SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Turning Humans Into Robots For 50 Million Monthly Unique Wesbite Views with Emerson Spartz of Dose.com Ep 240
18 Apr 2016
Chapter 1: How did Emerson Spartz start his journey in digital media?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per top. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark.
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Okay, Top Tribe, this week's winner of the 100 bucks is Jose Avila. He is a 17-year-old that doesn't want to go to college and he wants to start his own business. For your chance to win 100 bucks just like Jose every Monday morning, simply subscribe to this podcast on iTunes right now and then text the word Nathan to 33444 to prove that you did it.
Coming up tomorrow, Morning Top Tribe, you're going to learn from Eric Gattenholm and how he's 3D printing body parts and will do over 4 million in 2016. You won't believe what body parts he's reprinting. Top Tribe, good morning, good morning. You're in your cars driving to work right now or you are sweating on that jog of yours.
I'm sitting here with my tea and you're going to enjoy our guest this morning. His name is Emerson Spartz and he's one of the world's leading experts on internet virality. As the CEO of Dose, the company behind Dose.com and OMG Facts, he runs one of the world's fastest growing digital media companies with 30%. 50 million unique visitors per month.
At age of 12, Spartz founded MuggleNet, the number one Harry Potter website, which attracted 50 million page views per month. By the age of 19, Spartz became a New York Times bestselling author after publishing his first book. Emerson, are you ready to take us to the top? I'm ready to rack. I love this story.
I want to spend most of the interview because we only have 15 minutes focused on the math, the math behind this engine that you've built. But it sounds like you got bit by the bug back at age 12 with MuggleNet. How did you get into that and how did you grow to 50 million page views per month? So when I was 12, I convinced my parents to let me drop out of school and start homeschooling myself.
So I'm a middle school dropout and about a month later I came across a WYSIWYG editor and I thought it'd be fun to make a website. I made a bunch of crappy websites about things I wasn't very passionate about and then I got really into Harry Potter and it was the perfect mix of I want to make a website, I was really into Harry Potter, so I started spending eight hours a day working on it.
There's really three separate things that I did to grow it. The first one was that I did a ton of link swaps early on, linking to other Harry Potter sites in exchange for them linking to me. So that's how people first found the site. Convince me to do that. Let's go back a few years. I'm that person. What are you telling me? Let's say I have a big site and you're just starting out.
How do you convince me to link back to you and you link to me? Pitch me live. So I don't really fully remember. At the beginning, it was crude. It was just like, hey, link to me and I'll link to you. Sound good? Cool? But there was a big hustle component of it, which is that I had to email thousands of Harry Potter website owners to even get a small number, like 100 to say yes.
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Chapter 2: What strategies did MuggleNet employ to achieve 50 million page views?
We're building that out. Before Dose, we had a network of about 30 different crowdsourced content websites where our audience created 5,000 pieces of content per day. So we got very good at making the experience frictionless. So your velocity right now on dose.com in terms of content pieces of content per day is 5,000 units.
No, no, that was, uh, that was, that was, that was, uh, that was, that was a long time ago. Okay. What are you at now? Uh, we're actually pretty small now. We're like 50 articles a day, but we went down average. Why'd you go down? Why'd you go from a big 5,000? I was describing a different business model that we had before Dose. Oh, got it. Sorry about that. Okay.
So you've got, you got 50 kind of pieces going out per day. And how many, how many writers do you have on the team? Six. Six. Okay. And so how do you, this sounds like kind of, I don't know, maybe less writers, but maybe you bring them on full time. I know you raised capital as well. How much have you raised? And are these folks kind of full time or do you pay them per article or something? Yeah.
Yes, we've raised $35 million in there full time. Okay, got it. So you're just bringing folks on. And do you, I mean, are you kind of always scouring the net for talented writers? And if you find someone you just really have to have because they're the best, you just figure out a way to get it done? In short, yes.
when i say you know people are going nathan come on when you say figure out a way to get it done what does it actually mean what does that mean emerson uh it's selling i mean it's it's you know you have to you have to be good enough to recognize good talent but assuming that you're going to recognize good talent when you find good talent you have to go and figure out a way to persuasively get them to drop whatever it is they're doing and come join you which means that you have to uh have a compelling vision or just a compelling pitch it could be economics it could be status prestige there's all kinds of different things that you could possibly sell you got to figure out which one's going to work the best and and hustle right like
a lot of this always comes back to hustle like when the link swap thing i had to email literally thousands of harry potter websites by myself i didn't know anything about i didn't even know how to copy and paste at the time so i just like typing emails over and over because i was a kid uh so so you know you get enough at bats you're gonna hit some home runs you don't need that many home runs to still win the ball game let's say you saw me i was a writer i'm gonna make this up i was a writer for e-magazine you want you really want to recruit me for your hollywood section of dose you knew i was driven by economics what would that actual pitch sound like
So you can write... So caveat being, we don't do this a whole lot right now. Yep. We would have somebody look into you to figure out what you're motivated by. If we knew you were motivated by economics, then it'd be like, there's no place on the web that you can write for that's going to get you more views per article than writing for Dose. So it's views per article.
That's what they care about if they care about economics. Interesting. And prestige, is it kind of the same or is there a different number? We don't sell prestige yet because we don't have that kind of like crazy premium brand, although that's a big part of our future moving forward. Who do you think do, who does sell based off prestige to get new writers right now?
You know, old media for the most part. There's not a whole lot of new media that's able to do that just yet. Like New York Times. Yeah, New York Times, The Atlantic, you know, things like that. Interesting. Okay. So, and give us just, so you raised 35 million team size. Is it six total or that's just writers? No, our team size is about 50. Okay. 50. So, this is interesting. Six writers.
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Chapter 3: What are Emerson's insights on recruiting talented writers?
Interesting. So sentence, structure, noun, verb, plus a number equals a blank. Interesting.
It's almost like back when we were all in middle school, you wouldn't know this cause you dropped out halfway through middle school, but the English teacher would write those like diagrams with, with the line and then the backslash and you put the noun, then the verb, then it's split off almost like football brackets. Do you know what I'm talking about? Exactly like that.
That's exactly how I envision it too. It's a series of if-then statements that eventually creates a headline. We would geek the freak out. If I showed you this journal that I'm keeping right now where I'm diagramming a bunch of this stuff, I think we'd probably geek out. Anyways, I'm like you, man.
I haven't heard somebody articulate it like you do, so I'm going to copy it and steal it and I'll give you credit, but
art you know starting with art and then moving to science that's fascinating walk me through walk me through new distribution um a lot of it is obviously viral and organic you're putting some paid spend behind it to test it but some of these articles right now the one on the top of your page nickelodeon is bringing back legends of the hidden temple later this year by by your writer justine published six minutes ago is that you know how is the initial audience hitting that are you putting ads behind each article is there an email list you're doing it out is it just your social channels what's the initial kind of seeding process like
So the seeding process, again, that's kind of our secret sauce is how we seed. So I can be pretty glib and open about almost everything else, but the seeding part of it is a big part of what makes us unique.
But the more engineering review is that we seed against different audiences, we find out which audiences it resonates against, and then we use all of our distribution muscle to push it in the areas where we know it's most likely to resonate. Each month, you're pumping out 50 articles per day. Again, multiply that out by the month. You're pumping out about 1,500 articles per month.
For those 1,500 articles per month, how much... This will help my audience bring this back to their level from a relative perspective. For the 1,500 articles each month, what is your spend that you put out just for testing? Is it as simple as taking those numbers and multiplying times $5? No, it's not that simple. Um, because we actually don't just run it through one run of testing.
We actually run it through many rounds of testing. So basically we, we, we test against different audiences, different headline, thumbnail, et cetera, combinations. And then based off of whatever one in the first round, then the winners advance the second round. And then we do new variations on those rounds, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So can you quantify that for me?
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Chapter 4: How does Dose.com manage content creation and distribution?
Is it help us under, so you raised 35 million bucks. You have 50 full-time employees. Help us understand how you guys make money.
So currently we make money through programmatic advertising, but in the future, what we've actually been working hard on is, so we have a very different DNA from most media companies, of course, as we have almost all engineers and data scientists compared to other media companies, which tend to be just writers and salespeople.
So we've basically built a distribution, we've built a content creation distribution engine that is very powerful and enables us to essentially be able to guarantee virality. Again, there is a mathematical equation that backs into it, which is largely a function of just at-bats and batting average. The question is, if you can guarantee virality for brands, what does that mean?
What we've actually been building is, behind the scenes, we've been building a product that essentially enables us to guarantee performance of native advertising for brands and advertisers. So the next level of the company is taking that product and that software and that know-how and then using it to help brands achieve the same kind of results that we've been able to achieve on our content.
Got it. In terms of the email list, I'm sure that's probably not your main way of seeding because people would go crazy if you emailed them 50 articles a day. But how large is the email list? Uh, we actually don't do much email.
We actually have a pathetic, we have like maybe half million email subscribers, uh, which I just, as I said, a lot, I realized it doesn't sound pathetic to almost anybody, but compared to our social distribution, it's, uh, it's, it's pretty modest. Cause we're at about, uh, 27 million, um, social followers. And you, you know, I'm looking at the Alexa kind of toolbar right now for the site.
You guys are ranked. It looks like 1,671st traffic rank in the U S what are you guys at in terms of total unique website views?
uh in terms of uniques yeah 50 million between dose and omg facts which are actually basically the same site they're just on different domains because we test on different domains that's fascinating interesting um okay cool well hey emerson we're about to wrap up before we do where can people connect with you personally online emerson sparts.com and also we're always looking for awesome smart people we have like a zillion open positions so check us out
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