The GoFish Corporation lost $3.6 million in Q2 2008, down from $5.9 million in Q2 2007, reports the San Francisco Business Times. GoFish, which provides an advertising network targeting youth sites and virtual worlds like Magi-Nation, Weeworld, and Whyville, recently got a new CEO in former Tribal DBB head Matt Freeman and is undergoing a change in direction.
"We recently refined our strategic focus to narrow our target audience to the 6-17 year old demographic and their co-viewing parents," GoFish explained in its 10-Q for this quarter. "We seek to enter into contractual relationships with publishers that we believe appeal to a similar target audience, under which we assume responsibility for selling their inventory of available advertising opportunities, as well as syndicating video content to them. Our revenues have generally increased as a result of implementing this change and we expect our revenues to continue to grow during the remainder of fiscal year 2008."
It looks like that might be paying off. The company did report a 95% increase in revenues, leading to $1.28 million in Q2 over $657,150 in Q1.
“The significant increase in revenue for the second quarter was a direct result of the growing demand from brand advertisers for GoFish’s coveted target audience, immersive advertising products and turnkey solutions," Freeman said in a statement. "The company’s potential to continue growing rapidly is further exemplified by the increase in bookings we experienced in the second quarter. We believe that leading national brand advertisers are increasingly underserved in digital media."
While GoFish forecasts continued loss through fiscal 2008, it's betting that a change in the way kids access content will bring significant importance for content networks instead of portals. Users are shifting from large sites to small sites as the number of the latter booms. That's certainly true with virtual worlds. While several have partnered with portal sites like AddictingGames, it's usually only to share traffic instead of using the main site as a true portal. Many others are simply relying on viral growth.
"We believe that a shift in consumer behavior online, known as "Deportalization," is affecting and will continue to affect the distribution of advertising dollars on the Internet," explains the 10-Q. "The drivers of this trend are search and increased user confidence with regard to the medium. We expect that, in the next several years, the large sites will continue to lose traffic to smaller sites. We also believe that vertical advertising networks, such as the GoFish Network, will receive an increasing share of advertising dollars spent online."
Comments