So this morning, the M.O.B.A. Network Q4 report was released. Warm welcome to all our viewers, and also warm welcome to the Chief Executive Officer of M.O.B.A. Network, Björn Mannerqvist, who will walk us through the report. Please go ahead, Björn.
Thank you, Linda. Welcome to the viewers for the Year-End 2023 report presentation for M.O.B.A. Network. So we at M.O.B.A. focus on a diversified, large-scale portfolio of leading gaming brands. We run the advanced gaming tools and services category, as well as the user-generated category, combined reaching a very large global audience. So we are the home of some of the world's most known and popular community brands out there. We have 30+ gaming communities and tools right now, well over 1,000 content creators, and we serve over $1 billion monetizable content views per month.
Our focus is to be in the gaming services sector, catering to gaming fans all over the world, regardless if they want to consume gaming news, participate in forums and communities, become or just watch our YouTube creators in our YouTube network, or use and become better gamers by using one of our tools, like our Porofessor app for several leading games. So we reach a large global audience. We find this demographic to be an exceptional target group. So we offer advertisers throughout the world, programmatic video ads, and in-game advertising. Our offer has grown over the years, and as I said, we now serve over $1 billion monetizable content views every month. That's a summary of M.O.B.A. So now we move in to the quarter summary, financial, and the yearly. So quarter four, the company increased sales. More importantly, we increased EBITDA and margin by 133%.
EPS in the quarter amounted to 0.8 SEK. We also note that throughout the whole year and also in Q4, we have experienced headwind in the ad market due to the uncertainty in the macroeconomic world. To give a quarter-on-quarter comparison, we increased our sales 15% from Q3 to Q4. EBITDA also a larger increase, 56% during the quarters. So the financial summary for the group in 2023: sales decreased by 6%, primarily due to the weak ad market. We were able to grow adjusted EBITDA by 20% and had a positive EPS, although that's been impacted by increased amortization and interest costs over the year. To give the numbers some operational flavor for quarter four, we saw a sales trend upwards for all of our assets in the group. It's our best quarter ever despite the distressed ad market. Our traffic to community websites increased 30% year-on-year.
We have seen an increasing number of new creators added to our YouTube network, UFG, through a partnership with Mediacube. We started in the quarter to migrate 12 of our websites into a new ad platform with a partnership with Raptive. We completed that in January this year with promising results. We also kicked off high-gear development for our new product, an app for the game Valorant. We are continuously working with the development, with an expected release date in late Q1 or early Q2 of this year. Our app, Porofessor, keeps growing and reached a milestone of 12 million downloads in the quarter. Very proud of that. Some more flavor on the operational side. Increased sales for Porofessor in the quarter, but we're still disappointed, and it's performing below overall market trends, we feel.
So our number one priority, obviously, is to work on the ad revenues on the app together with our app ad partners in the space. We do have high hopes to succeed because we have really impressive user figures. We have a new app that's coming up, and we have a strong revenue track record to look back on. We focus on adding both direct ad buyers and strengthening the programmatic ad stack with stable ad demand partners. We really need to increase sales on European and other non-North American markets. This is where the more obvious revenue drop-offs are. To do a high-level summary of the year: again, very challenging ad market due to macroeconomics, inflation, conflicts in the world. We made a transformative acquisition of a world-leading app developer, Wargraphs.
We did two new long-term partnerships that we also were able to integrate and give back value to our company in this year with Raptive and Mediacube. And we start to develop new products to enter, give value to new audiences. The Valorant project stands out. We have a very strong focus on growing our overall audience. Community site traffic and app downloads increased during the second part of 2023, so gives good momentum coming into the new year. We have a very strong focus on identifying new ad partners, as I mentioned in the previous slide. And we are, at the same time, optimizing our costs and realizing cost synergies. So looking ahead for the year that's coming, 2024, our operational focus is Porofessor and its sales performance, number one. We are continuously scaling our partnerships with Mediacube and Raptive over the coming quarters.
We are working on traffic and audience acquisition to maximize our network effects and to grow our overall network. We want to strengthen our team with high-value growth competence and still maintaining cost efficiency while investing strategically. Thank you. Next up, we have questions.
Thank you, Björn. Now let's dive into some of the most important topics. Björn, for a start, can you what are the key takeaways from the report?
For the quarter, I think I'm proud of our operational capacity that we've had in the quarter. We have been able to integrate new partnerships, start development of new products, while at the same time executing on things that we have concluded in strategic reviews, such as cost optimization and stuff like that. So all of that we were able to do in a busy quarter. So I feel good with the momentum that we have in the group operationally. Financially, all our assets took a bump upwards in sales. It's good, but the ad market has been weak. Overall, we are going to focus on doing way better financially.
Also it has been a quarter of important cooperations. It seems like the cooperation with Raptive is going well, is developing good. What has the effect of this increased cooperation what has the effect been, and what do you expect for the full year 2024?
So we have moved over to their ad network in stages. We concluded, as I said in the presentation, the last ones now in January. First of all, making ad network migrations is usually quite hard and technically challenging. All of our migrations have gone really smooth. Usually, you see a negative effect on revenues right after migration because the new network needs to adjust to new brands and optimize their ad stack. But we have seen immediate positive revenue trends immediately post-migration. And we feel like it's a very positive cooperation we have with Raptive. They are also extremely supportive and helpful with everything and really takes it saves us time, really, to have sort of consolidated the networks into one place.
I think for this year, hopefully, we can optimize our ad stack way more, which I'm positive we can, add more direct into the mix, and hopefully, we can work with Raptive on other assets we have that they are not working on right now.
Mediacube is now fully integrated with the Union For Gamers, UFG. What do you expect going forward here?
This has also been a really positive experience integrating that partnership. This involves much more not only technical aspects, but recruiting new YouTube creators and other things. We've seen a definite uptick in new creators. Great. We're also able to offer a much more interesting and high-value fintech product for the creators in our network through the partnership with Mediacube. We're just going to keep on expanding on that throughout the year. Yeah, it's also been a great partnership with quick integration and quick results back.
Okay. And now over to the app, Porofessor. The KPIs, they are looking good, but the ad sales hasn't reached the levels that you expected, it seems to me. So how come to start with?
Well, one part is the ad market, but as I said, I think we are performing a bit below the level of where the market is in other assets that we see. So this has been disappointing and a bit challenging. As I said in the presentation, we need to focus together with our ad partner here. We have together concluded a detailed plan of really working throughout this.
Can you elaborate a bit on the detailed plan?
Yeah. So there has been an issue with yield, which is basically lower demand. We need to expand the demand, which is sort of the machine behind ad network. So we're looking to add, together with our ad partner, new demand partners with high yield in broad markets because we, as I also have said many times, we have a truly global audience, and now we have global users for the app. So some good markets are not performing well. So that's the main focus area. We need to add more into the mix to get more stable revenues per user. We also know that our ad partner for the app is investing really heavily this year into direct sales, and they have pretty high expectations on mitigating a lot through those channels.
All of this is quite hard work and something that even though it's hard work, we go to work every day and work on it. So we have a track record as well. I mean, we have been able to do a company-wide agreement with Raptive, for instance, like we talked about before. That's resulted in improving results. We do know how to improve ad situations. So that's what we're going to do this year.
Okay. And the ad market, what is your forecast for 2024? It has been very challenging until now.
It's been challenging, but also challenging to estimate where it's going. 2023, in one quarter, you could have one really bad month, like really bad, and one with hundreds of % better performance. And then the next quarter it was the same. Really hard to estimate. And perhaps it's a bit similar in the beginning of this year, so hard to estimate the market. My personal feeling is positive for the year. I think we'll see more.
On what grounds are you positive?
Well, we have seen improvements on many of our assets in the beginning of this year so far. It's one indication. But I also get the sense that sort of a lot of companies will be eager to market more overall if they've had a setback on budgets and other things. Like in 2023, they probably want to get back out there and market their products. And for this year, specifically, we could point to something like the US election. In 2020, we saw those ad budgets for the U.S. election for digital media buys really increase the whole market. And from what I understand, the budgets for the 2024 election will be higher. I'm assuming most of that will be spent in the last six months of the year, but such events can also trigger the overall market metrics to go up. So I don't know.
We've been through a lot of ups and downs, but yeah, I'm keeping a positive attitude.
Good. Back to your own operations. You mentioned that you will release two more apps, new in-game apps this year. What games are we talking to begin with?
So the one that we've talked about a lot is the Valorant app, which is we're gearing up for a deployment of that, which feels exciting, really good. That game is solid if you look at player KPIs and growth and everything like that. So it's straight out of the Porofessor playbook, and we have a lot of high hopes for it. The other one, I'm going to keep that to myself.
Okay. When will you be able to talk more freely about it?
I hope maybe in the next report.
Okay. So when can we expect to see some results from these two new apps?
So I think for the Valorant app, we think it's going to be contributing from quarter two. Obviously, not on full capacity, but ramp up from there. So that's our goal for that. The other one, we'll see.
You have devised a strategic review, and you have added some actions based on this review. Can you tell us a little bit, highlight some actions that you have already implemented and what the results have been so far?
So a lot of what we have concluded in a review is things that are kind of pillars of our company group. But I think when you do reviews like this, and in challenging economic times, you kind of become more laser-focused on certain things. And I think that seems promising for this year. So a lot of it has to do with audience building. So we are working on using AI to scalably translate content that we own so we can reach audiences that are not primarily English speakers, for instance. I feel really hopeful for that. So that's a laser-focused project. The app is a laser-focused project. Adding capacity to the company to focus on audience building is kind of a laser-focused project to come out of that.
And then on the cost side, when you look at everything that's on the cost side and the synergies between our different assets, there were more than you could expect to be found there, and that will reflect on in 2024. So those are the main things.
Finally, the expectations for 2024. Can you give us a heads-up on the challenges and the opportunities that you see for the year?
I mean, the overall ad market, both maybe a challenge or a great opportunity, we shall see. Obviously, that's there. Other than that, I just feel like on the audience growth, we have come into the year much better than last year. Good momentum, and I want to keep building on that positive note. I think we can do great things based on that.
Thank you so much, Björn Mannerqvist, CEO of M.O.B.A. Network. Thank you so much for watching us.