CuriosityStream Inc. (NASDAQ:CURI) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Dillon Heslin: Got it. Appreciate it. Thank you.

Operator: The next question comes from Jim Goss, Barrington.

Jim Goss: Hi. Thank you. As you have gone through these consumer tests, I am wondering if you could talk about the pricing philosophy you have developed that caused you to arrive at the $4.99 and $39.99. Is –was there an element of you got what you paid for, so it was perceived that you were under pricing your service that might have been part of it? And the $39.95 seems like a conservative and compelling. The $4.99 a month gets you into more direct competition with some of the other services and I wonder if you might talk about that variation and the impact and maybe the mix of monthly versus annual?

Clint Stinchcomb: I will take it at the start and then I will defer to my good friend and colleague, Peter. Jim, thanks for that question. So, yeah, as it relates to the $4.99 price, if you look out over the landscape of subscription services today, $4.99 with — without breaking up the programs with ads is still really compelling. The other value to $4.99 and $39.99 is the — we think that because that — because it’s not as steep a discount as we had in the past as it relates to the annual plan, we believe our mix will change probably by 10 points to 20 points. Peter, is that accurate as to monthly versus annual or

Peter Westley: Something along those lines. It’s definitely going to skew more monthly. I think one of the things that was really interesting for us to test and we tested a variety of different price points, you hold a monthly price point constant and try a few different annual price points then change the annual price point, always comparing against the control group that we are seeing kind of our historical pricing. And one of the things I was really interested to look at as we are going through it is, historically, the $2.99, $19.99 historical pricing that we have had is a real outlier in that the annual price was basically less than seven months worth of monthly subscription payments, if you would want to equate it to. There are many, many services out there, whether it’s consumer or enterprise, where typically — the more typical combination is that an annual price would equal about 10 months.

So we were really interested to see kind of what the right mix was, and ultimately, ended up with what effectively is our new pricing, which is about eight months — an equivalent of eight months in the annual pricing point. And that was certainly one of the things we thought was really interesting and that we were testing around to figure out where the ultimate kind of maximum optimized lift would be for revenue and value per session and lifetime value and all the other metrics we were trying to optimize for.

Jim Goss: Okay. And is it fair to think that you would need to get to a significantly higher critical mass to consider an ad-light option that’s been successful in a lot of streamers?

Clint Stinchcomb: I think that’s a great question and so here’s my response to that, Jim. First is, I think Disney’s recent price hike was constructive. They went out with a $3 price hike. And if you wanted to pay $3 more, you could continue to watch without ads. If you want to save $3, you could watch some ads. I think 6% of the people took the ad option. And so, but to your broader question, how do you use this service and how do you build a compelling advertising business. I think, we have a strategy to build our presence in front of the paywall, which will enhance our overall advertising revenue, which will enable us to promote to our direct service, but does not involve having a — at this stage, having a Curiosity light we will pay for.