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DATE
Thursday, November 13, 2025 at 4:30 p.m. ET
CALL PARTICIPANTS
- Chief Executive Officer — Charles Gillespie
- Chief Financial Officer — Elias Mark
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RISKS
- Management explicitly cited continued headwinds from poor Google search dynamics throughout the entire quarter, causing the marketing business performance and the basis for a downward guidance revision.
- Gross profit margin declined to 91.2% from 94.7%, attributed to higher cost of sales related to traffic source diversification and the inclusion of costs from acquired businesses.
- Adjusted net income fell 16% to $9.3 million while adjusted net income per share dropped 26% to 26¢, primarily due to higher interest expense.
- Free cash flow dropped to $9.6 million from $14.2 million, with management explaining that timing differences and extraordinary prior-year Q3 performance influenced the decrease.
TAKEAWAYS
- Revenue -- $39 million, a 21% increase year over year and a record for the third quarter.
- Sports Data Services Revenue -- $9.2 million in the third quarter, representing a fourfold increase year over year.
- Subscription Revenue -- 24% of total revenue, reflecting expansion of recurring income streams.
- Recurring Revenue -- 49% of total revenue, calculated by including marketing revenue share arrangements.
- Gross Profit -- $35.6 million, an increase of 17% compared to the year-ago period.
- Gross Profit Margin -- 91.2% in the third quarter, declining from 94.7% in the year-ago period as higher traffic diversification and acquisition costs weighed on margin.
- Operating Expenses -- $25.7 million, up 30% after adjusting for fair value, acquisition, and restructuring expenses; growth driven by acquisition-related headcount, higher marketing spend, and share-based payments.
- Adjusted EBITDA -- Adjusted EBITDA was $13 million, an increase of 3%, with adjusted EBITDA margin falling to 33% from 39% last year.
- Marketing Segment Revenue -- Flat year over year, pressured by unfavorable search ranking dynamics.
- New Depositing Customers (NDCs) -- 101,000, down 13%, reflecting continued SEO-related headwinds.
- Free Cash Flow -- $9.6 million, reflecting a 74% conversion from adjusted EBITDA, but down from last year’s $14.2 million.
- Total Cash Position -- $7.4 million at period end, with $70.5 million undrawn credit facility highlighted.
- Share Repurchases -- Approximately 562,000 shares repurchased in the quarter for $4.7 million; year-to-date buybacks total 672,000 shares and $5.6 million.
- Acquisition Activity -- Spotlight.Vegas acquired for $8 million (excluding working capital adjustments) during the quarter.
- Updated 2025 Guidance -- Full-year revenue outlook set at approximately $165 million (30% growth) and adjusted EBITDA at approximately $58 million (19% growth), reflecting continuation of recent operational headwinds and $1 million in additional cost of sales from diversification efforts.
- Opticods Revenue -- Doubled year over year in the quarter, driven by increased customers and revenue per customer, with recent partnership announced with Pragmatic Play.
- Rotowire Subscribers -- Subscriber count up 20% year over year, with improved lifetime value metrics per company disclosures.
- Non-SEO Revenue Shift -- For the first time as a public company, non-SEO marketing channels are expected to surpass SEO in revenue contribution in Q4.
- Q4 Revenue Guidance -- Guidance implies $46 million for the coming quarter, which would mark the company’s largest quarter historically.
SUMMARY
Gambling.com Group Limited (GAMB 23.13%) attributed robust year-over-year revenue gains to continued rapid growth in its Sports Data Services segment while acknowledging flat performance in the marketing business due to persistent search-related headwinds. Management indicated that marketing underperformance was temporary, citing improving search ranking trends since late October and the company's ongoing shift toward diversified non-SEO channels, which for the first time are projected to contribute more revenue than SEO in the fourth quarter. The company underscored the expanding contribution from its Opticods enterprise solution, the ramping consumer data services through Rotowire and Oddjam, and made clear it expects sports data services to drive growth into 2026 and beyond.
- CEO Gillespie said, "our sports data services business grew over 300% year on year in the third quarter," with CFO Mark specifying that Sports Data Services revenue quadrupled to $9.2 million for the period.
- Chief Financial Officer Mark highlighted that recurring revenue, combining both subscription and marketing share models, comprised 49% of total revenue, providing a stable financial base.
- Rotowire subscriber numbers rose 20%, supported by a company statement that the lifetime value per subscriber also improved, positioning the B2C data business for forward growth.
- Management described cost control actions including stable non-acquisition headcount and ongoing adoption of AI, while acknowledging operating cost pressure from acquisitions and marketing investments, as evidenced by the 30% rise in operating expenses.
- The company’s stated buyback activity—over half a million shares purchased in the quarter—was justified by what management described as a "simply wrong" market valuation and further supported by remaining authorization for additional repurchases.
- While sports data services are driving enterprise and consumer momentum, management set expectations for no growth from the UK and Ireland affiliate segment next year, citing headwinds from potential tax changes and muted market expansion.
- No plans to increase leverage above the current credit facility were disclosed, with management noting the need to see further recovery and growth before "lean in harder" with capital allocation.
INDUSTRY GLOSSARY
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization): The process of improving website visibility and ranking within organic (non-paid) search results to drive user acquisition, particularly relevant to digital marketing in iGaming and sports betting.
- NDCs (New Depositing Customers): Industry metric tracking the number of first-time depositing users referred to iGaming or sports betting operators over a given period.
- Opticods: Proprietary enterprise data platform delivering multi-operator odds, risk management information, bet settlement, and integration with third-party data providers for sportsbook operators.
- Prediction Markets: Financial or betting markets allowing participants to trade contracts whose payoff depends on the outcome of uncertain future events, leveraged as a new addressable category for data and marketing services.
Full Conference Call Transcript
Charles Gillespie, Gambling.com Group Limited's cofounder and Chief Executive Officer, and Elias Mark, Chief Financial Officer. This call is being webcast live through the Investor Relations section of our website at gambling.com/corporate/investors, and a downloadable version of the presentation is available there as well. A webcast replay will be available on the website after the conclusion of this call. You may also contact Investor Relations support by emailing [email protected]. I would like to remind you that the information contained in this conference call, including any financial and related guidance to be provided, consists of forward-looking statements as defined by securities laws.
These statements are based on information currently available to us and involve risks and uncertainties that could affect actual future results, performance, and business prospects and opportunities to differ materially from those expressed in or implied by these statements. Some factors that could cause such differences are discussed in the risk factor section of Gambling.com Group Limited's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date the statements are made, and the company assumes no obligation to update forward-looking statements to reflect actual results, changes in assumptions, or changes in other factors affecting forward-looking information except to the extent required by applicable securities laws.
During the call, there will also be a discussion of non-IFRS financial measures. A description of these non-IFRS financial measures is included in the press release issued earlier this morning, and reconciliations of these non-IFRS financial measures to their most directly comparable IFRS measures are included in the appendix to the presentation and press release, both of which are available in the Investors tab of our website. I will now turn the call over to Charles.
Charles Gillespie: Thank you, Pete. Good morning, and thank you for joining our third quarter 2025 conference call. We generated record third quarter revenue and adjusted EBITDA, with revenue rising 21% and adjusted EBITDA growing 3% year over year. Our sports data services business grew over 300% year on year in the third quarter. The marketing business was flat year on year as a result, as revenue was held back by less favorable search rankings, as previously discussed, that persisted for the entire third quarter. As has been the case since July, Google search algorithms continue to favor low-quality spam content in the gaming space, particularly outside the U.S.
However, since late October, the search marketing dynamics have started to improve for us. Our Source Data Services business continues to outperform our expectations with another quarter of strong growth driven by enterprise sales. Sustained strong growth in sports data services is increasingly the future of GAM, given our attractive offering and the multibillion-dollar TAM in front of us. I will therefore start today's call by laying out the opportunity that we see within sports data services, our fastest-growing segment. Through a combination of acquisitions and great execution, we have created a fast-growing sports data services business out of nothing, which delights both enterprise and consumer clients and is already responsible for 25% of our 2025 revenue.
The tight product market fit we have gives us confidence that there is a straightforward path for sustainable, highly predictable growth for this business. Sports betting operators are increasingly reviewing the cost side of their businesses, particularly in markets which are not growing like they used to. Our next-generation data platform delivers comprehensive premium data services at a competitive price point, enabling both startup and scaled operators to take costs out of their businesses while potentially improving their offerings. We expect this business to finish 2025 strong and continue to grow organically at a healthy pace in 2026 and beyond. The fastest-growing part of our sports data services business is Opticods, our enterprise solution for sportsbook operators.
Opticods' third-quarter revenue doubled year over year, reflecting growth in both customers and revenue per customer. Opticods began by providing multi-operator odds data from around the world to the trading teams and sports betting operators to use as an input to their risk management processes, like a bond trader would use a Bloomberg terminal to understand the bond market. We have expanded the products and now also provide bet settlement services, which is now live with multiple customers. Sportsbook operators can now rely on Opticods as an end-to-end solution to power both pricing and bet settlement. Included in our bet settlement services is support for the dynamic pricing of same-game parlays, and we are investigating adding on early cash-out functionality.
Opticods has also partnered with specialist odds providers like Rimble and ProLead Networks to plug into our OpenOMS marketplace, where our operator clients can easily subscribe to additional third-party data services and get delivery through the Opticods feed, creating additional value for our customers and enhancing our partners' distribution. Opticods was founded by Americans with an initial focus on American sports. We continue to rapidly expand the odds data offered on the platform to cater to sports betting operators around the world. Year to date, we have added 10 sports, 350 leagues, and over a thousand different betting markets to the Opticods offering. Opticods recently announced a deal with Pragmatic Play, a leading international platform provider.
Opticods will expand Pragmatic Play's offering by enhancing U.S. player prop market coverage. In short, we are offering more odds, data, and trading tools to an expanding client base, thanks to enhanced distribution. Another exciting aspect of the Opticods business is the clear value we can create for firms trading on prediction markets. This segment of the business is growing rapidly and currently includes a number of Wall Street's most well-known firms as well as the market-making arms of Kalshi and Polymarket themselves. We expect the prediction market ecosystem to become significantly larger given the national addressable market and some advantages over state-regulated sports betting.
Prediction markets are additive as a new category in the U.S., not a substitute for sports betting as we know it, which will no doubt still thrive given its simpler and more accessible product. We believe that our Opticods solution is uniquely well-positioned to assist market makers and therefore monetize the growth of prediction markets as they expand options for sophisticated consumers who want to create risk exposure with better payouts and fewer gimmicks. Given the long runway we have for consistent growth in our Source Data Services business, we believe that this exciting future will be the core of GAM.
Having said that, we expect our sector-leading marketing business to grow in 2026 and beyond, which will throw off more than enough cash for us to continue to invest in our sports data services offering and retain firepower to deploy capital to create shareholder value. I would like to congratulate everyone working on our marketing business for winning the EGR Affiliate of the Year award for an unprecedented third time in October. We are simply unequaled in our success in the online gambling affiliate industry.
Having operated a search marketing business at the highest levels of success for nearly two decades, we remain confident that the recent underperformance of the marketing business is overwhelmingly driven by short-term temporary search dynamics, which will be addressed. Following Elias' review of the third-quarter financial details, I will map out how we expect to return to growth in the marketing business. Thank you, Charles.
Elias Mark: Third-quarter revenue grew 21% year over year to a Q3 record of $39 million. Sports Data Services revenue quadrupled to $9.2 million in the seasonally slower third quarter. Subscription revenue was 24% of total revenue. Inclusive of revenue share arrangements in our marketing business, recurring revenue was 49% of total third-quarter revenue. Our marketing business continues to be impacted by low-quality search results in the gaming space, primarily outside of the U.S., as we have discussed. As a result, marketing revenue was flat, and NDCs of 101,000 were down 13% year over year. Gross profit increased 17% to $35.6 million.
Cost of sales was $3.4 million, compared to cost of sales of $1.7 million in the year-ago period, reflecting costs associated with the acceleration of our traffic sources diversification strategy for the marketing business and cost of sales from the acquired Oxgen and Opticods businesses. Gross profit margin was 91.2%, compared to 94.7% in the year-ago period. Operating expenses adjusted for fair value movements and acquisition and restructuring-related expenses grew 30% to $25.7 million. This growth is primarily associated with added headcount from this year's acquisitions, higher marketing costs associated with traffic source diversification, and increased share-based payment expense. Headcount outside the acquired businesses is flat year to date.
While keeping a very keen eye on cost control by optimizing our operating teams and adopting AI in our work processes, we continue to invest in product development and diversification strategies that we believe will power growth in coming years. Adjusted EBITDA grew 3% to $13 million. Adjusted EBITDA margin of 33% compared to 39% in the year-ago period, reflecting the higher cost of sales and marketing expenses associated with our traffic diversification strategy. Adjusted net income and adjusted net income per share for the third quarter fell 16% from the year-ago period to $9.3 million and 26¢, respectively, primarily because of increased interest expense. Free cash flow was $9.6 million, reflecting strong cash conversion from adjusted EBITDA of 74%.
Free cash flow was down from $14.2 million in the year-ago period as a result of timing differences in 2024, where we saw an atypically strong Q3 following an atypically weak Q2. At the end of the quarter, we had total cash of $7.4 million, and we had $70.5 million of undrawn capacity in our credit facility. During the quarter, we acquired Spotlight.Vegas, which included a payment of $8 million before working capital adjustments. We also made interest and term loan repayments of $3.4 million and $5.6 million, respectively, during the quarter. And we have repurchased approximately 562,000 shares for a total consideration of $4.7 million.
Year to date, we have acquired 672,000 shares for a total consideration of $5.6 million, and we have $14.4 million remaining with our share buyback authorization. We continue to generate strong free cash flow, which, together with our healthy balance sheet and undrawn credit facilities, continues to provide us with the flexibility to optimize our capital structure and shareholder value. This morning, we revised our full-year guidance to revenue of approximately $165 million and adjusted EBITDA of approximately $58 million. The change in guidance reflects the continued headwind of poor search dynamics, which affected all of Q3 and, while recently somewhat recovering, persists in Q4.
During our Q2 call, we expected Google's anti-spam team to make more progress against bad actors than we have seen to date. When Google addresses these quite objectively and frankly serious quality problems with the search results, we will immediately see meaningful revenue improvements, which go straight through to adjusted EBITDA. Our revised guidance also includes approximately $1 million in higher cost of sales than previously anticipated related to the successful acceleration of our traffic diversification strategy. The midpoint of the revised guidance represents 30% year-over-year growth. The midpoint of the revised adjusted EBITDA guidance reflects 19% year-over-year growth. Our guidance assumes an average euro to USD exchange rate of 1.15 per year.
I will now turn the call back to Charles for a review of the work we are doing to diversify and expand our marketing business.
Charles Gillespie: Thank you, Elias. We continue to see tremendous value in our marketing business that far exceeds the value currently being ascribed to it by the public markets. The perception gap is due to the fact that the marketing business has already been transformed from a pure SEO business into a diversified marketing engine, which is less reliant on SEO than ever before. Our push into non-SEO channels has succeeded and is already evident in our year-to-date results. In Q4, we expect to generate more revenue from non-SEO channels than SEO for the first time as a public company. And as these non-SEO channels scale further, the economics become increasingly attractive.
I think the best is yet to come as our marketing business is uniquely well-positioned to drive growth in an exciting new line of business we plan to launch in Q1, which will further diversify our offerings. My positive tone today reflects the fact that my senior leaders and I are genuinely excited about both our fast-growing sports data services business and the future of the marketing business. On the marketing side, we are, however, behind where we and our analysts thought we would be this year. And as a result, the share price has come under substantial pressure.
This recent price action seems to suggest that the marketing business is dead or dying, a position which is simply unsupported by the facts as we produced $13 million in adjusted EBITDA and nearly $10 million in free cash flow in the quarter, despite having one hand tied behind our back from short-term search dynamics. Furthermore, our business is now more resilient than ever thanks to two years of successful execution against our plan to diversify away from SEO. While the full SEO recovery remains in front of us, we are now past the worst of the short-term challenges and off the low point of the last several months.
Even though SEO is a smaller part of our future, there is still substantial upside to the current run rate of the SEO side of our marketing business. We consider the company's current market valuation simply wrong and have a sizable authorization for share repurchases in effect, which we are using. All in all, our diversification initiatives have already resulted in both a new fast-growing sports data services business and a more resilient marketing business that we expect will grow in 2026 and continue to throw off strong free cash flow for years to come. Operator, we will open up the floor for questions.
Operator: Thank you.
Ryan Sigdahl: You may press 2 if you would like to remove your question from the queue. Our first question is from Ryan Sigdahl with Craig Hallum Capital Group. Please proceed.
Ryan Sigdahl: Hey. Good morning, guys. I want to see on Google search just given the impact to results and kind of the transitory impact to the business right now. Guess what gives you confidence to step out on a ledge with confidence that, say, you are positioned to grow that business in 2026? Specifically, I know you gave some comments, but I guess secondly, to that or more specifically, has Google changed their algorithm where you have actually seen ranking start to change, or have you guys refined internally to make things better? What exactly has happened in recent weeks that gives you that confidence?
Charles Gillespie: Hey, Ryan. So toward the end of October, some of these spammy results started to get thinned out, rankings improved, we saw better rankings, we saw better traffic, and we immediately saw more revenue. So you know, Google Search is still working exactly in the way it has frankly always worked. I know we talked a lot about AI headwinds on the Q2 call. I think you know, we maybe overemphasized that. You know, the reality of the situation right now is that this is absolutely a business-as-usual search situation. It is not anything to do with AI. It is just rankings at the end of the day.
And as we have seen rankings come back, it has immediately translated to revenue as we would have expected it to. So that gives us great confidence that, frankly, it is business as usual with Google, and you know, we have always managed to get past any sort of ranking challenges in the past, and I do not have any doubt that this time will be different. But it is a little bit what is different this time is it is a little bit more dependent on Google than us. You know? I am not responsible for clearing the spam out of the search results. That is obviously the search engine's job.
And, you know, we think that there is a possibility that Google, certain Google people have telegraphed that there could be another update coming at the end of the year in December, and the focus of that update could be on dealing with some of these sort of spam results, and, you know, therefore, we, you know, in general, expect this to come back around, and we have reason to believe, you know, it could meaningfully change in December, if not before December. You know? It has taken longer than it normally takes. Obviously, that has affected our results and guidance today, but we do not have any reason to believe that anything is fundamentally changed.
Ryan Sigdahl: Helpful. Thanks, Charles. Data services, big focus. Great growth. Lot of opportunity. Appreciate kind of the comments there. On the B2B side, certainly seems like a lot of momentum. In core markets and predictions. I want to actually ask about the B2C side, which historically was the bigger part of that business. But has that continued to grow? Is that an emphasis? Then what are you guys working on specifically, on the Oddjam side? Thanks.
Charles Gillespie: Yeah. Revenue year on year in the consumer data services, so that includes B2C Rotowire and B2C Oddjam, grew marginally. Pro forma growth on a like-for-like basis year to date is around 10%. The third quarter was affected by the launch of the refreshed Rotowire products. We are optimizing for improved customer lifetime value with the expense of short-term revenue. Which we have historically seen, you know, substantial spikes in revenue from that business at the very beginning of the football season due to the way they used to monetize the apps. Now we, you know, we have subscriber numbers for Rotowire up 20% year on year, and that is on a much better, much higher estimate of subscriber LTV.
So we are well-positioned with that business to grow from this point forward. And also in October, Oddjam, which analyzes the liquidity across prediction markets and betting exchanges to identify where the sharp money is, and so that their users can kind of position themselves alongside that smart money, and that product has been an immediate hit. It is driving growth in ARPU and new users and is a perfect example of how we keep innovating with that product to drive growth through added features.
Ryan Sigdahl: Hey, Charles. I can attest that I tried your sharp money product, and it is fantastic. Good luck, guys.
Charles Gillespie: Great to hear. Thanks, Ryan.
Operator: Our next question is from Jeffrey Stantial with Stifel. Please proceed.
Jeffrey Stantial: Hey, great. Thanks for taking our questions this morning. Charles, Elias. Maybe, you know, hanging on Ryan's second question, but switching more to the enterprise side of the data services business. Charles, could you just give us a little bit more color on, you know, progress to date on Opticods' commercialization? Sort of what inning are you in of having that new sales team, you know, attack sort of some of the opportunity in Europe? Bring more customers into trial, you know, what has been the conversion rate on those trials?
Any sort of additional metrics or color that can help us think about sort of, you know, what point on the J curve you are at today would be helpful. Thanks.
Charles Gillespie: Yeah. I mean, I said in the prepared remarks, we have got, you know, tight product market fit with the offering we have today with Opticods. I think there is a very clear and long runway to grow the business just with that offering. Now having said that, you know, we have got a great team there. They are very ambitious and very keen to build additional features and expand the capability of the product as we all are. And, you know, so I think when you look out over 2026, 2027, there is a lot of opportunity there beyond just pure data and bet settlement.
You know, there is an entire kind of category of services called managed trading services, some people call that sportsbook operations. But you have got, you know, personalization of content, player profiling, active risk management, bet acceptance, there is a whole kind of suite of problems that need to be solved before you get to being a platform provider. You know, we do not want to do that. That I think operators need to do that themselves. They need, you know, that last step. Where the UI touches the user. I mean, that is the critical place where an operator differentiates their offering.
But everything kind of behind the scenes, especially around risk management, bet acceptance, is very interesting to us. And you know, I think it was Bezos that said your margin is my opportunity. There is quite a lot of margin out there. Between SportRadar and Genius and others that are doing very well with this category. And, you know, I think we have just got the team, the tools, and the platform to be extremely competitive and in more than just data and bet settlement. So that is where our heads are at when you look at the next kind of one to two years.
Jeffrey Stantial: That is great. Thanks for that. And switching gears, Elias, can you just help us think a little bit on, I know you are not providing formal guidance quite yet, but just on the margin side of things, just how to think about directionality here as we head into 2026, you know, cost of sales starting to tick a little bit higher. On some of these adjacencies in the marketing business. I think you touched on in the prepared remarks that it is going to be a bit of an investment mode before you start to realize the benefit of the leverage on that.
But just can you give us a sense of sort of puts and takes and how to think about margins maybe relative to your historical guidance as we start to look at 2026.
Elias Mark: Yeah. Yeah. I think, before we look into '26, and you are right. We are not giving formal guidance here, but a few talking points I think would be helpful for everyone. But before we get into that, it is important to highlight what Charles said earlier that we think we are through the worst of the SEO challenges and our non-SEO efforts are really bearing fruit faster than planned. So we have a high degree of confidence that we are bottoming up, and we are on the right path here.
So this means that we expect to see kind of mid-teens growth in revenue and around 10% adjusted EBITDA growth or even mid-teens growth quarter on quarter from Q3 to Q4. Our updated guidance implies revenue of $46 million for Q4, which will be by far the biggest quarter in the company's history, just to illustrate that we think that although we are not where we thought we would be at the beginning of the year, we are in a healthy place and we have bottomed up. If we turn into 2026, we expect to see overall revenue growth in the low teens with the sports data services business continuing to lead the way.
We expect marketing to grow at a rate in the low teens and for sports data services to grow in the high teens, with B2C in the high single digits and B2B above 20%. And if we look at our marketing business, our non-SEO marketing business continues to scale. Contribution margin becomes more attractive in the non-SEO channels, and that also carries much fewer fixed costs compared to the traditional SEO business. All in all, we expect to maintain overall adjusted EBITDA margins in the mid-thirties as we see on a run rate basis. So in Q3, our EBITDA margin was 33%. Our Q4 guidance looks towards 33%, 34%. I think that is pretty indicative of our expectations for 2026.
Jeffrey Stantial: Thanks very much.
Operator: Our next question is from Barry Jonas with Truist Securities. Please proceed.
Barry Jonas: Hey, guys. Some of the other data providers have said they are not ready yet to work with prediction markets. Curious to what extent that impacts your opportunity or strategy today. Thanks.
Charles Gillespie: Hey, Barry. It definitely positively impacts us. I mean, you are right. I think some of the big names out there are taking an extremely cautious approach to the category. Which means, you know, if you are a market maker, you literally cannot buy data from certain people at the moment. We have got, as I said in the prepared remarks, quite an interesting business developing there.
A lot of the market makers, both on Wall Street, you know, traditional kind of Wall Street market makers, which are active on prediction markets, and then the prediction market, you know, kind of native prediction market companies, if you will, you know, are virtually all clients of the data services business, not necessarily marketing. But you know, that data that we have is exactly what traders are looking for to make markets and reduce risk.
Barry Jonas: Great. And then, just as a follow-up question, I wanted to talk more about trends in the affiliate business outside of sort of that.
Charles Gillespie: Yeah. So if you look at our, you know, just to give you a little extra context there. If you look at North America for us, we grew 55% year on year in the third quarter. But that was driven mainly by sports data services. You know, while the marketing business was flat globally, it was down a bit in North America, but that was actually driven by Canada. In the U.S. itself, marketing grew year on year, and that is thanks to a lot of the, you know, non-SEO diversification that we have already done in the marketing business. Yeah. I think operator demand is healthy on the sports betting side.
You know, we have not seen any meaningful change in the way we work with our operators. We do continue to send more players on a revenue share basis, which delays revenue recognition and suppresses like-for-like growth rates. But, you know, even with that, the U.S.-specific marketing business definitely grew year on year. In regard to Penn and ESPN, I mean, you know, I think we were all, you know, watching with bated breath about what was going to happen there.
Like, it is, you know, I we certainly had a few kind of ideas about what ESPN could have done if they were not working with Penn, and one option, of course, is to go deeper with an individual operator like they have done with DraftKings, but, you know, it is not going to have a major effect on our business. You know, Penn, we work with Penn, of course, but not going to meaningfully move the needle, and of course, we also work with DraftKings.
Barry Jonas: Helpful. Thank you very much.
Operator: Our next question is from David Katz with Jefferies. Please proceed.
David Katz: Hi, good morning, everybody. Thanks for taking my question. Charles, I wanted to go just a little more strategic with respect to the OddsData business. And just talk through, you know, what the sort of critical success factors are, you know, the barriers. Right? I mean, you did mention some others that play in similar spaces. You know, that may be larger. You know, how important is scale? You know, bundling, you know, as part of, you know, offerings? What are the things you really need, you know, beyond just your obvious innovation capabilities?
Charles Gillespie: Morning, Dave. Thanks for asking a longer-term question. You are welcome. I think, you know, as I said, I think we have got a clear path with what we have got. But, you know, there are these areas which I think are easy for us to move into. You know, if you there are a lot of people out there that provide these managed trading services. It is not just Radar and Genius. There are tons of private companies. A lot of these companies are pretty old. You know, they have been around twenty, twenty-five years. So they do not have state-of-the-art technology.
It just was not built in the last two or three years using native cloud services, data science, Python, low latency, everything. You know, it is just no matter how smart you were twenty-five years ago, it is very dusty. When you bring that forward to today. So, you know, that creates real technology debt for some of these larger incumbents. And, you know, we have talked a lot about the, you know, ACE team we have with Opticods and OddsGen. I mean, these guys are hungry, and they move very fast. And then we start building stuff, you know, at the drop of a hat and are extremely effective.
So, you know, I just I think we have got the right people and the right platform to meaningfully go after some of these opportunities. Another kind of big trend in the space is, you know, I think, you know, there is this big debate a couple of years ago post-PASPA with official data and, you know, some of these there were lobbyists that tried to, you know, get it into the statutes that you had to buy official data, and as far as I understand, I do not think that succeeded anywhere. And but, you know, if you have the official data today, it is obviously very it is great, and it gives you access to other things.
Which are bundled along with the official data. But not everybody wants the official data. And, you know, this industry, while it is still a growth industry, it is not growing at the kind of furious clip that it was for the first thirty years. Which causes a lot of operators to look at the cost side of their business. You know? How can I, you know, if I am not going to grow by 25% this year, I am going to grow by 10%? Well, how can I take 5% in cost out and, you know, boost that? That EPS growth.
And, you know, whereas I think everybody just kind of naturally gravitated to the official data for, you know, a long period of time. I think there is an increasing willingness from a variety of customers in the space to not start there and actually just look and say, okay. Well, what else is out there? What, you know, what can we do? And, of course, that is just one thing that we do, but it is a gateway to get the door open. And then sell other things to our operator clients. Now we have great relationships with them on a data service business. They trust us. They ask us if we can build things for them.
There is a lot of back and forth in terms of communications and customer feedback, and I think we have operators' trust to solve more problems for them. So why would we not?
David Katz: Understood. I see clearly the upstart advantage. But the natural follow-up to that, and it is one that we get about this end of the business all the time, is, you know, if not for the official data and the scale and the, you know, the length of tenure, you know, would larger operators just be able to why cannot they do it themselves? I mean, that is the question we get all the time. So I would love to sort of put that one out there too.
Charles Gillespie: Yep. You know, if you just think about the Opticods market data business, we spend upwards of a million dollars a year on compute to process that data. So if any individual operator wants to do it themselves, well, it is going to cost them at least that plus then, you know, obviously, building all the software, the team, everything else. Well, we do not charge that much per client per year, so there is just an obvious advantage to buy it from us instead of trying to do it yourself. You know, it is a big complex industry. You cannot do everything. You know?
But, I mean, I think it is very helpful to break the operators down into tiers. Okay? Like, the tier one guys are always going to kind of try to do everything themselves. Absolutely everything themselves. That is their whole shtick. If they cannot do it all themselves, their equity story kind of does not make sense. So we are not going after tier ones. You know, I mean, we do work with tier ones. On data services, but, you know, we are not trying to, you know, overhaul their businesses.
But there is this very long list of tier two, tier three, tier four operators which, you know, are very happy to give away substantial portions of their business to anyone that can do it better for them. You know, you think about the long list of online casino operators in Europe, which offer sports betting. It is not the core product. It is just a kind of it is a tab on the website. And that, you know, they want a set it and forget it solution. They do not ever want to think about it. They just want to get a little bit of incremental extra revenue through.
And, you know, cases like that, they are very happy to work with, you know, with the most efficient, you know, provider that they can find. And, you know, when I think about all this stuff, it gives us an opportunity to really invest and win on product. We are a marketing company, so historically, we have won by, you know, having great marketing, great distribution. But with our data services business, we can actually win on products. We can, you know, we can kind of do go Tesla style. And say, okay. We are going to make something that is so good and so obviously better than everything else out there. That it sells itself.
And I just I think we have the team to build products like that.
David Katz: Helpful. Thank you very much.
Operator: Our next question is from Chad Beynon with Macquarie. Please proceed.
Chad Beynon: Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking our question. Charles, wanted to ask about the upcoming UK autumn budget and how this could affect the business. You know, you guys are obviously a leader in that market. So, you know, from what we have heard, it could hurt some of the smaller players. But anything you can help in terms of how you think this will change the affiliate business in that market and what you have learned in the past when taxes have been adjusted? Thank you.
Charles Gillespie: Good morning, Chad. To the extent that the next UK budget does raise gaming duty, it does hold back player lifetime values in the market, and that does ultimately affect what we can charge our clients. But that does not happen instantly. You know, the perceptions of the player lifetime value take time to evolve, and our commercial agreements take time to evolve. But, you know, in any event, if they raise gaming duty, it is obviously not helpful. I think our expectations for the UK and Ireland segment next year are very feet on the ground.
I think we are actually planning, you know, when we are looking at our budgeting for next year, you know, we are not expecting it to grow. So we are certainly not expecting it to fall apart either. But, you know, it is not going to be a growth driver next year for us like it has been in the past.
Chad Beynon: Okay. Thank you. And then in terms of maybe a medium or longer-term question, in terms of how you are thinking about running the company's leverage. You talked about it at the outset. That you are active in terms of share repurchases and you are unhappy with the stock price. So that is obviously a use of capital. You know, you have made some recent acquisitions in the last couple of quarters. And then more importantly, with Opticods and the sports data business, there might be other tuck-in acquisitions. So how are you thinking about, you know, running the company's leverage at this point?
If maybe this is a time to lever up, create the best product for the future, or if you are going to run more conservatively with just what you currently have in the tank. Thank you.
Charles Gillespie: Elias and I are always aiming to maximize shareholder value by continuously optimizing the capital allocation. We continue to see buybacks as a tactical tool to maximize shareholder value, but not as a means to return a specific amount of capital. At the moment, we have got about $89 million in interest-bearing debt outstanding, and we have about $70 million in undrawn credit facilities available to us. So as we generate cash, debt repayment is one of the options available to us. Oddjam and Opticods are going really well. They are in a good position to capture most, if not all, of the contingent consideration in respect of 2025.
That means that we will owe them $40 million in April 2026, and $20 million in April 2027. You know? So we do have those payments coming up. Yeah. At this stage, I do not think we are looking at levering up beyond our existing credit facility. You know, I think we would like to see a little more rebound in the marketing business. You know, a little more progress on growth in sports data services, and then I think we would have some confidence to lean in harder in terms of creating shareholder value through buybacks and other things. But we are, yeah. It is an everyday conversation over here, and something we think about a lot.
Chad Beynon: Thank you. Appreciate it, guys.
Operator: Our next question is from Michael Hickey with The Benchmark Company. Please proceed.
Michael Hickey: Yes. Hey, Charles. Elias. Good morning, guys. Just two from us. On the predictions market, obviously, we cannot stop talking about it, neither can investors. Neither can our operators. It is obviously accelerating here. We have got Flutter last night saying they are going to launch in December. DraftKings probably like to do the same. And part of that, Charles, is pretty meaningful investments in UA as we heard last night. And, of course, Kalshi and Polymarket there. So you have got a pretty vibrant ecosystem. So with that context, how are you thinking about the marketing services opportunity in this category? I know your data, PeerSpot radar, is already active.
Just curious if you are active and how you see the opportunity unfolding, especially in '26 for growth?
Charles Gillespie: Mike, thanks for the question. I think the sports data services, as we have covered, is where prediction markets are very exciting. When you think about the marketing side of the business, one unique feature of the prediction markets in contrast to sports traditionally regulated sports betting is that everybody has to be treated the same. It has to be a totally level playing field. So you cannot have personalization. You cannot have different bonuses. You know, there is frankly less marketing involved. Now people still need to find these services and sign up, and we can obviously help with that.
But we are taking a little more of a cautious approach with that, given, you know, our partnerships with all of our regulators in the United States. You know, I think raw data services are fairly innocuous. But, you know, on the marketing side, there is, yeah. I think there is also an opportunity there, but we are very focused on the data services side.
Michael Hickey: Thanks, Charles. On the data services, it sounds like you might be constrained a little bit on M&A just given your current leverage profile and your stock being down. How are you thinking about investment there? It sounds like you are adding layers, which is exciting. But how do you sort of balance, I guess, internal investment and capital allocation, sort of the organic development of data versus M&A, which I imagine there are probably some nice tuck-in assets out there that could sort of round out your current offering.
Charles Gillespie: Yeah. It is a great question. Again, something we are talking about often these days. But I think if you come at it from a first principle's perspective, you need to figure out what you want to buy. And if it makes true sense for the business, if it literally ticks all the boxes, and everybody has very high conviction, then okay, then you need to find a way to pay for it, and hopefully, that will come together. You know, at the current, you know, share price, virtually nothing is accretive. You know, it is certainly a headwind in terms of justifying M&A.
But that does not mean we are not still thinking about things, but obviously, it is front of mind, and we are going to be as focused on capital efficiency as we have ever been. But, you know, there are different ways to skin the cat. You know? There is every one of these deals is unique and interesting, and there are ways to go out things, which, you know, preserve our capital efficiency.
Michael Hickey: Thanks, Charles. With no further questions, I would like to hand the conference back over to management for closing remarks.
Charles Gillespie: Thanks for joining us today. We do expect to finish the year strong here in Q4, subject to our updated guidance, and we look forward to updating everybody on that early next year. Thanks for joining. Bye-bye.
