SOOP Profit Falls 60% as Esports Traffic Fails to Replace Lost Donations

SOOP Co., Ltd., the South Korean streaming company formerly known as AfreecaTV, reported a 59.9% drop in third-quarter operating profit as viewer donations fell to their lowest level in three years, even as more people visited the platform.

According to a preliminary earnings filing with Korea’s DART disclosure system on Oct. 30, SOOP’s operating profit fell to ₩14.5 billion KRW ($10.9 million USD) for the three months to Sept. 30, from ₩36.3 billion ($27.2 million) a year earlier. Revenue fell 16.0% to ₩105.7 billion ($79.2 million), and net profit fell 64.0% to ₩10.6 billion ($7.9 million). The figures have not yet been reviewed by the company’s auditor.

The decline is concentrated in the business SOOP was built on.

Donations and subscriptions, mostly the digital “star balloons” viewers buy and send to streamers, brought in ₩64.0 billion ($47.9 million), according to the company’s third-quarter factsheet. That was down 21.6% from ₩81.6 billion a year earlier and 11.0% from the second quarter. It was the lowest quarterly figure since the third quarter of 2023, and 22% below the peak of ₩82.4 billion in the first quarter of 2025.

The audience did not shrink. Monthly unique visitors averaged 6.62 million in the quarter, up 2.0% from a year earlier, according to the same factsheet.

Co-CEO Lee Min-won told analysts on the earnings call that game and esports content and global users had driven the rise in visitors, “but because payment behavior differs by content type, the increase in game-related traffic did not sufficiently translate into donation revenue,” Dealsite reported, in TEA’s translation. Lee also said that “a full recovery in platform revenue is taking longer than expected,” according to MTN.

SOOP’s earnings presentation attributed the drop to reduced activity by major streamer crews and the departure of some streamers. Dealsite reported that the departures hit “visible radio” content, a talk-show format that drives a large share of donations. Neither the company nor the Korean outlets covering the call named any streamers.

Third-party data point to the largest single case. Poong.today, a site that tallies star balloons from streamers’ broadcast chats and that the Korea IR Council has cited as a proxy for SOOP’s donation revenue, shows that SOOP’s 1,000 highest-earning streamers received 27% fewer balloons in the third quarter than a year earlier. Nearly 30% of that drop came from one channel. Cheolgu, the platform’s top earner in the third quarter of 2025, received 144.5 million balloons in that quarter and 13.6 million this year, all of them in July, according to Poong.today’s monthly rankings.

Cheolgu, a former professional gamer whose real name is Lee Ye-jun and who runs the streaming crew C9 Studio, admitted on a July 28 broadcast that he had gambled more than ₩1 billion ($749,000) in a single week in the Philippines and had used illegal private lenders, Asia Economy reported. In August, two fellow streamers filed fraud complaints against him over about ₩6.0 billion ($4.5 million) in loans. Lee has acknowledged borrowing the money but denies fraud, My Daily reported. He returned to SOOP on Oct. 23.

Two other top-five earners from a year earlier also went quiet. Kim In-ho wound up his crew, Ino Label, in early August and posted on Aug. 25 that his partner-streamer status with SOOP was being terminated, saying he would explain later, according to his SOOP channel. Yeom Bo-sung, a former professional StarCraft player, has not broadcast on SOOP since Aug. 17 and has posted no explanation on his channel. Together with Cheolgu, the three accounted for about half of the decline in Poong.today’s figures.

SOOP did not name any of them. But the timing matches both halves of its explanation: reduced crew activity in the third quarter, and the return of major streamers it expects in the fourth. It also fits a July note from Shinhan Investment, which argued that SOOP’s weak 2026 owed more to falling high-value payments in “excel” broadcasts, crew shows ranked by viewer donations, than to competition for market share.

That competition is still real. The main rival for SOOP’s streamers is Naver’s CHZZK, which launched in December 2023 as Twitch prepared to exit the Korean market, as previously reported by The Esports Advocate. Mobile Index data cited by Money Today put CHZZK’s August mobile monthly active users at 3.71 million against SOOP’s 2.33 million, although SOOP still led on total viewing time, at 39.24 million hours to 34.16 million. On Nov. 1, CHZZK will add a “Challenger” tier that pays mid-level streamers up to ₩30 million ($22,500) a year in production support, the paper reported.

Advertising carried the quarter. Ad revenue rose 35.4% from the second quarter to ₩36.8 billion ($27.6 million), which the company’s earnings presentation credited to higher spending around major esports leagues and large-scale events. On the call, the company pointed to growing production of Valorant and FC Online content and leagues in the second half, Dailian reported. Ad revenue was still 5.5% below the year-earlier figure. SOOP plans to launch SOOPHERE, a marketing brand combining its own and its affiliates’ advertising operations, in the first quarter of 2027.

The donation slide coincided with a large spending decision.

On Sept. 4, SOOP agreed to buy a building in Pangyo, south of Seoul, for ₩131.5 billion ($98.5 million) from Hana Bank and Eden Asset Management, according to a DART filing, to serve as its headquarters and R&D center. The filing said the purchase would be funded with the company’s own cash and bank borrowing. The deal closed Sept. 30.

SOOP’s balance sheet shows the effect. Long-term loans rose to ₩92.9 billion ($69.5 million) at Sept. 30 from ₩3.0 billion at the end of 2025, while cash and cash equivalents fell to ₩77.1 billion ($57.8 million) from ₩134.0 billion, according to the factsheet. The company’s own adjusted free cash flow measure, which counts the building as capital spending, was negative ₩170.8 billion ($127.9 million) for the quarter.

The building cost about a third of SOOP’s stock market value. Shares closed at ₩35,800 ($26.81) on the Kosdaq on Oct. 30, giving the company a market capitalization of about ₩400.5 billion ($300 million), according to Korea Exchange trading data carried by Naver Finance. The day’s intraday low of ₩35,450 was the lowest price in at least a year, less than half the 52-week high of ₩77,000 set on Jan. 30. The results were released for a 4 p.m. call, after the market closed.

The dividend is now a large part of the case for owning the stock. SOOP paid ₩36.0 billion ($27.0 million) for 2025, or ₩3,380 a share, a 35% payout ratio and more than double the ₩16.0 billion it paid for 2024. At Friday’s close, last year’s dividend works out to a yield of about 9.4%.

A second filing on Oct. 30 sets out the 2026 policy. SOOP will keep paying out at least 25% of consolidated net profit and will structure the year-end dividend to meet the high-dividend-company criteria in Korea’s tax code: a payout ratio of at least 40%, or at least 25% combined with a 10% increase in the total dividend, with the total not falling below the 2024 level. The filing states that the target “does not mean an increase or maintenance of the total cash dividend or dividend per share compared to the 2025 fiscal year,” in TEA’s translation.

The arithmetic explains the caveat. The floor the filing sets is the 2024 total of ₩16.0 billion, less than half of what SOOP paid for 2025. Through nine months, SOOP has earned ₩41.8 billion; matching last year’s payout would mean distributing 86% of that. The company also told analysts it expects costs to rise in the fourth quarter as it takes on more game-league and event production, Dailian reported.

SOOP has already returned capital another way this year: it cancelled 306,375 treasury shares, about 2.7% of its stock, on Sept. 10. Lee said a fuller plan for the remaining treasury shares and future dividends will be presented at the March 2027 shareholders’ meeting, according to Dailian.

Still unknown are which other streamers left and where they went, how much of the lost donation revenue Cheolgu’s return will recover, how much of the Pangyo building SOOP will lease out rather than occupy, the size and terms of the bank loan, the size of the 2026 dividend, and whether the streamers SOOP expects back in the fourth quarter return on terms it can afford.

SOOP’s ad business shows that esports and game content can draw both audiences and sponsors. The larger question is whether a platform whose profits rest on viewers paying streamers directly can turn esports traffic into that kind of revenue before CHZZK’s next round of incentives pulls more of its paying audience away.