Letterboxd's $300m price is 2.6 times its listed owner's value

Letterboxd is being marketed at more than $300m. The listed company selling it is worth about $117m.

That gap is the story. Tiny Ltd, the Victoria holding company that controls the film-review site, closed on Friday at C$5.64 a share, which puts its market capitalisation at C$165.29m, or roughly US$117m at Friday's rate of 0.707. The asking price for the website is therefore just over two and a half times the stock market's valuation of everything its owner holds. Counting the borrowings does not close the gap: stockanalysis.com puts Tiny's enterprise value at C$334.6m, about US$237m. Still short.

The New York Times reported on Thursday that its own parent company and A24 have put in second-round bids, with Sony Pictures Entertainment also circling and any deal expected to clear $300m. Letterboxd was founded in Auckland in 2011 by Matthew Buchanan and Karl von Randow, who run it as chief executive and chief technology officer and hold 20% each. Tiny bought the other 60% in September 2023 at a valuation of $50m to $60m, and has hired the merchant bank LionTree to sell it.

What the seller's own books say

Tiny does not hold Letterboxd on its own balance sheet. The stake sits inside Tiny Fund I LP, a private partnership, and what Tiny Ltd owns is an interest in the fund. In its second-quarter results on 6 August, the company put the net asset value of that interest at C$46.4m, or US$32.7m, as at 30 June. Up 4% since December.

Sixty per cent of a $300m sale is $180m. Tiny's carrying value for its entire share of the fund, which also holds the AeroPress coffee business and the yerba mate maker Mateina, is US$32.7m. Two readings fit. Either Tiny Ltd's slice of that partnership is a small fraction of it, or the fund has been marking Letterboxd at nothing like the figure LionTree is quoting buyers. The filings do not say which, and the 6 August release does not mention a sale process at all, four months after Semafor reported one was under way.

The same filings put a ceiling on the revenue. Tiny Fund I turned over a combined US$12.9m in the first quarter of 2026 and US$13.2m in the second, across every business it holds, which is about US$26m in six months and a run rate near US$52m a year. The Times put Letterboxd's own 2026 figure at roughly $15m. That fits inside the fund's total, at under 30% of it, and Tiny's account of the 15% revenue growth in the quarter listed AeroPress first, Letterboxd second and Mateina third. The most valuable thing in the portfolio is not the biggest earner in it.

Outlets disagree about what the $15m even is. Gizmodo called it revenue. World of Reel and Deadline both called it earnings. On a business sitting inside a partnership that turns over around US$52m in total, revenue is the reading that fits.

$9.77 a member

Tiny's August release put Letterboxd at 30.7 million members on 30 June, up 43% in a year and 185% since the purchase. Divide $300m by that and a buyer is paying $9.77 a head.

Set it against the last time the New York Times Company bought an audience outright. It paid $550m for The Athletic in January 2022, and The Athletic came with 1.2 million subscribers: $458 each. Per person, Letterboxd is going for roughly one forty-seventh of that. The difference is that hardly any of these people pay anything. Spread $15m across 30.7 million members and it comes to 49 cents a member a year, and Pro costs $19, so even if every dollar of it came from subscriptions rather than advertising and partnerships, that implies about 790,000 paying members. One in 39.

That is the calculation in front of every bidder. Not what Letterboxd earns, but what it would earn if someone who had just spent $300m went looking for the money.

Ten weeks, $50m

The price has climbed in public, in stages.

• 26 April: Semafor reported that Tiny was entertaining offers, naming the CNBC parent Versant and the trade newsletter The Ankler. Letterboxd had 26 million users.
• July: Variety reported exploratory talks with Netflix, Sony and Paramount Skydance, alongside the private equity firms TPG and RedBird and the Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, with LionTree floating a $250m valuation. Deadline reported another bidder, Intrinsic, a social benefit corporation.
• 24 September: second-round bids above $300m, from the Times and A24.

From $250m to more than $300m in about ten weeks. Over the same stretch Tiny reported a net loss of C$83.0m for the second quarter, driven by C$80.7m of non-cash impairments at WeCommerce and Creative Market, and its shares fell 27.3% across twelve months. The asset was revalued up by a fifth while the company holding it was revalued down by a quarter. Sellers rarely get to run both of those lines at once.

One of the bankers on the sale told Deadline that the site is "a phenomenon", and pointed to it as a driver of the box-office recovery that produced $4.76bn over the summer. Possibly. What a banker means by a phenomenon is an audience nobody has charged properly yet.

A24 is the bidder that reads best and prices worst. That $300m is around 9% of the $3.5bn valuation Thrive Capital's investment gave the studio in June 2024, spent on a business with perhaps $15m of revenue and a membership that would notice a paywall inside a day. It is also the company currently extracting ten extra points of film rental from American exhibitors, which is not the profile of a buyer who leaves a free product free. The Times, whose whole business is turning readers into subscribers, at least wants 30 million film-watchers for a reason that does not involve selling them a film. Paramount Skydance, which looked at this in July, is raising equity at $12 a share while its stock trades at $10.18 and has other things to pay for.

Buchanan and von Randow hold 40% between them, and nothing in the public record obliges them to sell. Tiny's third-quarter results fall due within 45 days of 30 September, the next scheduled moment at which the seller has to put a figure on any of this.