As you know, MyPoints.com is now owned by United Online, a company with stock that’s publicly traded as “UNTD.” They hold a quarterly conference call with stock analysts and SeekingAlpha.com posts the transcripts to their website so we can all see what they were talking about. (Love it!)
Anyway, the August 7th conference call transcript is up if you’d like to take a look. In it, United Online CEO Mark Goldston says that MyPoints “continues to perform very well and expand its member base.” He goes on to say that the promised site revamp will be live “in a matter of weeks.” This is how he describes the purposes for the redesign:
“While the benefits of our new website design are plentiful, I would say the three most notable improvements would be: one, significantly enhanced user navigation and search functionality, and that will allow members to locate products and shopping merchants far more efficiently; secondly, there is a new reward center on MyPoints that will showcase more than 60 merchants available for points redemption, which represents the heart of any loyalty program; and third, there are new personalization options on MyPoints that allow individual members to customize the layout of the MyPoints website to suit their personal interests.”
As an aside, if you’d like to put a face to the name, you can see CEO Mark Goldston on the NetZero commercials currently running on TV, or on their website here.
When one of the stock analysts asked about the possibility of spinning off their Content and Media section (that’s Classmates and MyPoints) into their own publically traded subsidiary, as was mentioned as an option in last quarter’s conference call, Goldston quickly cut him off and said that they were still exploring the possibility but couldn’t say any more than that. Which to me said, hello, they’re pretty serious about doing it. And guess what? They were. 6 days later, on August 13, UNTD announced they were spinning off Classmates Media, which includes MyPoints, planning a $125 million IPO, to be traded as “CLAS”. Motley Fool had an interesting analysis of this here.
Last thing from the conference call that I think is noteworthy is that the UNTD execs say they’re planning to make a big acquisition in 2008. I would highly doubt that it would be another rewards program. I heard the suggestion recently that Ebates might be a good buy for the right company, but MyPoints isn’t UNTD’s big money-maker — that’d be Classmates.com through their paid membership upgrades, taking advantage of the social networking craze — so I can’t see them wanting ANOTHER rewards program. No idea what kind of business they’d buy next but it would have to be something that would have some synergy with Classmates and MyPoints.
Many thanks to SeekingAlpha for the always-fascinating conference call transcript.
