Super League Enterprise Inc (SLE) 2019 Q3 法說會逐字稿

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for participating in today's conference call to discuss Super League Gaming's financial results for the third quarter ended September 30, 2019. Joining us today are Super League's President and CEO, Ann Hand; and CFO, Clayton Haynes. Following their remarks, we'll open the call for your questions.

Before we go further, please take note of the company's safe harbor statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The statements provides important cautions regarding forward-looking statements. The company's remarks during today's conference call will include forward-looking statements. These statements, along with other information presented that does not reflect historical fact, are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from those implied by these forward-looking statements. Please refer to the company's recent news release and to the company's reports filed within the Securities and Exchange Commission for more information about the risk and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ.

I would like to remind everyone that this call will be available for replay through November 20, 2019, starting at 8:00 p.m. Eastern Time tonight. A webcast replay will also be available via the link provided in today's press release as well as on the company's website at www.superleague.com. Now I would like to turn the call over to the President and CEO of Super League Gaming, Ann Hand. Ann?

Thank you, and good afternoon, everyone. Really appreciate you joining us for our third quarterly conference call. In many ways, our company achieved significant momentum during the third quarter which we are excited to share with you. We feel like the flywheel of that has begun to kick in as we start to achieve some critical mass with our key performance indicators and the growing array of revenue opportunities that have started to crystallize over the past 90 days since our last call.

This afternoon, I will review the accomplishments of the quarter and Clayton will cover our financials. But what I really want to emphasize is how the pieces of the puzzle we've been talking about this year are starting to fall into place to put Super League at the epicenter of a world for competitive gamers. It's coming together, we're on track and we're ready to share more data to help you feel more informed about how this can play out.

So first, a quick review of some of the top commercial highlights since our last earnings call in August. First is probably one of our most significant commercial advancements of the year, we announced a partnership with ggCircuit that offers a B2B software solution for gaming centers and extends our reach over time to more than 600 gaming centers around the world. A gaming center is like an Internet café. It's where competitive PC and console gamers go to use high-powered equipment and connection as they compete and socialize around the games they love.

While the street may not fully understand the bigger opportunity here, it is not just about a material acceleration of our retail footprint. It is about the power of our combined B2B2C technology that can become an even greater scalable solution that can extend well beyond gaming centers and apply to all kinds of retail. In addition, this captive audience of gamers, 200,000 unique monthly visitors and 1.6 million registered player accounts, as represented by these 600 locations, offers a ripe segment to initially introduce Super League Prime, our new monthly consumer subscription service launching in beta on November 18.

Starting in North America at a price point of $7.99 per month, players will be encouraged to sign up for Prime to get tangible valuable benefits that include free gameplay hours, accelerate reward points and access to exclusive game plan pricing. Also, in addition to our expansion of titles, we have deepened our focus on Fortnite through a series of tournaments at ggCircuit-powered gaming centers around the world, starting in October, offering a total sponsored price pool of $130,000 for everyday gamers to have their chance to get recognized and win. So far, with just 3 events completed, we have had 10,206 entrants participating. They've completed 75,537 matches and that all took place across 460 unique venues.

Additionally, we continue to expand our brand partner relationships and are introducing Tencent's PUBG MOBILE title onto our platform starting in December. These experiences will take place at Dave & Buster's locations across the United States. Also of note on the brand partner side, we joined forces with Sprint to support their national 5G launch, hosting a large-scale 5G mobile gaming tournament in Los Angeles, bringing together passionate gamers, the press and Sprint executives.

And while making it to the esports professional ranks is still a highly aspirational goal for the 2.6 billion gamers around the world, we were thrilled to see Blaze Elmore, a longtime Super Leaguer and one of our Clash Royale stars use the Super League platform to level up his skills and garner a spotlight for his talent. The result, Blaze was signed by Team Dignitas, a professional team, to become a full-time professional esports athlete as recently covered by The Los Angeles Times. And it's important to note that Blaze is only 17 years old.

Top players seeking us out validates the unmet demand gamers have for more competitive gaming. A top professional team using our experiences and events for recruiting validates the need to spot and foster talent. So this is just a sampling of the significant commercial highlights, but I hope you will feel we've had a fairly steady drumbeat of progress this year and that will continue. As I said on the last call, going public has been empowering to act more boldly and accelerate our future faster.

Now shifting to revenue. Let me first refresh everyone on our business model so we're all starting at the same place. Super League is a branded house of live and digital gamer experiences and offers, with the core building blocks of our Super League-powered retail network and a variety of proprietary digital entertainment channels. Simply put, our opportunity is to monetize gamers and the content they generate through our platform.

We speak not just to a wide range of gamers across game title, ages and skill levels but also a wide range of content capture well beyond just gameplay. This positions Super League as not just a tournament operator but a lifestyle and media company focused on capturing, generating, aggregating and distributing content across the genre of all things esports.

So to be more specific for an example, our Minehut digital property feels like a Facebook for Minecraft kids to socialize and connect. It's about much more than just the gameplay. And our frame rate social channels across Instagram is a brand that allows everyday gamers to submit their gameplay highlight reels. Those user-generated and submitted highlights can be for any game from any gamer anywhere, which then becomes our content to promote, repackage and monetize in a variety of ways.

The fundamental drivers are creating deep community engagement through our highly contextualized local experiences that, when coupled with the critical mass of large digital audiences, provides the depth and volume for content and offer monetization way beyond the classic advertising model. It's the powerful combination of those physical and digital nodes with Super League's platform as the hub that creates real leverage for a greater share of not just the customer's wallet but also the advertiser's wallet.

So back to monetizing gamers and their content. Let's start with content monetization which can be broken into 4 streams. First, classic brand sponsorships of our owned and operated properties, similar to the deals we've done historically with Red Bull and Nickelodeon. Second, brand partner program. These are more customized gaming offers that use our platform's flexibility, we also refer to this as Platform-as-a-Service. This can be a venue partner like Topgolf, who wants to create a specific league for their players, a game publisher like Tencent or even a brand partner like Logitech.

On our last call, I shared a case study where a digital-only activation for our brand on our platform enabled us to secure $40 to $50 CPMs, which is top tier. And when we marry up our digital properties with our live esports experiences for brands, we have seen CPMs in the ranges of $100 to $150 of CPM. So we have proven the top-down engagements with brands, whether it is more classic sponsorship or custom programs, elicits strong buy rates.

Thirdly, we now have an opportunity to deliver more traditional advertising revenue. Until recently, we have not had type of digital reach or eyeballs as they call it, but that has changed over the last quarter. However, unlike low-tier commoditized advertising models, we are still are able to offer media buyers a direct channel to this attractive, somewhat elusive gamer target, offering premium engagement and commanding equally premium CPM. So this is valuable ad inventory we are amassing. It isn't $1 to $5 CPM buys like you usually see. In fact, if you just look at our current inventory of 30 million to 40 million monthly views across digital channels, and we're still growing, and applied a conservative $15 CPM, it represents over $5 million in potential ad revenue per year in addition to our brand partner and sponsorship revenues. And that $5 million is the floor and just 1 dimension of content monetization. To that end, we have brought in former media sales executives from Twitch and Amazon to help us evaluate the value of this ad inventory and build a sales team to deliver against the opportunity.

And the fourth revenue stream under content monetization is the way that we can monetize the gaming content we're generating through third-party content licensing. While we have not done much of this to date, we are amassing a large and diverse library of competitive and social gaming content that we already know is of interest to many different types of distribution channels out there, whether it be linear, streamed or social.

So now, to the second vector, let's talk about gamer monetization or otherwise, we can put it as direct-to-consumer offers. There are 4 primary ways we can monetize our community of gamers. The first one, traditionally, we have, at times, charged tournament fees on select experiences and can elect to do that in the future when we feel it's a premium experience where it's justified.

Secondly, we have lightly dipped into consumer products, selling Super League, City and City Club-branded merchandise. And we believe the consumer products over time could continue to be an interesting complementary revenue stream for the direct-to-consumer space. The third type of revenue stream for gamer monetization is really where we think the big idea has been. We've always held the point of view that a monthly subscription model was one path to material recurring revenues once we had built an adequate user base with a compelling offer entry point.

We stated in our roadshow that our intention was to introduce a subscription offer in 4Q, and we are delivering on that promise with this month's launch of Super League Prime. To reiterate, we are initially launching through ggCircuit-powered gaming centers and their captive audience of 200,000 monthly unique users and 1.6 million registered accounts. So we envision Super League Prime as an offer over time that can be relevant to a large market of gamers wherever they choose to game play and socialize as part of our community. We think starting with this captive audience is smart. No inefficiently spent marketing dollars. Players are sitting at PC screens already engaged. They will convert into Super League's loyalty program and have direct prompts to upgrade to Prime at a low to no customer acquisition cost. At a $7.99 per month price point, as mentioned earlier, we will do a phased rollout across North America over the next 60 days and expanding globally early next year.

Unlike third-party content licensing on the content monetization side of the house, we know there's upside on the direct-to-consumer side as well. We're exploring digital goods and badging, which inside our platform will offer attractive revenue and margin potential.

So next on to our top 5 key performance indicators. These are the same KPIs we laid out at the start of the year and are the metrics we and the Board feel map the trajectory and future value of the company in this early but fast-growing stage. January 2019 feels like a lifetime ago, and our progress against these KPIs has been dramatic and has changed the landscape around us and how we accelerate our growth.

So let's dive in. Two of these KPIs, the number of game titles and the number of retail partner venues, bring more gamers to Super League. As we bring more players into our physical and digital experiences, we gain not only new registered users but also more gameplay hours that are running through our platform and ultimately more audience, right at the top of the funnel, which has an amplification effect on potential revenue and new customer acquisition.

So first, game titles. We ended last year with 4 titles, which we accumulated over 4 years of existence with a target of games at least 6 by the end of this year. We met that goal as of our last quarterly call with the addition of Capcom's Street Fighter V and Tencent's PUBG MOBILE. But more importantly, if you look at the programs we're running with Topgolf and ggCircuit partner venues, we are now promoting over 20 titles. We could not have predicted this back in January but we always knew a network effect would kick in with critical mass. And our venue expansion has directly led to game title expansion. And beyond gameplay, you will find dozens of game titles featured on our digital channels of Super League TV and Framerate. So Super League is now positioned as a destination for all gamers and all games.

Again, game title expansion is mostly about customer acquisition but being game title-agnostic also makes us resilient and evergreen. Similarly, our venue growth has been about doing a land grab on the field space for everyday gamers to competitively gain. And now we can see how that venue growth leads not just more gamers, but more game titles and more gameplay hours and outcome. We ended 2018 with 46 active venues and grew to 96 total active venues through Q2, with a full year 2019 target of 200 venues. As referenced at the start, in just 3 weeks of Fortnite tournaments, we have seen 460 unique venues participate. When combined with our Topgolf and Cinemark theaters footprint, we have more than 500 app Super League venues year-to-date.

Our third KPI is registered users. So these are people that have registered an account in some form and likely participated in a paid or free-to-play gameplay experience, either physically or digitally. At the end of 2018, we had acquired 300,000 registered users cumulatively over 4 years and had a goal to double that to 600,000 by year-end 2019. In our 2Q quarterly call, I was able to report that we had 621,000 registered users through the end of July, and I'm pleased to report that we've achieved 877,000 registered users through October. And as of today, we have eclipsed 900,000 registered users, making the potential to reach 1 million registered users by year-end an achievable goal. Again, this is an indicator of critical mass and the amplification effect these KPIs have on each other, which leads us to the next 2 metrics, gameplay hours and audience.

These are 2 metrics we set targets against based on the types of offerings we had in 2017 and 2018, which was skewed more towards live experiences. While live experiences remain our point of differentiation that attracts top brands to us with high CPM, we've been able to build digital reach as well, which dramatically impacts these KPIs.

So first, let's tackle gameplay hours. We ended last year with 1.8 million hours and had nearly 5 million through July. This exponential rise is due to our ever-expanding digital gameplay channels that provide always-on gaming well beyond our live experiences. Through October, we have pushed over 12 million hours of gameplay through our platform, more than 6x our 2018 number. Initially, this surge was related to our digital gaming channel Minehut. But the network effect of our physical retail expansion will start to be a material contributor to this gameplay hour generation going forward. The headline here, we're facilitating a massive amount of gameplay through our platform, and the content library we're creating can be repurposed and distributed in many ways for further content monetization.

And this leads to our fifth KPI, which is audience. It is also the one that we have consistently emphasized as the top of the funnel and therefore the KPI from which all things flow. We launched our SuperLeagueTV channel last year with modest audience, about 1 million views. We made the small acquisition of Framerate following the IPO and have grown that asset significantly to complement the organic growth of our homegrown Minehut audience. Our original target doesn't even matter anymore as the game has changed. On our last call, I reported we had achieved 11.9 million views through July. And because of the ramp-up and trajectory that we could see, we were willing to put out a bold goal to get to 100 million views by year-end.

Well, we've managed to deliver. Our audience growth as of today has reached 96 million views, so we are well on our way to beating our newly adjusted 100 million views full year target. Earlier in this call, I spoke about the potential value of our ever-growing ad inventory and impressions and views are the key drivers of that.

So to summarize, we have dozens of games, hundreds of venues, a path towards millions of players generating tens of millions of content hours with hundreds of millions of viewers. We knew that taking the company public would be a catalyst for bolder, faster move. And now that we have a solid foundation, we can begin to realize value through our core assets: our gamers, their content, our platform technology and our media inventory.

With the announcement of Super League Prime, we now have a direct-to-consumer offering to complement our live experiences, streamed esports programming, original lifestyle programming and digital gameplay environment so that gamers can engage with us in a variety of ways for an always-on relationship with Super League. At this point, I'll turn the call over to our CFO, Clayton Haynes, who will provide an overview of third quarter financial results, after which I'll come back on with some closing remarks. Clayton?

Thank you, Ann. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. As summarized in our earnings release and 8-K filed earlier today, third quarter 2019 revenues increased 129% to $350,000 compared to $153,000 for the third quarter of 2018. As we stated on our last call, we have continued our focus in 2019 toward offering a mix of paid and free-to-play events and digital and physical experiences to build audience. And we continue to see the emergence of Platform-as-a-Service revenue, which, along with brand and media sponsorships, generally come with more favorable margin profiles.

Our Platform-as-a-Service offering, which as Ann mentioned, refers to the more customized gaming offers that use the flexibility of our technology platform, was the primary driver of our quarterly revenue growth. On a year-to-date basis, revenues are also up, increasing 28% over the comparable prior year-to-date period to $822,000. Third quarter 2019 cost of revenue increased 174% to $192,000 compared to $70,000 in the comparable prior year quarter due primarily to the increase in related revenues. Cost of revenue in the quarter increased at a higher percentage than the quarterly revenues due to the specific mix of programs contributing to revenues in the quarter with varying direct cost profiles.

However, on a year-to-date basis, cost of revenues remained relatively flat despite the 28% increase in related revenues due to the realization of operational efficiencies resulting in lower direct costs for Super League's physical and digital experiences during the year-to-date 2019 period.

Third quarter 2019 operating expenses were $4.6 million compared to $3.6 million in the comparable prior year quarter. The increase was primarily due to our continued focus on high-grading our staff rather than large headcount expansion, including a net increase in the engineering headcount to support the company's technology platform development and an increase in technology platform infrastructure costs, insurance and other corporate public company expenses. We continue to be committed to investing OpEx appropriately to meet the top line and growth needs of company.

On a GAAP basis, net loss in the third quarter of 2019 was $4.4 million or $0.52 per share compared to a net loss of $5 million or $1.09 per share in the comparable prior year quarter. Noncash charges in the third quarter of 2019 included $737,000 in noncash stock-based compensation expenses. Pro forma net loss, which excludes the impact of noncash debt-related interest charges in 2018, noncash stock compensation charges and other noncash charges, was $3.7 million for the third quarter of 2019 compared to $2.6 million in the comparable prior year quarter. The increase in pro forma net loss was primarily due to the same operational expense fluctuation factors cited earlier. As described in our earnings release and 8-K filed with the SEC today, pro forma net income or loss is a non-GAAP measure that we believe investors can use to compare and evaluate our financial results, along with other applicable KPIs and metrics discussed by Ann earlier.

Please note that our earnings release contains a more detailed description of our calculation of pro forma net loss as well as a reconciliation of pro forma net loss with the most directly comparable financial measures prepared in accordance with GAAP. From a balance sheet perspective, we ended the third quarter of 2019 with $12.6 million in cash, no debt and total shareholders' equity of $17.2 million. With that, I will turn the call back over to Ann for some additional remarks. Ann?

Great. Thanks, Clayton. In summary, we're excited as ever about the opportunities we see in front of us to grow the business. We're well positioned to be at the epicenter of esports for the widest set of competitive gamers. We are materially beating all KPIs we set out at the start of the year. We expect that the combination of executing our plan and achieving our KPIs will result in significant shareholder value enhancement.

There is one thing that I want to make sure that all of you understand about Super League, and that's the fact that we are positioned very differently than a lot of the other esports players out there. We own our customers and we always have. So while you hear a lot of people talking about B2C monetization, we are very uniquely positioned as someone who already been amassing, over several years, a very deep community of gamers.

Yes, we have solid B2B partnerships as well, which provide us leverage and monetization in its own right. But the gamers aren't just coming to Super League to transact, they're coming to engage, to share and to belong. As our platform continues to become more multidimensional, we can fill in more and more of our competitive gamers' interest becoming integral to their gaming life. And with that, Clayton and I will now take your questions. Operator?

(Operator Instructions)

Our first question comes from Mark Argento from Lake Street Capital.

Just a couple of questions. I wanted to drill down a little bit in regards to the new subscription offering that you launched, the Prime offering for, I think you said it was $7.99 a month. Purely, I mean, they're a little bit -- and tell us what is -- what's like game player or customer or subscriber getting for the monthly fee?

Yes. So as I mentioned, we're initially starting this at these, as an offer, an enhanced offer, to these gaming centers that I spoke about. And I do want to clarify the reason that, that is extremely by intention, even though Prime is intended over time to be something that people can access and find value from at home, too. But when we talked to some real experts in the subscription business, what they talked about is the challenge that so many companies have in launching subscription from 0. And when they heard that we had an opportunity to take that captive audience of those 1.6 million registered users at those gaming centers, those 200,000 monthly uniques, they got really excited about the idea of, in a way, almost starting with a locked-in customer base.

So the way that we have designed Prime out of the gate is speaking directly to those people that are already coming and are loyal users of those gaming centers. So usually, those people walk in, they sit down behind a PC screen and they start gameplay. Once Super League Prime is launched in their gaming center, they'll now also be prompted to upgrade that loyalty account to a Prime account. So out of the gate, they will become Super League registered users. But then on top of it, we will have a way to upgrade them to the paid subscription, so much like a freemium model like you see so much in the gaming industry.

For $7.99 a month, that player will get 2 free gameplay hours a month at that gaming center. Typically, gaming centers charge at a minimum $5 an hour so that's $10 of value out of the gate. They will also earn SP, which is the name of our loyalty point system at a 5x acceleration so they'll earn points faster for their gameplay. And then there are additional other types of member benefits that really, we believe, when packaged together out of the gate, hopefully makes it a bit of a no-brainer to upgrade and see immediate value.

There is a local vault that occurs. So this is the local gaming center operator who puts free things into the vault for people to take. That's not our liability. This is their incentive or marketing program to get more people to keep coming back to their location versus competitive gaming centers. So you might be able to get a Mountain Dew or a piece of pizza with your points, but then Super League as well has a super vault, which is where you'll see all kinds of neat items, things that we're getting from the professional teams, from all of our brand partners that are just added things that gamers can really save loyalty points up to earn. So there'll be that extra access to the Super Vault as well, which we think will make the loyalty program have a lot of stickiness to it.

And a big objective that we have is obviously to ensure that a lot of that vault is really free marketing for brands. And so it's not us procuring those items for the most part. Those are things that actually brands are using our vault as a way to advertise and reach our players.

And I know it's probably a little premature, but when you think about the gross margin profile, putting aside customer acquisition and all that, but just cost of goods, looking at this Prime offering, have you thought about what kind of gross margin that might look like if you get it ramped up?

I mean, certainly, we've always felt that consumer subscription should have a very strong margin profile to it, right? So early on, we certainly aren't being kind of margin-obsessed, right? We really want to get traction. We want to start to understand the lifetime value of our players. We really -- this approach of starting first with this captive audience of these gaming centers does mean a pretty low to no customer acquisition cost, which is great. But certainly, we're trying to make the offer attractive.

That said, we're very conscious about the unit economics of the subscription and not -- making sure that it is profitable out of the gate, even if it's in a small way and then we know that we can figure out ways to further enhance and grow that margin. But we want to invest in it out of the gate, right? We want to really get some quick adoption and take up and really use the data launch as a way to really get smarter and smarter about how to fine-tune it. So not only is it super compelling to the gamer but equally that it does exactly what it's intended to do, which is to be a material piece of revenues for us going forward and absolutely to flow cash back to the company.

Last question for me. You guys have done a really nice job as getting originally laid out 2019, a year of just kind of trying to create scale, trying to create increased users. It looks like all of that is just kind of taking place. As you pivot towards monetization, what are the 1 or 2 things we need to really be focused on here? Is it monetizing the kind of the streaming gameplay out of Framerate? What are the things -- the lowest of low-hanging fruit in terms of the ability to actually start charging for a CPI that we can look for in the next couple of quarters?

Well, I mean, certainly, I've put some metrics out, right? I've given you some proof points of when we've been able, with live experiences, to reach $100-plus CPMs, real brand integrations we've done this year that have been digital-only, so therefore, super low cost related to them and have been able to extract that $40 to $50 CPM. Even when we go out to brands now with this new ad inventory that we have, this much greater inventory that we've just developed with all that digital reach, because it's such a premium buy, as I mentioned, we're not going out and saying, hey, take this off our hands for $1 or $2. This is still -- we're pricing these deals at $15, $20, $25 CPMs.

So some people amass a mass of digital audiences and then right out of the gate, start commoditizing their inventory. We've been much more selective and top-down. So to date, we've used about 1% of our available inventory with these very strategic brand partnerships. We're just moving down to that next tier. What are relevant brands we can bring in and monetize that inventory? But it's not just about slapping irrelevant logos at cheap CPMs. We don't need to do that. And I think we're going to have a much better brand and strategy by maintaining that premium quality lens.

If there were 2 things I'd say keep an eye on, I gave you a point of view on what the floor of our advertising inventory was worth when I said that if I just fully just sold it out at $15 a CPM today, it was about $5 million of value. You can see how much exponentially we've been growing that digital audience. So as that grows, that number grows. I didn't set for you the ceiling on that inventory. And keep in mind again, that ad inventory is in addition to those brand partner sponsorship revenue stream. The second thing is let's keep an eye on how we start to prove that we can monetize the gamer themselves.

Our next question comes from Laura Martin from Needham.

Ann, I have a brand question. On the extended B2B partnership with ggCircuit, can you remind me, what's the branding around Super League at those 600 gaming centers out there?

Yes. So yes, it's a great question. So we think the world of the guys at ggCircuit and knew that there was a pretty powerful way we could take their B2B software that has really become integral to the operations of these gaming centers and partner it with really what's -- where so much of Super League's experience and capability, which is we know how to design great experiences for gamers. We have a very strong brand that has a very kind of strong point of view on inclusive positive gaming. We have the sales and marketing expertise to bring sponsor revenues and other things like that to bear to even design what would a consumer-facing subscription offer look like.

And so there came a point in our relationship where we realized that their capability plus ours was like that perfect marrying of B2B meets B2C. And so what you'll see when you see the branding at the -- on the screen at those physical venues is we've made a decision to lean into the Super League brand because that's the stronger brand when it comes to the consumer side. So even a player who hasn't upgraded to Prime in those centers is still going to be collecting SP, which are Super Points, and they're still going to have an opportunity to go into our Super Vault to engage with Super League to participate in our programs. Prime is a way to accelerate and gain even greater access to Super League.

Super helpful for brand development. And then I have a question for your CFO. So I'm looking at this balance sheet, and it looks to me like your cash from operations are a loss of $10 million and it looks like you have $12 million on the balance sheet. Can you talk about that and how you think about your balance sheet, what your options are going forward to some losses?

Certainly, certainly. So yes, as you indicated, our current burn rate on a monthly basis is between $1.1 million and $1.3 million per month. As Ann outlined, much -- as far as today's call is concerned, we continue to make progress on many of the fronts toward growing our revenue and putting ourselves in position to improve our cash flow. We certainly expect new revenue sources to contribute to our cash flow, and that, at some point, we will be cash flow positive.

Now while we don't give guidance with respect to that, we're not providing a timetable regarding the timing of being cash flow positive, we remain confident in our ability to monetize the opportunities we have and has laid out today. That said, the management and the Board are cognizant of our current cash position and our cash burn rate. And certainly, as a young company, young public company, the option to raise capital is always on the table, especially if additional capital in our judgment, we believe, allows us to take advantage of opportunities to increase our revenues or otherwise enhance the value of our business.

At the end of the day, the Board and management are consistently assessing the adequacy of our capital and are considering several options and are currently focused on monetization and growth of the business going forward.

That's super helpful. So one last question just about a recession. Do you guys think this business is recession proof if we go into a recession over the next, pick a number, 3 years? Is this business that's recession proof, do you think?

Laura, I love that you asked that question. They always say that sales of lipstick spiked during recessions. It's affordable, right? So gaming is affordable and accessible. That's why gaming is -- has such explosive growth today. It doesn't take the same investment of traditional stick-and-ball sports. And everybody can be a Lebron today. You can download Fortnite for free on your phone and you can work hard to level up. And so I think that gaming in general and what Super League is offering is not just extremely accessible, but it's also recession proof.

Is the -- how old is the average age in these ggCircuit centers, do you think, of your average ggCircuit player?

Yes, it's a good question because we do have our youth product in Minehut, which is a kind of 10- to 16-year-old demo, and we like the fact that we're getting gamers young and that we're seen as a very family-friendly safe brand. More and most of our gaming titles, though are in that classic 16- to 30-year-old sweet spot. And inside the gaming, the ggCircuit centers, it's really a classic college student. So I'd say 18 to 24 is kind of the sweet spot there.

Our next question comes from Mike Latimore from Northland Capital.

Yes. I mean your views and registered users grew fairly dramatically sequentially in the quarter and are certainly tracking well ahead of expectations even a quarter ago. I guess can you just give a little more detail on sort of what drove that? Was it Super League specific initiatives? Was it just demand for content or any more insight to what drove the outperformance there?

Yes. So really, over the last 6 months, we've seen a pretty consistent trend. I think on the last call, I reported that we were seeing about 1,000 sign-ups a day. Most of what was really driving that originally was Minehut. We were getting just tremendous growth and have a few hundred thousand registered users on that platform alone. And again, that's a 24/7 gameplay and as I mentioned, kind of Facebook-like social platform for kids playing Minecraft.

What has been nice is that we've now started to see 2 new additional sources coming into registered users. One is running more of these digital or larger-scale physical tournaments like the Fortnite tournament, right? So -- and that, you physically had to be near one of our gaming venues, but that certainly has brought in some new users into the funnel. And then the other is starting to see some conversion from viewership. If audience is the top of the funnel, the more that we're building strong audiences on Framerate or Instagram channels and through SuperLeagueTV, starting to drive some conversion there.

So for example, with some of our programming on SuperLeagueTV, we actually use the actual program itself to generate people to join the tournaments. They have to register to do that and then that's their opportunity to potentially be featured on our YouTube or Twitch channels with their gameplay. So we're kind of using the lure of getting your chance to be featured in programming as a way to drive registration.

As far as viewership goes, it really comes down to, again, just the power of how quickly we've been able to expand those digital channels. When we bought Framerate, it was averaging about 9 million views a month. We've been able to double that. But more importantly, we now have a dedicated framerate.gg channel for Fortnite. We just launched one for Call of Duty. So we're really starting instead of just being a generic channel for all gameplay highlights, we're starting to now break it into sub-channels that really speak to specific game title.

Got it. It makes sense. Good. And then you sort of highlighted a potential revenue floor for advertising and you've dedicated some pretty experienced people to address that. I guess what are the next steps on kind of getting to maybe that floor level? And how long do you think that might take?

Yes. So if you think about it, some people said, "Well, gosh, if you have all this viewership, why weren't you monetizing it earlier?" So just as a point of reference, remember that on the last call, I reported that through July, we hit 11 million views for the full year, which was still beating our target for 2019. But now I'm reporting that through today, we have 96 million. So this is a new, really good kind of problem to have. As soon as we start to see that explosive audience growth really, we've got a great Board of Directors, a lot of experience on media and content monetization, specifically to gaming and Mark Jung, who's the former CEO and Founder of IGN and also COO of Fox Digital, that's when we started to realize, okay, we need to now start looking at this very differently.

So in bringing in those 2 sales executives to advise us, it's really about first understanding what is all the inventory we've just amassed because actually, if you look at owning like a 24/7 gaming channel like Minehut, there are tons of places where we could be bringing brands into that, that don't look like classic advertising real estate. So the first thing we've been doing is doing that audit.

The second thing we've been doing is refreshing some of our sales materials because when I'm out selling to the CEO of Logitech or the head of the gaming business about being a top-down brand partner or sponsor, that's a different audience than when you sell to media sales teams. And so we're now using or trying to exploit this inventory with a very different type of buyer. And so we've refreshed those materials to speak to that audience.

And then the other powerful thing that our advisers have helped us do is not only start defining what does the sales team need to look like to maximize the value of this inventory, but equally, they're opening up their own Rolodex of what brands they think are interested in reaching this type of gamer targets. So I can't define for you when we'll start achieving that type of a floor in just classic ad sales. But we put all the things in place this year so that we're going to start 2020 strong.

Great, great. And then just last. Last quarter, you gave the PaaS revenue for the quarter. I don't know if you want to do that every quarter, but if you have it, do you have the PaaS revenue this quarter?

Yes, from a Q3 2019 standpoint, the Platform-as-a-Service revenue was $176,000.

And keep in mind too, that really, the difference between brand sponsorship revenue and when I called it kind of brand partner custom programs, early on, we were the first users or consumers of our platform. And so for marketing reasons and brand development, we started running events and experiences, Super League-branded, and we started -- at times, we would bring sponsors along the way with us.

We then got to a point at the beginning of this year where we had so much flexibility in the platform that we could turn to somebody to like Logitech and say, "Well, what do you want it to be? Do you want to be a CS:GO tournament? Do you want to be League of Legends? Do you want it to run over 4 weeks or 4 days or 4 hours?" And so once we start to be able to create custom programs for these partners, we started to realize that we could start to have a lot more variety and bring a lot more brand partners in.

And those Platform-as-a-Service deals do have really strong margin profiles against them. The reason why? Well, in part, that brand partner is paying for a lot of the cost of revenues associated with delivering that program. But also too our platforms become more efficient turnkey. And so that's why you're seeing the trend line we like, which is revenues are improving relative to 2018, but cost of revenues are declining, that makes for better margins.

Our next question comes from Allen Klee from National Securities.

Could you expand a little or help me understand for your advertising strategy, how you can take it across all your -- or if you're thinking in these terms of all the kind of eyeball you have to the large amount, and therefore, get higher CPMs? Or to what degree it will be targeted for a specific type of viewers or activities?

Yes, our experience is that it's more -- the higher CPMs come with a richer -- more narrow targeting. When a movie studio is about to release a new kids movie, they don't really want to blast something across all our gamer properties. They want to know that they're reaching 10- to 14-year-olds. When a company like Logitech is wanting to reach gamers, they actually want PC gamers because they want somebody who needs to buy a new gaming mouse or keyboard. A mobile Fortnite gamer isn't as perfect of a target for them as maybe that League of Legends PC gamer. And so we're finding that it is our ability to provide that very specific targeting that extracts that higher CPM rate.

It's really no different than somebody does a banner ad on espn.com, right? And you don't really know if that person got up from their desk and walked over to go get some food. You don't really know. You probably had a 1 in 1,000 shot at hitting a gamer with that type of a banner ad placement. Those aren't the kinds of integrations we're doing. We're able to give brands that direct bull's eye but then also very immediate and measurable results.

Okay. And then could you give us maybe a hypothetical of what you might think about conversion rates from your viewers or people that go to these centers of what you think might be reasonable for conversion rates to subscription plans and what that could represent?

To be honest, I just think that, given that the beta launch is November 18, that, that would not be wise. I mean, we're hopeful that we have a captive audience, as I've said a few times today. We think that we've designed an offer that they're going to like. But the whole point of the beta is to, as we do this very phased rollout first in North America and then globally, that we fine-tune as we go and we improve those conversion rates. And we're bringing in real talent who know how to drive subscription programs and really know how to look at that funnel and really figure out those conversion strategies. So I just think it's too soon to tell to give a point of view on that. But we remain kind of cautiously very optimistic that we've -- we're launching this the right way.

Our next question comes from Brian Kinstlinger from Alliance Global Partners.

There was a question about the average age of someone at gg. What I'm curious about, given the obvious free 2 hours that a member would get on a paid subscription is, what are the average hours an active member spends at gg per month?

We do have -- yes, yes, we do have some data, and we know a lot about who those current users are, how many hours they're playing. And it's kind of as you would expect, it's a bit of a bell curve. You've got this power player who's engaging in anywhere from 6 to 8 hours a week. So this has become like a core part of their entertainment lifestyle. Then you've got the kind of person who's popped in for 1 single event and hasn't returned for the month. But the bulk, I would say, are averaging more in that kind of 2 to 3 hours a week. So it's 1 night of their entertainment but they're then doing other things and gaming at home.

They'll get 2 hours free per month, right, not per week?

That's right. So the kind of sweet spot if someone's playing, call it, anywhere from 8 to 10 hours a month, that typical user, and this will be a way to get 2 free hours.

Right. Now you mentioned -- you started the beta in the United States. Can you break down how many sites are in gg U.S. versus international? And I think you said November 18. Are they all going to be turned on then or will it be a gradual process of bringing site-by-site on?

Yes, absolutely gradual. There's about 200 of the 600 footprint is in North America and we are doing this rollout in waves. So we have a couple of locations today already testing the technology. And then the idea is that we take -- we have kind of what we kind of call the top 25, which are just really kind of top-tier locations but also very progressive operators. And they are going to be our first wave rollout in beta. And then the idea is after a couple of weeks of beta, we'll roll out to the remaining U.S. footprint.

Great. Last question I have is, assuming months from now, both the U.S. and the international gg beta testing goes very well, is your next move to find another partner that has a captive audience, a gamer center? Or would it be to think about going direct to consumers at their homes?

Yes, very much the latter, going direct to consumers at their homes, but also, I do believe that we're on the tipping point of being able to take this solution that we have for retail brick-and-mortar and extend the definition of what a gaming center could be in the future. So much like most people wouldn't have thought of Cinemark Theaters or Topgolf as e-sports arenas, and Super League's technology has made that possible, I believe that we will be able to continue to grow that retail footprint and less traditional types of retail environment. And that will be another way to acquire players, acquire customers and bring them into Prime and into our funnel. But absolutely, the goal is that Super League Prime is something available to people wherever they game.

Our last question comes from Mike Crawford from B. Riley FBR.

I understand that net cost value to your network that's growing exponentially. But as you look into 2020, what KPIs, maybe far away or become more important or additional to the 5 that you use now?

It's a really great question, and I can't say that together with the rest of the management and the Board, we've locked in on those. We know that the KPIs we set up this year, we believe, were the right ones and really create the right rally cry but also focus in the organization. It's interesting now that game titles kind of becomes irrelevant because once you're sitting with 20, 30 game titles, and now that we have access to all the game titles being played in these distributed venues, we have more than enough coverage. We're really getting the lion's share of competitive gamers out there with that size of a portfolio. So I don't think Super League needs to have 100 or 1,000 titles. I think the smartest thing is like any good investor, it's about portfolio management. How do we keep kind of moving the portfolio around so that we have the right mix of mobile titles, PC, console, different ages, different skill levels and kind of wherever the zeitgeist is going on gaming titles.

I mean, certainly, audience growth, top of the funnel will still be critical. I think retail venue growth is going to get really interesting because of the way we've been able to advance the technology this year. So we used to always talk about our chance to be a truly scalable retail solution, and I think the breakthrough we've had in the last few months and to be able to report that we're now -- we have 500 active venues, I couldn't have even imagined that back in January.

And so I think that's made that KPI even more interesting, partly because of what I mentioned in the call that it's because it's the flywheel effect. It's the way to grab players but we also grab gameplay hours. Now we're grabbing more titles through it. So I'm pretty excited about that. So audience, retail expansion, and then I'll just keep coming back to like users, and by that, I mean, come in, freemium and let's convert you into Prime.

At this time, this concludes our Q&A, our question-and-answer session. I would now like to turn the call back over to Ms. Hand for closing remarks.

All right. Well, we'd like to thank everybody for listening to today's call. We look forward to speaking with you at our upcoming conferences or when we report on our fourth quarter results. Please don't hesitate to reach out to us any time you have any questions, and we do really appreciate your time today. We know it's valuable. So thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.