Back on Airtasker (ART) : one of the tricky question with this company is to get a view on what the call "equity for media deals". Basically, some media companies (ex. oOH media in Australia) receives a convertible bond in exchange for media space for Airtasker. This allows ART to have a boost for its marketing activity, without impacting its P/L and cash flow statement. It tends to artificially inflate its earnings and cash flow, as ART benefits from higher revenues/receipts without booking the marketing cost which has enabled higher revenues (normally marketing costs represents around 30 % of revenues).
The bull case considers that this situation is not a problem, looking at the past example when they did a similar thing with Seven West Media. At the end of the period, ART kept the same level of business, while they decreased significantly the marketing activity.
