DoubleVerify

Prospectus Summary

Unless the context otherwise requires, the terms "we," "us," "our," and the "Company," as used in this prospectus, refer to DoubleVerify and its consolidated subsidiaries. DoubleVerify and its subsidiary DoubleVerify MidCo, Inc. changed their names from Pixel Group Holdings Inc. and Pixel Parent Inc., respectively, prior to the date of this prospectus. All references to DoubleVerify and DoubleVerify MidCo, Inc. are to these entities both prior to and after the name changes.

Our Company

We are a leading software platform for digital media measurement and analytics. Our mission is to increase the effectiveness and transparency of the digital advertising ecosystem. Through our software platform and the metrics it provides, we help preserve the fair value exchange in the digital advertising marketplace.

The advertising industry continues to shift from traditional mediums to an expanding array of digital channels and platforms. Digital advertisers have historically relied on inconsistent, self-reported data from a large number of publishers, social channels and programmatic platforms, making it difficult to form an accurate, unbiased view of how and where their ad budgets are spent. As objectionable content and ad fraud have proliferated across the Internet and other digital channels, advertisers are utilizing independent, third-party solutions to protect their brand equity and optimize the performance of their digital media investments.

Our technology addresses this need by providing unbiased data analytics that enable advertisers to increase the effectiveness, quality and return on their digital advertising investments. Our proprietary DV Authentic Ad metric is our definitive metric of digital media quality which measures whether a digital ad is displayed in a fraud-free, brand-safe environment and is fully viewable in the intended geography. Our software platform delivers this metric to our customers in real time, allowing them to access critical performance data on their digital ads. Customers then leverage our data analytics to improve the efficiency of their digital advertising investments by avoiding wasted media spend on blocked or fraudulent ads and to optimize their media strategies in real time by verifying their highest performing ads and content.

Our software platform is integrated across the entire digital advertising ecosystem, including programmatic platforms, social media channels and digital publishers. We deliver unique data analytics through our customer interface to provide detailed insights into our customers' media performance on both direct and programmatic media buying platforms and across all key digital media channels (including social, video, mobile in-app and connected TV ("CTV")), formats (including display and video) and devices (including mobile, desktop and connected televisions). Our technology enables programmatic media traders to evaluate approximately 200 billion transactions daily, ensuring that a digital ad meets advertiser-defined quality criteria before it is purchased. We also analyze more than 5 billion digital ad transactions daily, measuring whether ads are delivered in a fraud-free, brand-safe environment and are fully viewable in the intended geography. Our software platform and unique position in the advertising ecosystem allows us to develop a significant data asset that accumulates over time as we measure an increasing number of media transactions. We are able to leverage our data asset across our existing solutions as well as expand the data asset to launch new solutions that address the evolving needs of advertisers.

Our blue-chip customer base includes many of the largest global brands. We serve over 1,000 customers that are diversified across all major industry verticals, including consumer packaged goods, financial services, telecommunications, technology, automotive and healthcare. In 2020, we had 45 customers who each represented at least $1 million of annual revenue, up from 41 such customers in 2019 and 25 in 2018, with no customer representing more than 10% of our revenue in either 2019 or 2020. We serve our customers globally through our 23 offices in 15 countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Israel, Singapore, Australia, Brazil, France, Germany and Japan.

We generate revenue from our advertising customers based on the volume of media transactions, or ads, that our software platform measures ("Media Transactions Measured"), for which we receive an analysis fee ("Media Transaction Fee"), enabling us to grow as our customers increase their digital ad spend and as we integrate into new channels and platforms. We have long-term relationships with many of our customers, with an average relationship of almost six years for our top 75 customers and almost seven years for our top 25 customers, and ongoing contractual agreements with a substantial portion of our customer base. We have maintained exceptional customer retention with gross revenue retention rates of over 95%, and 100% retention of our top 75 customers, in each of 2020, 2019 and 2018. We are also able to increase revenue per customer as we introduce new solutions, which has resulted in a compounded annual growth in average revenue for our top 50 customers of 29% from 2017 to 2020. The combination of high customer retention and multiple upsell opportunities has resulted in net revenue retention rates of 123% in 2020, 156% in 2019 and 131% in 2018. We have delivered strong historical revenue growth, with a compounded annual growth rate of 50% from 2017 to 2020.

We generated revenue of $243.9 million in 2020 and $182.7 million in 2019, representing an increase of 34%. We generated revenue of $182.7 million in 2019 and $104.3 million in 2018, representing an increase of 75%. We generated net income of $20.5 million in 2020, $23.3 million in 2019 and $3.2 million in 2018. We generated Adjusted EBITDA of $73.2 million in 2020, or 30% of revenue, $69.0 million in 2019, or 38% of revenue, and $26.6 million in 2018, or 25% of revenue. Adjusted EBITDA is a financial measure not presented in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles ("GAAP"). For a definition of Adjusted EBITDA, an explanation of our management's use of this measure and a reconciliation of Adjusted EBITDA to net income, see "—Summary Historical Consolidated Financial Data."

Our Industry

We believe that our business benefits from many of the most significant trends in digital marketing and advertising, including:

Significant Growth in Digital Ad Spend. The global advertising industry represented $569 billion of ad spend in 2020, according to Magna Global, and continues to shift from traditional forms of media to digital channels and platforms. According to Magna Global, global digital ad spend, excluding search, reached over $170 billion in 2020 and is expected to grow to $225 billion by 2023. We believe the shift towards digital spend will continue as new distribution channels and advertising formats emerge that enable advertisers to more effectively reach their target audiences.

Acceleration of Programmatic Ad Buying. Advertisers are increasingly shifting their digital media buying to programmatic platforms, which automate the digital ad buying process through the use of computer algorithms and deliver targeted advertisements utilizing vast data sets. According to Magna Global, global programmatic ad spend was approximately $51 billion in 2020 and is expected to reach $75 billion in 2023 and grow nearly twice as fast as the rest of the digital advertising market over the next five years. Programmatic ad buyers and trading platforms benefit from consistent access to high quality and accurate data to improve purchasing decisions and optimize the efficacy of their ads. Furthermore, advertisers value having a single, unified data source that they can leverage to help make real-time decisions on programmatic ad placements across all channels and formats.

Emergence of CTV and Other New Digital Channels. Over time, the emergence of new digital channels, such as social, has attracted significant advertiser interest and investment. In turn, this has created additional demand for digital measurement solutions. According to Magna Global, global digital ad spend on social channels was approximately $87 billion in 2020 and is expected to reach over $120 billion by 2023. Today, CTV represents a large new frontier for digital advertising as the approximately $150 billion of annual global linear television media spend starts to migrate to digital channels. According to eMarketer, there was expected to be over $8 billion of CTV ad spend in the U.S. in 2020 which is expected to double by 2023, with over 50% of ad inventory projected to be bought through programmatic platforms. CTV presents a significant opportunity for full-suite measurement providers due to the fragmented inventory and ad fraud emerging within this channel. Based on the Company Data Analysis, CTV fraud impressions more than tripled from 2019 to 2020.

Importance of Brand Reputation. With the increasing scale of digital media channels, advertisers are placing a greater emphasis on understanding where their ads are placed and the content with which it is presented. Context of ad placement has become as important to a brand as the content of the ad itself. Determining the context and content of a web page, streaming video or social post is more complex than verifying a keyword or article headline and often varies minute-by-minute. This challenge is further complicated by a significant increase in user-generated content, as ad spend on social platforms continues to expand. According to a recent study that we commissioned with The Harris Poll, nearly two-thirds of consumers expressed that they would stop using a brand or product that advertises next to false, objectionable or inflammatory content. More than ever, advertisers are being held accountable for brand and content alignment. In response, advertisers are adopting scalable, sophisticated brand safety solutions to ensure effective use of their global digital media spend.

Desire to Improve Media Quality and Effectiveness. The significant growth in digital advertising has resulted in increased fraud and wasted ad spend due to ads that are never seen. Juniper Research estimated that approximately $42 billion of global digital media spend was wasted in 2019 as a result of continually evolving ad fraud activities, including bots, fake clicks and fraudulent web sites. New and sophisticated schemes, particularly across emerging channels such as CTV and mobile in-app, are uncovered each day. We have identified over 5,000 fraudulent CTV apps as of December 31, 2020, and we have seen CTV fraud impressions increase 220% in 2020 as compared to 2019. In addition, even when an ad is verified to be fraud-free, there is no certainty that it is actually viewable. According to Merkle, more than 40% of digital ads placed are deemed to be not viewable. To combat these issues, advertisers, digital publishers and media platforms rely on robust measurement solutions to validate the performance of their marketing campaigns and ensure that they are only paying for verified ads.

Rising Adoption of Independent, Cookie-Less, Cross-Platform Measurement Solutions. The proliferation of digital channels, formats and devices has made it more difficult for advertisers to measure campaign performance across all platforms. This measurement has been further complicated by recent moves by certain closed platforms, which are often referred to as "walled gardens," to restrict cookie and identifier-based data sharing. As a result, advertisers are increasingly adopting full-suite measurement solutions that are not dependent on cookies or cross-site individual-level data trackers and can be used seamlessly between the open web and the walled gardens. Point solutions that only deliver single metrics, often on a limited amount of media, and which are based on challenged data aggregation methods, continue to lose traction with advertisers. This has created a growing demand for independent, third-party providers that provide accredited and unified data analytics that improve the transparency and effectiveness of digital ad spend across the entire ecosystem without relying on cookies. Based on the Company Data Analysis, the total addressable market for our core solutions was less than 25% penetrated in 2020, and we believe that we have the opportunity to expand our customer base in response to increasing demand for our core measurement solutions.

What We Do

We are a leading software platform for digital media measurement and analytics. Our leadership in our industry is based on our differentiated technical capabilities resulting from years of innovation, our breadth of industry accredited solutions, and an expansive network of integration partners that enable us to analyze media transactions across the global digital ecosystem. Our solutions empower our customers to address the evolving and intensifying complexities of measuring the performance of digital advertising. We deliver our suite of solutions through a robust and scalable software platform that provides our customers with unified data analytics. Our broad market coverage of the digital advertising ecosystem and our leading software platform enables us to analyze billions of data points globally each day. We collected and analyzed data points on the approximately 3.2 trillion Media Transactions Measured by us in 2020, up from 2.4 trillion Media Transactions Measured in 2019 and 1.4 trillion in 2018. This volume has enabled us to build a self-reinforcing, proprietary data asset which we redeploy in new solutions that further enhance and expand the analytics that we can deliver to our customers and partners.

Our Solutions

The DV Authentic Ad

The DV Authentic Ad is our definitive metric of digital media quality, which evaluates the existence of fraud, brand safety, viewability and geography for each digital ad:

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Fraud: Our solutions are designed to safeguard advertisers against increasingly sophisticated invalid digital traffic, such as bot fraud, site fraud, malware (including adware), and app fraud. We continuously monitor and analyze billions of delivered digital ads on a daily basis for aberrant activity in order to detect new fraud schemes. We identify over 500,000 new fraudulent device signatures per day, distributing them to our partners nearly 100 times per day, thereby enhancing the protection we provide our customers.

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Brand Safety: Our customers use the data analytics that our software platform provides to help prevent their ads from appearing next to content that they do not deem appropriate for their brands and target desired contexts. Our brand safety solutions evaluate the full context of a webpage including the URL and the specific content. Customers can use our extensive content categories to target desired contexts for their ads, without relying on personal data or cookies. We also offer Authentic Brand Safety, which is an enhanced set of contextual targeting solutions that can be deployed across multiple programmatic platforms.


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Viewability: Digital ads are frequently obscured, paused before fully delivered or placed in locations that are out of view from the intended recipient. We help our customers determine if their ads are in-view by the recipient of each advertisement by providing advanced viewability metrics, including average time-in-view, key message exposure and video player size. Our solutions also leverage our historical data to predict the viewability of ads to optimize programmatic buying decisions.


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Geography: Many of our customers run distinct media campaigns that are targeted toward distinct geographic regions. The intended geography of these media campaigns may be specified due to the content or offer of the digital ad, the language in which it is presented or for compliance reasons. Our customers leverage our solutions to ensure that their geographic targeting requirements are met and that there is language alignment between the digital ad and the intended geographic region.

DV Authentic Attention

We developed DV Authentic Attention, a predictive measure of digital ad performance, by leveraging the data we aggregate to deliver our DV Authentic Ad. Developed in 2020 and released in February 2021, DV Authentic Attention is a performance measurement solution that we believe is the industry's most comprehensive evaluation of creative exposure and user engagement with a digital ad. When employed by our customers, DV Authentic Attention provides comprehensive, real-time prediction data that helps drive media campaign performance in a privacy-friendly manner, as an alternative to individual reach and frequency performance tools. DV Authentic Attention evaluates the real-time delivery of a digital ad by analyzing dozens of data points on the exposure of the digital ad and the consumer's engagement with the ad and device. DV Authentic Attention evaluates the entire presentation of an ad through metrics that include viewable time, share of screen, video presentation and audibility. Our customers use DV Authentic Attention to predict which ads will impact consumers and drive outcomes, enabling them to make changes to their media strategies in real time.

Custom Contextual

In late 2020, we launched our Custom Contextual solution to enhance our programmatic advertising solutions. Advertisers use our Custom Contextual solution to match their ads to relevant content in order to maximize user engagement and drive campaign performance. Custom Contextual metrics leverage our content-derived analytics data and are not reliant on third-party cookies or cross-site tracking technology. Custom Contextual enables advertisers to target audiences based on key points of interest even in web browsers and operating systems that have phased out or ended the use of third-party tracking technology, thus also positioning them to align with existing privacy regulations.

Supply-Side Solutions

We provide our software solutions and data analytics to publishers and other supply-side customers to enable them to maximize revenue from their digital advertising inventory. Supply-side advertising platforms (such as ad networks and exchanges) utilize our data analytics to validate the quality of their ad inventory and provide metrics to their customers to facilitate the targeting and purchasing of digital ads. We also provide the DV Publisher Suite, a unified solution for digital publishers to manage revenue and increase inventory yield by improving video delivery, identifying lost or unfilled sales, and better aggregate data across all inventory sources.

How We Deploy Our Solutions

We provide a consistent, cross-platform measurement standard across all major forms of digital media, making it easier for advertiser and supply-side customers to benchmark performance across all of their digital ads and to optimize their digital strategies in real time. Our coverage spans over 40 key geographies where our customers are located and includes:

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all primary media buying platforms, including direct and programmatic;


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all significant digital media channels, including social, video, mobile in-app and CTV;


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all key media formats, including display and video; and


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all major devices, including mobile, desktop and connected televisions.

We also maintain an expansive set of direct integrations across the entire digital advertising ecosystem in order to deliver our metrics to the platforms where our customers buy ads. Our partner integrations include leading programmatic platforms, such as The Trade Desk, Google Display & Video 360, Amazon Advertising and Verizon Media. Through these integrations, our customers utilize our solutions to better evaluate and optimize inventory purchase decisions. We also have direct integrations with key social platforms, including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest and Snap, as well as leading CTV platforms, including Amazon and Roku, which allow us to deliver more robust social campaign and CTV data analytics to our advertiser customers. Together, we work seamlessly to empower our partners by providing advertisers clarity and confidence in their digital investments across all key platforms.

Our Strengths

We believe the following attributes and capabilities form our core strengths and provide us with competitive advantages:

Best-in-Class Software Platform. Our technology stack enables us to develop proprietary advertising performance metrics on each digital ad transaction. This precision sets us apart from our competitors and allows us to combine and deliver performance measurements across fraud, brand safety, viewability and geography into a single, unique metric (the DV Authentic Ad), as well as the flexibility to disaggregate and analyze the individual measurements for each delivered ad. We believe we are able to provide the most robust data analytics in the industry, analyzing hundreds of data points for each delivered ad and across billions of ads every day, with approximately 3.2 trillion Media Transactions Measured by us in 2020.

Broad Ecosystem Coverage. We provide comprehensive performance measurement metrics across all key digital channels where our customers advertise and deliver them through the major platforms through which they purchase advertising. Our technology is integrated into major platforms that provide direct, programmatic and social advertising, including Google, Facebook and The Trade Desk. As new media formats emerge, the strength of our solutions and the flexibility of our software platform allows us to seamlessly onboard new integration partners and secure new partnerships as selling channels for our solutions. For example, as CTV continues to become an increasingly prominent advertising channel, we have secured partnership agreements with multiple leading CTV platforms, including Amazon and Roku, that have certified our measurement solutions for use on their platforms. We believe that we provide the broadest integration and partnership coverage across the industry.