s
Login Join Starter Story
Source
MarketBeat
Finance B2C

MarketBeat is a financial media company that provides stock market research, real-time market data, and investment newsletters to individual investors, monet...

marketbeat.com · Founded 2011 · 42 public sources · Updated about 16 hours ago

Researched profile. Starter Story's AI research system compiled this page from 42 public sources — the founder didn't write it. Automated research can misread or misattribute a source, so treat figures as best-effort. How this works →

How MarketBeat Grew

Financial media platform providing stock ratings and market research for retail investors

How did MarketBeat grow?

Summary of the sourced claims below

MarketBeat grew from a personal finance blog that earned tens of dollars a month from Google AdSense, and its founder pursued distribution channels others overlooked, such as the Finance tab on Google. The company built its audience largely through paid acquisition, with about 90% of growth from paid ads, and by capturing emails through lightbox popups and lead magnets to build an email list of over 4.3 million subscribers. It also gets 40k to 50k subscribers a month organically through search traffic, particularly from keywords like dividend calculator.

Channels

19 channels · grouped by how MarketBeat grows

  • Email List Growth

    · 9 mentions · 9 sources
    “Our primary focus is to grow the number of email subscribers to our free newsletters. I know that if we regularly have new investors sign-up for our free investing newsletters, some of them will click on our advertisers’ ads and buy their products and some of them will buy our products. All of ou...”
    high
    Show 8 more quotes
    “by 2019 reported more than one million email newsletter subscribers and over 5,000 paying premium members”
    medium
    “the business really revolves a lot around getting people to the website, but getting them on an email list or other subscriber list as quickly as possible and then learning how to monetize that list.”
    medium
    “He Built a Newsletter Empire Writing One Email a Week”
    medium
    “MarketBeat grew their email list to over 4.3 million subscribers... Spends $1M+ per month on newsletter growth”
    medium
    “MarketBeat has: - An active email list of 6.346 MILLION subscribers 🤯 ... And the most advanced email and SMS marketing systems I've seen”
    medium
    “And the whole time, he was capturing emails. Lightbox popup. Simple offer: “You’re reading about Tesla stock — want more stories like this delivered to your inbox?” That was the play. Find underpriced distribution. Own it. Then convert the traffic into something you actually own: an email list.”
    medium
    “your affiliate marketing and your email sending for MarketBeat.”
    medium
    “Our flagship newsletter, MarketBeat Daily Ratings, currently has more than 1 million active email subscribers.”
    high

  • Organic social media

    · 6 mentions · 6 sources
    “We do have some social media marketing efforts in play, but social isn’t a big focus. Our audience is primarily 50-80 year-old men and our customers just don’t spend a lot of time on services like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Pinterest. Some of them use Twitter and StockTwits, so we market i...”
    high
    Show 5 more quotes
    “As I began to implement some of these ideas (like multi-page articles, new subscription pricing strategies, a Facebook messenger bot, etc.), the work began to be fun again.”
    medium
    “If you have a big group of people that follow your content, whether that's on an email list or on Facebook or on Instagram or wherever, like you can always turn that into money somehow.”
    medium
    “MarketBeat gets 40k to 50k subscribers a month organically through search traffic. Matt told us his #1 keyword: 'We rank for a lot of stock tickers and tools. Our biggest keyword is “dividend calculator”. We get a ton of traffic just from that keyword.'”
    high
    “MarketBeat generates 80% of new leads from paid channels today. But email is still the engine that everything runs on.”
    medium
    “In middle school in the late '90s he built a fan site about SimCity 2000 and made $25 to $50 a month from ads for free web hosting. In college... he decided he needed to make money 'not from a job in Madison... That turned into freelance writing, then a personal finance blog earning 'tens of doll...”
    medium

  • Pay Per Click Advertising

    · 5 mentions · 5 sources
    “It grew because we bought advertising for email signups through co-registration ads and PPC ads. And really, our goal was just to acquire an email subscriber at $3 to $6, and that really let us scale up.”
    high
    Show 4 more quotes
    “We generate email sign-ups through a mix of organic search engine optimization efforts and paid advertising.”
    high
    “Ad spend across Google, Bing, Facebook, and other channels”
    medium
    “The majority of the spend (~$800k per month) is ads in financial investing email lists and investing-specific co-registration ~$200k on Google and Bing ads~$50k on Facebook ads~$15k on SparkLoop”
    medium
    “Then he'd build 'a very degenerate version of MarketBeat' with no subscription tools that are hard to maintain, just content, ads, paid traffic and an email list. That's the most profitable part of the business.”
    medium

  • SEO

    · 5 mentions · 4 sources
    “We generate email sign-ups through a mix of organic search engine optimization efforts and paid advertising. Our SEO strategy relies around being the best website to research any publicly-traded company. So, when an investor goes to search for the name of a company followed by the word stock or s...”
    high
    Show 4 more quotes
    “We’re doing a lot of work surrounding search engine optimization right now (look us up on SemRush, you’ll be impressed).”
    high
    “I realized, you know, I can't rely on Google traffic all the time. So I started collecting email signups.”
    medium
    “MarketBeat gets 40k to 50k subscribers a month organically through search traffic. Matt told us his #1 keyword: “We rank for a lot of stock tickers and tools. Our biggest keyword is “dividend calculator”. We get a ton of traffic just from that keyword.””
    high
    “If MarketBeat disappeared tomorrow, he'd spend more time on the VC funds and real estate. Then he'd build 'a very degenerate version of MarketBeat' with no subscription tools that are hard to maintain, just content, ads, paid traffic and an email list. That's the most profitable part of the busin...”
    medium

  • Lead magnets

    · 3 mentions · 3 sources
    “We always send people to a skinny landing page with kind of a free report, you know, where are the 10 best stocks to buy now and stuff like that. And then to get the report, we ask for people's email addresses and then, you know, we'll email them the report, we'll put them on a newsletter.”
    high
    Show 2 more quotes
    “By adding new marketing channels like co-registration advertising and content marketing, we’ve been able to grow the number of opt-ins we receive from a few thousand each month to more than 30,000 each month.”
    high
    “The #1 way MarketBeat converts website traffic into email subscribers is with lead magnets. We asked Matt the best type of lead magnet, he explained...“They tend to be like Stock List. Stock lists of whatever the ‘hot thing’ is now. Last year was AI stocks...'”
    high

  • Email marketing

    · 3 mentions · 2 sources
    “We’ve been primarily focused on building an email list over the last decade and we have some subscribers that signed-up for MarketBeat in 2011 that continue to receive our emails today.”
    high
    Show 2 more quotes
    “giving away a broad layer of aggregated data and news for free (via its Daily Ratings newsletter and per-stock pages) while charging for its All Access tier, which adds unlimited watchlists, premium screeners and filters, and earlier newsletter delivery.”
    medium
    “One of the things that I find really interesting is how much money he makes from his email list, the sponsored ads within his email list, how well, of course, he does with his paid email newsletter, and just how the business really revolves a lot around getting people to the website, but getting ...”
    medium

  • Advertising on social media

    · 2 mentions · 2 sources
    “The ad spend breakdown looks like this:The majority of the spend (~$800k per month) is ads in financial investing email lists and investing-specific co-registration ~$200k on Google and Bing ads~$50k on Facebook ads~$15k on SparkLoop”
    high
    Show 1 more quote
    “there's just like the create content, and stick ads in it, and run Facebook ads, and run Google ads, and buy coverage, and build an email list side of things and, like, that's much more profitable.”
    high

  • Affiliate program

    · 2 mentions · 2 sources
    “One of our affiliates, like, people that was, like, doing lead gen for MarketBeat was, like, doing what we were doing, but honestly a little bit more shady about it.”
    medium
    Show 1 more quote
    “Two big companies and smaller affiliates”
    medium

  • Google Ads

    · 2 mentions · 2 sources
    “there's just like the create content, and stick ads in it, and run Facebook ads, and run Google ads, and buy coverage, and build an email list side of things and, like, that's much more profitable.”
    high
    Show 1 more quote
    “The ad spend breakdown looks like this: The majority of the spend (~$800k per month) is ads in financial investing email lists and investing-specific co-registration ~$200k on Google and Bing ads”
    medium

  • Video content

    · 1 mention
    “Today? 620,000 subscribers. And they’re going all in. About a year and a half ago they hired a host — a local news anchor they recruited — and started producing interview-style financial content. It worked. Now they’re taking adjacent office space in their building, renting a couple thousand squa...”
    medium

  • Video Ads

    · 1 mention
    “We also currently spend approximately $100,000 per month on paid advertising. These dollars are spent between co-registration advertising networks, content recommendation ads such as Taboola and Yahoo Gemini, and lead generation service providers.”
    high

  • Backlinks

    · 1 mention
    “Yeah, we are doing some link building. We actually outsource that...So we found a good partner agency to do that for us. The company is called Spread Effect, but that's worked out really well for us. We've been good partners with them.”
    high

  • Word of mouth

    · 1 mention
    “We've also been introduced to them, kind of word of mouth from other people we work with. So we might know somebody at one kind of financial newsletter publisher, and they say, hey, you should talk to this person over at this other publisher.”
    high

  • Search engine marketing

    · 1 mention
    “The ad spend breakdown looks like this ... ~$200k on Google and Bing ads”
    high

  • Webinars

    · 1 mention
    “we've just developed a relationship with them over the years by one, going to conferences. A couple of financial publishing conferences, we go there, we've met a lot of them there.”
    high

  • Leveraging existing platforms

    · 1 mention
    “Our success in writing about stocks and generating website traffic from places like Google Finance, MSN Money and Yahoo Finance led to a pivot from focusing on personal finance to focusing exclusively on investing.”
    high

  • Lead Nurturing Sequence

    · 1 mention
    “Based on my research and our conversion with Matt, I estimated most of MarketBeat's advertising revenue comes from “email trigger” ads.”
    medium

  • Content marketing

    · 1 mention
    “His response wasn’t to write better content. It was to look for distribution channels everyone else was ignoring. He found them across the top of Google — the tabs most marketers walked right past. Images. News. Video. Finance. He went all in on the Finance tab. At his peak, MarketBeat owned 30% ...”
    medium

  • Referrals

    · 1 mention
    “About 90% of MarketBeat’s growth is from paid acquisition. They add over 400,000 subscribers per month from paid ads...”
    medium

How 3,222 businesses grow

Of businesses with mapped growth channels, the share using each — MarketBeat’s highlighted.
  • Referral/Word-of-mouth
    64% ◀
  • Social media
    63% ◀
  • Search/SEO
    58% ◀
  • Email
    47% ◀
  • Community
    37%
  • Content/Inbound
    35% ◀
  • Partnerships
    32% ◀
  • Events
    24% ◀
  • Paid ads
    23% ◀
  • Outbound/Sales
    19%
  • Press/PR
    17%
  • Marketplaces/App stores
    12% ◀
  • Podcasting
    4%
  • Influencer partnerships
    3%
S
Starter Story
Support Privacy Terms