficult to manage or insure against. Some buyers that use our solution, and some potential buyers, have their own relationships with sellers and can directly connect advertisers with sellers, and many sellers are investing in capabilities that enable them to connect more effectively directly with buyers. Our business may suffer to the extent that buyers and sellers purchase and sell advertising inventory directly from one another or through intermediaries other than us. In addition, as a result of solutions introduced by us or our competitors, our marketplace will experience disruptions and changes in business models, which may result in our loss of buyers or sellers. Our innovation efforts may lead us to introduce new solutions that compete with our existing solutions. New or stronger competitors may emerge through acquisitions and industry consolidation or through development of disruptive technologies. If our offerings are not perceived as competitively differentiated, due to competition and growth in our industry or our failure to develop adequately to meet market evolution, we could lose clients and market share or be compelled to reduce our prices, making it more difficult to grow our business profitably.
There has been rapid evolution and consolidation in the advertising technology industry, and we expect these trends to continue, thereby increasing the capabilities and competitive posture of larger companies, particularly those that are already dominant in various ways, and enabling new or stronger competitors to emerge. For example, while we are investing to participate in the shift of digital advertising spending to mobile channels, the mobile advertising market is dominated by a relatively small number of large competitors with direct mobile user relationships and proprietary first-party user data. These competitors have invested early and heavily in mobile advertising solutions that may be more compelling than ours, and have many established relationships with buyers and sellers that may be difficult for us to replicate. Similar dynamics can be expected as growth in digital video advertising brings established broadcast and content companies into the digital advertising business.
As technology continues to improve and market factors continue to compel investment by others in the business, competition and pricing pressure may increase and market saturation may change the competitive landscape in favor of larger competitors with greater scale and broader offerings, including those that can afford to spend more than we can to grow more quickly and strengthen their competitive position through innovation, development and acquisitions. In order to compete effectively, we may need to innovate, further differentiate our offerings, and expand the scope of our operations more quickly than would be feasible through our own internal efforts. However, because some capabilities may reside only in a small number of companies, our ability to accomplish necessary expansion through acquisitions may be limited because available companies may not wish to be acquired or may be acquired by larger competitors with the resources to outbid us, or we may need to pay substantial premiums to acquire those businesses. Our ability to make strategic acquisitions could also be hampered if the value of our stock, which we might seek to use as acquisition currency, is viewed negatively by an acquisition target, and the lower our stock price, the more dilution we will incur as a result of stock-based acquisitions.
Many buyers and sellers are large consolidated organizations that may need to acquire other companies in order to grow. Smaller buyers and sellers may need to consolidate in order to compete effectively. There is a finite number of large buyers and sellers in our target markets, and any consolidation of buyers or sellers may give the resulting enterprises greater bargaining power or result in the loss of buyers and sellers that use our platform, and thus reduce our potential base of buyers and sellers, each of which would lead to erosion of our revenue.
Our business depends on our ability to collect and use data to deliver advertisements, and to disclose data relating to the performance of advertisements. Any limitation imposed on our collection, use or disclosure of this data could significantly diminish the value of our solution and cause us to lose sellers, buyers, and revenue.
As we process transactions through our solutions, we are able to collect significant amounts of information about advertisements, their buyers and sellers, and the transactions in which they are placed. This includes buyer and seller preferences and requirements for media and advertisement content and specifications such as placement, size and format; pricing of advertisements; and auction activity such as price floors, bid response behavior, and clearing prices. We also are able to collect non-personally identifiable information about users, including browser or device location and characteristics; online behavior; exposure to and interaction with advertisements; and inferential data about purchase intentions and preferences. We collect this data through various means, including from our own systems, pixels that sellers allow us to place on their websites to track user visits, software development kits installed in mobile applications, and cookies (which are discussed below). Our sellers and buyers also may provide us with their proprietary data about users.
We aggregate this data over trillions of advertising impressions and analyze it in order to optimize our services, including the pricing, placement and scheduling of advertisements purchased by buyers across the advertising inventory provided by sellers. We also share this data, or analyses based upon the data, with clients as part of our services. Our ability to collect, use, and share data about advertising purchase and sale transactions and user behavior and interaction with content is critical to the value of our services, and any limitation on our data practices could impair our ability to deliver effective solutions that meet the needs of sellers and buyers of advertising, resulting in loss of volume and reduced pricing.
Much of the data we collect and use belongs to our buyers or sellers, and we use it with their consent. (Other data is subject to control by Internet users, either as a result of regulation or through choices such as behavioral advertising opt-outs or use of ad blocking technologies, as discussed below). We use data related to our buyers and sellers and their transactional activity on our platform to facilitate our services, but we must exercise care not to use this data in ways that provide unfair advantages to, or adversely affect, buyers or sellers. Although our sellers and buyers generally permit us to aggregate and use data from advertising placements, subject to certain restrictions, sellers or buyers might decide to restrict our collection or use of their data. There could be various reasons for this, including perceptions by buyers that their data can be used by sellers to extract higher prices for impressions, or perceptions by sellers that their data can be used by buyers to bid tactically to reduce pricing for impressions. As a result, for example, sellers might not agree to provide us with data generated by interactions with the content on their properties, or buyers might not agree to allow us to analyze bid responses. Buyers and sellers may also request that we discontinue using data obtained from their transactions that has already been aggregated with other data. It would be difficult, if not impossible, and costly to comply with such requests. In addition, interruptions, failures, defects, or other challenges in our data collection, mining, analysis, and storage systems could also limit our ability to aggregate and analyze the data from transactions effected through our solution. As consumers continue to increase their use of digital technology and to incorporate multiple devices into their lives, linking and using data across such devices will become increasingly important. Various challenges affect our ability to link data relating to discrete devices, including different technologies used in different platforms, increased user awareness and sensitivity regarding use of data about their device usage, and evolving regulatory and self-regulatory standards. These challenges may slow growth, and if we are not able to cope with these challenges as effectively as other companies, we will be competitively disadvantaged. Any limitation on our ability to collect data about user behavior and interaction with content could make it more difficult for us to deliver effective solutions that meet the needs of sellers and buyers.
If the use of cookies is restricted or subject to unfavorable regulation, or cookies are replaced by alternative tracking mechanisms, our performance may decline and we may lose buyers and revenue.
We use "cookies," or small text files placed through an Internet browser on an Internet user's computer, to gather data to enable our solution to be more effective. Our cookies record non-personally identifiable information, such as when an Internet user views or clicks on an advertisement, where a user is located, how many advertisements the user has seen, and browser or device information. We may also receive information from cookies placed by buyers or other parties who give us permission to use their cookies. We use data from cookies to help buyers decide whether to bid on, and how to price, an opportunity to place an advertisement in a certain location, at a given time, in front of a particular Internet user. Without cookie data, transactions occurring through our solution would be executed with less insight into activity that has taken place through an Internet user's browser, reducing the ability of buyers to make accurate decisions about which inventory to purchase for an advertising campaign. This could make placement of advertising through our solution less valuable, with commensurate reduction in pricing. If our ability to use cookies is limited, we may be required to develop or obtain additional applications and technologies to compensate for the lack of cookie data, which could be time consuming to develop or costly to obtain, less effective than our current use of cookies, and subject to additional regulation.
Cookies are an important component of our ability to provide a satisfactory offering to our customers, and our continued use of cookies is vulnerable to actions by sellers of inventory, consumers, and regulators. For example, the European Union, or EU, Cookie Directive directs EU member states to ensure that Internet users consent to storing or accessing information on their devices, such as through a cookie. Because we lack a direct relationship with Internet users, we rely on our sellers to obtain such consent. Some EU member states have interpreted the Cookie Directive to require sellers to provide increasingly granular data to end users about cookies placed in the course of delivering an advertisement, including cookies placed by us, or by buyers using our technology, in order to obtain effective consent. Providing this granular level of data may be difficult, and in some cases where a buyer is non-responsive or recalcitrant, may not be possible. Further, such disclosures may conflict with data provisions in our contracts with buyers and sellers designed to protect information the buyer deems to be confidential or proprietary, or may require us to impose additional contractual requirements on buyers or sellers. As a result, these types of disclosure requirements, as well as any other limitations on our or our buyers' ability to place or use third party cookies, may impair our ability to provide services in certain jurisdictions.
Separately, some prominent sellers have announced intentions to discontinue the use of cookies, and to develop alternative methods and mechanisms for tracking web users. It is possible that these companies may rely on proprietary algorithms or statistical methods to track web users without cookies, or may utilize log-in credentials entered by users into other web properties owned by these companies, such as their digital email services, to track web usage, including usage across multiple devices, without cookies. Alternatively, such companies may build different and potentially proprietary user tracking methods into their widely-used web browsers.
If cookies are effectively replaced by proprietary alternatives, our continued reliance upon cookie-based methods may face negative consumer sentiment and otherwise place us at a competitive disadvantage, compelling us to develop or license alternative proprietary tracking methodologies. Development would take time, potentially subjecting us to competitive disadvantages, and require substantial investment from us. Development also may not be commercially feasible given our relatively small size, the fact that development of such technologies may require technical skills that differ from our core engineering competencies, and the likelihood that the market would adopt solutions developed by larger competitors. Licensing new proprietary tracking mechanisms and data from companies that have developed them may not be viable for us for various reasons; creators of such technology may compete with us and may offer to provide the technology to us only on unfavorable terms or not at all, and if proprietary web tracking standards are owned by sellers or browser operators that have access to user information by virtue of their popular consumer-oriented websites or browsers and design their technology for use in conjunction with the types of user information collected from their websites, we may still be at a competitive disadvantage even if we license their technology.
If cookies are effectively replaced by open industry-wide tracking standards rather than proprietary standards, we may still incur substantial re-engineering costs to replace cookies with these new tracking technologies. This may also diminish the quality or value of our services to buyers if such new web-tracking technologies do not provide us with the quality or timeliness of the tracking data that we currently generate from cookies.
If the use of "third-party cookies" or digital advertising generally is rejected by Internet users, through opt-out or ad-blocking technologies or other means, or if other consumer choice mechanisms like "Do Not Track" and "Limit Ad Tracking" inhibit our ability to collect and use data about end users, our performance may decline and we may lose buyers and revenue.
Internet users can, with increasing ease, implement practices or technologies that may limit our ability to collect and use data to deliver advertisements, or otherwise inhibit the effectiveness of our solution. First, cookies may easily be deleted or blocked by Internet users. All of the most commonly used Internet browsers allow Internet users to modify their browser settings to block first-party cookies (placed directly by the publisher or website owner that the user intends to interact with) or third-party cookies (placed by parties, like Rubicon Project, that have no direct relationship with the user), and some browsers, such as Safari, may block third-party cookies by default. Most browsers also now support temporary privacy modes that allow the user to suspend, with a single click, the placement of new cookies or reading or updates of existing cookies. Many applications and other devices allow users to avoid receiving advertisements by paying for subscriptions or other downloads. Mobile devices based upon the Android and iOS operating systems limit the ability of cookies to track users while they are using other applications other than their web browser on their device. As a consequence, fewer of our cookies or sellers' cookies may be set in browsers or accessible in mobile devices, which would adversely affect our business.
Second, some Internet users also download free or paid "ad blocking" software, not only for privacy reasons, such as a desire to avoid being targeted for ads based upon location or online activity, but also to counteract the adverse effect advertisements can have on users' experience, including increased load times, data consumption, and screen overcrowding. Similar ad-blocking technology has also recently emerged for mobile devices. Such ad-blocking technology may prevent certain third-party cookies, or other tracking technologies, from being stored on a user's computer or mobile device. If more Internet users adopt these measures, our business could be harmed. Estimates of the use of ad-blocking technologies vary by user population, type of media content, geography, and other factors, and the ultimate prevalence and effect of ad-blocking technologies is not certain, but it could have an adverse effect on our business if it reduces the volume or effectiveness (and therefore value) of advertising. In addition, some ad blocking technologies block only ads that are targeted through use of third-party data, while allowing ads based on first-party data (i.e. data owned by the provider of the website or application being viewed). These ad blockers could place us at a disadvantage because we rely on third-party data, while large competitors have troves of first-party data they use to direct advertising. Other technologies allow ads that are deemed "acceptable," which could be defined in ways that place us or our clients at a disadvantage, particularly if such technologies are controlled or influenced by our competitors. Even if ad blockers do not ultimately have a material impact on our business, investor concerns about ad blockers could cause our stock price to decline.
Increased prevalence of ad blocking has prompted examination of the effect of digital advertising industry practices upon the quality of user experiences, and changes in industry practices may emerge as a result. Such changes could reduce the viability of our existing business model, place us at a competitive disadvantage, or require us to invest significantly in developing new technologies and business practices.
Third, current versions of the most widely used web browsers allow users to send "Do Not Track" signals to indicate that they do not wish to have their web usage tracked. However, there is currently no definition of "tracking" and no standards regarding how to respond to a "Do Not Track" preference that are accepted or standardized in the industry. The World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, chartered a "Tracking Protection Working Group" in 2011 to convene a multi-stakeholder group of academics, thought leaders, companies, industry groups and consumer advocacy organizations to create a voluntary "Do Not Track" standard for the web. The W3C is continuing to work on a policy specification that will provide guidance as to how websites and buyers should respond to a "Do Not Track" signal. The W3C's current draft policy specification, which has not yet been finalized, allows first parties to continue to track users, even if the users have enabled the "Do Not Track" signal in their web browser. At the same time, the draft policy specification would prevent third parties, like us, from any further tracking of such users across the Internet. This policy specification has not been finalized, and it remains unclear to what extent that specification will be accepted by legislators and regulators worldwide. Nonetheless, if we are required to respond to "Do Not Track" signals as required by the W3C's current draft policy specification, we may be placed at a significant competitive disadvantage compared to first-party data owners such as large website operators, many of whom own or are developing or acquiring capabilities that compete with our solutions.
Even absent an industry standard, various government authorities have indicated an intent to implement some type of "Do Not Track" standard. For example, the Federal Trade Commission, or FTC, and the European Commission, which proposes legislation to the European Parliament, have previously stated that they will pursue a legislative solution if the industry does not agree to a standard. Additionally, the "Do Not Track Online Act of 2015" was recently introduced in the US Senate, and members of the U.S. House of Representatives have also issued public statements supporting the idea of a legislative solution. Such legislation or regulation may affect our ability to collect or use data collected through our platform when a user enables "Do Not Track," and may also include a distinction between first-party and third party collection and usage of data, similar to the distinction in the W3C's current draft policy specification, which may impact our ability to compete in the marketplace.
The California Online Privacy Protection Act of 2003 requires operators of websites or online services to disclose how the operator responds to "Do Not Track" signals regarding the collection of personally identifiable information about an individual consumer's online activities over time and across third-party websites or online services, as well as to disclose whether third parties may collect personally identifiable information about an individual consumer's online activities over time and across different websites or online services. It is possible that other states or the U.S. government could adopt similar legislation. While we do not collect data that is traditionally considered personally identifiable information in the United States without user consent, we may nonetheless elect to respond to such legislation by adopting a policy to discontinue profiling or web tracking in response to "Do Not Track" requests, and it is possible that we could in the future be prohibited from using non-personal consumer data by industry standards or state or federal legislation, which may diminish our ability to optimize and target advertisements and the value of our services.
Fourth, in addition to "Do Not Track" options, certain mobile devices allow users to "Limit Ad Tracking" on their devices. Like "Do Not Track," "Limit Ad Tracking" is a signal that is sent by particular mobile devices when a user chooses to send such a signal. While there is no clear guidance on how third parties must respond upon receiving such a signal, it is possible that buyers, sellers, regulators, or future legislation may dictate a response that would limit our access to data, and consequently negatively impact the effectiveness of our solution and the value of our services on mobile devices.
These mechanisms for users to limit the presence of advertising in their online activities generally stem from a failure of the advertising technology industry to consider adequately the needs and preferences of the users sellers serve and buyers try to reach, and resulting user sentiment that digital advertising is often intrusive or irrelevant and can degrade users' online experience. The industry will evolve to address these issues, presenting not only opportunities for advertising technology companies that can help improve the user experience, but also risks for those that don't.
Legislation and regulation of digital businesses, including privacy and data protection regimes, could create unexpected additional costs, subject us to enforcement actions for compliance failures, or cause us to change our technology solution or business model, which may have an adverse effect on the demand for our solution.
Many local, state, national, and international laws and regulations apply to the collection, use, retention, protection, disclosure, transfer, and other processing of data collected from and about consumers and devices, and the regulatory framework for privacy issues is evolving worldwide. Various U.S. and foreign governments, consumer agencies, self-regulatory bodies, and public advocacy groups have called for new regulation directed at the digital advertising industry in particular, and we expect to see an increase in legislation and regulation related to the collection and use of data to target advertisements and communicate with consumers, including mobile device and cross-device data, geo-location data, anonymous Internet user data and unique device identifiers, such as IP address or mobile advertising identifiers, and the collection of data from apps and websites that are directed to children. Such legislation or regulation could affect the costs of doing business online and may adversely affect the demand for or effectiveness and value of our solution. Some of our competitors may have more access to lobbyists or governmental officials and may use such access to effect statutory or regulatory changes in a manner that commercially harms us while favoring their solutions.
The U.S. government, including the FTC and the FCC, has announced that it is reviewing the need for greater regulation of the collection of consumer information, including regulation aimed at restricting some targeted advertising practices. For example, the U.S. Senate is currently considering enacting the Location Privacy Protection Act, which would place significant restrictions on the collection and use of geo-location data, including for advertising purposes. More recently, the FTC has announced that it plans to issue guidance on the tracking and delivery of targeted advertisements to consumers across multiple devices. The FTC has also adopted revisions to the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act that expand liability for the collection of information (including certain anonymous information such as persistent identifiers) by operators of websites and other online services that are directed to children or that otherwise use (for certain purposes) information collected from or about children. In addition, the European Union has adopted a General Data Protection Regulation, Regulation (EU) 2016/679 or the "GDPR," that will supersede the EU Data Protection Directive. The GDPR sets out higher potential liabilities for certain data protection violations, as well as a greater compliance burden for us in the course of delivering our solutions in Europe. Further, the European Union has indicated that it intends to propose reforms to the EU Cookie Directive governing the use of technologies to collect consumer information. The UK decision to leave the European Union may add cost and complexity to our compliance efforts. The UK is an important geography for us and we have structured our EU privacy and data protection compliance in a UK-centric way by using our UK subsidiary as our EU data controller. If UK and EU privacy and data protection laws and regulations diverge, we will be required to implement alternative EU compliance mechanisms and adapt separately to any new UK requirements. Complying with any new regulatory requirements could force us to incur substantial costs or require us to change our business practices in a manner that could reduce our revenue or compromise our ability to effectively pursue our growth strategy.
Additionally, although we do not currently collect from consumers data that is traditionally considered personal data in the United States, such as names, contact information, or financial or health data in the ordinary course of providing our solution (except to the limited extent personal data is voluntarily submitted by a user or collected by us with the user's knowledge and consent), we typically do collect and store IP addresses, geo-location information, and persistent identifiers. Some of this data are or may be considered personal data in some jurisdictions or otherwise may be the subject of future legislation or regulation. For example, some jurisdictions in the EU already regard IP addresses and unique device identifiers as personal data, and certain regulators, like the California Attorney General's Office and the FTC, have advocated for including IP addresses, GPS-level geolocation data, and unique device identifiers as personal data under California and Federal law. Evolving definitions of personal data, within the EU, the United States and elsewhere, especially relating to the classification of IP addresses, geo-location data, and persistent identifiers, may cause us in the future to change our business practices, diminish the quality of our data and the value of our solution, and hamper our ability to expand our offerings into the EU or other jurisdictions outside of the United States. They might likewise result in additional regulatory, legislative or public scrutiny, including investigations.
Further, many governments are restricting the storage of information about individuals beyond their national borders. Such restrictions could, depending upon their scope, limit our ability to utilize technology infrastructure consolidation, redundancy, and load-balancing techniques, resulting in increased infrastructure costs, decreased operational efficiencies and performance, and potentially a greater risk of system failure.
We strive to comply with all applicable laws and regulations relating to privacy and data collection processing, use and disclosure, but these laws and regulations are continually evolving, not always clear, and not always consistent across the jurisdictions in which we do business. The measures we take to protect the security of information that we collect, use, and disclose in the operation of our business may not always be effective. Our failure to protect, and comply with applicable laws and regulations or industry standards applicable to, personal data or other data relating to consumers could result in enforcement action against us, including fines, imprisonment of our officers, and public censure, claims for damages by consumers and other affected individuals, damage to our reputation, and loss of goodwill. This is particularly true given that the FTC, Attorneys General of various U.S. States and various international regulators (including numerous data protection authorities in the European Union), have specifically cited as enforcement priorities certain practices that relate to digital advertising. Even the perception of concerns relating to our collection, use, disclosure, and retention of data, including our security measures applicable to the data we collect, whether or not valid, may harm our reputation and inhibit adoption of our solution by current and future buyers and sellers. We are aware of ongoing lawsuits filed against, or regulatory investigations into, companies in the digital advertising industry concerning various alleged violations of consumer protection, data protection, and computer crime laws, asserting various privacy-related theories. Any such proceedings brought against us could hurt our reputation, force us to spend significant amounts in defense of these proceedings, distract our management, increase our costs of doing business, adversely affect the demand for our services, and ultimately result in the imposition of monetary liability or restrictions on our ability to conduct our business. We may also be contractually liable to indemnify and hold harmless buyers or sellers from the costs or consequences of litigation or regulatory investigations resulting from using our services or from the disclosure of confidential information, which could damage our reputation among our current and potential sellers or buyers, require significant expenditures of capital and other resources and cause us to lose business and revenue.
Further, privacy and other regulatory violations by other participants in the digital advertising ecosystem could lead to increased regulatory and enforcement activities, reductions in the growth of demand for digital advertising, and increased user requirements, all of which could have adverse consequences and impose additional costs for all industry participants, including us.
The EU's recently finalized General Data Protection Regulation, which restricts the transfer of personal data of EU residents to the United States, as well as the Court of Justice of the European Union's recent opinion invalidating the EU-U.S. Safe Harbor which previously allowed the transfer of such personal data to the United States, could require us to adopt costly compliance mechanisms, subject us to increased regulatory scrutiny, and hamper our plans to expand our business in Europe.
The use and transfer of personal data in EU member states is currently governed under Directive 95/46/EC (which is commonly referred to as the Data Protection Directive) as well as legislation adopted in the member states to implement the Data Protection Directive. The Data Protection Directive generally prohibits the transfer of personal data of EU subjects outside of the EU, unless the party exporting the data from the EU implements a compliance mechanism designed to ensure that the receiving party will adequately protect such data. One such compliance mechanism was the process agreed to by the EU and the United States known as the EU-U.S. Safe Harbor Framework, pursuant to which U.S. businesses certified that they treat the personal data of EU residents in accordance with privacy principles promulgated by the Data Protection Directive.
We previously relied upon the Safe Harbor Framework to allow us to transfer certain personal data of EU Subjects, including both data about our employees and consumer data that is collected and processed through our technology, to the United States. In 2015, however, the Court of Justice of the European Union issued an opinion concluding that the Safe Harbor Framework is not sufficient to allow transfers of personal data of EU subjects to the United States. Therefore, we can no longer rely on the Safe Harbor Framework to justify the transfer of personal data of EU subjects to the United States. Instead, we must rely on alternative compliance measures, which are complex, which may also be subject to legal challenge, and which, unlike the Safe Harbor Framework, directly subject us to regulatory enforcement by data protection authorities located in the European Union. As a result, by relying on these alternative compliance measures, we risk becoming the subject of regulatory investigations in any of the individual jurisdictions in which we operate. Each such investigation could cost us significant time and resources, and could potentially result in fines, criminal prosecution, or other penalties. Being forced to rely on alternative compliance measures could also affect the market for our technology, as EU customers may choose to do business with EU-based companies or other competitors that do not need to transfer personal data to the United States in order to avoid the above-identified risks and legal issues.
Additionally, the EU recently adopted the GDPR, which will supersede the Data Protection Directive in May 2018, or perhaps earlier in some jurisdictions. Among other requirements, the GDPR obligates companies that process large amounts of personal data about EU residents to implement a number of formal processes and policies reviewing and documenting the privacy implications of the development, acquisition, or use of all new products, technologies, or types of data. Implementing these policies before the GDPR takes effect will take considerable time and resources, and could result in slowing our ability to develop, acquire, or enter into agreements to use new products, technologies, or types of data. Further complicating this effort, the GDPR enables EU member states to enact jurisdiction-specific requirements in key areas, which could require us to modify our plans to comply with the GDPR, or otherwise to implement multiple policies unique to the jurisdictions in which we operate, which could make it more difficult and resource-intensive to continue to operate in the EU.
Changes in tax laws affecting us and other market participants could have a material adverse effect on our business.
U.S. legislative proposals have been made that, if enacted, would limit or delay the deductibility of advertising costs for U.S. federal income tax purposes. Any such proposals, if enacted, will likely cause advertisers to reduce their advertising spending in order to mitigate or offset any loss resulting from a change in the tax treatment of such costs. Any such changes would likely have a negative impact on the advertising industry and us by reducing the aggregate amount of money spent on advertising.
U.S. legislative and budget proposals have also included limits on the ability to defer taxation for U.S. federal income tax purposes of earnings outside the United States until those earnings are repatriated, and immediate taxes on unremitted foreign earnings. Any changes in the taxation of our non-U.S. earnings could increase our tax expense and harm our financial position and results of operations.
We generally do not have privity with Internet users who view advertisements that we place, and we may not be able to disclaim liabilities from such Internet users or consumers.
Potential liabilities to Internet users include malicious activities, such as the introduction of malware into users' computers through advertisements served through our platform, and code that redirects users to sites other than the ones users sought to visit, potentially resulting in malware downloads or use charges from the redirect site. Sellers of advertisement space purchased through our solution often have terms of use in place with their users that disclaim or limit their potential liabilities to such users, or pursuant to which users waive rights to bring class-action lawsuits against the sellers related to advertisements. Certain of our competitors are also prominent sellers, and may be able to include protections in their website terms of use that also limit liability to users of their advertising services. We generally do not have terms of use in place with such users. As a consequence, we generally cannot disclaim or limit potential liabilities to such users through terms of use, which may expose us to greater liabilities than competing advertising networks that are also prominent sellers.
Changes in market standards applicable to our solution could require us to incur substantial additional development costs.
Market forces, competitors' initiatives, regulatory authorities, industry organizations, seller integration revisions, and security protocols are causing the emergence of demands and standards that are or could be applicable to our solution. We expect compliance with these kinds of standards to become increasingly important to buyers and sellers, and conforming to these standards is expected to consume a substantial and increasing portion of our development resources. If our solution is not consistent with emerging standards, our market position and sales could be impaired. If we make the wrong decisions about compliance with these standards, or are late in conforming, or if despite our efforts our solution fails to conform, our offerings will be at a disadvantage in the market to the offerings of competitors who have complied.
Evolving concepts of viewability involve competitive uncertainty and may cause us to incur additional costs and liability risk.
Viewability of digital advertising inventory is relevant to marketers because it represents a way of assessing the value of particular inventory as a means to reach a target audience. However, there is no consensus definition of viewability. Some approaches focus on whether an advertisement can be seen at all, and others focus on whether an advertisement that can be seen is actually seen, in whole or part, or for how long. Low viewability can be caused by various factors, including technical issues (
e.g.
device screen size, browser functionality and settings, web site load times), media design (
e.g.
below-the-fold or sub-page placements), and user behavior (
e.g.
the decision whether to scroll down a website or click on an advertisement or how long to watch a video). Non-viewability is a separate issue and may result, for example, from stacking ads so the one in the back is obscured, or serving ads into a single pixel space too small to be seen. Sometimes these two concepts of viewability are conflated, which tends to obscure analysis.
Aside from non-viewable inventory, which is generally well understood, various vendors and other industry participants advocate definitions and measurements of low viewability that are consistent with their technology or interests. We cannot predict whether consensus views will emerge, or what they will be. Nevertheless, some themes seem to have emerged:
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Buyers of advertising inventory are increasingly using technology, often provided by third parties, to assess viewability of impressions for use as a bidding or purchasing criterion, or to determine value for purposes of determining pricing.
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Assessment of viewability is imperfect, but technology can be expected to improve as data providers, DSPs, and buyers themselves develop viewability assessment tools and build viewability factors into their algorithms for bidding, purchasing, and pricing decisions.
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Inventory viewability and value correlate. More viewable inventory is more valuable, and viewability of inventory increases in importance with the price paid for that inventory.
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Viewability can be used as an inventory differentiator, by domain or on an impression level, with higher viewability generally associated with higher value and pricing, and lower viewability generally associated with lower value and pricing.
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These themes are relevant to our business of facilitating fully informed purchase and sale of advertising, and evolution of viewability standards may represent an opportunity to refine matching of supply and demand. However, incorporating viewability concepts fully into our business as they evolve will require us to incur additional costs to integrate relevant technologies and process additional information through our system. If we do not handle viewability well, we could be competitively disadvantaged.
In addition, inventory that is well differentiated on the basis of viewability will also be differentiated on the basis of value, with less viewable inventory valued lower. In this context, if we are not positioned to transact the higher viewability inventory competitively, our revenue and profitability could be adversely affected.
Buyers could attempt to hold us responsible for impressions that do not satisfy their viewability requirements or expectations, and depending upon how viewability evolves, market practice or emerging regulation may require us to incur compliance costs and assume some responsibility for viewability of advertisements transacted through our solution. Divergent views of how to measure viewability and imperfect measurement technology could lead to disagreement, increasing risk of disputes, demands for refunds, and reputational harm.
Failure to comply with industry self-regulation could harm our brand, reputation and our business.
In addition to compliance with government regulations, we voluntarily participate in trade associations and industry self-regulatory groups that promulgate best practices or codes of conduct addressing privacy and the provision of Internet advertising. However, in the past, some of these guidelines have not comported with our business practices, making them difficult for us to implement. If we encounter difficulties in the future, or our opt-out mechanisms fail to work as designed, or if Internet users misunderstand our technology or our commitments with respect to these principles, we may be subject to negative publicity, as well as investigation and litigation by governmental authorities, self-regulatory bodies or other accountability groups, buyers, sellers, or other private parties. Any such action against us could be costly and time consuming, require us to change our business practices, divert management's attention and our resources, and be damaging to our reputation and our business. In addition, we could be adversely affected by new or altered self-regulatory guidelines that are inconsistent with our practices or in conflict with applicable laws and regulations in the United States and other countries where we do business. As a result of such inconsistencies or conflicts, or other business or legal considerations, we may choose not to comply with some self-regulatory guidelines. Additionally, as we expand geographically, we may begin to operate in jurisdictions that have self-regulatory groups in which we do not participate. If we fail to abide by or are perceived as not operating in accordance with applicable laws and regulations and industry best practices, or any industry guidelines or codes with regard to privacy or the provision of Internet advertising, our reputation may suffer and we could lose relationships with buyers and sellers.
Forecasts of market growth may prove to be inaccurate, and even if the market in which we compete achieves the forecasted growth, our business may not grow at similar rates, if at all.
We have in the past provided, and may continue to provide, forecasts related to our market, including forecasts relating to the expected growth in the digital advertising market and parts of that market as well as the forecasted trend towards automation of analog and print advertising markets. Growth forecasts are subject to significant uncertainty and are based on assumptions and estimates that may prove to be inaccurate. Moreover, the anticipation that the advertising industry will continue to shift from analog and print media to digital advertising at the rate forecasted, or the anticipation of the shift in advertising spending from analog to digital, may not come to fruition. Further, we may not succeed in our plans to enter or increase our presence in various markets for various reasons, including possible shortfall or misallocation of resources or superior technology development or marketing by competitors.
Risks Related to Our Relationships with Buyers and Sellers and Other Strategic Relationships
We depend on owners of digital media properties for advertising inventory to deliver for advertising campaigns, and any decline in the supply of advertising inventory from these sellers could hurt our business.
We depend on digital media properties to provide us with advertising inventory. The sellers that supply inventory to us typically do so on a non-exclusive basis and are not required to provide us with any minimum amounts or consistent supply of inventory; they are free to, and often do, maintain concurrent relationships with various sources of demand that compete with us, and it is easy for sellers quickly to shift their advertising inventory among these concurrent demand sources, or shift inventory to new demand sources, without notice or accountability. Sellers may seek to change the terms at which they offer inventory to us, or allocate their advertising inventory to our competitors who offer advertisements to them on more favorable terms or whose offerings are considered more beneficial. Sellers may also sell inventory directly to buyers through other channels. Generally, sellers allocate their available inventory among channels according to various methodologies that often result in ranked prioritization in their ad servers. Competitors ranked higher in priority see available impressions earlier and have more opportunity to acquire more inventory and more high value inventory. It is easy for sellers to change rankings in their ad servers, and we cannot control how sellers rank us, and to the extent that competitors have higher priority than us, our revenue and the quality of inventory available to our buyers can be adversely affected. Supply of advertising inventory is also limited for some sellers, such as special sites or new technologies, and sellers may request higher prices, fixed price arrangements or guarantees that we cannot provide as effectively as our competitors, or that would reduce the profitability of that business. In addition, sellers sometimes place significant restrictions on the sale of their advertising inventory, such as strict security requirements, prohibitions on advertisements from specific advertisers or specific industries, and restrictions on the use of specified creative content or format. In addition, sellers or competitors could pressure us to increase the prices for inventory, which may reduce our operating margins, or otherwise block our access to that inventory, without which we would be unable to deliver advertisements using our solution.
If sellers limit advertising inventory made available to us, or increase the price of inventory, or place significant restrictions on the sale of their advertising inventory, we may not be able to replace this with inventory from other sellers that satisfies our requirements in a timely and cost-effective manner. In addition, significant sellers in the industry may enter into exclusivity arrangements with our competitors, which could limit our access to a meaningful supply of advertising inventory. If any of this happens, the value of our solution to buyers could decrease and our revenue could decline or our cost of acquiring inventory could increase, lowering our operating margins.
Our contracts with buyers and sellers are generally not exclusive and generally do not require minimum volumes or long-term commitments. If buyers or sellers representing a significant portion of the demand or inventory in our marketplace decide to materially reduce the use of our solution, we could experience an immediate and significant decline in our revenue and profitability and harm to our business.
Generally, our buyers and sellers are not obligated to provide us with any minimum volumes of business, may do business with our competitors as well as with us, and may bypass us and transact directly with each other or through other intermediaries. Most of our business with buyers originates pursuant to arrangements that are limited in scope and can be reduced or canceled by the buyer without penalty. Similarly, sellers make inventory available to us on a discretionary basis. Accordingly, our business is highly vulnerable to changes in the macro environment, price competition, and development of new or more compelling offerings by our competitors, which could reduce business generally or motivate buyers or sellers to migrate to competitors' offerings. Further, if our relationships with buyers or sellers become strained due to service failures or other reasons, including possible perceptions by our buyers that we compete with them, it might not be difficult for these clients to reduce or terminate their business with us. Because we do not have long-term contracts, our future revenue may be difficult to predict and there is no assurance that our current buyers and sellers will continue to use our solution or that we will be able to replace lost buyers or sellers with new ones. If a buyer or group of buyers representing a significant portion of the demand in our marketplace, or a seller or group of sellers representing a significant portion of the inventory in our marketplace decides to materially reduce use of our solution, it could cause an immediate and significant decline in our revenue and profitability and harm to our business. Additionally, if we overestimate future usage, we may incur additional expenses in adding infrastructure without a commensurate increase in revenue, which would harm our profitability and other operating results.
The emergence of header bidding may reduce the amount or value of inventory available to us from some sellers.
Sellers have begun to embrace so-called header bidding, by which impressions that would previously have been exposed to different potential sources of demand in a sequence dictated by ad server placement are instead available for concurrent competitive bidding by demand sources that use header bidding tags that the seller accepts. This can help sellers increase revenue by exposing their inventory to more bidders, thereby allocating more inventory to demand sources that value it most highly. However, the number of header bidding tags that sellers accept is limited because too many header bidding tags can cause delays in the transaction execution process, and therefore we must compete with other demand sources for sellers' header bidding slots. With sellers that accept our header bidding tags, we may be able to participate in improved demand dynamics by competing for impressions that would previously have been allocated first to demand sources prioritized above us in the seller's ad server, with accompanying potential for improved revenue. However, some sellers may not accept our header bidding tags, and our opportunities with those sellers may be impaired as a result. Certain sources of demand with unique value propositions may be prioritized by sellers in their allocation of available header bidding slots, leaving us to compete with other competitors for the remainder. Further, header bidding allows smaller competitors with less demand and/or fewer established seller relationships to compete for higher-value impressions on a more even footing. Just as header bidding allows us to compete with demand sources that would previously have been above us in sellers' ad server sequences, it exposes us to additional competition by demand sources that, prior to the emergence of header bidding, might have been below us in the sellers' ad server sequences or otherwise unable to compete effectively for inventory. In order to compete more effectively for inventory in header bidding transactions, we may reduce our fees in order to pass more money to sellers. It is too early to predict what effect the emergence of header bidding will ultimately have on our business, but to date we have experienced negative results, including increased competition for some inventory that we would have been able to sell through our platform in the absence of header bidding, with commensurate adverse revenue effects.
Loss of business associated with large buyers or sellers could have significant negative impact on our results of operations and overall financial condition.
We serve large numbers of buyers and sellers, but certain large buyers and sellers have accounted for and will continue to account for a disproportionate share of business transacted through our solution. Our contracts with buyers and sellers generally do not provide for any minimum volumes and may be terminated on relatively short notice. Buyer and seller needs and plans can change quickly, and buyers or sellers may reduce volumes or terminate their arrangements with us, quickly and without penalty, for a variety of reasons, including financial issues or other changes in circumstances; development or acquisition by buyers or sellers of their own technologies that reduce their reliance upon us; the fact that we compete directly with some of our buyers; new offerings by or strategic relationships with our competitors; change or removal of personnel with whom we traditionally had relationships; opportunities for buyers and sellers to bypass us and deal directly with each other; change in control (including consolidations through mergers and acquisitions); or declining general economic conditions (including those resulting from dissolutions of companies). Technical issues affecting our systems or the systems of our larger buyers or sellers could also cause a decline in spending. As is typical in our industry, some of the largest buyers and sellers on our platform are also competitors, which could increase the risk that such companies could reduce their business with us.
These factors make it important for us to expand and diversify our client relationships. The number of large media buyers and sellers in the market is finite, and it could be difficult for us to replace revenue loss from any buyers or sellers whose relationships with us diminish or terminate. Just as growth in our inventory strengthens buyer activity in a network effect, loss of inventory or buyers could have the opposite effect. Loss of revenue from significant buyers or failure to collect accounts receivable, whether as a result of buyer payment default, contract termination or other factors, or significant reductions in inventory, could have a significant negative impact on our results of operation and overall financial condition.
We must provide value to both buyers and sellers of advertising without being perceived as favoring one over the other or being perceived as competing with them through our service offerings.
Buyers and sellers have different interests, with each trying to maximize its value in their transactions through use of data, requests that we adapt our solutions to help them, and other means. We are interposed between buyers and sellers, and to be successful, we must continue to find ways of providing value to both without being perceived as favoring one at the expense of the other. For example, our proprietary auction algorithms, which are designed to optimize auction outcomes, influence the allocation and pricing of impressions and must do so in ways that add value to both buyers and sellers. Continued technological evolution in our business results in the availability and use of more data more incisively to inform buying and selling decisions. Third-party data analytics providers encourage this dynamic by offering products to buyers and sellers to attempt to swing transactional dynamics to their advantage at the expense of the other. We come under pressure to provide raw data to fuel these products and to facilitate their use by buyers and sellers on our platform. Unlike some competitors, who focus on serving either buyers or sellers, we must serve the interests of both, meaning that we must exercise caution in use of data and may determine not to facilitate some data products, which could result in loss of business from clients that insist upon using such products. Furthermore, because new business models continue to emerge, we must constantly adapt our relationship with buyers and sellers and how we market ourselves to each. Further, consistent with our goal of connecting buyers and sellers, we inevitably grow closer to each, and we must take care that our deeper connections with buyers, on the one hand, or sellers, on the other hand, do not come at the expense of the other's interests. In addition, as our own capabilities evolve, we may be perceived by clients, particularly buyers, as competing with them. For example, with the growth of our buy-side capabilities, including our intent marketing business, we have taken steps to provide assurances to some of our buyer clients that our own buy-side capabilities will not result in operational disadvantages to them, such as reduced access to our inventory supply. If we fail to balance our clients' interests appropriately, our ability to provide a full suite of services and our growth prospects may be compromised.
We rely on buyers to use our solution to purchase advertising on behalf of advertisers. Such buyers may have or develop high-risk credit profiles or pay slowly, which may result in credit risk to us or require additional working capital to fund our accounts payable. In addition, direct billing arrangements between buyers and sellers may result in unfavorable fee dynamics and increased working capital demands.
Our revenue is generated from advertising spending transacted over our platform using our technology solution. Generally, we invoice and collect from buyers the full purchase price for impressions they have purchased, retain our fees (where applicable), and remit the balance to sellers. However, in some cases, we may be required to pay sellers for impressions delivered before we have collected, or even if we are unable to collect, from the buyer of those impressions. There can be no assurances that we will not experience bad debt in the future. Any such write-offs for bad debt could have a materially negative effect on our results of operations for the periods in which the write-offs occur. In addition, we attempt to coordinate collections from our buyers so as to fund our payment obligations to our sellers. However, some buyers and sellers are beginning to require direct billing and collection arrangements between themselves, particularly for our Guaranteed Orders solution. When we collect from buyers and pay sellers, we are able to include our buyer fees in cost of media billed and retain our buyer and seller fees from cash we collect before remitting balances to sellers. However, more buyers and sellers are beginning to handle billing and collections directly, and if we do not manage collections and payments, we will need to invoice buyers and sellers for our fees, which may increase visibility and result in pressure for more transparent or lower fees. Further, growth and increased competitive pressure in the digital advertising industry is causing brand spenders to become more demanding, resulting in overall increased focus by all industry participants on pricing, transparency, and cash and collection cycles. Some buyers have experienced financial pressures that have motivated them to pressure us to reduce our fees and/or limit our pricing flexibility, to challenge some details of our invoices, or to slow the timing of their payments to us. If buyers slow their payments to us or our cash collections are significantly diminished as a result of these dynamics, our revenue and/or cash flow could be adversely affected and we may need to use working capital to fund our accounts payable pending collection from the buyers. This may result in additional costs and cause us to forgo or defer other more productive uses of that working capital.
Our sales efforts with buyers and sellers may require significant time and expense and may not yield the results we seek.
Attracting new buyers and sellers and increasing our business with existing buyers and sellers involves substantial time and expense, and we may not be successful in establishing new relationships or in maintaining or advancing our current relationships. We may spend substantial time and effort educating buyers and sellers about our offerings, including providing demonstrations and comparisons against other available solutions. This process can be costly and time-consuming, and is complicated by us having to spend time integrating our solution with software of buyers and sellers. Because our solution may be less familiar in some markets outside the United States, the time and expense involved with attracting, educating and integrating buyers and sellers in international markets may be even greater than in the United States. If we are not successful in targeting, supporting and streamlining our sales processes, our ability to grow our business may be adversely affected. In addition, because of competitive market conditions and negotiating leverage enjoyed by large buyers and sellers, we are sometimes forced to choose between loss of business or contracting on terms that allocate more risk to us than we would prefer to accept.
We rely on buyers and sellers to abide by contractual requirements and relevant laws, rules, and regulations when using our solution, and legal claims or enforcement actions resulting from the actions of buyers or sellers could expose us to liabilities, damage our reputation, and be costly to defend.
The buyers and sellers engaging in transactions through our platform impose various requirements upon each other, and they and the underlying advertisers are subject to regulatory requirements by governments and standards bodies applicable to their activities. We assume responsibility for satisfying or facilitating the satisfaction of some of these requirements through the contracts we enter into with buyers and sellers. In addition, we may have responsibility for some acts or omissions of buyers or sellers transacting business through our solution under applicable laws or regulations or as a result of common law duties, even if we have not assumed responsibility contractually. These responsibilities could expose us to significant liabilities, perhaps without the ability to impose effective mitigating controls upon, or to recover from, buyers and sellers. Moreover, for those third parties who are both a buyer and seller on our platform, it is feasible that they could use our platform to buy and sell advertisements in an effort to inflate their own revenue. While we do not believe we would have legal liability in connection with such a scheme, we could still nevertheless be subject to litigation as a result of such actions, and, if we were sued, we would incur legal costs in our defense and cannot guarantee that a court would not attribute some liability to us.
We contractually require our buyers and sellers to abide by relevant laws, rules and regulations, as well as restrictions by their counterparties, when transacting on our platform, and we generally attempt to obtain representations from buyers that the advertising they place through our solution complies with applicable laws and regulations and does not violate third-party intellectual property rights, and from sellers about the quality and characteristics of the impressions they provide. We also generally receive representations from buyers and sellers about their privacy practices and compliance with applicable laws and regulations, including their maintenance of adequate privacy policies that disclose and permit our data collection practices. Nonetheless, there are many circumstances in which it is difficult or impossible for us to monitor or evaluate their compliance. For example, we cannot control the content of seller's media properties, and we are often unable to determine exactly what information a buyer collects after an ad has been placed, and how the buyer uses any such collected information. If buyers or sellers fail to abide by relevant laws, rules and regulations, or contract requirements, when transacting over our platform, or after such a transaction is completed, we could potentially face liability for such misuse. Similarly, if such misconduct results in enforcement action by a regulatory body or other governmental authority, we could become involved in a potentially time-consuming and costly investigation or we could be subject to some form of sanction or penalty. We may not have adequate indemnity to protect us against, and our policies of insurance may not cover, such claims and losses.
Our business relationships expose us to risk of substantial liability for contract breach, violation of laws and regulations, intellectual property infringement and other losses, and our contractual indemnities and limitations of liability may not protect us adequately.
Our agreements with sellers, buyers and other third parties typically obligate us to provide indemnity and defense for losses resulting from claims of intellectual property infringement, damages to property or persons, business losses or other liabilities. Generally, these indemnity and defense obligations relate to our own business operations, obligations and acts or omissions. However, under some circumstances, we agree to indemnify and defend contract counterparties against losses resulting from their own business operations, obligations and acts or omissions, or the business operations, obligations and acts or omissions of third parties. For example, because our business interposes us between buyers and sellers in various ways, buyers often require us to indemnify them against acts and omissions of sellers, and sellers often require us to indemnify them against acts and omissions of buyers. In addition, our agreements with sellers, buyers and other third parties typically include provisions limiting our liability to the counterparty and the counterparty's liability to us. These limits sometimes do not apply to certain liabilities, including indemnity obligations. These indemnity and limitation of liability provisions generally survive termination or expiration of the agreements in which they appear.
We have limited ability to control acts and omissions of buyers and sellers or other third parties that could trigger our indemnity obligations, and our policies of insurance may not cover us for acts and omissions of others. We attempt to obtain indemnity from buyers and sellers (as well as other third parties) to protect us in case we become liable for their acts and omissions, but because we contract with many buyers and sellers and those contracts are individually negotiated with different scopes of indemnity and different limits of liability, it is possible that in any case our obligation to provide indemnity for the acts or omissions of a third party such as a buyer or seller may exceed what we are able to recover from that party. Further, contractual limits on our liability may not apply to our indemnity obligations, contractual limits on our counterparties' liability may limit what we can recover from them, and contract counterparties may be unable to meet their obligations to indemnify and defend us as a result of insolvency or other factors. Large indemnity obligations, or obligations to third parties not adequately covered by the indemnity obligations of our contract counterparties, could expose us to significant costs.
In addition to the effects on indemnity described above, the limitation of liability provisions in our contracts may, depending upon the circumstances, be too high to protect us from significant liability for our own acts or omissions, or so low as to prevent us from recovering fully for the acts or omissions of our counterparties.
Our solution relies on third-party open source software components. Failure to comply with the terms of the underlying open source software licenses could expose us to liabilities, and the combination of certain open source software with code that we develop could compromise the proprietary nature of our solution.
Our solution utilizes software licensed to us by third-party authors under "open source" licenses. The use of open source software may entail greater risks than the use of third-party commercial software, as open source licensors generally do not provide warranties or other contractual protections regarding infringement claims or the quality of the code. Some open source licenses contain requirements that we make available source code for modifications or derivative works we create based upon the type of open source software we use. If we combine our proprietary software with open source software in a certain manner, we could, under certain open source licenses, be required to release the source code of our proprietary software to the public. This would allow our competitors to create similar solutions with lower development effort and time and ultimately put us at a competitive disadvantage.
Although we monitor our use of open source software in an effort to avoid subjecting our products to conditions we do not intend, the terms of many open source licenses have not been interpreted by U.S. courts, and there is a risk that these licenses could be construed in a way that could impose unanticipated conditions or restrictions on us. Moreover, we cannot guarantee that our processes for controlling our use of open source software will be effective. If we are held to have breached the terms of an open source software license, we could be required to seek licenses from third parties to continue operating using our solution on terms that are not economically feasible, to re-engineer our solution or the supporting computational infrastructure to discontinue use of certain code, or to make generally available, in source code form, portions of our proprietary code.
Risks Relating to Our Operations
Real or perceived errors or failures in the operation of our solution could damage our reputation and impair our sales.
Our solution processes over
12 trillion
bid requests per month and must operate without interruption to support the needs of sellers and buyers. Because our software is complex, undetected errors and failures may occur, especially when new versions or updates are made to our software or network infrastructure or changes are made to sellers' or buyers' software interfacing with our solution. Errors or bugs in our software, faulty algorithms, technical or infrastructure problems, or updates to our systems could lead to an inability to effect transactions or process data to place advertisements or price inventory effectively, cause the inadvertent disclosure of proprietary data, or cause advertisements to display improperly or be placed in proximity to inappropriate content. Despite testing by us, errors or bugs in our software have in the past, and may in the future, not be found until the software is in our live operating environment. For example, changes to our solution have in the past caused errors in the reporting and analytics applications for buyers, resulting in delays in their spending on our platform. Errors or failures in our solution, even if caused by the implementation of changes by buyers or sellers to their systems, could also result in negative publicity, disclosure of confidential information, damage to our reputation, loss of or delay in market acceptance of our solution, increased costs or loss of revenue, loss of competitive position, or claims by advertisers for losses sustained by them.
We may make errors in the measurement of transactions conducted through our solution, causing discrepancies with the measurements of buyers and sellers, which can lead to a lack in confidence in us and require us to reduce our fees or provide refunds to buyers and sellers. Alleviating problems resulting from errors in our software could require significant expenditures of capital and other resources and could cause interruptions, delays, or the cessation of our business.
Various risks could interrupt access to our network infrastructure or data, exposing us to significant costs and other liabilities.
Our revenue depends on the technological ability of our solution to deliver and measure advertising impressions, and the operation of our exchange and our ability to place impressions depend on the continuing and uninterrupted performance of our IT systems. Our platform operates on our data processing equipment that is housed in third-party commercial data centers that we do not control. In addition, our systems interact with systems of buyers and sellers and their contractors. All of these facilities and systems are vulnerable to interruption and/or damage from a number of sources, many of which are beyond our control, including, without limitation: (i) power loss, loss of adequate cooling, and telecommunications failures; (ii) fire, flood, earthquake, hurricane, and other natural disasters; (iii) software and hardware errors, failures, or crashes; (iv) financial insolvency; and (v) computer viruses, malware, hacking, terrorism, and similar disruptive problems. In particular, intentional cyber-attacks present a serious issue because they are difficult to prevent and remediate and can be used to defraud our buyers and sellers and their customers and to steal confidential or proprietary data from us, our customers, or their users. Further, because our Los Angeles headquarters and San Francisco offices and our California data center sites are in seismically active areas, earthquakes present a particularly serious risk of business disruption. These vulnerabilities may increase with the complexity and scope of our systems and their interactions with buyer and seller systems.
We attempt to mitigate these risks to our business through various means, including redundant infrastructure, disaster recovery plans, separate test systems, and change control and system security measures, but our precautions may not protect against all problems, and our ability to mitigate risks to related third-party systems is limited. In addition, we rely to a significant degree upon security and business continuity measures of our data center operators, which may be ineffective. Our disaster recovery and business continuity plans rely upon third-party providers of related services, and if those vendors fail us, we could be unable to meet the needs of buyers and sellers. Any steps we take to increase the reliability and redundancy of our systems may be expensive and may not be successful in preventing system failures. Any failures with our solution or delays in the execution of transactions through our system may result in the loss of advertising placements on impressions and, as a result, the loss of revenue. Our facilities would be costly to repair or replace, and any such efforts would likely require substantial time.
Buyers may attribute to us any technical disruption or failure in the performance of advertisements on sellers' digital media properties, harming our reputation and resulting in buyers seeking to avoid payment or demand future credits for disruptions or failures. If we are unable to operate our exchange and deliver advertising impressions successfully, our ability to attract potential buyers and sellers and retain and expand business with existing buyers and sellers could be harmed.
Malfunction or failure of our systems, or other systems that interact with our systems, or inaccessibility or corruption of data, could disrupt our operations and negatively affect our business and results of operations to a level in excess of any applicable business interruption insurance, result in potential liability to buyers and sellers, and negatively affect our reputation and ability to sell our solution.
Any breach of our computer systems or confidential data in our possession could expose us to significant expense and liabilities and harm our reputation.
We maintain our own confidential and proprietary information in our IT systems, and we control or have access to confidential, proprietary, and personal data belonging or related to sellers, buyers, and their clients, as well as vendors and business partners. Our clients and various third parties also have access to our confidential and proprietary information. We take steps to protect the security, integrity and confidentiality of this data, but there is no guarantee that inadvertent or unauthorized use or disclosure will not occur or that third parties will not gain unauthorized access to this data despite our efforts.
We are subject to ongoing security threats and breaches, computer malware, computer hacking attacks, and inadvertent transmission of computer viruses or other harmful software code may occur on our systems or those of our clients, business partners, or information technology vendors. Security measures undertaken by us, our vendors, and our buyers and sellers may be ineffective as a result of employee error, failure to implement appropriate processes and procedures, malfeasance, cyber-attacks, cyber-extortion or other intentional misconduct by computer hackers, "phishing" or other tactics to obtain illicit system access, or otherwise. Because techniques used to obtain unauthorized access or sabotage systems change frequently and generally are not identified until they are launched against a target, and because we typically are not able to control the efficacy of security measures implemented by our clients and vendors, we may be unable to anticipate these techniques or to implement adequate preventative or mitigation measures.
Though it is difficult to determine what harm may directly result from any specific interruption or breach, any security incident could disrupt computer systems or networks, interfere with services to our sellers, buyers, or their clients, and result in unauthorized access to personally identifiable information, intellectual property, and other confidential business information owned by us or our buyers, sellers, or vendors. As a result, we could be exposed to legal claims and litigation, indemnity obligations, regulatory fines and penalties, contractual obligations, other liabilities, significant costs for remediation and re-engineering to prevent future occurrences, significant distraction to our business, and damage to our reputation, our relationships with buyers and sellers, and our ability to retain and attract new buyers and sellers. If personally identifiable information is compromised, we may be required to undertake notification and remediation procedures, provide indemnity, and undergo regulatory investigations and penalties, all of which can be extremely costly and result in adverse publicity.
Failure to maintain the brand security features of our solution could harm our reputation and expose us to liabilities.
Auction-based advertising is bought and sold through our solution in automated transactions that occur in milliseconds. It is important to sellers that the advertising placed on their media not conflict with existing seller arrangements and be of high quality, consistent with applicable seller standards and compliant with applicable legal and regulatory requirements. It is important to buyers that their advertisements are placed on appropriate media, in proximity with appropriate content, that the impressions for which they are charged are legitimate, and that their advertising campaigns yield their desired results. We use various measures, including proprietary technology, in an effort to store, manage and process rules set by buyers and sellers and to ensure the quality and integrity of the results delivered to sellers and buyers through our solution. If we fail to properly implement or honor rules established by buyers and sellers, or if our measures are not adequate, advertisements may be improperly placed through our platform, which can result in harm to our reputation as well as the need to pay refunds and other potential legal liabilities.
If we fail to detect or prevent fraud, intrusion of malware through our platform into the systems or devices of our clients and their customers, or other actions that impact the integrity of our solution or advertisement performance, sellers and buyers could lose confidence in our solution and we could face legal claims, which would cause our business to suffer. If we terminate relationships with sellers as a result of our screening efforts, our volume of paid impressions may decline.
We have in the past, and may in the future, be subject to fraudulent and malicious activities undertaken by persons seeking to use our platform for improper purposes, including to divert or artificially inflate the purchases by buyers through our platform, or to disrupt or divert the operation of the systems and devices of our clients and their customers to misappropriate information, generate fraudulent billings, stage hostile attacks, or for other illicit purposes. Examples of such activities include the use of bots or other automated or manual mechanisms to generate fraudulent impressions that are delivered through our platform, which could overstate the performance of advertising impressions. Such activities could also include the introduction of malware through our platform by persons seeking to commandeer, or gain access to information on, consumers' devices. We use proprietary technology to identify non-human inventory and traffic, as well as malware, and we generally terminate relationships with parties that appear to be engaging in such activities, which may result in fewer paid impressions in the year the relationships are terminated than would have otherwise occurred. Because buyers will frequently re-allocate campaigns to other sellers, and there may be alternative sources of demand to replace any buyer, it is difficult to measure the precise impact on paid impressions and revenue from the loss of these customers. Although we assess the quality and performance of advertising on sellers' digital media properties, it may be difficult to detect fraudulent or malicious activity because we do not own content and we rely in part on sellers and buyers for controls with respect to such activity. Further, perpetrators of fraudulent impressions and malware change their tactics and may become more sophisticated, requiring us to improve over time our processes for assessing the quality of sellers' inventory and controlling fraudulent activity. If we fail to detect or prevent fraudulent or other malicious activity, we could face legal claims from customers and/or consumers and the affected advertisers may experience or perceive a reduced return on their investment or heightened risk associated with use of our solution, resulting in dissatisfaction with our solution, refusals to pay, refund demands, loss of confidence of buyers or sellers, or withdrawal of future business. We could experience similar consequences if inventory sold through our platform is not viewable by the consumer for technical or other reasons.
Any acquisitions we undertake may disrupt our business, adversely affect operations, and dilute stockholders.
Acquisitions have been an important element of our business strategy. We expect to continue to pursue acquisitions in an effort to increase revenue, expand our market position, add to our service offering and technological capabilities, respond to dynamic market conditions, or for other strategic or financial purposes. However, there is no assurance that we will identify suitable acquisition candidates or complete any acquisitions on favorable terms, or at all. Further, the acquisitions we do complete would involve a number of risks, including the following:
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The identification, acquisition, and integration of acquired businesses require substantial attention from management. The diversion of management's attention and any difficulties encountered in the transition process could hurt our business.
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The identification, acquisition, and integration of acquired businesses requires significant investment, including to determine which new service offerings we might wish to acquire, harmonize service offerings, expand management capabilities and market presence, and improve or increase development efforts and technology features and functions.
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The anticipated benefits from the acquisition may not be achieved, including as a result of loss of customers or personnel of the target, other difficulties in supporting and transitioning the target's customers, the inability to realize expected synergies from an acquisition, or negative culture effects arising from the integration of new personnel.
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We may face difficulties in integrating the personnel, technologies, solutions, operations, and existing contracts of the acquired business.
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We may fail to identify all of the problems, liabilities or other shortcomings or challenges of an acquired company, technology, or solution, including issues related to intellectual property, solution quality or architecture, income tax and other regulatory compliance practices, revenue recognition or other accounting practices, or employee or customer issues.
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To pay for future acquisitions, we could issue additional shares of our common stock or pay cash. Issuance of shares would dilute stockholders. Use of cash reserves could diminish our ability to respond to other opportunities or challenges. Borrowing to fund any cash purchase price would result in increased fixed obligations and could also include covenants or other restrictions that would impair our ability to manage our operations.
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Acquisitions expose us to the risk of assumed known and unknown liabilities including contract, tax, and other obligations incurred by the acquired business or fines or penalties, for which indemnity obligations, escrow arrangements or insurance may not be available or may not be sufficient to provide coverage.
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New business acquisitions can generate significant intangible assets that result in substantial related amortization charges and possible impairments.
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The operations of acquired businesses, or our adaptation of those operations, may require that we apply revenue recognition or other accounting methodologies, assumptions, and estimates that are different from those we use in our current business, which could complicate our financial statements, expose us to additional accounting and audit costs, and increase the risk of accounting errors.
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Acquired businesses may have insufficient internal controls that we must remediate, and the integration of acquired businesses may require us to modify or enhance our own internal controls, in each case resulting in increased administrative expense and risk that we fail to comply with the requirements of Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 or that our independent registered public accounting firm is unable to express an opinion as to the effectiveness of our internal control over financial reporting, resulting in late filing of our periodic reports, loss of investor confidence, regulatory investigations, and litigation.
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Acquisition of businesses based outside the U.S. would require us to operate in foreign languages and manage non-U.S. currency, billing, and contracting needs and require us to comply with laws and regulations, including labor laws and privacy laws that in some cases may be more restrictive on our operations than laws applicable to our business in the U.S.
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Acquisitions can sometimes lead to disputes with the former owners of the acquired company, which can result in increased legal expenses, management distraction and the risk that we may suffer an adverse judgment if we are not the prevailing party in the dispute.
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The purchase price allocation for any acquisition we complete is generally not finalized until well after the closing of the acquisition, and any final adjustment to the valuation could have a material change on what is reported as the fair value assigned to the assets and liabilities.
The final purchase price allocation for any acquisition we complete depends upon the finalization of asset and liability valuations, among other things. The valuation studies necessary to estimate the fair values of acquired assets and assumed liabilities and the related allocation of purchase price may not be finalized until well after the closing of the acquisition. Initially, we allocate the total estimated purchase price to the acquired assets and assumed liabilities based on preliminary estimates of their fair values. The final determination of these fair values is subsequently determined based upon the actual net tangible and intangible assets that existed on the closing date of the acquisition. Any final adjustment could change the fair values assigned to the assets and liabilities, resulting in a change to our consolidated financial statements, including a change to goodwill. Such change could be material.
If we fail to attract, motivate, train, and retain highly qualified engineering, marketing, sales and management personnel, our ability to execute our business strategy could be impaired.
We rely to a significant degree upon our founder and Chief Executive Officer, Frank Addante, and our President, Gregory R. Raifman, for their strategic vision, industry knowledge, management execution, and leadership. The loss of either of them would have a significant adverse effect upon our business.
In addition, our success depends significantly upon our ability to recruit, train, motivate, and retain key technology, engineering, sales, and management personnel. We are a technology-driven company and it is imperative that we have highly skilled mathematicians, computer scientists, engineers and engineering management to innovate and deliver our complex solutions. Increasing our base of buyers and sellers depends to a significant extent on our ability to expand our sales and marketing operations and activities, and our solution requires a sophisticated sales force with specific sales skills and specialized technical knowledge that takes time to develop. Appropriately qualified personnel can be difficult to recruit and retain. In addition, as we execute on our international expansion strategy, we will encounter staffing challenges that are unique to a particular country or region, such as recruiting and retaining qualified personnel in foreign countries and difficulty managing such personnel and integrating them into our culture. In particular, it may be difficult to find qualified sales personnel in international markets, or sales personnel with experience in emerging segments of the market. Skilled and experienced management is critical to our ability to achieve revenue growth, execute against our strategic vision and maintain our performance through the growth and change we anticipate. For certain of our key employees, a significant portion of their equity ownership is vested. As a result, it may be more difficult, and require additional equity awards, for us to continue to retain and motivate these team members.
Competition for employees with experience in our industry can be intense, particularly in California, New York and London, where our operations and the operations of other digital media companies are concentrated and where other technology companies compete for management and engineering talent. Other employers may be able to provide better compensation, more diverse opportunities and better chances for career advancement. None of our founders, officers, or other key employees has an employment agreement for a specific term, and any of such individuals may terminate his or her employment with us at any time.
It can be difficult, time-consuming, and expensive to recruit personnel with the combination of skills and attributes required to execute our business strategy, and we may be unable to hire or retain sufficient numbers of qualified individuals in the markets where we do business or plan to do business. These challenges will increase as we grow. New hires require significant training and it may take significant time (often six months or more) before they achieve full productivity. As a result, we may incur significant costs to attract and retain employees, including significant expenditures related to salaries and benefits and compensation expenses related to equity awards before new hires contribute to sales or productivity, and we may lose new employees to our competitors or other companies before we realize the benefit of our investment in recruiting and training. Moreover, new employees may not be or become as productive as we expect, and we may face challenges in adequately or appropriately integrating them into our workforce and culture. At times we have experienced elevated levels of unwanted attrition, and as our organization grows and changes and competition for talent increases, this type of attrition may increase.
Even if we are successful in hiring qualified new employees, we may be subject to allegations that we have improperly solicited such employees while they remained employed by our competitors, that such employees have improperly solicited other colleagues of theirs employed by the same competitors, or that such employees have divulged proprietary or other confidential information to us in violation of their agreements with such competitors.
Our proprietary rights may be difficult to enforce, which could enable others to copy or use aspects of our solution without compensating us, thereby eroding our competitive advantages and harming our business.
Our success depends, in part, on our ability to protect proprietary methods and technologies that we develop or otherwise acquire, so that we can prevent others from using our inventions and proprietary information. Establishing trade secret, copyright, trademark, domain name, and patent protection is difficult and expensive. We rely on trademark, copyright, trade secret laws, confidentiality procedures and contractual provisions to protect our proprietary methods and technologies. Our patent strategy is still in its early stages and, while we have seven issued patents, ten pending U.S. patent applications and two pending patent applications in Canada, valid patents may not be issued from our pending applications. Further, the claims of our issued patents or the claims eventually allowed on any pending applications may not be sufficiently broad to protect our technology or offerings and services. Any issued patents may be challenged, invalidated or circumvented, and any rights granted under these patents may not actually provide adequate defensive protection or competitive advantages to us. Additionally, the process of obtaining patent protection is expensive, time-consuming, and uncertain, and we may not be able to prosecute all necessary or desirable patent applications to successful conclusion at a reasonable cost or in a timely manner. Accordingly, despite our efforts, we may be unable to obtain adequate patent protection, or to prevent third parties from infringing upon or misappropriating our intellectual property.
Unauthorized parties may attempt to copy aspects of our technology or obtain and use information that we regard as proprietary, and the steps we take to protect our proprietary information may not prevent misappropriation of our technology and proprietary information or infringement of our intellectual property rights. Policing unauthorized use of our technology and intellectual property is difficult. We may be required to protect our intellectual property in an increasing number of jurisdictions, a process that is expensive and may not be successful or which we may not pursue in every location. Our competitors and others could attempt to capitalize on our brand recognition by using domain names or business names similar to ours, and we may be unable to prevent third parties from acquiring or using domain names and other trademarks that infringe on, are similar to, or otherwise decrease the value of our brands, trademarks or service marks. In addition, the laws of some foreign countries may not be as protective of intellectual property rights as those of the United States, and mechanisms for enforcement of our proprietary rights in such countries may be inadequate. Also, despite the steps we have taken to protect our proprietary rights, it may be possible for unauthorized third parties to copy or reverse engineer aspects of our technology or otherwise obtain and use information that we regard as proprietary, or to develop technologies similar or superior to our technology or design around our proprietary rights.
From time to time, we may take legal action to enforce our intellectual property rights, protect our trade secrets, determine the validity and scope of the proprietary rights of others, or defend against claims of infringement. Such litigation could result in substantial costs and the diversion of limited resources, and might not be successful. If we are unable to protect our proprietary rights (including aspects of our technology solution) we may find ourselves at a competitive disadvantage to others who have not incurred the same level of expense, time and effort to create and protect their technology and intellectual property.
We may be subject to intellectual property rights claims by third parties, which are costly to defend, could require us to pay significant damages and could limit our ability to use certain technologies and intellectual property.
The digital advertising industry is characterized by the existence of large numbers of patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets and other intellectual property and proprietary rights. Companies in this industry are often required to defend against litigation claims that are based on allegations of infringement or other violations of intellectual property rights.
Third parties may assert claims of infringement or misappropriation of intellectual property rights against us or buyers, sellers, or third parties with which we work; we cannot be certain that we are not infringing any third-party intellectual property rights, and we may have liability or indemnification obligations as a result of such claims. As a result of disclosure of information in filings required of a public company, our business and financial condition are visible, which may result in threatened or actual litigation, including by competitors and other third parties.
Regardless of whether claims that we are infringing patents or infringing or misappropriating other intellectual property rights have any merit, these claims are time-consuming and costly to evaluate and defend, and can impose a significant burden on management and employees. The outcome of any claim is inherently uncertain, and we may receive unfavorable interim or preliminary rulings in the course of litigation. There can be no assurances that favorable final outcomes will be obtained in all cases. We may decide to settle lawsuits and disputes on terms that are unfavorable to us. Some of our competitors have substantially greater resources than we do and are able to sustain the costs of complex intellectual property litigation to a greater degree and for longer periods of time than we could.
Although third parties may offer a license to their technology or intellectual property, the terms of any offered license may not be acceptable and the failure to obtain a license or the costs associated with any license could cause our business, results of operations or financial condition to be materially and adversely affected. In addition, some licenses may be non-exclusive, and therefore our competitors may have access to the same technology or intellectual property licensed to us. Alternatively, we may be required to develop non-infringing technology or to make other changes, such as to our branding, which could require significant effort and expense and ultimately may not be successful. Furthermore, a successful claimant could secure a judgment or we may agree to a settlement that prevents us from distributing certain products or performing certain services or that requires us to pay substantial damages, including treble damages if we are found to have willfully infringed such claimant's patents or copyrights. Claims of intellectual property infringement or misappropriation also could result in injunctive relief against us, or otherwise result in delays or stoppages in providing all or certain aspects of our solution.
We are subject to government regulations concerning our employees, including wage-hour laws and taxes.
We are subject to applicable rules and regulations relating to our relationship with our employees, including health benefits, sick days, unemployment and similar taxes, overtime and working conditions, equal pay, immigration status, and classification of employee benefits for tax purposes. Legislated increases in labor cost components, such as employee benefit costs, workers' compensation insurance rates, compliance costs and fines, as well as the cost of litigation in connection with these regulations, would increase our labor costs. Many employers nationally have been subject to actions brought by governmental agencies and private individuals under wage-hour laws on a variety of claims, such as improper classification of workers as exempt from overtime pay requirements and failure to pay overtime wages properly, and failure to provide meal and rest breaks or pay for missed breaks, with such actions sometimes brought as class actions, and these actions can result in material liabilities and expenses. Federal and state standards for classifying employees under wage-hour laws differ and are often unclear or require application of judgment, and classification may need to be changed as employment duties evolve over time. We may misclassify employees and be subject to liability as a result. Should we be subject to employment litigation, such as actions involving wage-hour, overtime, break and working time, it may distract our management from business matters and result in increased labor costs.
Risks Related to Our International Business Strategy
Our international operations and expansion plans require increased expenditures and impose additional risks and compliance imperatives, and failure to execute successfully our international plans will adversely affect our growth and operating results.
We have numerous operations outside of North America, in Northern and Southern Europe, Australia, Japan, Singapore, and Brazil. Our expansion plans are also focused on other Asian and Latin American countries, and other countries in Europe, but many of these plans are nascent. We view further international expansion as imperative, and we expect our international operations to contribute significantly to our future growth, particularly through the mobile business, which could provide access to vast user populations in China and the developing world. However, our experience operating outside the United States is still limited. Achievement of our international objectives will require a significant amount of attention from our management, finance, legal, analytics, operations, sales, and engineering teams, as well as significant investment in developing the technology infrastructure necessary to deliver our solution and establishing sales, delivery, support, and administrative capabilities in the countries where we operate. Attracting new buyers and sellers outside the United States may require more time and expense than in the United States, in part due to language barriers, the need to educate such buyers and sellers about our solution, and we may not be successful in establishing and maintaining these relationships. The data center and telecommunications infrastructure in some overseas markets may not be as reliable as in North America and Europe, which could disrupt our operations. In addition, our international operations will require us to develop and administer our internal controls and legal and compliance practices in countries with different cultural norms, languages, currencies, legal requirements, and business practices than the United States.
International operations also impose risks and challenges in addition to those faced in the United States, including management of a distributed workforce; the need to adapt our offering to satisfy local requirements and standards (including differing privacy policies and labor laws that are sometimes more stringent); laws and business practices that may favor local competitors; legal requirements or business expectations that agreements be drafted and negotiated in the local language and disputes be resolved in local courts according to local laws; the need to enable transactions in local currencies; longer accounts receivable payment cycles and other collection difficulties; the effect of global and regional recessions and economic and political instability; potentially adverse tax consequences in the United States and abroad; staffing challenges, including difficulty in recruiting and retaining qualified personnel as well as managing such a diversity in personnel; reduced or ineffective protection of our intellectual property rights in some countries; and costs and restrictions affecting the repatriation of funds to the United States.
One or more of these requirements and risks may make our international operations more difficult and expensive or less successful than we expect, and may preclude us from operating in some markets. There is no assurance that our international expansion efforts will be successful, and we may not generate sufficient revenue or margins from our international business to cover our expenses or contribute to our growth.
Operating in multiple countries requires us to comply with different legal and regulatory requirements.
Our international operations subject us to laws and regulations of multiple jurisdictions, as well as U.S. laws governing international operations, which are often evolving and sometimes conflict. For example, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, or FCPA, and comparable foreign laws and regulations (including the U.K. Bribery Act) prohibit improper payments or offers of payments to foreign governments and their officials and political parties by U.S. and other business entities for the purpose of obtaining or retaining business. Other laws and regulations prohibit bribery of private parties and other forms of corruption. As we expand our international operations, there is some risk of unauthorized payment or offers of payment or other inappropriate conduct by one of our employees, consultants, agents, or other contractors, including by persons engaged or employed by a business we acquire, which could result in violation by us of various laws, including the FCPA. Safeguards we implement to discourage these practices may prove to be ineffective and violations of the FCPA and other laws may result in severe criminal or civil sanctions, or other liabilities or proceedings against us, including class action lawsuits and enforcement actions from the SEC, Department of Justice, and foreign regulators. Other laws applicable to our international business include local employment, tax, privacy, data security, and intellectual property protection laws and regulations, including restrictions on movement of information about individuals beyond national borders. In some cases, buyers and sellers operating in non-U.S. markets may impose additional requirements on our non-U.S. business in efforts to comply with their interpretation of their own or our legal obligations. These requirements may differ significantly from the requirements applicable to our business in the United States and may require engineering, infrastructure and other costly resources to accommodate, and may result in decreased operational efficiencies and performance. As these laws continue to evolve and we expand to more jurisdictions or acquire new businesses, compliance will become more complex and expensive, and the risk of non-compliance will increase.
Compliance with complex foreign and U.S. laws and regulations that apply to our international operations increases our cost of doing business abroad, and violation of these laws or regulations may interfere with our ability to offer our solution competitively in one or more countries, expose us or our employees to fines and penalties, and result in the limitation or prohibition of our conduct of business. As we continue to grow, we will need to expand into new geographies and learn the regulatory and business laws and customs of each new geography. The Chinese government could exercise significant influence or control over our business operations. The Chinese government has recently announced plans to require certain foreign companies operating in China to submit their software and other technology to intrusive security testing, include indigenous Chinese intellectual property and encryption technology in their software, disclose source code and other proprietary information to the Chinese government, and engineer their products to restrict the flow of data outside of China. It is not clear whether such requirements would apply to us, but our operations could attract Chinese government scrutiny as a result of our significant consumer reach and large database. Also, any censorship of websites and content served on computers in mainland China could result in latency with respect to our services in mainland China if our servers are located in Hong Kong or otherwise outside of mainland China, which could significantly impair our ability to process the auction impressions on a timely basis or our ability generally to facilitate the serving of advertisements in China. These factors could result in increased operational expense, and if we are not able to comply with these new regulatory requirements, our business, results of operations and prospects may be adversely affected.
We are subject to governmental export and import controls that could subject us to liability or impair our ability to compete in international markets.
Our operations are subject to U.S. export controls, specifically the Export Administration Regulations, or EAR, and economic sanctions enforced by the Office of Foreign Assets Control. These regulations limit and control export of encryption technology. Furthermore, U.S. export control laws and economic sanctions prohibit the shipment of certain products and services to countries, governments, and persons targeted by U.S. sanctions. We incorporate encryption technology into the servers that operate our solution. As a result of locating some servers in data centers outside of the United States, we must comply with these export control laws.
In addition, various countries regulate the import of certain encryption technology and have enacted laws that could limit our ability to deploy our technology or our customers' ability to use our solution in those countries. Changes in our technology or changes in export and import regulations may delay introduction of our solution or the deployment of our technology in international markets, prevent our customers with international operations from using our solution globally or, in some cases, prevent the export or import of our technology to certain countries, governments or persons altogether. Any change in export or import regulations, economic sanctions or related legislation, shift in the enforcement or scope of existing regulations, or change in the countries, governments, persons, or technologies targeted by such regulations, could result in decreased use of our solution by, or in our decreased ability to export our technology to, international markets.
Fluctuations in the exchange rates of foreign currencies could result in currency transaction losses.
We currently have transactions denominated in various non-U.S. currencies, and may, in the future, have sales denominated in the currencies of additional countries. In addition, we incur a portion of our expenses in non-U.S. currencies, and to the extent we need to convert currency to pay expenses, we are exposed to potentially unfavorable changes in exchange rates and added transaction costs. We expect international transactions to become an increasingly important part of our business, and such transactions may be subject to unexpected regulatory requirements and other barriers. Any fluctuation in relevant currency exchange rates may negatively impact our business, financial condition and results of operations. We have not previously engaged in foreign currency hedging, and any effort to hedge our foreign currency exposure may not be effective due to lack of experience, unreasonable costs or illiquid markets. In addition, hedging may not protect against all foreign currency fluctuations and can result in losses.
Risks Related to Our Internal Controls and Finances
Failure to maintain effective internal controls could cause our investors to lose confidence in us and adversely affect the market price of our common stock. If our internal controls are not effective, we may not be able to accurately report our financial results or prevent fraud.
Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 requires that we maintain internal control over financial reporting that meets applicable standards and report on the effectiveness of our internal controls and any material weaknesses we identify. When we are no longer an "emerging growth company" we will also need to provide a statement that our independent registered public accounting firm has issued an opinion on our internal control over financial reporting.
We may err in the design or operation of our controls, and all internal control systems, no matter how well designed and operated, can provide only reasonable assurance that the objectives of the control system are met. Because there are inherent limitations in all control systems, there can be no absolute assurance that all control issues have been or will be detected. We previously identified certain material weaknesses in our internal controls which were remediated during 2014. However, completion of remediation does not provide assurance that our remediated controls will continue to operate properly or that our financial statements will be free from error. There may be undetected material weaknesses in our internal control over financial reporting, as a result of which we may not detect financial statement errors on a timely basis. Moreover, in the future we may implement new offerings and engage in business transactions, such as acquisitions, reorganizations, or implementation of new information systems that could require us to develop and implement new controls and could negatively affect our internal control over financial reporting and result in material weaknesses.
If we identify new material weaknesses in our internal control over financial reporting, if we are unable to comply with the requirements of Section 404 in a timely manner, or, once required, if our independent registered public accounting firm is unable to express an opinion as to the effectiveness of our internal control over financial reporting, we may be unable, or be perceived as unable, to produce timely and reliable financial reports, investors may lose confidence in the accuracy and completeness of our financial reports, and the market price of our common stock could be negatively affected. As a result of such failures, we could also become subject to investigations by the stock exchange on which our securities are listed, the SEC, or other regulatory authorities, and become subject to litigation from investors and stockholders, which could harm our reputation, financial condition, or divert financial and management resources from our core business.
Impairment of intangible assets could increase our expenses.
A portion of our assets consists of capitalized software development costs, as well as goodwill and other intangible assets acquired in connection with acquisitions. Current accounting standards require us to evaluate goodwill on an annual basis and other intangibles if certain triggering events occur, and adjust the carrying value of these assets to net realizable value when such testing reveals impairment of the assets. Various factors, including regulatory or competitive changes, could affect the value of our intangible assets. If we are required to write down the value of our goodwill or intangible assets due to impairment, our reported expenses will increase, resulting in a corresponding decrease in our reported profit.
Our accounting is becoming more complex, and relies upon estimates or judgments relating to our critical accounting policies. If our accounting is erroneous or based on assumptions that change or prove to be incorrect, our operating results could fall below the expectations of securities analysts and investors, resulting in a decline in our stock price.
The preparation of financial statements in conformity with generally accepted accounting principles in the United States, or GAAP, requires management to make estimates and assumptions that affect the amounts reported in the consolidated financial statements and accompanying notes, and also to comply with many complex requirements and standards. We devote substantial resources to compliance with accounting requirements and we base our estimates on our best judgment, historical experience, information derived from third parties, and on various assumptions that we believe to be reasonable under the circumstances, the results of which form the basis for making judgments about the carrying values of assets, liabilities, equity, revenue and expenses that are not readily apparent from other sources. However, various factors are causing our accounting to become complex. As a result of the introduction of different transaction types in our intent marketing business beginning in April 2015, we use both gross and net revenue reporting, as opposed to our historical use only of net reporting, and the determination of gross versus net treatment for various transactions requires application of complex rules and exercise of judgment and can be uncertain. Further, our recent acquisitions have imposed purchase accounting requirements, required us to integrate accounting personnel, systems, and processes, necessitated various consolidation and elimination adjustments, and imposed additional filing and audit requirements. Ongoing evolution of our business, and any future acquisitions, will compound these complexities. Our operating results may be adversely affected if we make accounting errors or our judgments prove to be wrong, assumptions change or actual circumstances differ from those in our assumptions, which could cause our operating results to fall below the expectations of securities analysts and investors or guidance we may have provided, resulting in a decline in our stock price and potential legal claims. Significant judgments, assumptions and estimates used in preparing our consolidated financial statements include those related to revenue recognition, stock-based compensation, purchase accounting, and income taxes.
We report a portion of our revenue on a gross basis. The combination of gross and net revenue reporting may make our financial reporting more complex and difficult to predict and understand.
The recognition of our revenue is governed by certain criteria that must be met and that determine whether we report revenue either on a gross basis, as a principal, or net basis, as an agent, depending upon the nature of the sales transaction. Before April 2015, we reported our revenue on a net basis, but beginning in April 2015 we commenced an intent marketing offering by which we offer buyers dynamic CPM pricing for inventory acquisition in support of their advertising campaigns. We do not charge fees for this service; instead we attempt to acquire inventory for buyers at prices that satisfy their campaign objectives while allowing us to retain a margin. We report revenue from these transactions on a gross basis, and gross reporting results in higher GAAP revenue and lower GAAP margins on a particular amount of managed revenue (advertising spending) than for an equivalent level of managed revenue (advertising spending) for which we report revenue on a net basis, even though the take rate on the transactions reported gross may be higher than the take rate on transactions reported net. The portion of our revenue reported gross may increase as a result of growth in our intent marketing services, as well as through the evolution of our business to include other transactions for which revenue is reported on a gross basis, due to substantive changes in our business, such as through acquisitions, changes to the commercial terms with buyers and sellers or structural changes to our existing business, or due to changes in accounting standards or interpretations. It is also possible that revenue reporting for existing business may change from gross to net or vice versa as a result of changes in contract terms or transaction mechanics. We may experience significant fluctuations in revenue in future periods depending upon, in part, the nature of our sales and our reporting of such revenue and related accounting treatment, without proportionate correlation to our underlying activity or net income. The combination of net and gross revenue reporting, and potential changes from one to the other in various parts of our business, may make our financial reporting more complex and difficult for investors to understand, and may make comparison of our results of operations to prior periods or other companies more difficult. As our business evolves, the need to consider the use of gross reporting more broadly for different kinds of transactions and the potential for changes in reporting for particular elements of our business will require application of judgment and could increase the potential for reporting errors.
In order to provide guidance or make other projections regarding our expectations of revenue for future periods, we must make estimates and assumptions about the mix of gross and net-reported transactions based upon the volumes and characteristics of the transactions we think will make up the total mix of revenue in the period covered by the projection. Those estimates and assumptions may be inaccurate when made, or may be rendered inaccurate by circumstances occurring after the guidance is given, such as changing the characteristics of our offerings or particular transactions in response to client demands, market developments, regulatory pressures, acquisitions, and other factors. In addition, the rules governing revenue recognition in our business are complex, and the rules or their interpretation may evolve. Even apparently minor changes in transaction terms from those initially envisioned can result in different accounting conclusions from those foreseen. In addition, we may incorrectly extrapolate from revenue recognition treatment of prior transactions to future transactions that we believe are similar, but that ultimately are determined to have different characteristics that dictate different revenue reporting treatment. As a result, it is possible that our projections of revenue guidance may vary, possibly significantly, from actual results, or comparisons of our projections from period to period may be difficult, resulting in potential confusion and even claims against us based upon alleged inaccuracy of our projections.
Our tax liabilities may be greater than anticipated.
The U.S. and non-U.S. tax laws applicable to our business activities are subject to interpretation. We are subject to audit by the Internal Revenue Service and by taxing authorities of the state, local, and foreign jurisdictions in which we operate. Our tax obligations are based in part on our corporate operating structure, including the manner in which we develop, value, and use our intellectual property and sell our solutions, the jurisdictions in which we operate, how tax authorities assess revenue-based taxes such as sales and use taxes, the scope of our international operations, and the value we ascribe to our intercompany transactions. Taxing authorities may challenge our tax positions and methodologies for valuing developed technology or intercompany arrangements, as well as our positions regarding jurisdictions in which we are subject to certain taxes, which could expose us to additional taxes and increase our worldwide effective tax rate. Any adverse outcomes of such challenges to our tax positions could result in additional taxes for prior periods, interest, and penalties, as well as higher future taxes. In addition, our future tax expense could increase as a result of changes in tax laws, regulations, or accounting principles, or as a result of earning income in jurisdictions that have higher tax rates. An increase in our tax expense could have a negative effect on our financial position and results of operations. Moreover, the determination of our provision (benefit) for income taxes and other tax liabilities requires significant estimates and judgment by management, and the tax treatment of certain transactions is uncertain. Although we believe we will make reasonable estimates and judgments, the ultimate outcome of any particular issue may differ from the amounts previously recorded in our financial statements and any such occurrence could materially affect our financial position and results of operations.
Our ability to use our net operating losses and tax credit carryforwards to offset future taxable income may be subject to certain limitations, which could result in higher tax liabilities.
Our ability to fully utilize our net operating loss and tax credit carryforwards to offset future taxable income may be limited. At
December 31, 2015
, we had U.S. federal net operating loss carryforwards, or NOLs, of approximately
$59.8 million
, state NOLs of approximately
$54.8 million
, foreign NOLs of approximately
$13.7 million
, federal research and development tax credit carryforwards, or credit carryforwards, of approximately
$6.1 million
, state credit carryforwards of approximately
$5.1 million
, and foreign credit carryforwards of approximately
$0.5 million
. A lack of future taxable income would adversely affect our ability to utilize these NOLs and credit carryforwards. In addition, under Sections 382 and 383 of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986, as amended, or the Code, and comparable state income tax laws, a corporation that undergoes an "ownership change" is subject to limitations on its ability to utilize its NOLs and credit carryforwards to offset future taxable income following the ownership change. As a result, future changes in our stock ownership, including because of issuance of shares of common stock in connection with acquisitions or other direct or indirect changes in our ownership that may be outside of our control, could result in limitations on our ability to fully utilize our NOLs and credit carryforwards. The Company had an ownership change on December 31, 2015 subjecting the federal and state NOLs to an annual limitation. Additionally, the Company had an ownership change in January 2008 and $2.3 million of federal and state NOLs are already subject to limitation under Section 382 of the Code. Additionally, approximately $3.4 million of our federal NOLs and approximately $3.4 million of our state NOLs were generated during the pre-acquisition period by corporations that we acquired, and thus those NOLs already are subject to limitation under Section 382 of the Code and comparable state income tax laws. Also, depending on the level of our taxable income, all or a portion of our NOLs and credit carryforwards may expire unutilized, which could prevent us from offsetting future taxable income by the entire amount of our current and future NOLs and credit carryforwards. We have recorded a full valuation allowance related to our NOLs, credit carryforwards, and other net deferred tax assets due to the uncertainty of the ultimate realization of the future benefits of those assets. To the extent we determine that all, or a portion of, our valuation allowance is no longer necessary, we will reverse the valuation allowance and recognize an income tax benefit in the reported financial statement earnings in that period. Once the valuation allowance is eliminated or reduced, its reversal will no longer be available to offset our current financial statement tax provision in future periods. Given our anticipated future taxable earnings, we believe that there is a reasonable possibility that, within the next 12 months, sufficient positive evidence may become available to allow us to reach a conclusion that a significant portion of the domestic valuation allowance will no longer be needed. Release of the valuation allowance would result in the recognition of certain net deferred tax assets and a decrease to income tax expense for the period the release is recorded. However, the exact timing and amount of the valuation allowance release are subject to change on the basis of the level of profitability that we are able to actually achieve.
We may require additional capital to support growth, and such capital might not be available on terms acceptable to us, if at all. Inability to obtain financing could limit our ability to conduct necessary operating activities and make strategic investments.
We intend to continue to make investments in pursuit of our strategic objectives and to support our business growth. Various business challenges may require additional funds, including the need to respond to competitive threats or market evolution by developing new solutions and improving our operating infrastructure, either through additional hiring or acquisition of complementary businesses or technologies, or both. In addition, we could incur significant expenses or shortfalls in anticipated cash generated as a result of unanticipated events in our business or competitive, regulatory, or other changes in our market, or longer payment cycles required or imposed by our buyers.
Our available cash and cash equivalents, the cash we anticipate generating from operations, and our available line of credit under our credit facility may not be adequate to meet our capital needs, and therefore we may need to engage in equity or debt financings to secure additional funds. We may not be able to obtain additional financing on terms favorable to us, if at all. If we are unable to obtain adequate financing on terms satisfactory to us when we require it, our ability to continue to support our business growth and respond to business challenges could be significantly impaired, and our business may be adversely affected.
If we do raise additional funds through future issuances of equity or convertible debt securities, our existing stockholders could suffer significant dilution, and any new equity securities we issue could have rights, preferences and privileges superior to those of holders of our common stock. Any debt financing that we secure in the future could involve restrictive covenants relating to our capital raising activities and other financial and operational matters, including the ability to pay dividends. This may make it more difficult for us to obtain additional capital and to pursue business opportunities, including potential acquisitions. In addition, if we issue debt, the holders of that debt would have prior claims on the Company's assets, and in case of insolvency, the claims of creditors would be satisfied before distribution of value to equity holders, which would result in significant reduction or total loss of the value of our equity.
Our credit facility subjects us to operating restrictions and financial covenants that impose risk of default and may restrict our business and financing activities.
We have a
$40.0 million
credit facility with Silicon Valley Bank. At
June 30, 2016
, we had
no
amounts outstanding under this facility. Borrowings are secured by substantially all of our tangible personal property assets and all of our intangible assets are subject to a negative pledge in favor of Silicon Valley Bank. This credit facility is subject to certain financial ratio and liquidity covenants, as well as restrictions that limit our ability, among other things, to:
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dispose of or sell our assets;
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make material changes in our business or management;
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acquire, consolidate or merge with other entities;
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incur additional indebtedness;
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create liens on our assets;
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enter into transactions with affiliates; and
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pay off or redeem subordinated indebtedness.
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These covenants may restrict our ability to finance our operations and to pursue our business activities and strategies. Our ability to comply with these covenants may be affected by events beyond our control. If a default were to occur and not be waived, such default could cause, among other remedies, all of the outstanding indebtedness under our loan and security agreement to become immediately due and payable. In such an event, our liquid assets might not be sufficient to meet our repayment obligations, and we might be forced to liquidate collateral assets at unfavorable prices or our assets may be foreclosed upon and sold at unfavorable valuations.
Our ability to renew our existing credit facility, which matures in September 2018, or to enter into a new credit facility to replace or supplement the existing facility may be limited due to various factors, including the status of our business, global credit market conditions, and perceptions of our business or industry by sources of financing. In addition, if credit is available, lenders may seek more restrictive covenants and higher interest rates that may reduce our borrowing capacity, increase our costs, and reduce our operating flexibility.
If we make borrowings under the facility and do not have or are unable to generate sufficient cash available to repay our debt obligations when they become due and payable, either upon maturity or in the event of a default, we may not be able to obtain additional debt or equity financing on favorable terms, if at all. Our inability to obtain financing may negatively impact our ability to operate and continue our business as a going concern.
Risks Related to the Securities Markets and Ownership of our Common Stock
The price of our common stock may be volatile and the value of an investment in our common stock could decline.
Technology stocks have historically experienced high levels of volatility. The trading price of our common stock has fluctuated substantially and may continue to do so. These fluctuations could result in significant decreases in the value of an investment in our common stock. Factors that could cause fluctuations in the trading price of our common stock include the following:
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announcements of new offerings, products, services or technologies, commercial relationships, acquisitions, or other events by us or our competitors;
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price and volume fluctuations in the overall stock market from time to time;
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significant volatility in the market price and trading volume of technology companies in general and of companies in the digital advertising industry in particular;
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fluctuations in the trading volume of our shares or the size of our public float;
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actual or anticipated changes or fluctuations in our results of operations;
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actual or anticipated changes in the expectations of investors or securities analysts, and whether our results of operations meet these expectations;
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litigation involving us, our industry, or both;
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regulatory developments in the United States, foreign countries, or both;
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general economic conditions and trends;
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major catastrophic events;
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breaches or system outages;
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departures of officers or other key employees; or
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an adverse impact on the company resulting from other causes, including any of the other risks described in this report.
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In addition, if the market for technology stocks or the stock market, in general, experiences a loss of investor confidence, the trading price of our common stock could decline for reasons unrelated to our business. The trading price of our common stock might also decline in reaction to events that affect other companies in our industry even if these events do not directly affect us. In the past, volatility in the market price of a company's securities has often resulted in securities litigation being brought against that company. Declines in the price of our common stock, even following increases, may result in securities litigation against us, which would result in substantial costs and divert our management's attention and resources from our business.
Our equity compensation and acquisition practices expose our stockholders to dilution.
We have relied and may continue to rely heavily upon equity compensation, and consequently our outstanding unvested equity awards represent substantial dilution to our stockholders. In addition, we have used our common stock as consideration for acquisitions of other companies, and we anticipate using shares of our common stock or securities convertible into our common stock from time to time in connection with financings, acquisitions, investments, or other transactions. Any such issuance could result in substantial dilution to our existing stockholders and cause the trading price of our common stock to decline. As of
July 25, 2016
, we had
48,920,591
shares of common stock outstanding, including
1,242,830
shares of unvested restricted stock issued under our various equity incentive plans. At that date, we also had outstanding under our equity incentive plans
3,236,776
unvested restricted stock units and
4,315,518
stock options, of which
2,579,000
were vested at a weighted-average exercise price of
$9.63
per share and
1,736,518
were unvested. All of these outstanding stock awards, together with an additional
2,808,330
shares of our common stock reserved for issuance under our equity incentive plans and
1,100,149
shares of common stock reserved under our 2014 Employee Stock Purchase Plan, and any increase in the shares available pursuant to the plans' evergreen provisions (if applicable), are registered for offer and sale on Form S-8 under the Securities Act of 1933. We also intend to register the offer and sale of all other shares of common stock that may be authorized under our current or future equity compensation plans, issued under equity plans we may assume in acquisitions, or issued as inducement awards under New York Stock Exchange rules. Shares registered under these registration statements on Form S-8 will be available for sale in the public market subject to vesting arrangements and exercise of options, our Insider Trading Policy trading blackouts, and the restrictions of Rule 144 in the case of our affiliates.
Insiders and certain large stockholders have substantial control over us, which could limit investors' ability to influence the outcome of key transactions, including a change of control.
Our directors, executive officers, and stockholders who own greater than 5% of our outstanding common stock may be able to influence or control matters requiring approval by our stockholders, including the election of directors and the approval of mergers, acquisitions, or other extraordinary transactions. They may also have interests that differ from other investors and may vote in a manner that is adverse to investors' interests. This concentration of ownership may have the effect of deterring, delaying, or preventing a change of control of the company, could deprive our stockholders of an opportunity to receive a premium for their common stock as part of a sale of the company, and might ultimately affect the market price of our common stock.
Our public float is still relatively small, increasing the risk that sales by significant holders could adversely affect the market price for our stock.
A significant portion of our outstanding shares are held by pre-IPO investors and employees. In addition, institutional investors may from time to time accumulate relatively large amounts of our publicly traded shares. The average daily trading volume for our common stock during 2015 was
411,080
shares. In addition, we are relatively new to the public markets and not well known to many analysts, investors, and others who could influence demand for our shares. Further, because we are a relatively small company without an established history of profitability, the range of investors willing to invest in our shares may be relatively limited. As a result of these factors, our shares can be susceptible to sudden, rapid declines in price, especially when large blocks of shares are sold. Under our Insider Trading Policy, we impose trading blackouts during the period beginning on or about the fifteenth day of the last month of each quarter and ending after two trading days following the filing of our next quarterly report on Form 10-Q or Annual Report on Form 10-K. A substantial number of our employees are limited to selling their equity incentive plan shares during these open windows. In addition, our employee restricted stock and restricted stock unit awards typically vest each May 15 and November 15, and are subject to automatic sale arrangements at those dates to cover taxes accruing on vesting. Finally, shares we issue as consideration for acquisitions may be subject to lock-up arrangements that expire in large numbers on certain dates. These insider trading windows, restricted stock vesting mechanics, and acquisition stock arrangements tend to concentrate selling into certain periods, and the resulting sales pressure can cause the trading price of our common stock to decline at those times. Sales of a substantial number of such shares, or the perception that such sales may occur, could cause our share price to fall or make it more difficult for investors to sell our common stock at a time and price that they deem appropriate, and could also impair our ability to raise capital through the sale of equity securities.
Competition for investors could adversely affect the price of our stock.
There are many companies in the advertising technology or "ad tech" space, but we are one of a relatively small portion of those companies that is publicly traded. Some of the other publicly traded ad tech companies are substantially larger than us and have more diversified offerings, or may be perceived by investors as having greater stability or growth potential. Others may be focused on parts of the business that investors may view as more appealing. Ad tech or related advertising companies that are not yet public may become public, and publicly traded companies may enter the ad tech business through acquisitions. Increase in the number of publicly traded companies available to investors wishing to invest in ad tech may result in a decrease in demand for our shares, either because overall demand for ad tech investment does not increase commensurately with the increase in public companies in the ad tech space, or because we are not perceived as competitively differentiated or offering superior value compared to other such companies. Decrease in demand for our shares would result in suppressed growth, or decrease, in the value of our stock.
Our business could be negatively affected as a result of actions of activist stockholders.
Campaigns by stockholders to effect changes at publicly traded companies are sometimes led by investors seeking to increase short-term stockholder value through actions such as financial restructuring, increased debt, special dividends, stock repurchases or sales of assets or the entire company. If we are targeted by an activist stockholder in the future, the process could be costly and time-consuming, disrupt our operations and divert the attention of management and our employees from executing our strategic plan. Additionally, perceived uncertainties as to our future direction as a result of stockholder activism or changes to the composition of our board of directors may lead to the perception of a change in the direction of our business, instability or lack of continuity, which may be exploited by our competitors, cause concern to current or potential buyers and sellers on our platform, who may choose to transact with our competitors instead of us, and make it more difficult to attract and retain qualified personnel.
If securities or industry analysts do not publish research or reports about our business, or publish inaccurate or unfavorable research or reports about our business, our share price and trading volume could decline.
The trading market for our common stock to some extent depends on the research and reports that securities or industry analysts publish about us. We do not control these analysts, and their reports or analyst consensus may not reflect our guidance, plans, or expectations. If one or more of the analysts who cover us downgrades our shares or expresses a negative opinion of our business prospects, our share price could decline. If one or more of these analysts decreases or ceases coverage of our company, we could lose visibility in the financial markets, which could cause our share price or trading volume to decline.
We do not intend to pay dividends for the foreseeable future and, consequently, investors' ability to achieve a return on their investment will depend on appreciation in the price of our common stock.
We have never declared or paid any dividends and we do not anticipate paying any cash dividends in the foreseeable future. In addition, our credit facility contains restrictions on our ability to pay dividends. As a result, investors may only receive a return on their investment in our common stock if the market price of our common stock increases.
Provisions of our charter documents and Delaware law may inhibit a potential acquisition of the company and limit the ability of stockholders to cause changes in company management.
Our amended and restated certificate of incorporation and amended and restated bylaws include provisions, as described below, that could delay or prevent a change in control of the company, and make it difficult for stockholders to elect directors who are not nominated by the current members of our board of directors or take other actions to change company management.
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Our certificate of incorporation gives our board of directors the authority to issue shares of preferred stock in one or more series, and to establish the number of shares in each series and to fix the price, designations, powers, preferences and relative, participating, optional or other rights, if any, and the qualifications, limitations, or restrictions of each series of the preferred stock without any further vote or action by stockholders. The issuance of shares of preferred stock may discourage, delay or prevent a merger or acquisition of the company by significantly diluting the ownership of a hostile acquirer, resulting in the loss of voting power and reduced ability to cause a takeover or effect other changes.
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Our certificate of incorporation provides that our board of directors is classified, with only one of its three classes elected each year, and directors may be removed only for cause and only with the vote of 66
2
/
3
% of the voting power of stock outstanding and entitled to vote thereon. Further, the number of directors is determined solely by our board of directors, and because we do not allow for cumulative voting rights, holders of a majority of shares of common stock entitled to vote may elect all of the directors standing for election. These provisions could delay the ability of stockholders to change the membership of a majority of our board of directors.
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Under our bylaws, only the board of directors or a majority of remaining directors, even if less than a quorum, may fill vacancies resulting from an increase in the authorized number of directors or the resignation, death or removal of a director.
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Our certificate of incorporation prohibits stockholder action by written consent, so any action by stockholders may only be taken at an annual or special meeting.
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Our certificate of incorporation provides that a special meeting of stockholders may be called only by the board of directors. This could delay any effort by stockholders to force consideration of a proposal or to take action, including the removal of directors.
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Under our bylaws, advance notice must be given to nominate directors or submit proposals for consideration at stockholders' meetings. This gives our board of directors time to defend against takeover attempts and could discourage or deter a potential acquirer from soliciting proxies or making proposals related to an unsolicited takeover attempt.
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The provisions of our certificate of incorporation noted above may be amended only with the affirmative vote of holders of at least 66
2
/
3
% of the voting power of all of the then-outstanding shares of the company's voting stock, voting together as a single class. The same two-thirds vote is required to amend the provision of our certificate of incorporation imposing these supermajority voting requirements. Further, our bylaws may be amended only by our board of directors or by the same percentage vote of stockholders noted above as required to amend our certificate of incorporation. These supermajority voting requirements may inhibit the ability of a potential acquirer to effect such amendments to facilitate an unsolicited takeover attempt.
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Our board of directors may amend our bylaws by majority vote. This could allow the board to use bylaw amendments to delay or prevent an unsolicited takeover, and limits the ability of an acquirer to amend the bylaws to facilitate an unsolicited takeover attempt.
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We are also subject to Section 203 of the Delaware General Corporation Law, which prohibits us from engaging in any business combination with an interested stockholder for a period of three years from the date the person became an interested stockholder, unless certain conditions are met. These provisions make it more difficult for stockholders or potential acquirers to acquire the company without negotiation and may apply even if some of our stockholders consider the proposed transaction beneficial to them. For example, these provisions might discourage a potential acquisition proposal or tender offer, even if the acquisition proposal or tender offer were to be at a premium over the then current market price for our common stock. These provisions could also limit the price that investors are willing to pay in the future for shares of our common stock.
Item 2. Unregistered Sales of Equity Securities and Use of Proceeds
(a) Recent Sales of Unregistered Securities
None.
(b) Use of Proceeds
Our initial public offering of common stock was effected through a Registration Statement on Form S-1 (File No. 333-193739), which was declared effective on April 1, 2014. There has been no material change in the planned use of proceeds from our initial public offering as described in our final prospectus filed with the SEC pursuant to Rule 424(b) of the Securities Act and other periodic reports previously filed with the SEC.
(c) Purchases of Equity Securities by the Company and Affiliated Purchasers
In May 2016 we purchased
341,438
shares of our common stock at an average price of
$14.31
. All these purchases reflect shares withheld upon vesting of restricted stock and restricted stock units for minimum tax withholding obligations.
We presently have no publicly announced repurchase plan or program.