Reflecting on 17 Years of Blogging and Online Business

I started my first personal finance blog, Getting Green, 17 years ago today.?

Being home on Christmas break from college, I had some free time and really wanted to start an online business (because I needed money!). I saw the growing trend of blogging and jumped on the bandwagon of money bloggers writing about their personal finance journeys.

I had no money, so I signed up for a free Blogger.com account to get the site off the ground. Only after making $100.00 in AdSense money did I get a real web hosting account and a domain name. Later renamed the blog to American Consumer News and made money by selling links to SEOs on the site (probably a bad idea in retrospect). Then launched 4 more sites just like it (because why not?).

One of those was a savings and investing website called American Banking News. I realized you could get easy traffic from Google Finance in 2009 and renamed American Banking News to American Banking and Market News (so I could write about stocks).

Later, I heard on a podcast called Internet Business Mastery you should build an email list and sell stuff to your audience, so I launched a newsletter ("ABMN Daily") and later a premium newsletter for $$$ called ABMN Daily Premium.

I couldn't leave well enough alone, so I renamed American Banking and Market News to Analyst Ratings Network (awful name) and used my programming skills to build an investing tools website. The idea was that ARN would be the hub and ABMN and other news sites would point to it.

That worked all well until I went to?a conference called Microconf in 2015 and NOBODY could remember the name Analyst Ratings Network. I went away determined to rename the website. Went domain hunting and found MarketBeat.com for sale on SEDO for $10,000 (later negotiated down to $9,500)

By 2015, I had grown the website to $2.75M in annual revenue.?Had a great mix of advertising and subscription revenue at the time.? Started doing paid advertising to grow my list and discovered the world of financial publishing (Agora).

2016 was a bad year.?Our second child, Ady, was born prematurely and our family was frankly a mess. MarketBeat didn't grow in 2016.?I thought about selling the business because I was burned out and out of ideas. Thankfully, no one offered me the 3.5X EBITDA I was looking for at the time, so I just kept running the business.?

The business grew steadily in 2017, 2018, and 2019, and then COVID happened. Everyone was stuck at home and getting free government money. Then the whole Gamestop/AMC short interest thing happened. We grew by 86% in 2020 and 77% in 2021. Wild times.

2022 was kind of a meh year due to COVID stimulus running out, interest rates going up, and the market being generally blah.?2023 was a solid year (30% growth vs 2022). We'll end the year at $29-$30M in top-line revenue.

Plan for 2024 is to ramp up distribution in a big way.?I want to have a 5 million person email list by the end of next year, and I'm going to spend $1 million a month on advertising until that happens. I learned that distribution is much more important than product.?

There are some really cool investing tools out there (that are frankly, better than MarketBeat).

But you know what they don't have?

4 million email subscribers.

700K web push subscribers.

120K SMS subscribers

Anyway, I think we can grow the business to ~$50 million/year with our current business model and advertising mix (which is basically being a media company that runs ads for public companies, financial newsletters, and fintech products).

So, that's the story.

A few lessons from my career:

#1 - Distribution matters more than product.

#2 - Build your audience using platforms other people are ignoring.

#3 - Email is the best channel to build your audience on.

#4 - Work on the same thing for 15+ years for outsized success.