Our Media Company Continues To Grow [$40M/Year]
This is a follow up story for MarketBeat. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published over 6 years ago, check it out here.
Tell us about what you’ve been up to! Has the business been growing?
MarketBeat had an exceptional year. In 2024, we redesigned our website and updated our brand design for the first time in five years. We revamped the back-end system that powers MarketBeat called the “Web Admin.” We doubled down on our YouTube channel, which now has more than 140,000 subscribers. We worked to develop new advertising relationships and dial in our media-buying efforts that have allowed MarketBeat to grow to 5.2 million email subscribers. We brought on four new employees and several new contractors. These efforts allowed us to top more than $40 million in top-line revenue in 2024, which is up about 35% year over year. While some of the results we achieved were the result of election-year excitement, we really think we are firing on all cylinders.
One of the bigger changes we made at MarketBeat this year is that we learned to love advertising agencies. Historically, we have shied away from them because there are a lot of mediocre agencies that make big promises that they ultimately can’t deliver on. However, we knew there were areas we needed to improve on (such as Search Engine Optimization) and we just weren’t getting the results we were looking for without outside help. We rolled the dice in several different areas and found some great agency partners to work with. We now have a technical SEO agency, a digital PR agency, a newsletter advertising agency, a Google/Bing media buying firm, and a Meta ads media buying firm that we work with. MarketBeat does not have a dedicated marketing department, but working with our agency partners has allowed us to be exceptional in acquiring new users.
2025 will be a bit of a different year for MarketBeat, primarily in that we aren’t really trying to do anything new. We’re launching no new media brands. We aren’t adding major new features to the website. We aren’t planning a bunch of hiring. Instead, our focus is to do the things that we already do better. We have some technical debt to clean up in our 15-year-old code base. We want to redesign and improve several aspects of the MarketBeat website. We want to retire some of our older, less popular websites and brand efforts. It is an editing and cleanup year for MarketBeat, but the work we do will ultimately set us up for long-term growth and success.
