The Money Button That Earns MarketBeat $1M a Month (Hint: It’s Not Email)

I think that's like the biggest mistake newsletter operators make these days is that's probably where first 100k people came from.

So you went from doing 1 million a year to almost 1 million a month.

Yeah, that's fine. 80% of the revenue that we make comes from subscribers that came through.

Everyone that runs paid ads needs to listen to that again.

Anybody can go start a beehive list and get some subscribers. It's going to be tough to just be an email list. Are you willing to do stuff that other people aren't willing to do? SMS makes us a lot of money. It's about a third of our revenue is sms.

A third of all your revenue is sms?

Yeah. It's crazy. When I look at metrics though, I think it really boils down to like two numbers. It's how much money did we make today? And then.

Welcome back to the Growth in Reverse podcast. Today we have a very special guest named Matt Paulson who started MarketBeat over a decade ago, probably close to two decades ago, and we are very excited to have him on the show. So Matt, thanks for coming on the show.

Yeah, it's weird to like be the old guy in the room now because I was always the young entrepreneur and now I'm 40 and got a bunch of 20 and 30 year olds starting newsletters and it's like crap, I'm the old guy now.

Oh, we just look young, don't worry. But yeah, I guess just to kick us off, do you want to give like a quick background story of like how market be got started way back when? Yeah. Where it is now?

Yeah. So I've been making money on the Internet since I was a Kid in the 90s, long before Google AdSense was the thing, even before WordPress existed. Like I had a little website on GeoCities and then another web hosting company called Hypermart I think had like an ad network on there that no longer exists and I was making like 2550 bucks a month from it. So as a kid in middle school in the 90s, that was pretty sweet Gig kind of picked it up again in college. Needed money to pay tuition and job opportunities were McDonald's gas station or grocery store in my small university town and thought, you know, there's got to be a better way to make money. So I was doing like freelance writing on the Internet. I found jobs like on the pro blogger job board that would pay like 10 to $15 an article, which I'd much rather do that than make fries at McDonald's for 6.75 an hour. So I did that and then that kind of turned into a personal finance blog. Cause I was like really into Dave Ramsey at the time and trying to graduate from college debt free, which I did 2009, like during kind of great recession time, I pivoted more towards kind of investing content because, like, you could write about Citibank or Wells Fargo or any of the big banks and like, you just get a ton of traffic on your articles, like all the time. Like all day, every day. Washington Mutual got out of business with Kobe, had got out of business. And everyone was like, what's the new next shooter job? You could write about Citibank and get thousands of people to read a story, like every day. It was awesome. So did that. Then I kind of stuck with the investing content for a while. Got the MarketBeat name in 2015. And that's kind of probably about the time we got the current business model of likes, the MarketBeat subscription product plus advertising. And then the business really blew up during COVID when everybody was at home. The government was giving people free money to do whatever with. Couldn't go to the casino to gamble. Sports betting wasn't really a thing yet. So people are like gambling in the stock market. This is like the whole GameStop, AMC kind of mania that happened in 21. Our website was getting a million hits a day when that was going on. And like have like never returned to that high in terms of traffic. But it was like the best year ever. 21 was.

I mean, we've.

We've since surpassed that with revenue. But now we're kind of growing up as a company, kind of mid eight figures in revenue. We have 20 employees. We've got like an actual legit office. And. But for the first 10 years, we just kind of me and a couple of helpers kind of messing around. But, you know, today we're a diversified media company. Our niche is kind of stock market content, but YouTube channel, email, SMS, web push. Any channels that we think makes sense to be on, we'll be on. We've dabbled with direct mail even. But we're just trying to build the biggest audience around investing in the stock market and then monetizing that. And that's worked pretty well for us. Wow, that's awesome.

How many email subscribers are you at right now?

So that's a hard question. So in our database, it really is.

Yeah.

So in our database, there's 17 million unique addresses. 6 million of them are currently subscribed, and 3 million of them have opened in the last 90 days.

Okay.

Like, the, the subscriber count would be bigger, but we, like, just kick people off the list when they don't open for a while. So that's awesome.

And you have this. More than half a million subscribers on the YouTube channel. I think you have a half million SMS subscribers as well.

So, like, folks there. Yeah, really. In the last year, our two big growth levers have been one sms, because we've really pushed down on that and that's become a huge revenue stream for us. And then honestly, doing lists on Beehive has been huge for us as well. Their deliverability is so good. Since you're sending from mail.beehive.com, you don't really have to warm up a new list. And it's just such a shortcut for deliverability. They think their product is like being an email service provider. Like, no, the product is actually like your great deliverability. That's why everybody's heading over there.

Are you sending the main newsletter from Beehive?

No. So one of the things, one of my lessons in business over, over the years is if you're going to do, if you want to, like, make a big change, don't kill the geese that's laying golden eggs, just go make a new goose. So we just made a new list on Beehive and have been sending traffic over there. So when you sign up for, like, you go to our website from AdWords, like, there'll be a thing on there that says by signing up, you'll also get a free newsletter from American Market News. That's our Beehive list. So I signed people up for the main market list and up for the Beehive list, and that's worked out well for us.

Wow. And I'm curious how big your team is now.

We're at 19 currently and we've got a job open soon for number 20, so.

Wow.

But those would be like, employees. And then on top of that, like, all of our freelance writers are contractors. None of those people want jobs. Turns out, like, we've tried to give them jobs. Not interested. Like, they just want to be freelancers that write for two or three sites. So we've got another, like 10 of those.

Very cool. And so for people who don't know you mentioned a little bit. But why do people read MarketBeat? Like, what is the. What is the problem that MarketBeat and your affiliate newsletters, I guess, what's the problem they solve for their readers?

I mean, the whole business is stock ideas. Everybody's looking for, like, what's the next great stock? So we have writers and editors, analysts that kind of write about different companies and what's happening with them and why they could be interesting and like, what the down. What the risks are with them. Like, everybody's looking for the next Nvidia before everybody knows about it. Right, right. So, like, you are the media company that's writing about all the companies that could be the next Nvidia. It's easy to get attention for that.

Yeah. Yeah, no kidding.

I'm.

I guess I'm. I'm curious how you guys have grown the newsletter and monetize and I feel like your growth, especially lately, relates a lot to how you're monetizing. Right. Because you're reinvesting a lot of your revenue into growth. So can you talk to us a little bit about how you're kind of diversifying that?

Yeah, this is what I'm going to talk about, the New Media Summit. But really, your goal is to make a funnel so profitable that like, your paid kind of acquisition just kind of becomes. It gets really easy. So when somebody signs up for MarketBeat, like, they go to AdWords, they search best stocks to buy now or whatever the keyword is. Land on a landing page. Like, I'm getting your email address. I'm probably getting your phone number. I'm getting your email address from my beehive list. I'm maybe getting you for my push notifications list. So I'm not getting one opt in, I'm getting four. And then, you know, we can send content and ads to all the channels. Hopefully soon after they'll sign up for our YouTube channel as well. So if I can communicate like four or five different ways with people, it's a lot easier to break even than if I just have kind of one email subscription. And then we have a crazy funnel, like after you sign up of different offers and ads, so we can make a chunk of our ad revenue back kind of day one, and then hopefully we'll break even by kind of day 30, 30 to 45 typically. And then after the end of like 12 months, I'm looking for a row as of about three. So spend a dollar, make $3 over a year. We spent 11 million bucks on ads last year. My goal this year is 20. Trying really hard to do that, which is actually not that easy to do. But, like, you could do it, but, like, can you do it profitably? Like, is. Yeah, because, like, you don't want to, like, jump from like 5k a day on Facebook to like 20k, because that won't end well. Just like, you just kind of got to keep edging things up and hopefully like the performance sticks. Also, like, finance is a weird category. Like, you talk stock market, anything. Like, we've had a meta account got suspended, we've had our TikTok ad account get suspended. And like, it's not like a person is reviewing your account and be like, these guys are shady. It's all like algorithms saying like, ooh, this might be a stock scam, we better ban them. It's just. Yeah, so like you have to deal with that and advertise across different channels because, like, we're currently on like Google meta, Bing, TikTok, Taboola, soon to be Critio. To spend that much, you just kind of have to be everywhere. And then on top of that, there's like all the core edge networks of like, After Offers and Investing media Solutions and Sparkloop. And then they're like these proprietary, like lead share deals that we do and then we buy newsletter sponsorships and other people's newsletters. You got to do everything to deploy that much money.

Well, so you alluded to it beforehand. So after someone signs up, there are like, because I did it twice, three times today, there are like four or five offers that happen at least. How did. At least. Yeah, how did you get to the place where like, maybe you started with one and then you're like, nope, let's try another one. Let's keep going. And then you stopped at that number. Like, where do you.

It used to be more. I think we're at five pages now. I think it might have been six at once. So if somebody signs up, well, you know, we'll make two to three dollars from them. Typically, if they come like through a paid channel, that'll pay, you know, hopefully kind of half of my what they cost me on a good day. So what we do is like, we have different coedge networks. So we have After Offers, we have investing media solutions, and then we have kind of our own internal ad inventory served in a variety of different ways. And then we look at the data over the last kind of seven days of like saying, okay, what channels are performing well right now? And then we show that offer first. So it's a very kind of dynamic order of things. And that's really worked well because like, sometimes after officers will have the best inventory, like add inventory and pay the most. Sometimes it's ims, sometimes it's our own stuff. And we really, you have to take a data driven approach. To know like, okay, what's going to pay the most right now? And then show that first.

And so when you're going through these flows, like you said, these are getting shown to your, the people you're acquiring via meta, Google, those ads, those ad networks. But they're also getting showed to organic subscribers that that would come to your site organically.

Yeah, it's the same funnel regardless of how you sign up.

Okay. And one thing I noticed too, and we touched on SMS a little bit, but in you don't see this. The reason we're bringing it up is because you don't see it a lot. Where me and Chanel in the streets, we play in where people are asking for sms. You ask for email address, maybe your first name. But I noticed it was an optional field when I went to sign up for MarketBeat and then I didn't put it in. And then the very next offer in the signup flow was to just submit my phone number to get a stock tip sheet or something along those lines. And so you guys are trying really hard to get sms. Can you talk to a little bit about the value you put on phone numbers and why you're pushing so hard for those?

We are pushing hard for it and it's for a reason. It's that SMS makes us a lot of money in the last week. It's, yeah, I guess it's pretty consistent. It's about a third of our revenue is sms. So, like, to have a third of

all your revenue is sms?

Yeah, it's crazy. Wow. I mean, we have. SMS is expensive to send and there's some compliance stuff that goes along with it, but we've never been sued over TCPA stuff, so that's good. SMS is really like email was kind of 10, 15 years ago. Like before everybody was doing it, it was really easy. And you could just send an email and make money like, that's SMS today. So we'll send the same offers on email that we will on sms. We just send the subject line and then the link and that's basically it. And it works. Wow.

On sms, just like, yeah, I can

send an SMS to one of our lists and make five to $10,000.

And so are there limitations to how often and how frequently you can do that?

There are time of day limitations. Okay. Because you kind of like there's, you know, you've got four time zones to deal with and it's kind of like this 8am to kind of 9pm or not maybe 9am, 9pm Then you have to Account for time zones. So you don't want to email text before like 8am Pacific or so and you don't want to text after 8pm Eastern. So there's kind of a limited window. Some people do one text today, some people do three. It kind of depends. We have three different SMS lists now that people can sign up for in various ways.

But it gets expensive, right?

Oh yeah. Our Twilio bill is three to four hundred thousand dollars a month.

Wow, okay, that's a lot. That's like a dollar per semester.

I mean our email bill is like 60 or 70amonth. So it's just when you, when you get to be a big company, you have a big list, you end up paying a lot. But yeah, that's what it is. It's like that's the business, like a feature of the business.

Right. So would a phone number be more valuable to you than an email address?

Oh absolutely. Probably by a factor of 5 or 10.

So do you see that being. I've heard people talking more and more about it, but do you think it's a slept on strategy that not enough people are leveraging or do you think it's just that the barrier to entry is a little bit higher because of the cost?

I think both are true. Higher barrier to entry because it's more set up to do because like you have to figure out how to tie your landing page into a separate SMS kind of system. And like you need some tech skills to do that. Not everybody knows how to do that. Some people are afraid of the compliance stuff, some people are afraid of the cost. So that barrier to entry makes it like more effective.

And what are you sending in sms? Is this just like, hey, there's a new piece of content or is it like stock prices or what's going on?

So like we have a stock of the day and then I have some information about the company and then like our latest news story about it along with some ads and then like, and we'll also send out separate texts that are just ads and those make a lot of money.

That's crazy because it's so expensive. Would you recommend sending out just like, hey, here's a new piece of content or is it more like here's a landing page or a sale or you know, an ad like you're talking about?

Yeah, you probably have to be at least 50% ads otherwise like it's just not going to pay for itself. Like it's really hard to send a text to, to like a content because like whenever I send out a text to our full list. It's cost me like 2,000 bucks. So, like, you can't just send it out to a piece of content with no ads on it. Like, you have to figure out, like, figure out how to at least break even on that. That's. That send cost.

How much of your traffic? Not traffic, sorry. What is your kind of breakdown for paid subscribers versus organic subscribers?

So subscribe. Like subscribers that came from paid versus organic? Yeah, I don't know the count, but the last time I checked, like, 80% of the revenue that we make comes from subscribers that came through paid channels.

Okay.

So like 10 years ago, we would have been primarily organic. And like, that's a great way to build a 5 or 10 million dollars. Your business. If you want to scale beyond that, like, you're looking at just doing a whole bunch of paid.

Yeah, okay. And since a majority of your subscribers are coming from paid, it would make sense, I guess, that that 80, 80, 20 kind of rule would come into play that 80% of the revenue would come from. From paid channels.

Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. When you look at ROI, like, you talked about ROAs, how often are you evaluating, like, hey, these channels are not driving us ROI or roas anymore.

Yeah. So the way we do it is we break every paid channel down into like, monthly acquisition cohorts of, like, say for everybody that came from AdWords that signed up in November, I spent X dollars to acquire them, and I've made Y dollars on them. And then I'll look back at the past monthly cohorts and kind of see how the cohort is aging over time and, you know, hoping that, you know, you'll break even kind of month two or month three. And then over the course of 12 months, like, you know, getting your three to one row as. But we do that for every channel every month, multiple times a month. We're always looking at the data. Like, we recently rebooted our Google AdWords strategy because we were getting a lot of subscribers that were like three to four bucks. So obviously, like, good pricing, but the buy, like the, the rate at which they were buying products from our advertisers was not high enough. And what we ultimately figured out is, like, we were running on like, some lower quality websites and like, no, we need to, like, reboot this. And now we're advertising on like, Yahoo and Fox News and CNN and just more. More legit sites. So we're paying probably twice as much per subscriber that we used to be, but we're getting far more buyers from far fewer people.

Yeah, I think everyone that runs paid ads needs to listen to that again because so many people look at just like the cost per subscriber and that is not the end all be all. It's like that's just going to raise up your vanity metric more and make you have a less profitable business.

Yeah, I think that's like the biggest mistake newsletter operators make these days is like you're optimizing for cheap leads but then you end up getting very low quality leads. My reporting cost per lead is not a metric at all. It's really what did I spend on that cohort versus what did I make?

Yeah, I like that reframe and like

yeah, obviously if I'm paying 30 bucks a lead it's never going to work. But like I have leads I'm paying 15 bucks a lead for and it's profitable.

And your business is like almost, I would say like 90% affiliate sponsors, the lead gen type of deals. Right. You have your own product. But I've heard you say it's like it's only making around 3 million a year. So it's like a very small piece of the pie.

Yeah, it turns out like the stock research software business is not great a great business because it's like how many people are like want to research stocks like every month. It's just not that many people. Sometimes people like really get into the market and want to go buy stocks. But it's not like people, most people have just like extra money sitting around to like go research new companies and buy them every month. So just it's a pretty limited market and there's a lot of competitive tools. It's really more on the kind of financial publishing side where the opportunity is, but also like investor relations campaigns. We run those, you know, different fintech companies, credit card offers, you name it finance related, we've ran it and if it works, we keep running it.

Is your audience mostly like a person like myself who just be have a, you know, Robinhood account looking at stocks to buy or are you more sophisticated, a more sophisticated buyer, even somebody who's working in the finance industry?

Yeah, there is a mix. I would say our audience is primarily retail investors tends to skew a little bit older. The people that like really only started investing during COVID It's almost like an entirely different cohort of people. Like they're looking more like what stock did Nancy Pelosi buy versus fundamentals. Our crowd tends to be more fundamental based and less like looking for signals based off what other People are doing like there's a company out of Chicago called Quiver Quant that I've talked to those guys every now and then. But you know, their whole thing is like what stocks are, what stocks are congress buy and like what stocks. Like what companies are going up in Google trends and really looking for more like signals like that versus like what's the company's price to earnings ratio, what's the dividend, you know, more fundamental kind of stuff.

So that's they're more like the Gamestop AMC kind of like.

Yeah, more of the YOLO crowd.

Yes, the YOLO crowd.

Yeah.

I love was fun during COVID What can you say?

Everyone was bored.

Yeah, no, it's great. All right. So we talked a little bit about monetization. Monetization. I'm curious, like now you have 3 to 6 million subscribers depending on what metric you're looking at. But how, how did you start out? Like how did you get Those first? Like 10,000, 100,000 email subscribers. Like take us back. Way back. Because you've been doing this for a while.

Yeah. So it was all organic. Had the original name was Analyst Ratings Network, which later became MarketBeat. But we would publish, you know, we had pages about stocks and then we would publish these automated news stories about stocks. So like company announces their quarterly earnings. We would stick the numbers into a template, publish out on our website. It would get picked up by Google News. People would go to go to the article to click through to read it and then there would be a pop up. And the cool thing about the pop up, it was like specifically geared toward the company that was like on the page. So somebody came to read an article about Tesla like or I guess Tesla wasn't the thing back then, you know, about Apple. Like then the opt in would say like, you know, do you want to be notified whenever there's new news about Apple stock? And then like to have their logo on it. And that worked really well. And it was just like an obnoxious lightbox pop up that showed up right away. People would sign up and like we got was probably where first 100k people came from.

And you were putting out just like tons of those articles like using a template. You said this was automated.

Yep, automated. It was great.

It was the best before AI and everything. This was automated. I love it.

Yeah, because I mean it was just think like Mad Libs. It's like this company announced their earnings on this date. It was this per share compared to the estimate of this per share they had revenue of this compared to the estimated revenue of this number. And like you just kind of fill

in the blanks and then the popups are also automated.

Yeah. Or yeah, I mean that's just JavaScript lightbox thing.

Yeah.

Dang, that's awesome. And then from there, did it were. Did you continue doing organic stuff? Like was it SEO still or did you start moving into more paid ads after you hit that, that time?

You know, it wasn't really like we always kind of did paid ads. It just like the budget was never more than maybe it was like fifty to a hundred thousand dollars a month for a long time. It was really only the last two or three years that we've kind of started ramping it up. Mostly because like I didn't know how to buy ads effectively. One, we didn't have the monetization funnel like dialed in which we do now, but we went from like 1 million in kind of pre Covid a year. You know, by 23 we're doing 5 million. Last year we did almost 12 million in ads. And this year I'm hoping to spend 20.

Right, so you went from doing 1 million a year to almost 1 million a month.

Yeah, that's fine. But like it sounds awesome. But like Motley fool spent $100 million in ads in 2021. So like that sounds awesome. There's like there's another mountain to climb and I'm going to go climb that mountain.

Yeah, that's pretty cool.

So you've been running this for almost two decades at this point, right?

Yeah. So I opened my Google AdSense account December 26th of 2006 for my personal finance blog. Dang company. Yeah, that's going to be cool. Day Company incorporated 2008, started doing the investing stuff 2010, got the market, rename 2015, decided to be a real company in 2019 and hire employees and get an office. So it's very much an evolution over time.

So anybody who's listening to this and is in year one and is like, I've got a great idea but this is hard. Persist and you could be, you could be. Matt's a good example of what happens when you're, when you, you see things through and you just keep going. Right.

It's the type of business that's simple to understand but very hard to do at scale. Like, I mean you heard all the places we advertise. We run 10 different lists, three different SMS list. We probably have 30 to 40 advertisers in any given month. We've got a very sophisticated ad serving system. To decide what ad to surfware and when. And like, yeah, anybody can go start a beehive list and, you know, get some subscribers and kind of send the ads that Beehive has and like, you know, you'll make money doing that. But like, to do it at scale is. It's very complicated.

Yeah, yeah, I meant in no way to diminish what you're doing. I just wanted to show that you. You're an example of what can be done. Of course. An overlay example of it.

Yeah.

On the same topic though, Matt, like, how do you, how do you stay focused for that long, like on one thing? Because I know after a couple years it has to get like very, you know, doing the same thing over and over. Like, different but similar. How do you stay focused?

I've had a lot of side projects over the years, so that's helped. Like, I started the startup ecosystem organization in our town. I had a few different kind of side businesses over the years. Had a business that helped animal shelters raise money through a software as a service thing. I have a venture capital fund on the side now. Just kind of just do it like

letting yourself play a little bit.

Yeah. Because like, if you spend, if you try to over optimize things, sometimes you end up like, if you do a test, like you need to give it room to breathe and like time to get data. If you try to like over optimize some stuff, it tends to be counterproductive. Like if you do something new, like you got to give it a week or two to like see if it's working. You need something to do in the meantime. And it's. For me, it's fun to have other stuff to do. Like my latest thing is I'm apparently now a consultant.

Yes. I saw this on Twitter. So you essentially like put up a tweet and made almost 100k in a few 100k.

And then like the people from intro.com reached out and like, hey, you should be on Intro. And I was like, okay, it sounds great. So Now I've had two intro calls. Like some guy last night at 10pm booked me for this morning. I was like, oh, okay. So I hopped on a call. I mean, I made like 1500 bucks for 30 minutes, but it was like, oh, I guess I should maybe think about how, how much I want to do that.

Yeah. Or set up some like barriers.

Well, I kind of mind doing it. Maybe like not let people book the same day. Yeah, yeah. It was a great conversation and hopefully point. I mean, it's 25 year old guy trying to start a media company hopefully pointed him in the right direction.

Are you finding through that that you're giving any like consistent advice to people?

You know, it's, it's all very different. Some people are doing fine, like financial media, but a lot of other kind of niches too. I think what a lot of like my clients have kind of missed is like what does the entire end to end picture look like of buying, buying traffic to a landing page that turns into email SMS, push email number two, YouTube and then like developing like a flywheel of content where you're sending something new every day that people are interested in. And then like what does your monetization look like on the back end? And then how do you repeat that cycle? Like, I mean that's what this whole business is like getting people at your top of your funnel. Get them on your list, send them content, send them ads, send them ads for your stuff, monetize them, take that money, reinvest in ads and just repeat that process as largely and as quickly as you can.

One big flywheel.

Yes. Yep. Wow.

Have you found anything over, I mean the last 19 or so years that has been like a huge, I don't know, like any huge mistakes you've made or any, any stumbling blocks or anything like that throughout the years?

No, I mean, I don't think so. I've only gotten sued twice and both times over dumb stuff. Nothing that was like a multi year mistake. Maybe one mistake. I had a partner for a little While that was 10% partner and my partner just wasn't as committed to the business as I was and I ended up buying them out. So like if you're going to have a partner, make sure they're as equally into it as you are. There's that, you know, I do plenty of things that don't work but like the key is to say okay, it didn't work and then like rip out whatever the thing was and move on to the next thing. We had a podcast that didn't work out and just killed it after. I think we did it for two years and like could never get more than 500 downloads an episode. Like, okay, that's enough of that, let's get rid of it. So like being, being willing to like not give, like just murder your sacred cows and move on to the next thing of like, well we used to do that but not anymore.

What about the MarketBeat YouTube channel? Yeah, talk to us a little bit about that because it's nearly 600, 000 subscribers. And you guys publish content just about every weekday. If not every weekday. What's the, what's the goal of the channel? Like what's. What's driving that?

Yeah. So we're at 575,000 subscribers now, which is awesome.

Yeah, that's great.

We hired a gal who was like the anchor of the local news to run. It turns out when you tell people, tell a mom who's got a couple kids, hey, do you want to not work at 10pm at night? Like pretty easy sell. So we hired Bridget from the local news and she runs her channel and we're building out a studio for her. It is profitable. Not like compared to MarketBeat, not huge. But you know, it's maybe a million dollar, your business right now and like want to keep growing that really just wanted to try like, that was like kind of got bored. Wanted to try something new. It's like, let's try YouTube channel. Here we are.

Is it profitable through like not. Probably not YouTube ads, but is it like email again? Email. Going through the flywheel of that and you're just being able to say like, hey, they came from YouTube.

Yeah, it's a mix of things. So it's like one Adsense on YouTube. But we've also experimented with promoting some of our Advertisers offers on YouTube directly. Like that's worked. You know, we're always trying to drive leads back into our main funnel and those tend to be pretty valuable leads when they come from YouTube. As many people as we can get to like go download a free report and get into our funnel. Like we want to have that happen. We've had some sponsored videos where like small public companies will pay us $7,500 to be featured in a video. Some stuff like that. So we're still kind of in the figure it out phase. We've also tried some of the more traditional YouTube ads. Somebody sent us a rowing machine and Bridget did a video on the rowing machine and like that. We got a free rowing machine for a gym out of it. So that was cool. Just we're still trying to figure it out. It's going well, but.

Okay, so YouTube is working. Are you looking at your organic sources of email and SMS subscribers? Like what is the most valuable channel at this point?

Like on a per lead basis?

Yeah, like, I guess. I don't know. Yeah,

like for paid it would be like the newsletter sponsorships we buy in other newsletters. Like they tend to be the most expensive per lead, but also the highest per user on the organic Side, I probably say it's are you people that come from YouTube, they tend to be pretty high revenue per user.

Are you doing much another in social media as part of growth anywhere else, like organic? Like you have your Twitter account of course, which, which will drive a bit of readership, but are you guys doing anything else with like market beat the brand on like LinkedIn or Threads, Instagram, you know, any other channels like that?

Yeah, we've tried that a few times over the year and we just never got a lot of traction with it. Obviously there are like accounts on Twitter that are very market focused and I just don't think they make any money. But yeah, it's just never worked for us. I've never like never been able to figure it out. So maybe somebody probably has, but not me.

Yeah, it's different for every business, so that works.

We really half ass our social media efforts.

Well, you whole ass the other stuff though. So it's.

Yeah, like, yeah, but, but I mean I've been trying Twitter from Arcabee for 15 years and like. Yeah, never quite figured it out. Like one of the gals in the office is posting memes to our Twitter account now and it's grown a little bit, but we don't make any money from it. Right, right.

And then you just use it as a place to just chat, like, I don't know, build a kind of a. I want to use the term personal brand, but kind of as the face of the company that sort of.

Yeah, like the MarketBee Twitter account has like 18,000 followers and it doesn't get a lot of engagement. Twitter is just kind of my. My personal like where I like to post stupid stuff.

So. Yeah,

and also apparently where I get consulting clients from.

But yeah, that's right. Where you can bucks daily making calls. Yeah, yeah, it's great.

You keep. So when we asked you a couple questions, I noticed you keep looking at like your thing. Do you have like a dashboard that shows you like daily like acquisition costs, like everything?

Yeah, I've got got numbers for everything. I've got it on my phone. It's like a mobile phone.

Is that just like a custom thing you built out?

Yep, it's.

Yeah, it's.

Yeah, it's got all the subscriber data from today, it's got revenue data from today, open rates, all that kind of stuff. When I look at metrics though, I think it really boils down to like two numbers. It's one, how much money did we make today? And then what was my email open rate? Deliverability is, like, so much of a challenge these days, especially when you're emailing millions of people. Hard to do. So we're constantly monitoring that and trying to optimize it. And really, I just want to keep my kind of global open rate above about 40%. And I know if I'm doing that, I'm getting pretty good deliverability.

Chanel, when we were talking before you hopped on, Matt, we both heard you mention about that deliverability challenge when you have over a million subscribers. And so you guys decided to start a couple other newsletters. Can you talk to us a little bit about that? Like, how did you decide what to create? How did you, like, segment those subscribers? Like, what. What did that process look like?

So I don't know what it is, but, like, email lists tend to melt, like, after about a million people. It's like they only get above a certain size. And then, because then you're like emailing so many people at once, your deliverability becomes harder. You get higher unsubscribe rates. It's harder to get. I don't know. You know, we have 6 million subscribers. I think our biggest one is maybe like 2 million. And it's really hard to maintain that. So my thought is just go make another one. And that tends. That's worked pretty well for us. You know, we have kind of four. Four main lists. We've got two lists on Beehive. We've got some lists with partners where we provide the content, they provide the leads. I think it totals out like 11, 12, 13, something like that. Lists.

Okay. And so the. These aren't just like MarketBeat, like MarketBeat Daily on Beehive. It's like, different branded newsletter.

Or are they the same? Yeah. So if you go to like, Early Bird publishing, we have a newsletter called the Early Bird.

Okay.

Totally different content from MarketBeat, lightly branded as MarketBeat. My thought is, like, if you're in the investing space, likely you get 50 to 100 emails a day. And like, do you want to be one of those? Or do you want to be five of those? Or do you want to be 10 of those? Cause people sign up for all sorts of different brands. And like, if you want to have mind share and market share, you need to have more than one brand.

And are all those different newsletters, like, cross promoting each other as well then?

Sometimes, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Cause like, if somebody's on MarketBeat and they're like, click on the insider trades page four or five times, like, I'm probably just gonna sign them up for the insider trades list. Cause I know they're interested in that. Yeah.

Huh.

Oh, this is so interesting. And you could. I mean, I don't know that you would, but you could hypothetically sell these, like, if you wanted, like, a little cash injection. Be like, hey, I'm gonna go sell early bird for, you know, whatever.

Not that you would, but yeah, you could. I know people. I know a guy that, like, made an email list, and then, like, he made a second email list, like, from the same leads, and then just sold the second email list.

Ooh, I don't love that.

Yeah, I don't love it either. But, yeah, it's been done. And I. I definitely don't recommend, like, I don't. I don't sell email list. I don't buy email lists. M and A is not something I'm good at and just, like, don't want to be good at. Yeah, because, like, people think you have money. Like, everybody wants you to go acquire their business for some money. That makes no sense. Right. So it's just better to say, like, no, we don't acquire other email lists.

What about people coming around looking to acquire MarketBeat?

Yeah, let's come up. Everybody gets, like, the random, like, hey, we have an acquirer for your business. And it's like, yeah, sure you do, buddy. Like, those emails, like, everybody gets those every day. And, like, get those. We've had one serious offer from one of our largest advertisers. Like, hey, you should keep being MarketBeat, but you should do it under umbrella or our umbrella. And thought pretty hard about that. And I ultimately said, nah, I don't. I don't want to do that. Like, I like what I'm doing.

Yeah.

Like, I don't. I don't want a boss. I don't want to be part of some bigger company where I've got to fly out to the coast every month for meetings. Just, like, no interest in that. Right.

I don't blame you.

Do you think you'd ever sell or do you want to do this for the next 20 or so years?

No. I will run this business until the day that I'm dead. I don't want to do anything else. I love this business. I love the people that work there. Makes great money. I'm not bored of it at all. There's always something fun and new to do. Plenty of flexibility with it. So, like, it is. It's my baby and will be until.

That's awesome. I love to hear that. Because some people, you know, they get so burned out and they just like run themselves into the ground and then they feel like they have to sell. So I'm glad you're not in that space.

Yeah. And I don't, I never really understood that because like if it's your business and you built it, you get burned out from it. It's kind of like your fault that you built a business that burned you out. Like, if you like there's stuff that I don't do in MarketBeat. Like, you can't call MarketBeat and talk to somebody because like, I don't, like, we don't want that. Like. Right. So we build constraints around the business that like, there's just certain things we won't do because we don't want to deal with it. We've been encouraged. Like, you should go be a financial publishing company and make these personality driven newsletters that cost 200 bucks a year. Yeah, I don't want to do that. Like, just not, not interesting to me. Like, no, thank you.

Have you always been like, been like this? I feel like you're very level headed. You're very, like, you have good boundaries. I'm just curious where that came from.

Yeah, I don't know, like, not to

make this like a therapy session or anything. I'm just curious.

You know, I've got, it's admirable. I've got small children at home that want dad to be at home in the evenings. My kid doesn't want me to work on Saturdays. She wants me to go to Target and go to the science museum. And so I'm kind of constrained like in ways of like, yeah, I can work 8 to 5 and I can maybe work Saturday mornings before the kids get up. But like I don't want to work 60, 70 hours a week anymore. Like I don't need to. Yeah.

And you've kept the business pretty close to your roots too, right? Like you haven't uprooted everything and moved to like New York City or a big town somewhere. Like you're, where are you based again, Matt?

Sioux Falls, South Dakota. My current office in our, the fancy new office building is like maybe 2,000ft away from my original office. Ten years ago, first office was just like a single office for me that was like 12 by 12. So we're like, I can see my old office out our window. Like we haven't gone far.

I know we have like 10 minutes left, but I'm just curious how you think about the future of newsletters. Do you think it's going to be more SMS driven? Do you Think it's going to be more like holistic. Don't just have an email list, you should have YouTube and Instagram. Instagram and all those things or how do you think about it?

Yeah, I do think companies have to be multi channel these days. I think it's going to be tough to just be an email list. I think you have to be think of yourself as a media company where it's really not even hub and spoke but more of a network where you have all your channels point to each other. Like your email points to your Instagram, which points to your YouTube which points to your SMS. Like every channel should point to every other channel and kind of be a web or network because people will find you on all the like any place that has discoverability and then like from the place they land you can point them to all your other stuff and you know, somebody might unsubscribe from your email but they may still subscribe to you on YouTube and I think there's the way it is and needs to be moving forward.

Makes a CRM tool very hard to find a good one though when you have so many channels.

Well I think you don't need. It's going to be multiple tools. Like it's okay if like your email list and your SMS list are not connected to each other. Like it's really not that big of a deal. Like our web push stuff is not connected to our email and our SMS at all. And like sometimes we can figure, sometimes we can tie like a web push user to like a marketbeat user but most of the time not. But all the tools are out there now. Like you don't need to go build anything. Like you can use Beehive, you could use whatever for sms. Other financial publishing people use something called Lime Cellular.

For some reason I'm always just someone who loves to see like the full picture and it's not always possible. So.

Yeah, yeah.

How do you, how do you correlate that? Sorry Dylan, how do you correlate that with like, like sponsors and ads, Ad deals. So like you know you have so many email subscribers, you have some push notification people. Most of them are probably pretty similar. Like you probably have a lot of overlap. Like how does that work in your, in the way you structure deals with them?

Mo most of our stuff is performance based where you know we're getting a fee per sale. So when that's the case people don't really care where the person comes from. Right. When it's a CPC deal sometimes they might say email only. SMS only. Like there's kind of a hierarchy of like click value. Like people think email clicks are the most valuable, SMS is the second most valuable. Web clicks and push clicks are less valuable. So they may only want like email clicks or SMS clicks and that's fine. Sometimes we do flat fee deals for certain types of advertisers. It all just kind of depends. There are kind of benchmarks. Like our CPC traffic tends to be like 450 click and then we've got some really good anti bot kind of stuff to make sure they're real clicks. But the performance stuff is probably kind of a bread and butter. There's no caps to it. Like they'll take as many customers as you can give them. It's all performance based. So they don't care where you run. They just want to make sure they approve your copy or use their copy. So that way you're not like saying, you know, this expert's gonna make you 10,000% overnight.

Yeah. Especially in your field in the finance space. Yeah, it's gonna be tough.

I was gonna ask you before I forgot it. In terms of sponsorships because that's such a huge part of your, your business. How are, how are you handling outbound or inbound? Like how much of your business, I guess with sponsorships is, you know, people just coming to you saying, hey, we want, we wanna partner with you, we wanna do work with you or how much of it is like you have a team going out and trying to find new sponsors and part.

Yeah, we do no outbound sales at all. We don't do any outreach to anybody. It's typically all like media buyers talking to each other and like, hey, you should go talk to MarketBeat. We have, according to my list this month we have 45 kind of unique companies advertising. The smallest is maybe like 5,000 this month and the largest is $270,000. We've done probably, you know, four and a half million this month. We'll probably end north of 5 in ads.

And that's just no outbound salespeople going to. No, you know, they have to pay.

Yeah. No, they come to us. Yeah. And it tends to be the same ones every month. So like in any given month we might be onboarding one new advertiser and like if their stuff doesn't perform well, like we won't run it and we'll just kind of say like, sorry, like your stuff's not competitive without, with what else is out there.

And I love that you get to fire the sponsors.

Right.

Instead of the other way around.

Yeah, it's funny because where we come from it's like people like oh, oh dude, your, your newsletter. My ad got like, you know, crap for clicks. I'm not gonna rebook with you. And with you it's the other way around. It's like your stuff is not performing. We don't want to show it.

That's kind of one of the misconceptions that new advertisers have and people reach out to us and say, hey, I wanna advertise. And like our first question is like okay, what do you wanna advertise versus yeah, we'll take your money. Like people don't realize coming to us with like a checkbook is not necessarily enough to like get a get placement. It's like okay, what do you want to promote? Like what's the price points? What is it? And like it's got to be on par with the other stuff that we promote. Otherwise if we don't think it's going to get a good click through rate, we just probably won't. Won't do it.

Do you ever do flat fee insertions?

Yeah, we do. You really have to know who you're dealing with and because like it could be somebody like trying to manipulate the price of a stock that they own. We only take investor relations campaigns from three people and I've known them all for five years and I know like where they all live and all that kind of stuff. Like somebody emails us out of the blue and says hey, we want to run an ad to promote a company. We won't even respond because there's just too much risk with that.

I love how deep into the relationship side of things you are. I guess after a certain time it's just like, yeah, I know the people and I'm only working with people I know and like and sorry, that's it. Come talk to me for the next five years.

Well get on playing. Go see people. We There's a big annual event called Financial Marketing Summit in Orlando that we go to every year. Like a bunch of the finpod people are going to come to New Media Summit because I just talking it up and like we'll have dinner with people that we know and that's a lot of it. Like people will come to Sioux Falls and just come visit Sioux Falls and like hang out at our office. Like it's a very tight knit industry.

That's awesome.

It's nice to hear because you, I feel like a lot of that would be so transactional. It's Nice to hear. There's so much. There's a lot more behind that.

Yeah. I mean, the day, like, it's got to work, right? Like, most of our big advertisers, I've been probably, like, in their house or at least out to a restaurant with them. These are all people we know. I can call them on the cell phone, that kind of stuff.

I think that that speaks to a lot of the success in my mind that you're having is just that you're willing to do that and make those connections, build those relationships. So that's really cool.

So, like, that's true. Are you willing to do stuff that other people aren't willing to do?

That's right.

I love that. Well, cool. I mean, this has been awesome. I really appreciate you coming on the show. This is, like, great. Always good to connect. I feel like we've kind of interacted for a few years now, but never actually jumped on a call and a

ship's passing at night. But totally connect on. On the interview. Certainly. See you at New Media Summit a month from now.

And, yeah, we decided to hang out.

Yeah, that'll be a fun event. Yeah. Yeah.

Looking forward to that. It's gonna be fun.

Dylan will be emceeing. He'll be good.

Oh, really?

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah.

Yeah, It'll be fun.

Cool.

Well, everybody who is looking to get more and learn more from Matt should go over to his Twitter profile. We'll put the link in the description below. I think it's Matt Paulson sd.

Not anymore. Now I'm Edia King. I use the X Handles marketplace to get a new handle, and now I'm Edia King on Twitter.

Is there anywhere else we should send people?

That's probably the main place. I do publish, like, a quarterly Matt paulson newsletter@mattpulsen.com if you want to get that. It's very, very, very light for frequency. So if you want, like, five emails from me a year, like, go to mattpolson.com.

well, Matt, thanks for coming on the show and we'll talk to you next month. I guess we'll see you there.

Yeah, see you in a month,

Sam.