Angi Spent 56% of Revenue on Marketing and Still Lost 739,000 Leads

Every outlet that covered Angi’s second quarter led with the revenue miss and the stock drop. Almost none of them printed the two lines that matter if you buy leads for a living.

Angi is the largest lead marketplace in home services. Because it is public, it has to disclose what it costs to produce the leads it sells you. Private lead vendors never do. That makes this filing the closest thing the trades get to seeing the other side of the table.

What they reported

• Revenue of $248.0 million, down 11% from $278.2 million
• US service requests down 6%, from 4,562,000 to 4,311,000
• US leads down 13%, from 5,577,000 to 4,838,000
• Network revenue down 34%, to $17.2 million
• A net loss of $230.7 million, including a $235.2 million goodwill and intangible impairment

That lead decline is 739,000 fewer leads than the same quarter a year earlier. An impairment of that size is an accounting statement that the business is worth considerably less than what was paid for it.

The two lines nobody quoted

In the same release:

• Consumer marketing expense: $102.6 million
• Pro acquisition expense: $36.5 million

That is $139.1 million against $248.0 million of revenue. Fifty-six cents of every dollar Angi took in went to buying homeowner demand and recruiting contractors to sell it to.

And lead volume still fell 13%. To be careful about what that does and does not say: those two facts sit side by side in the same filing. Spending more while producing fewer leads is not the same as the spending having caused the decline, and Angi did not claim a cause. What it does establish is that the money required to generate a homeowner in this market is not going down.

Run the division on the other side

Two disclosed figures, one piece of arithmetic. $102.6 million of consumer marketing divided by 4,311,000 US service requests works out to roughly $23.80 to generate one homeowner inquiry.

Then look at the ratio between the two volume metrics. 4,838,000 leads against 4,311,000 service requests is about 1.12. A single homeowner request becomes more than one lead, because the same request is sold to more than one contractor.

Now compare that $23.80 to what you pay for an Angi lead in your trade and your market. The gap between those two numbers is the business model. That is not a criticism, it is how a marketplace works. But you should know the shape of it before you build a growth plan on top of it.

Put it next to Roto-Rooter

Last week Roto-Rooter reported that its free leads fell 13.1% while paid leads rose 7.3%, and that paid now makes up 59% of its mix against 44% eighteen months ago. Its CEO said plainly that Google hates the idea of free leads.

Read the two filings together and you get both ends of the same trade. Organic demand is drying up, which pushes contractors toward paid channels. And the largest paid marketplace is spending 56% of revenue to keep those channels supplied while its own volume shrinks.

Nobody in that chain has room to make leads cheaper for you. There is no version of this where you wait it out and prices come back down.

What that actually leaves you

If the cost of buying a stranger is fixed and rising, the levers that remain are the ones nobody is bidding against you for.

Convert more of what you already bought. The cheapest money in your building is the second half of the leads you paid for and did not book. Most home service companies book fewer than half the calls their marketing generates. Moving a booking rate from 35% to 45% does more for cost per booked job than any negotiation with a lead vendor will.

Own the demand that has no meter on it. Your Google Business Profile, your review velocity, your past customer database, your referral flow. Past customers book at a multiple of cold lead rates and cost almost nothing to reach.

Be present where the answers are written. A growing share of “who should I call” is answered by an AI summary rather than a list of ads. Nobody is charging per click for that yet.

None of that is exciting. All of it is yours, and none of it depends on a marketplace deciding to charge you less.

All figures are from Angi Inc.’s second quarter 2026 earnings release. The $23.80 per service request and the 56% of revenue are my own arithmetic from the disclosed consumer marketing expense, pro acquisition expense, revenue, and service request counts, not figures Angi published. Verify against the filing before relying on any single number for a business decision.