Categories: OLD Media Moves

The success of Wall St. Cheat Sheet

Hamish McKenzie of PandoDaily.com writes about Wall St. Cheat Sheet, a four-year-old financial news site that is making millions.

McKenzie writes, “The site design is cluttered and retrograde. It remains one of the hold-out websites that uses paginations on its news stories, even ones of less than 600 words, just to squeeze out a few more pageviews. There are newsletter signups, numerous calls to check out other stories, a “trending” ticker, and two search bars. Even the photo within each story gets an ad overlay. The site, essentially, is a mess, reminiscent of Yahoo circa 2003.

“But people are reading this website. What’s more, it’s doing something unusual for a media company: making a lot of money.

“Last month, four-year-old Cheat Sheet reported more than 11 million unique visitors and generated 47 million pageviews. It has annual gross revenue of about $15 million, and profit in the millions (the founders wouldn’t be more specific than that). Quantcast, which is by no means a perfect measure, puts the site’s monthly uniques at about 7.4 million, well above, for instance, Business Insider, which clocks about 2 million a month.

“The Wall St Cheat Sheet might not look pretty, but its founders, brothers Damien and Derek Hoffman, have managed to start a media company in the middle of the Great Financial Crisis and grow it to a 35-person operation.

“After careers that took them through the first dotcom boom (via body piercing jewelry site Tribalectic), law school, banking, a media agency, and a brief stint with their own music label, the Hoffman brothers decided to build a business that matched their knowledge of the stock market with their interest in media. Because they bootstrapped the company, they had to think about profitability from day one, which explains why the site is plastered in ads.”