Head to Head Contrast: People Incorporated Common Stock (NASDAQ:PPLI) versus Ibotta (NYSE:IBTA)

People Incorporated Common Stock (NASDAQ:PPLI) and Ibotta (NYSE:IBTA) are both communication services companies, but which is the superior investment? We will contrast the two businesses based on the strength of their institutional ownership, earnings, risk, profitability, valuation, analyst recommendations and dividends.

Risk and Volatility

People Incorporated Common Stock has a beta of 1.04, meaning that its stock price is 4% more volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, Ibotta has a beta of -0.43, meaning that its stock price is 143% less volatile than the S&P 500.

Insider and Institutional Ownership

88.9% of People Incorporated Common Stock shares are held by institutional investors. 16.1% of People Incorporated Common Stock shares are held by insiders. Comparatively, 20.9% of Ibotta shares are held by insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that hedge funds, large money managers and endowments believe a company is poised for long-term growth.

Analyst Recommendations

This is a breakdown of recent ratings for People Incorporated Common Stock and Ibotta, as provided by MarketBeat.

	Sell Ratings	Hold Ratings	Buy Ratings	Strong Buy Ratings	Rating Score
People Incorporated Common Stock	0	5	9	1	2.73
Ibotta	3	4	1	0	1.75

People Incorporated Common Stock currently has a consensus price target of $55.92, indicating a potential upside of 43.36%. Ibotta has a consensus price target of $36.50, indicating a potential downside of 7.59%. Given People Incorporated Common Stock’s stronger consensus rating and higher possible upside, analysts plainly believe People Incorporated Common Stock is more favorable than Ibotta.

Valuation and Earnings

This table compares People Incorporated Common Stock and Ibotta”s revenue, earnings per share and valuation.

	Gross Revenue	Price/Sales Ratio	Net Income	Earnings Per Share	Price/Earnings Ratio
People Incorporated Common Stock	$2.39 billion	1.12	-$104.03 million	$4.48	8.71
Ibotta	$342.39 million	2.33	$3.58 million	($0.47)	-84.04

Ibotta has lower revenue, but higher earnings than People Incorporated Common Stock. Ibotta is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than People Incorporated Common Stock, indicating that it is currently the more affordable of the two stocks.

Profitability

This table compares People Incorporated Common Stock and Ibotta’s net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

	Net Margins	Return on Equity	Return on Assets
People Incorporated Common Stock	16.05%	8.48%	5.71%
Ibotta	-3.21%	-4.74%	-2.55%

Summary

People Incorporated Common Stock beats Ibotta on 12 of the 15 factors compared between the two stocks.

About People Incorporated Common Stock

IAC Inc., together with its subsidiaries, operates as a media and internet company worldwide. The company publishes original and engaging digital content in the form of articles, illustrations, and videos and images across entertainment, food, home, beauty, travel, health, family, luxury, and fashion areas; and magazines related to women and lifestyle. It also operates a digital marketplace that connects home service professionals with consumers for repairing, remodeling, cleaning, landscaping, maintenance, and enhancement services under the Angi Ads, Angi Leads, and Angi Services brands. In addition, the company operates websites that offer general search services and information, including Ask.com, a search site with a variety of fresh and contemporary content; Reference.com that offers content across select vertical categories; Consumersearch.com, which offers content designed to simplify the product research process; and Shopping.net, a vertical shopping search site that contains a mix of search services and/or content targeted to various user or segment demographics, as well as offers direct-to-consumer downloadable desktop applications. Further, it offers Care.com, an online destination for families to connect with caregivers for their children, aging parents, pets, and homes; develops and provides subscription mobile applications across the communication, language, weather, business, health, and lifestyle verticals; a technology driven staffing platform for flexible W-2 work under the Bluecrew name; a platform to connect healthcare professionals with job opportunities under the Vivian Health name; The Daily Beast, a website dedicated to news, commentary, culture, and entertainment that publishes original reporting and opinion; and production and producer services for feature films for sale and distribution through theatrical releases and video-on-demand services. The company was formerly known as IAC/InterActiveCorp. The company is headquartered in New York, New York.

About Ibotta

Ibotta’s mission is to Make Every Purchase Rewarding. Our technology allows CPG brands to deliver digital promotions to over 200 million consumers through a single, convenient network called the Ibotta Performance Network (IPN). We are pioneers in success-based marketing: we only get paid when our client’s promotion results in a sale, not when a consumer merely views or clicks on the promotion. We have built the largest digital item-level promotions network in the United States by forming strategic relationships with major retailers such as Walmart Inc. (Walmart) and Dollar General Corporation (Dollar General), which use our digital offers to power their loyalty programs on a white-label basis. Through the IPN, our clients can also reach millions more consumers on our widely used rewards app digital properties, which include the Ibotta-branded cash back mobile app, website, and browser extension (collectively, Ibotta D2C). We work directly with over 850 different clients, representing over 2,400 different CPG brands to source exclusive offers as of December 31, 2023. Most of our offers cover products in non-discretionary categories, such as grocery, but we also work with general merchandise manufacturers in categories such as toys, clothing, beauty, electronics, pet, home goods, and sporting goods. Over time, our clients have generally ramped up their spend with us, and they rarely drop off our network. In fact, of our top 100 clients, 96% were retained from 2022 to 2023. Our technology platform uses an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled offer engine that is designed to match and distribute the right offer to the right consumer at the right time. This is possible because we receive a large volume of item-level purchase data through our secure point of sale (POS) integrations with 85 different retailers as of December 31, 2023. Using this data, we form a profile of each consumer based on what they have bought in the past and how they have responded to various price promotions. From there, we build recommenders that are driven by machine learning and designed to create personalized savings experiences for each consumer. The more data we accumulate, the smarter our recommenders become. Whatever our clients’ specific objectives may be – such as encouraging brand switching, shortening purchase cycles, incentivizing consumers to stock up, or promoting around key seasonal events – our platform helps them design a promotional campaign to accomplish their goals. Ibotta’s technology tracks which offers are selected by consumers, matches offers to the products that have been purchased, logs redemptions, handles the flow of funds, and takes care of all downstream billing and logistics. We perform the function of “air traffic control,” meaning our network enables offers to be matched, distributed, and redeemed across multiple large third-party publishers in a coordinated fashion. This minimizes the risks that offer budgets are exceeded and that consumers redeem the same offer several times for a single purchase (i.e., offer stacking). Our client tools allow CPG brands to set up campaigns, monitor redemption and budget levels, and analyze overall campaign performance – all in a single, convenient interface. We deliver success-based digital promotions at-scale because we manage a growing, open network of third-party publishers that host our offers. Retailers are among our most important publishers because their apps and websites are frequently visited by consumers with high purchase intent. A retailer may ingest digital offers from Ibotta’s Application Programming Interface (API) and present them to its consumers as part of its own branded loyalty program. We call these partners “retailer publishers.” We believe retailer publishers choose to work with Ibotta because we are a trusted partner that can provide a large universe of exclusive offers coupled with a set of plug and play capabilities that would be difficult for them to create and scale on their own. For example, Ibotta and Walmart entered into a multi-year strategic relationship that makes Ibotta the exclusive provider of digital item-level rebate offer content for Walmart U.S., across all product categories, for online and offline shopping. Consumers redeem our offers on Walmart properties without ever creating an Ibotta account. Instead, they can select manufacturer offers from the Walmart website or app, buy the featured items in-store or online, and instantly earn Walmart Cash which can be applied to future purchases in a Walmart store or on Walmart.com. All CPG brands wishing to run digital item-level rebates on Walmart’s website can only do so through the IPN. Ibotta also partners with several other leading retailer publishers. For example, Ibotta partners with Family Dollar, a subsidiary of Dollar Tree, Inc. We also work indirectly to publish offers on certain retailer properties, including Kroger (powering Kroger Cash) and Shell (powering Shell Fuel Rewards). In addition to providing digital offers for retailers, Ibotta also makes the same offers available on its own digital properties, which include Ibotta D2C. Since 2012, over 50 million Americans have registered for our free app. Ibotta D2C reaches a highly engaged audience of savings-conscious consumers who want a single digital starting point where they can find cash back offers across a variety of retailers. Many of these consumers decide where to shop based on the availability of deals in different retailers. Once the IPN launched, Ibotta D2C became a publisher on the IPN, meaning it is now one of many nodes through which our digital offers are delivered to the end consumer. In the future, we believe the IPN may be extended to other publishers across a variety of new verticals. For example, new publishers could include delivery services, banks, or other apps and websites that want to give their consumers access to offers on popular everyday items without having to source those offers from thousands of different CPG brands or secure item-level data from multiple integrated retailers where the offers can be redeemed. We believe Ibotta is well positioned to capitalize on a large and growing market opportunity. U.S. consumers spent approximately $1.2 trillion dollars in the grocery sector in 2023. CPG brands compete fiercely to influence consumer spending habits, spending approximately $200 billion on marketing annually in the United States. In fact, no other industry spends more on marketing, as a percentage of overall budgets, than CPG. Most of our revenue is redemption revenue which is generated from redemptions of offers across the IPN. A significant portion of that redemption revenue arises from offer redemptions on third-party publishers. We also generate revenue by selling ad products on our Ibotta D2C properties. Specifically, we allow CPG brands and retailers to enhance awareness of their offers by buying display ads, in-app videos, or email marketing campaigns. We also charge partners a licensing fee to leverage our aggregated data in ways that help them better understand their target consumers and improve their promotional activities. Finally, on Ibotta’s D2C properties, we also allow thousands of online retailers to advertise and present consumers with their own sitewide cash back offers. These clients benefit from the incremental sales generated by Ibotta’s savings-conscious audience. Our revenue growth significantly accelerated with the addition of new publishers to the IPN. Most recently, the rollout of our offers on the digital property of Walmart has attracted larger audiences, and in turn, resulted in greater spend by CPG brands and a greater number of redeemed offers. These developments have increased our scale, growth and profitability. • Total revenue grew from $210.7 million in 2022 to $320.0 million in 2023, an increase of 52%; • Redemption revenue grew from $138.7 million (or 66% of total revenue) in 2022 to $243.9 million (or 76% of total revenue) in 2023, an increase of 76%; • Gross profit grew from $164.5 million in 2022 to $276.0 million in 2023, an increase of 68%; • Net income (loss) improved from $(54.9) million in 2022 to $38.1 million in 2023; • Net income (loss) as a percent of revenue improved from (26)% in 2022 to 12% in 2023; and • Adjusted EBITDA margin improved from (13)% in 2022 to 26% in 2023. We were incorporated in 2011 as Zing Enterprises, Inc., a Delaware corporation. In 2012, we changed our name to Ibotta, Inc. Our principal executive office is located at 1801 California Street, Suite 400, Denver, Colorado.