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