Cars com : Quarterly Earnings Documents

Published: 2025-05-14 07:41:09 ET CARS

Published on 05/14/2025 at 07:41

08-May-2025

Cars.com, Inc. (CARS)

Q1 2025 Earnings Call

Katherine Chen

Vice President-Investor Relations, Cars.com, Inc.

Alex Vetter

President, Chief Executive Officer & Director, Cars.com, Inc.

Sonia Jain

Chief Financial Officer, Cars.com, Inc.

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Naved Khan

Analyst, B. Riley Securities, Inc.

Rajat Gupta

Analyst, JPMorgan Securities LLC

Tom White

Analyst, D. A. Davidson & Co.

Marvin Fong

Analyst, BTIG LLC

Joseph Spak

Analyst, UBS Securities LLC

I would now like to turn the conference over to Katherine Chen, President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Katherine Chen

Vice President-Investor Relations, Cars.com, Inc.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. It's my pleasure to welcome you to the Cars.com Inc. first quarter 2025 conference call. With me today are Alex Vetter, CEO; and Sonia Jain, CFO. Alex will start by discussing the business highlights from our first quarter. Then Sonia will discuss our financial results in greater detail along with our outlook. We'll finish the call with Q&A.

Before I turn the call over to Alex, I'd like to draw your attention to our forward-looking statements and the description and definition of non-GAAP financial measures, which can be found in our presentation. We will be discussing certain non-GAAP financial measures today, including adjusted EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA margin, adjusted operating expenses, adjusted net income and free cash flow. Reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures can be found in the financial tables included with our earnings press release and in the appendix of our presentation. Any forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties. For more information, please refer to the risk factors included in our SEC filings, including those in our most recently filed 10-K, which is available on the IR section of our website. We assume no obligation to update any forward-looking statements.

And now, I'll turn the call over to Alex.

Alex Vetter

President, Chief Executive Officer & Director, Cars.com, Inc.

Thank you, Katherine. We delivered a solid first quarter, making important progress on growth initiatives while also strengthening our bottom line. Revenue of $179 million was within our guidance range and adjusted EBITDA was a highlight for the quarter, exceeding the high end of our expected range by more than a 1 point. Strong free cash flow also enabled us to repurchase $22 million of shares during the quarter, which pace well ahead of our capital return commitment for the year.

Before we get further into Q1 results, let's take a step back to ground our long term strategy in light of the changes happening in automotive. Our platform strategy, which combines the leading and scaled consumer marketplace with dealer software tools, has been key to our diversified growth. There is still significant opportunity to deepen product penetration, and we are seeing elevated interest in AccuTrade and DealerClub as the industry focuses on used cars.

Thoughtful product innovation, leveraging AI and data intelligence positions us well to meet industry demand to simplify car buying and selling. And the same is true for consumers, where our sustained investments in shopping tools and brand leadership are translating into record marketplace metrics. While we're not immune to near term uncertainty that has affected the automotive outlook, the core value proposition of our platform remains incredibly strong and arguably even more relevant for the industry today.

We gained share in each of our end markets to exit March with much stronger momentum relative to the soft start in January that we discussed on our last call. Dealer count rose to 19,250 dealers, the best quarter of sequential organic customer growth since mid-2022. Our solutions portfolio was a standout in Q1, adding over 100 new website customers and additional AccuTrade subscribers. Our consumers are in in-depth editorial and news coverage of tariffs is resonating with shoppers helping set a new record for unique visitors in Q1.

As a result, OEM business also grew 6% year over year, reflecting the value automakers place on our high quality in-market audience. These broad based improvements from unit growth to operational efficiency are strong signals that dealer revenue will return to year-over-year growth. We are also particularly well placed to benefit from the emerging tailwinds in the marketplace and used car solutions.

The Cars.com marketplace is supporting a surge in consumer interest that peaked in March and stayed strong through April, reflecting a better user experience as well as incremental demand from tariff motivated shoppers. A record 29 million average monthly unique visitors utilize Cars.com to browse, research and submit leads in Q1.

Overall traffic of 117 million visits was also up 1% year over year after adjusting for an extra leap day in 2024.

Specifically, traffic to our news and editorial content was up more than 50% year-over-year, driven by resources like our American-Made Index. Multi-year investments and brand marketing and editorial are producing clear and strong ROI for our marketplace, and we expect to sustain engagement with content like our affordability report and the next American-Made Index update due in June.

Attribution and Marketplace Analytics also remain at the forefront of our engineering and product development roadmap. In the second quarter, we'll be incorporating additional data intelligence into Cars.com leads, expanding dealers, access to important, actionable insights like consumer shopping behavior and estimated budget. We expect this enhancement to improve lead quality and also boost long term dealer satisfaction. This feature will be bundled into marketplace packages and another example of our commitment to enhancing value delivery.

We're optimistic that audience strength and product innovation, combined with new commercial leadership, will help marketplace contribute to overall dealer revenue growth in 2025. Turning to the supply side, we are well positioned to drive adoption of AccuTrade and DealerClub as the market focuses on acquiring used vehicle inventory. AccuTrade appraisal volume was up over 813,000 appraisals in Q1 of a substantial 16% quarter over quarter and putting us well on our way to over 1 million quarterly appraisals.

On an appraisal per dealer basis, the 14% quarter over quarter increase in Q1 was the best sequential growth we've seen since starting to track this metric. This strong activity points to not only the success of our redesigned sales, onboarding and account management support model, but also the increasing importance of acquiring in-demand late model high quality vehicles directly from consumers. On average, the top quartile of AccuTrade users acquired nearly 50 cars through this service lane in February and March, demonstrating the importance and scale of AccuTrade's impact.

DealerClub, the latest addition to our platform also opens up a new channel for used vehicle acquisition or disposal via transparent, reputation based dealer-dealer auctions. In its first two months of integration with the Cars Commerce platform DealerClub increased active users by 50% and nearly doubled its volume of completed transactions from February to March. We also grew our pipeline by over 2,500 prospects in Q1 alone, leveraging our industry reach to accelerate dealer adoption. DealerClub users have already benefited from early integration with the Cars Commerce platform, which I also note has been some of our fastest development work to date.

In Q1, we updated DealerClub auctions with AccuTrade pricing data, providing real time insights to empower, inform buying and selling decisions. Just last week, we also turned on to one click ability for dealers to push AccuTrade appraisals directly into DealerClub auctions. Looking ahead, we plan to use our inventory intelligence to help dealers identify aging inventory on our marketplace or retail websites to manage inventory lifecycle within our platform.

Shifting to progress on websites Dealer Inspire and D2C Media were up nicely in Q1, adding over 100 new customers quarter over quarter. Shorten website time to launch and improved websites' speed and performance both contributed to the net growth we achieved in the quarter.

Moving to our OEM and national business, Q1 revenue was up 6% year over year and around one third of our OEM partners increased their spending on Cars Commerce media. However, late in the quarter, there were early signs from a handful of OEMs looking to more closely manage their media commitments. With auto industry outlook being revised down for the year, we need to operate on the basis that that media spending trend may persist. Putting pressure on new car sales for OEMs and franchise dealers. Based on those trends, we believe it's prudent to suspend full year revenue guidance until external visibility improves.

However, the value of platform remains clear and we're focused on driving commercial improvements, platform innovation, and product adoption and we remain confident in our ability to drive full year growth. We've also consistently demonstrate staying cost disciplined. Our existing cost controls are performing well and we have additional operating leverage to manage the business across a range of macroeconomic scenarios. As such, we are reaffirming our adjusted EBITDA guidance.

In closing, Q1 produced many positive key takeaways that gave us confidence in our ability to deliver consistent growth and long term value creation. Our business is fundamentally strong and resilient and we believe that we're poised for growth in the current cycle. We're confident that we can execute through dynamic external conditions and reaccelerate our growth trajectory.

Now I'll turn the call to Sonia to discuss first quarter financial performance and our outlook. Sonia?

Sonia Jain

Chief Financial Officer, Cars.com, Inc.

Thank you, Alex. While first quarter revenue was down slightly year-over-year, we are pleased that we made progress on multiple growth drivers. We outperformed adjusted EBITDA margin expectations and supported strong capital return initiatives during the first quarter.

First quarter revenue of $179 million was within our range of expectations based on the exit rate from Q4 into Q1 and also reflected a handful of discrete timing shifts, primarily stemming from customers reacting to the tariff environment.

Dealer revenue was down 2% year over year from a softer than normal start to the year for marketplace and some pressure on media products such as in-market video.

[ph] Reaccelerating (00:11:35) marketplace performance remains a key focus area, and we saw growing signs of improvement throughout the quarter. We were pleased to grow total marketplace customers month over month in February and March, driven by strength in winning independent dealers. Additionally, we improved on the slightly elevated churn that we called out in December and have seen levels improve since January.

Alex already pointed out our accomplishments around audience strength in Q1, which we believe is a leading indicator of underlying marketplace health and growth potential. Our Solutions portfolio demonstrated strong performance in the quarter, helping offset some of the pressure on marketplace and media.

We added over a 100 new website customers in Q1 with over 70% of those wins coming from Dealer Inspire. As previously discussed, renegotiating legacy agreements that govern DI packages is a growth initiative for 2025. We completed three of these negotiations during Q1, a strong start to the year that helped us better compete for and win subscribers. Furthermore, we are optimistic that we can favorably revise two to three additional agreements by year end.

AccuTrade also steadily expanded its user base, crossing the 1,000 subscriber mark during Q1. As we noted in our February earnings call. Forcing used vehicle inventory is once again in sharp focus after production forecasts were slashed due to recent policy changes. And our new commercial leadership has prioritized converting this influx of interest to drive greater AccuTrade and DealerClub growth for 2025.

Turning to OEM and national. Revenue was up 6% year over year, delivering a solid first quarter performance in what is typically a seasonally slower period. Incremental spending also reached its highest Q1 level since 2018 across a broad spectrum of automakers.

However, as is to be expected when uncertainty rises, we also saw early indicators that OEMs are more closely managing their marketing and advertising investment. Sell through rates of our media products remain high, but stepped down modestly from February to March as more tariffs were announced.

In general, both OEM and dealers are signaling that they prefer more flexibility on the timing of media investments to match the faster news cycle as s macro factors continue to evolve. We're confident that our value delivery and consumer scale will continue to draw strong spending from our partners. Despite decreased visibility into the specific timing of investments in this part of our business in the short term.

Now, switching to operating expenses, first quarter expenses were $173 million compared to $167 million a year ago, up 3% year over year, primarily from higher severance related costs. And the inclusion of new DealerClub expenses and partially offset by lower lease costs.

First quarter adjusted operating expenses were $155 million, roughly flat to the same period a year ago. Product and technology expenditures increased less than $1 million year-over-year on both a reported and adjusted basis. The majority of this increase was attributable to compensation expense, partially offset by lower software licensing costs.

Marketing and sales costs increased $1 million year-over-year on a reported basis, primarily driven by compensation expense, and was roughly flat on an adjusted basis as we supported our scaled and growing consumer marketplace with efficient investments in paid and brand marketing.

General and administrative expense was up $3 million year-over-year on a reported basis and down $1 million on an adjusted basis. The majority of the reported increase was attributable to severance related costs resulting from a targeted head count reduction in March to optimize marketing, technical operations and commercial teams.

In addition, we simplified organizational structure and increased focus on core strategic initiatives. Net loss for the first quarter was $2 million or negative $0.03 per diluted share compared to net income of $1 million or $0.01 per diluted share a year ago, with the variance primarily attributable to the severance related costs just described above.

Adjusted net income for the first quarter was $24 million or $0.37 per diluted share, compared to $29 million or

$0.43 per diluted share a year ago. Adjusted EBITDA performance of $51 million in the first quarter was down slightly year-over-year. We delivered adjusted EBITDA margin of 28.3% in the first quarter, exceeding our outlook and a result of continued cost discipline coupled with lower than anticipated integration costs associated with the DealerClub acquisition.

Moving to key metrics. Dealer count of 19,250 customers, not including DealerClub users, was up more than 40 dealers quarter-over-quarter, growing well to start the year. Solutions growth was a bright spot, particularly on websites. In addition, we saw sequential independent dealer growth within marketplace, a known opportunity for us, and one we actively repositioned resources to drive.

Looking ahead, we expect to drive dealer count growth from additional solution sales, improving and for marketplace and converting and cross-selling DealerClub users into our subscription based products.

For ARPD first quarter performance of $2,473 was roughly flat quarter over quarter and down $32 year over year, primarily reflecting changes in our customer mix. We continue to believe we can return to ARPD expansion in 2025 based on multiple growth initiatives that we previously laid out.

First, packaging more value into our marketplace subscriptions such as with media products, which we will begin to roll out around midyear as planned, second, driving more AccuTrade subscriptions through product differentiation and by leveraging OEM endorsements. As more dealers pivot to acquiring used vehicles due to tariff related production constraints, our sales team reported a notable increase in dealers asking to demo and trial both our AccuTrade and DealerClub solutions in late Q1.

Repackaging legacy agreements for websites is also an uplift for ARPD, and our success to start the year gives us confidence we can complete more of these negotiations, which will help align pricing with value delivery.

Shifting to our cash flow and balance sheet. Net cash provided by operating activities totaled $29 million for the first quarter. Free cash flow was $24 million during the period, down slightly year-over-year and reflecting adjusted EBITDA performance.

We repurchased approximately 1.6 million shares for $22 million in the first quarter, a strong demonstration of our commitment to return capital to shareholders. Recall in February, we announced a share repurchase target of $60 million to $70 million for 2025, and we're substantially over achieving this target on an average quarterly basis in Q1.

Debt outstanding remained at $460 million as of March 31, 2025, bringing total net leverage to 2.1 times, still at the low end of our target range of 2 to 2.5 times. Total liquidity was $321 million as of March 31, 2025, which provides ample future capacity to invest in our growth strategy and pursue thoughtful capital allocation to create long term value.

Now let's conclude with second quarter and full year 2025 guidance. As touched upon in the earlier revenue discussion, we are seeing signs that the magnitude and timing of some media investments may continue to shift given greater near term macro and tariff driven uncertainty. This uncertainty is pressuring the new car market where we are more indexed than other players due to our diversified revenue and strong relationships with OEM and franchise dealers.

While our business is fundamentally strong and we have confidence in the growth opportunities ahead, particularly around the dealer business, we believe it is prudent to adjust our approach to guidance to reflect changing market conditions, as such, we are suspending full year revenue guidance until visibility improves.

To give some color in the absence of an outlook range, we do expect Q2 revenue to be up year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter. We also continue to expect full year revenue to be up year-over-year, driven by growth initiatives related to greater product adoption repackaging and product innovation, including DealerClub.

Growth for the year is expected to be back half weighted as subscription based revenue compounds in later quarters. Setting aside external volatility, we remain firmly in control of our cost structure and operational levers. Adjusted EBITDA margin for the second quarter of 2025 is expected to be between 27% and 29%, roughly flat year over year at the midpoint reflecting revenue mix and marginally higher investments in our stated growth initiatives. We are also reaffirming an adjusted EBITDA margin outlook for fiscal 2025 between 29% and 31%.

Consumers and dealers are increasingly gravitating to our platform and upcoming product releases and enhancements to our commercial approach should further amplify our platform differentiation and appeal. Despite some market uncertainty, our business remains strong and we are confident in our ability to deliver full year growth.

And with that, I'd like to open the call for Q&A. Operator?

Naved Khan

Analyst, B. Riley Securities, Inc.

Great. Thank you very much. I have two questions. One understanding that the tariffs have created a ton of uncertain for the different players, including the OEMs, the dealers and the marketplaces. I mean, just trying to sort of understand the impact and it seems like it could be twofold. One is obviously the dealer and OEM ad spending on the platform. And the second is maybe driven by how the used car volumes might be affected - may or may not be affected, right, because of the tariff. So trying to understand the magnitude - relative magnitude and the uncertainty in these two buckets? And then the second question I have is that on AccuTrade, but I'll save it after you answered the first one.

Alex Vetter

President, Chief Executive Officer & Director, Cars.com, Inc.

Sure. Naved, thanks. Thanks for the questions. Well, first of all, on the consumer side, certainly the tariff news has pulled forward a lot of pent up demand of consumers flocking to the marketplace, looking for deals and looking to lock in purchases before tariffs are impacted. And so we are seeing very favorable consumer traffic trends. We think with inventory shortages like we saw during the COVID pandemic, when there's limited supply, marketplaces also get elevated traffic levels because consumers search far wider radius. So we have a ton of degree of confidence that organic traffic trends we think are going to persist throughout this year and give us a tailwind of natural consumer usage and value delivery for our customers.

I think obviously on the dealer side, we're feeling very front footed. We grew marketplace in February and March. We see positive sentiment from dealers that are leaning into technologies like AccuTrade and using DealerClub to source used cars, fearing that they won't be able to get new car supply. So fundamentally, on the dealer side, we see a lot of help.

On the OEMs side, I think that's where it's much harder to predict. We had a large OEM say that their upfront commitment, they're no longer committed. They think they'll spend the money, but they want to move to month to month until they get better visibility. And so it's really that uncertainty on the OEMs side that gives us pause on our full year view because that had been a nice growth engine for the business all of last year and even this year. We grew OEM revenue in the first quarter, 6%. So we feel good about the business, but the signals that we're getting give us less certainty on their commitment.

Naved Khan

Analyst, B. Riley Securities, Inc.

Okay, great. And so my follow-up question was around AccuTrade. I think you, on the last call, had announced some endorsements and you were optimistic of winning even more endorsements through the course of 2025. So wanted to get a sense of how we should think about the growth in customer count sequentially. I think the numbers look flat. Wondering if there's a [ph] lag there (00:26:08) in terms of endorsements translating into dealer wins or maybe is there something in terms of elevated churn that might be eating away into the basis? Any color would be helpful. Thanks.

Alex Vetter

President, Chief Executive Officer & Director, Cars.com, Inc.

No, I - first of all, I think we feel very confident about AccuTrade and our growth potential. We flagged the numbers in terms of usage growth over the quarter, which fundamentally signals dealers behavioral change is shifting aggressively to sourcing inventory differently from their service lane customers and also sourcing from marketplaces like Cars.com. So we've actually seen elevated interest in both AccuTrade and DealerClub in the current period because dealers are not confident that they're going to get steady new car supply.

So it's slower to ramp on solutions because of the onboarding, training and engagement that we need from the dealership to install AccuTrade and get them using it. But fundamentally, we feel very good about the inbound interest that we're getting with AccuTrade and the sentiment we're getting from the dealers that are using, particularly the power dealers, right? We flagged that the top quartile of dealerships are acquiring 50 cars a month using our software. So as word of that spreads to other dealers, we anticipate more adoption.

Sonia Jain

Chief Financial Officer, Cars.com, Inc.

And maybe one other thing to just add related to the endorsement, those do take kind of a little bit of time to season in the market. So we were expecting to see more impact from those endorsements rolling into our Q2 numbers versus Q1. And I think from where we sit today, looking at kind of April and the way April shook out, we're feeling good about kind of that that upward trajectory in terms of net new AccuTrade units in addition to the utilization metrics that Alex talked about, which really support strong long term retention.

Naved Khan

Analyst, B. Riley Securities, Inc.

Very helpful. Thank you.

Rajat Gupta

Analyst, JPMorgan Securities LLC

Great. Thanks for taking the question. I just have like a couple. Firstly, on the first quarter results, clearly good progress here on several fronts, dealer count going up as well. I mean, you were pretty much in line with your guidance for revenue, but clearly well ahead on the EBITDA. I was curious was there like some proactive measures that you had started to take, maybe like in March around cost and investments as the tariff news was started to gain traction. I was just curious, like, what drove the margin upside versus your initial expectation? And just I have a quick follow-up.

Sonia Jain

Chief Financial Officer, Cars.com, Inc.

Yeah, no, thanks for the questions, Rajat. I think in terms of EBITDA we've always really focused on managing the cost structure of the business well. I'd point out to a couple different things related to where our adjusted EBITDA margins landed. I think, number one, we're excited about the progress we've made in the DealerClub integration process. But the costs did come in a little bit lower than we'd originally planned. So we've been able to move quickly and efficiently.

OpEx was just generally flat on a year over year basis on an adjusted basis. So that's just general cost discipline. We did make some adjustments late in the quarter. These are actually unrelated to tariffs. More focused around how we want to run the business and tighten up our areas of focus. We did make a targeted head count reduction that's less of an impact to Q1 in terms of a benefit from a cost structure perspective, more something that you would see in the following quarters.

Rajat Gupta

Analyst, JPMorgan Securities LLC

Understood that. That's very helpful. And you mentioned a couple of things around, you're starting to see some signals from dealers and OEMs on maybe just changing the spending patterns on media.

Sonia Jain

Chief Financial Officer, Cars.com, Inc.

Yes.

Rajat Gupta

Analyst, JPMorgan Securities LLC

But you also guided to second quarter revenue being up. Could you help us tie up those comments? I mean, are you still expecting dealer up and OEM down? Just trying to understand the mix of that and what are you actually seeing on the ground today like in April in terms of just [indiscernible] (00:31:07) customers what exactly are the customers saying in terms of spend? Have you already started to see a drop in spending or is it something you just expect in the second half maybe? Thanks.

Alex Vetter

President, Chief Executive Officer & Director, Cars.com, Inc.

Yeah, I think that's part of the reason why it's a little bit harder to predict, Rajat, because we are getting mixed signals from both segments. I'd say on the dealer side, we've seen some pullback in media commitments like dealers have said, I'm not going to run video advertising this quarter. I'm staying on marketplace. In fact, as I mentioned, we grew marketplace in February and March. So we're seeing dealers understand the importance of getting their inventory found on our marketplace. But we are seeing a pullback in terms of discretionary or ancillary media solutions running alongside or on top.

And it's same on the OEM side. I think we're seeing steady commitment. A third of our OEMs actually increased their spending with us in the quarter. But equally, we saw some of our bigger OEM clients signal to us that they want to move to month to month as opposed to lock in quarterly or six-month commitments until they see a clearer picture.

So I guess, the positive is they still are seeing opportunities with us. They're just unwilling to make the same media commitments. Again, our software solutions, rock-solid. Websites were up over 100, dealers aren't pulling back on their websites in any macro environment. And then in our software tools like AccuTrade and DealerClub continue to get strong organic growth, it's really the media side that's harder to predict.

Sonia Jain

Chief Financial Officer, Cars.com, Inc.

And it's the visibility on the media side. It's not as though OEMs and dealers don't see the value in the product and don't want to get in front of consumers. It's really become, I think, a bit more of a timing question as to when they deploy those funds to maximize kind of impact on the inventory they, in fact, have available to sell.

Rajat Gupta

Analyst, JPMorgan Securities LLC

Understood. Great. Thanks for all the color and good luck.

Tom White

Analyst, D. A. Davidson & Co.

Great. Thank you for taking my questions. Maybe hoping you guys could just double click on the comments just about the improvement in the marketplace business over the course of the quarter, kind of relative to how things were trending, exiting last year. I guess, I'm just trying to understand like the comments around February and March being better sequentially, is that mostly some of the progress with the independent dealers that you touched on? And what are sort of the drivers of that? Is it sort of sales outreach? I guess, I'm just trying to put that commentary with maybe some of the comments you just made about dealers generally being strong, but there being a little bit of trepidation maybe on some of the media stuff kind of on the side. So yeah, just trying to understand the sequential improvement in marketplace over the course of the quarter?

Alex Vetter

President, Chief Executive Officer & Director, Cars.com, Inc.

Sure, Tom. We've seen this behavior before in the dealer environment where seasonal or macro events can trigger a reactionary behavior. Q4 typically is relatively soft. This year Q4 for us was much softer than we were anticipating as dealers began pulling back rather aggressively. And that persisted into January. However, when you saw that consumer demand and consumer traffic levels remained elevated, we started to see dealers blink and realized, wait a minute, the market's continuing to grow. I don't have to overreact here. And we've even seen some of the dealers that we lost in Q4 come back. So we saw growth in marketplace in February, we saw growth in marketplace in March, and we continue to see positive trends there heading into Q2.

Again, I think where we're seeing more of the softness is saying, I just want [ph] run (00:35:27) the base marketplace, I'm not going for the $10,000, $15,000 a month media campaign on top of that, but core marketplace metrics, both on the consumer and the dealer side, remained strong.

Sonia Jain

Chief Financial Officer, Cars.com, Inc.

Maybe one clarifying comment, because we do have a marketplace package that's called the base package, as we still see, we haven't seen any new material change in the tier distribution of our packages, to Alex's point.

They want marketplace. They want to be in the package they're in on marketplace. We continue to skew up tier from a package perspective. It's just those ancillary media attach rates feel like they're under a little bit more pressure.

Tom White

Analyst, D. A. Davidson & Co.

Okay, that's very helpful. And then maybe just one little housekeeping follow-up. The reported dealer count, is DealerClub included in that? And will it be included in it going forward? It doesn't sound like, but I just want to make sure, I understand.

Sonia Jain

Chief Financial Officer, Cars.com, Inc.

It's not included in the number now. I think it's still a little bit on the smaller size transparently relative to our subscription business, DealerClub is a transactional business. It doesn't mean that at some point you won't think about these dealer count numbers together. But for now, we're trying to [indiscernible] (00:36:43) more subscription based number.

Tom White

Analyst, D. A. Davidson & Co.

Okay. Thank you very much.

Marvin Fong

Analyst, BTIG LLC

Great. Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. So our first question, just on all the positive activity around AccuTrade and DealerClub. So, maybe two-part question, just the 2,500 prospects, I believe that was DealerClub specifically, how quickly does that that close? It would seem to me that that's a - something that could be done a lot faster than the AccuTrade product?

And then second part of that question is just on monetization, right? I think DealerClub is currently - you're really charging for that on the seller side, what are your thoughts there? Given the interest you're seeing, do you see now the time that continue to build market share or is there a monetization opportunity that you can sort of accelerate there? And I have a follow up.

Alex Vetter

President, Chief Executive Officer & Director, Cars.com, Inc.

Sure, Marvin. Well, first of all, obviously, the immediate growth to DealerClub, I think underscores the synergy that that the Cars Commerce platform can help bring to the club and enable dealer volume. We've had over 2,500 prospects reach out to inquire more and register for DealerClub. And so, we've been onboarding dealerships aggressively each and every month and we're excited about that volume. I think obviously it's a subset of that that are actually transacting on the platform, but those numbers are growing at 60% per month. And so we're excited to see that volume.

Increasingly in this environment, sourcing used cars is a real pain point. And the fact that dealers can do this far more cost effectively than the traditional marketplaces that are now charging premiums because of elevated wholesale prices. So there's multiple economic benefits here for dealerships to change their sourcing strategy and DealerClub is well positioned.

In the quarter, we really focused on integration to benefit our AccuTrade subscribers so that it strengthens AccuTrade. We shared on the call that now dealers can one click appraise the vehicle and if you're not interested in retailing it, they can launch it for sale in DealerClub and that workflow improvement creates a lot of efficiency because dealers have to manually enter cars into the other marketplaces. So we think that'll strengthen both AccuTrade and DealerClub volume as well. So we've got more initiatives planned on the integration. But preliminary, I think we've hit a very solid double out of the gates with DealerClub with momentum to come.

Marvin Fong

Analyst, BTIG LLC

That's great. Like great to hear. And second question just on OEM and national, obviously understand why that's under pressure. Can you just help us understand, I mean, you had previously talked about the strength you had in the upfront. I think you made a comment, though, that upfront may not be actually [ph] a firm (00:40:11) commitment. So as we think about how much of this is a timing modulation versus potentially - some commitments might not actually get spent. How much of the upfront commitments are actually at risk? And can you just remind us kind of how much of the total ad spend in a year is typically attributable to the upfront? Just that'll be very helpful. Thanks.

Alex Vetter

President, Chief Executive Officer & Director, Cars.com, Inc.

Sure. Marvin, I think this is more timing than it is anything else. We've even had OEMs signal to us as soon as they get clarity that they can give us equal clarity. But right now, they're operating week to week. And therefore, their commitments to us at best are month to month. So I'm empathetic to their plight and certainly have a ton of respect for the challenges that they're dealing with.

And so to me, it's purely timing. And we even saw this with some of the dealer pull back in Q4 and even January, the fact that we're now seeing those same customers reassume work with us because the consumer demand persists and even is elevated, gives me confidence that we'll see a similar behavior once the macro news settles down and the picture is clearer for our clients.

Sonia, do you want to comment on what percentage of total ad spend is it attributable to upfronts?

Sonia Jain

Chief Financial Officer, Cars.com, Inc.

Yeah, it's [ph] still in 50/50 (00:41:46) right now. But I think what - I would reiterate what Alex said, I think the challenge at the moment is not that we're getting spend pulled. It's that we're seeing spend shift. And so just from a visibility perspective, as we look to give you guys insight into business performance, that certainly creates like a little bit more challenge than normal. But again, the quality of the audience wanting to get in front of our in-market audience, that that remains of interest. It's really just a timing question of when those dollars come into play.

Marvin Fong

Analyst, BTIG LLC

And when you say timing, just a follow-up, I mean, you're saying it would still be spent this calendar year, or do you think the shift could move into next year?

Sonia Jain

Chief Financial Officer, Cars.com, Inc.

It's hard - like, unfortunately, that's like the crux of the challenge. It's hard to say. But like, as an example, we saw some OEMs who had spend planned in April shift some of that spend into June and July. And so you're starting to see a little bit of shifting like that. As Alex kind of mentioned, instead of they're going more a month to month management of their spend. But generally speaking, what I would say is based on what we know today, based on our Q1 numbers, which were roughly at the midpoint of our guidance range and the growth drivers performance, we feel good about where we are and the progress we've made. We expect to be up on revenue on a year-over-year basis. We expect to deliver a solid Q2. It's just the visibility and the specificity is a little bit harder to nail down right now.

Marvin Fong

Analyst, BTIG LLC

Okay. That's perfectly understandable. Thanks so much.

Joseph Spak

Analyst, UBS Securities LLC

Great. Thank you. Actually wanted to pick up right there on the visibility because I think as you sort of describe the environment, it's understandable about the guidance for the year, especially, it sounds like there's way more uncertainty in the back half. But I do want to, I guess, get a better sense of your true visibility in the near term. And I know you ended up providing a little bit more color on 2Q, but if we got a little bit over a month and a half left, I thought the subscription stuff, which is like 80% of sales is pretty low variance in the short term. It doesn't sound like there's any real change there. So like just maybe you could sort of go over this again. But like how much visibility do you really have on the ad side? Because you've even said a couple of times like they're going month to month, but it would seem like you should have a pretty good sense of that even by now, as we're in May?

Sonia Jain

Chief Financial Officer, Cars.com, Inc.

So I think on the subscription side of the business, like we said, marketplace is growing. We feel confidence in our ability to deliver our dealer websites. Those were up 100 in the quarter. AccuTrade is showing strong signals from Q1 rolling into Q2. I think where there is a little bit of uncertainty continues to be on media and some relatively discrete shifts in spend can have an impact on how those overall numbers do tend to roll up. I mean, if you look at OEM and national individually and think about hat on an annual basis in terms of total revenue or even on a quarterly basis in terms of total revenue, you can kind of do a little bit of math on what a small - relatively small change on that number could do to a guidance range.

Joseph Spak

Analyst, UBS Securities LLC

Okay. I mean, is it possible, if not plausible, that OEM national number is down this year?

Sonia Jain

Chief Financial Officer, Cars.com, Inc.

We still feel good about the ability to deliver year-over-year growth in the business, which I think would be contingent on seeing growth in both dealer revenue and OEM revenue. I think what's a little bit harder to say right now is a specificity on the range of what that growth is going to look like and in what timeframe that growth is going to be delivered. But on the media side of the business, when you think about some of the audience metrics that we put up for Q1, that gives us confidence. That's what drives that media portion of the business, that high quality, in-market audience and all the signals are green.

Joseph Spak

Analyst, UBS Securities LLC

Okay. And then just the second question, I know you've talked about your exposure to new versus used. And in the past, you've given us that franchise versus independent dealers, which is a good proxy for that, I guess,

maybe you just remind us of that split. But I'm also just curious if you can or are willing to provide your estimated revenue split just as it relates to new versus used, if that's even possible?

Alex Vetter

President, Chief Executive Officer & Director, Cars.com, Inc.

We don't break it out just because our subscription includes new and used exposure. And so we don't segment it out, but we do mirror the market, right? Like 15% to 20% of our revenue is anchored more on new car oriented traffic and the bulk of it is on used. So you can infer it, but it mimics sort of vehicle sales volumes between new and used,

I think on the [ph] franchised end-to-end (00:47:32) split, we don't break that out, but I will say there's been increased interest from independent dealers because consumers clearly are looking for more affordable vehicles and more cost effective options than some of the higher priced new cars. And so we are seeing steady pick up on independent dealer volume in the current quarter.

Joseph Spak

Analyst, UBS Securities LLC

Okay. I appreciate it. Thank you.

Sonia Jain

Chief Financial Officer, Cars.com, Inc.

Yeah, it's obviously - and these are roughly call it like a third of the marketplace mix.

Joseph Spak

Analyst, UBS Securities LLC

Sorry, what was that?

Sonia Jain

Chief Financial Officer, Cars.com, Inc.

Roughly a third of the marketplace mix.

Alex Vetter

President, Chief Executive Officer & Director, Cars.com, Inc.

Current mix is about a third independent.

Joseph Spak

Analyst, UBS Securities LLC

Okay. Thank you.

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