How Moby Built a Million-Dollar Ad Strategy With The Help of Who Sponsors Stuff

Where do millennials turn for financial news? They could look to established players like CNBC, longtime digital publishers like Motley Fool, or newsletters like Morning Brew. But in 2021, a new player entered the space, focused on dissecting the day’s financial news and offering advice on where to invest: Moby.

What sets Moby apart is that they are a financial tech platform “designed to help everyday people figure out how to navigate the world of investing,” said co-founder and CEO Justin Kramer. Moby isn’t breaking investing news like Bloomberg or Yahoo Finance. Their goal is to help people understand what’s happening in the markets, and how the latest news could impact their portfolio, their investments, and their overall net worth. Once they are armed with that information, Kramer believes anyone can become a better, smarter investor.

Kramer spent many years in financial services working for Morgan Stanley, where he invested clients’ assets in diversified strategies using data technology resources that the average investor doesn’t have access to. Friends and family would often come to him for investing advice, and he would always recommend low-risk options, which are not particularly flashy but tend to be good investments in the long run. During the pandemic, there was the rise of the retail investor on platforms like Robinhood and Coinbase, and Kramer grew worried — he saw many people making risky investments due to a lack of knowledge about financial markets. The goal of “Moby is to ultimately bridge the gap between the institution and retail world, and help people understand their finances and the markets,” he said.

With Moby, Kramer didn’t set out to build a media company — his focus was on building a premium membership, which costs $199 a year or $29 per month, and gives members access to stock picks, research reports, and tools for tracking where hedge funds and politicians are investing their money. He wanted to build a product where investors could get smarter, or identify what stocks to buy at the right price point.

But along the way, Moby collected hundreds of thousands of email addresses for their daily newsletter. They hadn’t intended to build a successful daily newsletter product — but with the quality of the content they were producing on a daily basis, they did. And they realized that an audience that was large and engaged could be monetized not just through memberships but through advertising.

Since their launch in 2021, Moby’s newsletter has since grown to over 250,000 subscribers, and native ads have become a significant revenue stream for the brand, bringing in over seven figures, Kramer said. But how did they build their ad business? And why did they turn to Who Sponsors Stuff and their ad database, Sales Pro, to help them build up a sales pipeline from scratch and figure out the right ad strategy for their newsletter? Let’s take a closer look at Moby’s story and what other newsletter operators can learn from them.

Moby had a newsletter almost from the start. It’s a free product that anyone can subscribe to, and it gives readers a taste of what they will get if they sign up for the Moby app, which is the primary way members get access to Moby’s reports and data. The newsletter lands in subscribers’ inboxes every weekday with a round-up of the biggest market news, providing subscribers with information on everything from tidbits from recent earnings calls to digestible explainers of big M&A deals.

Moby’s stock picks aren’t always the types of companies you’d see in a mainstream publication — they’re sometimes more obscure or unknown stocks with potential upside. (One of their top picks for 2023: Texas Pacific Land Corporation, a real estate company based in Dallas. The stock is up about 33% since the start of the summer.) The goal of Moby isn’t to encourage users to chase the latest stock trends but to understand that there are upsides and downsides to every stock. “The road to wealth takes decades,” Kramer said. “And that’s what we’re trying to explain to our audience. We’re trying to make that unsexy statement a little bit more palatable.”

While the initial goal of the newsletter was to convert free subscribers to paying ones, it quickly became a successful standalone product, Kramer said. “Honestly, I think we are adding so much value that a lot of people just stuck with the free newsletter because it was helping them figure out what’s going on on a daily basis,” he said.

At first, even as the audience grew, Moby was reluctant to find sponsors for the newsletter. Kramer wanted his team to focus on the content of the newsletter and not waste time chasing sponsors. But multiple advisors encouraged Kramer to consider monetizing the newsletter to provide the startup with an additional revenue stream. By the time Moby’s newsletter hit 100,000 subscribers, they knew they couldn’t pass up the opportunity to work with brands who wanted to target their engaged audience.

But if you’re interested in monetizing your newsletter with ads, where do you even begin?

Moby originally tried working with some third-party agencies to handle sales, but they ultimately decided they wanted to control their advertiser pipeline. They had established a relationship with their readers, and they didn’t want just any ad appearing in their newsletter. By working directly with advertisers, Kramer felt they could offer better outcomes for their sponsors as well as their subscribers and ensure the ads would be a good fit.

Still, that raised a big next question: Where would they find those sponsors?

There are many things to consider when building and growing a newsletter. It’s not just about creating great content. You need to consider user acquisition and how to scale. You’ll want to track email deliverability and run quality assurance tests to make sure the newsletter looks great in the inbox.

Monetizing a newsletter — often through advertising — also matters. While monetizing a newsletter can help to justify the expense and even allow for further investment in the product, it can also feel like a daunting task, especially for a lean team like Moby’s.

Kramer wanted to find a partner who could help them with their ad strategy and who could also help connect them to the right advertisers. That’s where Who Sponsors Stuff came in.

“We originally got connected with Who Sponsors Stuff to help bridge that gap,” Kramer said. “We’ve used their Sales Pro database and platform in order to find the connections and people who we think would be a good fit for advertising in the newsletter.”

When companies subscribe to the Who Sponsors Stuff’s Sales Pro tool, they get access to a database of over 6,000 potential sponsors, with an average of 75 new sponsors added each week. The database includes each sponsor’s contact info, so a newsletter’s sales team can save time identifying and reaching out to the right person to pitch their newsletter.

And when any newsletter buys a subscription to Sales Pro, Who Sponsors Stuff sets up a kickoff call where they go over advertising best practices and offer advice on how a newsletter should price their ads. But the one-on-one relationship doesn’t end there. Sales Pro clients can use Who Sponsors Stuff as a sounding board as they get their sales operations off the ground. They’ll review emails and offer additional advice. Some choose to work further with Who Sponsors Stuff on a consulting basis, getting help scaling their ad sales and setting up sales teams.

Who Sponsors Stuff founders Ryan Sager and Jesse Watkins first met back in 2018 when they worked at Ladders, a career site for high-paying jobs. Sager has a background in editorial, with years working at legacy publications like the Wall Street Journal and Time; Watkins has more than a decade of sales experience. At Ladders, Sager launched a daily newsletter, and Watkins built a direct-sold ad business around that newsletter, which grew into a multi-million-dollar revenue stream for Ladders. Seeing the potential to help others monetize their newsletters, Sager and Watkins launched Who Sponsors Stuff in 2021 — coincidentally, the same year Moby launched.

Building a monetization strategy from Day 1

How do you even know if you’re ready for sponsors? Sager said there are a few milestones a newsletter may want to hit before making an investment in their ad strategy:

B2C newsletters typically need around 25,000 subscribers to monetize through ads. Some newsletters sell ads based on a set rate per thousand readers who open the newsletter, commonly known as a CPM. But Sager highly recommends that newsletters sell on a flat-fee model — setting rates for each type of ad and then negotiating discounts if an advertiser wants to purchase multiple ads over a longer window of time.
B2B newsletters, on the other hand, can find sponsors at nearly any size, depending on the niche, and can typically charge far higher rates — sponsors will pay more to reach those hard-to-find audiences.
Newsletter frequency is important as well. Sager sees more revenue potential in newsletters sent daily or a few times per a week compared to one that publishes weekly.

As you build out a monetization strategy, you should have a pretty good idea of the lifetime value of a subscriber, Sager said. This will allow you to better understand what you can spend on customer acquisition when you want to build your newsletter subscriber list.

“Having a plan for what that revenue looks like per 1,000 subscribers is extremely important if you’re going to build a sustainable and profitable media company,” Sager said.

Say, for example, you have 50,000 subscribers on your daily newsletter. How much can you charge per ad? The price of an ad doesn’t just have to do with your subscriber base. You also need to track open rates and clicks. Sponsors will get more value out of advertising with you if your audience frequently opens your newsletters and clicks heavily. The stronger the engagement, the higher the rates you can charge.

A B2C product with an engaged audience, like Moby’s, might start with a CPM, anywhere from $20 to $50 per thousand readers who open the newsletter, and use that to back into the flat fee they charge advertisers. (Who Sponsors Stuff has a free newsletter ad calculator on their website so you can figure out you should charge for your newsletter)

Prospecting for advertisers

Moby already had a dedicated audience when they decided to work with Who Sponsors Stuff — the next step was figuring out what types of advertisers in the Sales Pro database would make sense for Moby. Kramer said he spent a month doing sales calls himself — about half originally sourced from Sales Pro — to prove that there was a big opportunity for advertising in Moby. Once he’d proved that thesis, he hired a salesperson who would just be dedicated to monetizing the newsletter.

Getting started had a few challenges, Kramer said. Sponsors were excited about the content of Moby’s newsletter and impressed that the brand already had 100,000 subscribers. But Moby was still a relatively unknown brand. To get things off the ground, they ran a few tests with advertisers to show the value of in-newsletter advertising. It didn’t take long for them to get to a comfortable space. “We know what our subscribers want to see,” Kramer said. “And more importantly, we know what they don’t want to see.”

Once they proved that ads were a good fit for their newsletter, they started working with two different types of advertisers, Kramer said. The first are direct-to-consumer products — advertisers that have products aimed at Moby’s audience of investors. Robinhood is one example of this, since they want to target people who are actively investing. Moby is where investors can learn what stocks or funds to invest in — Robinhood would be where they can then go to make the investments.

The second bucket of advertisers are B2C and B2B brands that want to reach Moby’s core demographic of affluent millennials. They’re not necessarily in the investing or business space — they might be brands like Athletic Greens, Coursera, or ezCater.

Both types of advertisers show up often in Sales Pro — since Who Sponsors Stuff tracks hundreds of newsletters, they can quickly identify new brands that might be starting to place ads in other newsletters.

A MUD\WTR promotion in a recent issue of Moby’s daily newsletter.

The most difficult piece of monetization

While Moby was able to quickly scale their newsletter business, it hasn’t always been smooth sailing. Kramer said that the constant changes to data privacy laws have been challenging to navigate. With some of the changes to cookies, it’s much more difficult for brands to track the success of a newsletter campaign beyond direct clicks to conversion. Moby is constantly trying to figure out how they are adding value, but it’s a learning process, Kramer said.

Sager of Who Sponsors Stuff agreed that privacy changes across the email ecosystem present evolving challenges to publishers. “The most important thing for newsletter publishers will always be maintaining strong one-on-one relationships with their audiences,” he said. “And Moby does a great job of this.”

Trust is essential in having a successful newsletter business. It’s why Kramer’s been picky about the kinds of sponsors Moby works with. He doesn’t want to lead his audience astray, and so if there are certain brands or products that don’t align with Moby’s mission, they won’t work with them — even if it means leaving money on the table.

All of the success with newsletters has empowered Moby to launch even more audience-centric products. They now offer an end-of-day newsletter, real-time market alerts, and a weekly podcast — all of which open up additional opportunities for advertisers.

Kramer’s confident that as Moby’s audience continues to grow, they’ll be able to find new advertisers who are a great fit for all of the products under the Moby umbrella. They’re doing their best to take Who Sponsor Stuff’s advice: That building strong, direct connections with advertisers will pay off in the long run.

“You can’t just wait for inbound sales,” Sager said. “It’s wonderful to have an inbound pipeline, but that’s not going to fuel a truly growing business. Owning your pipeline gives you control of your destiny as a business and gives you control of your growth.”

How Moby grew their newsletter business

Recognizing the potential of newsletter sponsors

Building a monetization strategy from Day 1

Prospecting for advertisers

The most difficult piece of monetization

By Lindsey Stanberry