Super League Announces Preliminary Record Q4 Revenue Of ~$9.4M; An Increase Of 32% YoY

Author: Benzinga Newsdesk | January 16, 2024 09:07am

~Company Issues 2023 Shareholder Letter~

 

~Record Contract and Pipeline Expansion Pave Way for Profitability in 2024~

SANTA MONICA, Calif., Jan. 16, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Super League (NASDAQ:SLE), a global leader in providing immersive experiences across the world's largest digital social platforms, today announced preliminary fourth quarter revenue grew 32% year over year to a company record of approximately $9.4 million. In association with the announcement of preliminary fourth quarter 2023 revenue, the Company has issued the below letter to shareholders from Chief Executive Officer, Ann Hand.

Dear Fellow Shareholders,

2023 turned out to be a year of strong momentum for Super League, highlighted by accelerated growth, streamlined operations, and the largest contract in the company's history leading to record annual revenues of approximately $25.0 million. With additional cash from our recently secured financings, we are now, more than ever, in a better position to drive significant revenue growth leading to profitability in 2024.

 

Super League's core mission is to help brands speak the language of 3D engagement, the new language of the internet, and the inevitable way the majority of digital advertising dollars will be directed in the future to reach new audiences and deepen engagement. We strive to be the leading provider for brands' digital advertising as this 3D engagement materializes, and through years of developing our capability and proprietary IP, we are creating an operating system for the 3D Web. During 2023, we further solidified our leadership position as builders of immersive 3D experiences—a dominant form of digital social interaction—across world-class platforms including Roblox, Minecraft and Fortnite, among others where the seismic shift of audience has already occurred with more than a half a billion users and growing. These platforms drive the future of advertising and have enraptured Generation Z and Alpha with the average Roblox user spending approximately 156 minutes a day on the social platform (more than 1.5X the time spent on TikTok). With Super League as their usher, more global brands are following suit with their ad spending into this transformative nascent marketing channel. While in-game advertising is expected to reach a market size of $56 billion in 2024, that represents a small slice of the global advertising addressable market. Our opportunity set is much larger. Today we compete for traditional internet and social media advertising dollars because 3D virtual world platforms like Roblox behave more like the next generations of social media rather than traditional video gaming.

As well, while Super League brings brands into virtual environments on other platforms' turfs, we are also the strategists and innovators to transform a brand's home-turf web domain into 3D experiences that allow for personalized conversations with consumers to ultimately increase brand loyalty and conversion. Super League is uniquely poised to be the omni-channel solution for a brand's 3D engagement and to be a primary beneficiary of this growing market that will become the dominant form of digital advertising.

In 2023, Super League served almost 100 brands and IP owners with astounding highlights:

• 11 custom builds with peak engagement times as high as 30.5 minutes
• 15 custom integrations into popular experiences on Roblox, Minecraft & Fortnite, generating more than 330 million visits and peak engagement times of 25 minutes
• 180+ media campaigns on Roblox & Minecraft ranging in size from mid-5 to 7 figures
• 40+ supportive media campaigns across digital and OTT video, mobile, social media, and influencer, also ranging in size from mid-5 to 7 figures
• 340 pieces of video content generating tens of millions of views across Tik Tok, YouTube, & Snap
• 81 million Try-ons of Branded Avatar Items

As a gold standard with a vertically integrated one-stop shop suite, every week we create powerful, high-impact immersive experiences for brands with our proprietary technology and capabilities. As an example, during the year we launched the Hamilton Simulator presenting the show's groundbreaking music through an interactive discovery of the magic of Hamilton. The experience went viral with over 1 million visits in the first two weeks, surpassing top Roblox experiences in terms of average session time (~21 minutes) and overall rating (97%). Ultimately, this led to a staggering 429 pieces of media coverage reaching an audience of 6.5 billion.

As we look ahead, our unique capabilities have positioned us to transition from an advertising model of short-term campaigns to larger deal sizes, as evidenced by our record-breaking approximately $4.0 million deal secured in the third quarter of 2023. Not only are our average deals getting much larger, but they provide high repeat percentages with revenues that are more recurring and forecastable with customers such as Visa, Disney, Mattel, Kraft Heinz, Hershey's, Wal-Mart, Chipotle, Universal and Publicis, among others.

Additionally, we have identified four key steps of a brand's journey into these new marketing channels that allow us an opportunity to achieve scale:

1. Introduce brands to our 3D engagement offering to achieve singular campaign objectives measured by new brands entering our funnel and larger deal sizes.
2. Become the 3D platform of choice for brands' various ongoing campaigns measured by repeat percentage and larger annual advertiser spend.
3. Guide brands to create persistent presences on 3D platforms measured by brand partner revenues that become more recurring and predictable in nature.
4. Build omni-channel 3D strategies for brands with crossover to their own 3D web experiences measured by revenues that go beyond advertising including technology licensing, first party data and direct-to-consumer monetization.

We have notable brands engaging with us at various stages of the first three steps with emerging conversations that will elucidate the potential fourth step of our operating system to deliver a multi-layered, persistent 3D Web solution for brand partners:

 

To support these world-class customers and drive continued growth, over the course of the year we successfully raised gross proceeds of $24.8 million and secured a $4.0 million accounts receivable facility. Ultimately, our significantly improved balance sheet provides the capital required to drive meaningful revenue growth and achieve profitability in the near term.

Looking ahead to 2024, our core focus is to build upon the operating leverage experienced in 2023. We delivered an approximate 26% reduction in proforma operating costs over the course of the last 12 months, and this lean cost structure coupled with larger, recurring brand and IP programs tees up 2024 to be a transformational year. As noted above, we will continue to transition our model from one that is built on short-term, campaign-based revenue streams to one that supports brands' persistent, long-term strategies leveraging our 3D Web operating system. So now, we turn our attention to scaling our business to achieve the previously mentioned goal of profitability in 2024, while driving shareholder value over the long-term.

Thank you to all our shareholders, partners, and talented team of Super Leaguers for your support on our journey as we step into another exceptional year.

Warm regards,

Ann Hand

CEO of Super League

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