Okay. Welcome, everyone. Jace, are we good to go?
We are good to go, sir.
Okay. Well, welcome. Good morning. As Jace said, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, depending on what part of the world you're in. Great to be doing one of these calls again. I'll talk a lot about sort of what's been taking place over the past six months or so, and also about what we're going to be doing going forward. So happy to have you all join. And hopefully, by the time we're done here in an hour or so, then our shareholders are all going to be as pumped as we are about what's happening in the business. So Jace, I'm going to share my screen here. Let's see if that works. Are we good?
You're good.
Okay. All right, everyone. So let's talk about first what the goals are for our call today. I've communicated with shareholders all the time, and I've gotten a lot of feedback, particularly over the first half of this year, that people are upset with the lack of communication from the company and the sort of transparency about what's going on. I'm going to address that today. I'm going to talk about what the reasons are behind that, and frankly, how we're going to change that going forward, starting with what's happening right now. I also want to take some time to clarify sort of where the company's at, what our goals are for the second half of the year in terms of the different business units, what's taking place, and kind of why we're so excited, frankly, about what the second half of 2024 holds for us and beyond.
The third thing I want to do is I want to take some time to dispel what I consider to be some myths and misconceptions that exist in sort of the online chat rooms and even the messages that I get directly about everything from share compensation through share consolidations and things of that nature. I know there's a lot of confusion about that, even some upset about that. I want to tackle that head-on, and I want to explain to you sort of where we're coming from, what our thoughts are. Frankly, I'm going to share with you some of the realities of what that really looks like from a monetary point of view. In addition, I want to talk a little bit about IR and our investor outreach and what our plans are for communicating with all of you going forward.
And then finally, I've taken many of the questions that were submitted and tried to compile stuff as much as possible to answer some of the shareholder questions that came into our website link before this call, and hopefully answer those questions. And if there's any time remaining after we've done all of that, then certainly we'll try to answer any questions that come in over the course of the call. So let's get started. First and foremost, QYOU Media is doing really well. There's a perception, I think, that exists out there that share price is the only indicator of how the company is doing. And certainly, and we'll talk about this momentarily in much more detail, don't get things wrong. Share price is critically important to us, and it's a daily focus of what we're doing.
However, what I'll say in the same breath is that we just can't manage the company to the share price alone. We have to manage the business in a way that's going to ultimately provide the greatest value for the business for all of us that are shareholders overall. We also have to manage the business in a way that's looking at all the different variables that are happening in the market, in the actual areas that we're working for our business units. And so we do that every day, every week, 365 days a year. I'm going to talk about each of the business units here in a moment in terms of what's happening there and what's been happening there, and a little bit about why we haven't been talking publicly about some of this stuff.
The goal of our management team and everybody who works for this company is singular. We're all looking to create a more valuable company, a more profitable company, a more successful company. There's no sort of lack of clarity in terms of what's happening in that regard. The fact is that we've got four different business units that all require different machinations around them based upon what's happening in the individual markets that they operate in. Again, I'll speak about this momentarily. Second thing is that the status of our share price, the valuation of the business, the unhappiness that we all have in that regard is also a big part of what we talk about from both the high-level management, the board, etc., on a daily basis.
Nevertheless, we are a public company, and we're unable to share with you on a daily basis the operations, the decision-making processes, the speculation, the things that are happening inside the company that we may or may not be doing. The last thing we possibly want to do is whipsaw shareholders back and forth saying we're going to do something and not doing it. The example I'll use is the proclamations that we made for over a two-year period about uplisting in the U.S. market. We've had every intention to do that, and we still talk about that. However, because of the inefficiencies of doing that from a valuation perspective, we made a decision not to do that. That was something that went on for literally over two years that we spent money on that I wish I had back right now.
But these are the types of things that go on regularly. Now, when we started to make the move that was publicly available information that we were going to do that, then you, as shareholders, know about that. We talk about it publicly, etc. But a lot of what happens inside a public company, and it doesn't matter whether we're Google or Microsoft or QYOU Media, cannot be shared on a daily basis because it can be speculative in nature, and it can actually end up being, worst case, misleading. That's not what we ever want to do. And because we've been in a process while we've been trying to figure out how to make the company operate more successfully, which we are doing, then we don't want to constantly be going to our shareholder base and saying things that may or may not come true.
So I'll talk about this again today in a bit more detail, but I want people to understand why that's happening. So what is happening in terms of each division of the company? As people that follow us are aware, we basically break our business down into four different divisions. On a very, very high level, it's two. It's the U.S. business and the India operations. But on a more specific basis, it's our QYOU USA influencer marketing business. It's our Chtrbox India influencer marketing business. It's our channels business, which is comprised of our broadcast channel in India, along with our streaming or FAST TV channels in India. And it's our gaming business through Maxamt ech and Q GamesM ela. That's the way we operate the business. Each of these business units has its own separate P&L that we manage. We do projections for that business.
We look at that, etc. So in managing that over the course of the last really 12 to even as much as 12 months to 2 years, it's been a real challenge for a lot of different reasons. And I'll start with QYOU USA. QYOU USA is experiencing, in the first two quarters of this year—I know we haven't reported Q2, second quarter, yet, and I'm not going to give projections about that—but I'll let people know that the two strongest quarters in the history of the QYOU USA business have happened in Q1 and Q2 of 2024.
Now, what I might have also said, had we been talking more about this in Q4, was that in Q4 we were having one of the worst quarters that we'd had in that division as a result of the strike that was taking place between the writers and actors and our strong reliance on the entertainment companies as a lot of the business that we were getting. Well, we knew and believed all along that there was a recovery that would take place in our business when those strikes ended. We also believed that the diversification that we were creating, particularly among gaming companies, but also in other categories like beauty and others, that our expansion of our sales efforts into those areas while the strike was taking place was going to bear fruit in 2024. Indeed, that's exactly what's happened.
And it's resulted now in the two strongest quarters in the company's history in that group. Do we believe that's going to continue? Absolutely. But there's a real challenge behind that of continuing the kind of growth trajectory that we've had. And Glenn Ginsburg, Lexi St. John, Morgan Barclay, and the entire U.S. team that sits underneath them, we deal with that on a daily basis. We have Monday calls. And trust me, if you were on those calls, you'd be hearing us talk every Monday morning about how are we going to make this quarter? What are we going to do to ensure that we have growth over the last quarter? What's our—sorry, I've lost the word. What is our projection? Not projection, but our pipeline. Sorry. What does our pipeline look at? Sounded like Joe Biden there for a second.
What does our pipeline look like in terms of what's happening? What does that look like for Q3, for Q4, etc.? These are very, very competitive marketplaces that we work in. So we're constantly fighting against other people to continue things. What's happened is we've established extraordinary loyalty among the group of companies that we work with across the board in our U.S. influencer marketing group. What's also happened is the U.S. influencer marketing contribution to the overall revenue of the business has risen dramatically and gotten close to 50% of the revenue that we generate as a company on a quarterly basis right now. This is not a bad thing. This is something that we always hoped was going to happen in terms of what sits around the expansion of the creator economy in general.
What we're seeing in that business is that budgets just keep going up and up and up. This is happening faster than what's happening in India. And because the U.S. dollar is so strong and because we report in Canadian dollars, the net effect of having that business growing very strongly and rapidly actually shows up in the Canadian dollar perspective disproportionately even higher than it might if we were doing things otherwise. You take all of these factors and you put them together, and you see the U.S. business contributing a major part of what's happening. What we're trying to do is we're trying to continue to diversify that business. We're looking at many ways every day, every week that we can do that and create more stability, greater growth. But we're doing it inside of a situation where that business is very, very competitive.
Just last week, we received an incoming RFP for what probably is the largest-sized project that we've had in that group to date. But as we sit here this morning on this call, we don't have a guarantee that we're going to get that. We think we're going to get that campaign, but we may not. And if we don't, we can't keep going back and telling shareholders, "Oh, we didn't get this one, but we get that one," because we're moving those chess pieces around constantly and consistently. The one thing shareholders need to pay attention to is that that group that had one of its weakest quarters over the last year and a half in Q4 of 2024 has rebounded magnificently, spectacularly.
We could not be more excited about the potential of what the U.S. business is doing now, particularly in the framework of what's happening in the creator economy in general and the growth that we're seeing in that. I'm sure everyone on this call is aware of the power of advertising on platforms like TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, etc. So we're the beneficiaries of that, and we expect that to continue. Chtrbox. Chtrbox is also experiencing significant growth similar to what's happening in the US business, but not at quite as fast a pace as what's happening in the U.S. business. Obviously, Chtrbox was not affected by the strike that the U.S. business was hit by, but Chtrbox faces in the India market extraordinary competition. The India market, as a general sort of rule of thumb, is extremely competitive. We've known that since we've been there.
In Chtrbox, what we're constantly doing is we're figuring out how to squeak out an extra 1% or 2% of gross margin in what we're doing. That's in the face of competition that's willing to go to major customers and say to them, "Hey, look, we'll do this basically for free for you, HP or Amazon or Spotify or whoever the client might be, just so we can establish you as a client." Well, we refuse to do that. We're actually going the opposite direction of saying we're providing premium service to you that we can show you on campaign after campaign is successful. We can't do this for free. You should expect to pay us a margin to make our business go to provide the kind of service to you. But on a daily basis, it's a dogfight in India.
So what's happening there is that we constantly have meetings with the Chtrbox management team, Karan Pherwani , Mrinal Dediya, Darshil Shah. Excuse me, guys, if I've done a poor job of pronouncing your last names, and trying to get that management team and the people that work there to be able to squeak out every rupee that we can in terms of making margin and continuing to grow that business. But no one will ever tell you inside of our business that any of this is easy or it's a layup or it just happens. It's a dogfight every day, and we're making great progress. We're driving more revenue than we ever have in the history on a quarterly basis, and we're driving more profitability than we have. But we're constantly fighting to drive that forward.
Both of these two businesses, as you've seen in the small amount of press that we've released over the last six months or so, have been receiving numerous awards. And the awards that we're piling up from the work that's being done and the repeat clientele that's been coming in has been really extraordinary over the last year or two. Which brings us to the channels business. As many of you know that followed this company over the last three years or more, the channels business was our flagship. That was the thing that really shot us up at the beginning three years ago, four years ago. And it's always been for us what we always called historically our Trojan horse.
We were going to enter the brand establishment of our business, and we were going to get into these other areas like influencer marketing and gaming over time to leverage that channel. The problem that we've had with that over the last really two years now, but it's accelerated over the last year, is imitation and copycat channels that have been launched into the market that took our channel and are now doing things that are similar. Now, one can sit here and say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. We would prefer not to be flattered in this light. We're now competing in a pack of channels that all sit around 25–35 GRP, stands for gross rating points, which is the rating system that's used in India that would be similar to Nielsen here in North America.
What we're doing is we've been fighting literally now for over a year to not only get our channel back on top of that pack of channels that are imitating us and sitting in a similar GRP level, but figuring out how to maintain costs so that we can operate at 25 or 30 GRP in a profitable way. This has been extremely difficult. Most of the competition, in fact, all of the competition that we're against in India have multiple channels. Some of you may remember that we launched a Marathi Channel about two years ago now, but it wasn't successful coming out of the gates. Because of the capital market situation, the problems raising money, the drive to get the business to be profitable, we had to pull the plug on that.
That is not really what was the most sound business decision in a perfect world. You can never expect a channel to get cash flow positive in nine months, but it was burning a lot of cash, and we had to pull the plug on that. Nevertheless, hindsight's always 20/20. We wish we still had that channel. The way to really make the channel business in India work is by having multiple channels. And so we've been trying to figure that out. And that's something, again, that I'll talk about here more in a moment in terms of what's happening around that. So the struggle and the challenge to get the channel business in India to perform at a level that's what we expected it to be at at this point has been really challenging for us over the last couple of years and certainly over the last 12 months.
It's one of the reasons that we've had a lot of debate internally with management and board over what we're going to do with that channel. Do we want to keep pouring money into it? How are we going to make that channel as successful as possible for us as we go forward? Those debates and discussions are ongoing as we speak, and we haven't made those decisions yet. We're talking about a lot of different things there, which cuts to the next part of our channel business, the streaming business. The streaming channel business has been slow to develop in India from a monetization point of view. Historically, we were probably a little bit too early in terms of the launch of our channels there. Now, one could debate whether we're in exactly the right place at the right time.
The streaming business or the FAST channel business, as any of you who follow that know, is exploding in growth all over the world. It's poised to begin to explode in growth in India as well. The downside of that has been that it's not produced the revenue that we expected in our original projections in 2023 and 2024. Does that mean we abandoned ship? No. Does that mean we look for ways to make those more successful in terms of how we're operating and maximize the potential of what's happening with those channels? Absolutely. All of the channels business right now is in a state of flux. It's something that hasn't been as performing as well as we've wanted to over the last 18 months. Is it cause for running out the door screaming and figuring out what are we going to do? No.
But is it something that we're concerned about and that we're working on and that we spend untold numbers of hours beginning to tweak and make work better for us? Absolutely. The fact of the matter is that that channel still reaches upwards of 90 million people every week. So we've got channels that are reaching a huge audience, and we know that there are ways that we can tap into that and monetize that on a go-forward basis. Final part of our business is the gaming business. Gaming business in India continues to explode in growth across the board. This is despite a GST tax that was levied on the gaming business after we acquired Maxamtech and before we launched Q GamesMela. It's a huge problem for the gaming business in India.
Fortunately, we weren't live yet with our platform and our app before that happened, so we knew that we were facing that. But as recently as this morning, literally this morning, there's a big article that came out about that GST tax possibly being lowered and being lowered dramatically. We don't know if that's going to happen or not. We're not sure what the impact of that will be overall. It'll affect all the gaming businesses in India equally if that happens. But these are things that are taking place on a day-to-day basis that we need to manage. But the most important part of the gaming business for us is that it was our original launch into the direct-to-consumer space. And the direct-to-consumer space has always been the target where we believe that we can grow massive and high value for all shareholders in our business.
You can look at the top five or six gaming businesses in India. They're all driving well over $100 million in revenue and in some cases close to $1 billion in revenue. Many of them are highly profitable in terms of the money that's being thrown off that have been there. And the opportunity for the gaming business in India and in the world remains profound. There was an estimate that I saw this week that are talking about nearly 1 billion people will be playing games in India by the end of this decade. That's a massive audience just in India alone, not to mention what we believe is possible for us over time outside of India. So what did we do? We launched the product. We saw what was happening.
We reported much of that in terms of reaching 3 million downloads in three months. We had 100,000 daily active users. We were starting monetization in a great way, but we were also analyzing all the data. And in the analysis of all the data, we said, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute, time out. We're spending too much money per user. We're spending per download. We're not monetizing these users as highly as we think we could. We think that there are campaigns that we've set free in terms of the acquisition of users that could be infinitely more effective." And all of this was being seen by the data that was incoming by the gaming business. So we said, "Wait a minute. Let's look at our gaming platform.
Let's look at the way the games are operating, how we're getting people to come into the rooms, how we're taking people that are playing free games and moving them to become what in India they call RMG or real money gamers. And how can we do this in a way that doesn't have us be throwing good money after bad, but has us in a way that can guarantee a trajectory for that business where the profitability and the margins going forward will be massively higher than what we even originally anticipated and also will be sustainable and that we can run with? So rather than keeping and throwing money at that, and I get a question about why have you not been talking about the gaming business, because we said, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down here.
Let's bring, as I say in the notes there, let's take the rocket ship back to the launch pad for a second. Let's tweak all of this with the intention of pushing this out and spending capital against it that will be significantly more effective on a dollar spend per user, per amount of money generated. In the gaming business, you've got what's called CAC, which stands for customer acquisition cost. You've got what's called retention, which is what you've got to spend to retain the people that download your app. And you've got gratification, which are things that are run to be able to get people to want to be happy and satisfied with your platform, and stickiness is what that drives. These are the three metrics that are all measured against average revenue per user or ARPU.
Any of you who are in that sort of business, who operate businesses that are affected by those sorts of metrics, understand exactly what I'm talking about. Our gaming business has the potential to outstrip everything else that exists in this company by a large measure over time. It also requires a significant amount of capital to get there. When you start with zero users, you have to spend money to get up to a point where you're at break even and then profitable beyond that. What we're doing in the gaming business right now is we've sort of looking at all the data that's coming in. We're servicing all the people that have downloaded and are gaming constantly. We're looking at beginning to do a much bigger spend and drive things forward probably around September of this year.
So you'll be seeing more news of what's happening around that business. But this is all set up by the fact that we've taken the data that we've received, we're being smart about it, and we're going to deliver much more value for our shareholders in this business than what we even originally anticipated. That we feel super confident about. So when you look at our business in terms of the overall aspects of what's happening, I wake up every morning, I look at the share price, and I say, "What the hell is happening here? How could we be having businesses that have the potential of everything that we've got and have a share price in a company that's so undervalued?" I'll talk about that more here in a second.
I've always been a fan of the expression, "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result." Well, we're trying not to be insane here. Look, it's been frustrating as hell. None of us who work at QYOU Media can tell you from the board, through the management, through the workers about how frustrating it's been over the last couple of years to be doing what we're doing and not receiving the sort of gratification from the shareholder price and the market cap and everything else that we previously had. Nevertheless, we also do not want to be stupid and be too close to what we're doing to not be looking at every avenue possible.
If we're not receiving the excitement for what we're doing as a company, if we're not receiving the value that people are giving us for our different business units, how can we change that? So we've been spending a lot of the first half, some of the last half of 2023, all of the first half of 2024 looking at that. We've stripped things back. Raj Mishra, who came on board in November, he started as a board member for us. He has a very, very successful career. He was the chief strategy officer for ByteDance, which runs TikTok in India after he'd been country manager of Musical.ly and TikTok there.
Raj started as a board member, and he came on board on an operating basis in November of 2023 with the point of view that we had incredible potential for all the different business units, but there was a way to build a better mousetrap. Since Raj came on board, what we've been doing is we've been looking at every way possible to build a better mousetrap. Some of that takes time. Now, everything that we're trying to do has taken longer than we expected. I'll be the first one to admit that. Frankly, part of the quietness that you've heard from us is that we expected some of the things that we expect to be announcing in Q3 and Q4 of this year to have been announced in Q2. As I mentioned at the very beginning, we can't talk about speculation.
We can't talk about these things publicly in detail. But rest assured, as shareholders, we are absolutely working on what I will call transformative things that are going to happen that will boost the value of our overall business and boost the operational efficiencies and synergies of everything we're doing as a company. This is what we spend all of our time on that's not spent building the actual businesses themselves. So if you look at our business and you say, "Well, we've got to build the individual building blocks of that business, make them more successful in terms of revenue generation and profitability," know that that happens every day without fail. But we're also looking at it and saying, "We're not getting the juice hasn't been worth the squeeze in terms of what we're doing from a corporate shareholder and market cap value point of view. Why is that?
Why is the market not responding to this?" So we're looking at changes that we can make around that that can begin to deliver on what we all believe should be delivered around that. We've also taken the approach that nothing is sacred or off the table. So we look at every one of these business units. We evaluate them on an individual basis. And we've been discussing for months, both internally and with third parties externally, about what we might be able to do to create more shareholder value. So you can assume that all these things are taking place every day. You can also assume that we can't speak about them publicly because we can't speak about rumor and speculation of things that might be happening around these businesses.
The other thing that I'll say about this is, I don't know if any of you are fishermen, but when you go out fishing, you don't put one line in the water unless you're out actually in a boat in a lake, maybe. But if you're sports fishing, you don't put one line in the water and hope that something good will happen. You put eight lines or 10 lines out in the water, and you troll, and you hope that you're going to get a strike on one of those lines. We're not shotgunning around what we're doing. All of these are tactical conversations that are happening around each of the individual business units because each of them have separate objectives and value creation and capabilities. But we also sometimes roll them in the whole QYOU Media business.
All of these things are happening in the strategic discussions and in the changes that we believe we can make in the structure of the companies going forward to provide what we all want: more value for shareholders and a greater opportunity for success financially and otherwise going forward. In doing that, we're looking at everything. Nothing is off the table. We've got multiple discussions that are taking place in real time around all of this. I'm not going to disclose any of it in specifics today. But again, you can know that these things are happening. At the same time, we're also trying to operate under a strategy that's called KISS. Some of you may be familiar with that expression. I like the version of it that's called Keep It Simple, Stupid.
We're also trying to operate and do things around the business to make it more efficient in terms of its operating capabilities. We don't believe that the synergies that exist between the different operating units have been maximized to date. So we spend a lot of time trying to work on ways that we can make things happen that will make the sum of the parts greater than each one of them is the whole greater than the sum of the parts and make the overall QYOU Media business more valuable, more successful, more profitable than it is on the basis of the individual business units. In doing that, you can get a lot of complexity, and you can find yourself wrapped up like a pretzel.
We're trying to actually do the opposite and simplify things and try to get things that not only we can report to shareholders in a more simplified and investors in a more simplified basis, but also begin to simplify the way the businesses operate and work together. We're making a lot of progress on that front. Finally, we've made mistakes. Hindsight, as we all know, is 2020. Trust me, the biggest mistake we made to begin with is if we'd known three plus years ago that the market in the microcap space was going to tumble the way it has, we would have raised more capital then. We were a growth business. We were part of businesses that were pouring capital into continuing to have that revenue go up and up and up and up. We've had to make a lot of changes around that.
We've had to do things to throttle certain aspects of our revenue growth to try to contain costs and try to reduce our reliance on raising more money. All these things are happening in real time. But what I can tell you is that, as I've said over and over again so far on this call, we are doing things as a company to create higher shareholder value. That's what we're doing. That's what we're in the process of. And you will be hearing in the coming months and quarters things that will reflect everything that I'm talking about right now. This is one that I sometimes actually unhappily chuckle about when I get notes from some of you online, including the guy who said that he hoped that I was hit by a bus. Hope he was just kidding. We're among the biggest shareholders in the company.
I'm one of the largest shareholders in the company. Scott Paterson is one of the largest shareholders in the company. Our top-level management and board members are among the largest shareholders in the company. We watch the share price just like everybody on this call does. None of us are happy about our share price. We also feel we are massively undervalued. But the thing that I want to repeat, the thing that I want everybody to know is lack of news that's come out over the last six months doesn't mean nothing is going on. It means that there are things that are actually quite important and large that are taking place that we're not yet able to divulge to shareholders. So what we're doing in the meantime is we're continuing to drive the day-to-day business, and we're making things grow the way we want it to.
But I want everyone on this call to be keenly aware that we're not happy with where we're at in terms of our valuation. This slide kind of says it all. Any of you that are sort of in the Canadian market would be different for people that are listening from India where the market's been very hot. And I'll talk about that in a second as well. A little over three years ago, on May 31st, 2021, we reported revenue of CAD 296,945, and our net loss was just over CAD 2.5 million. At that time, our share price was CAD 0.37, and our market cap was about CAD 100 million. Okay? May 30th of this year, we reported CAD 8,227,089 of revenue, up 2,670%, and our Adjusted EBITDA loss was CAD 492,000. Our share price was CAD 0.05. It's gone down since then, CAD 0.04.
These are Canadian numbers, by the way. Our market cap is now roughly CAD 25 million. Now, how in the hell could our market cap drop when over the last three years we've gone from CAD 300,000 in revenue to over CAD 8 million in revenue, and we've taken our loss from CAD 2.5 million down to CAD 500,000? Doesn't make any friggin' sense. Well, trust me, any of you who watch the markets, who especially are in the Canadian market, know that the micro and small cap market has been brutal over that time period. And I'll share a slide with you in a minute that'll show you some of the companies and what's happened with them that are at least tangentially aligned to the same space we're in. Now, some of you could say, "Okay, great. I want to get the hell out of here right now."
That's exactly what this isn't going to recover. We would argue exactly the opposite. This is a buying opportunity. This is a time where what's happening in our business is clearly undervalued. And I'll be the first person, and I've said it to many of you who are probably on this call directly when we've had direct personal calls, that back on May 31st, 2021, that market was white hot, stupidly so, and we were overvalued. A company that does $300,000 in revenue with $2.5 million in losses shouldn't be valued at $100 million.
But by the same token, a company that's doing $8 million and $500,000 that's in a growth market of the creator economy in India like we are, with the human capital talent that we have, with the customers that we have, with the growth that we've had, etc., should not have dropped in value during that period or be valued at $25 million, which is not even one time's revenue. So the fact of the matter is that we believe that we're massively undervalued as a company. Now, sometimes people will talk to me about, "Well, why isn't management buying shares, etc.?" Scott Paterson's participated in every finance that we've done. I'll share with you in a minute my own woes about my own stock market situation and what's happened for me personally and other board members.
But the fact of the matter is that everybody that's on the board of this company, everybody that's been involved in this company, I had a conversation with one of our largest Canadian shareholders the other day where he was saying, "I'm still seeing this as a buying opportunity." I said, "I couldn't agree with you more." So the fact of the matter is that we look at our business. We look at what we've set up. We look at the growth that's taking place. This is not a phantom smoke and mirrors business that we're building. This is a real business. It's evidenced by the growth that's happening financially. And we remain as bullish as we've ever remained on the potential for shareholders at these levels. And we expect them to go up massively going forward.
Do we think that May of 2021 is going to happen again when people had valuations of those sorts? We may never see that again in our lifetime. But the fact of the matter is that we know that the market right now is at a very, very low time period, and we remain very, very confident in the rise of our stock price. Let's look at a couple of the companies that have been in the space over the same time period. My video is going over, so I'm going to scroll up here a little bit so I can see it. Some of these companies you wouldn't be familiar with. And by the way, I'm not being critical of these companies in the least. I know some of the management of these companies.
I know that they've been doing everything humanly possible on their side to try to make their businesses work, but they've been swimming upstream just like we have. Cineverse, which used to be called Cinedigm, these aren't analog companies directly, by the way, with what we do. But sometimes when I talk to shareholders, more so in the U.S. market than in the Canadian market, these are the companies that they invest in and look at that they consider to be next-generation media companies, which is kind of the bucket that we fall into in the public markets. Cineverse, which used to be Cinedigm, was trading at $52 in September of 2021. It's now trading at $0.85 and has a market cap of $12.5 million. You can go in and look at their symbol and check them out. You'll see what's happening with that company.
It's shocking that they're trading at this value, and it certainly is unjustified from a financial point of view. Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment in the streaming business, in the media business, they were trading at $39 in 2021. They're now at $0.10, and they just filed Chapter 11 with a $3.4 million market cap. I'm not going to go through all of these companies right now. You can look at them and see where they're at. And some of these, by the way, have probably, I didn't want to spend as much time on this, but some of these are probably not split adjusted. So some of these companies, all these companies that are NASDAQ-listed, very possibly fell below the dollar minimum bid figure on NASDAQ. And so I think in the case of Versus Systems VS, I'm certain that they did a split.
So on a split-adjusted basis, it's even worse than what's being shown here. The point of this is, and Paramount, we all, of course, know about what's happened with Paramount over the last couple of days, and even a company like Snapchat. Snapchat, which was trading at $78 in July of 2021, is now at $16. That's a $27 billion market cap that they still have, but they had a market cap that was well into the hundreds of billions at that time. The point is, the market has been very, very tough, particularly on the small and microcap companies in the new media space. We all know these things are cyclical. We all know that.
That's why all of us in management, our board, has stuck with QYOU Media because we know there's going to be a turnaround here, and it's going to happen sooner than later from our point of view. One of the other questions—I got a lot of questions that got submitted about and that people talk about—is board and management equity comp. The fact of the matter is that our board—we have an incredible board, and we have a board of distinguished individuals who, frankly, I say namaste every day that they're still sticking with us. The reason they're sticking with us is because they believe in me, which I appreciate and am extremely grateful for, and they believe in our business and what's possible with our business. They're not here because of the money they've been making. It's exactly the opposite. Exactly the opposite. They've been making nothing.
What they've done is they've stuck with this because they believe that the shares that they're compensated with are going to have significant value if they stay in, they hang in, and we go forward. Not one of us has sold a single share since this company went public on March 31st, 2017. Not one share. And so the board, which has been compensated with zero cash, zero, which we think is in the best interest of the business. And by the way, many of those small-cap companies that I was just showing you and many of the other companies that are in our space are compensating their board. In one of the cases of one of those companies, I'll leave them nameless, we know that they were compensating their board $100,000 per year. I shouldn't even say that to my board. They will leave.
Fact of the matter is that the compensation that we're giving to the management and the board around this is not something that people are selling stock, etc., and that they've been making money of. It's quite the opposite. I want to show you this in black and white. Okay? It's a little hard for me right here because my screen, I'm sorry, is blocking. Maybe I can move this. There we go. Sorry, I'm going to move it. Is blocking this. On January 23rd, we made a grant to our board, which is the last time we made any grant to our board, of RSUs and options for services provided through 2022, okay, and going into 2023, through 2023. We've not done any grant since then. I'll look at the case of Steve Beeks, one of our most distinguished board members.
He received 125,000 RSUs, which vest over three years. Okay? Keep that in mind. We didn't just get those. They vest in tranches of a split and a third over three years and 250,000 options that were granted at a strike price at that time of $12.5, which those vest over four years. Okay? Those options, obviously, right now have zero value because we're trading at $0.25. The RSUs that have vested have a value currently of $1,875. So over the 18 months since that grant, Steve Beeks, very distinguished individual and a shining star in our board, has received roughly $100 a month for his service, for all the meetings that we've had, for all the discussions, all the board calls, everything else. Okay? Why would Steve still be here? Steve is here because he believes in our business and what we're doing.
The same can be true for everybody who's here. I'm the grand prize winner in this grant that happened, which is the last grant I received on January 9th, 2023, where my RSUs are currently worth that have vested are currently worth CAD 15,000. Okay? That's, by the way, CAD 15,000. So that's about 12, it's not even $12,000, about $11,000. That's the bonus I've received through my service since January 9th, 2023. I can assure you that no one here is getting rich right now. The notion, and the reason I want to just take this head-on and speak about it is because I know there's a lot of chatter online, and there's a lot of people who've emailed me directly about why are we sort of spoon-feeding ourselves with this, that, or the other thing.
This is no one's making any money here right now. And he's also vested over time, which means this grant that happened for the options doesn't even vest fully for four years. And we still need to virtually quadruple our share price at a minimum, at a minimum, before anybody would even think about exercising one of their options. On the other side of this chart that you see, in 2024 and 2023, these are options that have expired. People don't realize that my $0.50 options that I was granted when we went public in March of 2017 have all expired. Obviously, I'm not going to exercise options that are priced at $0.50. The time those were granted, I expected those were going to be worth $5. I still do expect all these things to be worth $5.
That's why I'm doing what I'm doing 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. But in the meantime, 1.3 million of the options and equity that I was granted by this company have expired. They're gone. They've disappeared. They're gone forevermore. And so that's real money that's lost by management across the board and by board members across the board because of the fact that the company hasn't performed. And I realize that everybody on this call has put real money and their real dollars and real hard-earned capital into this. But we also expected from a compensation point of view this to be part of what we receive. Why are we still doing it? That would be the question that any smart individual would ask. It's because we all believe in where this is going to go.
A lot of you know a story about a company that I founded called CinemaNow that we gave up in the streaming business in 2007 and got rid of it for $6 million. It sold two years later for $300 million. Okay? Trust me, all of us that were investors in that business wish we would have held on to that company for two more years to see what was happening in the streaming business. The point of this is that people are in for the long haul. That's why we're all doing this. That's what we expect to happen. We continue to believe that the dismal valuation that we have today will be dramatically changed. Not go up 2x, not go up 3x, but have a dramatic change as we go forward.
And that fuse will be lit and started by the announcements that you'll be seeing that will be coming from us in Q3 and Q4 in 2024 and the results of what's happening around those announcements in 2025 and beyond. Excuse me. Share consolidation. Why did we put this into the AGM? This has been on our AGM for the last two years. Why did we boost it up to 50? We did that, frankly, because our share price was so low, we knew that we might have to do that. There are two reasons for share consolidation. The first reason is that we cannot attract institutional investors at this point. Any institutional investor needs our stock to be really $1, and at least in a perfect world, $2, but $1 would be the minimum acceptable level to even consider making an investment into our company.
This has been a goal for us for a long time. This is why other companies have made the effort to do share consolidations. The other reason is that when we were looking at going onto the U.S. markets, we needed to do a share consolidation to meet NASDAQ minimums. We never made that move to go to NASDAQ to date, and so we never did the consolidation. We've never seen an effort for a company that was consolidating just to do it to get their share price to increase. So we haven't done it. But the reason we included it in the AGM is because also there could be an acquisition opportunity that might come in front of the company where a consolidation was in the best interest of all shareholders. That also hasn't happened.
But we did this as a placeholder so that we were in a position to be able to do it. We got a lot of blowback from shareholders over this. People were terrified that we were just going to do a share consolidation and see the resultant drop in the overall value of the business. It's the reason we haven't done it. As I've said over and over again on this call, we're all shareholders too. Why would we do something that would drive our share price down and the value of our business? That would be nonsensical. And so we're not going to do this. And as many of you saw from the announcement, we've withdrawn the vote around this from the AGM. I hope that's not something we regret in the next 12 months until our next AGM.
If we have an event that occurs that we believe in the best interest of all shareholders, including ourselves, will increase the value of our business, then we will go back to all of you and we will ask you to make a vote specifically around the share consolidation at that time with the specifics that are aligned with the reason for doing that. So I hope that clarifies that issue. Another issue that we've had people disgruntled about is just overall communication. I do appreciate that, and I apologize for that, and I feel that we have been lax in doing that.
The real driver, frankly, behind that has been that because of all of the machinations that have been taking place, I've been reluctant to come on and say one thing on April 1st and then come back to you on May 1st and say, "Only kidding, this is what we're actually doing." So we've been a little bit reluctant to have those communications, but we're going to change that going forward, starting with the call that we're on right now. As I said at the very beginning, the goal of this call over anything else is to create trust and transparency with all of you. So we're going to create what we're going to call Q1 Thursdays. What does that mean? That means on the first Thursday of every month, we're going to do a video. It's Jace will do with me. We'll feature Raj Mishra, other people in management.
We'll do a video which will give you updates around what's happening in the business, announcements that may have been made between now and then, other things that are happening that we can talk about publicly, etc. On our YouTube channel that this is going to be set live on as well at 8:00 A.M. Pacific Time on the first Thursday of every month, you'll see a video that we've made to address a lot of these things, very similar to what I used to do with Jason Cole back two or three years ago. So we're going to start doing that. In addition to that, we're also going to try to be more public in terms of following up on announcements that are made that are of, I guess I'll call it, substantial magnitude.
That wouldn't include, for example, where we're announcing a bunch of awards that we've won. I'm not planning on doing a special shareholder call around that, but where things that happen that are strategically very impactful for the business, we'll start doing more calls like that and increase the frequency of our shareholder outreach. In terms of future IR plans, you may or may not be aware, we've tried a lot of different IR over the last three years. We've seen our share price get an occasional response through that, but they've mostly ultimately fallen back. It's been really, really frustrating. We absolutely positively will continue with IR outreach going forward. Some of that will probably be reboosted when some of the things that I'm alluding to right now that we're announcing in the coming months and quarters, we'll get behind those and do a stronger push to do that.
It's been extremely challenging for us to be able to get the kind of shareholder response, partially because of the overall pressures that I was sharing with you with ourselves and other companies in the small and microcap space that we simply can't control, and part of it being a bit of a, "What have you done for me lately?" attitude, I think, among our shareholders. I believe as we change the financial fortunes of our business going forward, and as we make some of these strategic announcements about what we're doing around the business going forward, I think that's going to provide a platform for us to push out in the IR space again with assistance from third parties that we work with to be able to push that going forward.
So I think you'll see more of that, but that's the reason we've been a little bit quiet on that going forward. I know it's 52 minutes into the call, so I'm going to go as quickly as I can through the shareholder questions because believe it or not, I've got a hard stop at 9:00 P.M. to do some things to boost our business. How many employees do we currently have? This breaks it down by each group. We have 42 in the channels business in India, 82 in Chtrbox. One of the reasons that number is so high is because we have a lot of highly intensive labor-intensive work that's done on types of campaigns that are done by Chtrbox. On our gaming business, we have 47 employees, so there's a total of 171 people working for us in India currently. And the U.S.
business has 32 employees and 3 in Canada. So there's 35 in North America. Total of 206. Trust me, it takes a village. Whether it's Raj Mishra and Krishna Menon at the management levels in India, whether it's people like Glenn and Lexi and Morgan in the U.S. business, whether it's people like Xerxes and Mahtab Mulla n and Sundeep Thusu in the gaming business, whether it's Mrinal Dediya, Karan Pirani and Darshal Shah for Chtrbox, whether it's Anita Thakri and Shriti, sorry, Shriti Chakraborty, I think that's the pronunciation in the channels business. There's people working night and day, weekends, holidays, you name it, to make this happen for the overall company. But while myself and from time to time, Jace and Raj and others are the faces of this thing, there's a large group of people that are dedicated to make this all happen.
So please know that people aren't sitting with their feet up right now. I can assure you of that. As I mentioned earlier, our channels and game businesses reach over 100 million people weekly, and our influencer campaigns regularly reach hundreds of millions of people per month, and in some cases, can reach several billions of people per month when you have something that's gone viral. I mean, we have clips that sometimes can reach into 300, 400, 500 million views, sometimes even more, that happen off a single video clip for the campaigns that we're running. So we have a large audience of people that we reach with our content, and we expect that to continue. The plan to make up for the loss this year to lose your share prices, I think I've spoken about that extensively on this call, so I'll move on.
Shouldn't investors be more convinced and sought out to invest? Look, as I mentioned, I speak with you guys, some of you, all the time, others of you on a regular basis. I'm always available. I'm Curt@QYOU.com. If people email me directly, they know that I answer your emails. As I said over and over, I can't do things that would fall under the category of selective disclosure, so I have to be very careful about what I say. It's not trying to hide things. It's that it's just a public company, and we have to be extremely conscious of that concept. But we're constantly looking for new investors. We're constantly speaking to those that are investors in the company now.
And trust me, this issue of finding more people to get excited about what we're doing, it's one of the primary reasons that we were looking at listing into the U.S. market. We're still trying to get more attention in the U.S. market, but these are things that, again, it's not an excuse, but it is a reality that the small and microcap space has been one that's been challenged to do this. Maxamtech, the data, new employees, I think I spoke about this earlier about what's happening with the games business. I'm telling you, when I say there's nothing's off the table, there are scenarios and financial models that we have now on a go-forward basis that could say, "Let's get rid of everything and just be a gaming company." The opportunity in the gaming space is virtually unlimited.
The most important thing to get across to all of you, this is not a whiteboard exercise for us. This is not us all sitting in a room drawing on a whiteboard saying, "Oh, look, what if we started a gaming business?" We launched, we saw, it's out there, it's live. We have all the games. We have proprietary IP for the gaming business that we haven't even revealed to the world yet or launched yet around this. This is a massive, massive opportunity, not just in India, but globally, and there's a lot that's taking place here. And again, you'll be hearing news about this as we move forward. No news in 2024. I think I tackled that question for the most part. Going public in India, anything's possible. We've talked about this for a long time alongside our discussions about going public in the U.S.
For those of you who don't know, the India market has almost been like the U.S. market was back in 2021. It's been white hot and continues to be hot. Why is that? India is one of the fastest growing countries, if not the fastest growing company from an economic point of view going forward. The opportunities there are endless. This is a large part of why Raj Mishra came on board with great enthusiasm and continues to know, like I do, that we're going to make some big things happen there. What I will say, as I say in this note, great minds think alike. And so we're exploring every possibility for the company going forward to seek more value for all shareholders. If this is something that we think can achieve that, then we're certainly going to take a serious look at it.
That's something that you can assume that we're taking a good strong look at currently. Remuneration of the board of directors, I think I've already addressed that. This is from one of our German investors about the negative mood online. Look, unfortunately, I've come to learn that, as I say here, stocks are stock prices are like sports teams. Now, they fire the coach when sports teams don't deliver. Certainly, the board hasn't chosen yet to fire me. I don't know if anybody would want my job, but we're not giving up. If we've done anything as a company since inception is that we don't give up. We don't lose our drive. We don't lose our enthusiasm. We don't lose our passion.
We don't lose our faith in being able to take the equity as management and employees and board members that we have and creating real, significant, dramatic value from that. That is, at the end of the day, driving a large part of what we do. So as shareholders, I hope you realize that. I hope you recognize it. I thank you for your time today. If you know anything else about this business, know that there's a lot of exciting things that are on the horizon. No question, we are an undervalued business right now. We're all going to see that as we move forward. Thanks so much for joining, and I look forward to seeing you all on the next call. Okay, bye all.
That's going to conclude it for today's live stream. We'll see you online in the Discord, the Telegram channels, or leave comments on our YouTube live stream after the fact. Thank you so much for joining today, and we'll catch you here on August 1st, first Thursday. We'll see you then. Bye guys.