The more I look into this company the weirder it is.
The forums aren't just dead,
everything is. The sites, the Twitter accounts, etc. One of the Twitter accounts for their "major" sites has all of 17 followers. Their Warframe site has 415 followers and hasn't tweeted since 2019 and then it was only RT'ing the official Warframe Twitter account anyway.
The YouTube network they supposedly bought in May, you can't find shit about it online except from when it was owned by Twitch, which was
five years ago and anything after that is people talking about how they left and think it's shutting down. Until it skips a couple years and then MOBA buys it from another company.
They announced a new website in June:
https://www.creator1.com/With the new offer, M.O.B.A. Network will meet the growing demand for so called influencer-marketing through content creators in marketing campaigns. Influencer-marketing has grown considerably during the last few years, among other things, due to its capacity to reach audiences on important platforms such as YouTube, Twitch, and Facebook.
The new company Creator1 simplifies the administration and increases the proceeds for affiliated content creators by taking care of external companies’ requests and the organization of campaigns and promotions. By using Creator1’s services, content creators will be able to entirely focus on creating and delivering high quality content to their audiences.
In the middle of May 2021 M.O.B.A. Network acquired the American company Magic Find which, amongst other things, is a leading actor in streaming of games on YouTube. With this transformative acquisition, M.O.B.A. Network moved into the vertical streaming.
Creator1 will also work closely with the business area M.O.B.A. Services, which develops partnerships, brand integrations, and sponsorships. By taking advantage of M.O.B.A. Services sales infrastructure, the UFG-network can quickly increase access to potential customers and sponsors. M.O.B.A. Services will also broaden its offering by the ability to offer access to the most highly sought-after platforms such as YouTube, Twitch, Facebook, and Twitter.
”M.O.B.A. Network has quickly created a significant position within influencer-marketing through the content creators we have at our disposal within gaming and e-sports, two globally big and strongly growing areas”, says Björn Mannerqvist, CEO of M.O.B.A. Network. “With Creator1 and the acquisition of Magic Find we have also created new revenue streams which complement our market leading communities within gaming. We have demonstrated that M.O.B.A. Network continues to purposefully deliver on it’s effective growth strategy.”
Okay, great, right?
But I search for Creator1 and get YouTube and it's this:
Hi, i am 14 and i love Marvel, Minecraft, Fortnite and many more!
https://discord.gg/YeRMARBW Discord Server!
Twitch: creat0r1
And Check Out My Other Channels! : Creat0r2 and Create 0r Your Short
There's like literally zero web presence for anything MOBA Network owns. All of their websites are barebones. None of them have real About or Jobs or Press pages, they're just links to e-mails.
They claim in their reporting documents that mobafire.com generates 80% of their traffic and LoL sites in their group account for 95% of their traffic. The mobafire Twitter has barely over 4000 followers and pretty much no engagement.
This is from a company report from a year ago, ignore any weird language as I believe it's translated from Swedish:
Development of existing communities
To maintain the interest for and increase the number of visitors in a community, analyzes are made of visitors’ behaviors, visitor frequency, and posts. Based on these studies, the development of functionality and the use of appropriate marketing measures are defined. External marketing is mainly done through other online forums such as Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook. The Company’s communities are also followed by several ambassadors; people
who mention the Company’s websites in their channels such as blogs and Twitter feeds.
This is the "new" part of their company they're pushing:
M.O.B.A. Services
M.O.B.A. can also sell the ads inventory, without an intermediary, directly to the advertisers, which could bring in considerable higher fees per ad. We believe the fees could be 5-10 times higher with direct sales and should offer substantial profitability improvement potential as the business scale. However, direct sales require in-house resources as well as a large enough ads inventory to make it worth investing in an in-house sales team.
The Programmatic sales were heavily impacted by the Corona Crisis, while the traffic volumes to its websites have increased considerably. Therefore, the company has expanded its focus towards direct sales by adding the new Service segment with a focus on direct sales and partnerships. The company´s organization is strengthened with Peter Lindberg as “Head of Direct Sales & Partnerships” (See the section “Management team” below for further
information about Peter Lindberg and the management).
The task is to establish direct partnerships with companies that want exposure to M.O.B.A.´s growing target group. It could be through advertising, sponsorship, native partnerships, or other potential partnerships where M.O.B.A. can capitalize on its attractive user base. We believe that timing is right to increase the focus towards direct sales, which has already resulted in a substantial improvement in sales at the start of the third quarter. The Service segment will most likely develop new services in the future with i.e. rich media, different partnerships, and perhaps new products.
M.O.B.A. has stated a clear M&A strategy where it looks for additional acquisitions like the one of CriticalClick, where operations are not commercialized or optimized. In general, we believe it would be more “hobby” driven communities or websites with a focus on gaming/Esports related games. With the considerable current exposure towards the League of Legends game, we expect any acquisition to have low exposure towards that game, to
lower the dependency risk
Furthermore, the communities offer substantial amounts of user content as well as network effects. User content is both cheap, as it requires limited rescores from the company, and attractive from an SEO perspective.
The community also creates network effects as the community grows in the number of users and the amount of relevant content. The community´s attractiveness will become more significant as it increases in size, creating considerable moats if it becomes one of the leading communities within its game niche
Furthermore, we note that none of the sites/communities released after Mobafire.com has yet grown to a size that impacts the group’s overall traffic substantially.
We then compared traffic data to revenues, as illustrated below. The companies we looked at include several major services (Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter). We also added several smaller community-focused companies that are gaming, sports, and Esports-related (Enthusiast Gaming, Everysport Media Group, and HLTV.org). Enthusiast Gaming owns over 100 gaming-related sites and communities. Everysport Media Group owns several sportsrelated sites and communities. HLTV.org is an Esports-related community that Better Collective acquired earlier in 2020.
The graphs below show that M.O.B.A. is in line with other gaming-related communities, such as Enthusiast Gaming and HLTV.org. Its revenue model is similar to Enthusiast Gaming, while HLTV.org has a significant focus on leads for betting companies. However, we see a huge difference. One reason is that, for example, LinkedIn makes most of its revenues from premium functions and other services, while only around 20% is marketing-related. Facebook, on the other hand, generates close to all its revenues from marketing, which is more like M.O.B.A.´s business model. However, Facebook has much more data and information about
its users, which is very valuable from a marketing perspective.
Like, I guess I'm just wondering. How did Cerium and this company find each other AND decide to do business?