Last month was probably our best month ever. I think we did 5.2 million in advertising sales. If we do that again this month, we might hit 50 this year, which would be awesome. >> What would your answer be if someone said, "Yeah, but like advertising is so reliant on macroeconomic stability, seasonal issues." >> I would say if those are your concerns, you're probably not that good at it. >> Matt, $1.2 million in ad sales in one week. That is something that you tweeted two weeks ago. So, you got to break this down for me. How the heck did you make that happen? >> You know, we have some pretty big reach um as a starting point. Um I think today we crossed 6.4 million emo subscribers. Uh we also have a big SMS component. We have about 400,000 SMS subscribers. Our YouTube's up to like 390,000 subscribers. Um we still have probably 800,000 people that get browser notifications. Um you know, probably 500,000 people a day on our website. So, we've just got a lot of reach, a lot of inventory, and then we've been able to sell that to kind of a mix of different financial advertisers. >> Insane. So, uh tell us, uh tell you know folks who are watching or listening uh a bit more about the business. What is what is the product that you're selling? >> So, Mark Beat's a financial media business. The thing that we're selling is basically sales of your product. Uh we are an advertising business. Um you know, people look at Marketabbe and think, "Oh, there's a subscription option. You're a subscription business. You want people to sign up for marketab access." I'm like, "Yeah, we do, but it's like 15% of our revenue." Most of our revenue is advertising for financial publishers, public companies doing investor relations campaigns, regulation, a crowdfunding campaigns, sometimes fintech companies that have some new product, companies selling gold, it's kind of a a mix of all of those things. But if it's a investment type product, typically that's what we're promoting because obviously we're an investment list. >> Walk me through like what is the persona of the types of people that are in your audience or on your list or visiting your website? Is it like one main ICP or is it like multiple or or how do you look at that? >> So there's kind of two current ICPs. There's kind of the audience that's always been there which has been the 50 plus primarily male individual investor likes, you know, at retirement, near retirement, invest in individual stocks, like has their own brokerage account. kind of a hobbyist where it's, you know, they probably got money in mutual funds in their retirement account, but then they also have like their play account where they're betting on stocks and it's kind of their hobby and they want to brag to their buddy in a golf course about like, hey, I had this stock and it went way up. So, like that's kind of the historic audience and then since co there's this kind of new younger generation of traders um that kind of got in on kind of the meme stock wave of AMC, GameStop, you know, they're looking at what Nancy Pelosi is trading. You know, they're looking at a very different set of things than our older audience are. and you know they want different tools, different information. So we we try to cater to both. >> So you posted back in July that you were on track to hit 200 million in in lifetime total lifetime revenue by the end of the year. So we're we're in November now. So you've either hit that or you're really close. Curious like what is the split between uh like ad revenue, subscription revenue at this point? Like has that mix changed over the years? Like how do you balance that uh as a company? When I started the company kind of in its current form, this would have been 2010, 2011. Initially, it was entirely subscriptions and then for a while it was like 70% subscriptions, 30% advertising and that has entirely flipped in the last few years of like we've gotten really good at advertising and we haven't gotten really good at subscription side of things. What you find is there are a lot of like investment research websites that have subscription products and they all kind of cap out at like five million bucks a year in revenue because it's just such a it's such a niche product and like people aren't typically like researching stocks for you know years on end. So it's a product that I mean the churn is not super high but it's still high enough where it's you know limits the size of these businesses that you can build. Um but on the advertising side if I have 50 different things I can promote like never run out of things to talk about. So now today it's like 85% advertising, 15% subscriptions. >> So to what do you say people like that advertising is a means to an end? Like yeah, you start your media business with advertising, but then I want a subscription business or I want an events business or I want to have something that I own. Like you seem to be like, no, advertising is great. Let's keep doing that. Like like what's your perspective? >> I mean ultimately your goal is to generate net income, right? You know, do you really care where it comes from? If it comes from hosting an event or somebody clicking on an ad on your website or somebody signing up for a subscription, I would say my enduring asset is like my email list, my SMS list, the YouTube channel, all the owned media assets that we have. Like that's where the value of the company is is is in that attention. So like you could monetize it through subscription or you could monetize it by promoting stuff to your audience and I'm happy to do either of them. What would your answer be if someone said, "Yeah, but like advertising is so reliant on macroeconomic stability and other, you know, seasonal issues or changes at, you know, the advertiser pulling back." Are you do you feel like you're somewhat insulated from all those things? >> I would say if those are your concerns, you're probably not that good at it. >> I love the hot take. Let's go. Cuz like most people like when they think of advertising they think I've got a website and I've got Google AdSense on my website and you know whatever they pay me is whatever I get and like yeah that's level one but there's probably level 2 three four and five of like you know market beat has probably 30 to 50 direct ad deals every month and they're all performance-based. So um I get paid when I generate results. I don't get paid when I don't generate results. And that informs my media buying of like the advertisers I'll post back and say these are the people that bought so I know which channels um are generating like buyers that people actually buy stuff versus like say some of the co-ed platforms that send you a lot of subscribers but not a lot of customers. The mistake that a lot of people in the newsletter kind of media space these days of like I need to have a big list so I can like tell my advertisers I' I've got a big list and then they'll want to come come see me. really it's it's not like the number of subscribers and cheap CPL is what you should optimize for. It's like for my ad spend like what is the cost to generate one paid transaction like I can spend $300 to generate a transaction kind of after month one like I'm happy with that cuz I know that over time eventually like it will generate people will buy more than one thing from our advertisers. >> Okay. So we got to say more about this. So correct me if I'm wrong but do you only do performance-based deals? Are you not doing any sort of flat compensated sponsorships or like cuz I there there's a lot of creators who are just like, "Oh, that's terrifying me. I I don't know my numbers. I don't I don't I don't have the conviction that if I talk about something that X amount of people are going to purchase it." >> Um it depends on the type of advertisers. The kind of Agora, Market Wise, Financial Publishing, Publishing Financial Newsletters, those are all CPA based. So typically, you know, they have a front-end checkout price of $100 and maybe they have a back-end product that's $2,000. And for the people that are all in, they probably have a $10,000 product somewhere. And so for that $100 transaction, they'll pay me $400 right now. So like I'm very happy to get paid $400 to generate a $100 sale. Like I'll do that all day long. For the investor relations kind of u crowdfunding campaigns, those are more either flat fee or CPC based where they're paying me for a number of clicks, but I'm not necessarily going to take responsibility for like anything performance-wise on a fund raise. like then you're a broker and obviously you don't want to be doing that. >> I was reading a bit more about kind of the evolution of the company and you it seems like correct me if I'm wrong but you went from basically 2 million to 50 million annually in 10 years and I can't imagine that that was very smooth. So like walk me through kind of the two to three kind of biggest inflection points for the business things that you changed like that just seems like a stratospheric rise in in not too long a time. >> Yeah. Um before co we were maybe a5 to10 million a year business. So 2019 we made 7.7 million in revenue. 2020 we doubled and then in 2021 we almost doubled again. So we went from 7 million to 25 million in like two years. I mean we entirely rode like the COVID investing wave and uh really capitalized on that cuz when you search for GameStop short interest, GameStop GameStop short squeeze, like we were right there. Same for AMC, same for silver, all of the stocks people were talking about, we were perfectly positioned. And I mean honestly we kind of got lucky cuz we just right place right time right and 22 like the co money started slowing down people went back to work not a great year but then we've turned it around in 23 24 25 like we'll probably hit somewhere between 47 and 50 million this year depending on how the last two months of the year shake out. Um last month was probably our best month ever. I think we did 5.2 million in advertising sales. So if we do that if we do that again this month we might hit 50 this year which would be awesome. Last year was like 41. Um I think the the the inflection points like there were probably three huge inflection points in a business. One was like 10 years ago we kind of pioneered the idea of automated financial content of like company announces their earnings. We can kind of take that data, put it into a template, publish an article about it, get it to pick up in Google Finance, Yahoo Finance, MSN Money. People would come to our website, there'd be a pop-up ad on the article. They'd sign up for email list like our our CPA on those email signups was basically zero. So like that was awesome. And then in more recent years, we've had a big shift from organic to paid of like these days like 80% of our revenue comes from kind of our paid advertising spend. And it's with much less based off organic these days. And that might not be the exact right percentage, but the majority of like the advertising revenue we generate is cuz we spend a million, two on ads a month right now to generate 5 million in advertising sales. >> Hey, just a quick heads up. My in-person event, Sponsor Games, is happening March 15th to the 18th, 2026 in San Antonio, Texas. It's the only event in the world where you can practice your sponsorship pitch, do real time negotiation roleplay, connect with other creators landing four and five figure brand deals, and potentially win our cash grand prize. Here's what Doc Williams had to say about where his business was at before attending sponsor games. >> I just felt defeated. I felt defeated. I didn't know how to talk to brands confidently. I hadn't closed any long-term deal and I felt disillusioned. I was like, I don't think I can really make money on sponsors, but if I can win the games, I can make money off of that. And then going out, I was like, this feels sustainable. This feels like I can actually do this with my business long term. >> Any big wins that you can share after the event? >> I mean, pretty much all my deals, like afterwards, I was like, we've done multiple 15K deals. Um, and friends of mine, when I told them about like, you just have to do this. my friend, he's always complaining, no one hits him up, blah blah blah blah blah. He'd never made more than $500 from a sponsor. I was like, "Just do this method." I was like, "Read this." And he closed him at 35K for six events. He's a local creator in a small town and it was just because of that one thing in the bio. So, if you want to have the same transformation that Doc and his friend had, go to sponsorames.com to grab your ticket. We're capping it at 75 creators this year. And actually, I forgot to tell you the craziest part. Every single meal is catered. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks. We're basically blowing a huge chunk of the budget on amazing food. So, what are you even waiting for? Go to sponsorsames.com to grab your spot. >> That is absolutely insane. I mean, I I I heard or I saw you talking about this that you're you're spending seven figures a month on paid traffic. Uh I've also uh like heard that you have a lot of kind of customized software tooling that you've built to do analyses on cohort analyses ensuring like you know uh that they're able to return you you get a return on those like that game feels I think very foreign to a lot of creators and media you know just influencers in general and things like that to what do you attribute the the conviction to spend that much money is is it basically just like very simple math here like I'm spending this much and I'm seeing you know 5x rorowaz or something on it or did you have a fear of shifting every you know being largely organic to largely paid that the quality would degrade. >> Well I mean it happened over a period of a few years right so it's not something we did overnight. So for when we on board a new channel what we do is we sp say okay I'm going to spend 20 to50,000 to test a channel just to like know if it's going to work or not. So we'll run something probably $10,000 a month for a few months and kind of watch what happens like okay we paid $10,000 how many signups did we get? 5,000 we paid two bucks a lead. Then ba, you know, from those people, how much money did we make back? Like how many of them signed up for market all access? How many of them bought something from an advertiser with um a conversion post back? What's the open rate? What's the click-through rate? And then it's pretty easy to tell like when you have the data like which channels are good and and which are not good. >> Uh what's your payback period that you're targeting? >> Historically, like we'd be happy with like a co-re channel if we broke even at 90 days. Um in more recent years, that timeline has shortened up cuz I don't know, the market's been hot. Uh, you know, these days we're probably break even breaking even by day 45 or 50. Some channels were break even in that at 30 days like our AdWords last month like we've basically already broken even on which is great. >> Say more about I just want to go back to SMS for a second here. Like how do you view you were replying to someone on Twitter and you mentioned that uh like SMS is the new email. So like how do you view email versus SMS in terms of your overall strategy? >> So last month SMS was about a third of our revenue. It's kind of been that most of the year. >> A third. >> A third. Yeah. So, I have >> I have a three to $400,000 Twilio bill a month, but then that makes 1.5 to 1.7 million. So, like send out a ton ton of texts, you know, our SMS list, 400,000 change. There's no deliverability problems with SMS. Like you have a short code and you send a text to somebody, chances are it's going to go through and they're going to see it. So >> give me an example of like what what what is a an example SMS that you would have sent yesterday or something that like led to are these like direct respon or is it like hey go read this article or oh here's an offer from one of our partners. >> So it's a mix. So like say on our so we have two SMS lists like our new one is the early bird SMS. So we send a stock of the day based off whatever and it's like here's the stock of the day and then like if you click through there's this mobile friendly page of like here's the pros for this stock the cons for the stock and if we have a recent article here's the recent article. So, like that's kind of the content piece of it. And then like we'll also send an ad of like from one of our kind of advertisers. Very direct response. You know, it'll be u kind of catchy text message with a link. You know, maybe Trump just did what? And then click through and then there's a a video sales letter that's probably 45 minutes long. And then if people get to the end, there will be an offer to buy something. And believe it or not, people will watch the 45minute video and some of them will buy stuff like on a good text. Like it's not uncommon for us to make 5,000 bucks. >> Talk to me about your team size. more on the ad operations side. So like to how much do you lean on editorial and copy from your partners and you're just like sending people the click basically versus like your team actually having a a role or a hand in how that offer is positioned. >> So in kind of the financial world there's a lot of compliance stuff. So we're not actually allowed to like create our own copy from most of our advertisers. It's here's the copy you're going to use it. So what you find is there's a lot of deliverability challenges cuz like chances are the email copy's been sent before maybe from a less high quality list. So oftent times we'll ask our advertisers like okay can you create some unique copy that you don't give to anyone else to give to us and a lot of times they'll do that. Um sometimes you'll maybe mix like you'll have like the ads on top but then you maybe put an article on the bottom so it doesn't look like the same ad that's been sent out 100 times. There's a lot of lot of stuff like that that we try to kind of get around that, but typically it's entirely the advertisers copy and we're not allowed to mess with it. Some of them won't even let us experiment with subject lines. Like we have to use the subject lines they give us. Y >> that's wild. Okay. So you had posted on Twitter uh that we were going to have me be having this conversation and someone asked an interesting question. So shout out to Marketing Max. Uh he asked how and where do you find all the lead genen sponsors that you promote after sign up and what do you say to them to get you to give them money? So yeah, I'm really curious about this this whole kind of co-edge lead genen type type model. >> So like when you're doing kind of PPC meta adwords like you want to make as much of that back on day one as you can. So we have a very robust co-edge funnel and if you go to market and you sign up you'll see it. But we use networks like we use after offers.com. They're great. Tim and Emil from they're from California. Like I've known those guys for probably 10 years and like most of the time their unit shows up first and like they pay well and they pay the most. So like we show them first. um investing media solutions has kind of the same thing and then we also intermix some of our own ads like from our kind of bank of advertisers that have and if like if it's like a we have a order a lot of order called CTO offers or click to opt in where like you like click the get the free report button we'll pass your email address to the advertiser to send you the report and then you know they have your email as well like people will pay six bucks for you know that kind of optin and like it works really well um so I mean a lot of it is like we have relationships with advertisers we've had them for a long time. Uh we get a lot of referrals for from our existing advertisers cuz all the people in the industry talk and like they're all looking for traffic and who do you know that's got good traffic and you know we do. So we get get a lot of referrals and then you know once you have a relationship you know people are always looking for more like you know what placements do you have that we're not running like and sometimes you have to convince them like so we started doing like browser notifications in 2016 before anybody really was doing them as an ad channel and we like had to like give people like free traffic to say like no this is going to work try like here just give me a link and I'll send you send you some leads and like once we persuaded them like no this is good traffic like then they came back and bought it. When when you're lying lying in bed staring at the ceiling at night or maybe you sleep like a baby, I don't know. But when you're staring at the ceiling, are you thinking about ad operations like in terms of fulfillment and execution of this or are you thinking about like and deliverability and so on? Are you thinking about sales? Are you thinking about like how your sales team is performing or like like what what is top of mind for you these days? >> Our constraint is not not demand like we have more advertising demand than we can fulfill. Like I could have double the number of ad clicks and probably sell all of them to somebody. So like that's not the problem. I think the our real challenge these days is probably just on email engagement of like, you know, we have 6 million people in change that have opted in that haven't unsubscribed. You know, the 90-day active number is maybe like 3 million. So like that means there's another 3 million people on our list that, you know, we can't email them anymore really cuz like they aren't opening emails and it'll tank your numbers if you email them very often to like 3 million people disappeared. Like are these junk email accounts? Like who are these people? and like can't email them because they're not active and it'll tank your open rates if you you do and like how do you re-engage those people? We've tried a bunch of stuff over the years with you know a mix of results and >> why not purge them from the list? What's your take on that? >> Um we do purge people from the list like but it's mostly like if you haven't say you're a new subscriber, it's been 21 days, you haven't opened anything, you haven't clicked anything, then we'll we'll just bounce you from the list. You know, if somebody subscribed and they they have engaged before, you know, we always think there's a chance to get them back. So like we don't really want to permanently um bounce them >> but you the the cost to keep them on the list is small enough that it does nothing. It's zero because because of why >> we built our own CRM and then we emailed through Send Grid. So to have an entry in our database for Justin who hasn't opened an email in 6 months the cost is zero. So there's no downside to keeping people on a list. >> Interesting >> cuz like a lot of ESPs charge you based off your list size. And like you know send is really based off the volume of email we send. It doesn't matter how many people are in a database. >> At what point in a media publications's journey does it make sense to invest in your own infrastructure like that? You think >> we did it day one. For me, it was the right answer cuz I'm, you know, have a background as a software engineer and now we've got six devs. Like if you're not a technical person, like you probably shouldn't do it. If you are a technical person, like there are some values, but I also have to deal with a lot more headaches that most people don't deal with. Like I had to build my own like list unsubscribe mechanism, you know, stuff like that where it's a lot more technical and like you can shortcut a lot of it just by signing up for Beehive or Kit or whatever the hot platform of the day is. >> Was it ever in your mind that like maybe I should sell this tooling that we've built cuz it's pretty sophisticated? >> People have asked about that over the years. It's very personalized for us. Like building like your own platform for you versus like building commercial software that you sell to other people are two very different things. And like one thing that I've been pretty good at over the years is like understanding what business I'm in and what business I'm not in and not getting distracted by the businesses that I'm not in. Like we're building out a new YouTube studio downstairs for our YouTube channel. And our YouTube gal was like, "We could make money renting out the studio." And I was like, "Yeah, we could, but we're in the financial media business. We're not in the studio rental business. So like that's not why we're doing this." >> So why are you doing it? Why are you investing in YouTube as like another channel? >> One, we make money off of it. I mean, we're probably making 75 to 100,000 a month off of it right now and topline and grant just from AdSense or or also sponsorships and stuff. >> So, we take the So, what we do is we take kind of the financial publishers that are like the expert on whatever topic and we'll have them as guests on our YouTube channel. Like we sent Bridget down to Las Vegas a couple weeks ago to go to the Stansbury Research $5,000 event and then she was on site and interviewed all the experts and then on the videos had like links had like a QR code to their offer and we generated a bunch of sales doing that. >> Wow. Interesting. >> So we're like nobody in financial publishing has really figured out YouTube. So we're we're trying to be the first to do it. >> Do do you ever just sit and think like back in your early days playing the Sims having your selling banner ads on your website? Uh do you ever sit and think like wow I've come I've come a long way? >> Uh have definitely come a long way. When I entered college I thought I was going to be a math teacher and then I realized like oh that's not a good job and then I switched my degree to math and then they said you should do really do math and computer science and I said okay and then I enjoyed the computer science aspect much more and eventually time to kind of mix the like web ad kind of mind and then like the programming mind and build a cool business from it. >> What is it all for for you? I mean, I think that we've talked a lot about the kind of technical aspects and the topline results that you've been able to generate with this business, but I know you're really involved in a lot of other things in your life in terms of philanthropy and your faith and like I don't know what what is what is playing this game? What's it all for for you? >> I don't know that I have like a grand vision for my life. I just want to have a lot more more good days of my life and bad days and I do the things I enjoy doing and uh enjoy giving back and, you know, making an impact in my community. And I can look out my window here and just see like startups who follows which is the startup ecosystem organization helps start. Um like a little bit down from there is the Levit. That's like a outdoor concert venue where we sponsor 50 free concerts every summer. Um you look over that way there's the market holiday Christmas plaza. We just like to do things that are fun and like yeah we like give money to social service organizations that are helping people in need as well. So it's not all just fun stuff, but ARB makes a great net income every year and we love to give part of it back to our community. Love seeing the impact that it makes and making the place we live a better place. And another thing like about me that most people don't maybe recognize is like so if you're a business leader in Sufal, South Dakota, you get invited to 10 events a week that you could go to of like you should come to this banquet or you should come to the chamber annual meeting or come to whatever. It's a lot of frankly noise, but I think I have attended maybe like two after 5:00 p.m. meetings the entire year cuz like after 5:00 p.m. like I'm in dad mode and like do not give any any care about like all this like all the stuff other people want from me in the universe. So, um weekends I play with my kids and basically all I do I I will work on weekends before they get up, but it's mostly like kid time like what do you guys want to do? Okay, >> that's amazing, man. If you had to give one piece of advice to an aspiring creator, entrepreneur, etc. who looks at the business that you've built and the life that you've built and say like, "Man, I would I would love to have that one day." What would you tell them? >> It's very much a journey of like, you know, you're not looking to build a $50 million media business overnight. You're looking for that next 10% improvement and then just continue to look for those over a very long period of time. Like this is not a a microwave business where you can go. It's not like these AI businesses that are going from zero to 100 million AR overnight. Like media businesses, they take time. Um and that's okay. Like if you can be committed to it for like 10 years of your life, like you can build something awesome, but it's just not going to happen in 6 to 12 months, >> dude. Well, thank you so much, man. Uh if people want to learn more and sign up for Marketbeat, where should they go? >> Uh marketabbeat.com. Um I also have a personal newsletter if just want to follow like all of the Matt stuff, mattpson.com. I publish quarterly update. It's like one email a month at most if you want to want to sign up for that at mattson.com. >> Amazing, dude. Super appreciate it.