MarketBeat's Traffic Evolution

Congrats. Every media company lives or dies by its traffic. And MarketBeat survived because Matt learned very quickly what happens and what can go wrong when you rely on one single platform. So let's dive into the evolution of his traffic strategy.

We've kind of ridden a lot of different waves. We were— so we got hit by Google algorithm updates really early, like the first Panda update, the first Penguin updates, and really realized like, okay, we don't want to build a company that is dependent upon a big tech company to like exist. So I thought like, I need to build owned media channels where it's like, I'm not building on a Facebook group where Facebook can change the rules and then I can't reach my Facebook group or Facebook page anymore. I don't want to build an app where Apple kind of decides if I get attention in the App Store or not. So that really led me to focus initially, like it was all web traffic and like Google AdSense and like made some decent money doing that. But I thought, okay, this is, Um, you know, it's building on quicksand, like Google could change the rules any day and I'm done. So that, that made me think, okay, I need to get as many people on an email list as possible because if Google stops sending it to my website, I can, you know, send an email and tell people, hey, come to the website and check this thing out. Um, so that was kind of really the first owned media channel.

Was that you kind of pushing site traffic to the email list or what did that kind of evolution look like?

You know, people would go to an article about a stock like say Wells Fargo and then there'd be a popup on a page saying, hey, do you want news about Wells Fargo delivered to your inbox automatically? Fill out this form. And I think the next kind of evolution from there, 2016 or so, was kind of the browser notifications that you kind of do through OneSignal and companies like that. We were really the first kind of company in the finance category to implement them and first couple years, like we printed a bunch of money off them 'cause like nobody else was doing it and it hadn't gotten really annoying yet.

What does that look like? So these are the push notifications, right?

Yeah, like Google Chrome or Edge or whatever browser notifications, you know, something pops up saying, hey, do you want these? But we would send out ads on them and we would make a bunch of money doing that. I think over the course of the last 10 years, we've probably made, we've made between $5 and $10 million through those. And like, it definitely like peaked like probably through '21. And now Chrome and Edge and others make it a lot harder to like get those opt-ins. So like that category has fallen off, but like the fact that we jumped on it early, like was really helpful. From there, we kind of realized like there is like this gravitational force that limits an email list from being above a certain size. Like, you know, you get more than a million people on an email list, it's really hard to like get a million of the same email delivered to an inbox. So like your unsubscribe rates go up, your bounce rates go up, you know, you get filtered into promotions or even spam sometimes. So I thought, okay, maybe the play is to not have one email list, maybe the play is to have 5 email lists. And, you know, we did that with some other sites like the Early Bird Publishing or the Early Bird. Like that's a huge list for us now. We have dividendstocks.com, insidertrades.com, And I've tried to like make the same business 4 or 5 times in kind of slightly different angles. And that's worked pretty well for us. And then more recently, like SMS has become a huge thing for us. So like on every opt-in form, we have a phone number field now, and we just try to collect as many SMS opt-ins as we can because it makes us a lot of money.

What are we talking kind of conversion rates on the SMS side once you've got an email? Is that substantial or is it? Small number.

Well, kind of for comparison, you know, the email list is about 6 million subscribers and we have 400,000 SMS subscribers. So, you know, it's 10% maybe, but what you also find is that SMS subscribers are worth way more. It used to be the case that like you wouldn't want to put anything other than like the email address form on like your opt-in because it would like tank your opt-in rates. That's not really true anymore, at least in my experience. Like you can put a phone number field on there that's optional and not really lose anything on your conversion rates. And I think a lot of it's because like autocomplete fills your email and your phone in for you. So it just kind of happens automatically. So like that's been great for us.

Okay. And what in terms of the messaging or the delivery to SMS, obviously the open rates are super high, but what kind of content will you send out, you know, in comparison to an email?

Yeah. What you find with SMS is that you gotta be a lot more sensitive on volume. Like you probably only want to send one text a day for the most part. So typically what we'll do is we send like one content piece out a day. That's kind of the value that they get. It's kind of like maybe a stock of the day and not like we're endorsing the stock or recommending the stock, but it's like, here's an interesting company if you want to learn about it. And then like maybe later in the day we'll send out an ad for something and You know, does really well with that.

And then in terms of the YouTube organic, I saw you guys got to, I think it was 400K subs, insane, quickly. First question here is how do you kind of evaluate adding like a new traffic source or a new kind of channel in that way?

You know, a lot of it was like, we just kind of knew with like, we kind of feel like email is tapped out for us for now. It's harder to get in the inbox. SMS is regulated, so it's great, but like you could trip up a rule and just kind of be done the next day. So that would be bad. We kind of felt like we had done what we could with the web, so we, we tried a podcast and like that didn't really take off. So we thought, okay, let's try YouTube 'cause like it was great discoverability there. So we, you know, we like, we knew it worked 'cause there are other investing YouTube channels. We kind of knew what we had to do in terms of like go find talent., you know, find guests. And then like we had to point all of our other traffic at the YouTube channel to grow it. So like, you know, get people on email list to go to the YouTube channel, get people on the SMS list to go to the YouTube channel, you know, all the stuff like that. Um, so like that certainly helped from an organic perspective. Um, the other thing that we did on YouTube that really helped us grow is we took all the AdSense money we were making and just put that back into YouTube promotions to promote our own videos. Mm-hmm. Um, so they get a lot of extra discoverability that they would normally get.

And on this kind of ecosystem piece, you mentioned there you're kind of pointing traffic all over, you know, to the new channel, to different channels, etc. How do you view this kind of ecosystem of the different channels that you've got, and how do you kind of segment out the viewers or the kind of different pieces?

Yeah, I mean, we call this kind of cross-channel pollinization of, you know, we're just trying to build audiences on as many kind of owned media channels as we can.. And you know, if you get something new, like, can you get people from your other channels to sign up on that channel? Because like the more channels that somebody subscribes to you on, like the more valuable they are to you. So if you know, if somebody's on email, you want them to get to the website and sign up for browser notifications, or maybe you want to send them an email to get them to opt into SMS, or maybe they're already in SMS, you want to get them to your YouTube channel to subscribe over there, or you want them to follow you on social media. Just trying to get people to bounce, like, to all the places. And, you know, maybe they're like, I'm getting too much email from MarketBeat, but I love the YouTube channel, I'm gonna go subscribe over there. Um, it's like to get people as many places as we can.