BUSINESSWIRE – Aug 3 – Total Q2 revenue was $31.3M, up 91% YOY, mobile revenue was $23.3M, up 55% YOY. The company has increased daily video minutes by 80% to 7.2M, with ~20% of its users watching videos every day. They expect to fully launch livestreaming video on Tagged and Skout by the end of this quarter. The Meet Group will also launch new banner and native advertising units within the video experience and gifting inside of video.
See full article at The Meet Group website
BUSINESS WIRE – May 8 – Total revenue climbed up 51% YOY to $20M, mobile revenue is $18.8M, up 61% YOY. Net income is $0.4M. "We made strong progress toward rolling out livestreaming video inside of the MeetMe app. Currently, three out of four MeetMe users have access to the Live feature within the MeetMe app", said CEO Geoff Cook.
See full article at The Meet Group website
BUSINESSWIRE – Apr 4 – MeetMe has completed its acquisition of if(we), a social and mobile technology company, and changed its name to The Meet Group. The if(we) acquisition is expected to contribute $9M of adjusted EBITDA in the first 12 months post-close and to provide the combined company with a path forward for generating $150M in annualized revenue and $50M of adjusted EBITDA. Moving forward, The Meet Group will be the parent company of the MeetMe, Skout, Tagged, and Hi5 brands.
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BUSINESSWIRE – Feb 22 – Users of MeetMe and Skout will be able to browse the combined user bases, view profiles and photos from both apps, and chat between the two platforms. MeetMe intends to complete the rollout across its mobile apps over the next month.
See full article at BusinessWire
NASDAQ – Oct 5 – The two companies had entered into a cash-stock acquisition deal in June. The deal was valued at $54.6M, of which MeetMe paid $28.5M in cash, and the rest in stock. In May 2016, Skout had 3.5M MAU. Last year, it had garnered $28.5M in revenues. Skout's Q3 2016 revenues are expected to be ~$6.6M. Meetme expects revenues for 2016 to come between $73.5M and $75.5M.
OPW INTERVIEW – Aug 10 – MeetMe had impressive Q2 results and announced their acquisition of Skout, one of the hallmark mobile brands in the dating industry. I spoke to Geoff Cook, CEO and Co-founder of MeetMe, about the acquisition and what it will mean for both brands. – Mark Brooks
Why did you choose to buy Skout?
I have always been impressed by Skout’s number of chats per user per day. We’ve made a lot of progress on MeetMe, going from 8-10 chats per day to 25-30 chats per day, and Skout was having comparable numbers. We felt very familiar and comfortable with their business model. 90% of their revenue comes from ads, which is very similar to our business model. They have 700k-800k DAU, combined we’re ~2M DAU. We looked at some of the top level metrics and saw this merge as a pretty clear pathway to $100M revenue. So it made sense both strategically, operationally, and financially.
Would you say that the acquisition of Skout has expanded your geographic footprint?
It certainly expanded our geographic footprint. ¾ of Skout’s DAUs are international. MeetMe is much more focused on the US. Only half of our 1.3M DAUs are international. Skout is strong in Asia, so this will also increase our density among Asian users.
So, in these areas, will you promote Skout or MeetMe? How do you intersperse the numbers and drive membership between the two?
The first thing we will be working on is the lowest hanging fruit. We can improve their ad program based on our knowledge of mobile monetization. We are also thinking about cross promotion to drive MeetMe users to Skout and vice versa. We do intend to maintain Skout as a standalone brand. But over time, there will be no reason to have two separate cloud based chat systems.
How would you imagine someone describing the Skout end user experience vs the MeetMe experience?
They are very similar. In terms of how they are different, MeetMe has put a fair amount of emphasis on “Discuss” feature, where we transformed feeds into topic oriented communities. Skout has “Queue”, a swipe-able feature where you can like or dislike different users to unlock the chat, which is a relatively important piece of their app. We will continue investing in both “Queue” and “Discuss” and make them better.
How about the teams? Will you have an office in San Francisco? Have any changes been made?
At the time of the announcement, there was a reduction at Skout. Skout’s founders, Christian Wiklund and Niklas Lindstrom, have both agreed to help us for a year. We will maintain a team and an office in San Francisco and are looking to be posting open positions shortly to tap into the talent pool there. Right now we have our main office in New Hope, PA, and we have a satellite office in Philadelphia in order to tap into that job market.
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Post by Mark Brooks @ Courtland Brooks.
SEEKING ALPHA – July 6 – MEET is still trading at a 40-70% discount to peers with similar growth rates and EBITDA margins. The company's financial leverage is powerful; ~65% of incremental revenue dollars should convert to EBITDA in 2016, and ~85% of 2016 EBITDA converts to FCF. The acquisition has raised the ceiling on how big MeetMe can be multiple fold, and investors should want to own the company while management adopts best practices across both the MeetMe and Skout app to drive improved revenue and profitability growth. MEET is attractively positioned as a pure-play investment opportunity levered to the shift in advertising dollars towards mobile devices.
BUSINESSWIRE – June 26 – MeetMe, a public social discovery service, is acquiring Skout for $28.5M in cash and ~5.37M common shares of MeetMe. Skout is a mobile app for meeting new people with 2015 revenue of $23.8M and 3.5M monthly active users. Skout is adding 42K new users each day on average. Key highlights of the expected scale of the new combined company include: Mobile MAU of 8.5M, an increase of 69% from MeetMe's 5M in May 2016; mobile daily active users of 2.1M, an increase of 73% from MeetMe's 1.24M in May 2016. Geoff Cook, CEO of MeetMe, said, "We believe this combination provides a pathway to $100M in revenue in 2018 with adjusted EBITDA margins approaching 45%."
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PRNEWSWIRE – June 20 – Global dating app Skout is now available in Danish. Over the past two years, the number of connections made by Skouters in Denmark has grown by ~50%.