• by Wayne Friedman , March 2, 2021

Sports-focused virtual pay TV provider fuboTV says its revenues grew 83% to $268.8 million in 2020.

At the same time, fuboTV’s yearly net loss ballooned to $570.3 million versus $34.4 million in 2019. (Fourth-quarter net loss was at $167.8 million versus $23.9 million.)

After months of little sports TV content, sports programming returned substantially in the fourth quarter, with revenues -- subscriptions fees and advertising revenue -- topping $105 million.

Subscription revenue dominates the still young service, up 91% in the last three months of 2020 to $91.4 million — and up 73% for the year to $230.7 million.

For 2021, it expects a near doubling of revenue to between $460 million and $470 million.

Fourth-quarter advertising revenue grew 157% to $13.1 million; for all of 2020 it's 133% more to $29 million.

Fourth-quarter ARPU -- average revenue per user per month (ARPU) -- grew 17% to $69.19. Its yearly advertising ARPU grew 54% to $6.81, subscription ARPU was up 14% to $56.03.

Customers' time with the virtual pay service was up 12% to 7.2 hours a day.

As with other virtual-pay TV providers, fuboTV still looks to a declining traditional cable, satellite and telco business -- cord-cutting customers -- to see benefits.

Paid subscribers grew 73% to 547,880 -- including 92,800 net subscriber additions in the fourth quarter. For 2021, it projects it will end the year with 760,000 to 770,000 subscribers.

Although smaller than many other vMVPDs -- Hulu + Live TV, YouTube TV and others -- Wall Street investors keep driving up fuboTV’s stock price, which is up over 300% since September 2020.

Differentiation for fuboTV comes with its sports-focused content efforts --  at a time when pay TV providers have made cutbacks to pricier sports programming content.

The company touts that it is the only live streaming TV platform to air every NFL in-market game and every major college sports conference network. fuboTV has a carriage agreement with Disney Media Networks, including ESPN.

Aligned with lots of sports TV content, fuboTV closed its deal to buy a sports betting/gaming company Vigtory. The company says this will quicken its plan to launch its own gambling sportsbook, called fubo Sportsbook.

As for improving digital advertising revenue, it recently joined other major media companies in backing a new identity graph -- Unified ID 2.0 -- that looks to replace third-party device-based cookies.

The Trade Desk, Nielsen and others are also participants.