Roundtable Secures 10-Year, $1 Billion Agreement, Bringing its AI/DeFi Media Operating System to Global Scale and Profitability

Hello, and welcome, everyone, to this Roundtable shareholder press conference. My name is Aly Madhavji, Co-Founder and CFO of Roundtable. I am thrilled to be here, and it is great to see so many friends and supporters of the company on the line today.

If you have questions, please continue to ask them in the community section at RTB.io and in the Q&A section of your Zoom panel, under More.

As you may know, we made Roundtable the largest investment in my fund, Blockchain Founders Fund. Today is a peek into the game-changing initiatives that Roundtable has been working on and that have made me so excited to be a big part of this journey.

I am thrilled to have James Heckman, Founder and CEO of Roundtable, here today to share more transformational news.

Thanks, Aly. We are glad to have you as our CFO, taking a sabbatical from your fund.

For those of you who have invested in media technology and advertising technology over the last few decades, there is typically about a 99% failure rate in the industry. The biggest challenge is not having a great idea. There are lots of brilliant engineers around the world. The issue is execution, and the key execution issue, 100% of the time, is critical mass. A lot of people call it the chicken-and-egg problem.

Many of these companies come up with great, innovative technology. I think you have all had the opportunity to look at our accumulated technology from the last three and a half decades, building 11 global networks for major media. Eyal Hertzog, our founding CTO, invented the algorithmic feed for social video, built the first social video network, Metacafe, and is the inventor of DeFi technology. We have this incredible brain trust out of Tel Aviv.

The hard part is getting enough critical mass so that your revenue exceeds your expenses. When I say revenue, I mean your gross margin on revenue. Typically, you see press releases, companies covered by TechCrunch, people going to conferences, and arm waving about amazing, innovative technology. But to bring it to market, advertisers and marketers need enough scale. It is unaffordable to test reaching 1,000, 100,000, or 5,000 people.

You then have to dilute your shareholders, build a big sales team, and sell. But you do not have enough scale, so you slowly try to grow the media business. Then you run out of money and go out of business. It is a soft landing, and you say, "What a great experience that was." But that is 99% of VC-funded Silicon Valley digital media platforms.

Our teams have launched 11 networks, all still in business and successful, with three IPOs, two sales to Yahoo, one to News Corp, and many exits. That is because we focus on one thing once the technology is bulletproof and tested in beta. It is not raising money and maintaining a sustainable burn rate for 36 months so you can go to conferences. We always focus on a major transaction.

Looking back at our history, the first big deal was with the NFL. We put together the first digital media platform before the internet and closed 32 NFL teams at once. That gave us enough critical mass to be profitable in year one.

You are all familiar with Rivals.com. We were burning money, but then we did a deal with Yahoo, Fox, and SoftBank. Suddenly, we had enough critical mass, and it ended up being the highest-traffic sports network in the world. It was the same with Scout, News Corp, and Sports Illustrated.

We were involved in the strategy team for Hulu. They had the same vision before the technology was built: bring in Disney, News Corp, Discovery, Hearst, and NBC, and instantly have the scale to go to advertisers and generate revenue.

Some would ask, "Why would you take a dilutive event up front, or roll the dice with one big deal?" My answer is that rolling the dice is wasting investor money without solving the chicken-and-egg problem. It just does not work.

We have spent the last nine months working on this, and we reached out to shareholders to let them know. We put down a $10 million deposit and threw ourselves into the concept. We had proven our technology. We had Coinbase backing and an integrated smart wallet contract with a network of DeFi payment platforms. It totally changes the world: journalists can get paid instantly. We issued that press release in June.

We have hundreds of journalists getting paid and publishing, with millions of users on our platform, but that is not enough scale to go to major DSPs. As everybody knows, millions are not enough. You need 100 million to be legitimate. I talk about needing an OPEC-like scale.

We got all of that done, but we focused on what would be our biggest transaction. To finish the metaphor about how important this was, back in 2011, when I was running global media strategy at Yahoo, I was able to bring AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, and most major media companies together. We did not have the technology. We were addressing Google's monopoly, but we got AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo together.

If you look at the Digiday story from, I think, November 2011, we started with a billion users, before the technology. Technology is important, but the ecosystem is equally important. You cannot have one without the other. That has grown into what is now called the premium marketplace, a $200 billion industry, and that is the industry we are interested in.

Our last company, which we put on the New York Stock Exchange, grew from almost nothing to $200 million in about two years by bringing together Sports Illustrated, TheStreet, Biography, and History. Suddenly, we had 100 million users, and revenue shot up.

It is the method I have used since 1990 with Ted Turner and the Goodwill Games, and it works 100% of the time. Now we have the added bonus of the best media technology team in the world. Nobody can touch it in terms of enterprise-level technology for professional media.

I wanted to talk about the why. Why was this so important? Why did we keep issuing press releases saying we were working on a major transaction? That might seem goofy, but the way everybody else does it has a 99% failure rate. The way we do it, we are 11–0. If you compare a 99% failure rate against doing this 11 times, eventually you believe that getting traction and huge critical mass is important.

We announced this today; you have probably seen the press release. Aly, it would be great if you could bring up a slide. We signed an agreement with my old company and my former president, Paul Edmondson, a great entrepreneur and former Microsoft executive.

We have this incredible technology that eliminates operational accounting, provides full transparency and blockchain protection, and uses AI to prevent fake traffic and bots and secure community. This is not a technology presentation, but it is the next level.

I left that company six years ago and brought in my longtime partner, Bill Sornsin, a very senior product and engineering leader at Microsoft. We have built 11 companies together. We acquired DeWeb, Eyal Hertzog's amazing company out of Tel Aviv, and brought our 35 years of operational expertise in syndication, yield management, hosting, streaming, publishing, accounting, and all media operations.

About three years ago, we took that technology and, with AI, integrated it into Eyal's DeWeb technology, blockchain technology, and all the things we have been announcing. When we were done, we went through a beta process to show that it would scale, that journalists could get paid in real time, and that it was bulletproof.

Then we went to our old friend Paul Edmondson, who was president when I was CEO of the company, and said what we are now offering all major media companies: we can totally eliminate your operating expenses. I am going to pause on that.

Every media company in the world has dozens of employees doing the things I just mentioned, using these 17 operational plugins and SaaS businesses. We eliminate all SaaS platforms with our AI and DeFi. We are not going to give an exact number, but tens of millions of dollars will be saved for every company that works with us.

This is the first large-scale partner. Of course they want to save tens of millions of dollars. By joining the coalition, like the coalitions we have been building since 1990, you get the scale for advertising.

By bringing that scale to our current hundreds of partners, our company will be EBITDA positive by the end of the year. That is our forecast, and we are making that financial forecast for shareholders. For the record, we are stating that by the end of the year, we will have 100 million consumers directly on our platform.

Not syndicated, and not the fraudulent claims of social influencers who have subscribers but have no idea how many people are there. We mean a trackable, auditable 100 million consumers using our platform.

I want to remind everybody that we are not a media company. Arena, the company we are partnering with, is a media company. Our 200 journalists on the platform are media assets. The Hockey News, for example, is a whole network of hockey journalists around the world. We are not The Hockey News. We are behind the curtain: technology only.

We are a DeFi- and AI-based technology company. We do sales, subscriptions, membership, streaming, and all the things a media company needs to do. In practice, media companies are like airlines: they should not compete with Boeing and Raytheon to produce navigational systems, engines, and fuselages. They deal with customers, clients, and their brands.

Something happened 20 or 30 years ago that convinced media companies they should create their own technology. It has been a disaster for the industry. They spend most of their money on operations when they should spend it on content.

We are out in the market today. With The Hockey News, we grew their business into the millions and increased their page views without costing them anything. All operational costs are now covered by our AI technology platform. That is what we are doing.

Aly, before we go into any other numbers, could you show all the brands so people can see what we are talking about in terms of our marketplace? Then we can go back.

A lot of people wonder how we can compete with Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook. We cannot, and that is 100% true. We do not compete with social networks. First, we are not a media company. Second, these are two very separate ecosystems.

Social is an open platform. Think about the classic debate between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, and Google. Bill Gates and Google favored open platforms. Steve liked a closed, ring-fenced platform. Everything we have done, proven correct 11 times in a row, is curated, professional, high-level journalism and content creation only.

You cannot sign up to Roundtable. There is no sign-up form. Roundtable is an enterprise platform only. That is what we have been doing since 1990, with Turner and then the NFL. That enterprise platform empowers media companies.

I asked Aly to put up this slide so people can visualize this world: television stations, newspapers, and publications. It is professional media. These are not influencers, OnlyFans models, or kids showing videos of their dogs. This is professional, paid journalism and content. It could be travel, health, autos, finance, crypto, politics, news, local news, or weather.

A lot of people think all the money is in social, where we do not want to compete. You cannot compete with those trillion-dollar companies. But these media companies have been left behind. They do not have technology. They are using an antiquated 2001 architecture of WordPress and 17 plugins. It is a technical disaster, and they have to pay for it all. They are paying for really bad jalopies.

We have put everything together in an incredibly fast, fully comprehensive, full-stack platform, and we offer it for free. You are either paying a ton for 20- or 30-year-old plugins, or you can use what we are bringing to the market at no cost.

With Coinbase's backing, we have a media liquidity pool. You get paid instantly instead of waiting 90 days for an ad network. Instant pay, no cost. Then we take a percentage of the ads we bring in. We earn our keep.

For us, and for investors, it does not cost us anything to add one of these brands because it is all a software platform. It is a little like Salesforce, except we take a percentage of revenue. That is our business model. I want everybody to understand what we do, with no confusion: we are not a media company.

We did not buy Arena. We do not want to buy any media company. This is our first big customer. We have millions of users today and are generating millions of dollars, but when we put everything together by the end of the year, we forecast a revenue run rate of $100 million.

Let me say it again: following integration, with our current pipeline, user base, and revenue combined with this deal, we forecast a $100 million revenue run rate and expect to be EBITDA positive by the end of the year.

We are going from no forecast, with speculation based on our reputation, technology, and the important people involved, to a forecast of a $100 million run rate, EBITDA positive, with more than 100 million users altogether.

Again, we are not buying their company. This is our first major customer, and we are seeking more relationships. There are 10,000 companies like this in Germany, France, London, and all over the world. This slide is more focused on news, but there are travel sites and a very large ecosystem that does not compete with Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and X.

We will let them fight it out while we do the dirty, unsexy, behind-the-curtain work of providing technology for these wonderful media companies. I will pause before questions. Aly, you may want to run through the big-picture business model and numbers. Aly Madhavji, thank you for being here.

My pleasure. James shared a couple of exciting things. We are looking at a $100 million run rate with 100 million customers. You can see a breakdown of monthly unique users from some key properties at Arena, or Paradium, as they recently rebranded. This gives you an idea of their starting point in August.

August is still the end of summer, when sports and certain industries are a little slower. There is typical seasonality across Q4, when sports are back and Christmas and advertising spending pick up for the holiday season.

One of the exciting things for us at Roundtable is that we currently generate about $0.08 in revenue per user. It takes years to build all the connections and relationships that really grow revenue, as James and Bill did as founding members of Arena, now Paradium.

As you can see, this transaction helps us increase that to $1.14. For our existing customers and our new pipeline, that is all going to be in the range of $1.14, which is very exciting for us.

Thanks, Aly. I will turn it right back over to you. To return to the chicken-and-egg problem and educate investors, this is not like selling oil or gold, where you can just show up, contribute, and sell it. Advertising has become incredibly complex over the last two decades, especially the last five to ten years.

There is ROI-based, real-time bidding in social, search, and commerce on Amazon, where people are looking for an instant return. You need technology companies to serve that well. Meta, YouTube, and Amazon do a great job there. We are not competing with them and never would. That is not a tiger you want to poke.

Branded advertising is about romance, rather than the transaction. If GM comes out with a new Sierra truck, they want people to fall in love with it before buying it. ROI-based advertising is about identifying someone whose lease is running out, reaching that person for a dealership, and quickly evaluating whether there will be a margin.

In the branding phase, the metrics are different. Did they see the ad? Did they watch the video? Is this a qualified person? Is the context high-quality and professional? Is it in sports, alongside their favorite team? Branded advertising has separate agencies and budgets. That is the market we pursue, and it is $200 billion.

We think we can participate in a way that does not threaten anybody. All stakeholders win when brands come together on one platform, instead of advertisers trying to reach that quality across thousands of platforms. It is not profitable for advertisers to reach a publisher with only five million users. With an ecosystem greater than 100 million users, it becomes profitable for major brands to reach our users.

Before this deal, we had what I think is the best Manchester United football club website, but it is too small to sell advertising or receive an automated feed from a DSP. When I was running Arena with Paul and Bill Sornsin, we were constantly meeting to build relationships with brands so they could buy automatically from a branded advertising budget.

You can go to Google or AdX and put your content there. They will do a great job matching it, but every time you add intermediaries, your margin goes away. If you are a high-quality brand without enough scale, you are not included in automatically delivered branded campaigns.

If you are part of a coalition, which is what we offer, you maintain your sovereignty and branding. You get the benefit of scale without selling your company or doing everything on social, where you have no control over your audience or brand and no idea how much you are making. You just get a check. This provides full transparency and scale.

The point Aly was making is that, by partnering with our old friends at the company I started years ago, we benefit from a decade spent building scale and relationships with brands. Anyone we sign going forward, on top of that partnership, gets the benefit of a mature marketplace. We think we will sign hundreds.

That mature marketplace is more important even than the revenue from this deal, because it solves the chicken-and-egg problem. We can now walk into any major media company and say, "You will get market-rate pricing, and all your operating expenses will go away through our AI and DeFi platform, which eliminates your SaaS costs."

This is a SaaS-killing company. You do not need plugins or to pay SaaS fees for publishing, streaming, hosting, or any of this. You do not need people doing yield management. It is all free with our technology, and you make more money because you are part of a broader solution.

The headline is that this is now a reality. That is why we did this transaction. Sorry for taking so much of your time, Aly, but I wanted to provide some education.

That was fantastic, James. The exciting part for shareholders is that you and Bill know this company better than anyone. You founded it and built it, conversation by conversation and relationship by relationship, to where it is today, with iconic brands everybody knows.

I have followed TheStreet for decades, along with Men's Journal and some of these other iconic brands. It is exciting to see them come onto Roundtable technology. This is a testament to what you and Bill have grown over the years.

Could you touch on your history of scaling History.com, Sports Illustrated, The Hockey News, and TheStreet? I think it shows what you have been able to do. With new brands and companies in our pipeline coming on, perhaps you can share some of the secret sauce behind how you scaled these businesses and achieved such incredible performance.

We are very fortunate to have Aly as an early investor and to have him take time to be our CFO and bring us onto Nasdaq. Thank you, Aly.

A lot of people bounce between different ideas. I am from Seattle, had access to Microsoft engineers, and was intrigued by the world being able to break the rule that you had to buy ink by the barrel and have that kind of money. I have focused on providing infrastructure for journalism and media companies since the late 1980s, with digital publishing, which was invented in Seattle.

We did that for publications early on. We did it for the Goodwill Games, serving 5,000 journalists at the largest sporting event in the world at the time. We did it for every NFL team, then every college team in the 1990s, and were profitable for seven straight years.

We partnered with SoftBank, Intel, and News Corporation. With no cable company, marketing budget, or brand, we took Rivals from zero to the highest-traffic sports site in the world. It ultimately sold to Yahoo for $100 million, with no marketing budget. That was because of the model of bringing brands into a shared ecosystem and network, just like the strategy our team put together for Hulu.

YouTube cut them off. There was no marketing. You could not market it online because Google controlled the space, yet it reached $3 billion in revenue right away through the network effect of bringing everything together and the operating leverage of a single shared platform. It worked again.

The same applies to Spotify, which was not mine. Daniel Ek understood the value of bringing premium brands together on one network. SoundCloud, Napster, and others were trying. But bringing premium journalism onto one platform is a bulletproof plan. After Hulu, Netflix did it, then Prime and Apple TV.

It is a winning strategy, and I am 11–0 with it. But you must curate carefully and have only professional content, or advertisers will not want to be part of the premium branding experience. I have been doing this since 1990 and have the relationships, experience, and engineering team that major companies trust. That is why we keep being able to put these networks together.

Our last company was a big proof point for investors. Our old technology, which we started building in 2016, was before DeFi, AI, and blockchain. TheStreet was using 1995 technology. We took that over for Jim Cramer, whom I love, but nothing worked. It was down to 1.3 million users per month. We grew it to over 30 million. The slide says 23 million, but we actually reached 30 million unique users, with no marketing costs, just our technology.

This is the oldest financial publication on the internet. That was us, with Paul, the CEO of Arena, and Bill Sornsin, my COO, who has worked with me since 1999. We grew that business dramatically with our techniques and technology by bringing everything into a single ecosystem.

It is the same reason people laughed at us when Hulu was formed and said, "You will never survive against YouTube." It crushed it with this model.

The Hockey News was a 70-year-old magazine with essentially zero traffic. It now has millions of users, with no advertising: just our network effect, technology, integrated community, and all the lessons we learned when we invented and designed the first blogging platform with SoftBank backing, built the first social network, Rivals, and built the first subscription network. We have been doing this since the mid-1990s.

We apply all those lessons. Because we are not a media company, we are not worried about content. We help content creators succeed and eliminate their costs.

We took over History Channel's technical operations in, I think, 2018 or 2019. Paul, the CEO of Arena, convinced me to do it. We grew it from 20 million to over 35 million users. History eliminated all its operating expenses and had no marketing costs. It was just part of the network.

Sports Illustrated was probably the single biggest disaster I have seen in my career. They had the highest costs per user in the history of the internet, maybe except for Vice. You had to try hard to spend that much money, and they only had 10 million users. Their traffic was flat while the internet was growing, so their share of the internet was declining.

Their traffic exploded as soon as my team took over the technology. We applied the network effect, indexed every subcategory, and put it together in a self-circulating distribution model. We had lightning-fast software, which increased page views and improved Google performance and SEO. Look at the numbers: we grew it from a little over 10 million to 87 million users, from a virtually nonexistent ranking, with sports blogs ahead of it, to number two.

Our track record is not just 11–0. I have signed 3,600 SaaS clients since 1995. I cannot remember a single client leaving unless they sold their company or something like that. Sports Illustrated is the greatest example. Then our team left, and SI's traffic fell again to less than half.

We are proud that all we do is technology, and we go all in for our partners. What does this mean for Roundtable shareholders? You have a team of people who have worked since the 1990s. Eyal Hertzog, our CTO, invented social video, the personalized feed, and DeFi.

Eyal entered the Unit 8200 program in Israel at [age unclear in transcript]. He was one of the country's top computer scientists at age 17 and went on to invent a $3 trillion industry called decentralized finance. He is our CTO.

Bill Sornsin, our COO, ran engineering and built MSN before anybody was thinking about a huge, comprehensive network using web technology. He then built seven platforms for us. He is a computer scientist and electrical engineer with an MBA. Aly has nine degrees, and Bill Ackman is his biggest partner in his crypto fund.

We are talking about an elite team, and our only focus is helping media. In today's AI environment, media cannot sustain itself without great technology, and we supply that.

Perhaps we can move to what this means for shareholders and how our P&L works. Aly, you are an investor. Could you explain why this was your number one investment?

Absolutely. The reason we made this the largest investment in Blockchain Founders Fund was not only James and Bill's background, especially now with Paul back in the mix. When you look at transformational technologies and the risks around them, there are different ways companies can fail. I have looked at about 20,000 companies over the last decade.

Technology can break or fail to scale. Companies may not get customers, or they may have churn and retention problems. When I look at these common things that hold companies back and then look at Roundtable, it makes me more excited.

You have a world-class CTO who builds for hyperscale and has built products that served tens of millions of people on their platforms at once. That level of concurrent usage and the ability to build battle-tested technology are so important.

Then you look at James's ability to close incredible deals: 3,600 clients since 1995. With that pedigree, this is just the start. We are bringing on 21 strategic brands as part of this transaction, and you can see how it scales.

As the company brings on major brands, we estimate five million monthly unique users per brand, a typical brand size. Some will have 20 million, and some will have three million, so we used five million as the average.

As you add these brands, a real technology company's operating expenses do not grow much, or grow very slowly. Revenue can scale very effectively. You can see cash EBITDA starting to follow a hockey-stick trajectory. As we bring on clients, Roundtable's costs do not change much. That is the beauty of operating leverage.

It is exciting to have the Arena, or Paradium, deal bring in 21 strategic brands. But I think this is just the beginning, given the healthy pipeline of clients the company has, which we have discussed publicly in the past.

When we talk about onboarding challenges, certain competitors in this industry take a year to onboard a customer. This company does it in days or even hours. Heavy video content might take a few days, but that speed is game-changing.

You can move a customer with 100,000 historical stories, a million stories, or however many stories they have built over one, two, or three decades. Technology and AI can bring it all over flawlessly, improve the metadata and tagging, and generate more from the content. That is one of the major reasons I invested and why I am excited.

That is great, Aly. We appreciate your expertise and the ecosystem of blockchain engineers, some of the most elite in the world. Your introductions and help are really appreciated.

Could you return to the brand slide? I want to highlight one of your points and help investors understand our market. Looking back at the history of these companies, I think about the Los Angeles Times moving to Arc. I was an early adviser during that process. It took a year.

A company we are talking to implemented another platform. They are not really a competitor; they provide about one-seventeenth of the platforms we offer. It is a platform many major media companies use. Implementation took a year, they spent $2 million on consultants, and they still spend $1 million a year in costs.

Think about an eight-figure business and those costs going to zero. People are stuck in antiquated 1990s and early-2000s platforms that damage their business and force them to post on social because they cannot even build a community without being spammed to death. They are flying a biplane against jets. It is not fair, and it is why media companies are struggling.

We are bringing them ICBM-level technology for free, with no operating costs.

At our last business, we were excited to get History Channel up in 45 days, compared with the Los Angeles Times taking a year on the other platform. Growth is not just signing an agreement. It is a great agreement, and of course they would love us to do this and join the ecosystem. But implementation took so much time that growing from zero to $200 million in revenue took two years.

That was not because of sales. It was because implementation and onboarding took so long. Growing from nothing to $200 million is pretty good, but now it is instant.

Our Tel Aviv team worked with our Seattle team, led by Sornsin. We gave the Tel Aviv team 35 years of operational enterprise expertise, including all the little nuances, not something AI could simply look up, and rebuilt an onboarding system.

We signed one site at noon. It was up three hours later, and by five o'clock, it was number one on Google. That was a top UK soccer site. What used to take a year, or three months for a small site, now takes hours. The potential to grow exponentially faster than our past businesses is here because of our latest technology. Are there any questions?

Yes. Thank you, everyone, for submitting questions in the RTB.io community section. Let us start with some of those questions.

"Thank you for the presentation today. You highlighted who you do not compete with. Do you have competitors? Is the focus on helping brands run more efficiently, or is M&A of competitors the preferred growth strategy?"

That is a great question. Nobody likes to say who their competitors are because you do not want to call them out and pick a fight.

Thank you for pointing out again that we are not a social media company. You cannot sign up. We are not competing with Substack or anything like that where anyone can sign up. We see dogs with their own sites on some of these open platforms.

In today's market, you have WordPress, which does about three things, including publishing stories. Then you have separate vendors for ad serving, video streaming, video ads, comments, and social platforms. There are about 17 components, and a media company has to manage that many SaaS vendors.

There is not one company that competes directly with us and does all of these things, certainly not for free. I hate to say it, but we are eliminating all of them. They go away. There is no cost.

Take Google Ad Manager as an example. Suppose 10,000 media companies have Google Ad Manager accounts. It is expensive for Google to manage all those accounts, each with a different infrastructure. That is not good for advertising or for Google.

We want to build and grow our relationship with Google and be a great partner. We do that by making the engagement more efficient, with one ecosystem on one infrastructure. It is more efficient and better for advertisers. We are not competing with Google Ad Manager; we are consolidating to one client and one vendor, stripping costs and inefficiencies out of the market.

AWS is another example. They have thousands of major media clients. It would be better for AWS to have one huge client. It is more efficient for their data center, and maintaining all those customer service relationships does not make sense for them. They will make more money. The more successful we are, the more money Amazon can make.

With data on a single platform, they can also sell merchandise through one contact and a world-class engineering team of former Microsoft and Google engineers.

We are not competing with enterprise software, Google for ad serving, or Amazon for data storage. Microsoft and Google are also in that business. We do not compete there.

But middleware, which might have seemed like a good idea in 2021, charging for individual features, is now entirely antiquated and extinct. Anybody charging SaaS subscriptions for middleware in digital media should surrender immediately, because it does not make sense.

There should be one database, no data leakage, no latency, and no plugins. There should be one platform. All the major technology companies do that. You do not see Facebook with 20 vendors accessing its data, slowing things down, and making calls. The current status quo is a train wreck.

Our competition consists of lots of things. That explains the core of our business, and I hope it answers the question. Aly, what is next?

We have a question from Atharva Sabnis: "If your platform will facilitate more than 200 brands and generate sales of $1 billion, what part of that sales number would come to Roundtable?"

We describe ourselves as an SSSP, a super supply-side platform, and we also work with SSPs. We take our coalition of clients and sell directly to the advertiser, so the top line comes to us. It is 100%.

Then we pass the revenue on after our commission, which is our gross margin. There is no change for media companies: they are used to third parties selling advertising for them.

When you are the lead seller of record and manage yield across all the buyers, you take the top line. We will not discuss individual commission structures, because those are private contracts with our customers.

Fantastic. We have another question from the RTB.io community section: "Are you buying this Paradium.AI company?"

No, we are not. We will never buy a media company. They have a lot of media brands, and we want to be very clear: we only do technology.

That means technical sales, distribution, syndication, hosting, streaming, payments, reporting, and infrastructure. We do not create content or own brands that create content or own IP. We think that is a bad idea.

If you remember, when Google bought YouTube, they got sued by NBCU. It stunned everyone: "Wait a minute, the company that is supposed to help us grow may be competing with us." I am not picking a fight with Google; I am using a historical comparison. But we will never buy a media brand or IP. This company has media brands, and we have no intention of buying Arena.

We made an investment in their company, which is common. We did that at Yahoo with Alibaba and SoftBank Japan. YouTube makes investments in studios all the time, so it is common to have some skin in the game. But there are no plans to buy Arena, ever.

Thank you for that answer. We have a few questions related to this topic, so I will summarize: "How long will integration take, and when will the revenue impact the company?"

We have to close the deal, which will happen sometime in Q4, to make sure it is consummated. That is very close; we are already in mid-September. The revenue will have a dramatic impact during the quarter, and we stated in our press release that we will be on a $100 million run rate.

We are not saying that Arena itself is at $100 million. We are not making financial statements for Arena or statements about the state of its business.

We are saying that Roundtable will have a $100 million revenue run rate during Q4, will be EBITDA positive, and will have 100 million consumers within our ecosystem. Q4 is the answer, but we also wanted to clarify that statement.

Fantastic. That covers the major questions. Thank you, James, for your time and for sharing your insights. It has been valuable to help educate shareholders about this transformational announcement. Congratulations to you, the team, and all the shareholders.