How Matt Paulson Bootstrapped MarketBeat To $40M/Year and 4.3M Newsletter Subscribers

Foreign.

Welcome to the Newsletter Operator podcast. We're here with Matt Paulson. How you doing?

Good. How are you, Matt?

Thanks for coming on. We appreciate you having here. Awesome. Well, tell us. I think a lot of people know you because I've been following you on Twitter for ages and you're becoming more and more known in the newsletter community and of course, and other communities as well. Just tell us about who you are and what your business is. We'll get started with that.

Yeah. So my name is Matt Paulson. Been doing the newsletter business long before there was kind of the modern kind of category of newsletters. I started on a financial media business called Markbeat. We have very large email component. We have 4.3 million subscribers as of today. And started our email list tail end of 2010, early 2011. Have grown it since steadily since then. We've been on the Inc. 5000 list for eight consecutive years. I think this will be year number nine. So we've just kind of had, you know, slow and steady growth and if you grow 30% a year and you do it for a decade, you get a pretty large business. So we did about 30 million in revenue last year. We'll do about 40 this year. I think January was our best month ever. We did just under 4 million in revenue. So super happy with that. In the last year, we've really doubled down on ad spend to grow our email list. So last month we spent about a million two on ads to grow the MarketBeat mailing list and some of our different brands that we run and, you know, really happy with how that's turning out. We're breaking Even in about 90 days on our ad spend. So obviously I'm just gonna keep pressing that button until it breaks and having a lot of fun doing that. And yeah, I know. So the stupid amount. Yeah. Know a stupid amount about email, like, stuff that, you know, most people never bother to think about, like, oh, what is the optimal version of the list? Unsubscribe header to use for which esp. And you know, stuff like that. So happy to get into leads on anything.

Let's do that. And so what I love about you and what a lot of people love OD is you're so open and transparent of all the numbers. And so we want to, we want to break all that stuff down and get into it. So let's just start from the top here. So you explained this, but I'm going to run everything through step by step or you might have mentioned some of these numbers, but start with like, how Many newsletter subscribers do you have now for Market Beat? And we'll just, we'll go from there.

Yeah. So we have seven or eight different brands. MarketBeat is the main one, but kind of our other big one is called the early bird. That's earlybirdpublishing.com and dividendstocks.com insidertrades.com we're going to launch an earnings focused newsletter next month. We have a crypto newsletter called Crypto Beat. And then we have some lists that we are kind of partners on where we run the newsletter. But then somebody else provides all the leads, like tickertalk.com is one of those. And altogether we have about 4.3 million subscribers. We have people that are subscribed to just one of the newsletters. We have people that are subscribed to like five or six of them and you know, trying to build this network of kind of financial media brands. And one thing that we've learned is that like our audience, which is kind of older individual investors, they are signed up for a lot of lists. And if they're signed up for 10 list, I just want to be all 10 of them. So that's why we've launched all these different brands. And that's worked out great as a strategy.

Makes sense. And at this, there's not a lot of newsletters or media companies that are at this scale when it comes to this many subscribers. So that's awesome. What type of, at this level, what type of open rates and click through rates are you seeing? And I know it's a little bit open rates can be deceived. And you've talked a lot about this, but tell us what that looks like for you.

Yeah. So when you exclude, you know, the fake Apple and Google opens that are kind of automated or the true open rate is like 21%. When you add the fake ones back in, it's about 40%. So I think, you know, most people that are advertising, you know, 50% open rates on your newsletter, they're not taking out the automated opens from, you know, Apple Mail. So really I think like you take whatever your reported open rate is and you divide it in half and like that's probably your true open rate.

And how many subscribers are you adding from? You said you're spending or in January you spent $1.2 million on ads to grow your list. How many is that adding right now?

You know, the, the lead cost will vary as low as like $2 for like lead share deals up to like probably $12. And you know what we're willing to spend per lead is really dependent on like, how it backs out. And as you guys know, like, you know, maybe a subscriber from TikTok is not as valuable as somebody that's going through Google AdWords, landing on a landing page and typing in your email. So, you know, average lead cost is probably, you know, three bucks. So million two divided by three is 400,000 subscribers. And obviously, like when you have an email list that big, you get quite a few unsubscribes. So you probably need 100 or 200,000 new subscribers a month just to break even on your list size. So that's kind of the game we're playing.

That's awesome.

And what does the pie chart look like in terms of growth channels? I know you said you spent 1.2 million in January, which is a huge amount. What does that look like spread out across the channels that you're currently running or testing?

Yeah, probably about 200,000 ads. Google, Bing, 50,000 is Facebook. We're trying to grow Facebook more and more. You know, most of it is kind of, you know, the, the investing industry category really has its own media advertising networks. So like yes, we do Sparkloop and Google and Bing and Facebook, but the majority of the spend is advertising to different financial investing email lists and you know, co registration that are on investing specific advertising networks. So like we've all, you know, anybody who's listening to this podcast has heard of Sparkloop, but you know, maybe they haven't heard of After Offers or the co registration network that Investing Media Solutions runs. And you know, these things have been around a long time and we've been buying from them for a long time. You know, we've been able to scale those up pretty effectively.

Tell us how that works because like you said, we don't have any idea about this. I know of After Offers. That is about all I know about that space. So we could break down a couple maybe. Which one are you, maybe you think is the best that you're spending the most on? That would be good to tell listeners about it.

Yeah, I mean, I think AfterOffice is a great example. It's run by a couple guys out of San Diego named Tim and Email Berkman. But like we've been buying from them since 2014 and like, have been buying every month since then. We, we break even about 60 days from them. I give you some numbers just for all last year. So we spent $561,000 with them last month or last year, 20, 23 and that's generated 1.19 million in revenue from them so far. So you know, pretty happy with that. And obviously like as time goes on there would just be more and more profit. But I mean it is basically like Sparkloop before Sparkloop. With Sparkloop, like it's co registration network, it's ads that show up on opt in forms. After you sign up for a financial mailing list, check the box, I get the lead, I pay three bucks or whatever and get the sign up.

And so that's something that's different about these two. Is Sparkloop maybe the cost per lead there might be a dollar or $2, but you said three bucks. What's the cost per lead look like on after offers or another courage platform?

In finance it's typically in, in the investing it's in that two to three dollar range and but it's. You're paying for all the leads. It's not like with Sparkloop where you're only paying for leads that meet you. Kind of like we require in Sparkloop you gotta like click the confirmation link to like get paid because otherwise there's just a lot of noise and a lot of junk. But with the investing kind of coed stuff, it is, you're paying the for that volume and it is probably more expensive. And the reason it's more expensive is just that's what financial leads cost. And they tend to be. We find that like when we advertise on like an investing website, the lead quality in terms of like how they back out is just much higher quality than like if you're just on like a generic newsletter, you know, running Smart Lube. So we're willing to pay more is what it amounts to.

Interesting. So higher roas from after offers and something like Spark Lube.

Yeah, and it's just because it's more targeted. I mean we knew by Sparkloop we very happy with them. Talk to those guys pretty frequently and. But it is like just a different thing. It's more general audience. You know, you're not just advertising not investing lists, you're advertising on, you know, tech list and AI lists and you know, a variety of different types of things. So you gotta account for that. And you're kind of, you're tracking a roas.

Is there another financial media solution you can tell us about another network or source you're buying a lot from the finance space that most people wouldn't know about.

We've been working, you work a lot with agencies, so there's One called Net Effect that we've been working with. It's a gal named Nancy and another gal named Autumn that run it and they run click to opt in campaigns for us. We have these different free reports where it's you know, here are the 7 best energy stocks to buy in 2024 or something like that. And then people like they'll book with different advertising lists like Zachs.com is one of them, behind the Markets.com is another. So they'll book placements for us against these lists where they're sending a quick document email to their list. Somebody watched the free report, they click on the link in the email. We pay $5 for that lead and then they land on our website, you know, know with the email pass through. So I got the email address, I got them on my website. I'm paying five bucks. That's worked out great too.

Interesting it click to opt in. Is that what are the CPAs looking like for that five bucks on average or is there a range?

Yeah, five is kind of the common number in the investing industry. Some people try to push that up to 6, 7. Most of the stuff like we sell quick opt and stuff like a ton of it and that tends to be all in that five to six dollars range.

Any advice for people who maybe have they're operating in the finance space and they're looking into growing from these types of sources or channels for the very first time.

Yeah, so there is a brand called Financial Marketing Summit and it's like an event you can go to and they do a few events throughout the year but they also have a great YouTube channel guy named John Knutson does it. So like go watch all like if you're in the finance investing space like just go watch all of John's videos and like you will see interviews of like everybody who's anything kind of in the investing, you know, marketing world. Like that is the place to go.

I'm going to do that. I was recently introduced to John. I'm in the process of doing that right now myself actually.

Yeah. So yeah we just had Financial Marketing Summit last month. Saw a ton of people, everybody got Covid but made some great business deals and love going to that event every year and I usually speak at is just kind of the place to go for you know if you're you're doing lead gen or you know trying to do eval signups and invest in space like that is the place to be.

One more question on on channels. Do you know how many or can you tell Us. How many paid channels are you're running on right now to grow your list?

Yeah, I think the count is 22.

Wow, that's a ton.

Yeah.

You know, me and Ryan used to work at the Hustle together. I think we had like 12 at our, at our.

Yeah. You know, yeah. And thankfully, like it's pretty easy to manage because a lot of it is through agencies and then some of them are like, like after offers. Like I set that up 10 years ago and like, yeah, we changed the offer every now and then, but it's really just not a lot, a whole lot to do because you know, the posting is automated, the offer stays the same, billings automated. They take the money out of our account every week and you know, we, we look at the performance, but that's really all we do on a monthly basis. So it's very manageable. Like right now we don't even have a director of marketing. We had an advertising manager that left for another job. And so like right now it's just me and another guy named Will kind of doing it. And it is less work than you think it would be.

Interesting. And I imagine this level, is it like 99% of your subscribers are coming from paid or is it somewhere around there? Pay freedom ratio?

Well, yeah, it's probably like 90% or maybe it's 80 to 90. We're probably getting 40, 50,000 organic opt ins a month. So compare, you know, out of 400. So like you, that's really good.

I forgot you have a lot of SEO traffic. I forgot about that.

Yeah, we ranked for a lot of stock tickers and then like a lot of tools. So like our biggest keyword is dividend calculator. So you search dividend calculator. Like you get a ton of traffic just from that keyword. But like in 2021, like when everyone was freaking out about GameStop and AMC, like we ranked for like GameStop short interest and AMC short interest. So MarketBeat was all over Reddit when that was going on and just a ton of, ton of search traffic from stuff like that. Whereas they're like keywords that you don't really think about. But then like when something blows up, like there we are waiting, just get a ton of traffic.

You mentioned that you're using kind of these lead magnets for the click to opt in. Is there a formula that you use to generate these kind of lead magnets or anything that you found to be really successful in driving growth over time and experimentation?

Yeah, they tend to be like stockless. So like Whatever the hot thing is. So it's like know last year was AI stocks, so it's like seven AI stocks to own in 2024. And then you know, whatever the hot thing is will change, right? Like it was electric vehicles at one point, it was marijuana stocks at one point. And just kind of like this year it'll be all election based stuff. Like if you can like write an election kind of driven narrative like for like a report like an opt into your newsletter. Like those have gotten really high engagement this year. So like in a financial publishing space, like people are selling like newsletter subscriptions, right? And they tend to be $79 entry level price points. We sold 3,000 or we were subscriptions for this group called the Freeport Society, that's part of Investor Place Media, which is part of Market Wise, it's a public company last month and their whole narrative is that Biden's going to get removed from the ticket and Gavin Newsom is going to be the Democratic nominee and he's going to try to make the whole country like California. And then that's bad. Here's why. And we're making this organization for people that want to buck this trend and really want to understand here's where politics in America are going and here's how to trade based off of that. Like the offer just totally crushed it and we saw that it was doing well so we just set the heck out of it and sold 3,000 subscriptions at like 150 or 200 CPA, something like that last month and made a boatload of money promoting that.

Yeah, I think.

What do you mean by that? Cpa? What does CPA mean in that context?

Cost per acquisition. So typically. So there's two big companies in the financial publishing industry. There's Market wise public company mktw run by Porter Sansberry, who is kind of an industry legend. Like we, we named a conference room in our office after Porter because he's like that big deal. And then there's Agora, which is kind of the, you know, has been around forever. Bill Bonner started that in 70s 80s. They were always the biggest kind of direct response subscription organization. And they're, you know, still around. They run this brand called the Oxford Club. So like they are the two kind of big players in that space and they sell all these kind of niche, they're effectively newsletters or memberships to different newsletters. And the entry kind of price point on all of them is anywhere between like 49 and $99. And then they'll pay like $100 CPA on the low end and $250 CPA on the high end. And then they have all these big back end kind of upsells behind them, just like different tiers of their membership. So they're willing to, you know, pretty common numbers are like $79 checkout price, kind of the base. And then they'll pay us $150 CPA on that for that sale interest.

Yeah. So I wanted to get to. Is like that's the CPA is what they're paying you when you drive that sale. Which is, which is really interesting. They're willing to pay more because they make more money in the back end like you explained. And that's. I want to dive into that because I think I've been fascinated by the financial newsletter industry, financial marketing industry. There's not a lot of information out there about it. And so I'm glad you broke down a little bit about those two companies. If someone's listening to this for the first time and they're interested in newsletters, but most of them have no idea about this stuff, what other things should they check out to just understand the basics of these companies. And also can you give us some sense of scale? Like how big is market wise? How big is Agora? Why are these companies interesting?

You know, together I think they're probably about a billion dollars in revenue right now. So if you look market rises, you know, financials are public because they're a public company. Sure. In 12 months they've done about 500 million from what I can tell. And I think Agora is very similar. And then there's a bunch of independence like beyond that, like there's one guy who has a crypto offer where like his kind of front end, like his teaser is like if you complete by survey, I'll give you $10 in Bitcoin or something like that. And you know, we probably generate like 30, 40 grand a month for him in affiliate commissions. So like it is like there's kind of the two big companies at the top, but then like there's this whole universe of smaller companies and we try to work with all of them because we've got, you know, we think that audience is like 15 million people and we've got 4 million of them on our list. Yeah, I've now I've completely lost the question.

That's, that's what I'm looking for. That's the tam of this. Yeah. Any follow up questions on that, Ryan? It's just there's a Lot to learn from these companies, how they do marketing, like how they have front end and back end offers, all this different type.

Of stuff and like some of them.

A lot of places to learn about.

It go like go sign up for these lists and see what they're doing and like buy the product for 79 and see what the upsells are like. I mean I learned, I learned so much just by like buying products that people are selling and like seeing how they market them.

Yeah, that's the way reverse engineering.

I'm. I'm curious. I just wanted to dig in more. You mentioned there's like a, an individual who. Did you say he's making 30 to 40,000amonth via his crypto offer via your guys affiliate. Is that how I kind of, I got a little mix.

Oh, he's paying us that much to promote his offer.

Got it. Awesome. Yeah, I went through your funnel. I saw the, I saw the, the Joe Biden or the election of like lead magnet guide that was in there and I saw a bunch of others in there as well. Yeah, we've talked a little bit about growth and I'm sure we'll dive more into that. I'm curious just I guess again from a kind of pie chart perspective how does market beat make money? And then you know what are the different. I saw there's a premium subscription side. I'm curious how what kind of piece of the pie that makes up. Maybe you could just paint high level view of that.

Yeah. So we're a media company. Most of our revenue is advertising. So last year of our 29 point whatever million in revenue like 90% of that was advertising and about 10% was subscriptions. So we have right now it's about 13,000 people that are have a recurring market beat all access subscription. And you know the list price is kind of $400 but you know it's pretty frequent that like we sell for either $100 or $200 the first year. And like the offer that works really well to promote that is like we give people like what you're promotion and say hey we applied a $300 credit to your account from our community access. It's good for a week. If you want to claim, you know, your account credit, click here, you know to get it and then like you create the urgency and then tell people like your account credit's about to expire, do you want to use it or not? Like hey, a bunch of other people use their credit. You know, tomorrow's the last day to do it. Today's the last day to do it. And like that sense of urgency, like really works to, you know, get, get signups.

Tell us, how do these advertising deals work? You've talked about this on other podcasts. It's different than a lot of what other media companies are doing. I don't think you're selling a lot of flat fee sponsorships according to what you said. So how do, how does sponsorship work in your universe and what's worked for you?

Yeah, so like historically the financial publishing industry, like Initially it was CPM based, but it moved in about 2015 it moved to CPC and really in the last two or three years it's moved out to CPA where it's really based off the transactions that you generate. We do have some flat fee stuff and that is primarily when we do IR work, which is promotions for public companies that are looking to promote kind of their stock. So there are these IR firms that will create content about a stock that's know, public, like NASDAQ listed company, and then they'll pay us to drive traffic to kind of their landing page for stock. And that, you know, there's a lot of legal stuff and compliance stuff that goes into that. Like, you know, if you like are promoting a stock and you're getting paid to do it, you don't disclose it. Like, that's obviously like super illegal when people get busted for it all the time. So it's kind of considered more of a, like, I don't say shady kind of thing, but like it's, you gotta have your ducks in a row on it. And there are plenty of people that like, want to try to skirt through rules and like, you know, people will like, try to wire your money to you from like Canadian law firms who can't like track where the money came from. So like, you gotta be really careful on that. Like, so those are all flat fee stuff, like paid in advance and like, you gotta like know who, who the person is. And like, you know, typically we only deal with people like, oh, I've met Joe in person. Like he's a real person. Like, I know who he is because there's a lot of shady behavior that happens in that category.

What do CPMs for those kind of sponsorships look like? Just out of curiosity? I know that's something Matt and I have talked about in the past.

It's a really interesting space that we don't know much about. Yeah.

You know, typically when we send a mailing to something like that, you know, go to a segment of about A million people. So that'll be like the 30 day opens for one of our mailing lists and they Pay, I think, 15,000. So is that a $15 RPM?

Yeah, and I'm not gonna do the math, but I think that sounds about right.

Yeah.

And it's, it's. Do you have to. When you do one of these IR sponsorships, at least I've. I've seen some people do this. I think they have to disclose what they got paid for the sponsorship. Is that right? Or am I way off base on that?

Yeah, and it's like usually varied in a disclaimer, like on the bottom of the email. Yeah, it's who paid you? Why do they pay you? And yeah, we have like a standard disclaimer we use when we send those out.

Yeah, that's interesting. I've heard from other people that, like, they like these types of advertisers because they can't really measure results. It's like, who knows if someone went and bought the stock or not. I mean, that's the result they want, but you can't measure that. And so, you know, some people have multiple.

You can. When we send forum, like, you can see the stock volume go up when. Yeah, I mean, the people, like, we don't like, ever work directly with public companies. We always work with like these agencies that would run IR campaigns or buying media from us in a bunch of different places. And, you know, they do a good job of all the compliance stuff. And I know what they look for is like time on site, number of pages visited, and like, did this person, like actually research this stock and like stick around a little while? So those are kind of the metrics that they use.

That's cool. So they go to like, you attract people going to like marketbeats ticker page to check out the stock on your website. Is that what you're trying to.

So typically they've got their own website and then they have this big like landing page about stock with a bunch of information about it. So they want us to drive traffic to their website and then like, what is the time on site for the traffic we send? Like, how long on average did somebody stay on the site? Like, did they. Did I send a bunch of people and then they bounced right away? Or did they stay on the site for 5, 10 minutes and that's kind of what they're looking for?

That's cool. So it's a lot more sophisticated than I would have heard about, so I'm glad we dubbed into that.

And if they do A big IR campaign with marketbeats and the trading volume on a stock is totally unchanged. To them, it didn't work, but if it did change, it worked.

Okay. And I don't know if you mentioned this, but IR is investor relations. If people didn't know what that meant. I forget if we said that or not, but that sounds like that's a fraction of your sponsors, Matt. Is that like a smaller percentage, the type of advertisers you work with? Yeah. Tell us what the main one. Are these financial newsletter companies like. Like Money Wise and an Agora. And then you work with those. Do you work with those on a CPA deal? So you open up an offer and you get paid when someone purchases that.

Offer, that product, Right? Yeah. Most of them are these boutique financial newsletter, ship and newsletter and membership operators where, you know, they've got a. A membership, maybe it's 100 bucks a year. And then you get their content and whatever else with it, then we get a CBA based off of it. That is probably. It's definitely our largest bucket, but I don't think I could throw a percentage on it accurately.

Yeah. And do you get. Are the CPAs like you mentioned before? Is it usually above the front end offer price? So if the front end offer costs 79 bucks per year, are you getting paid 100, 150, 250 sometimes to sell that product?

Yep.

That is cool. I didn't realize that.

Yeah. So, like, when, like, you know, insurance people and savings account people, like, will email us all the time and say, like. Or even different affiliate offers in different categories that says, like, oh, we'll give you 30% or whatever you sell. It's like, man, I just don't really care because I'm getting 200% of what I sell over here.

I was wondering, like, when I listened to interviews before, I'm like, how is Matt building this business based off of just these, like, affiliate deals essentially, but because they're structured this way, it's an awesome deal for you. And I didn't realize that until this call. That's great.

Yeah, but I mean, it's. Yeah, it's an awesome deal for us. But, like, these are not. These are, like, not dumb people throwing money, like, just at advertising. They're like, they know what they're doing. Like, if they're giving me, you know, 150 bucks, they're making probably 500 bucks on. On average on that transaction. So, like, you know. Yeah, they're sophisticated buyers.

Tell us how they're making that money on the back end though. Can you break that down for us?

Yeah. So typically like, you know, there's like any kind of membership thing, there's like an ascension ladder of like there's the entry level price and then there's like the core offer. So like first price might be $79 and then maybe a $300 offer and then might be a $2,000 offer. Then these things tend to cap out like for you know, 10 or $20,000. Like where you can go to their annual event and you can go meet, you know, the experts in person and you know, maybe they do coaching or you know, you get access to whatever you can, you know, go to like membership meetup events. And like there are people that have like been Stansmere, like Stansberry is one of the brands that I guess Porter Stansbury started a long time ago but like Stansberry alliance is like, I don't know what it costs, 10, 20 grand but like the people that like love it, like love it, love it and you know, it's kind of, you know, always becomes like, you know, a lot of membership things becomes an identity thing where it's like that's kind of partially how you identify yourself. It's like I love this content. I, you know, I believe in how these people think. I invest in how they teach and some of these things get really, really popular.

What does your funnel to these affiliate placements look like? Like what is, what are the highest volume placements? I noticed you have a lot of plugs in the actual signup funnel for MarketBeat itself. But curious like what the highest volume placements and funnels look like.

Yeah, the co registration stuff kind of. Our signup funnel is a smaller and smaller part of our revenue every year. We think co reg as a category. I mean like Sparkloop is kind of a different thing but like classic Coredge is kind of maybe dying as a category. So that's just less, less valuable. Every year where we're seeing a ton of volume is on what we call our triggered campaign system. So when we send out a newsletter, if somebody opens we'll send them an ad email right away because we know they're in your inbox. Best time to send an email, those emails get like a 60% open rate or if you click on an ad or like if you click on a text or if you visit the website. Like whenever somebody like we know is active, we just send them the next offer at our queue and then we kind of sort this offer queue based off like which ones are like generating the most money in the last seven days. So like, any given time we have like 200 emails in our, what we call our triggered campaign system. And then they get sorted by performance. Like, we know like, you know, today this ad from Porter Co. Is doing it best. So somebody, you know, gets our article, they, they open it and we send them that ad. It's like the next one in the queue and there's a ton of volume there and we make a ton of money this week. If everybody's getting different offers, you get really good information on which ones are performing the best right now and then you can focus on the offers that are, that are doing great.

And in this trigger campaign, when I open one of Market's email and then I get a trigger email, does that trigger email come from, like, is the send name MarketBeat or is the send name the advertiser for that or does it vary? Like, is there any best practices you found about who that email comes from or the branding around that trigger email?

Yeah, it varies a lot. Sometimes it's like from MarketBeat, sometimes it's from like the advertiser name and market beat. Sometimes it might just be like the name of the expert. Like Porter stands very via MarketBeat. We do vary it a lot, I think. I don't have the data to back it up, but I think, you know, having, you know, I think when all of your emails look the same, people can become blind to them. So if you vary them, I think that tends to be a better way to go.

And from a copy perspective, like, I'm sure you've done tons and tons of testing and experimentation on what's going to convert in the inbox. Like, what are some frameworks or lessons that you've learned in converting to these affiliate offers via these email campaigns?

Yeah, you know, generally the trend is always, and it's always been this way, but like, our data has really shown it in the last couple of years is that, you know, email from people tends to do better, shorter subject lines tend to do better and then really just kind of, it's kind of the standard Aida attention, interest, desire, action formula of like, you know, you want to write something that's interesting and then you want to, you know, create a desire and get a, perform an action. Like it's, you know, it's not, not, not rocket science. And you know, more and more like, what's working are these like really short kind of teaser emails where it's maybe five, six sentences of text and then like click here to Learn more link. Like those tend to have done really well lately.

Are you getting, do you have an in house copywriter or are you getting some copy and creative from the advertiser for these trigger emails?

Yeah, typically they provide the copy so like they will all employ copywriters and then they'll give us a bunch of different copy to test and then we'll like after, you know, a few days, like we'll turn off the copy that isn't performing well then leave the copy on that's performing well. And you know, every month they tend to get swapped out with something new just so that you're not getting the same emails over and over again.

Any other types of. Or go ahead, I want to interrupt you but if there's any other types of email campaigns that drive a lot of revenue that'd be interesting to hear about too. So outside of the trigger campaigns.

Yeah, I mean we do what we're doing more and more is like kind of our main emails to our list or just content emails of like a new story that our writer, one of our writers wrote about some stock. Like, like we had an Nvidia, like Nvidia has been super hot the last year. So we write about it often. We might send out like a stock analysis on Nvidia that has some ads in it by itself. But then when you open it it gets, you know there's a trigger that gets triggered too. I mean that's where most of the money is right now. Oh the other interesting thing with our triggered system is like if they're on our SMS list we will also trigger an sms. If they signed up for browser notifications, we'll trigger a browser notification and then if they're on our website we'll trigger a pop up on their next page view. So you can really kind of when you know somebody's paying attention, you can make sure they get the message by sending the message in more than one different channel at the same time.

Wow. What do you use for this tool? So you mentioned like for your email provider. It's, it's a lot of custom stuff in SendGrid is what it's built on. What about what do you use from sms and is there any tool that you use for like this pop up and like integrating all this stuff together.

Any software for this? Yeah, that's all custom code. We use Twilio for sms. We have a short code. Super happy with Twilio. It's expensive but I think with that stuff you get what you pay for. Um, but yeah, I Mean it's, we've been building on this ad server system we have for the last 12 years and have just made it better and better. And like I could never sell it as a product because it's all tailored for us. But somebody should go build that product.

If you ever sell us, let us know. If you're sell as a product, let us know. I think that'll be really cool. SMS messages, what do those look like?

Well, before we get to that, there is a company called Inbox Mailers that does something kind of like what we do at triggered campaigns. So like if somebody wants an out of the box solution, it's run by a company called Beatmark, but it does something very similar and it's a product that you can go buy.

That's good to know.

Thank you.

What does the SMS copy look like for these trigger offers?

I mean it's kind of like any email subject line. Yeah, I mean it's basically the subject by an email. Same kind of stuff. Like you know, it's either like 10 best stocks by now, like you're not going to believe what Biden's going to do, the stock market, you're not going to believe what Biden, you know, Trump's going to do, the stock market. Anything that is kind of relevant. And then we think somebody would get to click that. You know they are really just kind of H1 tags or titles. They're not like, like conversational.

Okay. Yeah. So teasers that are going to be able to click and go to the offer and then watch the video, read the sales message on that page.

Yeah, but then like, I mean it's not just ads. Like people can get SMS alerts for us. So like if you text it's a 68285 like that's our short code. Like people sign up for that. Like you can like, like reply to us and say follow, follow Apple stock and you get alerts about Apple or follow Microsoft and you know, get, get news alerts about this company. So a lot of people really like those.

Do you know how many emails you're sending? Pretty on average maybe even without the trigger or with the trigger. What does that look like for you?

It's a lot. I probably don't want to say it on a podcast.

Oh good. Let's see here. What else would be cool to cover. I'm so glad we got in the weeds. I know this is not super exciting to the average person but I think someone is doing, doing this at a high level is going to love this.

I I do have a question I guess and this, this might pertain to, to a large portion of the audience as well. You put out a tweet earlier I think today actually saying the ultimate downfall of the new generation of newsletter operators will be that they are optimizing for the wrong things. List size, opens, clicks, they're the wrong metrics. The only metric your email list should optimize for is sales. And yeah, I think that's something that Matt and I have, have spoken a lot about as well. Would love to get kind of an expanded take on that. Like I know you've, you've obviously been in the email business for a lot longer than, than most that are, that are operating today. Yeah, I would just love your thoughts on that.

Yeah. So a lot of the big name newsletters that are popular right now, you know they all monetize with ads, right. They're, they're selling brand deals for know their newsletter and ultimately if you are that brand buying that ad, like it only makes sense for you to keep doing it if somebody is like ultimately buying something from you at the end of the day. And if you, you're buying these ads and you're not getting anything from it, like ultimately you're going to stop buying them. And I, I think like there's just a lot of money that's been flowing into the newsletter space. There's still a lot of VC funded companies that are sitting on some cash and maybe they're you know, not playing super tight on where they're spending their advertising revenue. And I don't know if it's me being a pessimist but I don't say the word bubble but it feels like people are playing unsustainably high rates for these ads and for signups to places like Sparkloop. Yeah, I feel, I don't say I'd say it's bubble but it feels very bubbly to me. And like you know, if, if you're like paying a dollar or two for a sign up on Facebook ads or, or TikTok, like is that really worth $50 CPM to an advertiser? Like for real? Like I just not sure that I buy that because for like the like great audiences are really expensive to acquire and if you're not paying anything for them, they're probably not a great audience.

For newsletter operators that like that might resonate with. Do you have advice for better optimizing for metrics? I mean how would you, if you're somebody who's been building a list, maybe you say You've got a list of like 10,000 people. Maybe you've got a list of like 5,000 people. Like, how can you set yourself apart and not become part of this, you know, whether it's a bubble or not, this, this big kind of trend towards the wrong metrics.

Yeah, you know, I think it's a lot about how you build your list. So like if you're going to buy Facebook ads like US Canada only 21 plus and then you know somebody that's in your interest segment. So that way you know, like they are like an adult in a developed country that can actually buy a product. So like definitely do that for sure, you know. And then like, I think it's probably smart. Like, like if you can get the brand ads, like go for it. Like I'd love to get a $50cpm from some big brand, but when those aren't available and like nobody has 100% fail, like go promote some affiliate offers and see if you actually generate transactions. Like if you can, like, I don't know, obviously it'll depend on what category you're in. But like if you can send out an Amazon link and like nobody buys anything like from it. Like how much value really is there with your list? And there was a tweet, you know, last week or two weeks ago where like somebody's like, it was like a beehive list and Morning Brew offered to like sponsor the list for, you know, a dollar amount. And you know that the argument was like, oh, I would never take this offer. It's thousand dollars from Morning Brew because like my, my newsletter is worth way more than that. It's like, like really, is it though? Like maybe it's not actually worth it. Like, you know, if, if I'm morning boo. Like I can only pay a certain dollar amount for subscriber that's going to buy something. Like, you know, they're probably, you know, paying, you know, offering you the right number. It's just maybe you think your audience is more valuable than it actually is.

There's a lot of that thought process by people who think they're like too good for certain advertisers when they really just need to fill inventory. When we talk to high level operators, they're just about filling inventory, generating revenue, not worried about all this other stuff. Matt, tell us. Like if we're looking for affiliate, this is basic. But if we're looking for affiliate offers, and it depends on the niche, of course, where would people find stuff like that if they have a small audience?

Yeah, you know, ClickBank is kind of the old standard one. They've gotten a lot more legit in the last several years. There's a bunch of them. Like there's Flex offers, there's Commission Junction, you know, there's a whole bunch of them out there, you know, do the Amazon affiliate program. But I mean really the way that I would think about it is like, okay, who is my audience? Like what's demographic, how old are they, what gender are they, what are their interests, what products, you know, are they likely to buy? And then like Google, like well my audience is like women and they're like 30. And like maybe they're interested in hair care products and like okay, what's a good one? And like go find an affiliate program for that based off your demo and like try it out.

Are there any in the finance space, Are there any affiliate networks in the finance space that are worth looking at or is it all like custom deals that are one on one relationships?

Yeah, I mean there are a few. They tend to be very relationship based. Strike Point out of San Diego is one Strike Point Media Investing Media Solutions out of Chicago. Like go ahead, like if you got 50,000 subscribers in the investing space, like go get either of them up, like they'll be happy to work with you.

Do you, what do you think about, and this is again from the beginner perspective, monetizing with advertising, whether it's CPA or flat fee versus selling your own product, like a subscription, like you have with Market Beat all access. How do you think about that and how should younger operators think about sponsorships versus owned products or both?

I kind of, you know, the big thing to think about that is like how often does somebody really want to hear about your product? Like if you only have one product to sell, like do people really want to hear about it? You know, every, every time you email them? I think the answer is no. So I think you want a mix of like your own products and probably more than one. But then you know, a mix of, you know, advertising stuff too. Mostly because people just, they don't want to hear about your thing all, you know, every time you email them, right? Maybe they want to hear about something else because there's like, as you email about any offer more and more like there's diminishing returns to it. So I think you just want to.

Mix and what, what have you had success with? So you have the membership or the subscription all access, what type of features are in that? And then are there any other own products that you've had success with. I know the main thing is advertising, but what does it look like for you?

Yeah, we used to have tiers, so we used to have a premium newsletter called Market Daily Premium. And then we had a Software thing called RatingsDB. And then like we had kind of a, you know, markbeat. All access was like those two things combined and for our audience it just kind of got confusing. And then we, for a while we were good, better, best. And now we are like free or paid and that's it. And that's really reduced to confusion with our audience. What you get with it, you can to the landing page and check it out, but you get access to a bunch of tools and stock list and premium content. You get our premium newsletter. There's a whole bunch of stuff you get along with it. Like you know, websites, ad free, you get like better customer support. You know, just a bunch of stuff.

I know you mentioned a little earlier. Could you just repeat how many, how many premium subscribers or all access subscribers there are currently?

Yeah, we're about 13,000 right now.

15,000.

And the price point seems to vary depending on what's. What you got going on. But what's like the average price point is it 99 bucks? 200.

That's probably about 200 bucks a year.

And what type of for these types of subscriptions, what type of price point do you think people should, should price their subscription at? Whether it's a paid newsletter or. I know this is a lot different than, than the average pays newsletter, but what type of price point should people think about?

Yeah, I think it's going to vary depending on industry. And I think the way to, to figure that out is just one see what other people in your category are selling them for. I think the way to do it is to have your list price a little bit higher and then discount. Like it's much easier to lower a price at this price. So like if you think the sweet spot is $150 a year, maybe you start at 300 and maybe everybody gets the $150 a year deal. Like for the most part. You know, like people love like time limited discounts are like a great way to get people over at the finish line to buy. And like I wish it wasn't that way. And you know, it feels kind of like not shady but like man, I wish I didn't have to do that. But like to get people over the finish line to buy, like you need to give them a reason to do it today.

That makes sense. And I've seen a Lot of people have these kind of recurring discounts that go on indefinitely essentially, like the Motley Fool. Have one, has one all the time. So it's pretty normal.

So Motley fool spends 40 million bucks a year on ads. They know what they're doing. That's a great.

That's one I want to learn more about too. And again, there's not a lot of resources out there. Any fun facts about the Motley fool that you can share that come to mind?

Yeah, I mean they were MarketBeat before MarketBeat was MarketBeat. Like they've been around since 80s or 90s and I don't know, like they've done a really good job of like they kind of have their core kind of stock picking, stock idea service, but then they've done a good job of kind of building that ascension ladder where like you can hire a full financial advisor or maybe if you're younger and you're not quite ready to sign up for the service yet. Like they have what they call the Ascent, where it's. That's kind of their portal for credit cards and savings accounts. And they've done a good job of diversifying and like having something for everybody. And I really appreciate that about them.

Yeah, they're a great example of like a value ladder. Even if you look at like their main website, you can see like the, you know, three main offers and there's many more like you talked about. That's really cool. I got one kind of out of the box question for you. I've talked to a couple people that know you somewhat well and they just kind of use kind of like a growth hacker, someone who kind of can break and bend marketing channels. Are there any fun examples in the past or recently where you've found a arbitrage opportunity or growth hack that worked to push the channel to its limits?

So did our mutual friend Perrin tell you about our Google News thing?

He didn't tell me any details. He just mentioned kind of channel breaker.

So about 10 years ago we were like one third of the search results in Google Finance. That is a lot of fun.

That's a big percentage.

So in 2010, we kind of pioneered the idea of data driven financial content where we took kind of a template and use structured financial data to create an article. So like when a company announces their quarterly earnings, for example, like there's a ton of ton of ton of data and you can just kind of use a fill in a blank thing of like Microsoft announced their earnings today, the Analyst forecast was 40% per share and then you fill in $0.40. The actual number was this number and you know, they beat it by this number. Then you know, we had this, you know, big elaborate way to generate these articles so we could do hundreds of them per day. And then we did it on a bunch of different financial sites and then it get picked up in like Google Finance and Yahoo Finance and MSN Money.

And.

You know, got a ton of traffic from those. And that's, I mean that's really how we built initial built the list initially was like getting a ton of traffic from kind of the finance vertical search engines onto the website. You know, there'd be an article about Microsoft and then a pop up would show up like say, hey, do you want Microsoft News sent to your inbox every day? Type in your email and we'll send it to you. And like that worked great forever.

That's cool. Do you have any idea of like at the peak what type of traffic you were getting from these, these articles?

Yeah, it was probably 150,000 hits a day from it.

Wow, that's huge.

Especially how high intent that traffic is. You know, it's not the average.

Yeah. And like we still run websites that have this content. Like if you go to americanbankingnews.com, you can see some of them in action and like you know they're. For a while Google had really clamped down on that kind of content and like, you know, they probably don't want it anymore, which is fine. But it still gets some traffic from Bing and some other places. So we kind of keep them up and keep the thing rolling along.

That leads to one more question on that is are there any opportunities you see now, like underpriced attention that you see now that people should look out for? It's a tough question.

Maybe Twitter ads. But my whole thing is like I just want to get really good at knowing the ROI on, you know, the leads or signups we're buying so that I can pay more than anybody else can pay. Like I'm not looking for cheap leads. I'm looking to maximize revenue so that I can pay more and I'll bid everybody.

That is the smart way to do it. Dan Kennedy quote, whoever can pay the most to acquire a customer wins. Any other stuff that we should ask you, Matt, or stuff that you want to talk to newsletter operators about?

Yeah, I did write a book about email marketing if you want to check it out. It's email marketing demystified on Amazon. My emailmarketingbook.com I will make a whopping 99 cents if you buy it. So that's me cashing in.

I will check that out. I mean, it's on my list to read. And you know this stuff better than anybody out there, so I'm excited to check that out. Where can people find you on social or like website stuff like that when they want to learn more about you and MarketBeat? Where do they go?

Yeah, I'm really active on Twitter. It's @MattPulsen SD. It's my Twitter handle. I publish quarterly kind of personal update on my website@mattpulsen.com m a t t p a u o s o n.com and then MarketBeat is just MarketBeat.com sounds good.

You're a great follow on Twitter, so I highly recommend that. Thanks for coming on, man. I appreciate it. This was really fun.

Yeah, great to great to be on here.