“We have never experienced such a high influx of new users at the beginning of a year as in 2021” – BookBeat CEO Niclas Sandin.
No real surprises here. Sweden-based unlimited digital books subscription service BookBeat is on target to exceed a half million subscriber in Q2, and is targeting 600,000 by end 2021.
Q1 revenue was up 45% and subscribers up 66% compared to the same period last year.
Total 2020 revenue amounted to SEK 508 million ($60 million) from the core BookBeat markets of Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Germany and Poland. BookBeat is notionally in the UK, but British publishers mostly don’t want to play. BookBeat is also notionally available across the EU, but without a localized presence that’s neither here nor there.
CEO Niclas Sandin said in a press statement at the weekend:
We have never experienced such a high influx of new users at the beginning of a year as in 2021. In recent months alone in our three Nordic markets Sweden, Finland and Denmark, the average number of paying users increased during the quarter by 34,000 compared with Q4 2020. Also outside The Nordic countries in Germany and Poland see a strong start to the year. In total, we expect to soon pass the milestone of 500,000 paying users, which is 200,000 more than BookBeat had last spring.
That’s still a long way behind Storytel, which is at 1.5 million subscribers across 25 markets, but may be ahead of Nextory, which doesn’t share numbers, only percentages.
Via Boktugg.
