MarketBeat’s SMS Play: Far More Valuable Than Email

MarketBeat, a financial news media company, surpassed 5.3 million newsletter subscribers this year. That’s pretty good, but what’s really exciting the company’s founder is good old fashioned texting.

It’s far more lucrative than the crowded inbox market, and five years after MarketBeat first started sending SMS alerts for stocks, it began a new alert, Early Bird, on January 1. The opt-in system delivers to 26,000 phone numbers already. Founder Matt Paulson said he gets about 1,000 new numbers every day. MarketBeat currently has a total of more than 200,000 total SMS subscribers.

“The thing to know about SMS subscribers is that they are worth like, 20 times what an email subscriber is, it’s shocking,” Paulson told AMO. “I sent an SMS on Saturday to 24,000 people, made $8,500 from it.” That’s twice what an email to the same number of folks would have returned, he said.

It’s a big part of his plan this year, on top of expanding the MarketBeat YouTube presence, which has 163,000 subscribers. Paulson argues that the key to the business is less in the content—though there does have to be some quality to it—and more about the distribution.

Paulson said:

Our competitors don’t understand that it’s a distribution game. They think it’s a content game, and a tools and technology game where they think if they build the best investing research tools, they’re going to get an audience, and it doesn’t work like that. Or they think they’re going to have some super unique take on the market. Sure, there are people that do that, but they also tend to cap out at a couple hundred thousand subscribers. It’s really a distribution game of who can build the biggest audience, and then from there, you can develop content and generate revenue.

MarketBeat Sends a lot of Emails

MarketBeat, like so many others, turned to newsletters after seeing traffic take a hit when Google altered its algorithm, though that was back in 2011. The Sioux Falls, S.D.-based company made $41 million last year, and is on track to hit $50 million this year. About $45 million will come from advertising and $5 million will be premium subscriptions, which started being sold in 2012. A premium subscription costs $399 a year, which includes a customized daily newsletter, an unlimited stocks watchlist, premium stock filters and more. The company has been profitable from day one.

How it gets newsletter subscribers is different than many publishers. Some of its best lead channels are places like It’s Today Media, Paulson said, which build massive email leads.

“We buy lists from them,” Paulson said. “They’re some of our most profitable lead channels. And then on the other side there are all these financial newsletter publishers that will pay us good money to send people to them. These are brands that are under Agora, and MarketWise, we work with all of their subsidiaries, so it’s sort of a cross pollinating industry.”

A typical month will see 500,000 new addresses opt-in or old addresses return, and 250,000 unsubscribe.

Last week, The Rebooting’s Brian Morrissey, posted on X a screenshot of an inbox with 15 emails from MarketBeat received over a 24-hour period.

“The email aggression of financial newsletter publishers is unmatched. This is 24 hours after signing up — and declining a dozen front end offers. Like everything it’s a matter of incentives. This works on the spreadsheet,” Morrissey said.

Paulson responded via message to AMO:

“The only way you get that many emails is if you click on a bunch of ads. We have an advertising system called triggered campaigns. Basically if you click on an ad, you get another one. High volume email is pretty common in the financial media/publishing space. We scale email volume with engagement, so super high engagement = more emails. Low engagement = far fewer emails.”

Moving forward, Paulson’s looking at expanding into crypto and internationally. The company currently has 18 staff members and all writers are freelancers. And MarketBeat has just a single advertising person.

We don’t really need to sell you on what we do because you’ll see the sales numbers, and then, if you like them, you’ll just keep coming back,” he said. “We’re much more of the direct marketing. We’re either going to generate a lot of sales for you and you’re going to pay us based off the sales, or, if we can’t generate sales, you’re probably just not gonna run the ads. It’s not a good fit. There’s none of the Madison Avenue presentations of like, here’s our audience, and you should love it, and you should run ads… you either get sales or you don’t. If it works, you keep it going, if it doesn’t, you stop.