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The Meet Group Stock Hits 2.5 Year High

Publicly traded dating and social umbrella The Meet Group closed at $6.17 on Friday, its highest valuation since August 2016 ($7.40).

The firm only crossed $6 per share on one other occasion in the intervening period – for a brief time in May 2017.

The new peak marks a 130% increase in value year-on-year, and a 50% increase in value since December 2018. The Meet Group’s market cap now sits at $439.21 million.

The company has just released its Q4 and FY financial results that exceeded many analysts’ high-end expectations. Q4 revenue landed at $52.5 million, with adjusted EBITDA at $10.6 million.

The Meet Group has also completed the acquisition of gay dating app Growlr and plans to introduce live streaming to the platform by the end of 2019.

When the preliminary financial results were released, CEO Geoff Cook attributed the growth to the successful integration of one-to-many video streaming.

He said: “We ended 2018 with excellent results across our business. Video revenue grew in total and across each of our apps in the fourth quarter compared to the third.

“We exited the year with an annualized video revenue run-rate of $71 million based on the month of December, capping a remarkable year for a product that we launched just 15 months ago.”

The introduction of streamer ‘Battles’ was also highlighted as a contributing factor. Popular creators on Skout and MeetMe can now compete against one another to earn video gifts, the exchange of which earns The Meet Group a small commission.

CFO Jim Bugden appeared at the Global Dating Insights London Conference in September 2018. Find highlights from the event here.

Visit The Meet Group’s website here.

Scott Harvey

Scott is the Editor of Global Dating Insights. Raised in Dorset, he holds a BA from The University of Nottingham and an MSc from Lund University School of Economics and Management. Previously he has written about politics, economics and technology for various online publications.

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