Full Transcript of MIVA’s 3Q05 Conference Call — Prepared Remarks (MIVA)

Here’s the entire text of the prepared remarks from MIVA’s (ticker: MIVA) Q3 2005 conference call. The Q&A is here. We recognize that this transcript may contain inaccuracies - if you find any, please post a comment below and we’ll incorporate your corrections. And please note: this conference call transcript is a Seeking Alpha product, so feel free to link to it but reproduction is not permitted without the explicit permission of Seeking Alpha.

Executives:

Peter Weinberg, Vice President, Investor Relation.
Craig Pisaris-Henderson Chairman, Chief Executive Officer.
Will Seippel Chief Financial Officer.

Analyst:

Eric Martinuzzi, Craig-Hallum.
Christa Quarles, Thomas Weisel Partners.
Youssef Squali, Jefferies & Co.
Colin Gillis, Adams, Harkness.
Richard Fetyko, Merriman & Co.
Stewart Barry, ThinkEquity.
Marianne Wolk, Susquehanna.

Presentation

Operator

Welcome to today’s MIVA Third Quarter 2005 Financial Results Conference Call. Today’s call is being recorded. At this time for opening remarks and introductions I’d like to turn the call over to Mr. Peter Weinberg. Please go ahead, sir.

Peter Weinberg, Vice President and Investor Relation

Good morning and welcome to MIVA’s earnings conference call for third-quarter 2005 results. I’d like to remind everyone that today’s comments include forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results and events to differ materially. These risks and uncertainties will be outlined at the end of this conference call and are also detailed in MIVA’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

To comply with the SEC’s guidance on fair and open disclosure we have made this conference call publicly available via our website and a replay of the conference call will be available at our website and on, for 90 days after the call. I’d now like to turn the call over to our Chairman and CEO, Craig Pisaris-Henderson.

Craig Pisaris-Henderson, Chairman, Chief Executive Officer

Thank you, Peter. Welcome to MIVA’s third quarter conference call. To begin, we are pleased with our accomplishments in the third quarter and believe it represents a foundation from which we intend to build. Over the last several quarters we acknowledged a number of challenges up front, taking what we believe to be necessary steps to resolve those challenges and to correct our course. We now believe we’re on a path to growth and are modeling for growth expectations in 2006. Not only have we’ve put many of the issues to rest that others in the industry have yet to address, but today we feel confident in our future. We believe we have a strong foundation, we are seeing momentum on the new partner front and we have an experienced management team in place to execute on our plans for the remainder of this year and into 2006.

In recent months we added several seasoned executives to our management team including Will Seippel as CFO, Peter Corrao as COO, and Adam Poulter who has joined to lead our European division. Now in the fourth quarter we are poised to initiate the final step of our recovery plan, rationalizing our expense infrastructure against current revenue levels. At the same time we are committed to maintaining our investment strategy into innovative products we believe will bolster our revenue and production in the short-term as well as the long-term.

The bottom line is we believe that we have the right platform and the right positioning to be the strategic new media solution for publishers and advertisers. These beliefs are based on a number of important factors that many of our competitors simply cannot claim including our global scale, our access to certain essential core technologies such as our licensing agreement with Fast (ph) and Yahoo. Our independent position in the marketplace and our publisher focused strategy. We believe innovation will be critical to our long-term success and we are executing against an active product development pipeline. But in the near-term we believe we have assembled the critical pieces that will enable us to realize greater opportunities as we move forward. We believe that over the third quarter our mission for helping publishers to effectively compete for audience and media spend while protecting their brand, audience and content value has gained momentum. We are pleased with our progress to date and look forward to introducing a number of new products and services to further achieve our goals in the coming quarters.

For us the third quarter represents a foundation that reflects the impact of prior traffic quality initiatives. We continue to be focused on the process of replacing intentionally dropped distribution with higher quality traffic. Adding high quality publishers to our network will directly benefit our advertisers’ ability to generate leads and improve their ROI while increasing the revenue streams we provide to the same partners. We announced a number of distribution partner deals over the last several months and we are encouraged by the response to our solutions and positioning. That said we will remain vigilant to ensure that our network continues to deliver convergence for our advertisers while traffic is generated in ways that meet our high standards. We believe our positioning is designating with publishers who have become increasingly weary of partnering with search providers who aggressively focus on aggregating end-users. In essence, threatening the business prospects for the very partners they claim to serve. We think newspaper publishers, media conglomerates and yellow page publishers have taken notice. To quote Rupert Murdoch on this very point, “Unless we awaken to these changes we will, as an industry, be relegated to the status of also-rans