Outbrain Inc
NASDAQ:OB
Outbrain Inc
Outbrain, Inc. engages in the development and operation of a recommendation platform powering the open web. The company is headquartered in New York City, New York and currently employs 1,016 full-time employees. The company went IPO on 2021-07-23. The Company’s technology provides personalization, engagement and monetization solutions to digital media properties, including many publishers. The firm provides media partners with a platform that encompasses data at scale, as well as prediction and recommendation capabilities, helping media partners, deliver a discovery feed personalized to their users, based on context and each user’s interests and preferences. Its platform is built for user engagement. Its advertisers use platforms to reach consumers through various advertisement (ad) formats across digital media properties around the world. Its platform provides access to a volume of ad inventory within the content feeds of its digital media properties. Advertisers primarily use its platform for performance-driven campaigns, with measurable outcomes. Its subsidiaries include Outbrain Israel Ltd., Outbrain UK Limited, Outbrain Italy SRL and Outbrain Spain S.L.
Earnings Calls
In Q1, Outbrain achieved significant growth with revenues reaching approximately $286 million, driven mainly by the February acquisition of Teads. Although this marks a 32% year-over-year increase, pro forma comparisons showed a slight 7% decline, an improvement from Q4's 9% decline. Ex-TAC gross profit surged 98% to $103.1 million. The company anticipates Q2 ex-TAC gross profit between $141 million and $150 million, alongside adjusted EBITDA guidance of $26 million to $34 million. By 2025, the expected cost synergies from the merger will increase to about $40 million, signaling a focused effort on efficiency and integration.
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Good day. Welcome to Outbrain Inc. First Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would like to turn the call over to Outbrain's Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Good morning, and thank you for joining us on today's conference call to discuss Outbrain [inaudible] First Quarter 2025 Results. Joining me on the call today, we have David Kostman; and Jason Kiviat, the CEO and CFO of Teads.
During this conference call, management will make forward-looking statements based on current expectations and assumptions, including statements regarding our business outlook and prospects. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from our forward-looking statements. These risk factors are discussed in detail in our Form 10-K filed for the year ended December 31, 2024, as updated in our subsequent reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Forward-looking statements speak only as of the call's original date, and we do not undertake any duty to update any such statements.
Today's presentation also includes references to non-GAAP financial measures. You should refer to the information contained in the company's first quarter earnings for definitional information and reconciliations of non-GAAP measures to the comparable GAAP financial measures. Our earnings release can be found on our IR website, investors.outbrain.com under News and Events.
With that, let me turn the call over to David.
Thank you, Tiffany. Good morning, and thank you for joining us today. I'm pleased to share that we had a strong start to the year. As a reminder, Outbrain and Teads merged on February 3 to form the new teams. I'm glad to report that we achieved our Q1 guidance, both in terms of ex-TAC gross profit and adjusted EBITDA while achieving significant milestones in the integration.
Our vision for the new Teads is clear: to create the open Internet advertising platform for elevated outcomes from branding to performance. Our end-to-end platform empowers brands to connect the consumer journey from discovery to purchase, driving real business outcomes. The open Internet provides a different level of access to incremental scaled user moments, but we've lacked the solution that can connect the fragmented channels of the open Internet in order to drive real business outcomes across all stages of the marketing funnel. That's where the new Teads comes in.
We believe there are several key factors that will enable Teads to become the platform of choice to drive outcomes from branding to performance on the open Internet. First, we have direct exclusive media relationships that allow us to curate inventory at massive scale globally. This means that we have significant flexibility around the use of such supply, mimicking the control the walled gardens have of owned and operated inventory. The fact that we are an end-to-end platform provides advertisers with the optimized transparent supply path that's essential for delivering outcomes. And we do this at a significant global scale across 50 markets and 2 billion users.
Second, these unique media relationships also yield a wealth of proprietary data around how consumers engage and take action. We access over 1 billion data points each minute, which fuel our AI-powered algorithm. That algorithm tailors our inventory environment to drive the optimum outcome for every user, again, in a very similar way to the algorithm of walled gardens.
Third, our Creative Studio is the key layer that enables our brand and agency partners to seamlessly connect with the audiences across previously fragmented channels. We understand what's most likely to drive outcomes from a Creative perspective for each of our partners' businesses, making us a deeply entrenched strategic partner. We believe that these capabilities will allow us to deliver dependable outcomes at scale on the open Internet similar to the walled garden in a way that's not possible with the currently fragmented DSP or SSP point solutions on the market.
Moving to execution. We see solid execution across the business and see momentum behind this strategy. Our platform features a healthy, diverse balance of advertiser segments, verticals and geographies. I want to mention that in terms of the marketing campaign objectives, we are well balanced with approximately 2/3 of spend on our platform on performance campaigns and approximately 1/3 of the spend on our platform on branding campaigns. And the feedback from the hundreds of client meetings we've had since closing has been consistent, offering an outcome-based solution for objectives from branding to performance and a combined brand form and solutions across all screens is highly compelling.
One segment of clients I'm excited by is our strategic joint business partner accounts. We closed Q1 with more than 50 JBPs, including new commitments with Ferrero, Haleon, Philip Morris International and Beiersdorf. We believe the structure of these strategic partnerships gives us a large opportunity for growth, servicing new product lines, geographies and marketing objectives in each brand's portfolio.
Legacy Teads has mostly serviced branding campaigns with the JBP partner, but practically all of them have significant performance objectives and budgets that would be available to us. We have already seen several successes with Legacy Teds branding customers expanding with us now to performance. In addition to the JBPs, over the past few years, the combined company has consistently maintained approximately 500 advertisers spending at least $0.5 million on our platforms on a rolling 12-month basis. On average, these customers have each spend in excess of $2 million annually, which represents roughly 70% of total customer spend on our platform. Additionally, we have another approximately 1,000 advertisers spending between $100,000 and $500,000 annually, representing a great base to grow our share of wallet with these large customers.
Moving to the supply side, where continued ownership of unique exclusive media environments remains critical. We are seeing wins not just from new business, but from long-time customers who trust us to innovate and scale with them. Renewals have included Webedia in France, Sankei in Japan and TMZ and Conde Nast in the U.S. We are also innovating the experiences we can provide to consumers across these traditional web environments.
Moments, our vertical video solution, provides the immersive experience of social media's scrollable format to traditional publishing environment and consumers are showing high engagement with users now consuming 8 videos on average. Over 70 publishers have adopted Moments and with examples delivering close to 80% viewability with nearly double the engagement rate of other branding formats. Moments will be one of the cornerstones of an expanded vertical experiences suite at the new Teads where brands can scale social experiences beyond the walled garden.
As we strive to drive outcomes for advertisers across all screens on the open Internet, expanding our access to unique CTV environment remains a key focus. In Q1, CTV revenue grew 100% year-over-year, now representing approximately 5% of our total ad spend. We also now have access to more than 300 million TV screens for manufacturers globally, with about half of these coming through our exclusive partnerships with LG and VIDAA in addition to our access to more than 7,000 CTV properties globally. And we believe the value of our unique CTV home screen inventory is clear. Since its launch in 2023, more than 1,500 CTV home screen campaigns have been run by premium brands globally, including Cartier, Nestle and Air France.
On the operational side, our focus remains on integration, efficiency and execution. Immediately post-closing, we implemented the majority of headcount-related synergies. At this point, we have actioned 90% of our annualized compensation-related targets. We are also making significant progress on other operating expense synergy opportunities such as office consolidation, licenses, professional services and others, and we remain on track to reach our total target of $60 million in annualized cost savings in 2026 and to achieve this run rate by the end of 2025. In addition, we are focused on our AI Everywhere efforts, identifying opportunities and implementing AI across our engineering, algo product solutions and internal processes teams with great potential to serve our partners faster and better.
Just as one example, in our direct response performance business, we have already seen more than $1 million of campaigns using our image to clip that enables short video creation for performance marketers based on an image. To sum it up, we are well underway in our strategic and financial transformation. I'm very excited that we are successfully executing with discipline on the merger synergies and continue to be committed to our profitability targets while also getting great traction for our market position and vision.
We are deepening our relationships with advertisers and media owners alike and seeing real validation for our strategy that we believe will lead to increasingly winning a larger share of wallet.
Thank you again for joining us. Now I will turn it over to Jason for a more detailed financial update.
Thanks, David. As David mentioned, we achieved our Q1 guidance for Ex-TAC gross profit and adjusted EBITDA following our completion of the acquisition of Teas in February. Though we closed the transaction in the middle of Q1, we are already starting to realize the benefits of this combination in our financials, and we are very pleased with the progress of our integration, both from a financial standpoint and with respect to integration of people, processes and systems.
Revenue in Q1 was approximately $286 million, reflecting an increase of 32% year-over-year on an as-reported basis, driven primarily by the impact of the acquisition. For context, given the timing of the closing of the transaction in February, we estimate a year-over-year decline of approximately 7% on a pro forma basis for the full quarter. This is our estimate of a like-for-like year-over-year comparison. As a reminder, this represents an improvement as compared with a pro forma 9% decline year-over-year in Q4.
We attribute the improvement to several factors, including a reduction of the employee uncertainty and distraction that we saw in the period following the deal announcement prior to the deal closing and team restructuring. Notably, we saw in Q1, which continued into Q2, improvement in the trends of the U.S. business, which represents around 30% of our revenue. Ex-TAC gross profit in the quarter was $103.1 million, an increase of 98% year-over-year on an as-reported basis, driven primarily by the impact of the acquisition.
Note that ex-TAC gross profit growth is outpacing revenue growth, which is driven primarily by a net favorable change in our revenue mix resulting from the acquisition as well as the continuation of improvements to revenue mix from the legacy Outbrain business. And as with revenue, while we're in the very early days, we're seeing a trend in a positive direction in terms of growth rates. And that's before we've been able to influence the overall growth in terms of combining our offerings and realizing any real synergies from cross-selling.
Other cost of sales and operating expenses increased year-over-year, predominantly driven by the impact of the acquisition as well as several related onetime expenses. Note, in the quarter, we recognized $16 million of acquisition-related costs as well as $16 million from the impairment of intangible assets for products determined to be discontinued as a result of the acquisition and $7 million of restructuring charges.
Note that we recorded a benefit from deal-related cost synergies in Q1 of approximately $2 million, which we expect to increase in Q2 and beyond as we continue to capture savings across both compensation and non-compensation areas. We continue to expect to achieve approximately $60 million of cost synergies in 2026 and to approach this run rate in Q4 this year. As a reminder, $45 million of this amount relates to compensation expenses. And as an update, we have now actioned on approximately 90% of this amount at this point in time.
Accordingly, we have better visibility to the impact of synergies on full-year 2025 and expect total cost synergy savings to amount to approximately $40 million for the year, which represents an increase versus prior expectations.
So there's a significantly higher amount of costs coming off the books in the coming quarters, and we see opportunities beyond that as well to be more efficient. Overall, we're focused on our integration and plan to remain disciplined on costs with extremely targeted investments into areas that we see as high confidence ROI drivers or critical to driving growth and efficiency.
Adjusted EBITDA for Q1 was $10.7 million, which on an as-reported basis represents a greater than 7x increase year-over-year despite the synergy capture being extremely nascent given the timing of closing and our path to more fulsome realization of the synergy opportunities in the coming quarters.
Moving to liquidity. Free cash flow, which, as a reminder, we define as cash from operating activities less CapEx and capitalized software costs was a use of cash of approximately $7 million in the quarter. Note that this included cash outflows for acquisition-related costs and restructuring charges of approximately $16 million, negatively impacting our free cash flow in the quarter. Excluding these amounts, the free cash flow generation for the quarter would have been a positive $10 million. As a result, we ended the quarter with $156 million of cash, cash equivalents and investments in marketable securities on the balance sheet as well as $16 million in overdraft borrowings, which are classified on our balance sheet as short-term debt. And we have $637.5 million in principal amount of long-term debt at 10% coupon due in 2030.
The first of our semiannual interest payments is to be paid in August. The long-term debt is carried on our balance sheet, net of discount and deferred financing fees and has a balance of $611 million as of March 31, resulting in a net debt balance of $471 million.
Now I'll turn to our outlook. Although, we haven't seen any meaningful impact in our results to-date, we have seen some advertisers planning and buying cycles shortening, meaning they finalize their budget commitments with less advanced notice than typically seen. On the other hand, we see some positivity in our Q2 pipeline as well. We see continued improvement of the Legacy Teas business since the closing of the merger and better visibility into the cross-sell opportunities. Also, we view the uncertainty of the environment as a longer-term opportunity as we expect advertisers to scrutinize their ad spend and to expect greater accountability from their budgets, which we believe aligns well with our mission at the new peak.
As we look forward in our guidance, considering the uncertainty of macro conditions, we are providing for a wider range of outcomes in our guidance. And with that context, we have provided the following guidance. For Q2, we expect ex-TAC gross profit of $141 million to $150 million, and we expect adjusted EBITDA of $26 million to $34 million. For full-year 2025, we continue to expect adjusted EBITDA of at least $180 million.
Now I'll turn it back to the operator for Q&A.
Our first question is from Ygal Arounian with Citigroup.
Nice to see the results in light of the macro context. I guess, first, maybe can we just expand on the macro a little bit more, what you're seeing, so shortening of planning of buying cycles, but doesn't sound like there's been any real pullback yet. And then on that opportunity as advertisers scrutinize budgets, can you talk a little bit more how you could capture that? And are you seeing any difference from advertisers on their focus between brand and performance? Is performance holding up better than brand? Let me just start there, and then I have a follow-up.
Sure. So thanks for the question, Ygal. Maybe I'll start, Jason. Yes, I mean, we saw in Q1 was really improvements in demand levels from January into February and March. And as I said in the prepared remarks, an overall continuation of that positive trend of the improving growth rates for the legacy Teds business. Into Q2, so far, so good. We haven't seen any meaningful impact in our results to-date stemming from the uncertainty in the macro, clarifying maybe what I said on the call, the shortened planning of buying cycles, maybe as an example, if you typically might get a month or 2 months warning on a budget, maybe it comes in a few weeks closer to the start date than typical.
So to us, that indicates, obviously, there's more scrutinization of the ad spend happening, which obviously, to the second part of your question, we view as a good thing for us. But obviously, there is a little bit less visibility. And obviously, I think you have to factor that into when you're giving the outlook and the guidance. Obviously, verticals, we look at, there's some stronger, some weaker, but nothing unusual, I would say. And as I said, we're seeing really more positives than negatives at this point in terms of the legacy Outbrain business continues growth from the same growth drivers, yields are up. The improvement, as I said, in the year-over-year growth rates for legacy Teas in U.S. in particular, which is encouraging positivity that we see. And the team is eagerly starting the early days here of the cross-sell. We have our first wins there. So generally good things. Obviously, we're being balanced in our guidance just given the uncertainty. But so far, so good is how I would do it.
Maybe I would add, it's David, to your last point around advertisers. So our breakdown is generally 7% performance, 30% branding. But think what we need to focus on is that we drive outcomes. And whether it's brand dollars or performance dollars, advertisers, whether it's a direct-to-consumer or an enterprise brand are looking for measurable outcomes. And this is how we look at the future in terms of our position in the market as a platform that drives the best outcomes, both for branding and performance. So we are very strategically important for our partners, and we believe that as long as we can continue and deliver on those measurable outcomes, that's what's going to continue and the ability to increase share of wallet.
I want to make one comment on performance. I mean, you've been following us for a few years. So before the merger, we've been talking about the increase in growth of share of wallet we have from pure performance advertisers to our Zemanta DSP that we rebranded as Outbrain DSP. So that trend continues. And there, we help performance advertisers bid into third-party environment, other SSPs, display advertising and something we've been doing already for a few years. Before we merged, it accounted for about 30% of our business was outside overseas. So we believe we're very well balanced in terms of the macro and also in addition to the points that Jason highlighted.
Okay. Great. And then one on kind of fundamentals also on the integration, and you guys called out the strong JVP wins, and that's nice to see. How much of that is maybe a direct result of the new combination versus what maybe in the pipeline? And I think if I'm understanding you correctly, you guys are saying that the cross-selling opportunity hasn't really even started. I don't know if that was more of a 1Q thing that started to play out in 2Q, but can you just talk a little bit about what you're seeing there and the opportunity from cross-selling?
I'll take it. So we're very excited about the JVP. I think it's a huge asset that sort of we have today at Teas, which is relationships, and we highlighted the size of the companies we work with, whether it is enterprise brands, their agencies, even the SMEs, and we're working with large customers, which have big budgets. The growth in that is coming, I think, also from a combination of the 2 companies. There's tremendous excitement about this combined value proposition. Sort of we have a weekly internal messaging in the company yesterday, I posted a video post the meeting with one large agency where we got more share of wallet because we now are able to bring to a legacy Teads client performance capabilities. They all, at the end, have they want to sell a product. They want to get a lead. They want to get someone to download an application or I think. So I think that is helping. I mean I cannot pinpoint directly that the growth is coming just from that, but we've had hundreds of meetings and the response is phenomenal to this value proposition of performance and branding combined. So I'm sure it will be a big growth driver.
Our next question is from Andrew Boone with Citizens.
You guys highlighted the improvement in Teads results in the prepared remarks. Can you guys just speak through that and talk through kind of the trends that you guys are seeing and moving that business back into kind of a strong growth position?
And then one of the striking things that you guys called out here is just the size of some of your larger clients. And so can you just step back and talk about the opportunity, whether that be larger clients or smaller clients? Or kind of how are you guys thinking about that? And just kind of explain why you guys wanted to highlight that disclosure?
Sure. So maybe I could start. Thanks for the question, Andrew. In terms of the legacy Teads business, obviously, it's something that we talked about the idiosyncratic headwinds on the business in Q4, one of which was region-specific, and we kind of updated that already last quarter. But I think the bigger kind of impact was about just the impact of the pending merger on the team, and there was hiring freeze and lack of focus. And I think just a lot of concern of, okay, when is this going to close? And is there a restructuring happening? We do feel that the overhang from that has really been relieved, and we see it in the results really since we've gotten certainty of kind of the closing date, which obviously we got in January, we have seen just kind of month-over-month improvement, right, in those year-over-year trends. So obviously, the focus, the execution, the just doing the restructuring very quickly and everyone kind of knows their role and the team and how everything fits in and the product road map, we really feel like it's kind of lifted and given everyone kind of the ability to just go do what they're good at and bring this back to growth. And we feel good about it. We feel good about the trends we've seen and expecting to get to pro forma overall growth in the second half of the year still from that.
To your other part of the question, Andrew, thanks on that. So we are highlighting those customers. We believe that there's a huge opportunity to get more share of wallet from these customers. I mean a lot of the spend goes to point solutions, DSPs. We believe that our platform on the open Internet by delivering better outcomes with elevated creative will allow us to get market share and gain more share of wallet from these very, very large customers, whether it's enterprise brands. Some of them are small and medium enterprises, but still with significant budget and obviously direct response customers. So it is about growing our share of wallet both their branding dollars and for their performance campaigns and doing that sort of across the board on different screens. And I think that's the opportunity. I mean it has a tremendous sales team today combined with the legacy Outbrain and legacy Teads, it's hundreds of people across the world organized in verticals. So we're very excited about the ability to drive a lot of more share of wallet through these capabilities.
Our next question is from Laura Martin with Needham & Company.
Yes. So you guys had a really central activation at possible. And you just said that you've had hundreds of meetings and customers seem really delighted with this end-to-end strategy of the brand and performance. Remind us what the path is between meetings to getting sign-ups? When would the revenue show up, assuming you get some kind of 20% conversion rate or something? When do we start seeing revenue from these positive meetings you're having?
Laura, thank you. So possible was great. Sorry, I wasn't there, but I know you had some good meetings there with our team. We are looking at returning back to growth, I mean, as Teads in the second half of the year. And it's a combination of some of the things Jason mentioned around just improvement in the performance of the legacy Teads business, but a lot of it is also coming from cross-selling and selling performance solutions to Teads advertisers, selling some branding solutions to the SME advertisers. So that is reflected in our plans for the second half of the year. We have already seen some of the sales happening with certain customers. So I think it's going to ramp up in an exponential way into the second half of the year.
Okay. So there isn't a typical -- you sign an MSA and then they experiment. There's not a typical path. It's just you just have to wait until. And you don't see a headwind of tariffs against people bringing new business to you?
At the moment, as Jason said, we have not seen any meaningful impact of tariffs.
Okay. And that wouldn't affect all these. Okay. That's interesting. And then my other thing is one of the things that's been really threatening sort of the existence of the open Internet as an existential threat is ad agencies have cut off their funding of new sites. And so I'm wondering if you're -- and there's been a lot of pushback on that and really trying to get ad agencies to be more nuanced about the type of news that they are willing to advertise on. Have you seen any reversal or people advertising on new sites again?
Yes. So I think actually, we have seen more openness, and I think there's better technology solutions that allow advertisers to be much more selective into what they're trying to block. So not doing sort of really large-scale blocking of new pages, but actually being much more granular around specific things that they want to block. And I feel very positive about the topic actually that's very close to my heart with the panel at CS. We talk about it at hand with some of our partners on the agency side, some of the CMOs and publisher side. I think there is a change of that. I think the ability of reaching incremental audiences at times where they are engaging with authentic content that is professionally produced, the value of that has been proven. There's tons of research out there that shows that there is no actually detriment actually, there's a positive impact of being associated with Teads, which have credible, authentic journalistic or other professionally creative content. And I think that is a big opportunity for us also to grow monetization within our base of supply partners.
Our next question is from James Heaney with Jefferies.
I'd love to hear your perspective just on the ruling in the DOJ Google lawsuit. Curious how do you think Teads would benefit if Google were to divest its ad serving and publisher side tech? And then I had a follow-up question.
Great. So I'll take that. Thank you. So the Google ruling, I think it's a good thing for the overall ecosystem. It affects us probably directly less than others because we are an end-to-end platform that has direct exclusive relationship on the supply. So we don't go for most of the business we have through GAM or through the ad Exchange or DV360. So we have exclusive supply, which is one of the differentiators why we can drive better outcomes, by the way, when you look at other point solutions like DSPs. And so it's impacting us less. I think overall, on the SSP front, I think it is a -- could potentially provide a great tailwind to SSPs, which could benefit us.
I mentioned, for example, on the performance side, on the direct response side of our business, we have been, over the last years, expanding significantly with third-party supply, display, other SSPs. As this market becomes more open and more competitive, I think it allows us to even further grow the value we can bring to our performance marketers on this third-party supply. So that's a direct positive. But overall, I think us being an end-to-end platform with direct call on page first-party data, this is less impactful on us directly.
Great. And then just one on your Moments vertical video product. I would just love to hear what your strategy is for expanding that product into new publishers and how we should be thinking about that as a growth driver for the business?
So we're looking at it as part of a broader suite of vertical video experiences. So Moments is one type of format. I don't want to be too technical here, it's one type of format, but there's other vertical opportunities that we see where we can leverage our end-of-article placement to create a vertical experience that is very, very suitable for brand advertising or for brands that want to drive performance. So overall, we think vertical video is a big category. It increases the engagement of audiences with content and is a great canvas for advertisers that want to promote either performance or brand. We've been seeing great success with Moments. I mentioned on the call, some of the data points, and we will continue to invest quite significantly into all vertical video opportunities.
Our next question is from Zach Cummins with B. Riley Securities.
I just wanted to get a little more context around your second half guidance. I think you might have alluded to it. But just curious, if you're still assuming kind of a return to low single-digit growth in the second half of the year on a pro forma basis. And just from a modeling perspective, I know synergies are expected to ramp throughout the year. So just curious of how we should be thinking about kind of the adjusted EBITDA progression for the pro forma entity in the second half of this year?
Sure. Thanks for the question, Zach. I'll take that one. Yes. So obviously, as I said, we're factoring in a number of things, the continued improvement of the year-over-year growth rates that we've seen from the legacy TD business, continued growth, obviously, from the legacy operating business we've been talking about for about a year now and obviously, the early days of the revenue synergy capture. So we are expecting something there, but we're obviously being fairly conservative in our model for that. And of course, acknowledging that the uncertainty in the world exists right now, we are accounting for that, even though we haven't seen any meaningful impact so far considering all the positives.
There are also anecdotally some easing of the comps for us, particularly on the legacy Teads business as we get later in the year, as we talked about the idiosyncratic headwinds from last year's Q4 as well. And so yes, all that kind of comes together, and we still do expect, as we said last quarter, to get to the pro forma growth year-over-year in the second half of this year.
And in terms of expenses and how that kind of relates to EBITDA, we've now shared that we expect to realize about $40 million of cost synergies alone in 2025, and that's really ramping over the next few quarters. We only had about $2 million of benefit in Q1 just based on the timing of closing and actions being put in place. We expect that to step up in Q2, but even more so in Q3 and for Q4. And much of those actions are actually already done. It's really just a matter of time at this point before the accounting is able to recognize those savings.
So we feel very confident about that in terms of the expenses getting lower over the course of the year. Q2 also has some marketing events and just timing type issues, making Q2 really the high watermark in terms of expenses for the year. So you put it all together, it definitely, we feel good about obviously maintaining our guidance. The historical seasonality is one that 2/3 of the EBITDA has always been recognized in H2 if you put these 2 companies together. So between that and the synergies, we feel very good.
Just on it is a financially transformational year with this merger. So we can see, for example, the ramp-up of -- based on the guidance of EBITDA is 3x the EBITDA in Q2 from Q1. So we are seeing it. I mean it's really the timing of a lot of these efficiency synergies coming in, the cross-sell that is starting in 5 geographies now in Europe and in the U.S. So all of these things will come in and will have -- we expect a significant impact, obviously, going into the second half.
Understood. And my one follow-up question is just around your CTV business, and I appreciate the disclosure there in terms of the growth rate and percentage of spend. So just curious of really how the combined entity has a differentiated CTV offering and where is kind of the near-term opportunities that you see to continue that momentum here in the coming quarters?
So today, the differentiation is in 2 aspects. One is we have for some TV manufacturers and operating system, LG, VIDAA in certain geographies of the world, exclusivity on a home screen placement that's is a highly impactful sort of native placement when you look at different piles and you decide what to do. So you spend a lot of time there. So we have exclusivity on that. That helps us also increase in general, our share of wallet with video advertisers once they do displacement. We will also get some of the in-stream regular, call it, video advertising from them. We're trying to grow that because these formats are -- you can't buy them programmatically. They are unique, and they're really leveraging the tremendous power that we have at Teads with brand advertisers. These are the type of advertisers that CTV and applications want to have on their home screen. So that's a big differentiator today.
When we're looking into the future, we see a huge opportunity on performance CTV. I think it's early days for that. And when you combine the performance capabilities of legacy Outbrain, the SME base that we have, the ease of producing today video content for these type of advertisers and the ability to target and deliver outcomes. We are spending a lot of time working on sort of the implementation and strategy for performance on CTV. We think we are uniquely positioned to capture significant share there.
We have reached the end of our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to management for closing remarks.
So thank you all for joining. I want to take this opportunity to thank our close to 2,000 employees across the world. It's been a great journey until now, and I'm very excited to see sort of the one team, one dream coming together. It's also been great. I mean if some of our partners are on the call, I mean, on the business side, I mean, they've been tremendous and the confidence and validation we got from them is really fueling the energy. And thank you all for continuing to support us as shareholders, and we look forward to continuing the dialogue. Thank you.
Thank you. This will conclude today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time, and thank you for your participation.