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MGNI US Equity

Magnite, Inc.Information Technology · Services-Computer Programming, Data Processing, Etc. · CIK 1595974 · FY ends Dec 31
$23.50
+0.15 (+0.64%)
USD · as of 2026-08-21 · marketstack

MGNI · 10-K · period ended 2022-12-31

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filed 2023-02-22 · EDGAR original ↗

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UNITED STATES

SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION

Washington, D.C. 20549

__________________

FORM 10-K

__________________

(Mark One)

☒ANNUAL REPORT PURSUANT TO SECTION 13 OR 15(d) OF THE SECURITIES EXCHANGE ACT OF 1934

For the fiscal year ended December 31, 2022

OR

☐TRANSITION REPORT PURSUANT TO SECTION 13 OR 15(d) OF THE SECURITIES EXCHANGE ACT OF 1934

For the transition period from _____________ to _____________

Commission File Number: 001-36384

__________________

MAGNITE, INC.

(Exact name of registrant as specified in its charter)

__________________

1250 Broadway, 15th Floor New York, New York

(Address of principal executive offices, including zip code)

Registrant's telephone number, including area code:

_

______________

Securities registered pursuant to Section 12(b) of the Act:

Title of each class Trading Symbol(s) Name of each exchange on which registered

Common stock, par value $0.00001 per share MGNI Nasdaq Global Select Market

Securities registered pursuant to Section 12(g) of the Act:

None

__________________

Indicate by check mark if the registrant is a well-known seasoned issuer, as defined in Rule 405 of the Securities Act. ☐ Yes ☒No

Indicate by check mark if the registrant is not required to file reports pursuant to Section 13 or Section 15(d) of the Act. ☐ Yes ☒No

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant (1) has filed all reports required to be filed by Section 13 or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the registrant was required to file such reports), and (2) has been subject to such filing requirements for the past 90 days. ☒Yes☐ No

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant has submitted electronically every Interactive Data File required to be submitted pursuant to Rule 405 of Regulation S-T (§232.405 of this chapter) during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the registrant was required to submit such files). ☒Yes☐ No

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant is a large accelerated filer, an accelerated filer, a non-accelerated filer, a smaller reporting company, or an emerging growth company. See the definitions of "large accelerated filer," "accelerated filer," "smaller reporting company," and "emerging growth company" in Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act.

Large accelerated filer ☒ Accelerated filer ☐

Non-accelerated filer ☐ Smaller reporting company ☐

Emerging growth company ☐

If an emerging growth company, indicate by check mark if the registrant has elected not to use the extended transition period for complying with any new or revised financial accounting standards provided pursuant to Section 13(a) of the Exchange Act. ☐

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant has filed a report on and attestation to its management’s assessment of the effectiveness of its internal control over financial reporting under Section 404(b) of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (15 U.S.C. 7262(b)) by the registered public accounting firm that prepared or issued its audit report. ☒

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant is a shell company (as defined in Rule 12b-2 of the Act). ☐ Yes ☒ No

As of June 30, 2022, the aggregate market value of shares held by non-affiliates of the registrant (based on the closing sales price of such shares on the Nasdaq Global Select Market on June 30, 2022) was approximately $688,440,018.

Indicate the number of shares outstanding of each of the registrant's classes of common stock, as of the latest practicable date.

Class Outstanding as of February 16, 2023

DOCUMENTS INCORPORATED BY REFERENCE: To the extent herein specifically referenced in Part III, portions of the Registrant's definitive Proxy Statement for the 2023 Annual General Meeting of Shareholders to be filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission pursuant to Regulation 14A. See Part III.

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MAGNITE, INC.

FORM 10-K

FOR THE FISCAL YEAR ENDED DECEMBER 31, 2022

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PageNo.

Special Note About Forward-Looking Statements 3

Part I

Item 1. Business 6

Item 1A. Risk Factors 16

Item 1B. Unresolved Staff Comments 39

Item 2. Properties 40

Item 3. Legal Proceedings 40

Item 4. Mine Safety Disclosures 40

Part II

Item 6. Reserved 42

Item 7A. Quantitative and Qualitative Disclosures About Market Risk 60

Item 8. Financial Statements and Supplementary Data 62

Item 9A. Controls and Procedures 108

Item 9B. Other Information 109

Item 9C. Disclosure Regarding Foreign Jurisdictions that Prevent Inspections 109

Part III

Item 10. Directors, Executive Officers and Corporate Governance 109

Item 11. Executive Compensation 109

Item 14. Principal Accountant Fees and Services 110

Part IV

Item 15. Exhibits, Financial Statement Schedules 111

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SPECIAL NOTE ABOUT FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS; SUMMARY OF RISK FACTORS

This Annual Report on Form 10-K and related statements by the Company contain forward-looking statements, including statements based upon or relating to our expectations, assumptions, estimates, and projections. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by terms such as "may," "might," "will," "objective," "intend," "should," "could," "can," "would," "expect," "believe," "design," "anticipate," "estimate," "predict," "potential," "plan" or the negative of these terms, and similar expressions. Forward-looking statements may include, but are not limited to, statements concerning acquisitions by the Company, including the acquisition of SpotX, Inc. ("SpotX," and such acquisition the "SpotX Acquisition"), the acquisition of SpringServe, LLC ("SpringServe," and such acquisition the "SpringServe Acquisition"), and the merger with Telaria, Inc. ("Telaria," and such merger the "Telaria Merger"), or the anticipated benefits thereof; statements concerning potential synergies from the Company's acquisitions; statements concerning macroeconomic conditions, including inflation, supply chain issues or the occurrence of a recession, or concerns related thereto; our anticipated financial performance; key strategic objectives; industry growth rates for ad-supported connected television ("CTV") and the shift in video consumption from linear TV to CTV; anticipated benefits of new offerings, including the introduction of our new Magnite Streaming platform; the impact of our traffic shaping technology on our business; the success of the consolidation of our two CTV platforms; the effects of our cost reduction initiatives; scope and duration of client relationships; the fees we may charge in the future; business mix; sales growth; benefits from supply path optimization; the development of identity solutions; client utilization of our offerings; our competitive differentiation; our market share and leadership position in the industry; market conditions, trends, and opportunities; certain statements regarding future operational performance measures; and other statements that are not historical facts. These statements are not guarantees of future performance; they reflect our current views with respect to future events and are based on assumptions and estimates and subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause our actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from expectations or results projected or implied by forward-looking statements.

Risks that our business faces include, but are not limited to, the following:

•our ability to realize the anticipated benefits of the SpotX Acquisition, SpringServe Acquisition, and other acquisitions, including with respect to the consolidation of our two CTV platforms;

•the impact of macroeconomic challenges on the overall demand for advertising and the advertising marketplace, including as a result of global conflict, global pandemics and the responses to such pandemics by governments, inflation, supply chain issues, the occurrence of a recession, or concerns relating to the foregoing;

•CTV spend on our platform may grow more slowly than we expect if industry growth rates for ad supported CTV are not accurate, if CTV sellers fail to adopt programmatic advertising solutions or if we are unable to maintain or increase access to CTV advertising inventory;

•we may be unsuccessful in our supply path optimization efforts with buyers;

•our ability to introduce new offerings and bring them to market in a timely manner, and to otherwise adapt in response to client demands and industry trends;

•uncertainty of our estimates and expectations associated with new offerings, including the CTV ad server product that we acquired in the SpringServe Acquisition and our developing identity solutions, as well as potential negative impacts associated with the integration of our CTV platforms and the introduction of Magnite Streaming;

•we must increase the scale and efficiency of our technology infrastructure to support our growth;

•the emergence of header bidding has increased competition from other demand sources and may cause infrastructure strain and added costs;

•our access to mobile inventory may be limited by third-party technology or lack of direct relationships with mobile sellers;

•we may experience lower take rates, which may not be offset by increases in the volume of ad requests, improvements in fill-rate, and/or increases in the value of transactions through our platform;

•the impact of requests for discounts, fee concessions, rebates, refunds or favorable payment terms;

•our history of losses, and the fact that in the past our operating results have and may in the future fluctuate significantly, be difficult to predict, and fall below analysts' and investors' expectations;

•our business may be subject to sales and use tax, advertising and other taxes;

•failure by us or our clients to meet advertising and inventory content standards;

•the freedom of buyers and sellers to direct their spending and inventory to competing sources of inventory and demand, and to establish direct relationships and integrations without the use of our platform;

•our reliance on large aggregators of advertising inventory, and the concentration of CTV among a small number of large sellers that enjoy significant negotiating leverage;

•our ability to provide value to both buyers and sellers of advertising without being perceived as favoring one over the other or being perceived as competing with them through our service offerings;

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•our reliance on large sources of advertising demand, including demand side platforms ("DSPs") that may have or develop high-risk credit profiles or fail to pay invoices when due;

•our sales efforts may require significant time and expense and may not yield the results we seek;

•we may be exposed to claims from clients for breach of contract;

•the effects of seasonal trends on our results of operations;

•we operate in an intensely competitive market that includes companies that have greater financial, technical and marketing resources than we do;

•the effects of consolidation in the ad tech industry or among our media clients;

•our ability to differentiate our offerings and compete effectively to combat commodification and disintermediation;

•potential limitations on our ability to collect or use data as a result of consumer tools, regulatory restrictions and technological limitations;

•the development and use of new identity solutions as a replacement for third-party cookies and other identifiers may disrupt the programmatic ecosystem and cause the performance of our platform to decline;

•the industry may not adopt or may be slow to adopt the use of first-party publisher segments as an alternative to third-party cookies;

•the impact of antitrust regulations or enforcement actions targeting the digital advertising ecosystem;

•our ability to comply with, and the effect on our business of, evolving legal standards and regulations, particularly concerning data protection and privacy;

•errors or failures in the operation of our solution, interruptions in our access to network infrastructure or data, and breaches of our computer systems;

•our ability to ensure a high level of brand safety for our clients and to detect "bot" traffic and other fraudulent or malicious activity;

•our ability to attract and retain qualified employees and key personnel;

•costs associated with enforcing our intellectual property rights or defending intellectual property infringement;

•our ability to comply with the terms of our financing arrangements;

•restrictions in our Credit Agreement may limit our ability to make strategic investments, respond to changing market conditions, or otherwise operate our business;

•increases in our debt leverage may put us at greater risk of defaulting on our debt obligations, subject us to additional operating restrictions and make it more difficult to obtain future financing on favorable terms;

•conversion of our Convertible Senior Notes would dilute the ownership interest of existing stockholders;

•the Capped Call Transactions subject us to counterparty risk and may affect the value of the Convertible Senior Notes and our common stock;

•the conditional conversion feature of the Convertible Senior Notes, if triggered, may adversely affect our financial condition and operating result;

•failure to successfully execute our international growth plans;

•failure to maintain an effective system of internal control over financial reporting, which could adversely affect investor confidence;

•the use of our net operating losses and tax credit carryforwards may be subject to certain limitations;

•our ability to raise additional capital if needed and the elimination of LIBOR;

•volatility in the price of our common stock;

•the impact of our repurchase program on our stock price and cash reserves;

•competition for investors and the impact of negative analyst or investor research reports; and

•provisions of our charter documents and Delaware law may inhibit a potential acquisition of the company and limit the ability of stockholders to cause changes in company management.

We discuss many of these risks and additional factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated by our forward-looking statements under the headings "Risk Factors" and "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations," and elsewhere in this report and in other filings we have made and will make from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC. These forward-looking statements represent our estimates and assumptions only as of the date of the report in which they are included. Unless required by federal securities laws, we assume no obligation to update any of these forward-looking statements, or to update the reasons actual results could differ materially from those anticipated, to reflect circumstances or events that occur after the statements are made. Without limiting the foregoing, any guidance we may provide will generally be given only in connection with quarterly and annual earnings announcements, without interim updates, and we may appear at industry conferences or make other public statements

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without disclosing material nonpublic information in our possession. Given these uncertainties, investors should not place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements.

Investors should read this Annual Report on Form 10-K and the documents that we reference in this report and have filed or will file with the SEC completely and with the understanding that our actual future results may be materially different from what we expect. We qualify all of our forward-looking statements by these cautionary statements.

NOTE REGARDING THIRD-PARTY INFORMATION

This Annual Report on Form 10-K includes data that we obtained from industry publications and third-party research, surveys and studies. While we believe the industry publications and third-party research, surveys and studies are reliable, we have not independently verified such data. Such third-party data and our internal estimates and research are necessarily subject to a high degree of uncertainty and risk due to a variety of factors, including those described in "Item 1A. Risk Factors" in this Annual Report on Form 10-K. These and other factors could cause results to differ materially from those included in this report.

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PART I

Item 1. Business

Overview

Magnite, Inc., formerly known as The Rubicon Project, Inc. ("we," or "us"), provides technology solutions to automate the purchase and sale of digital advertising inventory.

On April 1, 2020, we completed a stock-for-stock merger with Telaria, Inc. ("Telaria" and such merger the "Telaria Merger"), a leading provider of connected television ("CTV") technology, on April 30, 2021, we completed the acquisition of SpotX, Inc. ("SpotX" and such acquisition the "SpotX Acquisition"), a leading platform shaping CTV and video advertising globally, and on July 1, 2021, we acquired SpringServe, LLC ("SpringServe"), a leading ad serving platform for CTV.

Following these transactions, we believe that we are the world's largest independent omni-channel sell-side advertising platform ("SSP"), offering a single partner for transacting globally across all channels, formats and auction types, and the largest independent programmatic CTV marketplace, making it easier for buyers to reach CTV audiences at scale from industry-leading streaming content providers, broadcasters, platforms and device manufacturers.

Our platform features applications and services for sellers of digital advertising inventory, or publishers, that own and operate CTV channels, applications, websites and other digital media properties, to manage and monetize their inventory; applications and services for buyers, including advertisers, agencies, agency trading desks, and demand side platforms, ("DSPs"), to buy digital advertising inventory; and a transparent, independent marketplace that brings buyers and sellers together and facilitates intelligent decision making and automated transaction execution at scale. Our clients include many of the world’s leading buyers and sellers of digital advertising inventory. Our platform processes trillions of ad requests per month allowing buyers access to a global, scaled, independent alternative to "walled gardens," who both own and sell inventory and maintain control on the demand side.

We provide a full suite of tools for sellers to control their advertising business and protect the consumer viewing experience. These tools are particularly important to CTV sellers who need to ensure a TV-like viewing and advertising experience for consumers. On February 7, 2023, we introduced our unified CTV platform Magnite Streaming, which merges leading technology from the legacy Magnite CTV and SpotX CTV platforms. The platform enables CTV sellers to maximize their advertising yield holistically across live and video on demand ("VOD") inventory, addressable linear, CTV and other over-the-top environments such as mobile. Magnite Streaming unites sophisticated end-to-end features within a single platform and user interface, including: comprehensive seller deal management capabilities to monetize across all deal types, whether reserved or sold upfront; advanced curation and brand safety tools built for streaming video, such as ad-podding, a tool analogous to commercial breaks that allows a seller to manage business rules around competitive separation, audio normalization tools to control for the volume of an ad relative to content, frequency capping to avoid exposing viewers to repetitive ad placements, and creative review so that a publisher can review and approve the ad units being served to its properties; multi-faceted audience activation features including seller defined audiences, third-party data integrations, and secure data matching; responsive real-time reporting and dashboards; and innovative technology to help sellers optimize live inventory.

In addition to these programmatic platform capabilities, our ad serving technology manages video advertising across both programmatic and direct-sold inventory, including forecasting, routing, and creating customized ad units. The integration of SpringServe’s ad serving technology with our existing programmatic SSP capabilities provides CTV publishers a holistic yield management solution that dynamically allocates between direct-sold and programmatic inventory to drive value.

Buyers leverage our platform to manage their advertising spend and reach their target audiences on brand-safe premium inventory, simplify order management and campaign tracking, obtain actionable insights into audiences for their advertising, and access impression-level purchasing from thousands of sellers. We believe that our scale, platform features, and omni-channel offering makes us an essential partner for buyers.

We operate our business on a worldwide basis, with an established operating presence in North America, Australia and Europe, and a developing presence in Asia and South America. Our non-U.S. subsidiaries and operations perform primarily sales, marketing, and service functions.

Industry Trends

Continued Shift Toward Digital Advertising

Consumers are rapidly shifting their viewing habits towards digital mediums and expect to be able to consume content seamlessly across multiple devices, including computers, tablets, smartphones, and CTVs whenever and wherever they want.

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As digital content consumption continues to proliferate, we believe the percentage of advertising dollars spent through digital channels will continue to grow.

Automation of Buying and Selling

Due to the size and complexity of the advertising ecosystem and purchasing process, manual processes cannot effectively manage digital advertising inventory at scale. In addition, both buyers and sellers are demanding more transparency, better controls and more relevant insights from their advertising inventory purchases and sales. This has created a need for software solutions, known as programmatic advertising, that automate the process for planning, buying, selling and measuring digital advertising across screens. Programmatic advertising allows buyers and sellers to transact on an impression-by-impression basis through the use of real-time bidding technology, and allows for the use of advanced data and identity solutions to better target ad campaigns. Programmatic transactions include open auctions, where multiple buyers bid against each other in a real-time auction for the right to purchase a publisher's inventory, as well as reserve auctions, where publishers establish direct deals or private marketplaces with select buyers. Programmatic is the dominant method of transacting for desktop, CTV, and mobile inventory.

Convergence of TV and Digital

CTV viewership is growing rapidly and the pace of adoption is accelerating the transition of linear television to CTV programming. As the number of CTV channels continues to proliferate, we believe that ad-supported models or hybrid models that rely on a combination of subscription fees and advertising revenue will continue to gain traction. In turn, we believe brand advertisers looking to engage with streaming viewers will continue to shift their budgets from linear to CTV. Furthermore, as the CTV market continues to mature, we believe that a greater percentage of CTV advertising inventory will be sold programmatically, similar to trends that occurred in desktop and mobile. As such, we expect CTV to be a significant driver of our revenue growth for the foreseeable future.

Identity Solutions

A number of participants in the advertising technology ecosystem have taken or are expected to take action to eliminate or restrict the use of third-party cookies and other primary identifiers that have historically been used to deliver targeted advertisements. We believe that the elimination of third-party cookies has the potential to shift the programmatic ecosystem from an identity model powered by buyers that are able to aggregate and target audiences through cookies to one enabled by sellers that have direct relationships with consumers and are therefore better positioned to obtain user data and consent for implementing first party identifiers.

We believe that our platform and scale position us well to take a leadership position in advancing this shift and creating additional value opportunities for our clients. Accordingly, we have invested and intend to further invest in the development and enhancement of industry leading identity and audience solutions. In furtherance of this goal, in December 2021, we acquired Nth Party, Ltd. ("Nth Party"), a developer of cryptographic software for secure audience data sharing and analysis, and in February 2022, we acquired Carbon (AI) Limited ("Carbon"), a platform that enables publishers to measure, manage, and monetize audience segments.

We support industry privacy initiatives and believe that the next generation of identity solutions need to be open and ubiquitous, with consumer privacy, transparency and control at the core. We further believe that these solutions will ultimately lead to greater trust and consumer confidence in digital advertising, which will be positive for the advertising ecosystem in the long term. In the short term, however, these changes could create some variability in our revenue across certain buyers or sellers, depending on the timing of changes and developed solutions.

Supply Path Optimization

Supply Path Optimization ("SPO") refers to efforts by buyers to consolidate the number of vendors with which they work to find the most effective and cost-efficient paths to procure media. SPO is important to buyers because it can increase the proportion of their advertising ultimately spent on working media, with the goal of increasing return on their advertising spend, and can help them gain efficiencies by reducing the number of vendors with which they work in a complex ecosystem. We believe we are well positioned to benefit from SPO in the long run as a result of our transparency, our broad and unique inventory supply across all channels and formats, including CTV, buyer tools, such as traffic shaping that reduce the cost of working with us, and our brand safety measures.

Header Bidding and Data Processing

Header bidding is a programmatic technique by which sellers offer inventory to multiple ad exchanges and supply side platforms, such as our platform, simultaneously. Header bidding has been rapidly adopted in recent years in the desktop and mobile channels and has experienced modest adoption in CTV. The adoption of header bidding has created a number of challenges and technical complexities for both sellers and buyers, which require sophisticated tools to manage. Header bidding has led to a significant increase in the number of ad impressions to be processed and analyzed through our platform as well as

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by DSPs, which can lead to increased costs if not properly addressed. We have invested in technology solutions, such as Demand Manager, to help publishers manage their header-bidding inventory.

How We Generate Revenue

Digital advertising inventory is created when consumers access sellers' content. Sellers provide digital advertising inventory to our platform in the form of advertising requests, or ad requests. When we receive ad requests from sellers, we send bid requests to buyers, which enable buyers to bid on sellers’ digital advertising inventory. Winning bids can create advertising, or paid impressions, for the seller to present to the consumer. The price that buyers pay for each thousand paid impressions purchased is measured in units referred to as CPM, or cost per thousand, and the total volume of spending between buyers and sellers on our platform is referred to as advertising spend.

We generate revenue from the use of our platform for the purchase and sale of digital advertising inventory. Generally, our revenue is based on a percentage of the ad spend that runs through our platform, although for certain clients or transaction types we may receive a fixed CPM for each impression sold, and for advertising campaigns that are transacted through insertion orders, we earn revenue based on the full amount of ad spend that runs through our platform. We also generate revenue from our ad server and Demand Manager header-bidding product, where fees are either based on the number of impressions processed or a percentage of ad spend. In addition, we may receive certain fixed monthly fees for the use of our platforms or products.

Magnite: Competitive Strengths of Our Platform. Key competitive strengths of our platform include:

Leadership in CTV

Our Magnite Steaming platform has been strategically built to meet the unique requirements of CTV sellers. Many of these sellers have their roots in linear television and it is important that established business practices in television advertising can be translated to programmatic advertising. For instance, our ad-pod feature provides long-form content sellers with a tool analogous to commercial breaks in traditional linear television, so that they can request and manage several ads at once from different demand sources to control for competitive separation, in a single ad-pod. In addition, we provide dynamic ad insertion to serve live streaming events, audio normalization tools to control the volume of an ad relative to content, frequency capping to avoid exposing viewers to repetitive ad placements, and creative review so that a publisher can review and approve the ad units being served to its properties.

We have invested significant time and resources cultivating relationships with CTV sellers and have built a specialized team of CTV experts across our engineering and sales functions to support our clients and evangelize the benefits of CTV advertising. In addition, for certain larger CTV sellers, we may build custom features or functionality to help drive deeper adoption.

Scaled Omni-Channel Platform

We offer a scaled omni-channel platform that brings value to both buyers and sellers of ad inventory. For buyers, we offer a single omni-channel partner to reach target audiences globally across all channels, including CTV, mobile, desktop, and digital out-of-home, and formats, including video, display, and audio. For sellers, we partner as a one stop shop where they can sell digital advertising across all of their properties, regardless of device or format, and gain instant access to the world’s largest automated digital advertising buyers with the flexibility to sell their advertising inventory in an automated fashion on an impression-by-impression basis. We believe large numbers of diverse sellers on our platform attract more buyers and vice versa, resulting in a self-reinforcing network effect that adds value for all our clients and creates a stickier platform solution.

Reserve Auctions

A significant portion of premium inventory, in particular with respect to CTV, is purchased and sold through reserve auctions where the seller establishes a direct deal with a buyer or group of buyers. These transaction types allow the seller to maintain tighter control over their advertising allocation and are often used by sellers that maintain a direct sales force but still want to experience the benefits of automation to improve pricing, matching, and dynamic ad placement and to automate manual operations such as ad trafficking, quality assurance, and billing and collections. Our deal management and curation tools support sales functions rather than replacing them, which eliminates friction in the sales process. Buyers and sellers can also leverage their first-party data assets and third-party data assets in our platform to increase the value of sellers' inventory and the precision of buyers' targeting efforts.

Big Data Analytics and Machine-Learning Algorithms; Bid Filtering

A core aspect of our value proposition is our big data and machine-learning platform that is able to discover unique insights from our massive data repositories. Our systems collect and analyze a myriad of information such as historical clearing prices, bid responses, buyer preferences, ad formats, user location, buyer audience preferences, how many ads the user has seen,

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browser or device information, and sellers’ first party data about users. Our access to data puts us in a unique position to develop differentiated insights to help both buyers and sellers. Our solution is constantly self-improving as we process more volume and accumulate more data, which in turn helps make our machine-learning algorithms more intelligent and contributes to higher-quality matching between buyers and sellers. This data also fuels our bid filtering technology, allowing us to more aggressively block traffic that is not likely to monetize. We believe that our traffic optimization coupled with bid filtering improves return on investment for buyers and increases revenue for sellers, which in turn attracts more buyers and sellers to our platform creating a dual network effect that makes our platform stickier. These capabilities also help us manage the costs associated with the high volumes of ad requests we receive.

Identity Solutions

We offer identity solutions that help buyers and sellers create better matches and increase advertising ROI and the value of the underlying impression.Our tools enable sellers to create audience segments based on first-party data, which makes their advertising inventory more valuable to buyers looking to achieve specific campaign goals.In addition, our technology is integrated with a number of third party data, attribution and identity vendors, allowingbuyers and sellers to leverage these solutions directly through our platform without the need for multiple vendor contracts.

Integrated Video Ad Server and SSP

On July 1, 2021, we acquired SpringServe, a leading ad serving platform for CTV and online video. The SpringServe ad server manages multiple aspects of video advertising for both programmatic transactions and inventory sold directly by the publisher, including forecasting, routing, customized ad experiences, and advanced podding logic. Combined with our SSP, the SpringServe ad server provides publishers a holistic yield management solution that works across their entire video advertising business to drive value. This is of particular importance for CTV publishers, who still sell a large percentage of their inventory through their direct sales team. We believe the acquisition of SpringServe is highly strategic as it allows us to offer publishers an independent full-stack solution to the walled gardens, which can be leveraged across their entire video advertising business.

Header Bidding and Demand Manager Solutions

We are integrated with all of the major header-bidding standards, including Prebid.org, which we co-founded, as well as the solutions offered by Google and Amazon. We believe the various header bidding alternatives we offer, our buyer reach and scale, our buying efficiency, and our machine-learning capabilities put us in a strong position to compete for seller impressions monetized through header-bidding solutions, and we expect these header bidding solutions to deliver a meaningful volume of impressions. We also provide a software solution called Demand Manager that helps desktop and mobile sellers manage all of their header-bidding advertising inventory, regardless of who wins the impression, for a fee based on a percentage of that advertising spending. We believe that adoption and proliferation of these tools will further strengthen our relationship with sellers and contribute to our future revenue growth.

Transparency and Controls

We generate revenue each time an impression is monetized on our platform based on a simple and transparent fee structure established with our publisherpartners.Our clients direct the sale and management of ad inventory through our platform, including the ability to define supply hierarchies and demand tiers, set minimum price floors, and establish advertiser and category level blocked and allowed lists.We provide sellers with detailed analytics, which allows them to effectively monitor buying patterns and make real-time changes to take advantage of market dynamics and maximize their yield.

Self-Service Model

We offer a self-service model that lets sellers access our platform without extensive involvement by our personnel.This model allows us to scale efficiently and grow our business at a faster pace than the growth of our sales and support organization. As a result, we are able to achieve a high degree of operating leverage, which positions our business for growing profitability.

Buyer Tools

We provide a suite of buyer tools designed to help buyers curate inventory, append data and improve ROI in order to meet their campaign strategies. Our curation tools include Express Lane and Marketplace technology that enable agency holding companies and major brands to create their own private label marketplaces and establish direct connections with sellers. Custom auction packages give all buyers a versatile and cost-effective way to curate and target open market inventory, using categories such as audience, context, and viewability, while our deal discovery platform allows buyers to connect directly with sellers to arrange direct reserve auctions. Our audience tools enable buyers to append data in order to reach their target

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audience, and are often used in combination with our curation solutions. Finally, Estimated Market Rate, our innovative bid shading technology, helps buyers bid more effectively in our environment.

Independence

We are fully aligned with the interests of our publisher clients. Unlike some large industry participants, we do not have our own media properties that compete for advertising spending with our sellers. Therefore, we are agnostic and have no preference towards delivering demand to any specific publisher. In addition, because we do not offer a demand side platform, we are able to avoid inherent conflicts of interest that exist when serving both the buy- and sell-side.

Magnite: Growth Strategies. The key elements to our long-term growth strategy include:

Focus on CTV

We expect CTV to be the biggest driver of our growth. As streaming video continues to become mainstream and ad-supported models become more prevalent, we believe brand advertisers will continue to shift their budgets from linear television to CTV. We plan to invest significant resources in technology, sales and support related to our CTV growth initiatives. Consistent with this growth objective, in February 2023, we introduced Magnite Streaming, which merges leading technology from our legacy Magnite CTV and SpotX CTV platforms.

Supply Path Optimization

As described above, SPO refers to efforts by buyers to consolidate the number of vendors with which they work to find the most effective and cost-efficient paths to procure media. We believe we are well positioned to benefit from SPO due to the factors described above and that it presents an opportunity for us to capture market share and increase the volume of advertising spend on our platform. To capitalize on SPO opportunities, we have invested in our buyer focused sales team to pursue more direct relationships with advertisers and agencies.

Identity Solutions

We believe that the elimination of third party cookies has the potential to shift the programmatic ecosystem from an identity model powered by buyers that are able to aggregate and target audiences through cookies to one enabled by sellers that have direct relationships with consumers and are therefore better positioned to obtain user data and consent for implementing first party identifiers. In CTV, this identity model already largely exists with publishers more tightly controlling access to identifiers and user data, while offering proprietary first party data segments for reaching desired audiences. As the largest independent supply side platform, we believe we are well positioned to take a leadership role in advancing the shift to a first party identity model and creating additional value opportunities for our clients. Accordingly, we have invested and intend to further invest in the development and enhancement of industry leading identity and audience solutions. In furtherance of this goal, in December 2021, we acquired Nth Party, a developer of cryptographic software for secure audience data sharing and analysis, and in February 2022, we acquired Carbon, a platform that enables publishers to measure, manage, and monetize audience segments, which have been integrated with our platforms.

Increase Efficiencies on our Exchange

We aim to increase the operational efficiency of our platform, so as to enable buyers and sellers to achieve their campaign and monetization objectives in a cost-effective manner. Our solution is constantly self-improving as we process more volume and accumulate more data, which in turn helps make our machine-learning algorithms more intelligent and contributes to higher quality matching between buyers and sellers. We are continuing to invest in traffic optimization and bid filtering technology to allow us to monetize a higher proportion of the ad requests on our platform, which reduces costs for us as well as the process costs for buyers. We believe these cost savings make our platform more attractive to buyers, which in turn improves revenue opportunities for sellers.

Increasing Seller Inventory

In order to increase transaction volume we are continuously looking to add new high quality sellers to our platform and to expand our existing relationships with sellers to increase our share of their inventory, in particular in the CTV and OTT space where inventory is controlled by fewer sellers. Our plan for increasing our inventory volumes includes establishing and deepening our direct relationships with sellers, including through custom integrations, expanding our seller tools, capitalizing on our omni-channel capabilities, and leveraging our header bidding integrations, including through Demand Manager. In addition, our acquisition of the SpringServe ad server provides us with access to inventory that is directly sold by a publisher's

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sales force by enabling a unified auction that selects an ideal ad set, considering both direct and programmatic deal priority and yield.

Expand our International Footprint

With established operating presence in North America, Australia and Europe, and a developing presence in Asia and South America, we serve buyers and sellers on a global basis. We plan to continue to expand our international presence and make additional investments in sales, marketing and infrastructure to support our long-term growth and to position ourselves for expected increases in the penetration of programmatic advertising globally. We expect programmatic advertising to grow at different rates in different geographic markets, and are constantly evaluating new markets with a strategy to use our existing infrastructure and adjacent sales offices or by expanding our infrastructure footprint and placing personnel directly in those markets.

Continue to Innovate and Enhance our Platform

We are working on a number of platform innovations and enhancements designed to improve the value to our clients, such as our recently announced Magnite Streaming platform. We intend to invest in new features that facilitate the creation of first-party publisher segments, improve upon our traffic optimization and bid filtering, enhance our brand safety controls, and help sellers to optimize their yield across both programmatic and directly sold inventory.

Technology and Development

To support a majority of our non-CTV transactions, we have developed a globally distributed infrastructure hosted at data centers in the U.S., Europe, and Asia that run our proprietary software. Our CTV transactions run primarily on a hybrid infrastructure. We believe these two approaches optimize the type of traffic we handle - hosted data centers for high-frequency, low-latency transactions and cloud-supported for lower frequency transactions subject to more volatile viewing patterns, for example CTV prime-time viewing spikes.

Our approach supports the volume, diversity, and complexity of buyers’ bidding patterns, which increases market liquidity. Bid efficiency algorithms provide bid prediction (i.e., which buyers are most likely to bid on a given impression) and throttling (i.e., the volume of bid requests a given buyer can process), to improve infrastructure load and execute transactions efficiently by only sending bid requests to those buyers of advertising inventory who can handle the volume and are likely to respond.

This infrastructure is supported by real-time data pipelines, a system that quickly moves volumes of data generated by our business into reporting and machine-learning systems that allow usage both internally and by buyers and sellers. It also is supported by a 24-hour Network Operations Center, which provides failure protection by monitoring and rerouting traffic in the event of equipment failure or network performance issues between buyers and our marketplace, and our core technology and development team, which is responsible for the design, development, operation, and maintenance of our platform, and employs an agile development process that emphasizes frequent, iterative, and incremental development cycles.

We believe that continued investment in our platform, including its technologies and functionalities, is critical to our success and long-term growth.

Sales and Marketing

We market our solution to buyers and sellers through global sales teams that operate from various locations around the world. These teams leverage market knowledge and expertise to demonstrate the benefits of advertising automation and our solution to buyers and sellers. We deploy a professional services team with each seller integration to assist sellers in getting the most value from our solution. Our buyer team, which is separately managed, focuses on collaborating with and increasing spend from DSPs, agencies, and brands, and our client services teams work closely with clients to support and execute campaigns. Our marketing initiatives are focused on managing our brand, increasing market awareness, and driving advertising spend to our platform. We often present at industry conferences, create custom events, and invest in public relations. In addition, our marketing team advertises online, in print, and in other forms of media, creates case studies, sponsors research, writes whitepapers, publishes marketing collateral, generates blog posts, and undertakes client research studies.

Competition

Our industry is highly competitive. Overall digital advertising spending is highly concentrated in a small number of very large companies that have their own inventory, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Comcast, and Amazon, with which we compete for digital advertising inventory and demand. These companies are formidable competitors due to their huge resources and direct user relationships, and could become even more dominant as third-party cookie use decreases. Despite the

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dominance of large companies, there is still a large addressable market that is highly fragmented and includes many providers of transaction services with which we compete, including supply side platforms, video ad servers, and advertising exchanges. As we introduce new offerings, as our existing offerings evolve, or as other companies introduce new products and services, we may be subject to additional competition. There has been rapid evolution and consolidation in the advertising technology industry, and we expect these trends to continue, thereby increasing the capabilities and competitive posture of larger companies, particularly those that are already dominant in various ways, and enabling new or stronger competitors to emerge. There are many ways for buyers and sellers of digital advertising inventory to connect and transact, including directly and through many other exchanges, and buyers are increasingly demanding more transparency and lower transaction costs and establishing relationships directly with sellers of advertising inventory, which puts significant pressure on us. Our offering must remain competitive in scope, ease of use, scalability, speed, data access, price, inventory quality, brand security, customer service, identity protection and other technological features that help sellers monetize their inventory and buyers increase the return on their advertising investment. While our industry is evolving rapidly and becoming increasingly competitive, we believe that our solution enables us to compete favorably on these factors. In addition, we believe we enjoy a number of competitive strengths, as further detailed above.

Human Capital: Our Team and Culture

Our team draws from a broad spectrum of experience, including data science, machine-learning algorithms, infrastructure, software development, and from experienced leadership on the seller and buyer sides, including CTV, mobile and video. In addition to the United States, we have personnel and operations in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, in order to service buyers and sellers on a global scale.

Culture

We strive to build a culture that is high-performing and results-oriented while emphasizing transparency, collaboration and innovation. Our recruitment team seeks individuals that are committed to seeing the big picture and being catalysts of change. We ask our employees to empower others, make a difference and help make our company a great place to work, not just a "job."

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

Our Magnify Council, a group of internal employees, rotating yearly, is focused on enhancing diversity, equity and inclusion. Our objectives, through the support of the Magnify Council, are to create an exceptional employee experience, continually deploy programs to develop diverse talent, and support external partners that emphasize the global promotion of diversity, equity and inclusion.

Talent Retention

We reward team and individual excellence and are committed to creating an exceptional workplace environment in which we seek feedback from our employees in bi-annual engagement surveys. We believe in continual feedback on performance. Our employees set goals at a regular cadence throughout the year and managers provide achievement ratings at year-end. We continue to invest in learning and leadership development by expanding our dedicated resources for these functions. Our primary focus is to provide foundational skill development for the professional growth of employees, and

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cohesive training for our global people managers. Additionally, we routinely analyze voluntary employee turnover to understand and address trends. We give equity to our employees to promote alignment and ownership.

Employee Wellness and Safety

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, our global workforce maintained a work from home policy from March 2020 through October 2022. We have since returned to offices on a hybrid basis. We have approached our return to offices with caution to prioritize the safety and health of our employees, and continue to monitor best practices and guidance.

We recognize that stressful circumstances require us to provide additional care for our employees. We encourage our employees to focus on mental health by providing quarterly mental health days, a global employee assistance program, and a digital platform with access to live classes and discussions supporting wellness.

Conduct

We are committed to promoting high standards of honest and ethical business conduct and compliance in alignment with our cultural values. We do not tolerate harassment or discrimination. Our employees are required to take annual harassment and discrimination training as well as acknowledge our Code of Business and Ethics Policy.

As of December 31, 2022, we had 947 full-time employees.

Our Intellectual Property

Our proprietary technologies are important and we rely upon trade secret, trademark, copyright, and patent laws in the United States and abroad to establish and protect our intellectual property and protect our proprietary technologies.

We have several issued patents and pending patent applications, some of which may ultimately be abandoned if we determine that the cost of prosecution or maintenance does not justify the utility of receiving the patent. None of these patents has been litigated and we do not believe that any individual patent or patent application is material to our business. Their importance to our business is uncertain and there are no guarantees that any of the patents will serve as protection for our technology or market in the United States or any other country in which an application has been filed.

We register certain domain names, trademarks and service marks in the United States and in certain locations outside the United States. We also rely upon common law protection for certain trademarks. We generally enter into confidentiality and invention assignment agreements with our employees and contractors, and confidentiality agreements with parties with whom we conduct business, in order to limit access to, and disclosure and use of, our proprietary information. We also use measures designed to control access to our technology and proprietary information. We view our trade secrets and know-how as a significant component of our intellectual property assets, which we believe differentiate us from our competitors.

Any impairment of our intellectual property rights, or any unauthorized disclosure or use of our intellectual property or technology, could harm our business, our ability to compete and our operating results.

Client Dynamics

Sellers

Sellers own or operate media properties, websites and applications through which advertisements can be delivered to consumers as they navigate across screens. Sellers use our platform to monetize and manage their advertising inventory.

While we work with many clients, a relatively small number of them provide a large share of the unique user audiences accessible by buyers. This is particularly true in CTV, where sellers tend to be larger compared to other online sellers. Given the limited number of CTV sellers, we are focused on building deeper, long-term strategic partnerships with these clients through a full-service business development strategy. We have invested significant resources in identifying and cultivating these relationships and our sales executives and account managers often serve a consultative role within a client’s sales organization to help establish best practices and evangelize the benefits of programmatic advertising. This team is further supported by our product and engineering team with deep technical expertise, and for larger clients, we may build out custom features or functionality to help drive deeper adoption of our platform.

In the mobile channel, many of the application providers that make inventory available through our platform utilize system development kits ("SDKs") and other proprietary technology of third parties, such as aggregators, and it is those third parties, not the application providers themselves, that contract with us to help monetize the inventory. Termination or diminution of our relationships with these third parties could result in a material reduction of the amount of mobile inventory

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available through our platform. We encourage application developers to use our own SDK when appropriate, but it is difficult to displace existing SDKs.

Buyers

On the buy-side of our business, we maintain close relationships with brand advertisers and agencies, as well as the technological intermediaries through which they transact on our platform, principally DSPs.

These DSPs are directly connected to our technology through server-to-server integrations and are responsible for bidding on and purchasing advertising inventory on our platform pursuant to master service agreements. We have relationships with almost all of the major DSPs, and because ad spend is highly concentrated among relatively few DSPs, each of these relationships is important to us and represents a source of demand that could be difficult for us to replace.

We maintain close relationships with DSPs to maximize the amount of spend being transacted through our platform. For instance, our sales team collaborates with DSPs to create custom private marketplaces that fit specific targeting criteria for a given campaign and our team of technical account managers continually monitors DSP bidding activities and provides recommendations that inform their trading practices.

While the DSP is directly responsible for purchasing advertising inventory programmatically through our platform, the overall direction of an advertising campaign is typically determined by the advertiser or advertising agency that has engaged the DSP, and for certain reserve auctions, the specific parameters of a campaign may be negotiated directly with the advertiser or agency without involvement of a DSP.

In addition to transacting through DSPs, we also offer brands and agencies the ability to access our platform directly on a managed service basis through the use of insertion orders. For these campaigns, our team of specialists manages the delivery and execution of the campaign according to an agreed set of objectives with the advertiser or agency, at a negotiated fixed price.

Accordingly, in order to increase the amount of spend transacted on our platform, and in furtherance of our SPO efforts, we expend significant resources establishing and expanding relationships directly with brand advertisers and agencies as well as with DSPs.

Geographic Scope of Our Operations

The growth of programmatic advertising is expanding into geographic markets outside of the United States, and in some markets, the adoption rate of programmatic digital advertising is greater than in the United States. We face staffing challenges, including difficulty in recruiting, retaining, and managing a diverse and distributed workforce across time zones, cultures, and languages. We must also adapt our practices to satisfy local requirements and standards (including differing privacy requirements that are sometimes more stringent than in the U.S.), and manage the effects of global and regional pandemics, recessions and economic and political instability. Transactions denominated in various non-U.S. currencies expose us to potentially unfavorable changes in exchange rates and added transaction costs. Foreign operations expose us to potentially adverse tax consequences in the United States and abroad and costs and restrictions affecting the repatriation of funds to the United States. For detailed information regarding our revenue and property and equipment, net by geographical region, see Note 4 and Note 6 of the "Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements."

Regulation

Our business is highly susceptible to existing and emerging privacy regulations and oversight concerning the collection, use and sharing of data. Data protection authorities in the United States and around the world have focused on the advertising technology ecosystem. Because we, and our clients, rely upon large volumes of such data, it is essential that we monitor developments in this area domestically and globally, and engage in responsible privacy practices.

We do not collect information that can be used directly to identify a real person, such as name, address, or phone number, and we take steps to avoid collecting and storing such information. Instead, we rely on pseudonymous forms of data such as IP addresses, general geo-location information, and persistent identifiers about Internet users and do not attempt to associate this data with other data that can be used to identify real people. Increasingly, this type of information is considered "personal" across various jurisdictions and is therefore governed by consumer privacy laws and may be the subject of future legislation or regulation. The definition of personal data varies by country, and now even by U.S. state, and continues to evolve in ways that may require us to adapt our practices to avoid violating laws or regulations related to the collection, storage, and use of consumer data. As a result, our technology platform and business practices must be assessed regularly in each country in which we do business.

There are also a number of specific laws and regulations governing the collection and use of certain types of consumer data relevant to our business. For example, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act ("COPPA"), imposes restrictions on

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the collection and use of data about users of child-directed websites. With respect to COPPA compliance, we have taken various steps to implement a system that: (i) flags seller-identified child-directed sites to buyers, (ii) limits advertisers’ ability to serve personalized advertisements on child-directed sites, (iii) helps limit the types of information that our advertisers have access to when placing advertisements on child-directed sites, and (iv) limits the data that we collect and use on such child-directed sites.

The use and transfer of personal data in the European Economic Area ("EEA") member states and the United Kingdom (“UK”) is currently governed by the General Data Protection Regulation and the UK General Data Protection Regulation (the "GDPR" and "UK GDPR"). The GDPR and UK GDPR set out significant potential liabilities for certain data protection violations and establish significant regulatory requirements resulting in a greater compliance burden for us in the course of delivering our solution in the EEA and UK. While data protection authorities have clarified certain requirements under GDPR and UK GDPR, inconsistent interpretations of the regulations and how to comply with them remain across individual countries.

In addition to the GDPR and UK GDPR, a number of recent privacy regulations will or have already come into effect in the United States. California was the first state to enact an omnibus consumer privacy law in 2018, the California Consumer Privacy Act ("CCPA"), which became effective January 1, 2020. This law imposes substantial obligations on businesses that handle the personal information of California residents. The obligations imposed require us to maintain ongoing significant resources for compliance purposes. In addition, amendments to the CCPA, along with broad-based consumer privacy laws in Connecticut, Colorado, Virginia, and Utah, will all take effect by the end of 2023 and impose obligations that are similar to the CCPA. These new laws will cause us to incur additional compliance costs and impose additional restrictions on us and on our industry partners. In addition, other privacy bills have been introduced at both the state and federal level and certain international territories are imposing new or expanded privacy obligations. In the coming years, we expect further consumer privacy regulation worldwide.

The GDPR and UK GDPR also prohibit the transfer of personal data of EU and UK subjects outside of the EEA and the UK, unless the party exporting the data from the EU or UK implements a compliance mechanism designed to ensure that the receiving party will adequately protect such data. We have historically relied on certain compliance mechanisms that have since been invalidated, and had to shift our business practices to rely on other legally sufficient compliance measures. However, guidance on exactly what measures must be taken to allow the lawful transfer of personal data to the United States remains unclear. It is important to note that the EU and the US have agreed on a successor framework that is supposed to enter into force by the end of 2023 at the latest. The new framework may not address all issues raised by the European Court of Justice and may be challenged in court, too. Until that time, we remain subject to regulatory enforcement by data protection authorities located in the EU, UK, and the United States, so we will continue to interpret the guidance and explore the additional measures that can be implemented to protect personal data that is transferred to us in the United States. By relying on these compliance measures, we risk becoming the subject of regulatory investigations in any of the individual jurisdictions in which we operate. Each such investigation could cost us significant time and resources, and could potentially result in fines, criminal prosecution, or other penalties. Further, to the extent any new guidance emerges to these compliance measures, it could further invalidate our approach to data export from the EEA and UK. It may take us significant time, resources, and effort to restructure our business and/or rely on another legally sufficient compliance measure.

Additionally, our compliance with our privacy policies and our general consumer privacy practices are also subject to review by the Federal Trade Commission, which may bring enforcement actions to challenge allegedly unfair and deceptive trade practices, including the violation of privacy policies and representations therein. Certain State Attorneys General may also bring enforcement actions based on comparable state laws or federal laws that permit state-level enforcement. Outside of the United States, our privacy and data practices are subject to regulation by data protection authorities and other regulators in the countries in which we do business.

Beyond laws and regulations, we are members of self-regulatory bodies that impose additional requirements related to the collection, use, and disclosure of consumer data, including the Internet Advertising Bureau ("IAB"), the Digital Advertising Alliance, the Network Advertising Initiative, and the Europe Interactive Digital Advertising Alliance. Under the requirements of these self-regulatory bodies, in addition to other compliance obligations, we provide consumers with notice via our privacy policy about our use of cookies and other technologies to collect consumer data, and of our collection and use of consumer data to deliver personalized advertisements. We allow consumers to opt-out from the use of data we collect for purposes of behavioral advertising through a mechanism on our website, linked through our privacy policy as well as through portals maintained by some of these self-regulatory bodies.

We support privacy initiatives and believe they will be beneficial to consumers' confidence in advertising technology, which will ultimately be positive for the advertising ecosystem in the long term. However, until prevailing compliance practices

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standardize, the impact of worldwide privacy regulations on our business and, consequently, our revenue could be negatively impacted.

For additional information regarding regulatory risks to our business, see "Item 1A. Risk Factors."

Seasonality

Our advertising spend, revenue, cash flow from operations, Adjusted EBITDA, operating results, and other key operating and financial measures may vary from quarter to quarter due to the seasonal nature of buyer spending. For example, many buyers devote a disproportionate amount of their advertising budgets to the fourth quarter of the calendar year to coincide with increased holiday purchasing. We expect our revenue, cash flow, operating results and other key operating and financial measures to fluctuate based on seasonal factors from period to period and expect these measures to be higher in the fourth quarter than in other quarters.

Available Information

The Company is subject to the reporting requirements of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, or the Exchange Act, and accordingly files Annual Reports on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K, proxy statements, and related amendments and other information with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, or the SEC, pursuant to Sections 13(a) and 15(d) of the Exchange Act. Information filed by the Company with the SEC is available free of charge on the Company’s website at investor.magnite.com as soon as reasonably practicable after such materials are filed with or furnished to the SEC.

Item 1A. Risk Factors

Investing in our common stock involves a high degree of risk, including the risks described below, each of which may be relevant to decisions regarding an investment in or ownership of our stock. The occurrence of any of these risks could have a significant adverse effect on our reputation, business, financial condition, revenue, results of operations, growth, or ability to accomplish our strategic objectives, and could cause the trading price of our common stock to decline. You should carefully consider the risks set forth below and the other information contained in this report, including our consolidated financial statements and related notes and Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations, before making investment decisions related to our common stock. However, this report cannot anticipate and fully address all possible risks of investing in our common stock, the risks of investing in our common stock may change over time, and additional risks and uncertainties that we are not aware of, or that we do not consider to be material, may emerge. Accordingly, you are advised to consider additional sources of information and exercise your own judgment in addition to the information we provide.

Risks Related to Recent Mergers and Acquisitions

We may not be able to achieve anticipated cost savings or other anticipated benefits of the SpotX Acquisition and other recent acquisitions.

While the integration of SpotX, and other recently acquired companies into our core business is well underway, the ultimate success of the these acquisitions will depend, in part, on our ability to continue to successfully integrate such companies with our business and realize the anticipated benefits, including synergies, cost savings, innovation and technological opportunities and operational efficiencies from such transactions in a manner that does not materially disrupt existing customer, supplier and employee relations and does not result in decreased revenues due to losses of, or decreases in use of our solutions by, buyers and sellers of advertising inventory. For example, we recently introduced our unified CTV platform, Magnite Streaming, which merges leading technology from our legacy Magnite CTV and SpotX CTV platforms. We are currently testing the platform with a group of clients, and expect to continue to migrate additional clients to the new platform primarily throughout the first half of 2023 and expect the migration to be completed by the third quarter of 2023. Although we believe our new Magnite Streaming platform represents an industry leading solution, which incorporates cutting edge technology from our legacy platforms, there are certain risks inherent in introducing a new platform. For example, it is possible that our new platform will experience bugs or errors, or clients may not be satisfied with the functionality compared to our legacy CTV platforms. In addition, the migration of clients involves complicated technical and commercial expertise, in particular as relates to the transition of active reserve auctions and private marketplaces, which need to be migrated without disruption. In the event that client migration results in disruption to a seller's business it would reflect negatively on our reputation and we may lose that client’s business in the future. Moreover, the consolidation of our platforms generally will result in our platform sending less overall ad requests to DSPs as we reduce duplicative bids. While we expect this reduction in

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ad requests to lead to greater cost efficiencies, it is possible that the reduction in ad requests will result in a temporary decrease in the number of won ad impressions transacted on our platform, which would negatively impact our revenue.

If we are unable to achieve the anticipated benefits of our recent acquisitions, or if the integration process takes longer than or is more costly than expected, it could negatively affect our business and result of operations. The integration of SpotX and other recently acquired companies with our business involves a number of challenges, including, without limitation:

•managing a larger, more complex business;

•maintaining employee morale and retaining key management and other employees;

•retaining existing business and operational relationships, including clients, suppliers and other vendors;

•consolidating corporate and administrative infrastructures and technology platforms, including unanticipated issues in integrating technology, communications and other systems;

•organizational restructuring and realignment, including the elimination of duplicative roles and other redundancies;

•managing new products that we have not historically offered, such as the SpringServe ad server product, and which may require us to abide by different business rules with respect to data privacy and segmentation;

•coordinating geographically separate organizations; and

•unforeseen expenses or delays associated with the acquisitions.

Many of these factors are outside of our control, and any one of them could result in delays, increased costs, decreases in the amount of expected revenues or cost synergies, and other adverse impacts, which could materially affect our financial position, results of operations and cash flows.

Any acquisitions we undertake may disrupt our business, adversely affect operations, dilute stockholders, and expose us to costs and liabilities.

Acquisitions have been an important element of our business strategy, and we may pursue future acquisitions in an effort to increase revenue, expand our market position, add to our service offering and technological capabilities, respond to dynamic market conditions, or for other strategic or financial purposes. However, there is no assurance that we will identify suitable acquisition candidates or complete any acquisitions on favorable terms, or at all. Further, any acquisitions we do complete would involve a number of risks, which may include the following:

•the identification, acquisition, and integration of acquired businesses require substantial attention from management. The diversion of management's attention and any difficulties encountered in the integration process could hurt our business;

•the identification, acquisition, and integration of acquired businesses requires significant investment, including to determine which new service offerings we might wish to acquire, harmonize service offerings, expand management capabilities and market presence, and improve or increase development efforts and technology features and functions;

•the anticipated benefits from the acquisition may not be achieved, including as a result of loss of clients or personnel of the target, other difficulties in supporting and transitioning the target's clients, the inability to realize expected synergies from an acquisition, or negative organizational cultural effects arising from the integration of new personnel;

•we may face difficulties in integrating the personnel, technologies, solutions, operations, and existing contracts of the acquired business;

•we may fail to identify all of the problems, liabilities or other shortcomings or challenges of an acquired company, technology, or solution, including issues related to intellectual property, solution quality or architecture, income or other taxes and other regulatory compliance practices, revenue recognition or other accounting practices, or employee or client issues;

•to pay for future acquisitions, we could issue additional shares of our common stock or pay cash. Issuance of shares would dilute stockholders. Use of cash reserves could diminish our ability to respond to other opportunities or challenges. Borrowing to fund any cash purchase price would result in increased fixed obligations and could also include covenants or other restrictions that would impair our ability to manage our operations;

•acquisitions expose us to the risk of assumed known and unknown liabilities including contract, tax, regulatory or other legal, and other obligations incurred by the acquired business or fines or penalties, for which indemnity obligations, escrow arrangements or insurance may not be available or may not be sufficient to provide coverage;

•new business acquisitions can generate significant intangible assets that result in substantial related amortization charges and possible impairments;

•the operations of acquired businesses, or our adaptation of those operations, may require that we apply revenue recognition or other accounting methodologies, assumptions, and estimates that are different from those we use in our current business, which could complicate our financial statements, expose us to additional accounting and audit costs, and increase the risk of accounting errors;

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•acquired businesses may have insufficient internal controls that we must remediate, and the integration of acquired businesses may require us to modify or enhance our own internal controls, in each case resulting in increased administrative expense and risk that we fail to comply with the requirements of Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (the "Sarbanes-Oxley Act");

•acquisition of businesses based outside the United States would require us to operate in foreign languages and manage non-U.S. currency, billing, and contracting needs, comply with laws and regulations, including labor laws and privacy laws that in some cases may be more restrictive on our operations than laws applicable to our business in the United States; and

•acquisitions can sometimes lead to disputes with the former owners of the acquired company, which can result in increased legal expenses, management distraction and the risk that we may suffer an adverse judgment if we are not the prevailing party in the dispute.

Risks Related to Economic Conditions and COVID-19

Our revenue and operating results are highly dependent on the overall demand for advertising and any macroeconomic challenges may adversely affect our business, financial position, results of operations and/or cash flows.

Our business depends on the overall demand for advertising and on the economic health of our current and prospective sellers and buyers. If advertisers reduce their overall advertising spending, our revenue and results of operations are directly affected. Accordingly, our business and operations have been, and could in the future be, adversely affected by events beyond our control, such as health epidemics, including the COVID-19 pandemic, geopolitical events, including the conflict in Ukraine, and economic and macroeconomic factors like labor shortages, supply chain disruptions, inflation and recessionary concerns impacting the markets and communities in which our clients operate.

For instance, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and associated economic challenges, a significant number of advertisers, in particular with respect to certain categories of advertising that were particularly impacted by the pandemic and resulting stay-at-home orders, reduced their advertising budgets, resulting in an overall decrease in advertising spend through our platform compared to our pre-COVID expectations. More recently, our business has been negatively impacted as a result of macroeconomic challenges, such as inflation, global hostilities, recession, and other macroeconomic factors, which have generally negatively impacted ad budgets, and in turn led to reduced ad spend through our platform. Any worsening of macroeconomic conditions in future periods would likely have a negative effect on our financial results, the magnitude of which is difficult to predict. In addition, continued inflation could result in an increase in our cost base relative to our revenue.

Risks Related to Our Business, Growth Prospects and Operating Results

If CTV advertising spend grows more slowly than we expect our operating results and growth prospects could be harmed.

The growth of our platform is dependent, in part, on the continued growth in CTV advertising spend. Growth in the CTV advertising market is dependent on a number of factors, including the pace of cord-cutting (the replacement of tradition linear TV for CTV streaming), the continued proliferation of digital content and CTV providers, the adoption of ad-supported models by CTV sellers in lieu of, or in addition to, subscription models, and an acceleration in the shift of ad dollars from traditional linear TV to CTV to keep pace with changing viewership habits. If the market for ad-supported CTV develops more slowly than we expect or fails to develop as a result of these or other factors, our operating results and growth prospects could be harmed.

If CTV sellers fail to adopt programmatic advertising solutions, or adopt such solutions more slowly than we expect, our operating and growth prospects could be harmed.

As digital advertising has continued to scale and evolve, the amount of advertising being bought and sold programmatically has increased dramatically. Despite the opportunities created by programmatic advertising, CTV sellers have been slower to adopt programmatic solutions compared to desktop and mobile video sellers. Many CTV sellers have backgrounds in cable or broadcast television and have limited experience with digital advertising, and in particular programmatic advertising. For these sellers, it is extremely important to protect the quality of the viewer experience to maintain brand goodwill and ensure that online advertising efforts do not create sales channel conflicts or otherwise detract from their direct sales force. In this regard, programmatic advertising presents a number of potential challenges, including the ability to ensure that ads are brand safe, comply with business rules around competitive separation, are not overly repetitive, are played at the appropriate volume and do not cause delays in load-time of content. Our platform was designed to address these challenges and we have invested significant time and resources cultivating relationships with CTV sellers to establish best practices and evangelize the benefits of programmatic CTV.

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While we believe that programmatic advertising will continue to grow as a percentage of overall CTV advertising, there can be no assurances that CTV sellers will adopt programmatic solutions or the speed at which they may adopt such solutions. Any such failure or delay in adoption could negatively impact our finance results and growth prospects.

We may not be able to maintain or increase access to the CTV advertising inventory monetized through our platform on terms acceptable to us.

Our success requires us to maintain and expand our access to premium and unique advertising inventory. We do not own or control the ad inventory upon which our business depends and do not own or create content. Sellers are generally not required to offer a specified level of inventory on our platform, and we cannot be assured that any publisher will continue to make their ad inventory available on our platform. Sellers may seek to change the terms on which they offer inventory on our platform, including with respect to pricing, or may elect to make advertising inventory available to our competitors who offer more favorable economic terms. Due to their significant negotiating leverage, Sellers may also require us to take increased risks in some of our commercial agreements in the form of offering revenue guarantees or minimum spend commitments. Furthermore, sellers may enter into exclusive relationships with our competitors, which preclude us from offering their inventory.

These risks are particularly pronounced with CTV sellers. CTV inventory is highly sought after, and unlike desktop or mobile advertising, which may come from disparate sources, CTV inventory tends to be concentrated on a smaller number of larger sellers that enjoy significant negotiating leverage. This dynamic has been exacerbated by consolidation in the industry, as a number of digital-first CTV sellers have been acquired by larger established television and media brands. In some instances, consolidation may result in the loss of business with an existing client (for example, if an acquiror has a preferred relationship with one of our competitors or has a proprietary solution). As a result of this concentration, the loss of a CTV client may result in a significant decrease in the amount of CTV inventory available through our platform. Any decrease in our ability to access CTV inventory could negatively impact our results, as we view CTV revenue as a key differentiator and driver for our growth.

We may be unsuccessful in our Supply Path Optimization efforts.

SPO refers to efforts by buyers to consolidate the number of vendors with which they work to find the most effective and cost-efficient paths to procure media. There are a number of criteria that buyers use to evaluate supply partners. While we believe we are well positioned to benefit from supply path optimization in the long run as a result of our transparency, our pricing tools, which reduce the overall cost of working with us, our broad and unique inventory supply across all channels and formats, buyer tools such as traffic shaping that reduce the cost of working with us, and our brand safety measures, we compete for demand with a number of well-established companies, and we must continue to adapt and improve our offerings to win buyers' business.

In addition, in order to achieve increased advertising spend or prevent loss of business to a competitor, we may negotiate discounts, rebates, or similar incentives with advertisers or agencies. We believe that because our business has many fixed costs, increases in advertising spend volume generally create opportunities to disproportionately improve our bottom line results, even with increased discounts, rebates or other buyer incentives. However, our revenue could be negatively impacted by discounts, rebates and other buyer incentives, notwithstanding an increase in ad spend.

Our technology development efforts may be inefficient or ineffective, which may impair our ability to attract buyers and sellers.

We face intense competition in the marketplace and are confronted by rapidly changing technology, evolving industry standards and consumer needs, regulatory changes, and the frequent introduction of new solutions by our competitors to which we must adapt and respond. Our future success will depend in part upon our ability to enhance our existing solution and to develop and introduce competing new solutions in a timely manner with features and pricing that meet changing client and market requirements. Our solutions are complex and can require a significant investment of time and resources to develop, test, introduce, and enhance. These activities can take longer than we expect. We schedule and prioritize our development efforts according to a variety of factors, including our perceptions of market trends, client requirements, and resource availability; however, we may encounter unanticipated difficulties that require us to re-direct, scale back, or modify our efforts. If development of our solution becomes significantly more expensive due to changes in regulatory requirements or industry practices, or other factors, we may find ourselves at a disadvantage to larger competitors with more resources to devote to development. These factors place significant demands upon our engineering organization, require complex planning, and can result in acceleration of some initiatives and delay of others. We have expanded our use of outsourced software development, which may put the company at greater risk with respect to our technology development because we may have less control over the performance of outside programmers and we may be at greater risk of losing their services. To the extent we do not manage our development efforts efficiently and effectively, we may fail to produce solutions that respond appropriately to the needs of buyers and sellers, and competitors may more successfully develop responsive offerings. If our solution is not competitive, buyers and sellers can be expected to shift their business to competing solutions. Buyers and sellers may also resist adopting our

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new solutions for various reasons, including reluctance to disrupt existing relationships and business practices or to invest in necessary technological integration.

The emergence of header bidding has increased competition from other demand sources and may cause infrastructure strain and added cost.

In the mobile and desktop channels, the vast majority of sellers have embraced header bidding technology, a solution by which impressions that would have previously been exposed to different potential sources of demand in a sequence dictated by ad server priorities are instead available for concurrent competitive bidding by demand sources. This can help sellers increase revenue by exposing their inventory to more bidders, thereby allocating more inventory to demand sources that value it most highly. While header bidding has increased our access to certain pools of inventory that otherwise would have been allocated first to other exchanges, thus increasing our revenue opportunity, it has also resulted in a number of challenges for our business. For instance, some sellers may choose not to integrate with us as a header-bidding demand source, or may prioritize other sources of demand, including owners of the header bidding solutions, leaving us at a competitive disadvantage in the auction. In addition, header bidding generally exposes us to additional competition by demand sources that, prior to the emergence of header bidding, might have been below us in the sellers' ad server sequences or otherwise unable to compete effectively for inventory. Lastly, header-bidding has vastly increased the volume of ad requests that need to be processed and analyzed through our system, resulting in increased infrastructure costs.

If we are unable to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of our header bidding solutions and installations, we may not fully offset these increased infrastructure costs, and we will not be able to take full advantage of the opportunities made available through current header bidding technology to access a larger addressable market and increase our revenue by capturing a greater share of inventory. In addition, our success in monetizing impressions through header-bidding solutions is dependent on the interoperability of our platform with proprietary header-bidding solutions, some of which are owned by our competitors. As a result, we may be susceptible to evolution in technology and changes in business practices by the owners of such header-bidding solutions that we cannot predict.

While header-bidding technologies have not been largely adopted by CTV sellers, such solutions or similar solutions geared towards increasing demand competition may become more prevalent in the future. If we are not able to effectively offer or adapt our technology to such solutions, it may lead to increased competition for CTV inventory, resulting in reduced opportunities or higher costs to monetize such inventory. We plan to address this, in part, through our recent acquisition of SpringServe, which offers sellers a unified programmatic demand solution for CTV, which leverages our existing programmatic SSP capabilities as well as connecting with third party programmatic demand sources. However, this is a new offering and it may not be adopted by clients, or such clients may adopt competing solutions.

We must increase the scale and efficiency of our technology infrastructure to support our growth and transaction volumes.

Our technology must scale to process the increased ad requests on our platform. Additionally, for each individual advertising impression created when a user visits a website or uses an application where our auctions technology is integrated, our technology must send bid requests to appropriate buyers, receive and process their responses, select a winner, and, increasingly, integrate with downstream decisioning systems. It must perform these transactions end-to-end within milliseconds. We must continue to increase the capacity of our platform to support our high-volume strategy, to cope with increased data volumes and parties resulting from header bidding and an increasing variety of advertising formats and platforms, and to maintain a stable service infrastructure and reliable service delivery. To the extent we are unable, for cost or other reasons, to effectively increase the capacity of our platform, continue to process transactions at fast enough speeds, and support emerging advertising formats or services preferred by buyers, our revenue will suffer. We expect to continue to invest in our platform to meet increasing demand. Such investment may negatively affect our profitability and results of operations.

Our belief that there is significant and growing demand for reserve auctions may be inaccurate, and we may not realize a return from our investments in that area.

We believe there is significant and growing demand for reserve auctions, where publishers establish direct deals or private marketplaces with select buyers, and we have made significant investments to meet that demand and grow our market share of reserve auctions. Currently, the majority of CTV transactions are executed through reserve auctions and we expect reserve auctions to grow as a percentage of revenue in mobile and desktop as well. Additionally, we expect our Demand Manager solution to serve as a tool for increasing the prevalence of reserve auction in desktop and mobile. Reserve auctions may involve lower fees than we can charge for open marketplace transactions, which may not be fully offset by anticipated higher CPMs. In some cases, we have experienced fee pressure as we have built out our reserve auction offering, and we expect this fee pressure to increase as more competitors, including new entrants as well as sellers themselves, build their own technology and infrastructure to enable reserve auctions. Even if the market for these solutions develops as we anticipate, and our buyers and sellers embrace our offerings, the positive effect of our reserve auction offerings on our results of operations may be offset or negated if reserve auctions cannibalize our open marketplace transaction volumes, by similar offerings from our competitors, or through other adverse developments.

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We have invested heavily in our mobile technology, which poses unique risks compared to our desktop display business. To the extent our access to mobile inventory is limited by third-party technology or lack of direct relationships with mobile sellers, our ability to grow our business will be impaired.

Due to increased usage of mobile devices and resulting migration of advertising spending to mobile platforms, we have invested heavily in our mobile technology. Our success in the mobile channel depends upon the ability of our technology solution to provide advertising for most mobile-connected devices, as well as the major operating systems or Internet browsers that run on them and the thousands of applications that are downloaded onto them. The design of mobile devices and operating systems, applications, or Internet browsers is controlled by third parties. These parties frequently introduce new devices and applications, and from time to time they may introduce new operating systems or Internet browsers or modify existing ones in ways that may significantly affect our business, such as by providing ad-blocking capabilities or by limiting access to Internet user data. Network carriers may also affect the ability to access specified content on mobile devices. To the extent our solution is unable to work on these devices, operating systems, applications, or Internet browsers for any reason, our ability to generate revenue through mobile advertising is significantly impaired, and that impairment may be material.

We expect mobile applications to be the largest driver of our mobile business. Many mobile apps utilize software development kits, or SDKs, and other proprietary technology of third parties, such as aggregators, and it is those third parties, not the application providers themselves, that contract with us to provide exchange services to help monetize the inventory. Due to this consolidation, if our relationships with these third parties decline or are terminated, it may result in a larger than usual loss of access to mobile inventory. Any rapid and/or significant decline in the availability of mobile inventory can adversely affect our mobile advertising spend and growth prospects.

Fee issues have in the past and could in the future have a material adverse effect on our business.

A majority of our revenue comes from buyers purchasing advertising inventory made available by sellers on our platform. We experience requests from buyers for discounts, fee concessions or revisions, rebates or other forms of consideration, refunds, and greater levels of pricing transparency and specificity, in some cases as a condition to maintain the relationship or to increase the amount of advertising spend that the buyer sends to our platform. In addition, we charge fees to sellers for use of our technology, typically as a percentage of the cost of media, and we may decide to offer discounts or other pricing concessions in order to attract more inventory or demand, or to compete effectively with other providers that have different or lower pricing structures and may be able to undercut our pricing due to greater scale or other factors. Our revenue, take rate (our fee as a percentage of advertising spend), the value of our business, and the price of our stock could be adversely affected if we cannot maintain and grow our revenue and profitability through volume increases that compensate for price reductions, or if we are forced to make significant fee concessions, rebates, or refunds, or if buyers reduce spending with us or sellers reduce inventory available through our exchange due to fee disputes or pricing issues.

Our take rates may be difficult to forecast and may decrease in future periods; any decrease in our take rates may result in a decrease in our revenue notwithstanding an increase in the amount of spend transacted through our platform.

We generate revenue through our platform on a transactional basis where we are paid by a publisher each time an impression is monetized on our platform. Typically, this fee is structured as a percentage of advertising spend that the publisher receives for its inventory. Our take rate varies by publisher and transaction type. For instance, our take rate tends to be lower for reserve auctions compared to open auctions, and tends to be lower on CTV transactions compared to other channels. Additionally, take rates tend to be higher for our managed service business where we are responsible for delivering a campaign at a fixed price. We may also negotiate lower take rates with large sellers to win additional business or share of inventory.

As a result of these factors, even if we are able to accurately forecast the anticipated total advertising spend transacted by buyers across our platform, we may have limited visibility regarding the revenue or Revenue ex-TAC (as defined in section "Key Operating and Financial Performance Metrics") we will generate. Any decrease in our take rate could cause our revenue and Revenue ex-TAC to decrease notwithstanding an increase in the total spend transacted through our seller platform.

We have a history of losses and we face many risks that may prevent us from achieving or sustaining profitability in the future.

We reported net loss of $130.3 million, net income of $0.1 million, and net loss of $53.4 million during the years ended December 31, 2022, 2021, and 2020, respectively. As of December 31, 2022, we had an accumulated deficit of $524.8 million. We have implemented strategic plans designed to improve our financial performance and continue to increase revenue, and have taken steps to reduce unnecessary expenses and redirect spending to areas we expect to produce higher growth; however, these plans and steps may ultimately prove to be unsuccessful.

Notwithstanding these measures, revenue could decrease due to competitive pressures, maturation of our business, macroeconomic or other factors, and additional cost-reduction measures may be required even as we must continue to increase investment in technology in response to industry developments and to retain competitiveness. We may not be able to sustain growth or to achieve or sustain profitability in the future.

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Our business and the businesses of our advertiser clients may be subject to sales and use tax, advertising and other taxes.

The application of sales and use tax, goods and services tax, business tax and gross receipt tax on our digital services is complex and evolving. In general, sales of tangible personal property are subject to sales and use tax unless a specific exemption applies, while services generally are not subject to sales tax unless specifically enumerated. Advertising services are considered a service and are generally not subject to sales and use tax, except in a few states. For example, Maryland adopted a tax on gross revenues from digital advertising. While the law has already been successfully challenged, the law took effect and we are technically subject to the tax, which increases our cost of doing business. Other states are looking to follow suit and tax either digital advertising or other goods or services. In addition, the continual evolution of our services and the expansion of our business offerings may further complicate the determination of the sales taxability of our services in certain jurisdictions.

As a result of various factors, our operating results have in the past and may in the future fluctuate significantly, be difficult to predict, and fall below analysts' and investors' expectations.

Our operating results are difficult to predict, particularly because we generally do not have long-term contracts with buyers or sellers. We have experienced significant variations in revenue and operating results from period to period, and operating results may continue to fluctuate and be difficult to predict due to a number of factors, including:

•seasonality in demand for digital advertising, as many advertisers devote a disproportionate amount of their advertising budgets to the fourth quarter of the calendar year to coincide with increased holiday purchasing, and advertising inventory in the fourth quarter may be more expensive due to increased demand for advertising inventory;

•changes in pricing of advertising inventory or pricing for our solution and our competitors' offerings, including potential further reductions in our pricing and overall take rate as a result of competitive pressure, changes in supply, improvements in technology and extension of automation to higher-value inventory, uncertainty regarding rate of adoption, changes in the allocation of demand spend by buyers, changes in revenue mix, auction dynamics, pricing discussions or negotiations with clients and potential clients, header bidding and other factors;

•diversification of our revenue mix to include new services, some of which may have lower pricing or may cannibalize existing business;

•the addition or loss of buyers or sellers;

•general economic conditions and the economic health of our current and prospective sellers and buyers;

•changes in the advertising strategies or budgets or financial condition of advertisers;

•the performance of our technology and the cost, timeliness, and results of our technology innovation efforts;

•advertising technology and digital media industry conditions and the overall demand for advertising, or changes and uncertainty in the regulatory environment for us or buyers or sellers, including with respect to privacy regulation;

•the introduction of new technologies or service offerings by our competitors and market acceptance of such technologies or services;

•the phasing out of third-party cookies throughout the industry;

•our level of expenses, including investment required to support our technology development, scale our technology infrastructure and business expansion efforts, including acquisitions, hiring and capital expenditures, or expenses related to litigation;

•the success of the consolidation of our two CTV platforms;

•the impact of changes in our stock price on valuation of stock-based compensation or other instruments that are marked to market;

•the effectiveness of our financial and information technology infrastructure and controls;

•geopolitical and social factors, such as concerns regarding negative, unstable or changing economic conditions in the countries and regions where we operate, global and regional recessions, political instability, and trade disputes;

•foreign exchange rate fluctuations; and

•changes in accounting policies and principles and the significant judgments and estimates made by management in the application of these policies and principles.

Because significant portions of our expenses are relatively fixed, variation in our quarterly revenue can cause significant variations in operating results and resulting stock price volatility from period to period. Period-to-period comparisons of our historical results of operations are not necessarily meaningful, and historical operating results may not be indicative of future performance. If our revenue or operating results fall below the expectations of investors or securities analysts, or below any guidance we may provide to the market, the price of our common stock could decline substantially.

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Risks Related to Our Relationships with Buyers and Sellers and Other Strategic Relationships

We rely on buyers and sellers to abide by contractual requirements and relevant laws, rules, and regulations when using our solution. The acts or omissions of buyers or sellers, or our own failure to meet advertising and inventory content standards and provide services that our buyers and sellers trust, could harm our brand and reputation and those of our partners, and negatively impact our business, financial condition and results of operations.

The buyers and sellers engaging in transactions through our platform impose various requirements upon each other, and they and the underlying advertisers are subject to regulatory requirements by governments and standards bodies applicable to their activities. Though we contractually require buyers and sellers to abide by relevant laws, rules and regulations, as well as restrictions by their counterparties, when transacting on our platform, we do not control the content of the advertisements that we serve or the content of the websites providing the inventory, and there are many circumstances in which it is difficult or impossible for us to monitor or evaluate the compliance of our buyers and sellers. If buyers or sellers fail to abide by relevant laws, rules and regulations, or contract requirements, we could potentially face liability for such misuse.

In addition, both advertisers and inventory suppliers are concerned about being associated with content they consider inappropriate, competitive or inconsistent with their brands, or illegal, and they are hesitant to spend money or make inventory available, respectively, without some guarantee of brand security. Buyers increasingly require us to accept liability for inventory quality and sellers increasingly require us to accept liability for ad content. Consequently, our reputation depends in part on providing services that our buyers and sellers trust, and we have contractual obligations to meet content and inventory standards. We contractually prohibit the misuse of our platform by our buyers and sellers and actively monitor inventory against our quality guidelines. Despite such efforts, we may provide access to inventory that is objectionable to our buyers or serve advertising that contains objectionable content, which could harm our or our clients’ brand and reputation, decrease their trust in our platform, and negatively impact our business, financial condition and results of operations. Furthermore, we may receive public pressure to discontinue working with certain sellers or buyers on our platform and our determination whether to continue or cease working with a given client may subject us to reputational risk.

Our contracts with buyers and sellers are generally not exclusive, may be terminated upon relatively short notice, and generally do not require minimum volumes or long-term commitments. If buyers or sellers representing a significant portion of the demand or inventory in our marketplace decide to materially reduce the use of our solution, we could experience an immediate and significant decline in our revenue and profitability and harm to our business.

Generally, our buyers and sellers are not obligated to provide us with any minimum volumes of business, may do business with our competitors as well as with us, may reduce or cancel their business with us or terminate our contracts without penalty, and may bypass us and transact directly with each other or through other intermediaries that compete with us. Accordingly, our business is highly vulnerable to changes in the macro environment, price competition, and development of new or more compelling offerings by our competitors, which could reduce business generally or motivate buyers or sellers to migrate to competitors’ offerings.

Sellers and buyers may seek to change the terms on which they do business with us, or allocate their advertising inventory or demand to our competitors who provide advertising demand and supply to them on more favorable terms or whose offerings are considered more beneficial. Supply of advertising inventory is also limited for some sellers, such as special sites or new technologies, and sellers may request higher prices, fixed price arrangements or guarantees that we cannot provide as effectively as our competitors, or that would reduce the profitability of that business. In addition, sellers sometimes place significant restrictions on the sale of their advertising inventory, such as strict security requirements, limitations on data sharing, prohibitions on advertisements from specific advertisers or specific industries, and restrictions on the use of specified creative content or format. Finally, with the proliferation of header bidding, sellers' inventory is available for purchase through multiple exchanges simultaneously. Buyers, in turn, are free to direct their spend to us or one or more of our competitors, and increasingly are seeking price concessions, rebates, or other consideration to direct more spend towards us.

We serve many buyers and sellers, but certain large buyers and sellers have accounted for and will continue to account for a disproportionate share of business transacted through our solution. In 2022 there were two buyers of advertising inventory that indirectly contributed to approximately 35% of revenue through their buying activity from sellers on our platform. If a buyer or group of buyers representing a significant portion of the demand in our marketplace, or a seller or group of sellers representing a significant portion of the inventory in our marketplace decides to materially reduce use of our solutions, it could cause an immediate and significant decline in our revenue and profitability and harm to our business. In addition, loss of substantial inventory or demand could degrade our marketplace. Loss of major DSP sources of demand could adversely affect bid density or pricing in our auctions, and reduction in fees if we are not able to redirect inventory to other demand sources. Loss of important unique inventory could reduce fees from demand that cannot be shifted to other sellers and make it harder to differentiate ourselves from our competitors. The number of large media buyers and sellers in the market is finite, and it could be difficult for us to replace the losses from any buyers or sellers whose relationships with us diminish or terminate. Additionally, if we overestimate future usage, we may incur additional expenses in adding infrastructure without a commensurate increase in revenue, which would harm our profitability and other operating results.

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Because of these factors, we seek to expand and diversify our client relationships. In particular, as part of our strategy to increase the volume of advertising inventory on our exchange, we are continuing relationships with aggregators of inventory and with large sources of supply that have their own monetization capabilities but also allow third parties to connect to their exchanges and bid on their inventory. These relationships represent additional risks in terms of inventory quality, transaction discrepancies, and collections, and may be less profitable because we may be required to compensate these partners or share the fees available for intermediaries in these transactions, and may incur higher serving costs relative to revenue.

We must provide value to both buyers and sellers of advertising without being perceived as favoring one over the other or being perceived as competing with them through our service offerings.

We are interposed between buyers and sellers, and to be successful, we must continue to find ways of providing value to both without being perceived as favoring one at the expense of the other. For example, our proprietary auction algorithms, which are designed to improve auction outcomes, influence the allocation and pricing of impressions and must do so in ways that add value to both buyers and sellers. Continued technological evolution in the availability and use of more data to inform buying and selling decisions necessitates that we, as an intermediary, use data in a manner that complies with the expectations of both our seller and buyer clients. Furthermore, because new business models continue to emerge, we must constantly adapt our relationship with buyers and sellers and how we market ourselves to each. Consistent with our goal of connecting buyers and sellers, we seek to grow our connections to each, and we must take care that our deeper connections with buyers, on the one hand, or sellers, on the other hand, do not come at the expense of the other's interests. In addition, as our own capabilities evolve, we may be perceived by clients, particularly buyers, as competing with them. If we fail to balance our clients' interests appropriately, our ability to provide a full suite of services and our growth prospects may be compromised.

We rely on technological intermediaries such as DSPs to purchase advertising on behalf of advertisers. Such buyers may have or develop high-risk credit profiles or pay slowly, which may result in credit risk to us or require additional working capital to fund our accounts payable. In addition, direct billing arrangements between buyers and sellers may result in unfavorable fee dynamics and increased working capital demands.

Generally, we invoice and collect from buyers the full purchase price for impressions they have purchased, retain our fees, and remit the balance to sellers. However, in some cases, we may be required or choose to pay sellers for impressions delivered before we have collected, or even if we are unable to collect, from the buyer of those impressions. There can be no assurances that we will not experience bad debt in the future, and write-offs for bad debt could have a materially negative effect on our results of operations for the periods in which the write-offs occur. In addition, we attempt to coordinate collections from our buyers so as to fund our payment obligations to our sellers. However, some buyers and sellers may require direct billing and collection arrangements between themselves, and some providers of header bidding wrappers or other downstream decisioning mechanisms in which we participate (such as Google EB) may control billing and collection for transactions we win through their platforms. Further, growth and increased competitive pressure in the digital advertising industry is causing advertisers and buyers to become more demanding, resulting in overall increased focus by all industry participants on pricing, transparency, and cash and collection cycles. Some buyers have experienced financial pressures that have motivated them to slow the timing of their payments to us. If buyers slow their payments to us or our cash collections are significantly diminished as a result of these dynamics, our revenue and/or cash flow could be adversely affected and we may need to use working capital to fund our accounts payable pending collection from the buyers. This may result in additional costs and cause us to forgo or defer other more productive uses of that working capital.

Our sales efforts with buyers and sellers may require significant time and expense and may not yield the results we seek.

Attracting new buyers and sellers and increasing our business with existing buyers and sellers involves substantial time, expense, and personnel investments, and we may not be successful in our efforts. This is particularly true with respect to our managed service business, which relies on direct relationships with advertisers, and is therefore more resource intensive. We may spend substantial time and effort educating buyers and sellers about our offerings, including providing demonstrations and comparisons against other available solutions. Certain of our product offerings require a significant amount of time and costs in the initial client setup and implementation, and we generally do not recognize revenue from such clients until we commence services. This process can be costly and time-consuming, and is complicated by us having to spend time integrating our solution with software of buyers and sellers. Because our solution may be less familiar in some markets outside the United States, the time and expense involved with attracting, educating and integrating buyers and sellers in international markets may be even greater than in the United States. If we are not successful in targeting, supporting and streamlining our sales processes, our ability to grow our business may be adversely affected. In addition, because of competitive market conditions and negotiating leverage enjoyed by large buyers and sellers, we are sometimes forced to choose between loss of business or contracting on terms that allocate more risk to us than we would prefer to accept.

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Our business relationships expose us to risk of substantial liability for contract breach, violation of laws and regulations, intellectual property infringement and other losses, and our contractual indemnities and limitations of liability may not protect us adequately.

Our agreements with sellers, buyers and other third parties typically obligate us to provide indemnity and defense for losses resulting from claims of intellectual property infringement, damages to property or persons, business losses or other liabilities. Generally, these indemnity and defense obligations relate to our own business operations, obligations and acts or omissions. However, under some circumstances, we agree to indemnify and defend contract counterparties against losses resulting from their own business operations, obligations and acts or omissions, or the business operations, obligations and acts or omissions of third parties. For example, because our business interposes us between buyers and sellers in various ways, buyers often require us to indemnify them against acts and omissions of sellers, and sellers often require us to indemnify them against acts and omissions of buyers. Large indemnity obligations, or obligations to third parties not adequately covered by the indemnity obligations of our contract counterparties, could expose us to significant costs.

Our solution relies on third-party open source software components. Failure to comply with the terms of the underlying open source software licenses could expose us to liabilities, and the combination of certain open source software with code that we develop could compromise the proprietary nature of our solution.

Our solution utilizes software licensed to us by third-party authors under "open source" licenses. The use of open source software may entail greater risks than the use of third-party commercial software, as open source licensors generally do not provide warranties or other contractual protections regarding infringement claims or the quality of the code. If we combine our proprietary software with open source software in a certain manner, we could, under certain open source licenses, be required to release the source code of our proprietary software to the public. This would allow our competitors to create similar solutions with lower development effort and time and ultimately put us at a competitive disadvantage.

The terms of many open source licenses have not been interpreted by U.S. courts, and there is a risk that these licenses could be construed in a way that could impose unanticipated conditions or restrictions on us. Moreover, we cannot guarantee that our processes for controlling our use of open source software will be effective. If we are held to have breached the terms of an open source software license, we could be required to seek licenses from third parties to continue operating using our solution on terms that are not economically feasible, to re-engineer our solution or the supporting computational infrastructure to discontinue use of certain code, or to make generally available, in source code form, portions of our proprietary code.

Risks Related to the Advertising Technology Industry, Market, and Competition

The digital advertising market may develop more slowly or differently than we expect, if so our business, growth prospects and financial condition would be adversely affected.

Our future growth will be constrained if we are not able to adapt successfully to market evolution. It is difficult to predict adoption rates, demand for our solution, the future growth rate and size of the digital advertising solutions market or the entry of competitive solutions. Any expansion of the market for digital advertising solutions depends on a number of factors, including social and regulatory acceptance, the growth of the overall digital advertising market and the growth of specific sectors including CTV, social, mobile, video, and out-of-home as well as the actual or perceived technological viability, quality, cost, performance and value associated with emerging digital advertising solutions. If digital marketing does not develop in the manner we expect, our business and financial condition would be adversely affected.

We operate in an intensely competitive market that includes companies that have greater financial, technical and marketing resources than we do.

We face intense competition in the marketplace. We compete for advertising spending against competitors that, in some cases, are also buyers and/or sellers on our platform. We also compete for supply of advertising inventory against a variety of competitors. Some of our existing and potential competitors are better established, benefit from greater name recognition, may have offerings and technology that we do not have or have significantly more financial, technical, sales, and marketing resources than we do. In addition, some competitors, particularly those with greater scale or a more diversified revenue base and a broader offering, have greater flexibility than we do to compete aggressively on the basis of price and other contract terms, or to compete with us by including in their product offerings services that we may not provide. Some existing and potential buyers have their own direct relationships with sellers or are seeking to establish such relationships, and many sellers are investing in capabilities that enable them to connect more effectively directly with buyers without the use of intermediaries such as us. Our business suffers to the extent that buyers and sellers purchase and sell advertising inventory directly from one another or through intermediaries other than us, reducing the amount of advertising spend on our platform. New or stronger competitors may emerge through acquisitions and industry consolidation or through development of disruptive

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technologies. If our offerings are not perceived as competitively differentiated, we could lose clients, market share or be compelled to reduce our prices, making it more difficult to grow our business profitably.

There has been rapid evolution and consolidation in the advertising technology industry, and we expect these trends to continue, thereby increasing the capabilities and competitive posture of larger companies, particularly those that are already dominant in various ways, and enabling new or stronger competitors to emerge. There is a finite number of large buyers and sellers in our target markets, and any consolidation of buyers or sellers may give the resulting enterprises greater bargaining power or result in the loss of buyers and sellers that use our platform, and thus reduce our potential base of buyers and sellers, each of which would lead to erosion of our revenue.

As technology continues to improve and market factors continue to attract investment, competition and pricing pressure may increase and market saturation may change the competitive landscape in favor of larger competitors with greater scale and broader offerings, including those that can afford to spend more than we can to grow more quickly and strengthen their competitive position. In addition, our competitors or potential competitors may adopt certain aspects of our business model, which could reduce our ability to differentiate our solutions.

For all of these reasons, we may not be able to compete successfully against our current and future competitors.

Risks Related to Our Collection, Use and Disclosure of Data

Our business depends on our ability to collect and use data to deliver advertisements, and to disclose data relating to the performance of advertisements. Any limitation imposed on our collection, use or disclosure of this data could significantly diminish the value of our solution and cause us to lose sellers, buyers, and revenue. Consumer tools, regulatory restrictions and technological limitations all threaten our ability to use and disclose data.

The more informed advertising is about its audience, the more valuable it is. Programmatic advertising enables more precise audience targeting based on the interests and actions of the user. Targeted advertising is generally more effective and valuable for buyers than other types of advertising, resulting in more revenue for sellers. In order to target advertising, we and our clients must collect and use data in a variety of ways. Our ability to collect, use, and share data about advertising purchase and sale transactions and user behavior and interaction with content is critical to the value of our services, and any limitation on our data practices could impair our ability to deliver effective solutions to our clients. Any restriction on the types of data we collect could make placement of advertising through our solution less valuable, with commensurate reductions in revenue.

Consumers can, with increasing ease, implement practices or technologies that may limit our ability, or that of our sellers, buyers and business partners, to collect data. For example, users may delete or block the use of the cookies and similar technologies used to collect data, including through their browser or mobile device settings. Consumers may also download "ad blocking" software that prevents certain cookies from being stored on a user’s computer or mobile device or from making calls to advertising partners. This may prevent the display of targeted or other advertisements. In addition, device manufacturers, browsers and other tools are increasingly promoting features that allow users to disable the collection of data. For example, Apple now requires user opt-in before permitting access to Apple’s unique identifier, or IDFA. This shift from enabling user opt-out to an opt-in requirement has had, and will likely continue to have, a substantial impact on the mobile advertising ecosystem and could harm growth in this channel. User privacy features of other channels of programmatic advertising, such as CTV or over-the-top video, are also still developing. Technical or policy changes, including regulation or industry self-regulation, could harm our growth in those channels.

In addition, current and potential future privacy laws and regulations in the U.S. and abroad already restrict, and could further restrict, the ability to collect and process certain types of user data, including, in the case of GDPR and UK GDPR, requiring user consent or another legal basis in order to collect or process personal data and, in the case of CCPA and other state privacy laws, giving the user a right to opt out of the sale of their personal data as well as the sharing and processing of such data for targeted advertising purposes. To the extent sellers are unable to obtain valid consent or an alternative legal basis or otherwise become restricted from processing or sharing data for targeted advertising purposes, it would impair the ability to deliver targeted advertisements on their inventory.

Further, much of the data we collect and use belongs to our buyers or sellers, and we receive their permission to use it. Although our sellers and buyers generally permit us to aggregate and use data from advertising placements, subject to certain restrictions, sellers or buyers might decide to restrict our collection or use of their data. There could be various reasons for this, including perceptions by buyers that their data can be used by sellers to extract higher prices for impressions, or perceptions by sellers that their data can be used by buyers to bid tactically to reduce pricing for impressions. As consumers continue to increase their use of digital technology and to incorporate multiple devices into their lives, linking and using data across such devices will become increasingly important. Various challenges affect our ability to link data relating to discrete devices or browsers, including different technologies, increased user awareness and sensitivity regarding use of data about their device usage, and evolving regulatory and self-regulatory standards. These challenges may slow growth, and if we are not able to cope with these challenges as effectively as other companies, we will be competitively disadvantaged. Any limitation on our ability

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to collect data about user behavior and interaction with content could make it more difficult for us to deliver effective solutions that meet the needs of sellers and buyers.

If cookies are replaced by alternative tracking mechanisms, our performance may decline and we may lose buyers and revenue.

Industry participants in the advertising technology ecosystem have taken or may take action to eliminate or restrict the use of cookies and other identifiers, and we expect the use of third-party cookies to be largely phased out by the end of 2024. For instance, Google has announced plans to fully eliminate support for third-party cookies in the Chrome browser by the end of 2024, while Apple has further restricted the use of mobile identifiers on its devices. In the absence of third-party cookies, it is possible that these or other companies in our ecosystem may rely on proprietary algorithms or statistical methods to track web users without cookies, or may utilize log-in credentials entered by users, to track web usage, including usage across multiple devices, without cookies. Alternatively, such companies may build different and potentially proprietary user tracking methods into their widely-used web browsers. While these new identification solutions will likely provide some level of consistency and compatibility with our platform, they are unreleased and unproven, and will require substantial development and commercial changes for us to support. There is also further risk that the changes will disproportionately benefit the owners of these platforms or the large walled gardens that have access to large amounts of first party data. Even if cookies are effectively replaced by open industry-wide tracking standards rather than proprietary standards, we may still incur substantial re-engineering costs to replace cookies with these new technologies. This may also diminish the quality or value of our services to buyers if such new technologies do not provide us with the quality or timeliness of the data that we currently generate from cookies.

Our belief that the elimination of third-party cookies will lead to an increased use of first-party publisher data may be incorrect.

We believe that the elimination of third party cookies has the potential to shift the programmatic ecosystem from an identity model powered by buyers that are able to aggregate and target audiences through cookies and other tracking technologies to one enabled by sellers that have direct relationships with consumers and are therefore better positioned to obtain user data and consent for implementing first party identifiers. While we believe that our platform and scale position us well to provide the infrastructure and tools needed for a publisher-centric identity model to succeed, there is no guarantee that our efforts will lead to an increase of the use of first-party publisher segments in the ecosystem. It is also possible that the increased use of first-party publisher segments will disproportionately benefit sellers or the large walled gardens that have access to large amounts of first party data. Additionally, these changes could create some variability in our revenue across certain buyers or sellers, depending on the timing of changes and developed solutions, and even if there is an increase in the proliferation of first-party publisher segments, we may still incur substantial re-engineering costs to optimize our solution for use with such segments.

Risks Related to Regulation

Legislation and regulation of digital businesses, including privacy and data protection regimes, could create unexpected additional costs, subject us to enforcement actions for compliance failures, or cause us to change our technology solution or business model, which may have an adverse effect on the demand for our solution.

Many local, state, federal, and international laws and regulations apply to the collection, use, retention, protection, disclosure, transfer, and other processing of data collected from and about consumers and devices, and the regulatory framework for privacy issues is evolving worldwide. Various U.S. and foreign governments, consumer agencies, self-regulatory bodies, and public advocacy groups have called for or implemented new regulation directly impacting the digital advertising industry. For example, while California was the first state to enact an omnibus consumer privacy law in 2018, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah, and Virginia will each have similar laws become effective by the end of 2023, each of which affect the digital advertising ecosystem. In the future, we expect to see more state regulation, as well as potential federal regulation, aimed at the collection and use of data to target advertisements and communicate with consumers. Such legislation or regulation could affect the costs of doing business online and may adversely affect the demand for or the effectiveness and value of our solution. Some of our competitors may have more access to lobbyists or governmental officials and may use such access to effect statutory or regulatory changes in a manner that commercially harms us while favoring their solutions.

At the state level, amendments to the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 ("CCPA"), California’s omnibus privacy law regulating business’ processing of personal information, take effect in 2023. Amendments include the establishment of a new privacy agency known as the California Privacy Protection Agency (“CPPA”) and gives that agency broad rulemaking authority to issue regulations that could have additional impacts on our business. In addition, by the end of 2023, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah, and Virginiawill have adopted broad-based consumer privacy laws similar to the CCPA. These state laws define “personal information” or “personal data” in ways that capture the types of data that we collect, such as device identifiers and IP addresses. Under these laws, consumers have broad privacy rights (including rights of access and

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deletion), which bear similarity to some of the data subject rights granted to EEA and UK residents under the GDPR and UK GDPR. In addition, these laws require all businesses that engage in certain advertising uses of consumer personal information to offer and honor an opt-out of such activities, including, in some states, through browser or device-based preference signals. The implementation of these state laws and any corresponding regulations will cause us to incur additional compliance costs and may impose additional restrictions on us and on our industry partners.

A potential federal privacy law remains the subject of active discussion; in June 2022, a bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced a bill that would substantially impact the digital advertising ecosystem if passed. Any federal privacy law would likely place significant restrictions on the collection and use of certain types of data used for behavioral advertising. Even without federal privacy legislation, the collection and use of data and privacy in the advertising technology industry has frequently been subject to review by the FTC.

In the European Economic Area ("EEA") and the United Kingdom ("UK"), the General Data Protection Regulation, Regulation (EU) 2016/679 ("GDPR") and UK General Data Protection Regulation ("UK GDPR") respectively treat much of the end-user information that is critical to programmatic digital advertising as "personal data", subject to significant conditions and restrictions on its collection, use, transfer and disclosure. The GDPR and UK GDPR also set out substantial potential liabilities for certain data protection violations and create a compliance burden for us in the course of delivering our solution in Europe. Compliance stakes are high because penalties for violation of the law can reach up to the greater of 20 million Euros (GDPR)/£17.5 million (UK GDPR) or 4% of total worldwide annual turnover (revenue).

Further, many governments are restricting the transmission or storage of information about individuals beyond their national borders. Such restrictions could, depending upon their scope, limit our ability to utilize technology infrastructure consolidation, redundancy, and load-balancing techniques, resulting in increased infrastructure costs, decreased operational efficiencies and performance, and increased risk of system failure.

These laws and regulations are continually evolving, not always clear, and not always consistent across the jurisdictions in which we do business. Any failure to protect, and comply with applicable laws and regulations or industry standards applicable to, personal data or other data relating to consumers could result in enforcement action against us, including fines, imprisonment of our officers, and public censure, claims for damages by consumers and other affected individuals, damage to our reputation, and loss of goodwill.

The GDPR and UK GDPR impose strict requirements for transferring personal data from the European Economic Area and United Kingdom to the United States and other countries, and regulatory guidance and case law on international transfers is continually evolving; this increases uncertainty and may require us to change our EEA and UK data practices and/or change our technology solution or business model, which may in turn adversely affect demand for our solution.

The GDPR and UK GDPR generally prohibit the transfer of personal data of EEA and UK subjects outside of the European Economic Area and the UK to countries whose laws do not ensure an adequate level of protection, unless a lawful data transfer solution has been implemented. On July 16, 2020, in a case known as "Schrems II," the Court of Justice of the European Union ("CJEU") ruled on the validity of two of the primary data transfer solutions. The first method, EU-U.S. Privacy Shield operated by the U.S. Department of Commerce, was declared invalid as a legal mechanism to transfer data from the EEA and UK to the U.S.

The second mechanism, Standard Contractual Clauses ("SCCs"), an alternative transfer measure that we also offer to our EEA and UK customers for extra-EEA and UK data transfers, was upheld as a valid legal mechanism for transnational data transfer. However, the ruling requires that EEA and UK organizations seeking to rely on the SCCs to export data out of the EEA and UK to ensure the data is protected to a standard that is "essentially equivalent" to that under the GDPR and the UK GDPR including, where necessary, by taking "supplementary measures" to protect the data. In June 2021, the European Commission published revised SCCs, and shortly thereafter the European Data Protection Board promulgated guidance on implementation of the new clauses. However, it remains unclear what "supplementary measures" must be taken to allow the lawful transfer of personal data to the United States.As a result, we and our EU-based sellers risk becoming the subject of regulatory investigations which may result in fines or other sanctions if our approach and supplementary measures are being considered insufficient. If European sellers react by choosing to monetize their content through closed EU-only monetization chains in order to reduce risk, the volume and value of impressions available through our exchange would decrease, with potentially significant adverse consequences for our business.

Recently, the EU and the US have preliminarily agreed on a successor framework for the transfer of personal data from EEA subjects to the US; however, such framework is not yet in place and the precise terms are not yet established.

The GDPR imposes new requirements for end user consent or opt-out that may cause us to incur additional or unexpected costs, subject us to enforcement actions for compliance failures, or cause us to change our service or business model, which may have a material adverse effect on our business.

The European Union Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive (Directive 2002/58/EC), commonly referred to as the "ePrivacy Directive," and the GDPR require consent or another legal basis in order to process personal data for purposes

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of behavioral advertising, and there is currently significant risk and uncertainty regarding the standard for obtaining valid consent.

End-user consent is difficult for ad tech intermediaries like us to obtain because we do not have direct relationships with such end users, so we have historically relied upon sellers to obtain consent for use of our technology. To the extent any seller does not adequately satisfy its consent obligations for our technology, we may face regulatory risk. Further, emerging regulatory guidance in the EU has challenged this method of obtaining consent. To the extent we (and/or our buyers) are required to obtain or confirm consent directly from end users, our ability to use cookies or access devices within applicable jurisdictions may become significantly restricted.

In 2018, IAB Europe released a tool, the Transparency and Consent Framework (the "TCF"), in order to assist sellers, advertisers and advertising technology providers, with passing signals related to the legal basis obtained for processing personal data. For example, the TCF is used to indicate in the bidstream when there is consent from end users in accordance with the ePrivacy Directive and GDPR.

There is currently significant uncertainty as to whether the TCF (or any other) tool to convey legal basis (including consent) is acceptable to regulators as an appropriate mechanism to provide transparency and establish lawful grounds for processing. In particular, the Belgian data protection authority has recently found that consents obtained under the current form of the TCF are not valid, which may require us to change our implementation of the TCF or to implement additional or alternative measures to obtain consent from end users in order to satisfy the requirements of the ePrivacy Directive and GDPR.

Legal standards and regulatory guidance will continue to evolve. National regulators in the UK and EU are evolving their guidance on the use of advertising technologies and compliance with the GDPR and ePrivacy Directive. This guidance may be burdensome or inconsistent across countries, and present challenges to the way we operate.

As a result of all of the factors set forth above, our or our clients’ ability to serve target advertisements may become significantly impaired or complicated in certain jurisdictions.

Legal uncertainty and industry unpreparedness may mean substantial disruption and inefficiency, demand constraints, and reduced inventory supply and value.

Some sellers may be unprepared to comply with evolving regulatory guidance under US and foreign privacy laws, and therefore may remove personal data from their inventory before passing it into the bid stream, which would reduce the value of the inventory to buyers. Even well-prepared sellers and buyers will be confronted with difficult choices and administrative and technical hurdles to implement their privacy compliance programs and integrate with multiple other parties in the ecosystem. Further, compliance program design and implementation will be an ongoing process as understanding of the new law increases and industry compliance standards evolve. The resulting process friction could result in substantial inefficiency and loss of inventory and demand, as well as increased burdens upon our organization as we seek to assist clients and adapt our own technology and processes as necessary to comply with the law and adapt to industry practice. The uncertain regulatory environment caused by changes to privacy laws discussed in the sections above may benefit large, integrated competitors like Google, Facebook, Comcast Verizon, AT&T and Amazon, which have greater compliance resources and can take advantage of their direct relationships with end users to secure consents from, and offer necessary choices to, end users that we and other intermediaries without direct user relationships are less able to obtain under current industry conditions.

We are subject to regulation with respect to political advertising, which lacks clarity and uniformity.

We are subject to regulation with respect to political advertising activities, which are governed by various federal and state laws in the U.S., and national and provincial laws worldwide. Online political advertising laws are rapidly evolving and in certain jurisdictions we have compliance requirements with respect to political ads delivered on our platform. In some jurisdictions we may determine not to serve political advertisements due to uncertainty around these requirements and potential burdens of compliance. In addition, our sellers may impose restrictions on receiving political advertising. The lack of uniformity and increasing compliance requirements around political advertising may adversely impact the amount of political advertising spent through our platform, increase our operating and compliance costs, and subject us to potential liability from regulatory agencies.

Failure to comply with industry self-regulation could harm our brand, reputation, and our business.

In addition to compliance with government regulations, we voluntarily participate in trade associations and industry self-regulatory groups that promulgate best practices or codes of conduct addressing privacy and the provision of digital advertising. If we encounter difficulties abiding by these principles, we may be subject to negative publicity, as well as investigation and litigation by governmental authorities, self-regulatory bodies or other accountability groups, buyers, sellers, or other private parties. Any such action against us could be costly and time consuming, require us to change our business practices, divert management's attention and our resources, and be damaging to our reputation and our business. In addition, we could be adversely affected by new or altered self-regulatory guidelines that are inconsistent with our practices.

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Risks Related to Our Operations

Real or perceived errors or failures in the operation of our solution could damage our reputation and impair our sales.

Source: SEC EDGAR (public domain) · 10-K for the period ended 2022-12-31, filed 2023-02-22 · accession 0001595974-23-000010

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