VerticalScope Holdings Inc

TSX:FORA

Earnings Call Transcript 2021-Q2

[Operator]

Hello, and welcome to VerticalScope Holdings Inc. Q2 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] I now have the pleasure of handing over to Diane Yu, Chief Legal Officer, to begin today's presentation.

[Diane Yu, Chief Legal Officer & Corporate Secretary]

Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to VerticalScope Holdings Second Quarter 2021 Earnings Call. I'm joined by Rob Laidlaw, our Founder and Chief Executive Officer; Vince Bellissimo, our Chief Financial Officer; and Chris Goodridge, our President and Chief Operating Officer. We'll begin with commentary on the quarter before opening the floor to questions. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that today's presentation contains forward-looking information that involves known and unknown risks and uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual events to differ materially from current expectations. These statements should not be read as assurances of future performance or results. Such statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from those implied by such statements. A more complete discussion of the risks and uncertainties facing the company appear in the company's management discussion and analysis for the 3-month period ended June 30, 2021, which are available under the company's profile on SEDAR as well as on the company's website. You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this presentation. The company disclaims any intention or obligation, except to the extent required by law, to update and revise any forward-looking statements as a result of new information, future events or for any other reason. Our discussion today will include references to adjusted financial measures, including adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow, which are non-IFRS measures. All references to currency in this presentation shall refer to U.S. dollars unless otherwise specified. Now I will turn the call Rob Laidlaw, Founder and CEO of VerticalScope Holdings. Rob?

[Robert Laidlaw, Founder, CEO & Director]

Thanks, Diane. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our second quarter 2021 financial earnings call. Before we begin, I would just like to recognize the hard work of our team at VerticalScope. We now have 249 team members in Canada, the United States and around the world. It is their passion and dedication to our communities that continues to make our company better every day. Thank you. Q2 was a milestone quarter for our business as we successfully completed our initial public offering and raised CAD 143.8 million, inclusive of the exercise of the overallotment in early July. This capital puts us in a great position to continue building upon our Fora software platform while accelerating our accretive M&A engine. VerticalScope is delivering on our mission to enable people around the world that share common interests and passions to connect, geek out and share their knowledge on the things that they love. Our niche communities are providing a safe space for our members that care deeply about their hobbies and passions. We serve a different purpose than the memes, family photos and politics that are found today on mass social media. Our platform allows our users to connect in a meaningful way with like-minded enthusiasts and consume content about these niche topics that are core to their identity. Turning to Q2 results. We grew revenue to $14.4 million, up 19% from the same period last year, with a strong performance from our advertising business. This revenue growth was achieved through organic growth initiatives and is built upon the back of our multiyear investment in our Fora platform, where we significantly improved our user experiences and our advertising quality and performance scores. We saw large year-over-year gains from both programmatics, up 74%, and direct, up 43%, despite some supply chain challenges faced by some of our largest customers in the automotive and power sports categories as they face chip shortages, plant shutdowns and low inventory levels at dealerships. In facing these challenges, which caused numerous campaign delays and moved significant dollars out of Q2 and into future quarters, we were pleased with our team's ability to meaningfully increase revenue on a year-over-year basis while maintaining our steadfast commitment to a strong user experience for our community members. We did not sacrifice user experience to achieve these gains. Rather, we did it through close client relationships and high-performing advertising placements. Our commerce business continued to perform well in the quarter, even as it was down 24% versus last year. Our prior year result was driven by pandemic lockdowns that created a surge in online shopping activity. We believe that this year's result was driven by the lifting of restrictions and pent-up demand for people to get out of their homes, shop at brick-and-mortar stores and feel normal again through the spring reopening. This pent-up urgency to get out may have caused the pendulum to swing beyond future norms in key categories such as home fitness equipment, and we think it may soon shift again due to the Delta variant and as we head into the colder fall and winter seasons and people once again prefer to remain indoors and shop online. We are extremely excited about the long-term prospects of our commerce business, and we'll continue to invest in this line of business as we look to make our community sites more shoppable through the marketplaces, product recommenders and comparative shopping experiences going forward. We are in the early innings here and believe new commerce initiatives will be a large growth driver for many years to come. Adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow remains extremely strong. They are key pillars of VerticalScope's financial discipline. We delivered $6 million of adjusted EBITDA, a 42% adjusted EBITDA margin and 80% free cash flow conversion. Net of the Canadian Emergency Waste Subsidy or CEWS payments in the prior year, our adjusted EBITDA grew by 25% in Q2, driven by the organic top line revenue growth. Turning to our Fora platform communities. They delivered an impressive 9.2% year-over-year MAU growth, which contributed to the overall business growth to 94.8 million MAU, up 4.3% year-over-year. Just adding a little more color on that, we will generally look at MAUs on a year-over-year basis and less so on a sequential basis. The reason for that is our communities have some seasonality, and Q1 is typically the strongest quarter of the year for MAUs. We are very happy with the 4.3% year-over-year, but we also think that we can accelerate that growth in Q3 based on what we've experienced thus far. The Fora platform has been a multiyear investment. It began in late 2018, and the results of this long-term strategy are beginning to show in this MAU growth. We believe we can continue to deliver organic MAU growth on existing communities while onboarding additional communities through our M&A strategy using the IPO proceeds. We are continuing our aggressive investment into the Fora platform with numerous initiatives underway that will create long-term revenue and MAU growth. In the quarter, we continued work on our vendor self-service platform that will allow us to sign up, onboard and service our small business subscriptions in a highly automated fashion. With additional functionalities and net new product offerings being launched in Q3 and Q4, we're excited about the growth of this recurring revenue, self-service subscription platform. At the end of the quarter, we have migrated open 90.3% of our forum communities over to Fora. We expect the pace of migration to slow a little bit over the next quarter or 2 as we build migration tooling for additional legacy third-party software and move some of our more technically challenging community sites. We are seeing the growth potential as these sites -- of these sites once they're moved over to Fora, so we'll keep moving forward as fast as we can with these migrations. Lastly, we also recently completed a user survey of more than 4,800 users on our Fora platform and received tremendous feedback on additional features, upgrades and functionalities that they would like to see. Without a doubt, we have an exciting road map ahead to continue improving user engagement and growing our communities for the long term. I will now turn it over to Chris to give you more depth on our revenue performance and M&A strategy, followed by Vince, who will walk you through the financials.

[Christopher Goodridge, President & COO]

Thanks, Rob. As Rob highlighted, we are pleased with the progress of our business in the quarter. Revenue grew organically by 19% in the quarter and 30% year-to-date, positioning us very well to post strong year-over-year growth in 2021. Our advertising business had a strong quarter with revenue of $9.9 million, up 59% compared to prior year as we continue to see the benefits of the Fora platform on the performance of our advertising products. Year-to-date, advertising revenue was up 45% compared to prior year. Programmatic revenue was particularly strong in the quarter, growing 74% compared to prior year, driven by 3 main factors: first being impression gains driven by MAU growth from sites running on Fora; stronger advertising rates across all programmatic partners as compared to Q2 last year when the industry experienced a drop in demand due to COVID-19 lockdowns; and three, a greater proportion of higher rate programmatic direct deals compared to prior year. These gains are a testament to the improvements we've made to add quality, viewability and page performance and the optimization of our programmatic stack. Our direct advertising business also had a very strong Q2, up 43% year-over-year. Our largest direct customers continue to increase spending on our platform with our top 10 direct accounts growing spending by 60% on average year-to-date compared to prior year. Although we were pleased with the performance of our direct business, as Rob alluded to earlier, Q2 revenue was negatively impacted by some of our customers delaying campaigns until subsequent quarters due to inventory constraints and chip shortages. The shortage has particularly impacted automotive and power sport manufacturers as many have temporarily reduced production as a result. We expect to see improvements in direct advertising in the back half of the year as the impact of these disruptions dissipates. The digital advertising industry is watching closely Google's planned elimination of third-party cookies from its Chrome browser. Google announced in the quarter that it's delaying this change until mid- to late 2023 when it plans to have its alternatives to third-party cookie-based tracking deployed. Regardless of the timing of this change by Google, we continue to believe that our business is very well positioned for this shift as advertisers look for alternative means of reaching customers. Our focus on product-based communities that reach highly specific targeted audiences and the quantity and quality of our first-party data is a real point of differentiation. In the coming quarters, we will continue to experiment and test new solutions that surface the value of our first-party data in cookieless environments while at the same time protecting the privacy of our users. Turning to e-commerce revenue. E-commerce revenue in the quarter was $4.5 million, a decrease of 24% compared to prior year. And year-to-date e-commerce revenue was $11.5 million, an increase of 10% compared to prior year. In Q2 2020, we benefited from a surge in consumer spending in categories where we have relative strength such as fitness. As pandemic-related lockdowns went into effect across North America last year, we experienced significant increases in transaction volume in these categories, which did not repeat to the same extent this year as the U.S. economy continued to open. Outside of these categories, we saw double-digit organic revenue growth and continue to be encouraged about the long-term prospects for e-commerce on our platform as we introduce new commerce-related experiences at scale across our 4 communities, including marketplaces, product recommendations and deals. And turning to our staffing. Our headcount finished the quarter at 249 members, growing by 17 positions, 7% compared to prior year as we continue to grow our product and engineering capabilities to accelerate the development of new features and experiences on our Fora platform. Our business has embraced the work-from-anywhere model quite successfully, and we expect that to continue for the foreseeable future. The health and safety of our employees is a top priority, and our teams have consistently demonstrated an ability to maintain productivity while working outside of an office environment. To this end, we entered into agreements to sublease our Toronto headquarters and are actively pursuing alternative locations with a smaller footprint that better reflect the needs of our business and allow us to realize cost savings of approximately $1.1 million per year, beginning in 2022, before accounting for the cost of alternative space. Turning to an update on our M&A progress. M&A is a key component of our growth strategy, and we've been actively building our pipeline leading up to and since the closing of our IPO in June. M&A, of course, is not a substitute for organic growth in our business, and we believe that we can continue to drive both organic growth and inorganic growth with accretive acquisitions. We have a great track record of accretive M&A at VerticalScope. And with our Fora platform in place, we are better positioned than ever -- than we ever have been to enhance the user experience of the communities we acquire and improve their trajectory. We recognize the unique opportunity not only to continue to consolidate a fragmented market of product-focused enthusiast communities but also to significantly improve these communities with Fora. Towards the end of the quarter, we announced the purchase of Paddling.com, a leading community for canoe, kayak and paddleboard enthusiasts. This acquisition is a perfect example of the targets that we're going after, a passionate community of loyal users with high-quality, product-focused discussions. Acquisitions like this are immediately accretive as a result of our direct sales relationships and our programmatic and e-commerce platforms. We've got a strong and growing pipeline and are using a disciplined approach to acquiring the best properties. We've touched base now with over 200 potential targets and opportunities in the last couple of months and are moving through our M&A process. We've signed 3 additional purchase agreements so far in Q3, including a few smaller deals and are now working agreement with a few of the larger targets between late Q3 and early Q4. And with that, I'll pass things over to Vince to provide more detail on our financials in the quarter.

[Vincenzo Bellissimo, Chief Financial Officer]

Thanks, Chris, and welcome to everyone who has joined. It's exciting to comment on our Q2 results as part of our inaugural earnings call as a TSX listed public company. As mentioned by both Rob and Chris, revenue in the quarter grew organically by 19% and marks the third consecutive quarter with double-digit top line growth. Growth drivers include an increase in total ARPU of 14% and an increase in MAUs of 4%. Increased performance in search ranking results from a higher number of communities running on the Fora software platform were key drivers in both ARPU and MAU growth. Now the benefits of our ongoing investment into developing the world's leading community software platform that puts users first and delivers a modern, fast and scalable experience. Operating expenses, inclusive of $3.1 million in onetime professional fees and expenses relating to the initial public offering, were $16.6 million in the quarter, up 39.1% when compared to the prior year. As mentioned previously, the 2020 wage and consulting comparable include the benefit of $764,000 in CEWS with no amount recognized in 2021. Net of noncash items, expenses relating to initial public offering and normalizing for the Q2 2020 CEWS benefit, operating expenses were up 13% year-over-year, driven by the increase in platform and technology costs and a rise in wages and consulting costs as a result of a 7% increase in headcount. The strength in the Canadian dollar versus the U.S. dollar is also a contributing factor to the period's comparables with the movement in exchange rate period-over-period contributing $381,000 increase in wages and consulting expenses for the quarter. As mentioned by Rob, we pride ourselves on our profitability and a disciplined approach to managing our adjusted EBITDA and continue to generate strong free cash flow that we can reinvest in our business. The Fora platform and its unified code base will empower new automation and efficiencies, allowing us to realize a higher level of operating leverage as we scale versus our legacy platform. Adjusted EBITDA for the 3 months ended June 30, 2021, was $6 million, up 8% year-over-year and resulting in adjusted EBITDA margins of 42% compared to 46% in the prior year. The recognition of CEWS in Q2 2020 coupled with the strengthening Canadian dollar in the quarter are contributing factors to the year-over-year change. Normalized for the $764,000 in CEWS and the $381,000 in FX movement, adjusted EBITDA in the quarter was up 33% compared to prior year. Free cash flow generated in the quarter was $4.7 million, an increase of 5% compared to last year, resulting in free cash flow conversion of 80%. There was $1.3 million in capital expenditures in the period, $1.2 million of which is related to our ongoing investment in the Fora software platform towards engagement and ARPU growth initiatives. In the quarter, the company entered into an amended and restated credit agreement. The multi-tranche term loans under the prior credit agreement were restated into a single-term loan tranche with a principal amount of $50 million, and the revolving loan commitments under the prior credit agreement were increased to $75 million. The amended and restated credit agreement gives us the flexibility to roll out our M&A strategy efficiently while realizing savings on interest. There were no amounts drawn on the revolver in the period. The $75 million revolver will be used entirely to fund M&A in the coming quarters. The available cash at the end of the period was $55.5 million, with key movements including $96 million in net proceeds relating to the initial public offering, offset by $49.6 million payments made towards the extinguished credit agreement. Our net loss for the quarter was $4.4 million, less favorable by $3.5 million compared to last year. The net loss was largely driven by the $3.1 million in onetime expenses tied to the initial public offering and $2.3 million in credit facility financing fees relating to the amended and restated credit agreement and the extinguishment of the prior credit agreement. And now I will turn it back to Rob, our CEO, for closing remarks. Rob?

[Robert Laidlaw, Founder, CEO & Director]

Thanks, Vince, and thank you, everyone, for the continued trust. We're really excited about our future as a public company, and we aim to deliver exceptional shareholder returns for the long term. Operator, we will now open it up for questions.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] Our first question today comes from Drew McReynolds of RBC.

[Drew McReynolds]

Vince, congrats on the appointment. You really addressed a lot of my questions with the opening remarks. So just a couple of clarifications. On the M&A environment, maybe for Chris or Rob, how do you characterize kind of the small acquisitions that you've done versus maybe some of the bigger ones that you're alluding to later on in the back half of the year? And then secondly, in terms of completing the migration of sites to Fora, it sounds as if that would be a 2022 time frame, just to confirm that. And then lastly, on the deferral of advertising, presumably auto and water sports verticals are 2 of the bigger ones for you. Just wondering if you could kind of quantify kind of what impact that would have had in the quarter, just maybe put some numbers around what that deferral would be.

[Robert Laidlaw, Founder, CEO & Director]

Yes. Maybe I can take the first one on the advertising piece, and then Chris can talk through the M&A a little bit. It's Rob. So I think on the advertising piece, it was definitely a couple of hundred grands, close to $0.5 million in the quarter that we would have seen moved out. And again, we're pretty hopeful that, that business -- in our conversations with the advertisers, it looks like they're trying to move that to kind of Q3 or Q4. So we're hoping to keep it within the year. But it's definitely kind of an ongoing conversation as we see how the chip shortages in particular kind of resolve themselves for some of those manufacturers. Chris?

[Christopher Goodridge, President & COO]

Yes. Yes. Drew, thanks for the question. On M&A, so the deal that we referred to, for the most part, these would be smaller deals. So less than 500,000 MAU kind of size range. And some of the larger acquisitions we referred to would be well north of the 1 million MAU mark.

[Drew McReynolds]

That's great. And just my last one was the completion of the migration of sites to Fora.

[Robert Laidlaw, Founder, CEO & Director]

Yes. I can take that one. So yes, I think I mentioned in the comments, we'll slow down a little bit here. We're at 90.3% now. We think we can kind of get through some of these other platform toolings over the next couple of months and then kind of reaccelerate in Q4 and Q1 with the goal being -- and part of this also depends on how quickly these acquisitions come in and how technically complex they are. So with acquisitions included, I never necessarily expect be at 100% migrated to Fora because there's going to be new communities coming on to the platform. But we want to keep moving that needle, and we'll always kind of evaluate it on what sites could benefit most from Fora and try to get them moved over as quickly as possible and at least complete some of the existing communities, kind of the, let's call it, pre-IPO communities in 2022, for sure.

[Operator]

Our next question today comes from Vince Valentini of TD Securities.

[Vince Valentini, Analyst]

First, I think this is what Drew asked, but I just want to make sure I heard it correctly. The 3 deals you've signed so far in the third quarter are all on the smaller side? Is that what you said, Chris?

[Christopher Goodridge, President & COO]

That's right, Vince.

[Vince Valentini, Analyst]

Okay. Perfect. And I have a few others. I'll just do them one at a time, if that works for you. The 19% revenue growth this quarter, it's effectively all organic other than like 2 weeks of Paddling. Is that correct?

[Christopher Goodridge, President & COO]

Yes, that's also correct.

[Vincenzo Bellissimo, Chief Financial Officer]

Yes, that's correct.

[Vince Valentini, Analyst]

And I know this was a tough comp on e-commerce this quarter, but it was obviously an easier comp on advertising. Is it fair to -- I know you're not giving official guidance, but is it fair to say, on a consolidated basis, not including any huge acquisitions, that 19% is probably better than you'll do in Q3 and Q4, it will start to tail down a little bit? Or do you think you can sustain that rate of organic growth?

[Robert Laidlaw, Founder, CEO & Director]

I think as we think about 2020, the prior year, Q3 and Q4 was definitely when we started to see some of that recovery in the advertising market and commerce was still quite strong. So I think we'll have slightly tougher comparables going forward. But definitely, we'll continue to do all we can do to keep that organic growth high.

[Vince Valentini, Analyst]

And on -- sticking with the revenue comps. For a lot of companies, given the distortion in Q2 last year, we're trying to look back to the second quarter of 2019. You guys obviously weren't public then, and we don't have great disclosure on the revenue segments. Can you give us any sense of -- on the e-commerce side, it spiked up last year and then it's come back down kind of to normal. If you look at Q2 '21 versus Q2 '19, can you give us a sense of the organic growth?

[Robert Laidlaw, Founder, CEO & Director]

Yes. I can take that one as well. So we showed -- I would say '19 and '21 looked kind of far more similar. And part of the reason for that is we think that '21 actually kind of, like I mentioned in the comments, kind of the pendulum swung a little bit kind of further. We've got that, call it, double-digit organic growth kind of outside of the fitness category. But I think fitness in particular with people just wanting to get outdoors, right, buying a home gym equipment was probably where that pendulum swung a little bit harder on us. And we expect that to recover as we get into the winter months.

[Vince Valentini, Analyst]

Excellent. Two other little things. One, the seasonality of MAUs that you mentioned, good to know that first quarter is the high-water mark. We obviously see second quarter is a little bit lower. Can you give us any sense of what Q3 and Q4 look like relative to Q2? Is Q2 the low-water mark? Or which quarter would be the lowest?

[Robert Laidlaw, Founder, CEO & Director]

So last year, I think it was Q3, that was the low-water mark. And we think we're definitely seeing, as I mentioned, improved growth or accelerated growth versus the 4.3% as we look at Q3. So we expect year-over-year growth to pick up in Q3.

[Vince Valentini, Analyst]

And the last one, let's try to get your new CFO engaged here, on the expense side. Any -- we obviously see the unusual impacts from the CEWS and FX in the second quarter. Is there anything we should be looking out for in the third quarter? Did you continue to have any wage subsidies last year? And assuming the FX rate just sort of stays where it is, do you have any rough idea of the year-over-year impact? I assume it will be less significant than the 381,000 impact in Q2.

[Vincenzo Bellissimo, Chief Financial Officer]

Yes. Vince, thanks for the question. Yes, we are seeing a sort of strengthening of the U.S. dollars. So we soon will start seeing a rebound and thus impacting FX in Q3 and likely into Q4. Based on the dollar CAD forecasts that we've been looking at, to answer your question, in Q3 of last year, we had approximately $180,000 in CEWS that landed in the quarter. That program, I believe, tailed off as of September of that year. And we were no longer eligible. And then going forward into subsequent quarters, you're going to start seeing in OpEx, probably predominantly in the G&A line, the normalization of sort of public company level costs. So higher levels -- there's a prorated amount obviously in Q2 for the 9 days post close. But what you'll start seeing is a normalized run rate in G&A for things like D&O insurance and runoff policies, et cetera, but nothing sort of overly material to call out at the moment.

[Operator]

Our next question comes from Adam Shine of National Bank Financial.

[Adam Shine, MD, Head of Montreal Research & Research Analyst]

Congrats on your first quarter out. Maybe for you, Rob or Chris, can you talk a little bit about some of the new products that might have already been launched in regards to your product road map, both on the advertising side of things as well as on e-commerce? And then I'll follow up with another.

[Robert Laidlaw, Founder, CEO & Director]

Yes. So the focus in the quarter really was around this vendor self-service. We think there's -- one of the dynamics that I talked about a lot with our small business customers is they're working hard on their business kind of Monday to Friday, 9 to 5, and they kind of get around to some of the marketing and promotional work on evenings and weekends, and that's harder for us from a sales team perspective to kind of cover for that. And these are often $200 or $300 a month type clients and accounts that love to get onto our platform and speak directly to our enthusiasts. So having a self-service platform there, I think, is going to drive revenue growth in the long term but also makes us a much more efficient business. And then there's just a lot of kind of user engagement initiatives, just continuing to kind of react to what our communities are looking for, how we can get them spending more time on our communities and provide them with a better user experience. So that's where we're focused most of our time. And I'll let Chris talk to kind of some of the product side. But again, even there, I mean, we're really focused on not kind of plastering the site with more ads. So I'll let Chris talk about what we have done.

[Christopher Goodridge, President & COO]

Thanks, Rob. And yes, that's exactly the point I was going to call out, Adam, that Rob alluded to, is with respect to the Fora platform, we really are putting the user first. It's not to say our advertising sales teams wouldn't love us to have many higher-impact ad formats and those types of things. We've been very selective with the ad products that we have introduced. So a billboard ad unit only on certain pages and only when sold through direct channel and some limited video placements as well at this stage. We think video could have a long-term place on the platform, but it's going to be driven by the users, and the products that we add will enhance user experience. It's the exact same philosophy that we have on the commerce side. So when Rob alluded to marketplaces, it's something we're actively building right now. We see marketplace experiences in providing structure to kind of buy/sell activity that's already happening really in an ad hoc fashion within the forum as being a real enhancement to that user experience but also an opportunity for us to participate more in those transactions that now we facilitate on the platform. So that would be one to certainly keep an eye on in the coming quarters.

[Adam Shine, MD, Head of Montreal Research & Research Analyst]

Fantastic. And just maybe as a quick little follow-up. Notwithstanding the MAU seasonality effect, your ARPU was a bit better than ultimately expected and notwithstanding some of the deferral around power sports and automotive that was alluded to. So clearly, I guess some of the new products might be providing a degree of traction. But maybe do you want to speak a little bit more broadly in regards to some of the ARPU strength and how that flows perhaps continuing into the H2?

[Robert Laidlaw, Founder, CEO & Director]

Chris, do you want to take that one?

[Christopher Goodridge, President & COO]

Sure, yes. No problem. So with respect to ARPU, there are a couple of different things happening there, Adam, like certainly for us, the programmatic side of the business was strong. And admittedly, we had a weaker comp compared to prior year when the industry did go through an advertising -- general advertising pullback. But I think when we look -- when we step back from that, we're seeing higher programmatic ad rates really across the board than we've experienced before. And it is really a result of the decisions we've made to lower ad density and really only focus on sort of the highest-quality products and making sure that we deliver very high viewability scores on the platform. So we think programmatic's strength certainly will continue because of the work we've done there. And then similarly, as we get further on into the year and see those direct dollars coming in, we think that will be supportive of continued ARPU growth on the advertising side. And then with respect to e-commerce, as Rob alluded to, there are some factors obviously that are beyond our control with respect to any further lockdowns or those types of things in reaction to the Delta variant. But we think even absent that happening, from a product perspective and the things we've alluded to before, which we think will start to come online as we get deeper into the year, will be supportive of ARPU on the commerce side as well.

[Operator]

Our next question today comes from Aravinda Galappatthige of Canaccord.

[Aravinda Suranimala Galappatthige, Managing Director]

Two for me. One, just a follow-up on that -- on those comments around programmatic growth. Are you sort of looking at that mix between programmatic and direct ad sales, potentially with a view to sort of drive the direct ad sales piece a bit more or make that larger perhaps with a bigger sales team and so forth? I just wanted to get your thoughts on that given the sort of the rate differential, the CPM differential. And secondly, with respect to your mobile strategies, I was wondering if there's an update in terms of app development and so forth. Just looking for any color there.

[Robert Laidlaw, Founder, CEO & Director]

Yes. I can take those. So on programmatic versus direct and kind of the split there, I think that's definitely -- we want to continue to push, build our direct sales team. You mentioned the higher CPMs, absolutely. And I think we're just looking to do that in a smart way. We're kind of just post IPO, and it's going to be about finding the right talent in a competitive market and growing the team over time. It won't be a rapid, higher up all of a sudden. It will just be kind of progressive over time and allow those people to come on board and build up a book of business. Definitely, we think having those direct relationships, even as we saw within Q2, can really kind of help us push CPMs higher and drive more ARPU and especially with the Fora platform, where they get that consistent experience across all of our communities. They know what they're buying. They're getting high-quality placements. And then we can start to push kind of some of those bigger, higher-impact video and billboard-style units out through direct channels without having an impact on user experience because we control which advertisers are buying them, and we're not getting low-quality ads in those spots.With respect to the product and mobile and app development, it's definitely still something on our radar and we're pushing forward. We're very excited to get our users accessing our communities in the most convenient way possible. So no kind of timing around that yet, but excited to kind of continue making our communities more accessible.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] We have no further questions on the line. So I'll hand back over to the team to make any final remarks.

[Robert Laidlaw, Founder, CEO & Director]

Great. Thanks again, everybody. We really appreciate the time and attention and the trust here, and look forward to having a great Q3 and onwards. Have a good day.

[Operator]

We thank you all for attending today's conference. The call has now concluded, and you may now disconnect your lines.