Roger Hamilton: Yes, it’s a very good point, because we’re actually seeing at the moment just how challenging it can be for any, kind of, company with a network effect to survive on marketing alone, right? Or actually to be dependent on the ads that are being run. And I think that a lot of the companies in the industry that are relying on digital advertising or paid ads are seeing the challenges that are happening not only in terms of the actual cost of acquisition of a customer becoming much higher, as customers have more and more choice, but also obviously the platforms themselves coming under scrutiny in terms of how they’re tracking data and how they’re managing privacy as well. So we’ve seen many companies that are education companies that before relied very much on Facebook ads, Google ads, YouTube ads, that simply can’t do that anymore.
They come to our model and they see that because we have such a high amount of number one word-of-mouth. And number two, pathways in which people are able to come and join us without that traditional ad spend, so two big areas. One is when we bring the new partner on board they’re already coming with the trusted community. That entire trusted community comes and joins our platform. And we don’t have to pay anything for them. In fact, we get paid because now we have a partner on board as well. So that is a really powerful way for us to actually bring trusted communities into our platform without having to rely on advertising at all. And the second thing that happens, which is a very big part of our personalization, is the assessments we do. If I see an ad for a course is very unlikely, I’m going to go and share that with my friends, my family, my staff, unless it happens to be a very compelling course.
But when I go and I do an assessment, which is a passion test, which teaches me about my passions, or I do a genius test, which teaches me about my talents, then it’s a very natural thing for me to go share that together with my staff or with even with my family, and we’re seeing that happen a lot, which means that we’re getting the halo effect of one person choosing to do this and then through sharing with others. So it is more powerful than word-of-mouth, because it’s an incentivized reward in that there’s a network effect, the more people that actually take the assessment you just talk, the more value will become for you as well. Those two main areas we see continuing to drive forward and I think a really important part of our metrics going forward is being able to track just how much we are getting an increase virally, because this is where the viral growth really comes in from those things which are not actually paid advertising.
It doesn’t mean we’re not going to do pay advertising, we’re seeing the biggest success still in the companies that actually are investing properly within their marketing, so we want to do that wisely. But it is really important to distinguish the unique benefits we have, which is how we can bring the cost of acquisition of every student down as low as we do at the moment.
Hunter Diamond: No, that makes perfect sense, in terms of growth for the company. That’s all I have in terms of questions. Again congratulations to the whole team on those strong results.
Roger Hamilton: Thanks very much for that, Hunter. And if I could just add one extra thing in before we come to any other questions, it’s the rationale of even the purchase, the most recent purchase of Revealed Films. Revealed Films is a perfect example of an education company that is reaching 100s of 1,000s in fact, they’ve got like well over a million on their database of students that are wanting to learn through documentaries, through high quality production, more than simply basically just like learning from a teacher or a lecturer in front of a hall. And the power of that is that again the shareability and also the cost of acquisition that they have for every student they’ve been working on for many years and they’re really perfected.
They’ve done a really good job of that. So there’s a whole series of learning where obviously the two things I just mentioned, which was assessments or partners coming on board with their students, when you bring on documentaries with the star power that documentaries have and all those students come on board as well, that gives us another pathway of actually attracting students in that are coming for the right reason in exactly the same way that many of the YouTubers that we see out there. The influencers have got much, much bigger audiences that they’re teaching to than even the best lecturer at university. But they obviously are part of a curriculum program, the way that we can develop a curriculum program. So there is a real, like power in the fact that by bringing onboard documentary company and then being able to actually link that as a front end that then leads into people then being able to then join the community and then go on to their additional learning at whatever level it happens to be, can actually be building through the documentary series as well.
So I just want to share that as an additional way that we’re thinking about where students actually are going, so that we’re not having to chase students, but more they’re the ones that are doing up to join us. I’ll leave — I’ll turn it back to the operator for any other questions.
Operator: Thank you. Our next question is coming from Brad Sorensen from Zacks. Your line is now live.
Brad Sorensen: Yes, thank you. Thanks for taking the questions, and great results and congratulations. And actually, it’s just on what you were just talking about, it’s like you could just give some thoughts on what’s your thinking about acquisitions going forward, that’s obviously been a big part of your strategy in the past year? Are you — is there a hole that you’re looking to fill? Or are aggressively looking at more acquisitions? Or are you more concentrated on integrating the existing acquisitions at this point?