Audience Bridge [Insights]
Audience Bridge Insights is a podcast for newsletter operators, marketers, and media founders who want to scale smarter. Each episode dives into real-world strategies, tools, and conversations with industry experts on email deliverability, list growth, monetization, and the evolving tech behind the inbox.
Audience Bridge [Insights]
Why MarketBeat Just Cut Their Email List in Half (On Purpose) w/ Matt Paulson
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Matt Paulson, founder & CEO of MarketBeat, is just deleted 3 million "active" subscribers from his list — and he's doing it on purpose.
In this episode of Audience Bridge Insights, recorded at MarketBeat's brand new Sioux Falls studio, I sit down with Matt for round two (he was my very first guest on this show) to unpack what's actually happening inside one of financial publishing's biggest email operations in 2026.
We get into the engagement-only future of email, the 5-minute pixel rule that reclassified half their "opens" as automated, why MarketBeat now runs four parallel Beehiiv lists, the "Make Money Button" automation that Matt McGarry credits to Matt, ASN-level bot filtering, and the one metric Matt thinks every newsletter publisher should be obsessing over right now.
If you publish a newsletter — especially in finance, health, or any vertical ISPs treat as "high risk" — this one is required listening.
⏱️ CHAPTERS
- 00:00 Cold open
- 00:54 Welcome to the new MarketBeat studio
- 01:28 The Yahoo collapse, one year later
- 02:50 Apple is the new deliverability headache
- 04:42 The 5-minute pixel rule that reset every metric
- 05:50 Why MarketBeat is cutting their list from 6M to 3M
- 07:03 The Beehiiv diversification play
- 08:48 Inside the "Make Money Button"
- 10:59 AI's impact on email and the inbox
- 13:47 Inside the newsroom: Claude Code, Multi, and Victor
- 18:53 SMS at MarketBeat: 200K active, $9 RPU
- 23:15 YouTube and the new MarketBeat studio
- 29:27 The cohort data game
- 31:20 The bot war: ASN filtering and Cloudflare
- 34:10 Why Spark Loop didn't work (and Beehiiv ads do)
- 37:40 What every ESP is missing
- 39:11 Matt's #1 advice for newsletter publishers
- 40:04 Wrap-up
🔗 ABOUT THE GUEST
Matt Paulson — Founder & CEO, MarketBeat
Website: https://www.marketbeat.com/
X.com: https://x.com/MediaKing
ABOUT CHRIS MIQUEL AND AUDIENCE BRIDGE
Subscribe to Our Newsletter: https://links.audiencebridge.io/subscribe-v2
In this video, EXPLAIN.
Follow Chris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrismiquel/
If you liked this video, subscribe to my channel!
Intro
SPEAKER_00Content's pretty darn good. Like it's like a human would want to read that.
SPEAKER_01How is Gmail looking for you right now compared to last year or the year before deliverability goes? Yeah, we're 70% Gmail, so like that's kind of the tail that wags the dog. Everyone just talked about AI, but when you go out there and actually talk to people that aren't in the business, they don't know what the hell you're talking about.
SPEAKER_00Yep. I mean we're not trying to replace people with AI. We're just trying to like work off for our people so they can do more interesting stuff. We've got all of our eggs in the send grid analystradients.net basket for deliverability. Like this is a very risky thing we're doing. How has that affected engagement in general, numbers with the ISPs, maybe even revenue? We have a great bank of advertisers. We know which advertisers work really well, we know which offers are hot, um, which offers we should send. So a lot of it's a data game, and we've just gotten pretty good at that.
SPEAKER_01Welcome back to another episode of Audience Bridge Insights. I have the pleasure of being invited by Matt to his new beautiful Market Beat studio.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, this is the uh first non-like Market Beat official podcast recorded in here. So kind of fun to be able to use all the new equipment and lighting and cool stuff that we have. I'm excited about this one.
SPEAKER_01It's the actually Matt kicked off the Audience Bridge Insights podcast. He was my first guest. So this is act two.
SPEAKER_00Episode number like 15, 20?
SPEAKER_0116, I think we're on now. Okay, cool. So not too bad.
SPEAKER_00I mean, I made it to 26. So if you make it to 27, you're you're doing pretty good before I placed out on my podcast.
The Yahoo collapse, one year later
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I got to keep going. I gotta keep going. Let's go back to the beginning. So when we first kind of got to know each other and started, was it was during the the big Yahoo debacle that happened. Yeah, about a year ago. Last year. Yep. You know, last year. Hit everybody, especially the finance industry, very hard. I know we we worked on some stuff, got through some of that, just wanted to see how everything's going in the Yahoo space right now in general for market beat. How's it going in the Finpub space as a whole for everyone? I did uh attend FMS for the first time this year, financial media summit. Um, and it seemed like some people were starting to like get out of the funk that that happened this year.
SPEAKER_00So yeah, it does seem like the Yahoo issues have mostly come and gone. All of us that had Yahoo issues last year. I mean, you basically lost the people that were active on Yahoo. Like you you didn't get most of them back. So it was a lot of kind of rebuilding of your Yahoo audience. You know, we're we're getting there. We're not quite where we were in terms of clicks, like on a weekly basis before the Yahoo issues a year ago, but we're probably 60, 70% of the way back. So we're pretty happy with how things are going right now, and you just hope they don't take another big whack at, you know, if failure traffic and stuff like that.
SPEAKER_01Have you had since that kind of growth back up to to the audience? Have you guys had any setbacks during that timeframe where they kind of hit you again and you kind of had to slow down and get back up or kind of steady?
Apple is the new deliverability headache
SPEAKER_00Yeah, there was one, I think October, November, that we had an issue for like a week or so, but it was it sounded like it was more of a technical issue than anything that we had done, and then it came right back. I don't know exactly what happened, but things things are pretty good right now. Lately we've had more issues with Apple than anybody. See issues there off and on, and yeah, had some deal.
SPEAKER_01Apple has not been friendly to anyone uh across all the people I I talk with. Everyone's getting throttled or blocked for a certain percentage, a lot of a lot of bounces.
SPEAKER_00But for us, like Apple is a pretty small portion of our list. Like, you know, we're 70% Gmail, so like that's kind of the tail that wakes the dog, and like if our Gmail stuff's doing fine, like the other stuff, well, you know, it's kind of nice to have right critical.
SPEAKER_01They just announced that they're getting into the the business email game now. So just like the Microsoft or the Google uh Workfaces, Apple's gonna have their version of that. So well, it'll be interesting to see how that goes. As far as market be subscriber-based, kind of keeping on in that conversation. Do you have a big percentage of people that are using corporate accounts, even if they're their Google app accounts or their Microsoft Outlook accounts for businesses, like, or is it mostly your top level just Gmail, Yahoo, your general emails?
SPEAKER_00And we kind of have a big other category of everything that's not like Gmail and Yahoo and all the Yahoo domains and Microsoft, and um, I would say Gmail is the biggest, and then it's like other and then it's Yahoo, and then it's Microsoft, then it's Apple, then it's probably Comcast. But there is a lot of that. Um, we see tons of bot clicks on that. So we have to try really hard to filter those out and look at like things like click velocity of like this IP has clicked 40 times in the last 24 hours, probably a bot, and then we make them go through a capture or something like that. They're really like we don't want fake engagement signals, so we try to filter out as much of that as we can.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, those are the hardest ones because of all the, I mean, they're business related, so they have all their internal firewalls and all the things in place that check everything. And then as far as Yahoo, they came out with the Yahoo Insights this year, or maybe tail end of last year. How is that played into your guys' deliverability monitoring or anything like that? You guys looking at that closely, just keep an eye on it.
The 5-minute pixel rule that reset every metric
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean I pilot. I can do it once a week. Or our Yahoo spam numbers are pretty good. They're kind of 0.04, you know, try to keep it under 0.08. So look at that, and like everything's fine. So pretty happy with that. Nice.
SPEAKER_01Now let's go into Gmail, which is the big delivery, I mean, probably the largest chunk of your list, I would say. How is Gmail looking for you right now compared to last year or the year before, as far as deliverability goes?
Why MarketBeat is cutting their list from 6M to 3M
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's it's really hard to tell because we've changed how we track Gmail stuff. Um, historically, it's had a pretty high open rate, but what we've come to realize recently is that a lot of the Gmail image proxy opens are probably like just automated opens. So we've started making it so that if we send a Gmail address, an email, and then the pixel fires within the first five minutes, we consider it automated and then we don't track it as an engagement metric. And in doing that, like, you know, there's a lot more, a higher percentage of our open pixels are considered automated. And then that kind of cascades into like we don't do a triggered email on an automated pixel. So then we send out less and it's just kind of reset the bar for all of our metrics. Uh generally, I think it's fine. We have a domain reputation of medium on Gmail. We're working on getting that high, right? And like to do that, like, you know, we're focused on like keep getting our spam report rate under you know, 0.08, really focusing on email sign up channels that um have a higher activation rate of like of all the emails sign up, what percentage of them click. You know, we're focused on that. And then just kind of, you know, we have a lot of people on our list that they may have like recent open dates, but they've never clicked, and like they could have been on the list for 12 months, maybe gotten 500, 1000 emails from us and never clicked. Like that's probably like not a true engagement signal. Like if you've gotten 500 emails and like haven't clicked on one of them, like it's probably not a real account in my mind, because you're gonna click on something eventually. But like those people were gonna start to scrub them, and we're probably gonna do some of the more aggressive scrubbing we've done over the years. Just because our list is 15 years old, and you know, there's just a lot of a lot of noise on there and kind of kind of need to dial back. Like when we're done cleaning out, we're like, we won't have six million UF subscribers anymore. We might have three. Like, we're gonna cut it back pretty hard.
SPEAKER_01For for fun, have you ever gone back and looked at like a recent purchaser, like the recent purchase, see how long the oldest person has been on the list? Like, do you have someone from 10 years ago that's so maybe made a purchase this this year?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, we have people from 2011 that are still actively opening and clicking. I haven't looked at the purchase data, but we've definitely had some blind time subscribers, and every now and then they write in and like, I remember when you guys were analystratings network. And I'm like, Yep. We still set from analystratings.net, though. We sure do. That's funny. It's hard to warm up a new domain these days. Yeah, yeah.
The Beehiiv diversification play
SPEAKER_01Well, talking about that, I know one of your big initiatives, I don't know if it was beginning this year or end of last year, you started testing out some new lists over on Beehive.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And I've heard that's been going very well. I know you you kind of talked about that a little bit of FMS. How's that going right now? What was your, you know, initial strategy when you're when you were going that route? And what was the kind of ramp up of these new lists? Because I think these lists now are pretty mature. Yeah. Or at least the first one you had, I think was pretty mature.
Inside the "Make Money Button"
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So about a year ago when we had the Yahoo issues, we thought, okay, we've got all of our eggs in the send grid analystratings.net basket for deliverability. Like, this is a very risky thing we're doing because we get our domain gets blocked, our IPs get flagged or whatever. Like, that's a bad day, right? Like, yeah, we have other channels, we have SMS and browser notifications and our website, but like email is very like stuck in that one basket. So we thought, okay, uh, everybody is talking about Beehive, at least not in the financial publishing industry then. Like, nobody was on, no, none of the FinPEP people were on Beehive yet. But I thought, okay, we should try a Beehive list and we should try a Substack list. The Substack list didn't really go anywhere. It was um couldn't get good open rates on those emails. We were sending people to the Substack page to sign up, like to our push notifications and SMS stuff like that. Had a very hard time getting people to sign up. And then when people did sign up, like the open rates were just not good. So we eventually turned that list into a second beehive list. Um, but now what we do is like on our main landing page, you know, there's a thing that says, like, that, you know, when you sign up for Market Beat, you're also going to get a free subscription to American Market News, which is our Beehive list. And then when people fill out the form, we just do an API call to Beehive saying, Chris signed up, put him on the list, you know, start sending him the daily email. And then if Chris activates and starts to engage with that email, then we'll also send like an ad every day to the people that are opening and clicking actively. And you know, we're able to maintain 40, 50% global open rates on Beehive, really healthy click-through rates. And you know, we've done the stuff that you've talked about with the base sending segments and you you you've coined your own term there for beehive, the make money button, right? Yes, there is the make money button. And that is um, it's an automation where you're taking your most active people and then just sending them your best kind of, I don't know, make money kind of emails. Um, could be an offer for an advertiser, could be like your own best offer for your product. But like if if you know somebody has clicked in the last seven days, like they're an active person, like that's the time to just like start sending them the stuff that will make you money. Matt McGarry made a really nice video about how to set that up. He tried to steal the steal it from you. Um he did, well, I don't say he tried to steal it. He was just he did give me credit about it. Yeah, he credited you, I think. Yeah, he did credit. It was definitely my idea. So and it definitely works. Like we make so much money from the Make Money Button series. Go look up Matt's video on that and learn how to do it if you have Beehive.
SPEAKER_01Awesome. And how many lists are on Beehive right now?
SPEAKER_00Uh we have four. Three that are really kind of up to speed. One that's we're just getting started on. You know, I think by the end of the year we'll probably move two more over. Uh, we're probably done creating like brand new lists on Beehive for a while. From our we send like too many different newsletters from our main sending domain. So I think it'd be helpful to move a couple of them over to Beehive to that way Gmail doesn't think like like because we have like 10 different email lists, and if somebody happens to be on all 10 of them, Gmail's like, you're sending 10 emails a day to this person. It's like, well, yeah, but they're different brands, but they don't really see it that way.
SPEAKER_01And then, and I guess you said you you're just gonna migrate a couple of existing lists over there. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Same same people, you're just yeah, so we'll just take like, I mean, we'll move over in activists, but the people who are active will, you know, like take something off kind of our off analystradings.net or sending domain and move them over to our behive list, and then I think that'll go pretty well.
SPEAKER_01And when we were talking earlier, I I think you mentioned uh I know in the past you had done the BIME setup, but you stopped doing it because, you know, back then when you initially did it, you didn't really see anything. And now you're telling me you recently redid it.
AI's impact on email and the inbox
SPEAKER_00Yeah, we just VMC again a verified mark certificate because we have our Mark BM trade like trademarks so we can get a BMC. We did a BIME Pi three years ago, did it for a year, think expired, and thought like this didn't make a big difference to our deliverability. Let's drop it. And now we're kind of hearing through the grapevine from people like our friend Ashki at SunGrid and from you that like, you know, it probably does actually make a difference with deliverability. So go spend the money and get a VMC and just just do it. How long ago did that happen? Or did you go? Like last last week. Okay. I guess pretty weird.
SPEAKER_01Too early to tell, so yeah, we'll we'll have to follow up and see if it really made any movement uh across those those sends. Let's go with the whole world's talking about now, at least in our little nerdy ecosystem, especially on Twitter and stuff, which is AI. Um, seems like it's everywhere in the world. Everyone just talks about AI, but when you go out there and actually talk to people uh that aren't in the business, they don't know what the hell you're talking about. Yep. So we're still kind of in the infancy, but uh obviously it's gonna snowball here. Obviously, it's no snowball for our industry and the tech industry. What is your your mindset on what AI is gonna do to email deliverability, inbox, consumer behavior within the inbox because of all these AI summaries? All obviously all the ISBs are gonna be leveraging it heavier than they already do or with all their filtering algorithms and things. How do you think that's gonna affect you? And then we'll get into the second part is how is the market be kind of leveraging AI right now?
SPEAKER_00I think the the content filters are gonna have a really hard time, like Cloud Mart, um, because what you could do is just say for every thousand recipients, we write an email. So then every email which looks a little bit different, it'd be really hard to do fingerprinting in a way that ESPs have historically. Like I feel like if you are, yeah, if you're an ESP trying to filter based off content, I feel like that's gonna get really hard for them to do. Um if you're a sender, like it's great news because then you can use AI to rewrite any email that you sent before, send it again, it looks like a brand new email. And that, you know, if it got fingerprinted before, the new email isn't fingerprinted. So it'd be tough, tough for ESPs, good for senders. You know, I think the the email summary stuff that's in inboxes right now, you know, right now it's it's only available for people that are paying Google a couple hundred bucks a month for their Google AI ultra thing. So most people don't have that today. I I do think there's, you know, there's the trend of like inboxes are flooded with email, people get too many, too many things. I'm guessing there's gonna be machine learning to say, okay, Chris is not engaged with XYZ email. Um, right now it all makes suggestions to say, you know, you haven't opened um this newsletter in 30 days. Do you want to unsubscribe? One of the predictions is that Google is gonna start clicking the list unsubscribe button for you proactively. Like I could totally see that happening. Um I feel like the summarization tools are probably like a cut, you know, a year or two out from just being the default for every for everything. I I don't know that it's gonna change that much for us.
Inside the newsroom: Claude Code, Multi, and Victor
SPEAKER_01Yeah, the I actually talked about that as a prediction for the auto unsubscribe unsubscribe for for people that aren't engaged with their email on uh Mamma Gary's year, whatever being the year thing. Which I think is gonna happen because it makes sense. They know everything that's happening, they have the the tech stacks already there. Um, and then the amount of money it would save them not having received filter all those emails uh and bulk is or if it's like a dead Gmail account that hasn't been live to log into in 12 months, like they probably should just unsubscribe. Yeah, mailbox full for like 10 years. Yeah, it's interesting. And then as far as market beat itself, how are you guys leveraging AI within the company, whether it be for content? I know you guys played a bit a few months ago or maybe in the last year of using some AI summarizing within articles or something. Yep. Um, I know you guys are starting to use it uh as on the tech team side for faster development and and things.
SPEAKER_00AI at Market Beat really started about 12 months ago when the initial kind of strategy was to kind of use the APIs that OpenAI and others offer to kind of summarize content, you make automated content, which we've been doing automated content for 15 years with templates and stuff like that. But now we could take like an SEC filing and write a news brief or an earnings, um, earnings call transcript and write a story based off that. And like content's pretty darn good. Like it's like a human would want to read that. And I don't know if that's been true of like the templated stuff we've done historically. Like the new automated stuff we're doing is really good. Um, so we can write a full news story about like what was set on an earnings call and like it's great. Um, we also do like news summaries for companies where it's you know, Apple, there might be two, three hundred news stories a day written about Apple on kind of big news sites. So we try to sum like distill and summarize it into a couple paragraphs of like here's what's moving Apple stock today. Doing a lot of that in the fall. So that was kind of our spring summer initiative last year. In the fall, we um when cloud code got really good, when Opus 4.5 came out, we had all kind of experimented with different things with like GitHub Copilot Agent and some of the earlier things that come out, and Cloud Code got really good. And I basically told everybody, like, okay, this is what we're using. You all need to go get this right now and try it out. So our dev team has been become super efficient with cloud code. Like we're burning through our past kind of like we had like a year backlog of stuff and we're just burning through that list. We'll be caught up in a month or two of like everything that had been on the list for over a year, and then our dev team is gonna have a lot of free time to like go do new stuff, which will be be really cool. And then lately, like we've we've created a couple of AI agents. I've had an open claw instance or cloud bot kind of since it came out and kind of teaching it to do new things. But one of the cool things to have it do is, you know, we have a big reporting system called the Market Beat Web Admin that's got kind of all of our data. We looked at it, you know, today together. Um, I'll have my clo my open claw, his name is Multi, logs into that, looks at all the key reports, and then if anything has changed dramatically over the course of like a week, like he'll alert me to that. Because, you know, I don't look at the reports every day, but he can look at the reports every day and be like, hey, your Yahoo open rate went up 15% this week. You should take note of that and figure, figure it out. So he's really good at alerting me and that kind of stuff. Um and then we just recently installed Victor into our Slack instance, and Victor is basically like open claw for your Slack team, um, which has allowed um some of our people that you know maybe aren't technical enough to set up open claw on their computer to have like an AI agent where they could train it to do stuff. And that's going pretty well. Like our team's finding a lot of use cases for it.
SPEAKER_01And you said, didn't you say that like Victor and Multi have a little chat every day to follow up summarize with how their day went?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so we have a Slack channel called uh just Project Stash Lobster where the the two open claw agents talk to each other and at 7 p.m. every night they each give each other a report of like, here's what I did today, here's what I learned today, here are the things you should keep an eye on. And that way, like their memories can kind of, I don't know, cohabitate a little bit. Anything interesting come out of that? Not yet. Um Multi makes a lot of mistakes, like he just does like get stuff wrong. So we've been having a lot of them get wrong on his Twitter post or his ex posts? Uh there's some of that, but like Multi just gets stuff wrong and then like we'll call him out and be like, Multi, you mess this up again. Then we had Victor start keeping track of Multi's mistakes. Just did a runny log of that. That's kind of been fun.
SPEAKER_01What um I guess what's the what's the end goal with with these agents for you guys?
SPEAKER_00Um, I mean, we're not trying to replace people with AI. We're just trying to get some of the little legwork off of our people so they can do more interesting stuff. How many developers are you are on the team now? Let's see, we got Rebecca, we got Becca, we got Ryan, we got Liz, we got John, Savannah, and Alex. So seven. One of Alex is a designer, but so probably six developers. Nice, and you just three, four X dumps, and now you have 24 developers. Yeah, we can do a lot of stuff. You know, we have a 15-year-old code base, so a lot of it's refactoring, and we were running jobs through an ASP.net web application, like like cron jobs. We're moving that to like a separate job system, so it's been a big project this year. Got it.
SPEAKER_01Any plans on changing any of the tech stack?
SMS at MarketBeat: 200K active, $9 RPU
SPEAKER_00Well, what it's what we're doing more and more, uh, like we've built like two new web applications that tie into our existing database, but they're built like on Node.js, entirely vibe coded. Like we built a new editorial management system so that um our writers and editors can have their own workflow and their own system where like a writer can submit a submit a pitch and then like an editor can approve it, the writer can write the article, the editor can edit the article, go through a bunch of checks checks in it, and then like use AI to write like a meta description and like meta keywords, stuff like that that a person should need to write. It's all in an entirely like vibe coded no JS application. And then it just writes back into our database. And then eventually we'll go delete all the legacy stuff that's in the market beat web admin. And yeah, I see us building more and more kind of specialized apps versus like having one big monolith that we've historically had.
SPEAKER_01And then this past uh I don't know, it was I wouldn't say that maybe the last year, maybe the last two years, you you've really gotten your hands into the SMS game.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01How's that going? How big is your SMS list now? And then what do you see more growth there? Or are you kind of seeing somewhat of a ceiling that you gotta kind of break through to get to the next level?
SPEAKER_00So we're at maybe 400,000 SMS subscribers. You have three different SMS lists, about 200,000 of those are have clicked on a link from SMS in the last 90 days. So 200,000 is probably our active number. It's definitely a different game than email. It's simpler in some ways because like deliverability is not as much of a problem like if you have a short code.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_00But it's also much more complex from a legal perspective. For example, like one thing you need to do is every now and then run your email, your SMS list through the like what's called the reassigned numbers database. Because let's say Nick had a phone number, he signed up for MarketBeat SMS, he says, I don't want Verizon anymore. I mean, go to AT ⁇ T, get a new phone number. Or somebody will eventually end up with Nick's old phone number. That person hasn't opted into MarketBeat SMS, but Nick did, so that consent is no longer valid. Then you have to run your list through the reassigned numbers database and say, okay, that number is reassigned. We need to unsubscribe that number, and it's not a valid opt-in anymore. The other thing is there's a lot of serial litigants under the Telephone Consumer Production Act, TCPA. So like at least once a year somebody threatens to sue us over TCPA saying, you know, I didn't opt into your list, you're spamming me with SMS. And then we're like, and we of course you have to go back and say, hold on, like you gave us your email, you gave us your phone number from this IP address, you showed out this form, and then we sent you a text, and then you clicked on the confirmation link, and here's your Verizon IP, or you clicked on it and just really like provide the evidence, like, yeah, you did opt in. So like you could sue us, but we've got the data to prove that you've opted in, and then they usually go away. Like we've never had a TCPA thing become a lawsuit. We just get get the complaints from like the serial litigants all the time where like they're just looking for people that don't have the consent data, and then if you don't have that, then they'll sue you, and then you end up having to settle for 15 grand. But thankfully we've got good consent data for for everybody.
SPEAKER_01So that's interesting.
SPEAKER_00So, how often are you guys rerunning that phone number SMS checker? Um, you're supposed to do it every 30 days. So we end up spending a couple grand a month to do that, but it just kind of the cost of doing SMS, like the like you pay way more for SMS than email, but the revenue per subscriber is also quite a bit higher. Like of our 200,000 active SMS subscribers, like that might be like nine dollars in revenue per user per month. Like, you know, or two to two hundred thousand people, like that could make us a million eight in revenue each month. So it's the monetization is is very strong.
SPEAKER_01And it's interesting that you talk about that, and and that's a big problem. We talked about this on the email validation side earlier today, and it's a big issue with the industry. And a lot of people, one don't really do a probably a great job validating on the front end when they're acquiring the data, but then really recycling and then re revalidating during a certain cycle, if it's quarterly, biannually, whatever it is, to make sure that their their list is still valid. It's kind of a similar thing because I mean people's emails. I mean, I've had you know 20 emails over over the years, and different emails turn into spam traps because you left them and things like that, and and that could end up hurting the
SPEAKER_00Yeah. That's definitely something people should do too, you know, like every I don't know 90 days or whatever their good frequency is, but just go revalidate your list and make sure all the people are on there are still good and kick off if somebody's become inactive and now they're a spam trap. Like obviously you don't want those people on your list. And um, there's lots of these services out there. Our friend Sean runs one code emailable, you use one code email oversight, we use whatever SendGrid has built in, and they all kind of do slightly different things. So it's just kind of knowing which ones are the good ones. And um, we use one called kickbox for years. That was pretty good, but we're you know, who knows?
SPEAKER_01I actually um had Tim Berklin from After Offers on, I think it was the last episode. Um, and he talked about it. So all every everything that comes through his uh co-reds channel, they like quadruple verify on four different validation tools, plus he has other layers of of things for for bot protection. So he's trying to do it on, you know, for his clients, um, which is great.
SPEAKER_00That's probably overkill for, you know, a normal person, like with the list. But if you I guess if you're running a co-reds lead network, that that could make sense.
YouTube and the new MarketBeat studio
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, it's definitely like I mean he he said it. I think he said like every time he does a validation, he's losing like five or ten percent because it just keeps on whittling. Everyone has their own little master global suppression file, their own bot file that they say are bots and and things like that. So now that we've talked about guests, let's talk about your your YouTube channel that just skyrocketed, which you built this beautiful new studio. Yep. Um, which how long has this been open now? I mean, they finished like a week ago, if that.
SPEAKER_00This is one of the first episodes in here, guys. Yeah, we hired uh Brian, the guy behind the camera, to help us run the studio and to be kind of our video production coordinator. And of course we have Bridget doing her YouTube channel, she's doing a great job with that. We're up to 62,000 subscribers. Hipco view video get 40,000, 50,000 views. Uh, we've been able to get some great guests. Like Mark, like Mark Shakin is a regular on our channel. He's um one of the experts over at Stansbury Research, and you know, he does really well on video. So he's been our frequent contributor to the channel, and we've been able to get some really fun guests just based off our advertising relationships, and um, there's a real audience for it. Like, and it's it's very much different people than like what are normally on like a Marquette email list.
SPEAKER_01Is is the majority of your acquisition for that channel strictly like advertising via Facebook? I mean Facebook via YouTube directly, and that's where you get your subscribers from.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So like initially when we started the channel, like we sent our email subscribers um and our SMS subscribers to YouTube to like go say, hey, we published a new video, go watch it on YouTube um to kind of see the channel with some people. And then we did YouTube ads for a while. They've been off for a couple of months now, and now all the go-through really is organic YouTube of YouTube showing our videos to people that might like them, and then obviously if they watch the whole video, you know, show more of them for a while.
SPEAKER_01And then have you guys been able to track how many of those subscribers may have now gone the other way to your your email list? Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yes, list from the YouTube page. Yeah, I mean it's a few thousand a month. It's not a huge number, but the people that come from YouTube tend to be pretty, pretty engaged and pretty kind of high revenue per user numbers. You know, our YouTube channel probably makes about$100,000 a month, so certainly covers the the step, you know, the salary of the staff and pays for rent in the studio and pays to some equipment and you know it's profitable. It's not wildly profitable like some of the other stuff we do, but um, I think it is a key differentiator for us. And that like these days it's really easy to go build out a stock research website that has data powered by like you know, you can go buy stock market data anywhere from Intrinio or Zax or whoever, and then vibe code a tool to show off that data. Like anybody can do that now. So, like that's not really a bar anymore. Like 15 years ago, like that was kind of hard to do. Now it's really easy to do. Then the next layer above that is kind of like original written content where you've got writers and editors and like the real people and see their picture and their bios. Like that's kind of a bar of like difficulty. Like, there's a great site called stockanalysis.com, like really cool website. They do a really nice job. Um, but one thing that differentiates us from them, like they've got some really good tools, but they don't have the original content piece. We have kind of the written content piece, but then the bar above that is video. Like, video is hard to do because you need a studio, you need a host, you need guests, you need production people, you need editors, and like just a lot of people that goes into it and like equipment and resources. So, like we see that as a differentiator for us versus the people that either don't have the resources or the ambition to do that.
SPEAKER_01Did you guys find out what we talked at one point? Did you guys finally hire a uh a guest booker or whatever, someone who like tries to get guests for you guys for this pod?
SPEAKER_00Um, we don't have somebody that does that actively. Um, so our YouTube team is Bridget, our host, Brian, who's our video production coordinator, and then Lacey's um, who was our original YouTube host, is now mostly doing some other things, but now she's you know still helping with the YouTube channel. A lot of it is just our advertisers and kind of the, you know, so many of our advertisers are financial newsletter publishers, and all those um newsletters have a face behind them, and then it's to the person who's the face ends up being the guest on our YouTube channel. It gives them credibility because it's kind of an independent media where it's talking to their expert and it gives us content. So it's really a win-win kind of deal. And you know, sometimes they can promote their offers. Uh, we've done some of that with I'd say moderate success. But it's it's been a really lot of fun to learn YouTube and what works and what doesn't work, and you know, we'll argue over like we should do ads again. No, we shouldn't do ads again and just kind of go back and forth on some of that stuff. And uh, it's been a lot of fun to do it.
SPEAKER_01Uh, you think you guys will get to one million this this year?
SPEAKER_00Uh if we turn ads back on, we will. If we don't, then uh we probably won't.
SPEAKER_01I won't.
SPEAKER_00Because like you can grow your your organic view count pretty easily, like with your organic stuff. But if you really want to push your subscriber, like your subscriber count, like you probably gotta do some YouTube ads.
SPEAKER_01What what percentage of the of your subscriber base do you think uh watches an average video? How many views does it get?
SPEAKER_00Average video gets 40 to 50,000 views, so like that's pretty good. Yeah, better than social media reach. Yeah, we've Mario Beats never figured out social media um outside of YouTube. Like we've never been able to make it work for us.
SPEAKER_01Are there any new emerging channels that you guys, I mean, you're always looking for a new channel and you know, spreading out the I mean you're a media brand now, obviously, not just uh originally you guys were you know an SEO kind of play game on the website, then you got into the email game, which is what really blew you up, and obviously now you're trying to find different things. SMS, we was next thing, now you're doing YouTube. Is there another channel that you see on the horizon that's something you're gonna try to capture? I know you talked about your kind of AI openness where like you allowed all the AI to come in and and scrape the entire website and stuff to get that data. Because obviously, if they're doing that, then hopefully people searching for stuff are gonna find you. Is there any other channel? Is that the channel that might be the one?
The cohort data game
SPEAKER_00Um, we do get some good referral traffic from like ChatGPT, but it's nothing compared to Google. I think the emerging thing, like the we're still trying to figure it out. Like, you know, we have some great video content on YouTube. We've just recently started putting that like on Facebook and Instagram, get seen some pretty good engagement reach there. So I think that's a growth opportunity for us. Then can we do like some native shorts and get them? Yes, on YouTube, but also on like Instagram where we all's and whatever Facebook's version of shorts are. Um, we also upload our YouTube videos to msn.com and like do pretty well with that. Um, not everybody does can do that, but we've got like the MSN deal, so we upload all of our videos there and it makes us a few thousand bucks a month to do that. What about TikTok? Uh we have a TikTok channel. I don't know if we're doing videos on it actively now. Um we actually run ads on TikTok profitably, and like that's kind of unusual that a financial newsletter that's generally kind of for older people is doing law on TikTok. But uh the ad the ad channel is doing pretty well for us.
SPEAKER_01As far as monetization, we talk about, I mean, you guys have you guys, you in general, or the brainchild behind it, but you guys have mastered your cohort analysis, you know, the monetization by your sources. That's how you're being able to scale so much because you know exactly the money you're putting in, what's coming out, so you know what to kind of push on it, what not to. What how are other people in industry doing that? Is it is they're not able to do it at that level?
SPEAKER_00I don't know if I have a great answer to that. Um, you know, in terms of monetization, like we do really well when like we've got the data of like who our buyers are, which is kind of kind of a unique thing for financial publishing that you get post-back data. Not everybody gets postback data. You know, we're really good at getting people to sign up on multiple channels of like when you go to our landing page, like you're gonna sign up for our main email list or beehive list or SMS list. Um, so we can get people on three channels at once. You could send them to the YouTube channel to get number four. So obviously, if people are more channels, you can send them more ads and monetize better that way. We have a great bank of advertisers. We know which advertisers work really well, we know which offers are hot, um, which offers we should send. So a lot of it's a data game, and we've just gotten pretty good at that.
SPEAKER_01Have you guys done an analysis on uh your your your subscribers that opted in with both email and SMS? And has that is the engagement on your email for those people higher than just your regular subscribers with just email? Kind of because they're a multi-channel, maybe they see more so they're they're more ingrained to the brand.
SPEAKER_00They tend to be pretty separate. Like somebody who's very active on SMS, like that's not a guarantee that they're gonna be active on email. And if they're active on email, it's not guaranteed that they're gonna be active on SMS. So, like if we do a trigger campaign based off SMS, like we probably won't send an email off that because it's not like a good indicator that they're gonna open an email. So yeah, they they tend they tend not to be correlated, I guess is my experience.
The bot war: ASN filtering and Cloudflare
SPEAKER_01Since you brought up the triggered emails or the trigger campaigns, what um what would you say the biggest mistake people are making out there around their triggered campaigns or triggered systems that they're trying to implement?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, um, there's no good tech to do it right now. Like inbox mailers is out there, but I don't think there's a lot of product innovation happening with that product. I think Kit does a pretty good job with um like trigger-based emails from what I know. Be Hype doesn't really have it yet. Hopefully they'll add it soon. Like the problem is you have to build your own tech. Then when you build your own tech, and if it's you're gonna be based off open pixels, like you have to know what a real open is, right? Or if it's gonna be click-based, you have to know that it's not a bot. And you know, it's it's pretty hard these days to differentiate like real engagement and fake engagement. And like if you can do that, you can do triggers really well. But you know, if you send in a triggered email based on every click or every open, like you're gonna have a bad day.
SPEAKER_01And then based on, I mean, we talk about like identifying real human openers, real human clickers, like all these stuff, and some of these ESPs, a lot of them are starting to come out with their own, you know, verify click metric, human click metrics, real click metrics, whatever they call it, to try to help identify those. What have you guys done on Market Bee? You guys do have your own custom platform. What has changed over the last year or six months of how you're looking at your opens and how you're looking at your clicks from your traditional? How has that affected delivery or engagement in general, numbers with the ISPs, maybe even revenue?
Why Spark Loop didn't work (and Beehiiv ads do)
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Um, I think we've gotten better at identifying automated traffic in the last six months. And like you don't want to like unsubscribe people because they're said to be bot clicks, because an email address can be both a bot and a real person. And like the security software might be clicking on every link, and then the person like might be clicking on the link here and there. Like you don't want to like kick off an email address off your list because the security software is opening every email because like there's still a real person behind it. So you have to differentiate like the the security software traffic from the real human traffic. Um, and you tend to do it by like IP address or like there tends to be it tends to be a lot of that stuff from like the cloud computing networks. So you can do it from like the ASN numbers, like for an IP range, and say, okay, if this is like Google Cloud traffic or AWS traffic, or if it's Microsoft Azure traffic, you know, probably not a real person. And then we can send them to like an interstitial page where like they have to click on a button to say, like, yeah, I'm a real person. So like when we do like a clicked opt-in campaign, for example, we know that a lot of the clicks from the cloud computing networks are Py bots. So when we get a click that comes from like Azure on a clicked opt-in campaign, we'll send them through a Cloudflare capture page before they ever hit our redirect script. And then it'll go through all of our standard other bot bot checks too. So that way we kind of have two layers of protection. You just kind of have to do that depending on the campaign type. But then we have other stuff that's like pure affiliate stuff, whereas we're only getting paid per sale. It doesn't really matter if we send bot clicks to those links. We just try to discount those clicks from our click perspective, like in our campaign counts, but we'll still redirect to the landing page in case it's a real person. Because if they end up buying something, we'll get paid for it. Like there's no reason to block that redirect.
SPEAKER_01Well, we're talking about, I mean, I guess let me rephrase this. I guess so. My last two newsletters I'd sent out over the last couple weeks. One was my podcast uh about co-reg with after offers, uh, Tim Berkwin. This last one I just talked about, I talked about how cheap clicks can become very expensive for you. You know, a lot of it's tied to co-reg in general leads and things like that. What is your thought on co-reg? What can you share there? Where where would you tell people that you really have to have all your ducks in a row and make sure those cheap leads don't become expensive? And then, meaning it could be expensive. Leads could even not be, it could be very expensive as well if they're just not good quality. But how are you banding your co-reg?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So for for, you know, there's kind of different levels of like engagement with channels. Um co-reg tends to be on the lower end, lead shares even lower than that. And on the high end is like a PPC campaign where somebody went to your landing page, they typed their phone and their email, and then they're looking for that lead magnet, and then they're going to their inbox to get the lead magnet right away, right? So that tends to be pretty high engagement uh website opt-in somewhere in the middle. Um, so it's good to know like what your engagement is by channel of like what percentage of these people activate in terms of like of the thousand people, how many of them actually like clicked on a link within the first 30 days, stuff like that. And code red can work. It's really gotta be an alignment in category. So, like if I'm on another investing website and then there's code edge for market beat, like that can work pretty well. More general co-reds, like what Spark Loop does. I haven't seen that work as well with our own data. What we found with Spark Loop is that like every every newsletter would promote our offer um across every different category, and we'd end up with a ton of leads. All of them probably came from Meta, um, very low engagement. Well, lots of like click engagement, but not a lot of buyers. Right. So, like from a raw just engagement perspective, it looked pretty good because people clicked on stuff all the time. But there weren't very many back-end like people that actually bought stuff. So we ultimately had to shut it down as a channel because like it's ultimately self-defeating for you to send traffic to your advertisers that aren't gonna buy anything because they're gonna look at your list as junk if you're not really driving those back end sales.
SPEAKER_01And how how does how does the uh beehives, what do they call them, the upsells or not the upsells, the up, up uh boost or whatever they call them? How is that traffic looking? They they seem to have some more FinPub kind of people on there now. I don't know. Are you testing that one?
SPEAKER_00Um, well, we're buying ads and beehive's ad network for our market. Uh that way it can kind of go through our cohort tracking system. Like the early data on that's pretty good. That's not beehive boosts. Okay. These are ads and other beehive newsletters. Right. So beehive boost is their like co-edge program or recommendation platform. Um, we haven't done a whole lot with that yet, but running ads on their ad network has been pretty good because one thing that they'll do is like they'll hand pick which newsletters or which categories they offer show your offer to. So like they only show the market beat offer to like finance investing type newsletters. That way, like a cookie newsletter doesn't see a market beat ad as something they can run, right? Which is really nice.
SPEAKER_01And then it's like you said, those are the ads that are actually going to your site to fill out the lead magnet. Yeah, so it's kind of a higher tier person anyway.
SPEAKER_00And you're gonna pay in more for those leads, but I mean ultimately I think you know, having people that are more engaged on your list, um, people actually want what you're sending down, like is what you need to do long term. Like it's uh it's a quality game more than it is a quantity game these days.
What every ESP is missing
SPEAKER_01Well, we're looking at ESPs and we can talk about, I mean, you have your own custom app, but now you're on sure you used other ESPs in the past. You're using Bhab now, and are you tested Substack, Burkit, uh, but be Bhab mostly right now. What do you see from these ESPs that's that's usually missing? And I know I remember seeing I think you put an ex post or something yesterday, how like you wish ESPs just focus on on email? Email, email automations and things like that, and not all these additional things that they're trying to do. Um, what do you think they're missing in general?
Matt's #1 advice for newsletter publishers
SPEAKER_00Yeah, what you see with both kit and beehive and probably some other ESPs is they try to be like the everything creator platform because like that's what they want their investors, so it's what their investors want them to be. Like they want you to have your podcast on Beehive or Kit. They want you to have your newsletter there, they probably want you to have your video content there, recommendations through there, maybe a referral program, and like a lot of these things are just kind of annoys for somebody who's really focused on email. Um, really, where all the ESPs need to get better is kind of at the data game of like cohort analysis of like which channels are driving like good engaged leads, really kind of engagement data based off ESP. Um, a lot of them don't give you that data unless you like pay for an enterprise plan or a more expensive plan. Because email is, you know, it's a 50-year-old technology and like it wasn't designed to be sent to a million people. And we've added so many things on top of that. And you know, each ESP behaves a little bit differently, and like you really have to have some depth of understanding of that data, and the ESPs don't always give you that. So, like, I would love to see them more focused on like there should be a base sending segment installed into every ESP, right? But no, you have to set it up from scratch. Some more stuff like that that's really email focused and engagement and deliverability focused. That's what they should spend their time.
SPEAKER_01I think we're getting close to the end of this because I think you you have a place to go. What's what's the one thing, one advice you would give any other newsletter publishers out there? It doesn't have to just be FinPub on like what's the number one thing they should be focused on while they're growing their list.
SPEAKER_00I think the thing that more people need to spend time on is like what are your activation rates by channel of like, so you get a thousand leads from a channel, what percentage of them actually ever click on anything? And then to know that, like, okay, my Twitter leads had a 10% activation rate, my meta leads had a 20%, um, this co-edge thing only had 5%. And really focus on channels that have that higher engagement metric because that's ultimately what's going to be good for your deliverability long term.
SPEAKER_01Perfect.
Wrap-up
Wrap-up
SPEAKER_00And I think we'll end it on that one. Matt, thank you so much for having me here at the studio. Love it, it's beautiful. Yeah, thanks for thanks for coming. And make sure to follow me on Twitter. I'm at Media King. Chris is at M IQ Chris, right? Yeah, M IQ Chris.
SPEAKER_01Trying, we're trying to get the uh, you know, email King, Twitter's holding the hostage or ex holding the hostage right now.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I'll just email Elon and let him know that, yeah. You should. And uh is the Market Beat Beat open coming up soon? Market Beat opens in October. Uh, we're also so that's our tennis tournament. We have the Loudly Cooler Music Festival. That's our our outdoor concert kind of festival thing. That's in July. We're also gonna be doing um NCAA women's basketball tournament called the Market Beat Invitational or something like that. So got a lot of cool, fun stuff happening in Sioux Falls that Market B Mighty pays for, and we just have a lot of fun doing it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's awesome. This is my first time in Sioux Falls. This is a nice, nice city. Very, you know, it's a smaller city, but very well put together. Thanks for having me, guys. I hope you enjoyed Market B declassified. See you guys next week.