Penn National Gaming Inc

NASDAQ:PENN

Earnings Call Transcript 2020-Q2

[Operator]

Welcome to theScore Q2 Fiscal 2020 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speakers’ remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today’s conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions]

I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, James Bigg, Senior Communications Manager. Please go ahead, sir.

[James Bigg, Senior Communications Manager]

Thanks, Ian. Hello and good afternoon. Many thanks for join joining us on today's call and webcast of theScore's Fiscal 2020 Q2 Results. Presenting today will be theScore Founder and Chief Executive Officer, John Levy; President and Chief Operating Officer, Benjie Levy; and Chief Financial Officer, Alvin Lobo.

At this time, we would like to caution our listeners that this presentation contains forward-looking statements. There are risks that actual results could differ materially from what is discussed and that certain material factors or assumptions are applied in making these forward-looking statements.

Any forward-looking statements contained in this presentation represent the views of management and are presented for the purpose of assisting theScore shareholders and analysts in understanding theScore's financial position, objectives and priorities and anticipated financial performance.

Forward-looking statements may not be appropriate for other purposes. Additional information on items of note, theScore's reported results and factors and assumptions related to forward-looking information are all available in our financials and MD&A for Q2 fiscal 2020, both of which were filed on SEDAR a few moments ago and are also available on our Investor Relations page at scoremediaandgaming.com.

Our CEO, John Levy, will now begin the presentation.

[John Levy, Founder & Chief Executive Officer]

Thank you, James. Good afternoon to everyone and welcome to our Q2 2020 earnings report. Thank you for taking the time to join with us today. In a moment, I'll walk you through the momentum we achieved across our media and gaming operations in our second quarter.

But I want to start by addressing what is not just an unprecedented time for the world of sports, but for the world at large. As all of you are aware much of life in general, including sports, has been put on pause while the world collectively tackles the global health crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Our first priority at theScore has been to protect the safety and well-being of our team, prompting us to implement a mandatory work-from-home program in mid-March. At the same time, to mitigate anticipated revenue decline while sports were on hiatus, we took swift and focused measures to manage costs and pursue available government programs.

Our early and decisive actions, which I'll detail further shortly, have enabled us to keep our team at full strength and empower them to continue engaging sports fans in new and creative ways, while pressing ahead with our key product road map activities, including the multi-state rollout of theScore Bet, so we are primed and prepared for when sports resumes.

Now looking back at our operations prior to this mass disruption, we were seeing great momentum across our core media and gaming operations as demonstrated by our Q2 results. In our sports betting operations, we achieved exciting quarter-over-quarter growth in both gaming handle and gross gaming revenues with increases of 58% and 83% respectively. That momentum was supported by ongoing product enhancements to theScore Bet, including further deepening the unique and differentiated integrations between our gaming and media platforms.

We also secured market access to operate theScore Bet in Colorado, through an agreement with a subsidiary of U.S. gaming operator Jacobs Entertainment. We remain on track to launch theScore Bet in both Colorado and Indiana later this year, of course, subject to receiving all relevant licenses and approvals.

We continue to strategically pursue market access opportunities across the U.S. and offer our support to legislative efforts to progress sports betting, both in the U.S. and in Canada, where possible. In addition, we also finalized the deal to become an authorized sports betting operator of the NBA. This multi-year partnership grants us access to official NBA betting data and related marketing rights for theScore Bet.

In our media operations, we achieved a new record in Q2 for engagement on our sports app. Average monthly sessions reached $453 million during the period, which was year-over-year growth of 15%. This equates to users opening our app on average of 110 times a month each on a base of 4.1 million monthly active users, which also represents a year-over-year increase for the second quarter running.

In addition to this it was another period of strong performance for our social and e-sports platforms. We reached 91 million sports fans in Q2 across our social channels including Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. We also continue to rapidly build our audience on this newest social platform, TikTok with our account now surpassing 1.2 million followers despite only launching late last summer.

On the esports side, we continue to reinforce our position as the leading independent provider of on-demand competitive video gaming content. Total video views surpassed $78 million in the quarter which was up 92% over last year, while our YouTube channel now has more than 1.2 million subscribers.

We are very excited to take all this momentum into Q3 and capitalize on events like NCAA March madness, the started MLB season and NBA and NHL playoffs. Of course with -- along with most other major sports those events were all suspended or canceled beginning mid-March as necessary measures to contain and minimize the impact of COVID-19, while we took precedence.

As I mentioned earlier once these disruptions and broader concerns around the coronavirus pandemic began to materialize we took swift measures to adapt to the rapidly evolving situation and ensure the health and safety of our team members while striving to mitigate the business impact on our company.

As of March 16 we successfully adopted a mandatory work-from-home program for all staff, keeping our team at full strength and remaining fully operational. Their creativity and versatility has truly been impressive during this time, helping to keep sports fans informed and engaged across our sports app and social platforms with our esports team also continuing to develop and output new and innovative video content for our ever-growing audience which is stronger now than ever.

At the same time we are also forging ahead with key product road map initiatives for both our media and betting platforms. Due to the fluidity of the pandemic as well as the uncertainty over its magnitude, outcome and duration, we are unable to definitively quantify the potential impact of this situation on our business at this time.

In the near term, given the current disruption to sports events, we do expect a decline in revenue beginning in Q3 versus last year. However, we have taken a number of measures to be -- to responsibly and prudently counteract the anticipated decline in revenue including reducing operating expenses and exploring applicable government programs.

In addition earlier this month every member of our management team, VP level and above unanimously agreed to forego 25% of their salary from May 1 to August 31, in exchange for an equivalent grant of RSUs restricted stock units in the company. A variation of this program was also made available to all full-time staff on a purely voluntary basis.

While this remains an unprecedented and uncertain time for all of us, we must not lose sight of the fact that sports will return. Though the measures we are taking as well as the continued hard work by our content and product teams, we are operating diligently and nimbly to ensure we'll be ready when that moment occurs.

Before I turn the presentation over to Benjie who will provide some further detail on how, we've been keeping sports fans engaged and with our other product initiatives, I also want to take a moment to recognize an exciting new addition to our Board of Directors that we announced just a few moments ago.

We are thrilled to welcome accomplish sports business and marketing veteran, Brian Cooper to our Board. Brian is the Chairman of award winning marketing Agency MKTG Canada and has been responsible for over $1 billion in sponsorship transactions. He's also one of the key Exec -- sorry he was also one of the key Execs at MLSE responsible for driving the launch of the Raptors' expansion franchise and serves as Chair of Basketball Canada.

He is also an adviser to the Wayne Gretzky Foundation and sits on the Advisory Board of Playmaker Canada. His fast experience as sports marketer and operator across North America will be extremely valuable as we continue to grow our media and gaming operations. Welcome Brian. We look forward to working with you.

Additionally, I also want to send a big thank you to long time Board members, Lorry Schneider and Mark Zega who are stepping down. Both have served as highly valued members of our Board and we greatly appreciate their dedication and all of their contributions. On behalf of our entire Board -- years of service.

Now over to Benjie for our product and content updates.

[Benjie Levy, President & Chief Operating Officer]

Thanks John and good afternoon everyone. As John noted the creativity and versatility of our team during this time has been outstanding enabling us to continue engaging sports fans across our media and gaming platforms while pressing ahead with all previously planned product development activities.

On theScore Bet, the continued growth in both handle and gross gaming revenue in Q2 was underpinned by our technology-led focus of tightly integrating our media and gaming platforms building on the launch of our FUSE initiative last quarter.

In Q2, we launched support for additional sports, more betting options, and expanded our cross-app integrations into our MMA golf and tennis sections. These integrations led to a 50% increase in cross-app usage between theScore and theScore Bet over the previous quarter.

Early results like this are very positive indications that our differentiated approach of an integrated media embedding ecosystem are gaining traction and will serve as the foundation for our success.

Further, in the wake of the disruption to the regular sports calendar, our team has been proactively standing up support for new markets and additional sports on theScore Bet including those for events like the NFL draft and eNASCAR to ensure we continue to provide bettors with as many options as possible during this period.

This proactive effort and creativity also extends to our media operations where we've launched innovative new content offerings to keep sports fans engaged in and informed. These include dedicated news rivers in our sports app focused on the impact of COVID-19 on the sports world allowing users to subscribe to breaking news release.

We've also introduced more long-form editorial new video franchises in-app interactive quizzes and polls as well as a free-to-enter contest based around the NFL draft. This quarter, we continued to leverage the power and reach of our social audience creating unique content to engage our off-platform fans.

Over the past few weeks, we've conducted multiple Instagram live interviews with professional athletes like Lance Stephenson, Stephon Marbury, and Austin Rivers. We also leveraged our large social audience to amplify numerous public service announcements from athletes and celebrities to help encourage responsible behavior during this crisis, while also highlighting heartwarming philanthropic stories. On top of this, we continue to see incredible growth on our TikTok channel and massing over 1.2 million followers since our launch in August.

theScore e-sports also enjoyed another powerful quarter of growth with total video views reaching 78 million and our YouTube channel now surpassing 1.2 million subscribers. Our team continues to find new and engaging content to entertain fans with competitive gaming and for the past month have been maintaining the same high quality of content, all while recording and editing from their own home.

As with our social content there has been no tangible impact on our e-sports operations with our audience's appetite for the best on-demand video gaming content stronger than ever.

We also continue to see increased brand interest in this content following successful partnerships with video game developer Ubisoft and tech company Nvidia in Q1 we recently executed direct deals to produce custom content around the Mortal Kombat finals as well as a content series with food delivery service Grubhub.

I'll now turn things over to Alvin who will run through our financial results.

[Alvin Lobo, Chief Financial Officer]

Thanks Benjie and good afternoon everyone. Before addressing the financial performance for the quarter, let me take a moment to remind everyone of the actions we are taking as a result of the pause in the sports calendar.

As John mentioned earlier, due to the fluid nature of the pandemic, we are unable to definitively quantify the potential impact on our business at this time. However, we do expect a decline in revenue beginning in Q3 versus last year.

As a result of the pandemic and the subsequent pause in the sports calendar, we undertook a number of measures to responsibly counteract the anticipated decline in revenue including cost reduction measures to decrease operating expense and the exploration of -- an exploration of applicable government programs.

And as previously discussed, every member of our management team at the VP level and above unanimously agreed to forego 25% of their salary from May 1 to August 31st in exchange for an equivalent grant and restricted stock units in the company.

A variation of this program was also made available to all full-time staff on a purely voluntary basis. All of these initiatives are designed to prudently manage costs during these past, initiatives that we anticipate will generate mid-seven-figure cost savings per quarter while allowing us to quickly regain our momentum when sports return.

Now for the financial recap of the quarter. Total revenue for Q2 fiscal 2020 was $6.7 million compared to $6.8 million for the same period last year. Revenue for the six months ended February 29, 2020 was $15.9 million compared to $16.3 million for the same period last year.

In the quarter we saw very positive momentum on the direct side of our media business both in Canada and the U.S. This growth in direct advertising revenue was offset by a decline in programmatic revenue, primarily the result of reduced demand from a programmatic partner who prior to January 2019 was a significant buyer of the company's programmatic revenue and more limited programmatic inventory in New Jersey in the surrounding states following the launch of theScore Bet.

We also saw positive momentum in our gaming business with strong growth in both gaming handle and gross gaming revenue quarter-over-quarter, driven in part by ongoing product enhancements and deeper integrations between gaming and media platforms. Handle was $13.8 million and $22.6 million for the three and six months ended February 29, 2020, while gross gaming revenue was 443,000 and 685,000 for the same periods respectively.

When taking into account promotional costs and fair value adjustments on unsettled bets, this resulted in negative net gaming revenue of 195,000 and 222,000 for the three and six months ended February 29, 2020.

EBITDA loss in Q2 was $8.6 million versus an EBITDA loss of $2.2 million for the same period last year. EBITDA loss for the six months ended February 29 was $13.5 million versus EBITDA loss of $1.2 million in the same period last year.

The increase in the EBITDA loss was primarily the result of additional expenses incurred in connection with the launch and expansion of our gaming operations. From a liquidity perspective, we ended the quarter with cash of $21.5 million and our $5 million revolving credit facility remains undrawn.

Before I turn it over to James, I want to thank everyone for joining us on today's call. Stay safe, stay well and remember, we're still working every day to make theScore and theScore Bet better than ever once sports resume. So please feel free to reach out to us in any time after this call.

With that I'll turn it over to James.

[James Bigg, Senior Communications Manager]

Thanks, Alvin. That concludes the formal part of our presentation. Operator, we'll now take any analyst questions.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Nikhil Thadani of Mackie Research. Your line is open.

[Nikhil Thadani, Mackie Research]

Great. Thanks for taking my question guys. Recognizing that we're living in pretty sort of challenging times, unprecedented times. The first sort of obvious question would be from – given your perspective, what's your best guess or visibility right now into any potential resumption of the sports calendar? What might that look like? And as that comes into visibility, what does that mean to reengage the sales force to start reselling ad inventory once again?

[John Levy, Founder & Chief Executive Officer]

Hi, Nik, it's John. Obviously, in answer to your first question, it's obviously very fluid. I think we look at and read every report that's coming out. Internally, we build models to try to take into account various time lines as to when sports will return. I think from an optimistic standpoint, we hope it would be great, if some of the reports we're reading from the NBA and I read one today from the NHL, saying that they're going to try and finish the season sometime in the early summer June, July.

Obviously on a condensed basis and probably an arena – nobody in the arena except the players and broadcasters and limited press. So that's one scenario that we look at. I think from our perspective that'd be terrific. However, I think from a more pragmatic realistic, I think what we think is we're sort of looking at late summer, early fall for the resumption of NFL, probably other sports kicking in during the usual course and building models according to that. So -- but in answer to your question about the advertisers, I just want to give a bit of a shout out to our sales force, our sales guys who have -- diligently obviously over the last six to eight weeks. This thing fell apart right in front of March Madness.

I mean I don't have to not just from a betting opportunity and a handle opportunity which we are very, very excited to lead into because of the momentum we were having before that, but also from a media perspective that was a big -- with tons of sponsors and lots of potential revenue being generated. And kudos to our -- have taken all these deals. And a lot of them are just gets postponed or reallocate them into other products.

Obviously there's a significant hit to the revenue, but our sales guys have been doing yeoman's jobs, keeping all these relationships alive, moving product around and rescheduling it for the resumption of the sports. I can't tell you how big or what it's going to look like when sports gets back, but I think just like on the consumer side, there's a lot of pent-up demand for sports right now. And we're expecting when it does start, it's going to come back with vengeance.

I think you probably may see the same thing on the advertisers' side. And we're gathering that from our discussions and from the relationships that we have with these advertisers. So, let's get sports coming back let's, get it live. And I think we will be very well positioned and because -- also because we're so nimble and also because we've been developing new product both from the media side and on the betting side. So, when sports does resume, I think we're going to be in very good shape to attract and capture a lot of the advertising revenue is going to come back.

[Nikhil Thadani, Mackie Research]

Got it. Fair enough. And Benjie you spoke a little bit about some new sort of content that you're putting out there. Could you maybe give us a sense for what the engagement looks like on that content? And what that roadmap might look like over the immediate kind of short term while we wait for sports to come back?

[Benjie Levy, President & Chief Operating Officer]

Sure Nik. Thanks for the question. I think, if you're in the app, the content clearly has shifted. We've moved from an environment where a lot of the content that we're producing is around the live event itself and telling a lot of the stories about what's happening during -- before during and after the game to really giving our guys a lot of time to create kind of more engaging pieces to longer form pieces.

And so, what that manifested itself is obviously a lot of our engagement in the app is driven by the live event, but we're still seeing a very large proportion of our users return to the app. They have great muscle memory. They're coming back to engage around our content. Clearly, they're not coming as often as they do and they're coming to hammer box scores all night on NFL Sundays. But we're very encouraged by the fact that we're seeing this behavior pattern with our users to come and engage around our content to continue to engage on social, to really engage around our e-sports content. And so when live sports comes back, we expect that our audience will snap back to.

[Nikhil Thadani, Mackie Research]

Got it. And just one last one before I pass the line. In terms of e-sports, could this perhaps be an opportunity to accelerate some of the monetization with that product line? And if so, what the strategy there is? Thanks guys

[Benjie Levy, President & Chief Operating Officer]

Listen Nik, certainly there's a lot of visibility on e-sports and the audience there continues to grow and we're having those discussions with advertisers. So, in terms of the specifics of what opportunities may materialize or not, it's difficult to comment on or to forecast. But we're focusing on building the -- continuing to build and develop the content. We're seeing that reflect in audience that's growing significantly year-over-year, quarter-over-quarter and we're starting to see advertisers take notice.

[Operator]

Your next question comes from the line of Rob Goff of Echelon. Your line is open.

[Rob Goff, Echelon]

Thank you very much. I appreciate your comments with respect to the conditions and the times also liked Benjie's comment on muscle memory. With respect to the cost savings initiatives you indicated a seven-digit savings. Could you dive into cash savings versus non-cash savings? And perhaps talk about your access to government programs to recompress on those costs?

[Benjie Levy, President & Chief Operating Officer]

Sure. Rob. Maybe, I can start and then turn it over to Alvin Lobo. Obviously, Rob from a cost perspective we are focused on saving costs and also preserving cash. So as an example, one of the initiatives that preserves cash as John talked about was all of the senior execs for going 25% of cash comp from May to August in – as part of the RSU program that we implemented and actually extended that out to all of our staff.

In terms of the specifics of the government programs, we're looking at everything that's being made available to companies across the spectrum. I mean, you've probably seen lots of reporting on the wage subsidy program, which we're looking at. There is some programs that are being rolled out through EDC and BDC that we're also looking at. It would be kind of premature to comment on the specifics of those, but we're certainly looking at everything that's being made available to help support companies like ours.

And in particular, help support companies like ours make it through with as John said, without having to make cuts to our workforce, because those – girls who are working every day to help keep our product road map on track for once sports resume to help keep – and then help keep our audience engaged in the meantime.

[Rob Goff, Echelon]

Thank you. Looking beyond the initial return to sports and return to betting the pain in the economy will stay on. Could you talk to the percentage of your advertising that would be from the sectors that are particularly retail sensitive economically sensitive such as travel or hospitality?

[Benjie Levy, President & Chief Operating Officer]

Yeah. It's probably tough to get into the weeds right now in terms of how that's going to be impacted. Rob, I think you're right there are going to be sectors that are kind of disproportionately impacted on the one end of the spectrum. And then, I think there will be advertisers on the other side of the ledger companies that come out of this crisis in a bit of a stronger position. I think our focus coming out of this on the other side is making sure we're ready to re-engage our audience in as strong a manner as possible. And at the same time, continuing to work with all of our advertisers as John said, we're not – the conversations don't stop. We're continuing those discussions with them all now. And to make sure that, we are as best positioned as possible and continue to service our accounts and to be as creative as possible to take advantage of those opportunities.

[Rob Goff, Echelon]

Thank you. Good luck guys.

[Benjie Levy, President & Chief Operating Officer]

Thank you.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] Your next question comes from the line of David McFadgen of Cormark. Your line is open.

[David McFadgen, Cormark]

Hi, guys. A couple of questions. So, maybe I'll just start on the sports betting part of the business. So we saw in the quarter that the amount of handles up obviously nicely, but the NGR was slightly negative. I am just wondering, do you anticipate that maybe the next quarter we might have a positive NGR? Or is the market just so competitive -- well actually it's not competitive because you know sports, when you do you -- when you do you think you might be positive guys when sports are back?

[John Levy, Founder & Chief Executive Officer]

That's funny. I mean, it's not funny. In terms of – I think what we've always said about, where we're focusing at this point is market share and growing our handle and that's not – just somebody buzzing me here. I'm just going to wait till it clears. Sorry. That's – I don't know, if I can continue. That's not at the extent of us being sensitive to what our take is on that. But what we've always said is, a, we're in one state; b, we're just starting. As we roll out into multiple states as the handle increases and as our market share increases and we start to look at this in retrospective of being out one year or 18 months. I mean, we fully expect and when we're our models to hit the take percentages that we've always talked about and fall right within the industry standards.

Right now the reason that you're seeing the negatives or the basically the flat in terms of the revenue generated from this. It's just because the amount is so small, growing nicely. I mean, we're very encouraged by the 60% increase. We think we're going to just absolutely do amazing with March Madness based on the amount of momentum that we were achieving going into March and April, but I think we're not -- I'm not saying, we're not concerned about it, but I think we're very optimistic that along with the increased handle you're going to start to see the revenues that we're talking about.

[David McFadgen, Cormark]

Okay. And I think last quarter you gave us an idea of how many sports betting customers were coming from the media app. I was wondering if you can give us an update on that?

[Benjie Levy, President & Chief Operating Officer]

Yeah, I think last quarter we said it was about three quarters of our users who are coming from the media app. And we continue to see the lion's share of our users coming from the media app David. And I think what's more as we start -- as we rolled out kind of some of the FUSE features at the end of Q1 and started to kind of see the impact of the full impact of that through the end of football season through Q2. We saw not just kind of the aggregate number of people coming from media to betting as a percentage of the kind of total betting users we have, but if you look at the frequency that they're coming back and forth between the two apps that was up 50% quarter-on-quarter.

So it was kind of a very positive indication to us that the integrated approach is going to be useful not just from the perspective of user acquisition, but also ongoing engagements and retention and bet stimulation and all of those type of things and it's why one of the kind of key product focus is for us that we're -- we have [Technical Difficulty] in addition to doing all of the multi-state infrastructure work is working on how do we deepen that integration and how do we deepen that connection between the two platforms.

[David McFadgen, Cormark]

Okay. And just - I was just wondering about the inverse like, do you see many people are coming in specifically for your betting app and then migrating over to your media app? Do you see much of that?

[Benjie Levy, President & Chief Operating Officer]

We do see some coming into betting and then going back the other way, but as far as kind of aggregate overall numbers is predominantly media to betting, which is -- betting to media is nice, but media to betting has really been our core thesis. And we're seeing that bear out in the numbers.

[David McFadgen, Cormark]

Okay. So maybe I can ask then just a question on the cost. Alvin talked about the 25% reduction from the senior people at the firm. So does that mean that the cash savings are like somewhere in the $1 million to $2 million a quarter range? Alvin, could you -- can I just get some clarity on that?

[Benjie Levy, President & Chief Operating Officer]

I think Alvin had said and Alvin can comment further, but we're looking -- per quarter we're looking at savings in the mid 7-figure range. So a little bit higher than what you're thinking there, David?

[Alvin Lobo, Chief Financial Officer]

Correct.

[David McFadgen, Cormark]

Okay. And then you talked about launching your sports betting in Colorado and Indiana sometime this year. I think in the past you've always or were you planning on launching it prior to NFL launching or just in conjunction with NFL. Is that still your thoughts? And if NFL is delayed what would you do then?

[Benjie Levy, President & Chief Operating Officer]

We haven't nailed down the specific time line for when we're going to launch there. We're going through the regulatory approval processes now. We're finishing up our multistate infrastructure work and then getting that through the various gaming labs that we have to put that through.

I think certainly that would be a goal of ours and we think just like we did with New Jersey last year, that's a good time of year to launch. I think -- but probably there you're right there's the added consideration of this year, it's not just when you're through your regulatory process, it's what's going on with the broader sports landscape. So both of those things will factor into when we ultimately decide to pull the trigger to launch, but we are sort of well underway from our multi-state infrastructure process and our licensing process.

[David McFadgen, Cormark]

Okay. And then maybe just one final one. Can you give us an idea on the user engagement say over the last few weeks now that this COVID situation has really hit? Typically, your users have looked at the media app 110 times a month. I was just wondering where you're kind of tracking in right now?

[John Levy, Founder & Chief Executive Officer]

You wouldn't be trying to back door into a programmatic revenue number would you David?

[David McFadgen, Cormark]

Well you know...

[Benjie Levy, President & Chief Operating Officer]

Listen, I think we -- are we able to quantify it precisely in that regard? No I think -- but look a significant percentage of our usage in the -- historically is driven around game and box score engagement. And well sports is off that's not going to be there. I think and our job in the meantime is to try and keep the users engaged, and we recognize we're not going to be able to recreate that same level of engagement, but how do we keep them as engaged as possible? How do we keep the score top of mind for them and have to still make sure we're part of their daily routine. And so that's our -- that's the focus from a content perspective currently.

[John Levy, Founder & Chief Executive Officer]

Just to add on that David, I think the critical thing for us is to make sure -- I think as Benjie just said, we remain the brand of choice and remain top of mind. If we lose that, we lose everything. And as long as people keep coming to us, which they are doing and in higher percentages, than honestly than we even thought they would in the context of they're not hitting the app 110 times, but they're coming to read our articles and then they're coming back to read another article. And that sort of consistency in the user base and loyalty to the brand is really what's critical, because I know once sports starts, if they're coming to the app, they're going to be banging in 110 times again for sure.

What scares the crap out of companies is the fact that their brand gets lost and becomes forgotten. And that's -- fortunately for us, that doesn't appear to be the case. And I'm not surprised, because people genuinely love theScore. It's the second most popular app in North America. It's not there because we spend billions of dollars marketing in the U.S. it's there because it works and people want it. So just let's get sports started again and I'm confident that both from a media perspective and from a betting perspective, particularly since I know our betting product continues to get better and better and better because our engineers are working their butts off like nothing -- as if COVID hadn't hit which is unbelievable. So just David get out there and get sports going again for us and we'll do the rest.

[David McFadgen, Cormark]

All right. Thanks a lot guys.

[John Levy, Founder & Chief Executive Officer]

Thank you.

[Operator]

There are no further questions over the phone lines at this time. I turn the call back over to the presenters.

[James Bigg, Senior Communications Manager]

Thank you, Ian. Thanks everyone for joining us on our Q2 results call today. We look forward to presenting to you again when we deliver our Q3 results in mid-July. That concludes today's call.

[Operator]

This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.