Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator instructions) Our first question comes from Marianne Wolk – Susquehanna.
Marianne Wolk – Susquehanna Financial Group
Yes, I had two questions. The first one was for Wayne. Did you report any stock compensation expense this quarter? And secondly, it looked like the cash from the exercise of stock options was very significant this quarter, certainly relative to the past years. Can you talk about when you issued options and in what context?
Then finally I looked like subscriber counts in North America really picked up and were really impressive. Could you talk a little bit about what’s changed that enabled you to generate so much more interest in the current timeframe? I mean if this is countercyclical, I think I would have seen it since last September so I’m just trying to understand what changed over the last few months. Thanks very much.
Holger Bartel
Hi, Marianne. So Wayne will indeed answer the first part of your question, and then I will address the subscriber acquisition.
Wayne Lee
Yes, hi Marianne. We did not have any stock option compensation in Q1. The cash from the option exercise that you see in Q1, that was from the exercise of existing options. These are options granted back in 2001. It was about 2, 158,000 options that were exercised.
Holger Bartel
Regarding subscriber acquisition, Marianne, we are indeed very pleased with the performance. In fact, when I look at the numbers at Q1 2009 and compare them to the previous year, we spent in Q1 2009 $2.96 million in subscriber acquisition. A year ago in Q1 2008 that was $4.11 million; however, we added this year in Q1 1.19 million subscribers which compares to 1.05 million last year. There’s a number of reasons explaining this.
First and foremost, I think it’s much better execution on our side. We have internally refocused the team. We added some more talent and we feel we are doing a much better job on this. Second, media prices are going down as you can probably imagine, so that helps as well.
And third and last but not least, as I mentioned earlier, consumers are really looking for deals right now, so it’s a good opportunity for us to promote our services. But even on the organic side a lot of people are just flocking to our site and are signing up because they hear from some of their friends, family and colleagues about values that we promote in the Top 20 newsletter.
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