The company generated $7.2 Million in Income from Continuing Operations for Q4 2024. Athlon Sports’ momentum provides a blueprint for scalable, profitable growth for media brands. Paul Edmondson, Arena CEO, and Manoj Bhargava, Arena’s largest investor, review Arena’s quarterly results and business strategy.
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SportsTranscript
00:00Hi, I'm Paul. I'm the CEO of Arena Group. Today, we have Manoj with us. Okay, Manoj,
00:08we went out and we're trying to do things a little bit differently. We don't want to just
00:11tell the world what a great company we are. We want to show that we're doing things a bit
00:14differently. And so we went out and on X and on LinkedIn, and we asked for some questions.
00:20And these were for people that are just curious about our business. Some of them are investors,
00:24and some of the people that just want to know about what we do. So Manoj, you have over 100
00:29million bucks invested. Why did you invest? And does this turnaround seem like it's going to stick?
00:34Are you committed to the team? Well, I thought fundamentally, it's a great business run really
00:40poorly, because it was losing all kinds of money. And we thought, you know, it's kind of obvious what
00:46was wrong with it. And so we came in, and within a year, it was profitable. We're also profitably
00:53growing. You know, lots of people make excuses where they say, well, we're growing, so we don't
00:59have to make any money. Right? No, no, no. I don't believe in that. I'm not from the Bay Area.
01:05I don't believe in that. For me, it's like, I'm from the, I live in the Midwest. You don't make
01:10money. You don't make a profit. You're not a business yet. Let me talk a little bit about
01:14the model we created. We started with Athlon Sports. We brought what we call competitive
01:18publishing. And competitive publishing is two teams that work and compete head-to-head,
01:23covering news, not just nine to five, but around the clock. And these are world-class talent who are
01:31insightful, talented, and driven. And they're producing content that people love. We get really
01:37great talent that cares about what the audience likes. And then we pay them based on if the audience
01:47likes it or not. If they don't like it, they don't get paid. So it turns into something that they serve
01:53the audience, which traditional publishing doesn't. They serve themselves mostly of what my opinion is
02:01when nobody cares what a journalist's opinion is. And that's the crux of the business model. So they get
02:09paid based on the customer satisfaction rather than what their view on life is. And that's changed
02:16everything. We're bringing this to our other brands. And we're seeing some early results that
02:19look super promising. But I think the most important thing to our business is we now expect
02:24to be profitable from every quarter of 2025. What are your thoughts on acquisitions for the Arena Group?
02:34Acquisitions are totally opportunistic. I mean, what you've done is create a model which can take
02:42a lot, any, almost any publishing unit or any brand name publisher and turn it profitable.
02:50Right? So yeah, at this point, since everybody's losing money, we should, we should pile in and say,
02:58okay, give us your stuff so we can turn it profitable.
03:01Yeah. Yeah. I said, we like to be opportunistic. Like, like Manoj said, we like brands that have
03:08a lot of untapped value in terms of what they are capable of both doing offline and digitally.
03:14And that's what we really find as the best targets for what we do best. And we're continuing
03:19to look for those at, you know, like what we think are really great prices.
03:24Bot fraud. Some reports saying 40% of web traffic may be bots. How do you protect your advertisers?
03:31We just recently named one of the four publishers that don't have any bot traffic,
03:35which we think is very important to the ad ecosystem.
03:37One of the key things that I thought is that our platform is such that all these bots are kicked out.
03:45Yeah. It's a, yeah, it is. It's a combination of a technology ad placement and just making sure
03:50that you're treating the advertisers with a ton of respect as well as the readers.
03:54I think there's a lot of advertisers that don't realize that they're buying stuff that is 40% bot.
04:00That gives us another place to go to say, look, except four or five major guys,
04:05everybody else is 40% bots. Why are you paying them that much? So it gives us another way to
04:12monetize better than everybody else.
04:15Can you speak about the ongoing lawsuits?
04:17It's always an important question to ask about litigation. Our policy is not to make any comments
04:21about pending litigation, but we'll let folks know as soon as, as soon as we have something to tell
04:26them. Thanks for tuning in today. Our hope isn't to, isn't to talk and scream about what a wonderful
04:31company are and how great we are and what all our earnings is. It's really for folks to understand
04:35what we're doing, how we're approaching the business and how we're, how we're different than
04:39traditional media. Stay tuned. We're going to be putting out regular updates for folks and you'll
04:45see us active on social media and you'll see us active here with Manoj frequently. So thanks for
04:50joining us Manoj and thanks for being an investor.