Audience Bridge Insights #1 - How Matt Paulson Built an 8-Figure Media Empire with Email

All right, we got Matt Paulson here, the founder owner of Market Beats, the big dog in the financial media landscape. Thanks for joining us.

Happy to be here.

I'm pretty excited about this because we're going to dig into a lot of about your email deliverability. I know you're, you're more of a media company these days with all the stuff, stuff you have with your website, podcast videos. I know you're into SMS stuff now too, but really, really want to focus is on, on the email side of things. So for those that may not know you which or market be the brand, can you kind of let us know what inspired you to start this back in the day, the early days and possibly what the first version of this newsletter looked like as I'm sure it's evolved over time.

Yeah. So one of the common pieces of business advice is to follow your passion and I think that's the wrong answer most of the time. I think you kind of start somewhere and you follow the business where it takes you and where the opportunity is. And that's really been the story with MarketBeat. So in 2006, I was a personal finance blogger in the, you know, free web 2.0, like blogs are just becoming a thing kind of phase. Had a personal finance blog called American Consumer News and was making some decent money from that. I thought, okay, I'm going to start three or four more of these and try to sell to the same advertisers on multiple websites, which was somewhat effective. But one of those sites was called American Banking and Market News. So I could write about banks and savings accounts, but also the stock market on that site had a lot of success with that site in the way the personal finance sites never really did. Was able to get it into like Google Finance and Yahoo Finance and MSN Money and some of those more vertical search things for, you know, stocks. And was kind of learned that game, figured out how to get a ton of traffic from that and. But it was also very up and down like, like during the Great Recession, everybody was wondering like, is Citibank going to go out of business today? So like we'd write about Citibank every day. But then like that calmed down. So then the traffic died down with it. And I thought, okay, I got to figure out a way to like capture some of his attention. And that led me to launching an email newsletter in 2009. You know, long time.

So the first three years you weren't even doing email?

No, no. I didn't know it, didn't understand it. It was purely web and Google Ads. And you know, I grew to like 100 grand a year in revenue doing that. And you know, really the email thing wasn't even our main revenue source until about 2015 because there wasn't, you know, back then there were no like ad networks for email.

Right.

There's just not really any ways to monetize other than selling premium subscriptions which is kind of the main thing that we did initially. And it worked fine, I mean made a few hundred grand a year. But it wasn't really until we discovered the kind of financial publishing industry in 2015. These are like all the Agora and market wise brands like the Oxford Club. That's really when we figure out a good way to monetize the email list because they have all these, what they are called front end offers where it's you know, $99 a year for to subscribe to some niche investment newsletter like in gold or oil or tech stocks. You know, those were a great fit for our audience is the content people are interested in, people would buy them. And that's kind of really where we kind of became a million dollar business is kind of promoting those types of things. We kind of stayed a low single digit million dollar year company until Covid and kind of when they, you know, everybody had free money from the government. GameStop, AMC kind of stuff was blowing up in 21. That's really when we kind of leaped from being a seven figure year company to being an eight figure year company. We were super well positioned for that. We had some search rankings for things like GameStop short interest, AMC short interest, kind of all the keywords people were looking for. So there were days when we had like a million dollars or not a million dollars but a million page views on the website which is, you know, today or 400,000.

When that GameStop thing happened, how many million visitors, how many of those subs did you were able to convert to subscribers?

I don't actually know. I'd have to go back and look. But our subscriber count went up quite a bit. And then it was kind of after that 22, 23 when we really figured out the paid acquisition channel. So we went from spending maybe 100 grand a month to a million a month in advertising to grow email list. And then our list went from maybe 1 to 2 million to more like 4 or 5 million. And today we're at 5.4 million. Yeah, I was gonna ask you here.

How big it was. Last time we checked it was like 4.5 million. So you got another million bridge.

Yeah.

Period of time.

I mean, we. Yeah, we spend a million dollars a month on AdWords and Bing and Facebook and Co reg and buying like newsletter placements and any way that seems viable to go by email signups, we will. And then we, you know, track the performance. Are these, you know, is this cohort of people from afteroffice.com or whatever the channel is, like each month, are they worth a little bit more to us? And then we track that and we can tell pretty easily whether or not a source is good or it's not worth messing with.

Cool. So just to go back on the email side, when you guys first started, you know, a few years later, what. How'd you start your email as far as what software were using and how has that evolved over time? Because I'm sure you're not, you know, if you started with who knows what, what was around back then, but say you're on Mailchimp or something at some point in time, you're not 74 and a half million subscribers on Mailchimp. I'm sure of that. So.

Yeah. So one thing about me is I love to automate as much as possible. I'm kind of lazy, so if I can't automate something, I will. So when I started the newsletter, like, I don't want to write a newsletter every day. Like, that's, that's not me. I'm not doing that. But we had a bunch of data and one of the pieces of data that we had that people seem to like were like ratings from stock analysts for different stocks. So, you know, you. There are all these people that work for Goldman Sachs and Bank of America and Wells Fargo that like write these research reports for institutional investors and then to give a stock, like I think the price is going to be this year from now, and I rated a buy. So we aggregated all that information and put it in a daily newsletter. And that was kind of our initial newsletter. Back then it was called like ABMN Daily Ratings. And now it's like Markbeat Daily Ratings. But we, yeah, never used Mailchimp, never used AWeber or, you know, any, any of the tools. There was always custom code, custom CRM because like back then I didn't know how to like load and like I could create the content like an automated way, but like, I didn't know how to like load it into a CRM and send it out. So it's always.

Who did all the coding for you?

I did.

That's what I was going to say. Because it was interesting to find out that you were actually a writer at first. And then you know, boys see you kind of like coding and talking about all this stuff and I've seen you working on your, on Twitter showing little code base, whatever you're working on. So I thought you're always a programmer person develop, you know, MarketBeat as a, as a tech tool for, for finance, you know, show all the ratings and different things like that. It's interesting that you were actually a writer then I guess taught yourself how to code.

Yeah, a little bit of both. Kind of the skills that like markbeat needed, like somebody need to know how to write, somebody needed to know how to write code. And then somebody needed to be a dirty marketer that could figure out all the strategies that nobody else was kind of figuring out yet.

Swiss Army Knife?

Yes. I mean now we have like a team of five developers. We have another one starting next week and you know, we have a very data heavy website like MarketBeat. It is a lot of work to maintain that. And like, you know, our prices have to be like real or stock prices have to be real time up to the second. So like all that infrastructure takes, you know, money and people to do.

How, how did you go from your, you know, the first thousand or so subscribers and then got to a hundred thousand and then a million. I know you kind of touched base about all the media that you've been spending, but how did you originally start acquiring your, your subscribers? Still this.

Yeah, the first five years it was mostly organic and like we had traffic from Google News and Google Finance and those kinds of places. So people would click through to read an article and there'd be a like a lightbox pop up that said like so say the article was about Citibank stock. Then the pop up would say Citibank buy, hoarder, sell or like get Citibank News. So then the pop up would be specific to the article they were reading. And then it would say like enter your email address below if you want more news about Citibank delivered to your inbox automatically. And then you type in your email and click on a button to sign up. That worked really well for a long time. That probably got us our first half a million subscribers before we ever even looked at paid.

That's awesome.

Yeah.

Thousand organic subscribers. People died for that. Did you test your, your AI AB split test on your pop up that you showed on, on X?

Yeah, I mean back then there was no AI, but like constantly testing, you know, different button copy colors, titles, you Name it, tried it for a long time and we still do that today. Like these days a lot of our email signups come from this landing page that we have and I can post a link to it somewhere, but very simple, like, but you know, every day there's a different test going on for button, text or know, copy and all that stuff really matters for those people.

Who are growing their list and you know, the bottoms you have are, you know, at the, at the top tier. Where's your. When did you go from? If you ever were on maybe shared IP infrastructure versus dedicated IP infrastructures. And like, when did you make that decision or were you always dedicated in the bj?

So initially we were on AWS with their email stuff ses. We found like it worked, but the support wasn't very good. And then like you had to pay for a support plan to like get anybody to respond to your email. And then even when you did that, it just wasn't. Wasn't great. So we moved from there to SendGrid pretty early on, probably 2010 or so, and have been with Sendgrid pretty much ever since and just had fantastic results with them. Like, it's not a CRM where like it's going to maintain your list and kind of do all the stuff that ConvertKit or Beehive would do. It's not that, but if you want somebody to like deliver your emails like, like through an API call, SendGrid is fantastic. So we've been with them for 15 years, been probably with Twilio for five years, and we just think great company, great people over there. I've been very happy with them.

Great. And was there any hiccups or issues like when Twilio purchased Sungrid on the.

No, I mean they're not, they're not truly integrated yet today. I mean, they finally have like single sign on, but like we have a send grid person and then we got Twilio person and they just kind of stick to their own universes, but got it.

And when you first started on SendGrid, were you guys doing dedicated IPs?

I think so. I think we only had one. Now we have like seven every year. So we add one or two just because our person at SendGrid tells us I should probably add another one.

Oh, so you're able to send that much volume? Just seven dedicated ips?

Yeah, it's.

I mean, how much volume you sending daily?

Oh, I don't know if we want to talk about that on podcast. It's. It's a lot. 7. I mean, you know, 5 million subscribers, everybody gets at least 20 mil a day, so.

Right. And we know you like to send more than one a day.

Maybe.

I guess that. So at what point did email deliverability become a serious focus of the newsletter? Or did you have. Were there any big issues?

Like, yeah, it was like, oh, it's.

Time to get an expert. Or I believe you say you got someone over at SendGrid that helps you out as well.

Yeah, we pay for a consultant at SendGrid to keep an eye on our stuff. And, you know, if there's an issue, they'll file a mitigation request on our behalf. And what we find is that, like, the SendGrid people filing a mitigation request with Yahoo or Hotmail or whoever, like, gets a lot, gets listened to in ways that, like, one for me would not. So that's kind of alone. It's really been in the last couple years where deliverability has been more of a challenge. You know, kind of the new Yahoo goal kind of rules of like, that's made things a little bit harder for people, but then like, our volume has gone way up too. Of like, we're spending a lot more on subscribers and it's really hard to maintain good deliverability when you're buying a ton of co reg. So that's been a challenge for us. And what we've learned is that you've kind of have to treat the different ESPs a little bit differently. Like, Microsoft historically has a very strict spam filter. So, like, we send different types of mail to Microsoft users versus a Gmail user.

For example, are you. Are you getting so granular on sending that you know, which IPs might be a little healthier for you and you're more engaged? People are going out on some and the other ones may be being retracked. Other IPs because of, you know, how engaged you are.

We do have a separate IP pool for Microsoft. We had issues with Microsoft a little over a year ago, and they decided they liked some of our IPs and not the others. So we just kind of limited our mail to the IPs that they liked, and that's worked out well for us.

And then they just change or send the requirements to go with Gmail and Yahoo. I don't know why they wait so long for that.

Yeah.

What. What's your. I guess, what would you consider your list churn? Like, what's your. Your unsubscribe rate on average? And I mean, you have a. Now it's five and A half million. I can't even imagine how many new subscribers you kind of need to feed the beast to just keep. Not even grow, just. Just to keep at a certain level. I mean, you got to be feeding in tons of, you know, setting up a ton of subscribers. You're obviously spending the money too, but that still seems like you need a lot to grow.

Yeah, you know, it's about 5% a month that unsubscribe. So we need 250,000 new emails a month to kind of be at break even, which obviously that's a challenge. But, you know, coordinates leads are two, three bucks, so you can get a lot of those and kind of get back to where you were. The other challenge we have is, you know, with 5 million subscribers, like, you end up having a lot of inactive. So finding ways to try to reactivate some of those people over time and doing it at scale has been a challenge. One thing that we're trying now is there's a platform called inbox mailers. Maybe some of your subscribers are with. But they can track, you know, they have this network of different email lists, and you can know when somebody's opening an email from another list. So then I'll do an API call and they say, okay, you know, this person hasn't opened in a year from us, but they have just opened with some other list. Then we can send them an email and see if they open it and kind of mark them as re engaged. So testing different stuff like that to try to re. Engage people and maybe a little bit smarter way.

Has that been. Has that been working so far?

It's pretty new to us. I mean, in the last couple weeks, so it's. I couldn't tell you if it's working yet.

I know you track your. Your cohorts down, you know, really tightly. Do you know, on average, just overall, like what the average length of engagement of a subscriber is like, how long have. Will they stay on your list?

Sorry, one more time? Oh, yeah. I mean, we have people on the list since 2009.

Right.

So some people stay a long time. Some people, like, don't like getting three emails a day and then unsubscribe the next day. That's. For us, that's like, not really the most important thing that we look at. Like, we really look more at the financial metrics, like revenue numbers say, like we really look at cohorts. So say, you know, afteroffers.com we buy leads from them, half for years, you know, over 10 years. Say, okay, last Month we gave them this amount of money for this number of leads. Those leads have made us this amount of money. Like are we seeing the ROI benchmarks we're looking for is kind of how we look at things.

Are you looking at it just in that shorter time period and then after a while you just. Obviously it's going to keep on recurring revenue people that stay on. But those co. I mean I can't imagine looking at cohorts every month for every source.

Yeah, it is all automated so like I can go back for, for years and get that data. But we try to break even by month three typically and then have it grow from there. But different acquisition channels have different characteristics. Like when you buy leads from AdWords or Facebook, like they tend not. They're more expensive so they don't break even as quickly, but they. There's higher user intent so they stick around for a while and then the ROI tends to be about the same as Coredge or anything else.

You mentioned inbox mailer. Are there any other inbox placement or sender reputation tools you're using?

I think a lot of that stuff is kind of snake oil. Like the stuff that like, well, like fake engagement in ESPs. Like I don't really believe in those things.

Do you do any like seed tools to see if things are inboxing?

Yeah, we use Inbox Monster for that. Sendgrid gave it to us with their, I don't know, deliverability services. So we use that. There's a tool called Postmaster plus. It's from the Optipub guys but it shows kind of your reputation and block list and kind of a really easy to see way. And then they send you alerts every day like show you your Gmail domain reputation and your SNDS reputation and those kinds of things. And it's kind of just nice to have an easy way to keep an eye on that. So really like that tool as well.

Cool. Do you do anything as far as to help with the engagement segment wise that you can share that help people deliverability wise versus just obviously always studying to their list. The same, the same people every time.

Yeah, you know we kind of, you know, you talk about doing a base segment of, you know, new subscribers, X day clickers, X day openers and you know, we certainly do something like that. But we also kind of have what we call like our really high or recent kind of segment where every morning at 6am we're sending an extra email to people that have opened in the last three days or clicked in the last six days. And then those emails get 50, 60% open rates and I think it kind of raises our average a little bit and really helps with deliverability.

Yeah, we, we do that as well. Where we send ours is a little different. We're sending most of our stuff we said at night, our main list along with all the new subscribers just because we find that there's less complaints and unsubscribes in the evening from people and then in the morning we're saying to the most engaged people which is usually anyone who's open the last we do. I mean ours is super tight one day and then anyways, click. The Last seven Days is our kind of morning SEM. But it's more of just a regular AMPM style newsletter. Not as niche and aggressive as you guys are. On the monetization side we're really just add arbitrage people not not going straight to CPA offers and things like that. What else we got here? How frequently are you cleaning your data as far as like revalidating old subscribers, see if anything's falling off come spam traps or anything like that or, or you are using a specific email validation service.

Yeah, so we use SendGrid's validation service before adding new people to list and then periodically, you know, every few months maybe we'll go. Well I mean it's kind of expensive to go and like revalidate 5 million emails.

Yes I can.

So we'll take like maybe the most recent million that like based off last view date and we validate them every few months. We typically only do it if we're starting to see issues otherwise like, you know, we get API notifications if somebody's, you know, there's a spam report or a bounce or anything like that. So we can scrub people automatically that way. And then you know, if you don't open an email from us in 30 days, like you're probably not going to get much mail from us. So it's. People just kind of fall off automatically too.

Got it. And if you can kind of explain your. So you, you market be itself. The brand actually has multiple lists. I know people understand that. But you're sending different, you know, branded lists under the market beat brand. Things like, you know, you talk about market B daily with your daily ratings and then you have like the early bird insider trades. Is there a reason why you have the different ones? You know, is everyone subscribed to all them? Do they fall off if they don't subscribe to just specific ones?

So in the financial investment space, people tend to be subscribed to a lot of different newsletters for different types of content and different opinions. And you know, my theory is like, I'd rather be, you know, I could be one of those or I could be five of those. Right. So I'd rather be five of them and have more, more of that mind share in their inbox than. Than not. So each kind of newsletter has its own different flavor. Some people trade different ways. They like different strategies. So we can have different newsletters that cater to different interests. So there are people that are subscribed to basically all of them, and then there are people just subscribe to one of them and it works pretty well.

And, and you've never had any issues sending all in the same domain?

No, not really. We kind of, we have our kind of list unsubscribed, wired up correctly now and then like if people like there's a big mailing preferences page where people can pick and choose what they want, what they don't want. And it hasn't really been an issue. I think it could start to become an issue now that the like Gmail has that list unsubscribe, kind of reporting whether or not they think you're compliant. It turns out it's, it's by domain, not by from address. So say somebody who unsubscribes from the early bird like Gmail would want us to unsubscribe them from every, every list, not just that one.

Right.

So, you know, that tells me like maybe we should start looking at more than one sending domain.

Very interesting. Let's see here. What do I. What do you think are the most common mistakes newsletters make that can hurt their durability? Not that you've ever made them.

Yeah, I mean buying a bunch of cheap leads from places that are kind of sketchy, like in the finance space. Maybe two years ago now there was a company that, I won't say the name, but we're selling really cheap leads for like A$50. And it was very unclear where they were coming from. And, but they were also like, tended to be buyers or people didn't ask too many questions. Eventually it came out that maybe these leads were stolen from a big public company. So. And then, yeah, there's a whole, it was a whole thing in our industry. But then like basically what happened was like the funnel of leads got shut off. But then like the company, you know, still wanted the money. Right. So then they just started sending garbage leads and it took companies that were giving them money a while to figure that out. Right. So I, when you know we're buying leads from somebody or email signups, like I really want to know what they're doing. Like and like if I can't, can't see front front end to back end of like what's happening like that I'm probably not a buyer.

Yeah, definitely got be careful data you're using. I know you're, you're, you have the same mentality I do. As far as a single opt in strategy, can you kind of dive in on, on, on your guy's strategy as far as when you get a lead, what's the activation process or, or your window of trying to onboard that person before you might just put them dormant, unsubscribe and delete them, whatever that that is.

Yeah. So somebody signs up for a list, they'll get a confirmation email, actually a series of them for I think it's 21 days. So as long as you click on any link or click on a confirmation email within 21 days or I think even open a certain number of emails like you're good to go. But like if there are no signs of life within the first 21 days and by then we've sent you at least 50 emails and like you haven't opened any of them, then we'll just unsubscribe people because we don't think it's a, I mean how do you not open one of 50 emails? Right, right. So we'll just unsubscribe people like hard at that point and consider them not a real email address.

Cool. Are you, are you guys doing without. Now that you have all your different channels, how are you leveraging your email to push people to sms, to push people to your podcast or the videos on YouTube, your YouTube channel? How's that going?

Yeah, so we think of ourselves as, you know, we used to be like an email kind of only company. And I think in today's world you really have to be more of a multi channel kind of media company if you're going to survive. Because things kind of coming in out of favor. Deliverability gets harder than like you're just going to just have your revenue go down or you can have like a backup plan. So for us like we just want to be on as many owned media channels as we can. So email, SMS, website, browser notifications and YouTube. YouTube is not really an owned media channel, but it's, it's pretty close. So we try to be as many places as we can be. That makes sense. Like we've tried direct mail unsuccessfully. Anything that seems plausible we'll try and we try to get people to bounce from one channel to the next to the next because it just creates more communication opportunities. So you sign up for the email list, the next page you're going to get an opt in for sms. And we make a boatload of money from sms. So like that we're pushing that really hard. And then like we'll send emails out to invite people to opt into the SMS stuff as well.

What's your opt in rate from email to SMS on initial?

So our active SMS list is about a quarter million right now, so it's only about 5% but like this month SMS is 40% of our revenue. So it's just the monetization is so much more effective on SMS than email that we're going to keep pushing it pretty hard.

And when you're doing sms, are you pushing the same type of offers that you're doing on email? Are they more specific to something different like investor relations type campaigns or more lead gen versus maybe a cpa?

It's largely the same kind of stuff. Um, if something's going to work on email, it's going to work in sms. So we do find Legion to be quite effective on sms and the IR guys love sms so there's a lot of that. That happens too. Yeah, people pay us five grand for one text to the list. So that's kind of nice.

Have you, do you, do you, you guys have a consultant over there on SMS side from Sendgrid as well from Twilio. That helps you out because I know that the different carriers can also be a little bit of a bumpy road.

Yeah, we have an account manager. We don't really have a deliverability consultant on the SMS side. It's been much less. I mean like there's some compliance stuff you have to do, especially TCPA related but then like the carriers have their own compliance stuff and you do get audited like every year to make sure like, does your help message say what it's supposed to say? Like you type start, you sign up, you press stop, you unsubscribe and you know as long as you're checking the boxes like typically you're going to be fine.

Cool. And your, any traffic into your, your new product, you release the, the earnings call.

Oh the, yeah. So now you can listen to like live earnings calls on the MarketBeat website. We that's through a partnership with a company called Quarter. We've done some promotion of it, but what we Find is like Markbeat is almost like two different businesses. Like there is the MarketBeat website and premium subscription side of things and people that actually use the tools and then like the email SMS side the ad side is really like kind of a different group of people that like read the content and email and ads and buy stuff. It tends to be very very distinct. And obviously the ad set is a way bigger business but. Right, so there's one. Yeah, like there's a bunch of businesses on like the product subscription side like tip ranks and simply Wall street that like never got into the media side and you know they may have similar reach as us but like they haven't been able to monetize because they haven't haven't been the ads Apple and have gone down that route.

Right. You see any big changes or things coming in the news space or newsletter space, email space in the next year or so?

Oh I mean it does seem like a lot of the me too people have kind of washed out which is good. Like how many AI newsletters do we need? So I'm glad that's happened. Like I would prefer the space like not to be gold rush mentality because then you just get a bunch of low quality you know lots of me too kind of stuff. So I'm glad that appears to have kind of come to an end. It is nice to see the tools getting better. Both Beehive Convertkit like you know get get better every month. That's good. I think deliverability is going to get a lot harder which will make like buying co reg type leads much more difficult. I think there will be a shift towards quality of sign up versus quantity. Like yeah, having 5 million subscribers is great but maybe having 1 million really good subscribers is better. So like our, our ad spend shift is gonna kind of move away from co edge and lead share type stuff more towards like AdWords and Facebook ads where somebody's actually coming to our website typing in their email and they're just higher intent. There's so there'll probably be more in that direction.

Yes, I think it's gonna, I think they're gonna tighten up even more on the security side. Obviously they you know now that Microsoft jumped on board Yahoo Gmail did it last year. I think I mentioned this to you before that I think that the the verified certificate marks is another layer that they can do to to kind of secure that the mails that are coming are from a legit brand. Very you know pretty similar to now with evo sms you know when they made their Changes to tcpa, whatever it was, they required more official things registered to allow you to send, send the SMS from them.

Yeah, getting a short code is pretty hard these days.

Yeah, it's pain in the ass. We did a little bit of sms, but when all that stuff happened, we kind of stop going that route unfortunately. But you know, I think email is gonna get, it's, it's gonna get weeded out in the next couple years. I think it's, I think all these fly by night people, it's gonna be too tough for them as far as deliverability and the more layers of, you know, setting up that you're actually not an official business, people can contact you, locate you. You know, if not, you're not gonna be all male. So let's see, are you. Well, I guess I can bring up this issue. Obviously people that follow me know I've been big on this whole Yahoo block that's been going on or their algorithm shake up. I mean it's hit everyone that I know for the most part. You know, some people, maybe not as much some people know, but you know, majority of people, it doesn't matter really what niche you're in. What if you're on shared IPs, dedicated IP, it didn't really matter. You were still seeing a lot of either low, low deliverability or low open rates because they're basically just throwing you in the spam box. I know I chat with you a little bit about it over the last couple weeks. How's that going for you guys now?

Yeah, so a bunch of people in the financial media, publishing industry, you know, got blocked effectively by Yahoo. A bunch of deferrals, bunch of blocks. So what we did is we cut our volume back probably 90% Yahoo. And the other thing we did was we told all of our CoreEdge providers like no more Yahoo addresses because like it's not going to work. So we're kind of coming back from it now, but hearing from a lot of other people, they have not been able to kind of get it unlocked. But I, I think that, I think this stuff's gonna blow over eventually. I'm not sure.

Yeah, they're, they're, they're like, it's, it happens every couple years, the big purge. And you know, they're just trying to weed out those, those shady affiliates and shady bulk mailers that are, you know, just flooding their, their inbox.

So I mean for us it's been a good opportunity to like say, okay, of all the leads that we have coming in, like, where's kind of the lowest quality and like maybe places we should just stop buying, especially for Yahoo addresses and really kind of encouraged us to move into quality direction maybe a little bit quicker than we would otherwise.

So are you, are you guys filtering out any. Any outside of. I know you're not getting co reg or whatever sign up from something yo Yahoo, but are you filtering out any other GI domains, general interest domains for deliverability issues or you just take everything validate and send.

And when you say general interest domains, what do you mean by that?

You know, it could be business domains. Chrisopiedigital.com or Matt Paulson.com or you know, just.

I mean we've always had pretty good luck with the, what we call the other bucket of domains that are not like any Gmail or Yahoo. You know, any of the big ones. We haven't had to do anything special with those at all.

All right, well, I think we went over a bunch of good stuff. Now I got a very important question here. What is your favorite movie?

Oh, favorite movie. Probably Memento. That's a good one. I don't know if I mean it's a 20 year old movie at this point, but. Right guy, effectively like he's trying to figure out who murdered his wife and it turns out it was him.

One of my top five as usual suspects.

Okay.

There's kind of that, you know, at the end, like total curveball that you didn't think was happening. And what computer game did you play back in the day?

Okay, so the one that like defined my childhood was this MMORPG that was like pre World of Warcraft called Nexus, the Kingdom of the Winds. It's. It still exists. I think the player base is probably like 300 people now. Yeah, it's not high.

Is it in the cloud?

I mean there is a server and you connect to it, but played a lot of Age of Empires growing up. Played World of Warcraft in college. Played a lot of Civilization games. Still do. I play Hearthstone collectible card game with Warcraft stuff. I've played that for the last 10 years. Play it basically every day. So very big video gamer here.

I think I'm a little bit older than you. So when I started off, the big game that got me hooked was King's Quest.

Oh sure.

That was like the big one. My brother got me into that one. And then I was all into the civ games and all those growing up and then got into when we all went online. I got hooked on Star wars galaxy for a while.

Oh sure.

Being a Jedi Knight. And then as far as card games, we used to play magic together a lot.

I never got into in person magic. Like it was pretty big in college, but never was quite my thing.

Yeah, my brother got me into it. I have like, I'm like, I got two brothers. My older brother, who's more of the intellect and he's all into the, you know, RPGs and he do all like in real life, role playing games and stuff. What's the one he was playing live in college? Vampires or something. Not sure what that one was, but. And then he had my other brother who's like a jock. And then I was kind of in between be like sports over here with my brother and then I'd be over here doing the. The other stuff. Little fantasy sci fi computers. So kind of a mix of, of the two sides.

Oh.

Well, I think that's pretty good. Do you have any else, Anything else you'd like to add or ask me?

Yeah, I don't know. If you want to hear my random stuff, you can talk. I do a quarterly, like personal newsletter that's like totally accepted from MarketBeat, Matt Paulson.com if anybody wants to check that out. And very active on Twitter at Matt Paulson SD Yeah, sounds like. And it sounds like we're going to see each other in person next week at the newsletter conference in New York. So that'll be. That'll be fun. Hello.

He made the announcement.

Yeah, we'll be there.

Have you been letting other people, anyone else you know that's going?

Yeah, we. We hear a few financial publishing people going, so we'll connect with everyone there.

Cool. All right, well, I appreciate your time. Look forward to seeing you next week and have a great end of the weekend.

Weekend sounds good. Great to see you, Chris.

All right, Matt, take care.

Bye. Bye.