SEEKING ALPHA – Feb 3 – Smaller companies in the social media sector have been under pressure since Fed Chair Janet Yellen said that social media stocks were overvalued. But some of these companies, and in particular MeetMe, just may be worth investing in because of the significant growth/ turnaround in performance. This week the company has surpassed 1.1M mobile daily active users for the first time ever. Much of MeetMe's revenues come from the sale of its digital credits and its membership dues. It also relies on ad revenue. The company has recently signed an agreement with a well-known ad firm Beanstock Media to generate ads revenues on its mobile platform. Meetme reported Q3 net income of $52K.
Category: MeetMe
Meetme Launches Virtual Currency Product “Stickers”
PRESS RELEASE – Dec 10 – MeetMe, the social discovery service, has launched a new “Stickers” feature that lets users send emoticons, expressions and virtual gifts like “flowers” and “stuffed animals” inside the chat. MeetMe users can download their first two Sticker packs for free and buy additional packs for 150 Credits (~$3).
MeetMe Q3 2014 Financial Results
PRESS RELEASE – Nov 6 – Total revenue was $11.6M, up 15% YOY. Mobile revenue represented 58% of total revenue which was $6.7M, up 128% YOY. Net income was $52K compared to a net loss of $1.5M in Q3 of 2013. Average mobile daily active users increased 6% versus Q2 and 15% versus Q1 to an all-time record of 888K in Q3.
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Geoff Cook, Co-founder And CEO Of MeetMe
OPW INTERVIEW – Nov 7 – Geoff and his team have morphed MeetMe. I interviewed him to find out how things have changed. – Mark Brooks
How has MeetMe changed since we last caught up in 2013?
In 2013 we were focused on building out the mobile monetization engine, which we did quite successfully. When we last spoke, mobile was 25% of our revenue, now it’s 58%, thanks to the success of our mobile banner and native advertising products. MeetMe continues to focus on meeting new people; we still see ourselves as the mobile equivalent of the bar or coffeehouse. What’s different, is our focus on driving new chat partners as a way to connect people to each other. MeetMe today is a mobile chat app for connecting with new people.
I understand you reported your Q3 earnings today. How did it go?
Q3 was a strong quarter all around. We saw 128% growth in mobile revenue YOY to $6.7M in the quarter. Our adjusted Q3 EBITDA grew 213% YOY to $2.18M, and we were net income positive in the quarter too. Our average mobile daily active users were at 888K in Q3, up 15% versus the start of the year. We rank in the Top 15 social Android apps in the US – ahead of Skout, Badoo, Zoosk, OkCupid, and Match.com.
What has spurred the growth?
Chat is the main action in our app. Before we started, we never crossed 10M chats a day. Now we routinely break 15M chats a day, and we had our first 20-million-chat day recently. Within the last few weeks we released a major redesign of our MeetMe apps on both iPhone and Android to make it easier to find new chat partners.
How are you helping users discover compatible people to talk to? How are you defining compatibility?
We want to drive good conversations. A good conversation is a lengthy conversation. Users presently discover people in different ways on MeetMe – in the Meet tab and in Feed. The Meet tab shows the people near you who are available to chat. The Feed displays new photos and status updates of the people near you. We’ve found people prefer to chat with people local to them of a given age range and gender. Now that our app is optimized visually around the Meet tab since the redesign, we are working on further optimizing that tab by showing only the users most likely to result in lengthy conversation. To do that we leverage our data beyond age, gender, location. Our product pipeline is oriented around interests and leveraging data that affects likely conversation length, which we determine through a series of data experiments, which influence our algorithms. We slice and dice data in many different ways to predict conversation length.
What’s the demographics of MeetMe now, and how have they changed?
Our users are young, mobile, and engaged. Our core demo is 18-30 years old. They login 122 times per month on mobile. The US is our biggest market (80% of our traffic) followed by UK, Canada, Turkey, and Brazil. Android is our biggest platform by far, followed by iPhone, and then the web. In terms of how they’ve changed, we’ve become a bit more international and our average users have skewed a year or two older over the last few years.
Why should users use MeetMe instead of Facebook or dating apps like OkCupid, Tinder and Zoosk?
People join MeetMe to make new friends and to find new people to chat with. Facebook is a network for communicating with existing friends. Dating apps like OkCupid, Tinder and Zoosk are for dating and romance. We believe a focus on chatting and friendship reduces churn once connections are made. Also most people prefer to start off as friends before dating. In addition, our business model differs markedly from dating apps. In Q3 we drove 84% of our mobile revenue from ads. Many dating apps tend to become increasingly paid services. We like to build our business and design our products with every user in mind, and not for the one or two percent who might buy a premium service someday.
Are you seeing chat volume helping to drive revenues?
We believe our mobile ARPU is higher than Facebook’s mobile ARPU. We earned $2.29 per mobile user in Q3, which has grown 100% in the last year. We have advertising in Chat so we monetize every user in that way. We’ve recently announced the launch of a new virtual currency product in Chat called Boost, and we are likely to experiment with others in the future as well.
What can we expect to see from MeetMe in the Future?
We expect to continue to innovate our technology to improve the relevance of chat partners and the quantity of chats. We’ll likely continue to experiment with standalone apps, which we view as inexpensive product research and a quick way to gather user feedback. We’ve recently launched a new standalone app called Advice Chat for iPhone.
MeetMe: Innovative Social Discovery Company Worth Investing In
SEEKING ALPHA – Aug 18 - MeetMe has gone from 800K users to 1M in just three months. Mobile revenue is up 114% YOY and mobile average revenue per user is up 123% YOY, outpacing Facebook by 41%. The company is improving in all metrics while the stock is down 37%. Social media is a fast growing sector, led by Facebook. There are smaller companies such as MeetMe that may be worth investing in. The keys to look for are: user growth, revenues, and the innovation.
More People Meet Their Valentine Online
BUSINESS WIRE – Feb 14 – MeetMe.com's Valentine's Day survey of 12K members reveals that 94% of women and 84% of men prefer to start out as friends. Making new friends is the number one reason people use MeetMe today. Online/mobile apps are by far the most common way to meet someone new. More people met their Valentine’s Day date online than offline this year.
San Francisco Sues MeetMe Over Teens Stalking
MERCURY NEWS – Feb 5 – San Francisco sues MeetMe app, saying it illegally gives underage teenagers' personal information and geographic locations to strangers without obtaining valid consent. Children under 13 are not allowed on MeetMe.com and adults 18+ are not permitted to view profiles of children in the 13- to 17-year-old age group. But the lawsuit alleges the website does not verify the birthdates of users.
MeetMe Launches New Dating App Choosy
HEAVY – Jan 1 – The founders of MeetMe have launched a new dating app called Choosy for Android. Choosy lets users show off their personalities by asking icebreaker questions. Catherine Cook the co-founder of MeetMe says, “I know too well just how many low quality messages you receive. Choosy provides a useful filter. Only people who answer your question ‘right’ can message you – and now you have something to talk about.”
MeetMe Q3 Financial Results
MEETME CORP – Nov 7 – Q3 revenue was $10.1M. Mobile revenue reached another quarterly record of $2.9M, up 65% YOY and 12% sequentially from the Q2 of 2013. Net loss improved to $1.5M, compared with a net loss of $2.6M in Q3 2012. Monthly active users (MAUs) increased ~37%, averaging 5.34M. Mobile MAUs increased 36% to 2.66M.
See full article at MeetMe Corp
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MeetMe Teams With Sprint’s Pinsight Media+
MEETME CORP – Nov 7 – MeetMe partners with Pinsight Media+, a mobile media company powered by Sprint. Under the agreement, Pinsight Media+ will manage the mobile advertising inventory for MeetMe on iOS and Android through the end of 2014.
See full article at MeetMe Corp
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