The LFG Show
Talking with movers and shakers who grew up with nothing and worked their asses off to achieve success. Let's 🤬 Go!!!!
The LFG Show
Why Media Buyers Are Moving Beyond Google & Meta — Inside NewsBreak's Headquarters ft. Ryan Ludlow
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🚨 LFG SHOW EPISODE DROP 🚨
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Before you scale… make sure your infrastructure can handle it.
🔥 SPONSORS OF TODAY’S EPISODE
Ringba — The Pay Per Call Platform Built For Scale
If you’re serious about pay-per-call, call tracking, and real-time conversion data, Ringba is the platform trusted by top operators.
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NewsBreak — One of the Most Underrated Traffic Sources in Performance Marketing
While everyone fights over CPMs on Meta and Google, smart advertisers are quietly scaling inside the NewsBreak ecosystem.
⚡ Native + video inventory
⚡ Massive local audiences
⚡ Multiple ad surfaces with different demographics
⚡ Premium third-party supply
👉 Get $5k matching ad credits and test the platform:
https://admanager.newsbreak.com/signup?utm_source=pod&utm_medium=lfg
🚀 Inside NewsBreak’s San Francisco Headquarters
Walk with us inside NewsBreak HQ and see how Particle Media turned a local news platform into a scale engine for performance advertisers.
We break down the strategy behind:
• NewsBreak
• Scoops
• Crime Radar
Three different ad surfaces that unlock very different audiences and allow media buyers to tailor creative, funnels, and bidding strategies for each one.
Ryan Ludlow explains how Scoops captured the 18–35 male video audience, creating opportunities for:
🎮 Gaming
💳 Debt settlement
💰 Biz-op
📊 Financial offers
Meanwhile the core NewsBreak audience continues converting in:
🏥 Medicare
🏠 Home services
📈 Asset management
📈 Scaling Budgets Without Losing Control
Top advertisers are also tapping third-party premium supply including:
• Weather apps
• Bible apps
• Casual gaming apps
This inventory allows brands to add a zero to their budgets when creative, funnels, and targeting match each surface.
🧠 Signals That Make The Models Work
Ryan explains why advertisers should pass back:
• Device IDs
• Hashed emails
• Conversion values
These signals help the system optimize for high-LTV users, not just cheap clicks.
⚙️ The Engineering Behind The Platform
NewsBreak powers performance through ClearStream server-side scanning, which:
• Protects user trust
• Unlocks premium placements
• Rewards high-quality creatives
We also explore the AI creative engine helping advertisers spin compliant video faster and how automated CPA rules help stabilize performance while scaling spend.
📞 Closing The Loop With Real Data
For lead gen and pay-per-call teams, Ringba’s direct integration allows advertisers to send real-time call conversions back into the platform.
That means:
📊 Better optimization
📊 Smarter bidding
📊 Higher-quality leads
📊 If You Want To Diversify Beyond Meta & Google…
This episode is a playbook for aligning surfaces, signals, and strategy so you can scale beyond the duopoly.
👍 If you got value from this episode:
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Sponsor Intros & Cold Open
SPEAKER_00Newsbreak is the fastest growing local news app in the United States with over 50 million monthly and 16 million daily users checking in throughout the day. When you sign up, the Newsbreak team reaches out with White Love service to get you on boarded and making money right away. Up to$5,000 in matching ad credits, quick account approvals, and dedicated account management to help you find early success. To learn more and sign up, check out the link in the description below. Don't waste time. Sign up now and let's fucking go. Ringba is the leading inbound call tracking and analytics platform for marketers, brands, and paper call teams. It gives you real-time reporting, intelligent call routing, and fully customizable call flows backed by global telecom access in more than 60 countries. With enterprise-grade reliability, a powerful API, and no contracts instead of fees, Ringba has become a go-to platform for performance marketers worldwide. To learn more and to sign up, check out the link in the description below. Get golden and let's fucking go. LFG fam, man, I am freaking pumped up. We are in San Francisco right now. Beautiful part of the country, by the way. Like, man. And you know what? I feel like there's so much technology going on here. There's so much like innovation going on. I'm so happy to be here. We're with Ryan Ludlow, Newsbreak, proud sponsor, LFG Show. I am so happy to be partnered up with you guys. It's been, I think it's been mutually, really, mutually beneficial for all of us here. And uh thank you for having us here. We talked about coming here months ago, and we're here, man. So thank you for inviting us, walking with us. And man, I'm freaking pumped up.
SPEAKER_01My pleasure, man. Uh, thanks for making the the long travel. I know it's like 30 in Florida right now, so hopefully the sun shines.
SPEAKER_00Iguanas are freezing, man.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Alligators' tails are freezing off. That's what all sorts of wacky stuff's going on over there. Yeah. Good, good. Yeah. Well, welcome to San Francisco. I mean, like this is like the tech epicenter, right? We have Google down the street. We have Apple just last week or on Monday. We just onboarded a new machine learning engineer that spent his time at Amazon ads. And like, that's why we're here, right? We get quality uh engineering resources. We're here to work with the top monetization platforms like Facebook, like Googles that are just down the street from us. And, you know, iron sharpens iron.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, for sure. I mean, I feel it. I mean, I I see the Way Moles driving around or self-driving. I mean, I see so much stuff going on here. It just boggles my mind. And I think it's going to come for the rest of America, you know, that it's going to, you need it. It drives that innovation is what's the heartbeat of the economy, right? So it's beautiful.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I mean, just yesterday in San Francisco, there was a uh open claw is the new word, but it used to be clawed bot. There was a whole, you know, happy hour. There were hundreds of people that were there. And like, I think that's why people are here in San Francisco to be near the cutting edge technology, AI, crypto, whatever it is that that's happening, that's why people come to San Francisco.
SPEAKER_00I love it. And that's one thing about the Love G Show. We travel when we're like a traveling show, traveling podcast, whatever you want to call it. But every time I go somewhere new, and I haven't been here in 20 years, man. It's been a long time.
SPEAKER_01You're a show pony. That's what you're trying to say.
Particle Media Beyond NewsBreak
SPEAKER_00Yeah. No, but like, but like I and I I learned, like I come and I feel like I like a piece in my brain just grew, right? And then coming here, and one thing I want to touch upon, I didn't realize how big newsbreak was. You know, I knew you guys were big. I mean, you and I think, and I want to talk about how, you know, since we did our first podcast in uh Barcelona, ATO, great show, by the way. They're doing another one in Miami in a couple months. Amazing. But we we do, I think you got you guys had 40 million subscribers. You guys are probably doing 300,000, 400,000 uh in a day in ad spend, but now you you pretty much tripled uh in terms of the ad spend per day now, right? You have 200 employees here. You could feel the freaking brain power here. Like, so let's talk about that because I I want people to understand newsbreak is much more than just a local news platform.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I and I I think that's honestly the best place for us to start because everyone thinks about us only as newsbreak, but we're really this parent company called Particle Media. You know, we have the Newsbreak app, which is our flagship, 10 million daily active users, 20 million um monthly active users. We have a massive newsletter business with over 50 million subscribers. We have over 20 million emails that get opened every single day, but it's not just newsbreak, and that's what everyone kind of knows us as. In addition to that, you know, I tell people that we're engineering-led company, but it's not until you like walk through the front doors when you really feel that you get a chance to see things like our war rooms, where there's a group of like six engineers just sitting there building our next app. Yeah, you know, and I think like on that point, you know, it's thinking about this particle media strategy and like who really who we are. Um, when I first joined five years ago, I built the platform that monetizes the newsbreak app, but now we're building out multiple apps, which means that advertisers can just come in, add an extra zero to their ad set budget, and we have that supply for them. Yeah. So we'll continue to build out first party apps and then monetize third-party apps as well. So we built in-house mediation. And I think something that um we do unique that that maybe some other publishers don't, is that we're building tools in-house and then we're incubating them to then turn them into tools to give to advertisers or publishers or users. So a couple of examples of that is like our newsletter business. So I I know I mentioned 50 million subscribers, 20 million daily opens. It takes so much to create that business. Deliverability, how do we get ad demand? Um, building automation triggers based on did the user open the email yesterday? If they didn't open the email yesterday or the day before, the day before that, probably not likely to open up that email today. And so we will probably pass on even sending that email so that we're driving you know better deliverability. But we built that in-house. That is now a B2B company called AGN.ai. So advertisers on the newsbreak ad platform can now buy that inventory. They could buy not just the newsletter, the newsbreak newsletter, but also sports bible newsletter, other publisher um content, and we'll continue to build out more apps and more B2B tools for local businesses, advertisers, and publishers. Uh, one thing dope that we're actually doing on the local business side is um we have Noah in the Seattle office, and he's reaching out to real local businesses and writing content for them and then getting them to then post video content in the newsbreak app and getting them to run ads. And so, you know, that is a surprise and delight, something unique that people can find in the newsbreak app that no one's really doing that. No one's trying to help the real local businesses. So it's really amazing to be part of this business, watch it grow and expand. Yeah, have folks like you come in and I get to give you a peek underneath the hood. Like uh, there's a lot of joy, but you know, it didn't start this way, right? And like there, there's a lot of struggles in building this over the last couple of years. And uh it takes, you know, taking that step back and opening up our eyes and being like, holy shit, we got something amazing here and uh a lot of momentum and a lot of excitement going into 2026.
Building First-Party Apps & B2B Tools
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you feel it, man. I feel the walking in there. I'm someone that feels energy and I can I really feel the freaking brain power. They're like deep in it and they take their shit, they take it serious. Like they're they don't want to like they're this is they're holding stuff close to the vest and they're they're they're pouring. You could tell that they they really care about what they're doing, they want to deliver a great product, and man, just really smart people. You got people, you know, CS CSSB in here, uh, Critis Weiss. I mean, you got people in every aspect of the business, the engineers, you know, like everything. And I think you're in your role, I think you're perfect for this, you know, because I feel like I know one with engineers are so smart, like and they're the brain power, but you got to have someone that delivers the vision, right? I guess people behind it. And I think you do a fantastic job with that, man.
SPEAKER_01Thank you. I appreciate that. Um, you know, it's uh it's unique. You we're engineering led, and and there's not many people that are going out in public and doing B2B or working with partnerships or even jumping on a podcast like this. So we still are largely undiscovered, but we're gonna start to change that. We're gonna start to ramp up our marketing and uh building awareness by like sponsoring the LFG podcast. Um, and honestly, I have the easy role here, right? I'm not the one who's you know working 24-7, optimizing the machine learning models or looking at like our SREs, looking at server capacity and whatnot. And you know, I get the opportunity to talk to advertisers, share best practices, give them ad credits. And once they test out the newsbreak ad platform, they're likely to find success and scale up. Um, and that's why I'm saying I have the easy role, not like these machine learning teams um that are doing a lot of the hard work. And I have just you know utmost respect for them of what they're doing on a day-to-day, so that I can come out here and go to Miami and hang out with you or sit on a podcast on a you know Thursday afternoon.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I love it. So uh being here, one of the good things I got to peek on her a little bit. You show me some some apps, right? That that you guys have, show me the email delivery. No, but that I'm kidding. I I really and I talked to the engineers about it. I think Scoops is scoops is great because I mean newsbreak, you have it's it's uh it's female 45 plus, right? That's really the main audience, right? And that does well for home improvement, does well for insurance products, right? The scoops product, I saw some debt debt settlement ads on there, right? And I'm like, and they they look great, and I can see that that audience would do one. I don't know a lot of people. That's one thing why we we have these podcasts who give awareness to the audience about other ways they can make money with platforms like Newsbreak. So can we talk about Scoops exactly what that is? I don't think a lot of people know about it. I feel like it's like something that no one's talking about.
Scoops: Younger Male Video Audience
SPEAKER_01It it's largely undiscovered, yeah. And um, you know, Newsbreak app, core flagship app, 10 million daily active users. About two years ago, three years ago, we started to bring in video content. And what we notice is younger users were actually consuming the video content while older users were reading article content. So what we did is we actually split this off into its own standalone app. We opened up some of the uh it's more uncensored on the scoop side of things, and it's targeting men 18 to 35. And you know, what we're finding it's you know, in um apps that are like gaming apps, uh debt settlement, biz op like all of these verticals are really crushing. And you have the ability to target these advertisers or this publisher supply through our ad platform. You could run campaigns only targeting scoops or only newsbreak or run unlimited strategy based on that. But you're right, like no one really knows about scoops. So if you're listening to this podcast now, you heard it first. Target scoops on your campaigns, Biz Op, debt settlement, in-app gaming, you got it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, no, that's great, man. And that that's I love that. I saw the debt settlement. I was like, man, this people are be crushing it on that, you know. So that was good. And I saw your financial, a lot of big financial companies on there. When I talk about financial, I'm not talking about debt settlement career, but I'm talking about like investments, like actual Wall Street investments, that kind of stuff. People putting their retirement money away, which is a massive audience, man. I mean, there's so much money, you know, trillions of my tens of trillions of dollars out there that people put to work, right? I mean, so it's crazy. So I think I didn't even know about that aspect. Huge.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Uh, I mean, that vertical is massive. And I'm actually looking for gold advertisers as well. Uh, debt settlement has always done really well on the platform, biz op type of offers, but on the complete other side, we have people that are trying to figure out what to do with their money, right? How do they preserve their assets? And we have an older um demographic. So actually 29% of the demographic is over the age of 65. Great for Medicare, but it's also really um strong for folks that are looking for asset management. And um, there's a handful of advertisers that are finding success running that on the newsbreak platform and constantly looking for more. And I think that's the beauty of it. When we have so many users, you know, you can run debt settlement and you can run asset management, and both can find success.
SPEAKER_00So let's talk about um so six months ago when we uh did the podcast, right? You were doing, I mean, it seems like you you tripled the amount of ad spend per day, right? Let's talk like what what was that attributed to? Was that was that open enrollment or like what what was the whole like push? I mean, obviously you you you've been but you've been traveling, going to these shows, parting with LFG, this help, I bet like all these. Well, what's what was the what do you think is happening right now? Because I feel that you guys are just growing exponentially, which is exciting, man. Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01I mean, part of it is us growing our supply, you know, and and that's crucial if advertisers want to spend more money, is us growing our supply on one side of the equation. Uh, but what we talked about last year is how within our first year we went from zero to over 100 million in ad spend that we've delivered. Since then, you know, we've skyrocketed. Last year we did more than doubling that, with the run rate going over a million dollars a day in ad spend. And I think that's the opportunity for advertisers on the platform. Folks are jumping in, they're finding success. Um, and you have to come in and take the LFG, you know, promotion and give it a shot on goal and you know, find a way to diversify your ad spend based on that. Um, and honestly, the way that we're looking at it is like we're not trying to compete with Facebook and Google and App Loving and Tapula. It's like, do you want to grow your business? Do you want to drive an extra, you know, 10% conversion rate or 10% revenue by introducing a new ad platform? That's the secret sauce. And, you know, more people coming on the platform and testing has honestly been the part of that revenue driver is us increasing the awareness, getting more partners to test. But uh, in addition to that, it's also, you know, you have to emerge and break through into new categories. When we launched the platform, we had a ton of success with affiliate industry, but now we've started to work our way up funnel into lead gen advertisers, for example, and app install and e-commerce. So, you know, I'm looking at the incremental revenue that came last year, and most of it was e-commerce advertisers and uh app install advertisers, which is now about 10% of our revenue. Yeah, and then Medicare, we had a massive bump in Q4, and we're continuously seeing Medicare finding success on the Newspray platform.
Finance, Medicare, And Asset Audiences
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I'm glad to hear that too, because I think when we spoke in Barcelona, like there were, and I keep hearing that they're the theme, not only in Barcelona, but also the geek out and these um these masterminds, the high-level masterminds, right? Where people are spending a lot of money was there was a lot of frustration with uh their their regular app platforms. Those platforms are gonna go anywhere. And if meta's not gonna go anywhere, you're always gonna still need that. But it became really saturated, right? People, I I see it in home improvement like crazy, right? So the point is that people had to start, advertisers had to start going into other platforms, man. And I think that's perfect timing for you guys, right? Because uh, man, and it seems like it's working. I know, I know people, I know media buyers that spend big money on newsbreak, right? And I'm benefiting because I work with them. We are some campaigns with those guys. Um, and then on the insurance side and other big big killers that are doing really well with so it's it's exciting to see that because at the end of the day, you gotta evolve, man. You can't keep doing the same thing everyone else is doing.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. One of the recent promotions we did together, Dave, you said if you're swimming in the same pool, right? You're eating the same fish. Yeah. Uh, and that that's always stuck with me. Um, you know, and I think when building out our ad platform, uh, we're not trying to sell, we're not gonna call you 15 times and email you 30 times. I've learned a lot about this industry. No one wants to be sold to. They they want to learn from events, referrals, and partnerships. They want to hear that others are finding success and how they're finding success. Um, and that's why we, you know, fish where the fish are to that extent. And you know, if we know all the advertisers are hanging out at the LFG, you know, suite at the Cosmopolitan, we're gonna go and sponsor that event, for example.
SPEAKER_00We're gonna do one in Miami too, by the way, guys. Be there, be square. Anyway. So anyway, I was gonna say too. Um, obviously, any app platform, there's gonna be fluctuations, it's gonna be volatility, right? One day or one hour, you're gonna be doing great. Another day, another hour, it might be doing terrible. It's a freaking roller coaster like any other freaking business. But I what I saw here, you guys are working on some auto automated reporting. You're doing a lot of automations to kind of combat that. Can you talk about that? Because I don't think a lot of people know about it.
Scaling Ad Spend And New Verticals
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's um honestly, it's still like um in in beta right now, but um, you know, performance fluctuation is the biggest thing that our engineering team is working on. And it's a very common problem with CTR and CVR models. And that's essentially how all ad platforms are built, trying to predict users that are likely to click and users that are likely to convert, taking in factors like CPA bias and trying to juggle to make sure that advertisers have both scale and performance. Yeah. Um, but the fluctuations are natural with these models, and it's the biggest thing that our engineering teams work on. So, what we built is automated ruling. And you know, you can think about it as like a bid cap essentially, uh, that other platforms offer. Um, and we're really bullish on this. And we think that this is gonna drive both performance and scale for advertisers. So that the thought is, you know, advertisers today will dupe out ad sets, winning ad s and, you know, run those at say five, ten thousand dollar daily budget, running target CPA, where we optimize towards a CPA goal. Yeah. And so if we're unable to hit CPA goal, we're not gonna spend their budget in full. But what this means in the future with automated rulings is they could go from five ad sets at a five to ten thousand dollar budget to 10 ad sets at a$20,000 budget with a lot of these hard rules optimizing for a CPA goal or saying if budget has spent 25% and CPA is this, increase budget more or kill ad set. And so this is a way that you could really hack performance and scale all in one. Right now, this is on beta. There's a couple of advertisers that are testing it. I'm sure uh they they watch your podcast too. But for the LFG community, if you're watching this, you have an account manager, reach out to them, let them know that you want to be part of the automated rules beta program, and we'll get this added onto your account.
SPEAKER_00Love it. And that's why we wanted to do this, uh, get under the hood, see what's going on there so that the audience knows and they're taking full advantage of all the you know, knowing how to use the platform as best the capabilities so they can.
SPEAKER_01I'm actually happy you said that. You know, one thing that we do with this promotion with LFG and uh even on the event side and referral side is we try to partner new advertisers with ad credits and access to an account manager. You know, if they have access to an account manager for the first 30 days and some test budget, they're likely to find success. Yeah, right. They scale up that campaign, they bring on new campaigns and they tell their friends about it. And that's at like just flywheel that I've been um enamored with since launch of this platform, and we'll continue to find ways to drive right good performance for advertisers, increase our awareness, give out ad credit so people test it out, and then partner them with an account manager so that they find the tools and tips and and um ultimately success. But at Facebook and Google, you don't always get that, right? The only way that you're able to get that is by going to a mastermind or spending, you know, a million dollars a day essentially, uh, to even get them to respond to an email. So we understand that's a pain point in the industry and therefore try to lean into it uh and do it in this like natural organic way where it doesn't feel like a sales pitch, doesn't feel like we're shoving stuff down someone's throat.
SPEAKER_00I love that. So, what are other pro tips you can give to people watching as media buyers? Because obviously there's some people that are crushing it, other ones that maybe there's they're struggling, and I'm sure a lot of the struggles could be easily fixed if they just fine-tune a few things.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Um it's a good question. And I mean, there's a ton of things that are raised in my mind, but like you hit on one in the early beginning, like scoops. Like this is inventory that not a lot of people are targeting right now. Uh, if people are targeting it, they're running unlimited campaigns on both newsbreak and scoops. But what they're not doing is building a specific funnel for the scoops audience. Yeah, they're not trying to build a creative that aligns with 18 to 35-year-old males. They're not trying to run a unique offer that fits in with them for the folks that are finding success. That's what they're doing, right? So that's one thing that I would recommend. Um, the second is then also our premium partner supply, too. So, in addition to our first party apps, right? You got to see War Rooms, you got to see the newsbreak app, the scoops app. We also just built a crime radar map. Oh, yeah. So uh stoked about that. We could come back to that later. But in addition to this, the first party apps, we also connect to third party supply. We're monetizing like the biggest weather app in the US, the biggest Bible app, Solitaire, Sudoku, uh, in some casual game inventory as well. And that is largely undiscovered. We launched that on December 20th, I believe. Wow. Um, so it's still brand new, and that's really our our big company focus is building new apps and first party supply and then connecting that to third party users and not newsbreak owned and operated environments. Yeah. So with this, we have to understand who the users are in that third-party environment. So one secret sauce that advertisers are doing is implementing pixel and postback, passing back all different events, including, you know, device ID, hashed email address, age, gender information. Yeah. The more information you could feed into the models is like key. That's the key to the entire game. Is how much information are you feeding to the model? Is it a positive or negative signal for that model that drives better performance for you, reducing CPAs and increasing LTVs? So pass back all events. And then in addition to that, pass back values. Right? We talked about this last time. Like when you're running debt settlement, the cost per lead, sure, is a$7 or$10 cost per acquisition for someone to make that call. But is this somebody with$60,000 in debt or is this somebody that just doesn't qualify? So if you're passing back that info to say this value is actually worth$0, and this one is worth, you know,$10,000, that's going to help our models optimize, bid higher for users that we think are more likely to convert on your offer and drive high value.
SPEAKER_00Great. Thanks for sharing that. That's huge.
SPEAKER_01I mean, I can keep keep going.
SPEAKER_00Hey, man, what else? What else? Yeah, let's go.
Fluctuations, Models, And Automated Rules
SPEAKER_01Oh boy. Okay. Um there is actually a pretty cool undiscovered uh tool on the platform. We have a partnership with creatify.ai. So creativy.ai is like the leading AI uh ad creative tool. So advertisers on the newsbreak platform can go to the ad creation page, press create video, and it's gonna auto-create their creative account with them with ad credits in there. You know, like the ability to just go in there and we're essentially paying and compensating for advertisers to use uh AI tools and eventually use those creatives to find success on Newsbreak and scale them up. They have a ton of features in there. This is not a paid promotion for Creative, believe it or not, but uh a ton of features in there. Um, like, you know, you can upload a competitor ad and they'll find, you know, an auto-create an ad specific to your brand and your offer or your vertical. Uh, you can find, you know, AI avatars and give them specific scripts for them to run. So we have a lot of advertisers that have started to test that, but I still think that it's largely undiscovered. So we'll we will launch some you know educational materials and product marketing stuff in the next couple months. But you know, we're we're really trying to lean into the idea of AI, right? Yeah, and you know, uh on the local business side of house. We're building agents for local businesses because that's a high touch, low value um uh user base, and then you know, for advertisers. We're launching automated rulings and bid cap. And so uh we're we'll continue to to lean into this idea. And you know, maybe at the end of this podcast, we'll talk about some uh ads quality stuff and kind of how we're leveraging AI for ads quality and maybe some tips for for the audience on you know how to drive great creatives that find access to our premium inventory and drive good performance.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, got it. And all the stuff we can talk to your account manager about, right? Just get yeah, we say I heard you talk about LG, let's go more in depth and how can we actually implement this, right?
SPEAKER_01Absolutely, yeah. And like uh we're we're not afraid to you know create a telegram chat and you know be proactive. And if they start to find success and spending$5,000,$10,000 a day, then we turn into you know proactive meetings once a week. What's been going on with your account um in you know long term? We're actually working on something pretty cool right now, which is a full AI kind of like account manager dashboard. So this is pulling in all of our internal metrics that account managers are using to provide optimization. Whether it's too many ad creatives are driving uh low performance uh for an advertiser, or whether they have too many ad sets and they're competing against one another. So we've built this whole dashboard. We're feeding in AI agents, we're training these AI agents based on existing communication we have with advertisers as well. So it's pulling all, you know, Telegram and uh Slack communication and using that to feed in this AI bot. Um, and so we're using it right now for our account managers to improve the level of service that they provide to advertisers, and then we're gonna give it to our agency partners. And our agency partners can use this to provide better support to the advertisers underneath them. And then sometime, my guess is around Q2, maybe beginning of H2, we'll launch this publicly for all advertisers on the platform as well. That's great. Yeah. So can't wait. Like this is gonna be huge, right? You know, this and automated rulings. Uh, we're trying to build a platform, right? And I think if we offer ad credits, access to account managers, educational materials, you know, tips and trips on how to find success, like they're gonna find a way to make it work and ultimately scale up and increase their business 10, 15, 20 and diversify away from Facebook and Google, right?
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. That's what you gotta do. And then, guys, basically that's why you have to make sure you're subscribed to the LOG show because when these announcements happen, we'll we're gonna make sure that you guys know about it, right? And you don't want to be finding out about this a month, two, three, four months later. I mean, the name of the game is speed. You gotta implement fast, learn, execute, and go from there. That's why I found the people that have had the most success in this industry and any industry, they find about they get these little edges, right? So at the end of the day, I feel like this gives them the edge, is what it comes down to. So we'll announce that.
Creatives With AI And Service Model
SPEAKER_01I'm actually I'm uh I'm always impressed with the the high-level talks that are happening in the LFG community, telegram chat too. Oh, yeah. It's not just like not just private jets, it's not just private jets, it's not just you know, uh uh late night uh suites or uh uh nightclub video, you know, like they're talking real shop around what's working or what's happening on Facebook or you know, access to new traffic sources like Newsbreak. And uh yeah, I I see it in real action, that's why we're sponsored.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and I appreciate that. I was uh at affiliate summit uh West. I was on the Digistore, I was on a panel there, and I told you it was a little intimidating for me because I'm always on freaking killers, right? And these are media buyers. I'm not a media buyer, I work with media buyers, I understand you know what they do, but these these guys are like putting up dumbness. Carter, Carter was on there, right? Danin, I mean, a bunch of guys on there, Ryan Hoodie. And um, you know, I didn't mention that because there's a point a lot of my conversation about biz dev and growing your business and like old school wisdom, right? I was throwing out there, but I didn't mention about the telegram groups. I mean, Carter's got a phenomenal one. But he caps at the 420 people, is what he does. But once it gets 420, he kicks somebody out, right? So I know I know Jason Akativ has a great one too for an AI one where you gotta have, he has AI. If you if you don't chat at least once within 24 hours, you're kicked off automatically. But there's some high-level telegram groups, right? And that's another, I think, hack is that try to get into some of those. Find out which are the good groups to be in. John Castle's got a great one, bulletproof scaling, you know. So the point is that that's how you can really collapse time frames and find out about new features that someone's figured something out that's gonna help them accelerate their learning curve, right? And collapse time frames. So I'm glad you mentioned it because that's what I talked about too. And uh it went a long way in that talk.
SPEAKER_01And I mean, this community is just arms wide open. Doesn't matter if you've never run an ad before or you're spending a million dollars a day, they will happily share insights around what's working, what's not working, and in real transparent ways, too. And uh I think that's what makes this industry great. That's why I don't have a sales team, right? Yeah, like you know, we we join these channels, we we make sure that we're able to talk about newsbreak, we shine a light on it, add credits, test out the platform, find success, and scale up from there.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and I'll tell you what, I think there was a little bit of uh nervousness with people that were succeeding with newsbreak when when uh we made this uh collaboration, right? You're like, oh, this is yeah, there's a little the cat's out the bag, oh newsbreak, they're gonna get more people that are gonna compete with us, or those are gonna be gonna compete against them. But what would be your I mean, you guys are gonna keep growing, right? So that's not gonna stop. So what what's your advice to to those people, like, oh man, I had like this fucking secret with newsbreak, and now the cat's out the back, all these other people getting on it. Like, what what would you say to them?
SPEAKER_01I I would say that I've been hearing this for a year, uh, every year, right? It's just like growing and growing and growing and growing, and it's probably not gonna slow down. Yeah, you know, the phone the folks that found us last year, they're gonna tell another friend that finds us this year, yeah, they're gonna join another channel. And it's really important. That's why my biggest focus is how do we grow supply? You know, and how do we know that who these third party users are so that we could drive good performance for these advertisers? That's why, you know, you just saw a war room with the team building new apps. Like that, that's really what it's about, so that we can continue to grow our supply, continue to drive good performance for advertisers, despite whatever the competition is. And I think that that's also, you know, another reminder for advertisers. If everyone else is running your vertical, you should probably find a new vertical.
AI Account Manager & Partner Support
SPEAKER_00Yeah, 100%. Going back to what we said about swinging the same pool, eating the same fish, right? What it comes out of. But I will see also me being here, guys, seeing what's going on, you guys care about the user experience and you guys are are just saying it. You're doing, I see the engineers working in that corner office, the actual war room, right? And they're like, they're excited, they're passionate about, they're probably working around the clock. Like you can see that they're really trying to good to do that. And then at the end of the day and improve, that benefits everybody. The better user experience, the more they can spend, the more they can, you know, use these tools that you're mentioning, the more they're gonna grow. So I really I think it comes down to like really being part of those groups, watching what we're talking about, talking to you, talking to your account managers, and and learning and pushing the gas.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I, you know, one thing that I will say, and it's like our company culture, not just the user obsessed, but also ownership and agency, you know, and like if you have an idea, run with it. And that's really uh top-down mandate here at uh at Newsbreak or Particle Media because anybody can come up with that next billion dollar idea. We now have access to the tools like AI that can, you know, go from uh three months to develop something to now you can do it in three hours. Yeah. And that's that's the magic of you know, the we're actually at the magic moment right now in the gold rush right now. And uh my hope is that we'll be able to spin up in a a new, you know, billion-dollar app, just like Newsbreak in the near future.
SPEAKER_00I I believe you're gonna do that. And and let's talk about the the culture because you want to uh what was what are we fast companies, fair best most innovative, most innovative workplace, yeah. Yeah, and it's it's obvious, like walking in there, you feel it, right? So I and I think that's part of what you're talking about, you know, that that vision and then that performance. So let's let's talk more about that. Man, winning that award, that must have been a freaking awesome thing, you know?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I absolutely. And so, you know, it it comes down to that culture, it comes down to everybody feels like an owner at the company, but also encouraging folks to not suppress ideas. You know, you come in with a role and a title, but you're much more than that. You have the ability to help out the finance team, the HR team, the scoops team, the newsbreak team, our newsletter team. Like, do you have a new business idea? Run with it. And and um, we celebrate that. We we really do. Um, and so along the way, we've built some really cool tools. So part of that award that we won was actually around uh uh patented, you know, ad tech technology that we have called ClearStream. Essentially, what this is is this is a server-side scan on the ad content before it delivers to the user. So most of the um scanning and ads quality tools are happening client side and not server side. They're happening after the ad had had already won an auction as opposed to making it so it doesn't even enter the auction. And that's some of the innovative technology that we have that we could then offer to third-party publishers, right? And that's part of the energy that we have here. It's not just helping our users, it's helping advertisers, it's helping publishers. It's really um, you know, trying to change people's lives.
Culture, ClearStream, And Ads Quality
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I see it. You feel it, which is beautiful, man. It really is. So, what is uh like let's talk about kind of we're going like, and we'll get back to like the the weeds here, right? But let's talk more about newsbreak and the growth that's happened. I mean, you were at Uber, right? Which I think is like I mean, that Uber, they're they're they're founded here, right? In San Francisco. So you were you were there. How did that that mustn't help you here or like see things from a different perspective, right? Help grow. And I mean, you didn't go, it must have been challenging in the beginning, right? To to come here and then get you had to fight the Titans. Yeah. You had to do, right? So let's talk about that.
SPEAKER_01Uh yeah, and I I actually have uh uh interesting story, you know, an unconventional story, my my background. And uh out of high school, I actually wanted to become a restaurant tour. So I started working at the most fanciest restaurant in the Knapp Valley. I became manager, our chef was on, you know, celebrity iron chef at the time, and I eventually hit a ceiling. You know, I was making$36,000 working 12-hour shifts five days in a row. And so I had servers that were life servers and professional servers making a hundred thousand, a hundred and twenty thousand. So I did that for a few years and was like, no, this isn't it.
SPEAKER_00I had Fran too, yeah. You survive it.
SPEAKER_01Exactly, exactly. So I went back to school and in school, I actually tore my ACL and I was working in a law firm. When this law firm, I was like picking up phone calls, and one of the partners at the law firm was like, he just got a deal for uh Dwayne Wade wine label, and he tapped me on the shoulders, like, you want to help me build this. And so I was the first person hired on a Dwayne Wade light wine label while I was still in school. I put that on my resume. I applied for a job at Uber when I was a senior in college. Yeah and uh I eventually got this job at Uber to be the first employee hired on a new project that was trying to sell Uber in high foot traffic locations. It was essentially trying to take driver onboarding offline because Craigslist was saturated, our paid ads was saturated. We were spending a ton of money on paid ads at that time. And so I was the first person hired on this project.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you had an affiliate program, right? I I think I remember people were driving traffic to that. It was, yeah.
SPEAKER_01There were people that made a lot of money doing that or referral programs. Um, yeah, it was uh the gold rush at that at that time. So I got to scale that, you know, being from the first employee to then a manager to then being, you know, leading a sales team of like 300 people. I ended up moving out to Chicago and launching this program in Chicago. Um, and then, you know, I got the chance to build multiple zero-to-one projects, not just offline driver acquisition, but Uber kiosk, which was like an ATM-like machine, mid-funnel driver conversion, trying to lower our global support cost. And um, then I got to parlay that into joining here at Newsbreak with no ads experience, but have ultimately taken it from zero to over a million dollars a day in ads.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think that's such a great experience. You you were part of the IPO then. Were you there when the IPO Uber?
SPEAKER_01That's actually a really good story. Um, yeah, I was there for the IPO. I actually got sick that morning because it was like uh there was a bunch of uh McDonald's that sponsored our our uh our our going public, uh our IPO. So we had a bunch of like you know, McDonald's breakfast there in the morning. And for some reason I I had some. We're watching the you know, the the ticker open and um our CEO at that time, it was Dara. We got to hear him like ring the bell and whatnot. Uh, but I ended up getting sick that morning, having to like run back home and like taking sick time off. But for me, I got this like really magical experience in 2015 to 2020 before we went IPO to see growth at all costs and like what it takes to build zero to one and this innovative, exciting in um environment. And like that's what I feel here at Newsbreak. That's why I'm here. That's why I've been here for five years and we're continuously growing. But then this like pre-IPO went into post-IPO, and then I got to see people in suits and consultants and everybody talking about ideas, but nothing getting done. And and that was a frustrating type of environment for me. And I wanted to uh be in a place that had agency where people had the ability to spin up new programs or or test new things going to zero to one. And so that's why I ultimately left Uber after they went public and joined a company like Newsbreak, you know, right when we got our Series C$100 million in funding. And uh now look at us. It's it's been a fun ride.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and I and thank you for touching upon that because I think that's I went to college during the dot-com bubble, right? And I remember there always IPOs and all the stuff going on. I interned at a company that IPO there. I was called Instant. They got uh, I think they got bought up by Reuters, is what happened at some point. But uh, I remember, I mean, I was like 20, early 20s, man, and just seeing the whole thing. And I was so young, you know what? I really didn't really fully understand it, you know. But it was just it was pretty cool to be part of it. A lot of people never they'll never be part of that. They don't they stay this is stuff that moves the markets all the time, right? I mean, Elon Musk, I think that what they're doing, the SpaceX is about to uh go IPO or one of those uh space exploration companies, so it's just something, man.
SPEAKER_01Actually, just down the road from here, he has a Fremont um Tesla manufacturer, uh, and he's actually shutting that down. He's gonna start building robots there.
Uber Lessons To Zero-To-One Growth
SPEAKER_00Wow, yeah, yeah, it's crazy. Speaking of robots on innovation uh when they got we got at the airport uh trying to get to the to get an Uber, they have a freaking uh barista, like Robot Barista. Do you see that? Yeah, Onyx is the name of the company. Cafe X, yeah. Yeah, bro. That was I mean, I didn't get one, man. I uh kind of should have gotten one. Uh I don't know. I didn't feel like waiting was uh there was a line, but uh man, it was pretty cool.
SPEAKER_01But it's gonna be hard to compete with your espresso on uh Adam Young's private job. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, that'd be good. We can do more of those, man, by the way. You'll be I could be on the next one for sure.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. I hear he's flying uh back and forth between San Jose and Miami.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, he's still here pretty often. Let's get a fire. Let's talk about Ringba, right? You guys have some stuff going on. Ringba, right? It's integrated right now with Newsbreaker, what's going on and how could that benefit the audience?
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. Yeah. So we're we're stoked about this partnership with Ringba, it's still in the early phase. So maybe by the time this is uh launched, uh we'll we'll be you know more public and you'll be able to enter our help center and learn a little bit more about it. But we're building out a direct integration with Ringba. Uh, this is gonna allow us to pass back more data, optimize better performance for advertisers. Uh, and this also makes it so maybe you don't need to use some of the third-party trackers and just work with us more directly, passing conversion data sooner, um, or like ASAP is our preference rather than I think some of these platforms try to delay sends like 24 hours. Um, and so we want to see conversions in real time. And I think partnering with Ringba is gonna allow us to do that through these direct integrations.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and it's great. And Ringba was very supportive of this partnership with LFG and Newsbreak. You know, they saw like that this is great, this is a good partnership, everybody wins, you know, and it was a great thing to see that.
SPEAKER_01Actually, me, you, and Adam Young, we all have we we have something in common. And what we want to do is we actually want to democratize advertising. You know, there isn't a barrier to entry. How do we provide the access, the tools, the resources for anybody to change their life in this amazing industry? So that's our you know what what we all have in common. And uh Newsbreak and Ringba will work on an education platform and series for new advertisers that are trying to figure out how they could, you know, quit their day job and like become a full-time advertiser, yeah. Uh, which I'm stoked about and always want to try, opening up that opportunity, not just for people in the US, but all over the world, right? And like we're in this industry where there are no barriers and trying to continuously democratize it, provide access to the information so that anybody can jump on and give it a shot.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, no, it's true. It's that's it's the greatest it's uh what do you call it, the equalizer. I always say sales that equalizer society, but the internet really is. I mean, man, it's just crazy what's going on nowadays, especially with these young kids we're talking about earlier. I know guys in Miami, 19 years old, that didn't go to college or printing, making millions a month. We I showed you a video chance did with uh someone on the boat about a week ago. Um, guys doing some e-com, putting up big numbers, man. 16 years old, you know, like that they dropped out of high school. You know, you can't blame them. So we're living in a day and age, and I think you guys being here in San Francisco, the proximity, the all the technological innovation, it gives you guys a such a freaking edge, man. So it's it's a good thing.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and like um, we are here in San Francisco. There's not a lot of uh advertisers, lead channel advertisers, e-commerce brands here, to be honest. Yeah, it's that that is true, yeah. But like that's why we go to Miami, that's why we go to New York, that's why we go to San Diego, uh, or even like Austin. I'm looking to go to Austin for the commerce roundtable event hosted by Nick Shackelford at the end of April. And um, yeah, it's like we got to meet advertisers where they are, and um, in doing so, we lift all tides.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, 100%. So what is what are other we talked about these uh with with with uh with the let's talk about the verticals, right? What are the verticals that are popping right now? I mean, you mentioned some we we talked about uh with scoops. I thought uh the debt is a no-brainer, obviously. Uh what else? Like what's going on on Newsbreak? What are where people have success with right now? Obviously, open enrollments, you know, what was it seems like some people did pretty well, some people asked over, but uh, you guys did pretty well with there?
Ringba Integration And Real-Time Data
SPEAKER_01Yeah, we we did really well with uh Medicare, obviously. Um, but we're we're still running Medicare. You know, there's some of these big um advertisers, you know, enterprise style clients that own the funnel end to end, and they're still running, right? They're still running um uh campaigns right now. Uh and so we we still see some Medicare on the platform, all right. Home services. So as Medicare comes down, right? Oh, a lot of the affiliates kind of drop out at the beginning of the uh or at the end of open enrollment. Yeah, so like a lot of the major companies will still run through January. So as that kind of drops down, we see affiliates starting to jump on some of the home services verticals as well. So that's starting to pop off everything from roofing, uh, gutters, um, uh bathroom remodel too. Um, we also just onboarded a new interesting one, uh, a DIY, build your own watershed. Well, that's that's gonna be interesting. You know, uh, I'm excited to get that tested out on the platform. When you think about, you know, the user of a news app, someone who's interested and curious, and you know, they're kind of DIY. And uh so I'm excited to launch that campaign here in the near future. Um, let's see what else I got for you. Uh, e-commerce side, obviously, health and wellness is is big. Uh, we're trying to find, you know, our own internal playbook for the telehealth vertical too. Handful of brands have come in and found success. Uh, but because with the high CPA, like$200,$300, sometimes having that performance fluctuation isn't possible for someone in the telehealth vertical. And that's because they can't ride the highs and the lows in their business. And so what they do instead is, you know, that's why we're building out automated rulings to to kind of be find a way to get both scale and performance, uh, smooth over some of that performance fluctuation and find uh a home for the telehe telewealth vertical as James called it, right?
SPEAKER_00Listen, yeah, it's popping. People are doing pretty well with that. Yeah, yeah, that's it. That's it, where people are losing weight left to right. It's crazy bad.
SPEAKER_01I I mean the GLP one is one side of it, but there's hair loss, NAD plus, BPC 157. What was the one that you were telling me about? The recovery one?
SPEAKER_00Glu glute oh, glutathione for immunity. Yeah, glutathione is my I don't get sick. Yeah, I travel, I do double, triple glutathione with uh ascorbic acid, zinc, like this cocktail that works, man.
SPEAKER_01You know, and and there's these secret sauces, right? And so how are we gonna get it out of like tribal knowledge, out of doctor's hands, and into you know the mass public is gonna be through digital advertising.
SPEAKER_00You know, you see it with only our fungus, like crazy stuff like that. I mean, I mean, it it's it it happens. You have no, I'm saying about that. People people are like they're they're hitting that, you know. It's like so it's not just like the weight loss, like you said, yeah, hair loss, skin, getting into new verticals, right?
SPEAKER_01And and this idea of telehealth, calling a doctor, they write this subscription for you, they ship it to your house, like that can be replicated in so many verticals. And I think everybody sees that right now, and we're stoked to bring on that demand, build our own playbook, and find a way to get these folks to grow with the the teleworth vertical. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_00You mentioned legal too, right? You get in some uh pick up a legal, that's it all.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. And and I think that goes to like understanding who the user is, you know, and the newsbreak user, slightly older, slightly female. We're seeing things like timeshare, finding success on the platform, on the scoop side, you know, maybe what we'll see is uh the the Uber um discrimination or Uber sexual assault. Uh that might work a little bit better on scoops as opposed to newsbreak. Yeah. So um thinking about what that offer is and what's the inventory, yeah. You know, uh newsbreak is key for for that, right? We have a lot of these engaged users that come in to learn something and uh maybe it is that perfect alignment. And with the legal vertical, like I said earlier, pass back conversion values to us. Let us know what happened after they filled out that form. Is this somebody that's worth zero to you or worth$10,000 to you?
Winning Verticals: Home Services To Telehealth
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and passing that signal to our model will allow us to optimize. So let's talk about something kind of um, I don't know what that, I don't know if it's controversial, what you want to say, but it's the the these uh people that try to run super aggressive, right? They try to beat the system and and and throw like you know BS shit, like celebrity stuff and all that. How do you how do you combat that? Because at the end of the year, I mean, I I saw, I mean, you got like big brands out here using your platform, right? You got those investment Wall Street companies, you got you got CNN, you got Fox. Yeah, I mean these Are freaking massive companies that are big targets, right? So, how do you what what are you guys doing to kind of make sure that no BS ads are going out there and catch them as soon as possible?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Um it's a it's a hard question, and I'm happy to shine a light on it. I think like that's one of the benefits of working with Newsbreak is that we're trying to be transparent about this rather than having it be a black box. And I think that's the result on other platforms, and you just don't know why things are rejected. So we're trying to provide the reasoning behind it. Uh, we hit on it earlier, but leveraging AI. So, you know, the fundamental ability for our ads platform is after you submit an ad, it's going through an AI review. And we're scoring and scanning that ad and landing page, and we're looking for things like fake publisher endorsements or fake celebrity endorsements. You know, if you're saying that Elon Musk has invented a new solar program, like that takes one journalist or reporter to screenshot that and I lose my business overnight. You know, we we we can't uh these are detrimental stuff, right? And we need to have a high bar for it. And also it's against the law. Like we we need to ensure that um we're protecting our users. So maybe one of the things that's unique to newsbreak that maybe other folks don't have to run into on other platforms is trying to like mimic news because we need to earn that user trust. They need to know the difference between ad content and news content. So on the newsbreak platform, we don't allow advertisers to build creatives that come across as it's breaking news. Yeah. Uh, in addition to that, it's also you know, fake publisher endorsements. Like it took us a long time uh to build these strong relationships to build out our publisher network, and we need to retain them, right? If they see that we're running ads with fake publisher um endorsements, that they're not actually endorsing the weight loss product or a new government program. You know, we we we can't allow that. So thinking about the scanning and the scoring, um, essentially what's happening is like we're looking for the highest quality creatives, the ones that aren't aggressive on their ad copy, have clean landing pages, aren't doing anything, you know, uh against the law essentially. And though those ads will get access to the more premium inventory, you know, uh app open ads or you know, users' uh new experience in the app, uh, or even like partnering with you know weather.com. They have zero tolerance. They're low quality ads. So how are we factoring and how are we scanning and identifying this ad can show on this inventory, but it's not allowed on newsbreak. But it can run on scoops, it can't run here, it can run here. So there's a lot of that logic there. And um, I will like transparently say that the higher quality ads actually get a discount in the auction, right? So they're more likely to find success. They get access to the best supply, they get discounts in the auction. That's because we're trying to reward people to have higher quality creatives. Um, in doing so, it improves the user experience. You know, we have full teams that are monitoring user experience stuff and uh user reports and things like that. And we'll we have to continue to have a high bar and lean on innovative solutions like AI.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah, I was also gonna say too, um, when when we did our we we we partnered up, I downloaded the newsbreak app. I never had it downloaded now. I think a lot of media buyers, I you know, I wonder how many actually downloaded the app because you you want to understand the user experience. I'll tell you something funny. So I told you this once before, I think. I was uh we were doing family pictures in Sunny Isles where I live on the beach, right? And there was a helicopter flow low, like flew really low, a police helicopter. I never seen them over there. I'm like, what's going on? Like my I figured like something, I don't know, maybe they found cocaine in the damn water. I don't know. It happened right in Miami, like floating bricks of cocaine, man. I never seen it, but I've seen pictures like in the news that shows up, right? And then people will catch it, whatever. So I'm thinking that's what happened. And literally, like um freaking 10 seconds later, I get an alert from Newsbreak that there's a dead body floating in Golden Beaches right next to right next, like literally, but I probably could have walked and seen it, right? So I guess it was there, they just found it, like it's reported, and someone died, but it sucks, right? It's a sad story. But newsbreak really broke the freaking news before no one that didn't come out for anyone, and I think like like an hour later, one of the other news outlets reported that. But uh, how the hell are you guys doing that so quickly, man? And that ties into the other stuff I want to talk about later.
Legal, Quality Controls, And Trust
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and I think that's actually a good place for us to talk about crime rate, which is our newest app. And um, I think last time I checked, it has around 500,000 daily active users, but growing rapidly. We just launched it a couple months ago. Customer acquisition cost less than a dollar retention at like 80%. Like it's looking like this is gonna be the next home run for us, which is really, really exciting. But uh, some of the um logic uh or like how it's built is we're actually scanning police calls. Yeah. And people are calling 911 and the different um routing from the dispatcher to a police officer to identify what is happening kind of in real time. Wow. And then transcribing that and bringing it into this app and putting it into a map view so you know what the proximity is for you. Uh, we have a lot of location data too, right? We're sending 13 push notifications a day, but on average, we have uh our 10 million daily active users are opening on average six push notifications a day. It's huge, right? So we know that you're a commuter from New Jersey to New York. Yeah. Or, you know, you split time between New York and Miami. Yeah. Uh, and there's a lot that we could do with that location data. But when it comes to the users, about providing meaningful local news that enrich their lives.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and you know what? That gave me a lot of I was happy that you guys broke the note like that. It gave me a lot of confidence that I'm I'm parting over with a group. You guys are really you you're breaking freaking news. It's happening, right?
SPEAKER_01And I think also in the crime radar map is like you could build and and open up a map of folks that um are sex offenders. Yeah, that you can find sex offenders because you need to register as a sex offender around you. And uh, I I think that that is a scary map and maybe something you keep to yourself and maybe don't don't uh scare your wife around what's happening around the the community.
SPEAKER_00No, but there's moms, like moms are very, and that's why the 45 plus like they're they're the their nature is to protect, right? And and they want to, and I guess you're spending a lot of time on that, and that's your audience right there, man.
SPEAKER_01Actually, that that reminds me too. We were talking about verticals earlier, home insurance and life insurance. Oh, yeah. I mean, obviously final expense to it, right? These are three verticals that I think uh final expense, or there's a lot of uh momentum, and people talk about that, but not so much on home insurance and and life insurance side, and that is prime for the newsbreak audience.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think you know why that is, is because I think that those life insurance, uh home insurance, they they're kind of like um, I don't know if this is the right word. Maybe they're antiquated in terms of their businesses, meaning like these like almost like MLM models, right? So they don't have these big calls, but you're starting to see more of those pop up. I've seen some of them in Florida. Uh and I was just at ICMG, the insurance conference uh Monday. Was it Monday or two? I don't even know. These days are all blending in, but anyway, uh did see a lot of final expense talk and some heavy hitters that crushed it in ACA. When we did ColumbiaCon one, the big and this was this really happened. This is why you have to go to the freaking masterminds. People were getting ACA topped out. ACA topped out at the time, and these were these are just guys in that room that were doing six figures a day in ACA, right? And they weren't making that kind of money more, so they were all moving towards final expense, like final expense about to pop off, and it freaking did. Yeah, but then it's still going, people are still talking about that talking about English, Spanish, final expense. So, yeah, that's the importance going to those masterminds. And I'm glad you mentioned that too, because um, I wasn't aware that you're seeing some of that flow to newsbreaker. It makes sense though, at the end of the day.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and and honestly, the advertisers that are finding the success today are testing out multiple verticals, they're testing creatives that map to the right inventory, they're testing out the premium supply, they're testing scoops, they're finding that right combination that can get them right 10, 15, 20k a day and an ad spend, and then they're replicating that across multiple verticals and multiple funnels. And that's how folks are finding ways to make it work with scale and performance on the newsbreak platform.
SPEAKER_00What's the most easy someone spend on on newsbreak in a day?
SPEAKER_01Uh over 125,000.
SPEAKER_00Wow.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And a lot of this is is e-commerce, honestly. Yeah.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_01So I mean in uh Q4, we we had advertisers that spent over 30 million. Oh, I can't imagine those black friends. We were 30 million over 90 days with us.
SPEAKER_0030 million over 90 days. Yeah, so big organizations. Yeah, yeah, it's awesome, man. It's it's great to I just we'd love to hear the I want people to hear these numbers. See, it's it's it's it's happening, right?
Crime Radar App And Hyperlocal Alerts
SPEAKER_01I'm stoked that you came here to our headquarters, right? You get a sense of like what's happening underneath the hood. I could get on every podcast in America and say we're an engineering-led company, but like to actually feel it and see it is different. And yeah, um, I'm just like also stoked to get the opportunity to shine a light on what we're working on and not just newsbreak out, but also this platform and how it's gonna continue to expand into more supply. And then along the way, we gave some you know some secret sauce.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I know for sure. And let this is again we LOG, we want to build this community of people that we we're gonna add value at the end of the day, right? And we're not gonna partner up with people that are just is BS. This is real, and then me coming here, man, it just makes me feel even more pumped up, right? To keep pushing the the narrative here, right? And I love what you guys are doing. And again, I see in the faces, seeing these engineers and seeing how Carl Sears are taking this stuff. And then I mean the stuff that you guys are working on is great. And I can't wait till it comes to fruition because it's gonna be it's gonna be a game changer for everybody. At the end of the day, this is about having an edge. You want to have some sort of edge, and I think working with you guys, you're you're you're providing that answer. It's exciting for me because we just want to keep growing this community, providing value. And I want I want people to, you know, I I love it with souls like I saw I saw that podcast, and I took a nugget from this, and bam, you know, I I it helped fucking 3x my business or do this. It's it's such a real thing.
SPEAKER_01It's real. Real I get there's so many people that reach out to me about our podcast eight months ago. And they're not just people in the lead gen space, but also like agency owners and other folks. Um, and you guys are providing real value. And I had I hear it left and right, and yeah, um, I've never seen a podcast at the Facebook uh offices or the Google offices. Yeah, you know, we're trying to be honest and transparent and arms wide open, welcoming folks in. And I think uh the markets can respond to it. The advertising industry definitely has with the performance affiliate type style of advertisers, and we'll continue to work our way up funnel.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and we're gonna keep doing it. I mean, the the the sponsorships, but we don't we don't take that money and spend ourselves. We reinvest that. We have an email marketer now. We bring someone on there's a help. They saw the drone. Oh, the drone, we got a drone, yeah. It's our third drone. We've had some issues with drones. Uh Dubai, I think uh Chancellor's got arrested. Uh he was detained for like an hour. Uh Columbia, I don't know what happened. Uh the fucking uh, I think the drug lords took that motherfucker, man. That shit was up there and like it just disappeared. Like, I don't know what happened. Yeah, so we're in our third drone. I'm on my fifth pair of metaglasses. Um yeah. Hey, it's part of uh it's like it's like slippage in stocks. That's what that is, man. But bro, but honestly, but that's what we're doing. All this stuff helps us grow the audience. And uh, we're excited, man. We're excited about 2020. What's what's exciting you about 20 the rest of the year? We're in February. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Uh I mean, I just built uh my own open claw. So, like, you know, similar as uh a lot of folks in the space is like leaning into the cutting edge technology. Maybe I'll get it to build another my own app for me in the future, get it to manage my personal life so I could invest more time on newsbreak as a business. But uh, I think that for me personally, I'm stoked about and then seeing our product and engineering teams also leverage this, right? We have product managers that are turning into designers and engineers. We have designers turning into product and engineers, we have engineers turning into designers and product, and um, you know, the innovation is just gonna continue to ramp up. Um, the automated rules, I'm very bullish about this to this new feature launch. And don't forget, reach out to your account manager, get access to the beta. I I really think that this is going to essentially hack the algorithm to both get scale and performance. Um so we'll we'll do another podcast a couple months from now. Yeah and uh I'll be able to share maybe some more information. But uh yeah, I'm uh I'm thrilled to get a chance to come on the podcast and talk about our journey along the way, right? Six months ago, we were doing you know two-thirds of the ad spend that we're doing now. Uh, ton of product advancements, ton of new supply, and we'll continue to grow and innovate. And I want to use you know, LFG to talk to the advertiser base. And even for those that are unaware of us, um, you know, ri raise awareness to them.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I love it. And guys, don't forget that the ad credits, I mean, we're gonna get up to five thousand dollars in ad credits, right? Matching ad credits. So take advantage of that. Not bad. Why not? Right? 5,000, baby. 5,000 big number, man. It works. I mean, why not? Free money, man. Go take it. Uh, so anything, I mean, there's so much we covered a lot of stuff. I mean, I think uh I think we got a lot of it. Is there anything else you think you want to add that we didn't before we wrap up here?
Insurance Plays And Mastermind Flywheel
SPEAKER_01I do think that there's probably like three things that that we didn't touch on throughout this entire conversation. Um, one being our ads policy side of things. There is um, because we're the biggest local news app, we talked about you know having creatives that say breaking news on it, but on the other side of things, you know, we do allow dynamic copywriting. So it'll say city name or state name for every user. Okay, and we dynamically change that based on where the user actually is. So when you're running a campaign that says city or state name is offering free government assistant program for services or um a discount, that's not true. You know, it's not true because uh every city in every state doesn't offer that program. So if there is a program that is available for windows or roofing or bathroom remodeling, you know, um say check if you apply, right? Don't say that it's available within that city or that state. Our users constantly complain about that. And we saw that big in search arbitrage too. Um people were running like, you know, homes for only$1,000 a month, like San Francisco homes for$1,000 a month, that doesn't exist. We we we can't allow that on the floor. You're right, that's just a thousand years. Um, but at the same time, leveraging dynamic copywriting is a way to improve CTRs. Okay. So we we we definitely recommend that. So uh that's one of the the secret nuggets that um definitely wanted to share with the audience. Uh the second that I would say is also our audience management. I think this is just like largely undiscovered. Uh, we were talking about some of the finance and asset management folks that are spending big volumes on newsbreak right now. And you know, what they're doing is they're uploading audiences, they're either uploading audiences for us to target, for us to build look-alike models, or they're uploading audiences that already converted on their offer and opting them out of the campaign. So I think advertisers that are leveraging audiences, whether they have access to seed audience that have already converted, have access or have been running with Newsbreak for a long time and want to exclude that audience from conversions. No, there's a lot of different ways to leverage the audience piece. And then the the third thing is it comes down to weekends, you know, like looking at our daily revenue, uh, it has these downs um every weekend, every Saturday and Sunday. It's because the call centers are closed. Yeah. So for lead gen advertisers that are doing form submit on the weekends, we see lower CPAs, improved conversion rates. So recommend that for any advertiser on the platform, right? So we we shared some insights into ads quality, shared some insights into best practices on the platform, shared some insights into what verticals to run and how to take those verticals to map them to what supply we have access to. Talked about creative strategy, we've talked about new features being launched here. And hopefully your audience walks away with some secret sauce and uh ability for them to grow their business even more platform.
SPEAKER_00I love the weekend comment because I saw that all. I mean, I see the whole improvement right now. I see a lot of my clients where they they they they some of them are voracious, they want every freaking lead that comes in, right? They don't care if they're costing this clothes, and we'll work out deals with them stuff that well. Maybe they if they are closed, maybe we give them a little bit, we can generate cheaper, we pass it down to them. We're not trying to rape them. We want them to be, we want them to also benefit, right? If there's a little bit of a of a you know section or whatever.
SPEAKER_01It softens on the weekends. And so, you know, if you're swimming in the same pools, you're gonna be exactly fishing. So, you know, uh auto insurance, there's a lot of competition Monday through Friday, nine to five. You know, run it on a lead form submit in the off hours. And uh actually something cool that we've done on our platform is we've uh highlighted where competition is based on the hour of the day. Oh, okay. So there's certain advertisers that are building ad sets, only targeting weekends or only targeting some of these off hours. And then on the ad set level, we're able to develop learnings based on these uncompetitive hours as opposed to some of the more competitive hours.
SPEAKER_00That's awesome. Really drop a lot of sauce here, man. Hope the audience is ready for this.
SPEAKER_01Hopefully, it wasn't too much. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh let's go check in with the head of communications and you know what it comes down to?
SPEAKER_00It it's it's the people that freaking execute. You can give all the information you want. Is who's gonna actually fucking execute on the information and deliver and make the money on it, man? So that's really where it comes out. We give you the we open the doors to people walk through the door and actually execute on this stuff.
SPEAKER_01So I there's a link in bio, right? To to sign up for the newsbreak platform. Our team looks at that sign up, they'll outreach you directly. Reach out to Dave or Chance, they're happy to send over personal introductions or join the telegram chat and we're we're pretty active with that.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely, man. This has been great. I'm so happy we came here. I this is I I love seeing this. I can't wait to come back. Maybe we do this like once every six months or something, right? I go to the New York office, I'll go check that office out too. I'm in New York pretty often, right? Yeah, but just being here, guys. I mean, it's what what a what an amazing experience. I love seeing the growth. Gets me so excited, man.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, peak underneath the hood, right? Yeah. Uh I think this is us trying to be real, trying to be transparent. We're not trying to be a black box. And I think along the way, we're building reputation, we're building awareness, and those two things are key to me.
Spend Ceilings, Q4 E‑Com, And Scale
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you are. It's it's the proofs and the pudding. You know, the growth, the numbers keep growing, and they're gonna continue to grow. You guys are obsessed with it. So I know you're gonna make it happen. Thank you, buddy. Yeah, thank you. Beautiful stuff. Take advantage of the ad credits, hit up my guys at newsbreak. Fucking best in the best in the industry at what they're doing, and they're out there, man. You guys are all the advanced, you're at the show, you're on the you're on the podcast, you're doing what you're supposed to be doing. So we love it, man. Let's keep going, guys. Let's fucking go. It's the money, newsbreak. Your network is your net worth. We got a fucking crazy network of people. I'm not talking about your average motherfucker, I'm talking about people doing$300,000,$400,000,$500,000 a day in ad spent. People have made billions of dollars in sales, people that exit their companies for about a billion dollars. We hit a hundred episodes. Guess what? We're about to take it to the next level. So you want to be part of it? Subscribe right now. Remember, no money, no money.