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Earnings Call Transcript

Earnings Call Transcript
2020-Q2

from 0
Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. And welcome to the Score Q2 Fiscal 2020 Earnings Conference Call. [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.

J
James Bigg
Senior Manager of Communications

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.

J
John S. Levy
Founder, Chairman & CEO

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 multistate 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 multiyear 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 e-sports 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 rightly 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 e-sports 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 accomplished 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, I want to thank them for their years of service. Now over to Benjie for our product and content updates.

B
Benjamin David Levy
President, COO & Executive Director

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 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, amassing 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.

A
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 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 31 in exchange for an equivalent grant in 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 pause, initiatives that we anticipate will generate mid-7-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 6 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 and 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 3 and 6 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 (sic) [ $221,000 ] for the 3 and 6 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 6 months ended February 29 was $13.5 million (sic) [ $13.4 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 any time after this call. With that, I'll turn it over to James.

J
James Bigg
Senior Manager of Communications

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.

N
Nikhil Thadani
Analyst of Technology

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?

J
John S. Levy
Founder, Chairman & CEO

Nik, it's John. Obviously, answer to your first question is, it's obviously very fluid. I think we look at and read every report that's coming out. Internally, we build models that 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 been working diligently, obviously, over the last 6, 8 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 sales staff who have taken all these deals. And a lot of them are just getting postponed or reallocating 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 on 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.

N
Nikhil Thadani
Analyst of Technology

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?

B
Benjamin David Levy
President, COO & Executive Director

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, so 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.

N
Nikhil Thadani
Analyst of Technology

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?

B
Benjamin David Levy
President, COO & Executive Director

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.

R
Robert Goff
MD & Head of Research

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 7-digit savings. Could you dive into cash savings versus noncash savings? And perhaps talk about your access to government programs to recover some of those costs?

B
Benjamin David Levy
President, COO & Executive Director

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 forgoing 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 are the guys and girls who are working every day to help keep our product road map on track for when sports resume to help keep -- and then help keep our audience engaged in the meantime.

R
Robert Goff
MD & Head of Research

Okay. 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 or economically sensitive, such as travel or hospitality?

B
Benjamin David Levy
President, COO & Executive Director

Yes. 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 reengage 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.

Operator

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

D
David John McFadgen
Director of Institutional Equity Research

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 there's no sports, when you do you think you might go positive, guys, when sports are back?

J
John S. Levy
Founder, Chairman & CEO

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 1 year or 18 months. I mean we fully expect, and when we're building 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 -- 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.

D
David John McFadgen
Director of Institutional Equity Research

Okay. And I think last quarter, you gave us an idea. 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?

B
Benjamin David Levy
President, COO & Executive Director

I think last quarter, we said it was about 3/4 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 2 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 -- our guys had done in addition to doing all of the multistate infrastructure work is working on how do we deepen that integration, and how do we deepen that connection between the 2 platforms.

D
David John McFadgen
Director of Institutional Equity Research

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?

B
Benjamin David Levy
President, COO & Executive Director

We do see some coming into betting and then going back the other way, but as far as kind of aggregate overall numbers is, it's 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.

D
David John McFadgen
Director of Institutional Equity Research

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?

B
Benjamin David Levy
President, COO & Executive Director

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?

A
Alvin Lobo
Chief Financial Officer

Correct.

D
David John McFadgen
Director of Institutional Equity Research

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?

B
Benjamin David Levy
President, COO & Executive Director

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 multistate infrastructure process and our licensing process.

D
David John McFadgen
Director of Institutional Equity Research

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?

J
John S. Levy
Founder, Chairman & CEO

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

D
David John McFadgen
Director of Institutional Equity Research

Well, you know...

B
Benjamin David Levy
President, COO & Executive Director

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, it 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 theScore 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.

J
John S. Levy
Founder, Chairman & CEO

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 it 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. They're doing the same work today 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.

Operator

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

J
James Bigg
Senior Manager of Communications

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.

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