Earned & PaidCompanies · performance marketing
QuinStreet
Sell sideQNST
QuinStreet brought in $1.29B of revenue in fiscal 2026, growing 17% a year over five years at a 3% operating margin.
$1.29Brevenue, FY2026
+17%growth a year, 5 years
3%operating margin
Revenue and margin
Bars: revenue, $B (10-K). Line: operating margin. Years where the filing's revenue line isn't comparable are left out of the line.
What they told investors
“And we are driving market growth by expanding and innovating new products and media capacity, and by uniquely and consistently delivering results at scale for clients.”Douglas Valenti · 2026 Q4 · transcript
“the performance marketing industry generally when things get soft, like they did in the last part of last quarter and they are for this quarter generally for auto insurers, the worst mixes and the lowest quality get cut first, always.”Douglas Valenti · 2022 Q1 · transcript
What they see in the market
What its leaders and filings say about the ad market: its own ad business, or the channels advertisers use, since 2019; counts are statements, not spending.
Affiliate & lead gen 62× since 2019Programmatic & display 17× since 2019Paid search 10× since 2019AI in marketing 6× since 2026SEO & AI search 4× since 2019Creative campaigns 3× since 2019CRM, loyalty & first-party data 2× since 2019Measurement 1× since 2019
- Affiliate & lead gen · Programmatic & display “Our revenue growth generally will continue to be driven by the relentless shift of marketing budgets to digital, and in digital to our performance marketplaces, whose microeconomics drive unparalleled media efficiency at scale for our clients.” Douglas Valenti on the earnings call · Aug 13, 2026 · source
- Paid search “First, as AI overviews have expanded rapidly over the past year to now trigger on an estimated 50% plus of Google searches, revenue from our proprietary campaigns on Google has grown by over 100% over the same period. A second example.” Douglas Valenti on the earnings call · May 8, 2026 · source
- AI in marketing “And we are expanding the application of AI to dozens of other areas of the business, to our massive store of proprietary data generated from billions of dollars of media spend, to our millions of permutations of campaign and marketplace variables, to our proprietary integrations…” Douglas Valenti on the earnings call · May 8, 2026 · source
- Creative campaigns “And as I said, we're active in both insurance and in home services, running advertising campaigns there to both generate revenue, of course, and we have generated our first revenues there, but also to continue to help them pilot that platform and evolve it into a much bigger…” Douglas Valenti on the earnings call · May 8, 2026 · source
- SEO & AI search “The mix has shifted to more SEM around AI-based searches and that's good.” Doug Valenti on the earnings call · Feb 6, 2026 · source