On Thursday, PubMatic (NASDAQ:PUBM) discussed second-quarter financial results during its earnings call. The full transcript is provided below.
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View the webcast at https://pubmatic.zoom.us/j/94661902097#success
Summary
PubMatic reported impressive financial results for Q2 2026, with revenue growing 11% year-over-year and adjusted EBITDA increasing by 38%.
The company returned to double-digit revenue growth ahead of schedule, driven by strong performance in high-value formats such as CTV and mobile app, which now account for 60% of revenue.
Notable strategic initiatives include the adoption of AI technologies like Agentic OS and the launch of Decision Fabric, enhancing advertising performance and expanding PubMatic's addressable market.
Significant leadership changes were announced, with CFO Steve Pantolik planning to retire in 2027, and Megan Ram joining as Global Chief Revenue Officer.
PubMatic's outlook remains positive, with continued double-digit growth expected in the second half of the year and plans to increase full-year capex to support AI workloads.
Full Transcript
OPERATOR
Hello everyone and welcome. We will begin momentarily.
Annabeth, Operator
Hello everyone and welcome to PubMatic's second quarter 2026 earnings call. My name is Annabeth and I will be your Zoom operator today. Thank you for your attendance today. As a reminder, this webinar is being recorded. I will now turn the call over to Stacey Clements.
Stacey Clements, Operator
Good afternoon everyone and welcome to PubMatic's earnings call for the second quarter 2026. This is Stacey Clements and I'll be your operator today. Joining me on the call are Rajeev Goel, Co‑Founder and CEO, and Steve Pantolik, CFO. Before we get started, I have a few housekeeping items. Today's prepared remarks have been recorded, after which Rajeev and Steve will host live Q&A. If you plan to ask a question, please ensure you've set your Zoom to display your full name and firm and use the Raise Hand function located at the bottom of your screen.
A copy of our press release can be found on our website at investors.pubmatic.com. I would like to remind participants that during this call management will make forward‑looking statements, including, without limitation, statements regarding our future performance, market opportunity, growth strategy, and financial outlook. Forward‑looking statements are based on our current expectations and assumptions regarding our business, macroeconomic environment, and future conditions.
These forward‑looking statements are subject to inherent risks and uncertainties and changes in circumstances that are difficult to predict. You can find more information about these risks and uncertainties in our reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission and available at investors.pubmatic.com, including our most recent Form 10‑K and any subsequent filings on Forms 10‑Q or 8‑K. Our actual results may differ materially from those contemplated by the forward‑looking statements.
We caution you, therefore, against relying on any of these forward‑looking statements. All information discussed today is as of August 6, 2026, and we do not intend and undertake no obligation to update any forward‑looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future developments, or otherwise, except as may be required by law. In addition, today's discussion will include references to certain non‑GAAP financial measures, including Adjusted EBITDA, Adjusted EBITDA Margin, non‑GAAP Net Income, Cash Flows from Operations, Free Cash Flow, and Free Cash Flow Margin.
These non‑GAAP measures are presented for supplemental informational purposes only and should not be considered a substitute for financial information presented in accordance with GAAP. A reconciliation of these measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measure is available in our press release. And now I will turn the call over to Rajeev.
Rajeev Goel, Co-Founder and CEO
Thank you Stacy and good afternoon everyone. We delivered an outstanding second quarter. More importantly, we returned to double-digit year-over-year revenue growth well ahead of schedule and we expect that growth will accelerate through the second half of the year. I'm extremely proud of what the team has accomplished, in particular our innovation and leadership in Agentic advertising. Over the past several years we've made disciplined investments to diversify the business and strengthen our competitive position to deliver both faster growth and strong operating leverage.
Today, approximately 60% of our business comes from CTV, mobile, app and emerging revenues, all of which fuel profitable double-digit growth. This represents a remarkable transformation of our business and fundamentally strengthens our long-term growth profile. With this strong foundation in place, Steve has announced his plans to retire. He will remain as CFO into the first quarter of 2027 and then in an advisory role through July 1, ensuring a smooth transition as we conduct a search for successor.
Steve and I have worked together for 15 years and it's difficult to overstate the impact he's had on PubMatic. Under his leadership, we built a global company with the financial discipline to invest for the future while consistently generating cash, maintaining a debt-free balance sheet and returning capital to shareholders. I'm deeply grateful for his partnership, his friendship and his many, many contributions to PubMatic. He's built an exceptional finance organization that positions PubMatic to create long-term value for years to come.
Helping us build that future is our new Global Chief Revenue Officer Megan Ram who joins us on Monday, August 10th. Megan brings deep direct-to-brand and performance advertising expertise with established relationships across marquee brands. Her rigor around sales process and execution will enhance our sales effectiveness and is a natural fit with our culture. Together these strengths will help accelerate adoption of our AI-powered platform while strengthening our commercial capabilities.
These leadership milestones reflect the evolution of both our company and our industry. It is clear digital advertising is entering its next major technology transition as AI reshapes how media is bought and sold across the open Internet and PubMatic is at the epicenter of this change with market-leading scale. Since launching Agentic OS in January, we've delivered over 80 Agentic campaigns, including with all five global agency holding companies.
This is up from 30 campaigns just a quarter ago. For years, the walled gardens have delivered superior advertising performance because they operate a single integrated technology platform that optimizes media and audiences for advertisers. With Activate and Agentic OS, we're bringing those same performance and technical advantages to the open Internet. As a result, we're monetizing far more of the value chain between advertisers and publishers than at any point in our history and attracting entirely new customer types to our platform.
And because our business is built on outcomes and usage, we generate revenue when we deliver the best outcomes for our customers. Advantage will be determined not by traditional software user interfaces, but rather by AI-native infrastructure, proprietary intelligence and the ability to consistently deliver superior outcomes. We spent two decades building these capabilities. Today they're redefining how value is created across the open Internet by delivering compelling, measurable outcomes.
Level Agency is a great example of this. In a controlled comparison against their incumbent DSP, Agentic OS delivered in excess of two times more reach per dollar on qualified audiences while significantly accelerating campaign setup and activation time. Additionally, Agentic OS delivered retargeting at scale within days compared to the one to two months ramp typically required by DSP-led campaigns. As a result, Level increased ad spend with PubMatic to expand its buying across the open Internet.
Patrick Van Gorder, Chief Partnership Officer at Level Agency, said it best: what Agentic OS delivered changed how we're thinking about where the open Internet can compete for client budgets, and that's exactly the kind of adaptive advantage and innovation we're always looking for. Level is one of many examples across of BOSS and Telefonica, Amnet and Interbev above O Max, Fleet, Butler, Till and many others. We're consistently delivering better performance, faster execution and greater efficiency and it is changing how buyers are thinking about the value chain.
Those results are driven by our unified platform, where multiple competitive advantages compound and are increasingly difficult to replicate. They're built on years of investment across our infrastructure, intelligence, solutions and customer relationships. First is Agentic OS. We have deployed over 20 agents to automate and optimize core buying and selling workflows. As Agentic advertising compresses the traditional workflow, more of the transaction runs through PubMatic's infrastructure.
This allows us to create more value for our customers and drive incremental revenue back to PubMatic. This week we announced an exciting new agent for enterprise buyers. It provides configurable controls, approved workflows and full audit trails for autonomous campaigns. As customers move more budget into Agentic buying, trusted governance becomes essential and we believe this capability will help accelerate enterprise adoption of Agentic OS. Second is Activate.
Activate enables advertisers to buy directly in our SSP. This significantly increases working media and operational efficiency while also targeting audiences at the point of auction. The result is better advertiser performance, including Comscore, Nielsen, Experian, TransUnion, PayPal, Intuit, Klarna, Walmart and more. With our own proprietary bitstream data which exists only on PubMatic. As our business continues to grow, particularly in logged-in environments like CTV and mobile app, the quality and depth of those signals continues to improve, making our platform smarter with every campaign and every transaction.
This intelligence runs on our AI-native infrastructure. Through our partnership with Nvidia, we're able to process massive amounts of data and execute increasingly sophisticated AI-driven decisioning in real time. And fourth is our premium SSP inventory which includes nearly the entire open Internet, over 2,000 publishers representing 100,000-plus streamers, mobile apps and websites. Most recently we added marquee broadcaster Channel 4 in the UK and announced a strategic partnership with Sony Pictures Entertainment as their preferred sell-side platform, delivering access to hundreds of millions of monthly users across PlayStation and Sony BRAVIA TVs. Importantly, these advantages reinforce one another. Premium supply generates unique signals. Those signals strengthen our proprietary intelligence. That intelligence improves advertising outcomes. Better outcomes attract more advertisers, more campaigns and more data, creating a compounding advantage with every transaction. Building on this advantage, in Q2 we introduced Decision Fabric, the next evolution of our platform. Introduced in June, Decision Fabric enables advertisers, DSPs and technology partners to securely deploy their proprietary models directly within PubMatic's infrastructure.
This is commonly referred to as containerization. By running their models closer to our inventory data and the point of auction, customers remove the traffic shaping and latency constraints that have historically limited performance across the open Internet, allowing them to unlock better advertising outcomes. We're seeing encouraging traction with launch partners including MiQ, Chalice, AI Swim, AI Empowered and a growing number of DSPs. This is an exciting opportunity that we believe will transform the way advertising is transacted on the open Internet.
More importantly, our unified platform and compounding intelligence are unlocking performance advertising budgets on PubMatic. It's expanding. Our Wellness brand expanded into premium CTV without sacrificing the performance measurement and optimization it relies on in social media. Using Agentic OS, the campaign delivered a 5x return on ad spend, double the client's original objective, while significantly accelerating optimization and campaign execution.
We're seeing the same trend scale across our DSP partnerships. Smadex, a leading performance CTV advertising platform for apps and games and a business unit of Entravision, partnered with PubMatic to leverage our premium CTV inventory using our first-party audience targeting and cross-device measurement capabilities. As performance improved, Smadex increased spend on PubMatic over 10x year over year with 75% of that incremental spend flowing into CTV.
This kind of measurable performance is unlocking entirely new advertising budgets for PubMatic and it's reshaping the inventory advertisers want to buy. Creator-led video is another incremental opportunity, which now accounts for 26% of all TV and video viewing. Yet much of that market has remained within walled gardens even as TV platforms have brought creator content to the living room. As brands look to stand out, they're increasingly seeking creators whose audiences, values and content creators naturally align with their brand.
With the launch of our Creator Marketplace, we're bringing our infrastructure and Agentic OS to the creator economy, enabling advertisers to connect their premium inventory and reach highly engaged audiences while giving creators new ways to monetize across the Internet. For PubMatic, this positions us well as the creator economy, which is approximately $250 billion globally, moves into the open Internet advertising market, representing an entirely new category of publishers to our platform.
Performance is also driving growth across our live sports marketplace, where activity more than doubled year over year, highlighting the scale of our premium inventory and the strength of our offering. We were recently recognized with several industry awards including The Drum's Technology Innovation Award for helping advertisers buy live sports inventory with precision. As more premium events enter the programmatic market like US Open for Tennis, NFL, NBA, MLB and NCAA, there is significant opportunity to scale growth from this vertical, accelerating the value of our live sports offering.
We recently partnered with Gracenote to bring real-time content and make decisions within the milliseconds available before every impression is served. That's particularly valuable in live sports, where context changes continuously and buyers need to optimize campaigns in real time. Whether it's contextual signals from live sports or commerce signals tied to purchasing behavior, our strategy is the same: bring differentiated data closer to every advertising decision.
As more buyers, publishers and transactions run across our platform, that intelligence compounds and improves advertiser performance, increases publisher yield and makes our platform more valuable with every interaction. That's the power of the platform we built. The investments we made over the last several years are translating into accelerated, profitable growth. By investing early in AI, we've established a leadership position that continues to widen as more customers adopt our platform.
We built a platform that is attracting more buyers, more publishers, more data and more advertising spend. Just as importantly, we're expanding the market we can serve, bringing new forms of advertising, new sources of demand and new intelligence onto our platform. That not only increases the value we can create for customers, it also expands the long-term growth opportunity for PubMatic, which we believe is significantly larger than the business we operate today.
I'll now turn the call over to Steve for the financials.
Steve Pantelick, CFO
Thank you, Rajeev, and welcome everyone. We delivered an outstanding second quarter, significantly exceeding our expectations on both the top and bottom line. Our revenues grew 11% year over year, adjusted EBITDA increased 38%, and free cash flow increased 47%. We saw strength across channels and formats, underscoring the breadth and depth of our platform. Our high-value formats and channels gained momentum and scale, and we continue diversifying the business.
AI adoption across our company is accelerating innovation, driving revenue growth, improving customer outcomes, and unlocking incremental cost efficiencies. Importantly, we returned to double-digit revenue growth ahead of schedule today. Our revenue mix is fundamentally different than it was three years ago. The majority of our business now comes from high-value formats and channels, which are the fastest-growing segments of digital advertising. In Q2, approximately 60% of our revenue came from CTV, mobile app, and emerging revenue streams, double that from three years ago.
Together these categories grew nearly 40% year over year. Breaking this down further, CTV growth was led by the Americas, which grew 25% year over year, driven by new CTV advertisers and expansion of premium inventory including live sports. Globally, CTV revenue grew 13% year over year and accounted for approximately 20% of total revenue. Mobile app grew more than 40% year over year and represented approximately 25% of total revenue. Q2 growth was driven by the mediation platform integrations we highlighted last quarter, ongoing product innovation, and continued expansion of our global app publisher base.
Emerging revenue streams continued their strong momentum and nearly doubled year over year, reaching an all-time high of approximately 15% of total revenue. Growth was driven by increased adoption of our new AI products, including agentic OS, on a global basis. Direct buying on Activate more than doubled year over year. Total display revenues grew strongly at 12% year over year, primarily driven by mobile app growth. In Q2, we saw the benefit of our broad, diversified omnichannel platform.
Across our channels and formats, we generated several million dollars of incremental revenues from the World Cup, Amazon Prime Day, and political advertising. We continue to enhance our platform with capabilities that make it easier for advertisers of all sizes to achieve strong ad performance. This is contributing to a broader and more diversified DSP mix. Activity from our mid-market DSP partners accelerated compared to the first quarter, growing over 25% year over year in Q2.
Looking ahead, we expect activity from mid-market DSP partners to further increase, driven by new inventory categories like content creators, growing demand from direct-to-consumer brands, and continued investment in our go-to-market teams. Turning to our diversified ad verticals, in aggregate, our top 10 app verticals increased 15% year over year. We saw double-digit percentage growth in five of the top 10 verticals, led by shopping, health and fitness, and personal finance.
This helped offset some softness in food and drink, arts and entertainment, and travel. Our owned and operated infrastructure continues to be a significant competitive and financial advantage. The investments we've made over the last five years are enabling us to introduce higher-value capabilities while improving the efficiency of our platform. That was evident in the second quarter where revenue grew 11% and gross profit increased 19%. With our increasing focus on AI-native capabilities, we are realigning our platform's compute and processing resources towards products that create the greatest economic value for our customers and our business.
We intend to reduce the number of gross impressions processed to unlock cost savings and repurpose compute capabilities while increasing the number of monetized impressions. We saw the first results of these efforts in the second quarter as we reduced gross impressions sequentially by 2% while increasing monetized impressions by 4%. This is an intentional outcome of how we are evolving the platform, and it should result in an even more efficient business over time.
As we prioritize the impressions that create the most value, we expect monetization rate to continue rising in future quarters. AI is also improving productivity across the organization. In the second quarter, total headcount declined year over year as AI and automation increased efficiency across engineering, marketing, customer success, and finance. This funded incremental investments in our buyer-focused sales team and broader go-to-market organization while holding total opex growth to 4%, well below our revenue growth.
Q2 adjusted EBITDA was $19.6 million, or 25% margin, compared to 20% margin a year ago—our 41st consecutive quarter of positive adjusted EBITDA. Q2 GAAP net loss was $1.2 million, or minus $0.03 per diluted share. Moving to cash and our capital allocation, our balance sheet remains a core strategic advantage. We generated $20.2 million in net operating cash flows in the second quarter, up 36% over Q2 last year, and delivered free cash flow of $13.7 million, or a 47% increase over last year.
To underscore our long-term ability to generate cash, since the beginning of 2021 through Q2 2024, we have generated nearly $450 million in net cash from operations and more than $246 million in free cash flow during the quarter. We used $21.5 million in cash to repurchase 2.1 million Class A common shares. We ended the quarter with $137.5 million in cash and marketable securities and zero debt. Our capital allocation strategy remains disciplined and balanced, focused on long-term shareholder value creation.
We continue to invest in innovation and infrastructure to drive incremental organic growth while maintaining the flexibility to pursue strategic M&A opportunities. We have also made a long-term commitment to return capital to shareholders via our share repurchase program. Since the inception of our repurchase program in February 2023 through the end of Q2, we have bought back 15.5 million Class A common shares for $211.4 million. We have $63.6 million remaining in this program authorized through the end of 2026.
Moving on to our outlook, the strong momentum we built throughout the second quarter continued into July. In Q3, we anticipate continued double-digit year over year revenue growth with revenue of $75 to $77 million, or 12% growth at the midpoint. Q3 adjusted EBITDA is expected to be in the range of $17 to $19 million. We expect cost of revenue and opex to increase by a low single-digit percentage sequentially in Q3, with continued go-to-market investment through the balance of the year as revenues expand.
With our leverage cost model, we expect Q4 adjusted EBITDA margin similar to last year's fourth quarter, leading to a meaningful full-year margin expansion. Last quarter we described our plans to further shift our platform investments to target GPU-centric infrastructure that will strengthen our proprietary data intelligence, creating a compounding advantage as the business continues to grow. We believe this approach will be a durable accelerant to growth over the long term while also supporting the broader industry shift to performance-based advertising.
Our results in the second quarter and our momentum in AI-powered products reinforce this strategy. Accordingly, we are increasing our full-year capex outlook to a range of $20 to $25 million. These additional investments support increased AI workloads and our strategic innovation with Nvidia, and we expect them to generate incremental revenues with a payback of approximately 12 months or less. In closing, the results this quarter reinforced what we've been building over the past several years.
We returned to double-digit revenue growth ahead of schedule, continued to shift our revenue mix towards high-value formats and channels, and demonstrated the strength of our financial model through expanding profitability and higher free cash flow. PubMatic is reshaping digital advertising by leveraging our AI-native infrastructure, compounding intelligence, and automation to deliver better outcomes for customers. These are durable competitive advantages that we believe will continue to strengthen our financial model and drive long-term profitable growth.
Let me close with a personal note. As Rajeev mentioned, I plan to retire early next year. It wasn't an easy decision. Rajeev recruited me in 2011 when PubMatic was a small private company. And together with an exceptional team, we built something I'm very proud of: a global public company with revenue that's nearly doubled since our IPO, zero debt, and 41 consecutive quarters of positive adjusted EBITDA. I'm grateful to Rajeev for his partnership every step of the way.
On the transition, my successor will inherit a finance organization we spent 15 years building and a leadership team as strong as any I've worked with. One of the greatest privileges of my career has been working alongside such talented team members and building trusted relationships with our customers, investors, and analysts. I believe PubMatic is in the strongest position I've seen in my time here. My priority is continuing the momentum of our business.
Thank you.
Stacey Clements, Operator
As a reminder, you can ask a question by raising your hand located on the dashboard. The first question comes from Shweta Kazaria at Wolfe. Please go ahead. Shweta, are you unmuted?
Shweta Kazaria, Analyst at Wolfe Research
Thanks. Stacy, can you hear me?
Stacey Clements, Operator
Yes, yes, thank you.
Shweta Kazaria, Analyst at Wolfe Research
First of all, Steve, congratulations and I'll miss you. We have some time with you still, but congratulations and I'm super happy for you, and it's been a great run and it's been nothing but a joy to work with you, so all the best.
Steve Pantelick, CFO
Thank you very much. Appreciate that.
Shweta Kazaria, Analyst at Wolfe Research
Well, on to the earnings, I guess. A couple of questions for me, please. One is, what are some of the top two to three things that you would point to that imply durability of this strength that you're seeing? Whether it is top line growth, demand trends, product adoption, anything that you can point to on the durability of the growth you're seeing. And second, at a high level, are you seeing clear indications that the overall environment is changing to benefit the supply side? And if so, what are some of the tangible indicators that you're seeing that are to your advantage? Thank you.
Rajeev Goel, Co-Founder and CEO
Yeah, thanks. I can kick that off. I think the two questions are actually closely related. So I think it's clear that the industry is rapidly moving towards an agentic future, and PubMatic is not only at the epicenter of that shift, but we're driving it. And with that comes a shift in decisioning to the PubMatic platform. So you saw some of the stats—rapid agentic adoption. Obviously it's still early, but the trend is very clear: 80 agentic campaigns, 4,000 AI-powered deals, and agentic is driving improved ad performance.
So advertisers are getting better performance while also reducing ecosystem complexity and operational overhead, you know, which is growing our addressable market. And I think, you know, when we look at our platform, we're very uniquely positioned with our AI-native owned and operated infrastructure. The scale of our publisher relationships, Activate, which, you know, we've, you know, been building for several years now, direct buying in the SSP with the Agentic OS, the 20-plus agents, and then the intelligence that we have from our own proprietary data from all the impressions that we process, as well as, you know, over 300 data partners.
And as I talked about in the prepared remarks, I think the competitive advantage of the past that was built around the software user interface and the lock-in that created with buyers, that's very rapidly eroding now. I think competitive advantage is increasingly being determined by AI-native infrastructure, proprietary intelligence, and the ability to consistently deliver advertising performance. We have a second major front in this AI area with Decision Fabric.
And Decision Fabric allows curators and DSPs to run their models in our infrastructure, which leverages the impressions and data from our SSP along with our proprietary intelligence. So I think these are, you know, what we see in terms of customer, of not only our ability to continue to grow at double digits, but also this, you know, structural shift towards the sell side with more of the decisioning, more of the processing, you know, happening in our infrastructure, which allows us to add more value and participate in that value creation.
Steve Pantelick, CFO
Thanks, Rajeev. I'd just add to Rajeev's comments, and that is, as an organization, we've always been very focused on operational excellence and execution is in our DNA. And when you think about our strong innovation and all the things that we pioneered over the last 15 plus years, we've really been working towards this position for a very long time. And we're very confident in sort of the trajectory and the durability of everything we've built. And part of it is it's our DNA and we're very enthusiastic about the future.
Annabeth, Operator
Thanks, Steve. Our next question comes from Nubad Khan. B. Riley, please. Go ahead, Naved. I'm going to keep moving just in the interest of time. I'll come back to you if we can get you back on the line. Our next question comes from Andrew Merrick. I'm sorry, hold on a second. From Rob Kulbritz, please. Go ahead, Rob.
Rob Kulbritz, Analyst
All right, first off, Steve, you're my idol. I don't, I, I don't give you permission to leave, but, you know, congratulations on amazing run at the company and, and, you know, best wishes for your retirement.
Steve Pantelick, CFO
Very, very appreciate it.
Rob Kulbritz, Analyst
We're looking forward to spending a lot more time with you between now and when you eventually leave. So, Rajeev, wanted to ask you maybe about the pace at which agencies and advertisers are leaning into Agentic OS adoption more broadly across the landscape. Any way to contextualize that? You know, a lot of this sounds very exciting, but just wanted to think about how you're thinking about, or ask how you're thinking about, you know, how quickly this could go in terms of agentic penetration of programmatic media budgets or pools.
It seems to be going fast. It seems like there's a lot of incentives for people to make this move. But my thoughts about that. And then, you know, just wanted to ask you broadly for your thoughts on a lot of different flavors, different approaches to how people are talking about agentic programmatic media right now. You know, maybe some hops in the supply chain being cut out, some people thinking about, you know, fee savings in different parts of the ecosystem.
Just wondering what you think is going to be most essential as we have a robust sort of highly decisioned programmatic landscape. Any thoughts there on what's, you know, what's going to remain after we have this agentic?
Rajeev Goel, Co-Founder and CEO
Yeah, thanks, Robbie. So on the first part of your question, in terms of the agentic pace, you know, maybe the Clayton Christensen, you know, framework is useful. We're definitely still in the phase of the early adopters. But what I think is very promising is that all of the clients that we've run agentic, you know, campaigns or execution with, they've all come back for much more. Right. So it's working. We, you know, put out, I think, case studies in 10 different countries around the world, maybe half a dozen around the world at this point.
We're running things with every agency HoldCo. So the seeds are planted and the, you know, the grass is starting to grow. We can very clearly see the shoots. I've said publicly that I think by the end of '28 about 25% of our ecosystem will be traded agentically and by the end of 2030 it will be 50%. I continue to believe that that's the case. And so that, you know, implies a pretty rapid, you know, continued trajectory of growth and acceleration between where we are still early stages, early adoption, and getting to that projection.
But we are seeing that, you know, advertisers and agencies are able to execute. We're seeing broad-based adoption across independent agencies and HoldCos and brands pushing on this. And so that's what gives me confidence. On your second question, in terms of, you know, what, where are some of the benefits? You talked about hops and other things. You know, I think our focus is really on how do we use this amazing technology as more than just a technical revolution, but really around value chain or supply chain revolution.
So our focus is really on compressing the distance between the publisher and the advertiser, whether it's programmatic transactions or it's agentically executing IOs, bringing the publisher and advertiser much closer together so that when they transact, they can transact more directly, primarily on our platform in our case, where between Agentic OS, Activate, and our SSP we have all of the components that are needed for full end-to-end execution of the transaction.
And by doing that we're able to demonstrate very clearly significantly increased advertiser performance, but also a lot less operational overhead and complexity. And that's leading to, I think, a massive win for our clients and for our business.
Annabeth, Operator
Our next question comes from Naved, who I think I have back now. Naved, if you can. There you go.
Naved Khan, Analyst at B. Riley
All right, can you guys hear me now?
Annabeth, Operator
Yes, we can.
Naved Khan, Analyst at B. Riley
Perfect. So maybe a question on this monetization of the Agentic OS. Is this, like, what's your, what are your thoughts? How are you, is this something you're charging for as an added feature or are you just monetizing because of the lift you might be seeing to the CPMs and to the overall monetization, you know, feeding into that? Just give us your thoughts on that and then I have a follow-up.
Steve Pantelick, CFO
Sure. Steve, you want to— I mean, first. Hey, Naved. So, you know, the Agentic OS opportunity first and foremost is opening up net new business for us, right? It's new channels, new opportunities. So that's step one. And Agentic OS, you know, can be, you know, either a DSP agent. It could be, it could be, you know, any number of third-party agents. But what we've done is we've created Activate that we launched several years ago. And so that's the direct buying interface onto our platform.
And so when that happens, we generate a buying fee as a result of that. And then really what's really important when you think about the economics of what we're building here is that dollar now is entirely within our ecosystem. And so we're making incremental fees and the absolute dollar amount is growing. So it's very much a compounding benefit to us as a company and you're seeing some of those strong results. Overall, our portfolio of emerging revenues nearly doubled in the quarter and that's been a very consistent trajectory.
That category hit an all-time high of 15% of revenues. So from our perspective, we're building on the platform that we created. We're making that platform even stronger and broader and more efficient. And so what you're seeing as a business is we're getting leverage not only from top-line growth, but also the cost structure. So you should expect to see margin expansion as well.
Naved Khan, Analyst at B. Riley
Okay, that's great to hear. And pretty, pretty impressive performance across the board. I want to ask maybe versus your own expectations, you know, that you set for us for the quarter. Coming into the quarter, where were you so surprised in terms of the amount of upside?
Steve Pantelick, CFO
So, yeah, from our perspective, you know, we were very pleased because we saw positive incremental results across the board. So areas that we've been investing in, executing against, all of them came in better than we expected. CTV, you know, better. As a reminder, CTV in the Americas grew 25% year over year. Total CTV globally was up 13%. Mobile app, which is about 25% of our revenues, grew 40% in the quarter. And that's better than we anticipated.
And then I just referenced emerging revenues, nearly double. So we really saw great incremental progress across the board. And then in addition to that, we also saw display increase double digits and that was largely a function of our mobile app progress. So we're very pleased with the results. And it wasn't just one factor, it was across the board. And that's something that we've been sharing with analysts, investors that, you know, we see a very big vision and we've been building it on our platform and now we're just, you know, starting to see the early stages of that ramp.
Naved Khan, Analyst at B. Riley
Perfect. Thank you. Congrats on the retirement.
Steve Pantelick, CFO
Thank you. Really appreciate that.
Annabeth, Operator
Our next question comes from Eric Martinuzzi at Lake Street. Please go ahead, Eric.
Eric Martinuzzi, Analyst at Lake Street
My congrats as well to you, Steven. Thanks for sticking around through our September investor conference.
Steve Pantelick, CFO
Thank you.
Eric Martinuzzi, Analyst at Lake Street
Was curious to know. Just, you know, we are sort of one year removed from pretty substantial disruption that you experienced with a large DSP. Your business has changed dramatically in those 12 months. And I was just wondering if there was sort of a decrementing of your inventory with that DSP. I was wondering if there's been a kind of a return or a warming of the relationship, if you could comment there.
Steve Pantelick, CFO
Sure, yeah. On the relationship. So, you know, from our perspective, you know, we've been investing in modifying and evolving our business for a number of years. We shared a stat that about 6% of all of our revenue comes from high value formats and that's a pretty material number and that's growing double digits. And so we've been growing through the challenges that we've called on in the past. And we had anticipated this was going to happen. And as both Rajeev and I called out, we did it ahead of schedule.
And so from our perspective, our focus has always been on investing and making sure that we are developing our capabilities for wherever the fastest growing opportunities are. You're seeing that in our results. At the same time, we really have been building out our relationships with DSPs and continue to maintain very healthy, positive relationships. I'll turn it over to Rajeev for any other comments.
Rajeev Goel, Co-Founder and CEO
Yeah, thanks. So the relationship with the DSP remains positive and healthy. Continue to do significant business together. But you know, as Steve pointed out, our DSP base has diversified significantly. I think in general what we're seeing in the market is DSP growth and penetration is diversifying into many different facets of the market: vertical specialization, mid-market advertisers, SMB advertisers, performance, CTV performance, mobile app. So the market I think has grown much faster than that DSP in question, and so that's contributing to the diversification on our platform.
At the same time, as we have been growing our sales team, we've been connecting more directly with advertisers as well as agencies. We've always been deeply connected into the agencies. But as we've gone deeper into building those advertiser relationships, it's giving us more direct ability to demonstrate the capabilities of our platform, where then the advertisers are saying, okay, we specifically want to be buying on PubMatic because of the Agentic OS capabilities, the Activate capabilities, Decision Fabric now.
So I think our solution set and our ability to take that to market to the end customer, the end decision maker, is also strengthening the diversification in our business.
UNKNOWN, Analyst
Okay, and I wanted to follow up. You talked about a greater than doubling of the Agentic OS adoption within the installed base. As far as the size of those campaigns, you know, the 80 campaigns versus the 30—are we getting, is there, is there repeat? Because I realize it's early adopters, but are they coming back with larger campaigns or are they still kind of the same size campaign, dipping their toe in the water?
Rajeev Goel, Co-Founder and CEO
Yeah, so there's kind of two aspects to it. One is there's more new buyers, you know, every quarter. And those new buyers are typically starting with small campaigns and then ramping from there. The existing buyers, you know, so the ones that are repeating, let's say from Q1 to Q2, they're absolutely ramping the size, you know, volume of their buys as they work through the change management within their own organization. And they rapidly see the benefits from agentic execution on PubMatic.
UNKNOWN, Analyst
Got it. Thank you.
Stacey Clements, Operator
Our next question comes from James Heaney at Jefferies.
James Heaney, Analyst at Jefferies
Great. Thank you, guys. And Steve, congrats on the retirement. Really enjoyed getting to work with you, I think, since the IPO. So wishing you all the best.
Steve Pantelick, CFO
Thank you.
James Heaney, Analyst at Jefferies
Maybe I'll start with you. Could you just talk about the pockets of strength and weakness—probably more strength than weakness—but just what you're seeing across different verticals? Do want to ask specifically on maybe categories like prediction markets that we've been seeing doing quite well, and interested if that's something that you're seeing on your end.
Steve Pantelick, CFO
So, I mean, as I've shared with everybody in the past, one of the strengths of our business is that we have a very diversified set of ad verticals. And so, in the second quarter, the top 10 grew in aggregate around 15%. And, for example, we saw very strong results from shopping and a couple other categories that helped offset some softness—let's say food and drink and travel. And so the strength that we have developed over time is being able to really be a place for any type of advertiser.
And, you know, the opportunities vary depending on the time of the year, macro conditions. And so overall, we haven't seen any material softness. I shared that July was fairly healthy in terms of momentum. And I think there are certain pockets—as you just point out, prediction markets—that get rolled up into certain advertising categories. We see some growth there. And from our perspective, we're doing what we need to do: making sure that we continue to develop the relationships on the publisher side that provides all that valuable inventory, and then exposing that to an emerging group of new buyers.
We've talked about performance DSPs, of which the category that you described would largely fit in. And that part of our business, which we call mid-market DSPs, actually accelerated in the second quarter, 25% year over year. So overall, there might be, quarter to quarter, some verticals that are softer and others stronger. But we have a very diverse set of verticals that help us navigate that period to period.
Rajeev Goel, Co-Founder and CEO
James, I'll maybe just add a little bit to that, which is there have been some kind of notable standouts around prediction markets within our live sports business. So that live sports business has been growing pretty rapidly. And we saw, for instance, with World Cup—you know, some of the, I forget which one—one of the two major prediction markets advertising pretty heavily on our platform as part of the World Cup. So I think, you know, as they scale, I would expect to attract more of their spend on an ongoing basis.
James Heaney, Analyst at Jefferies
Okay, great. And then maybe one for you, Rajeev. Could you just talk about the partnership you have with Roku? I mean, I know they're obviously one of your CTV supply partners, so I'm just interested in hearing how maybe the conversations have evolved with them since the acquisition of Fox. And even if you want to broadly comment on other kind of mega deals that we're seeing across the media landscape, and just how you think about your position in kind of those.
Rajeev Goel, Co-Founder and CEO
Yeah, absolutely. So I think one of the things that we're seeing is, you know, obviously consumers are spending more and more time in streaming, and so that's part of what's driving that growth and the scale of CTV within our business. And then I think the second big trend is that we're seeing what were walled gardens, or what might have been walled gardens, having a much more open approach to monetization and really, I think, appreciating the capabilities in our platform—our ability to drive performance advertising solutions, and also the scale of data and the inroads that we have in terms of ad spend budgets flowing on our platform with marquee agencies and advertisers. So Roku is a great example of that, where we monetize a significant portion of their inventory, and we'll expect that to expand and continue with Fox. We also shared earlier in the quarter that we'll be the primary SSP partner for Sony Pictures Entertainment—their streaming service launch at some point later in the year. So that, I think, is a prime example of where I think if we were three or four years ago, somebody may have approached that as a walled garden, but here now they're doing that from an open perspective, and they've chosen our platform with which to do that.
And, you know, there are many other examples—Roblox and others—that we've talked about in prior quarters and years. So I think we remain really encouraged by the open nature of monetization, and the strength of our platform and our buyer relationships creates significant ability for us to monetize that inventory.
James Heaney, Analyst at Jefferies
Great, thank you.
Stacey Clements, Operator
Our next question comes from Barton Crockett of Rosenblatt.
Barton Crockett, Analyst at Rosenblatt
Okay, great. Thanks for taking the question. I was curious about share of your business. I mean you've given us some growth for Activate doubling. You said that the mid-market DSPs grew 25%. But can you give us a sense of how much of your business is on Activate now, and just broadly how much of your business is not involving a DSP on the other side, just kind of coming direct through your platform one way or the other?
Steve Pantelick, CFO
So I'll take that. So from our perspective, we've shared in the past that we estimate our market share to be about 4% globally, and that obviously has been growing over time. The categories that you just referenced that sit within our emerging revenues portfolio are clearly growing quite significantly. And, you know, just to level set, the approach we take is these are all rapidly evolving new opportunities and they are self-reinforcing, and so we are capturing them in this portfolio.
We're not currently planning on breaking them out specifically until they get to a certain size. But clearly as a category, emerging revenues at 15% of total revenues is becoming more and more material. And the other thing to bear in mind is that we've been growing in the fastest growing areas of the market, and so we expect to grow at or faster than the market now and into the future as a result of all of our investments and the progress that we're making.
And then the last thing I'll comment on: none of our expectations or guidance assumes any resolution of the DOJ case against Google. So all of that would be upside to our market share background.
Barton Crockett, Analyst at Rosenblatt
Okay, well, you know, if I could just follow up, because, I mean, our earnings call is kind of coincident with The Trade Desk, which, you know, the revenue has really kind of flattened out this quarter and, you know, yours accelerated. You know, in just broad strokes, is there some broad kind of transition among DSPs and SSPs, some kind of shake-up there that you can speak to that maybe these things are all kind of related, or is it just, you know, coincidental, they're not really related?
Rajeev Goel, Co-Founder and CEO
Yeah, I can take that. I mean, I think, Barton, that there are some broad macro trends that are favoring the sell side and, in particular, PubMatic. And I think we've been talking about some of them for a while. But first of all, I think the agentic opportunity, right—the industry movement towards agentic monetization, agentic execution—we're obviously aggressively driving that. And that comes with the shift in decisioning to the PubMatic platform, right?
So we're processing more and more of the transaction between Agentic OS, Activate, our sell-side platform, and our data platform. More of that end-to-end transaction between the publisher and the advertiser is being processed in our platform, including the decisioning, which means we're adding more value and we're participating in that value creation. More recently we've opened a second front in this area with Decision Fabric. So Decision Fabric is our containerization solution, and it allows curators and DSPs to run their models directly in our infrastructure.
And so that leverages the impressions and data from our SSP along with our proprietary intelligence. It gives them more time to make bidding decisions, allows the buyer to use a more complicated model, and we're hosting all that in our infrastructure. That's still early, but that again is another, I think, sign of the shift that's happening towards the sell side of the ecosystem. And I think underlying all of it is, you know, if we kind of go back in time, it's a little bit, I think, clearer in hindsight, is that the user interface that some of the primary buying platforms had trained into agencies and advertisers over years—that had created, I think, substantial lock, where trading organizations were used to a particular user interface. And now with AI and with Decision Fabric, the UI, the value or the lock-in from that UI layer, is now eroding. Instead, I think advertisers and publishers are saying, hey, what is the greatest performance? What's going to generate the most ROI and the most yield? And that's exactly the opportunity that we're focused on with Agentic OS and with Decision Fabric.
Barton Crockett, Analyst at Rosenblatt
That's interesting. And just one final, just checkbox—you guys in the past few quarters have talked about a drag from a DSP transition. That's not happening this quarter, right? That's done.
Steve Pantelick, CFO
Yeah, that is now, Barton, fully behind us.
Barton Crockett, Analyst at Rosenblatt
Okay, great, thank you.
Rajeev Goel, Co-Founder and CEO
Thanks, Barton.
Stacey Clements, Operator
Our next question comes from Simran Biswell at RDC. Please go ahead.
Simran Biswell, Analyst (on behalf of Matt Swanson)
Hey guys, this is Simran on for Matt Swanson. Congrats on the quarter and congrats, Steve. Just thinking about your go-to-market investments. How are they balanced across your growth initiatives versus how much are you leaning into your customers to understand Agentix, or do you think it's becoming more pervasive?
Rajeev Goel, Co-Founder and CEO
So our approach on the go-to-market side is really to think about different segments of the buyer community and then to go in with value propositions that are tied to performance, transparency, and control. And so we think about those audiences, the primary audiences, although not the sole audiences, but the primary ones are advertisers, agency holdcos, and then independent agencies. And those sit alongside some of the more tech-forward companies like DSPs and curators.
So our go-to-market investment is really about broadening the sales footprint that we have so that we can go deeper into each of those categories. So for instance, with advertisers, we want to be covering the top several hundred, not just the top 100. With holdcos, we want to cover not only the investment teams but also, brand by brand, the key teams. With independent agencies we're going from the top 50 to the top 250. So that's how we're thinking about some of the investment that we're making.
And as we grow and as we penetrate, there's both an account management function as well as a sales function. And so we need to add the right number of people from an account management perspective, but with our own usage of AI internally what we're seeing is that each account manager can handle more and more accounts and put more time into the relationship side of things rather than the day-to-day management. And so you're seeing that flow through in terms of the leverage that we called that in the quarter.
Steve Pantelick, CFO
And a quick stat for you, Simran: in the quarter, on a year-over-year basis, we were able to increase our investment and headcount in these go-to-market areas that you just described by 12% while our total headcount was slightly down. So this is a reflection of just how we plan and manage and execute, you know, using AI as a financial lever, not just on the top line but also delivering on the bottom line.
Simran Biswell, Analyst (on behalf of Matt Swanson)
Okay, cool, that's helpful. And then, Steve, just really quickly, anything from political that you're embedding into Q3 guidance?
Steve Pantelick, CFO
We are assuming that there is going to be incremental political. You know, if you just step back, there was a large benefit to the company back at the '24 presidential cycle. The good news: many capabilities that we first developed there in terms of activation, and our AI capabilities, have just gotten better, stronger over time. And so we are very well positioned to take advantage of the political dollar opportunity. We saw a small amount, relatively speaking, in the second quarter.
We expect that to ramp up the balance of the year. We don't think it's going to be as large as it was in the '24 presidential cycle. But we are very optimistic about us getting, I would say, probably more than our fair share based upon all the capabilities that we built. And obviously I'll update as we go along in the quarter, but I do expect it to be more back-end loaded — in the third quarter, but mostly fourth quarter impact.
Simran Biswell, Analyst (on behalf of Matt Swanson)
Great. Thanks guys.
Stacey Clements, Operator
We have time for one more question from Brianna Diaz at Citizens. Brianna, can you hear us? Okay, I'm going to— Unless Brianna comes back, I'm going to throw it back to you for closing remarks.
Rajeev Goel, Co-Founder and CEO
Thank you, Stacey. We delivered an outstanding second quarter, returning to double-digit revenue growth well ahead of schedule while expanding profitability and free cash flow. Importantly, our growth was driven by the strategic areas of our business where we've invested over the past several years, reinforcing our confidence in continued double-digit growth in the second half of the year. Our leadership in magnetic advertising continues to strengthen as more customers choose PubMatic for superior ad performance and measurable business outcomes, and that performance is expanding our addressable market.
We look forward to seeing many of you at upcoming conferences including Oppenheimer's 29th Annual Tech, Internet and Communications Conference, Rosenblatt's Age of AI Virtual Conference, Wolfe's TMT Conference in San Francisco, and Lake Street's Big Investor Conference in New York. Thank you everyone for joining us today. Have a great rest of your afternoon.
Disclaimer: This transcript is provided for informational purposes only. While we strive for accuracy, there may be errors or omissions in this automated transcription. For official company statements and financial information, please refer to the company's SEC filings and official press releases. Corporate participants' and analysts' statements reflect their views as of the date of this call and are subject to change without notice.
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