ScoreStream 2020 Summary
So glad to be done with 2020. With a little luck and a vaccine we are hoping for a return of sports in 2021. I thought it was worth sharing how December ended up for us and how the year as a whole played out. TLDR — Numbers were down but not as bad as we expected. Ad revenue was basically break even.
In December we saw a pretty steep drop in users. We were down 31% from 2019 going from 987K users to 678K users. Many states played abbreviated seasons and ended the fall sports season before Thanksgiving to try to avoid the inevitable surge the country experienced over the last 8 weeks or so. During this whole fall we saw a big increase in advertising RPMs and CPMs which actually helped us finish the month up in advertising revenue by 16% on a year over year basis. That growth in advertising was entirely driven by upside in our web based advertising revenue. Throughout the year we saw a strong decline in our mobile app usage as people were not going to games during the pandemic.
The year was a wild ride. We started the first 2 1/2 months on a pace to grow by 75% for the year. That was very exciting. Then March came and everything stopped. Surprisingly, as I mentioned before, our users did not entirely evaporate as we thought might happen. In May our users were down by 50% on a year over year basis and we saw similar numbers in August and November. Both August and November were down by this much because so many states pushed their seasons to 2021 and normally we have tremendous traffic in these months. Being down by 50% in November meant we still had 1.2 million uniques and with the almost tripled advertising RPM/CPM growth, that was not the disaster it could have been.
For any given month we would try to figure out how to plan for the next month but things were so erratic. For example, Michigan pushed their playoffs for high school football for 6 weeks and will be completing those games in the coming weeks. Texas similarly pushed their top tier leagues and are conducting their championships this coming weekend. The 15 states that pushed to 2021 are still a moving target. Certainly we have the potential to have two football seasons in states like California, Illinois, New York and some other football hotbeds like North Carolina. All of that is up in the air though.
Ultimately the bottom line for us was that we ended the year with 7.9 million uniques down from 10.7 million uniques in 2019, which is a 26% drop. If you asked me in February, I would have predicted we would have ended up around 15 million uniques in 2020. On the advertising side we ended up growing 37% on a year over year basis while mobile app advertising declined by 50%, driven mostly by a deep drop in mobile app users but also not a lot of CPM growth when compared to the web. Between the two, we ended up the year down .78% which all things considered, was a lot less than expected.
Here is to a healthy 2021 and hopefully a return to some kind of normal for people and businesses.
