ACCESS Newswire Q3 2027 Earnings Call Transcript

ACCESS Newswire (AMEX:ACCS) reported third-quarter financial results on Tuesday. The transcript from the company’s third-quarter earnings call has been provided below.

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Summary

ACCESS Newswire reported a 2% decline in Q3 2026 revenue to $5.5 million due to a slowdown in press release volumes, though subscription revenue grew to 60% of total revenue.

Gross margins improved to 75%, and the company completed a $1 million share repurchase plan, with intentions to continue buybacks.

A restructuring plan in October aims to save $1.5 million, with cost savings expected in Q4 2026 and fully realized in Q1 2027.

Product innovations, including the new Spot AI agent, are expected to drive future growth, with a focus on improving press release outcomes before distribution.

Management remains optimistic about returning to top-line growth in 2027, supported by strategic cost reductions and product enhancements.

Full Transcript

Lamar Waller (Editorial Manager)

Hello and welcome to ACCESS Newswire’s third quarter 2026 earnings conference call. My name is Lamar Waller and I’m the Editorial Manager here at ACCESS Newswire. For the past several years I’ve had the privilege of leading a talented, dedicated team of editors who work around the clock to help thousands of customers get their stories to the audiences that matter most. I’ve seen some remarkable stories come across my desk, though I’ll keep those to myself today.

What I’d rather share is how much our platform has improved. These improvements are helping our customers deliver their news with higher quality and stronger engagement than ever. I encourage all of you to see Spot in action. Before we begin today’s call, I would like to remind everyone that statements made in this conference call concerning future revenues, results from operations, financial position, markets, economic conditions, product releases, partnerships, and any other statements that may be construed as predictions of future performance or events are forward-looking statements. These statements involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such statements.

We will also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures which are provided for informational purposes and should be considered in addition to, not as a substitute for, GAAP results. With that, I’ll turn the call over to our Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Brian Balbirnie, and our Chief Financial Officer, Steve Knerr. Brian.

Brian R Balbirnie (Chairman)

Thank you, Lamar. You and the team do an amazing job helping our customers every day. I’m sincerely appreciative of your leadership style, your calm approach, and best of all the surprise backgrounds on our weekly Teams calls. I also love the plug of our new Spot product offering you did in your opening remarks. Good morning everyone and thank you for joining us to discuss our third quarter 2026 results. Our third quarter demonstrated the resilience of our business model in a rapidly evolving Newswire market. Our unit economics performed despite the decline in revenues and I want to start with a few of those highlights. Gross margins came in at 75%, an increase of 2% over the second quarter and consistent with last year. Adjusted EBITDA was $829,000, or 15% of revenue, and cash flows from operations were $469,000.

Subscriptions keep moving in the right direction. Subscription revenues reached 60% of our total revenue and our subscribers and average ARR per subscribing customer also grew, to 1,213 customers and $12,331, respectively. The average price of a press release also increased, supported by our social monitoring and insight and analytics products previously released, and our total customers grew 14% year over year to 14,134. Our cash position remains consistent with prior periods.

We completed our million dollar share repurchase plan and we plan to continue buying back even more shares in the remaining part of this year. Honestly, all of these results are overshadowed by the industry slowdown, which has impacted our press release growth. Revenues came in at $5.5 million compared to $5.6 million in the second quarter and $5.7 million a year ago, which is attributable to the broader slowdown in press release volumes. Steve will review the financial results next. Then I’d like to come back and discuss what we’re seeing going into 2027, our restructuring that we just completed in October, our new products, and positioning for ACCESS Newswire’s next phase of growth.

Steven Winfield Knerr (Chief Financial Officer)

Thank you, Brian, and good morning everyone. I’ll now take you through the third quarter and first nine months of 2026. Financial results: Total revenue for the third quarter of 2026 was $5.5 million, a decrease of approximately $103,000, or 2% compared to Q2 2026, and $208,000, or 4% compared to Q3 of 2025. The decreases were primarily driven by a 12% and 15% decrease in volume, respectively, from our core press release business, reflecting softer industry conditions. However, revenue from our Pro Plan customers as well as revenue from our new social monitoring and insight and analytics products partially offset those declines.

Revenue from our IR products was flat compared to the prior quarter and increased slightly compared to the prior year. For the first nine months of 2026, total revenue was $16.5 million, down $360,000, or 2%, from $16.8 million in the first nine months of 2025. The year-over-year decline was due to three reasons: first, a decrease in core press release revenue of 1%, primarily due to lower average revenue per release in the first half of the year and lower volumes during the third quarter of 2026; second, a decrease in revenue from our webcasting products due to lower revenue from resellers and virtual annual meetings; and third, a decrease in Pro offerings due to customer attrition.

Gross margin for Q3 2026 was $4.2 million, or 75% of revenue, compared to $4.1 million, or 73% of revenue, in Q2 2026 and $4.3 million, or 75% of revenue, in Q3 of 2025. The increase in gross margin percentage compared to the prior quarter was due to distribution costs falling more in line with prior year due to the lower volume I spoke about earlier. For the first nine months of 2026, gross margin was $12.2 million, or 74% of revenue, compared to $12.8 million, or 76% of revenue, during the same period of 2025.

The year-over-year decline in gross margin percentage primarily reflects higher press release distribution costs from a combination of new partners, price increases from existing partners, and additional usage under variable contracts. Moving to operating expenses, total operating expenses were $4.3 million in Q3 of 2026, down $153,000, or 3%, from $4.5 million in Q3 of 2025. For the first nine months of 2026, total operating expenses were $13.4 million, down $549,000, or 4%, from $13.9 million in the first nine months of 2025. We continue to balance cost discipline with targeted investment in areas we believe can support future growth. General and administrative expenses were $1.4 million for Q3 of 2026, a decrease of 5% compared to the same quarter of last year, and $4.5 million for the first nine months of 2026, a decrease of 13% compared to the prior year.

The decreases reflect lower bad debt expense, stock-based compensation, and non-recurring expenses. Sales and marketing expense was $1.7 million in Q3 of 2026, up 5% compared to Q3 of 2025. For the first nine months, sales and marketing expense was $5.3 million, up $595,000, or 13%, compared to the same period of the prior year. These increases reflect our deliberate investment in advertising and trade shows as we work to convert our product innovation into customer and revenue growth.

However, we expect these costs to come back down in 2027 as we reorganize the sales team. Product development expenses decreased 21% for both the three and nine months ended September 30, 2026 as compared to the prior year. The decrease was primarily due to higher capitalized software costs. We capitalized $94,000 of software development costs in Q3 and $303,000 for the first nine months of 2026 compared to $0 and $23,000, respectively, in the comparable periods of last year.

The costs mostly reflect the investment we made in our social monitoring, insight and analytics, and Spot enhancements that we rolled out during the second and third quarters this year, as well as some additional enhancements we have planned for the remainder of the year and into 2027. Operating loss for Q3 2026 was $142,000 compared to $184,000 in Q3 of 2025. For the first nine months of 2026, operating loss was $1.2 million compared to $1.1 million for the same period in 2025. The year-over-year change was primarily driven by lower gross margin partially offset by lower operating expenses. On a GAAP basis, net loss from continuing operations was $80,000, or $0.02 per diluted share, for Q3 of 2026 compared to $45,000, or $0.01 per diluted share, in Q3 of 2025.

For both the first nine months of 2026 and 2025, net loss from continuing operations was $1 million, or $0.27 per diluted share. On a non-GAAP basis, EBITDA was $0.7 million, or 12% of revenue, for Q3 2026 compared to $0.5 million, or 9% of revenue, in Q3 of 2025. Adjusted EBITDA for Q3 2026 was $0.8 million, or 15% of revenue, compared to $0.9 million, or 16% of revenue, in Q3 of 2025. Non-GAAP net income was $0.5 million for Q3 of 2026, or $0.14 per diluted share, compared to $0.8 million, or $0.20 per diluted share, in the prior year quarter. Adjusted free cash flow was $375,000 for Q3 of 2026 compared to a negative $418,000 in Q3 of 2025.

For the first nine months of 2026, EBITDA was $1.2 million, or 7% of revenue, compared to $1 million, or 6% of revenue, for the first nine months of 2025. Adjusted EBITDA was $2 million, or 12% of revenue, compared to $2.3 million, or 14% of revenue, during the same period of the prior year. Non-GAAP net income was $1.2 million, or $0.32 per diluted share, compared to $1.5 million, or $0.39 per diluted share, for the same period of last year. Adjusted free cash flow was $1.4 million compared to $0.8 million for the first nine months of 2025.

There was a significant increase in cash flow from operations during the quarter as we generated $469,000 of cash flow from operations in Q3 of 2026 compared to an outflow of $582,000 in Q3 of 2025. We ended the quarter with just under $3 million in the bank, and Brian will talk a little further about our share repurchase activity, which was ongoing during the quarter. Our deferred revenue balance, which we expect to recognize over the next 12 months, was $5 million as of September 30, 2026, compared to $5.3 million at December 31, 2025.

I will now turn it back over to Brian, who will talk a little further about the rollout of our new Spot agent and some savings initiatives we have heading into Q4 of next year. We believe both of these will enable us to continue to post adjusted EBITDA in the mid-teens while generating higher cash flow from operations. Brian.

Brian R Balbirnie (Chairman)

Thanks, Steve. Let me expand on a few points for the remaining part of the call: what we’re seeing going into 2027, the restructuring that we completed in October, our new products, and how we’re positioning ACCESS Newswire for its next phase of growth. I’ll start with costs. In October, we completed a $1.5 million restructuring plan that streamlined our organization across sales, development, editorial, and operations. It affected personnel in several departments and reduces our cost structure in the fourth quarter and going forward. We expect approximately $300,000 of savings to show up in the fourth quarter this year, with the full benefit being in the first quarter of 2027 and beyond.

The repositioning of our business ensures that the next phase of our journey we will remain cash-flow positive, produce greater earnings power, and keep adequate cash on the balance sheet to invest in growth strategies and in repurchasing our common shares. Moving along to subscriptions, the average ARR per customer, which does not include EDU, was $12,331 at the end of the quarter, up from $11,651 a year ago, a 6% increase. It’s another quarter of stable ARR revenues, which reached 60% of our overall revenues for the quarter, or $3.2 million. We added 115 new subscribers during the quarter, ending with 1,213 total subscribing customers. We believe that we can continue in the fourth quarter and, at the end of the year, get closer to our restated goals of 1,300–1,350 subscribers across the whole business.

As of September 30th, we had 14,134 customers who had an active contract during the past 12 months with us. In a softer press release market, our Insights and Analytics, Social Monitoring, and Pro offerings built continued momentum and helped us grow average revenues per release. That progress is being driven by the products that we have built and brought to market over this year. Our Social Monitoring platform and Insights and Analytics reports have been live since mid-year, and this month our new Spot agents — early adoption is encouraging. We expect to release additional products before the end of the year, and our focus now is turning the innovation into subscribers and revenue growth in our subscription business. We are also sharpening our product roadmap and go-to-market pricing centered around outcomes for our customers and what they value most.

During the current quarter and to end this year, we will introduce an SMB Entry plan starting at $249 a month for smaller businesses seeking an affordable plan with options to buy up the outcomes they want in our platform each month. It includes one release, one monitor keyword, one newsroom, and 10 journalist pitches with three Spot agents. The strategy is driven from the success of our Insight and Analytics and PressRelease.com customer upgrade indicators during the storytelling process, meaning 11% of our customers that distributed a press release in the third quarter bought upgrades in our platform, and these are what we’ll refer to as in-platform or outcome-based add-ons. We expect this new SMB subscribers to generate an average ARR closer to 6,000 after outcome-based add-ons are completed.

The trade-off to our current ARR will be an increase in number of subscribers per quarter as well as top-line revenue growth. Our unit economics on this new lower-tier plan begin at 80% gross margin and have the ability to grow with recently announced Spot agents. So let me tell you about Spot. Spot — Smart PR Optimized Tools — is our newest advancement to our platform: a suite of AI agents that check a press release before it goes out. We built Spot for one simple reason. We have been examining the PR and IR markets for a year and have noticed that our competitors are building traditional subscriptions or AI tools around the wrong stage of a story. Looked at simply, a story has three stages: before distribution, the actual distribution, and after distribution.

All newswires today focus on steps 2 and 3, and all other communication platforms also focus on steps 2 and 3. Even the companies in the Magic Quadrant, according to Gartner’s report, specialize in the second and the third. Those are the obvious places that we all sit, which makes the moat very difficult to defend. In the first step, we believe there is significant value to us. Spot runs in the optimize step after the release is written and before it’s submitted.

While the release can still change, this is where we believe there are opportunities to help improve outcomes and engagement for our customers. Distribution comes second, and our editorial teams still review every single press release. After distribution, we will be there as well with our ACCESS Insights and Analytics, which we launched May of this year, measuring how the story performs for each of our customers. This is why we released Spot in the first step of our agents.

There are several more coming over the next few months. These agents are included with every release: Access Verified Source Verification and Release Timing Advisor. Four more are available as add-ons: LLM Visibility Scoring, Readability Score, Earnings Audit, and PR Headline Optimizer. These agents are built to be outcome-based and give customers the ability to buy up when their outcomes matter most. And we plan to introduce lower-tier subscriptions with outcome-based pricing built in. These Spot upgrades can move gross margins from mid-70s to as high as 80% on a per-release basis.

So as we continue to hold our volume position in the market, we have built tools that give us some additional gross margin leverage. When industry-wide growth resumes, we will be uniquely positioned to be one of the most profitable newswires in the market. As we look at the industry, we do believe that growth will resume. Gartner recently published a report calling the public relations industry to double in the coming years, with AI being a significant contributor. Today, because volumes are softer, it led to our core volume being down 12% year over year and 15% over the second quarter. That volume decline is why revenues came in at $5.5 million compared to $5.6 million in the second quarter and $5.7 million a year ago, and is exactly why we have acted on costs and product upgrades.

Another viewpoint: if volumes remain consistent with last year, plus with our improvement of ARR increasing, we would have seen growth this quarter in our top-line number. We remain focused on executing our strategy over the next several quarters with renewed cost savings to shore up our bandwidth, our balance sheet, and our operating costs. We are confident in what we’re doing, and we invite our shareholders to come see our complete platform and strategy, book time with us and take Spot for a test drive, see the systems that we have launched, and get a peek at Spot in the near future.

We are excited about our developments, where we see the market going, and what we can do to take more market share in the coming years. Turning to capital allocation, as I mentioned earlier, we have completed a million-dollar share repurchase this year, and we intend to be back in the market for the remaining part of the year with another repurchase plan approved by the board. All this valuation with our cash generation. We believe both investing in the business and repurchasing our shares is an important part of our capital allocation strategy. With 75% gross margins, double-digit adjusted EBITDA margins, positive cash flow, and minimal debt, we are in a strong financial position and expect to return to top-line growth in 2027.

I want to thank our teams, our customers, partners, and shareholders for their trust and ongoing support. With that, I’ll turn the call back to the operator for questions.

OPERATOR (Moderator)

Thank you. The floor is now open for questions. If you wish to join the queue to ask a question at this time, please press star-one. We do ask, if listening on speakerphone today, that you please pick up your handset while asking your question to provide optimal sound quality. Once again, please press star-one on your phone at this time to join the queue to ask a question. Please hold a moment while we poll for questions. And our first questioner is Luke Horton with Northland Securities.

Luke Horton (Analyst)

Hey guys, thanks for taking the questions. Just wanted to touch on, obviously, industry press release volumes being down. Could you help give us a sense — has that sort of rebounded at all here in 4Q, and what are you kind of budgeting from a volume perspective going into ’27?

Brian R Balbirnie (Chairman)

Hey Luke. Yeah. Look, I would tell you that what we have seen over the better part of the last few months, and we’ll likely see this for the next month and a half here in Q4, is that there are a good amount of companies coming to market trying to confuse customer decisioning around earned and paid media. Paid media obviously is an attribution of what a press release is. Earned media is more on the pitching standpoint and having articles placed and written about you as a customer in publications like Forbes or Business Insider.

There’s a lot of competition in that space right now, and the SMB market is driving there more so than they’re driving towards a traditional paid or press release product. We’re seeing the lack of engagement come from those articles; we’re watching and proving that out to customers. So we’re confident that folks will come back into a traditional press release market. That’s one of the reasons why we’re coming downstream to a smaller SMB product offering — to help spur some of that activity late this quarter and into next year.

Luke Horton (Analyst)

Got it. And then just kind of following up on how you said kind of moving downstream with that lower price point entry — or I should say entry price point for the SMBs — but I think you did say you expect these to generate an average ARR closer to 6,000. I’m just wondering, how quickly do you expect to ramp from that entry rate to kind of the upgrades and ultimately leading to that 6,000 per customer?

Brian R Balbirnie (Chairman)

Yeah. When we analyze what to include in the plan — and to be clear, the press release being provided in that subscription low-end tier to start is a newsroom article — our newsrooms generate about a third of the engagement traffic for our customers. But we do recognize that throughout the year customers are going to have stories, product launches, executive hirings in the private sector — things that they’re going to want to promote or target more.

And the way the tool and the application is built is to allow them to buy up. So the assumption on price is about a $3,000 base fee. Customers will spend another $3,000 a year buying up to a national press release, more targeted journalists, more brand monitoring, and additional Spot agents. If you average our current price of a press release, it basically equals four additional press releases throughout the year, which is conservative based on our current customer usage. And only using Spot agents or upgrades in-app 25% of the time gets us to about $6,500 a year.

So we’re confident that customers will, at a minimum, do this, and we build models accordingly and have all that to discuss and talk to folks about.

Luke Horton (Analyst)

Okay, got it. And then just lastly, I guess with all of the kind of product development and new launches slated for the coming quarters, could you handicap what you are most excited about or what you think has the biggest potential?

Brian R Balbirnie (Chairman)

I love the smart PR optimizer tools. There is a catalog of them in our development environment that we’re currently working on testing with customers. The IR segment is actually very interesting to me. I think that there is a lot of underserved customer opportunity here. Our earnings audit product, for example, can take in an earnings 8-K into our system and tick and tie every number, narrative, or table in a matter of a minute or two, showing you where the potential issues are, rounding problems.

We can extend that architecture and that agent to be more about a full offering, a 10-Q. We can make it about forward-looking statement consistency. There’s a lot of script chatter and things that we’re doing as well. So we’re looking forward to more IR product. We’ve maintained a consistent revenue stream in that side of the business. We’ve done really well with, you know, the Fortune 1000 there. The largest companies in the world use us for their investor relations platforms and their earnings calls, and we’re strong there, and so we’re trying to move up market, and those customers are asking for those tools.

So we’re going to be focused there as well. We’re also going to bring to market a couple of other front-end beneficial platform enhancements to our customers, both public and private, direct and indirect, that will impact our newsrooms and additional traffic for them that we’ll discuss at the year-end call.

Luke Horton (Analyst)

Got it. Well, thanks for taking the questions, Brian. Appreciate it.

Brian R Balbirnie (Chairman)

Thank you.

OPERATOR (Moderator)

We now hear from Jacob Stefan with Lake Street Capital.

Jacob Stefan (Analyst)

Yeah, hey guys, appreciate you taking the questions. I just wanted to touch on Spot a little bit more in depth. You said that other PR suites are essentially looking at the wrong parts of a workflow, but maybe explain to us what the current workflow is like with the press release, and then how does Spot change that, and maybe what are the other solutions doing currently?

Brian R Balbirnie (Chairman)

Yeah, I will. Up until, let’s say a quarter ago, I’ll give you the viewpoint of the entire industry. Excuse me, everybody that creates a press release drafts it offline, excuse me, in their own word processing document. They connect to their PR provider of choice, they upload the document or put it into an editor, and they submit. The editorial for review and the decisioning of that IR or PR person has to figure out whether or not they’ve got all the right timing advisories, the right keywords, the right headlines.

That is all built on and put on them as a customer to figure out. The market really has been focused about premium distribution, getting it to the most outlets as possible, and monitoring the visibility and the engagement on that third step, and then selling tools and technologies around it, which we’ve all done. But when we examined our agent builder and our MCPS and all the things that we’re doing developmentally this year, we said we can verify content, right? We can look at the content of a press release based on historical data from our customers or public information. We can verify all that information in real time as they submit. We can give them the ability to improve their headlines for optimization for pickups and engagement. We can give them the ability to tell them when is the best time to run a press release based on their industry, based on their company, based on engagements that we’ve seen over the past several years.

And then we can also tell them what their output LLM visibility is going to be, because folks are now finding articles and content there before they’re finding it on search engines. And then what the readability score is in three different levels. What audience are you trying to reach, and is the tonality there and consistent enough to resonate with those analysts and investors, those customers, and those other constituents that you care a lot about.

And then lastly, of course, the earnings audit add-on. All of that is done pre-submission, and it’s done inside of a workflow that adds maybe about a minute to the entire process. While our agents work in the background, you’re continuing to pick the best distribution you want. You’re adding keywords, you’re setting dates and times. By the time our editorial team gets it, we have already verified this. You get a certified report; it’s part of the Access Verified system. You get to look at all the outputs. You get to change outputs with editors to improve that and continue to do that until distribution time. So that separates us significantly.

We feel like we’re going to do well when we get that story told to a customer, and they understand the impacts of what it is. So we’re going to spend a good amount of time there the remaining part of this year and into next year by focusing on what does the story contain and how best do we tell that story, and what tools can we use to make it better.

Jacob Stefan (Analyst)

Okay, got it. Very helpful. And maybe if I could just kind of piggyback off that a little bit. But I mean, you guys have talked about, you know, OPEX reductions in, you know, over the next several quarters. But I guess, you know, with a broader marketing push and that kind of commentary, you know, how are you going to shift the overall marketing strategy here?

Brian R Balbirnie (Chairman)

Yeah, we, as we talked about in the prepared remarks, we’ve gone through the entire organization and, you know, took a viewpoint of what is capacity, what matters most to our customers, and where are the areas that we can optimize personnel to prepare ourselves for being an efficient organization to generate the higher gross margins and higher EBITDA margins that we said that we will. So we took that $1.5 billion cost savings. We had spent a significant amount throughout this year in our sales and marketing departments, in our product development teams, and around our organization branding out our business, our brand, and our product offering.

We’ve pulled back a little bit in some of those areas. We feel like we’re getting a good amount of inbound lead traffic today because of our brand and the things that we’ve done to drive new customer acquisition and growth. Our e-commerce engines are working really well now with all three of the brands that we go to market under. And we feel like we’re getting enough opportunity there that can help us also be more efficient on paid spend and other things that marketing teams do. And as we all know, there are more conferences in the world that you could go to that you just don’t have the bandwidth.

So we’re being selective in picking and choosing the conferences — they’re very expensive — and trying to find the right ones that we know we’ll get the returns for immediately. So we’ve got bandwidth there, we’ve got budget there. But more importantly, we reorganized our teams and some of the things that they’re doing. Deploying our agent managers around our organization to help us be more efficient has been the biggest outcome of benefit to us.

Jacob Stefan (Analyst)

Got it. I appreciate all the color. Thanks.

Brian R Balbirnie (Chairman)

Thank you.

OPERATOR (Moderator)

A reminder that if you would like to ask a question at this time, please press star-1 on your telephone keypad, star-1. Please wait one moment while we poll for any additional questions. With no further questions remaining in the queue, I turn the call back over to your call hosts for closing remarks.

Brian R Balbirnie (Chairman)

Thank you, everybody, for today. We appreciate the opportunity to listen to our Q3 earnings call and commentary. As we said in our ending session of our closing remarks, we’d love an opportunity to set times with everybody. We want analysts and our investors to take a tour of our platform. We talked about maybe a third of what is there today. There is a lot more to show, and we really feel confident of where we’re headed and what the business is fundamentally.

We appreciate your time today. Have yourself a good trading day. Thank you.

OPERATOR (Moderator)

Thank you. This does conclude today’s conference call. You may disconnect your phone lines at this time and have a wonderful day. Thank you for your participation.

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.