In this interview excerpt, Matt Paulson explains why MarketBeat outperforms other financial‑media companies. He contrasts the traditional subscription‑research model—limited to $5‑10 M annual revenue and high churn (5‑8% monthly)—with MarketBeat’s decision to prioritize advertising. To support this, MarketBeat built its own technology stack: a custom CRM (leveraging SendGrid), an in‑house ad server, and a sophisticated cohort ad‑tracking system. This system records monthly spend per channel, leads generated, revenue, activation rates, and ongoing user activity, allowing the company to instantly assess the profitability of any media channel. By testing small ad spends ($25‑50 K) and measuring true ROI, MarketBeat can scale only the profitable channels and cut the ineffective ones, turning data into a “cheat code” for media buying and driving massive profit.
Chapters
I feel like this is one of the best questions kind of in this set actually, but why is MarketBeat— why does MarketBeat stand out? Why are we making so much more money than everyone else?
I, you know, there are a lot of companies like MarketBeat out there in the financial media space, or like there are the software companies, companies like TipRanks or Finviz or Stock Analysis, where their primary business is making investment research tools. That's where MarketBeat started with MarketBeat All Access and MarketBeat Daily Premium. The investment research tools business, you can get that to $5 or $10 million a year, but it's really tough to scale beyond that because these are consumer products that have pretty high churn rates, 5 to 8% a month. It's really hard to grow that because you're starting backwards every month as people churn. So those can be okay businesses, but they're hard to scale past 8 figures. What MarketBeat figured out is that we should really focus on advertising. And we had to build our own systems. Like we built our own CRM for email that's powered by SendGrid. We also built our own ad server. And then in the middle of that, we built this really sophisticated cohort ad tracking system where I know that, say, during the month of June, you know, we spent say $500,000 on Facebook and have made, let's say, you know, now we're at the end of July, we'll probably break even on that number. So for any given channel, for any given month, I know what we paid, how many leads we got, exactly how much revenue we had, what percentage of those users activated, what percentage of those are still active. So sometimes there are channels out there like certain co-registration platforms that will show you a lot of engagement metrics that like there's lots of clicks, there's lots of opens, but turns out nobody's buying anything. If you didn't have the ad system that we had, you would never know that. You would say, "This is great. These people are opening my emails. They're clicking on stuff. Everything's perfect." But you would never know that they're not buying anything. So I think MarketBeat's data game is probably the best in the industry, at least in terms of what we do. And that's kind of the magic to it. It's— I can test out any new ad platform spend. $25,000 to $50,000 on it, and then I'll know if we're making money off of it. And if it is, we just do more of it, and if it doesn't, we stop doing it. And that data is kind of a cheat code in terms of media buying and then ultimately your profitability.
