This is surely true for small customers. These are likely the self-service segment customers mentioned in reports, who have lower retention as stated in the reports, and are sold through the telesales channel. Personally, I have been using these for almost 12 years and I think that selling a traditional media monitoring tool in a telesales fashion to a small business carries a big risk that the service won’t be utilized effectively, and the 60-day contract clause surely upsets many. These are services that need to be implemented carefully, preferably with expert assistance, so that searches work well (and then usually the first few months involve refining it to address shortcomings, i.e., proper expert onboarding is required). So, in my opinion, it’s not yet the best possible self-service product. The active sales work is indeed intense, which from an investor’s perspective can also be seen as a strength, as sales culture (or its absence) is a big challenge in many companies. This small customer segment challenge (especially regarding traditional media monitoring) is certainly also why Meltwater’s focus is on large companies and the Social product. In traditional media monitoring, all providers have had challenges for a long time (for example, with content behind login credentials, etc.).
I don’t know the pricing precisely, especially for large customers (they usually have customized offers depending on user numbers, etc.), but a typical package for an SME, which includes monitoring of their own industry and competitors of a certain size, monitoring of their own media and social media mentions, and a tool for sending press and influencer releases (including updated contact lists of thousands of media contacts), costs about 4000-5000 euros annually. I personally think that if this helps you stay updated every morning on what’s happening in your field and gets a few press releases turned into media articles annually, it easily pays for itself. But this assumes that the organization knows how to use the tool and also sends out releases with news potential (i.e., the tool itself doesn’t bring visibility to anyone). I also understand that communications agencies use these when monitoring their clients and sending out media releases as a service (there are also other sending tools, e.g., ePressi and STT have their own lists). Perhaps a communications agency consultant would be best to broadly assess customer satisfaction across different sized clients.
But for me, at least, this investment case relies entirely on the service offered to Premium customers and especially on the increasing penetration of the Social product family among existing customers and potential synergistic acquisitions that would boost this growth. For these, the organic and inorganic growth figures in the latest report were both developing well.