Nexstar Media Group, Inc. (NXST) Q3 2020 Earnings Call Transcript @themotleyfool #stocks $NXST
Let’s now open the call to Q&A to address your specific areas of interest. Operator?
Questions and Answers:
Operator
Thank you. [Operator Instructions] We’ll take our first question from Dan Kurnos with The Benchmark. Please go ahead.
Dan Kurnos — The Benchmark — Analyst
Thanks. Good morning. It’s a new one for me. First off, just publicly, congratulations, Tom, well deserved, obviously. And then maybe to Perry, your core commentary is a lot more optimistic better, frankly, than I think the peer group right now, you explicitly called out auto. I’d love to hear more about kind of pacing? And what’s driving that outperformance and optimism right now?
Perry A. Sook — Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Well, I think it’s the fact. And the facts are that we have seen sequential monthly improvement in core advertising results since the low ebb of April. And that continued uninterrupted through the third quarter with every month finishing better than the month before in relation to the prior year. And that is continuing in Q4 with the exception of October, obviously, half of our political revenue for the year came in the month of October. So there was displacement there. But — even with all of that, our fourth quarter auto pacing is better than — 20 points better than where we exited auto for Q3. So the sports betting category is now a double-digit millions per quarter business for us, an 8-digit category on a quarterly basis. That didn’t exist last year. And Tim Busch and his teams have done a great job of generating new-to-television revenue, which it up substantially as we just reported, on a year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter basis. So our teams are really hustling, and I just can tell you that the results, I think, indicate that.
Dan Kurnos — The Benchmark — Analyst
That’s really helpful. And then, obviously, there’s been a lot of noise, I think, around net retrans lately, just timing. I think you were pretty clear, Perry, unless I misheard you just in the call that you still expect that to be a source of growth even with a smaller footprint coming up at the end of this year. So I just want to confirm that you’re still anticipating strong net retrans growth in ’21.