Jun Bei Liu, founder and portfolio manager at TenCap, was asked on The Switzer Show whether her children were being tagged by the app.
“Absolutely. Even my pets, my dog and my car,” she said.
Then she described the shift that she thinks the market has not caught up with.
“If I look at my kids, how they use Life360, it’s just not just me tracking them. It is them tracking all their friends,” she said. “I look at it thinking that’s very strange, but they like to see where their friends are.”
“So tracking has now grown into this huge industry where it’s almost about connectedness rather than, you know, looking at where everyone is, spying on everyone, as people like myself would think that way.”
Life360 has been explicit that its original customer is no longer the centre of the business. In its June quarter shareholder letter, writing about US families raising driving-age children, the company said: “Today, that group represents only about a third of the members who engage with us every month.”
It has been building features that only make sense for a wider social group. Temporary location sharing, which lets someone share their position with a person outside their circle for a set period, draws most of its views from people who are not Life360 members: the company reported more than 60% of views coming from non-members.
During the World Cup the app recorded more than 150 million interactions “between friends and families” across more than 180 markets. A Toy Story tie-in prompted members to send more than 30 million quick notes. “Life360 is managing to generate, you know, advertising revenue per slot, which is now growing very, very rapidly,” she said.
That ad revenue reached US$22 million in the June quarter, against US$5.3 million in the same quarter a year earlier, a rise of 315%. In the March quarter it was US$19.7 million against US$4.6 million, up 329%. Across the half it was US$41.6 million against US$9.9 million.
The company attributes the jump to new advertising formats rather than simply showing more ads to the same people.
The reason the inventory exists at all is engagement. Life360 says about 80% of its US monthly active users are eligible to see ads, 46% of its US monthly actives open the app every day, and the average US user opens it six times a day. That is an unusual profile for an app people describe as a utility.
