With free cash flow of $4 million in Q3, Saga’s net revenue was $28.8 million as a result of the 19.5% increase. With every passing quarter, Saga edges closer to pre-pandemic 2019 revenue levels.
Political revenue for the quarter was $256,000 in 2021 compared to $1.8 million in Q3 2020. In 2021 so far, Saga has pulled in $894,000 in political compared to $3.1 million for the same period last year. Without political, gross revenue increased 26% for the third quarter and 21.5% year-to-date.
While we don’t expect to return to 2019 revenue levels for the full year in 2021, we are pushing to get close to the 2019 monthly revenue levels as we approach the latter part of the year.
Net revenue for July and August were both approximately 10% below 2019, while September was only down approximately 3%, resulting in the third quarter being down a little less than 8% when compared to the third quarter of 2019.
Fourth quarter of 2021 is currently pacing ahead of the same period last year by a little over 8%, excluding political.
Saga took in $3.8 million in political revenue during the fourth quarter of 2020. The company is seeing some political in the fourth quarter this year, October had a little less than $700,000. Not much more is expected the rest of the year.
As a further comparison on the improvement in quarterly performance in 2021 compared to 2019, net revenue in the first quarter of 2021 was behind the same period in 2019 by 20%, while the second quarter of 2021 was behind 2019 by 13%.
