Newsletters & Advertising

Tom Nixon (00:03.141)
This is the podcast where precision meets promotion. Curtis, welcome back. How have you been?

Curtis Hays (00:09.905)
I’ve been great. Yeah, so we’re hitting the flywheel here. We’re rocking and Episodes, recording episodes a couple days in a row. We’ve got a bunch of guests lined up. The year started out slow, but we’re picking up the pace. It’s fun and exciting. Feels good.

Tom Nixon (00:11.025)
Good

Tom Nixon (00:15.718)
Yeah.

Tom Nixon (00:21.606)
Yep.

Tom Nixon (00:27.771)
We are picking up the pace. Yes. Well, speaking of starting slow picking up pace, I don’t know if you noticed, but the economic indicators have been somewhat difficult to predict and with any certainty and say, well, we know what’s coming in the next 30 days because I really don’t know what’s coming in the next 30 minutes. Today is Friday, May 2nd. The markets, believe it or not, today are on a winning streak, which

depending on when you’re listening to this, you’re to be like, what? What did they record this? So I don’t know what the future holds for the economy. I’m assuming you don’t either. And the reason I’m not, I guess I’m being the bearer of bad news. I’m not trying to be. I’m just saying when certainty arises, people tend to maybe get a little more conservative with budgets. We haven’t seen it yet, but it could be on the horizon and people might say, well, let’s just be cautious about what we’re spending and where.

Have you seen this yet or do you anticipate the same?

Curtis Hays (01:27.621)
Yeah, so there’s been some market reports I’ve seen that there are expectations that

And companies, business owners, they’re going to cut back on marketing spend. You know, they’re concerned about costs, whether that’s tariffs or downstream from tariffs. We’re here in Detroit. hear all my friends who are in automotive, it’s like tariffs are on, tariffs are off, tariffs are on. They don’t know how to plan. And when there is this uncertainty and you don’t know how to plan, it’s difficult to plan budgets.

And so then it’s sort of allocation of our advertising dollars and initiatives and where’s that going to and how’s that going to be spent. Sometimes it’s difficult to make decisions there or to feel a little bit uncertain about how we want to do that. And I think during those times, we want our clients to rely really on tried and true methods of doing marketing activities to stay in front of their clients that don’t necessarily cost them.

much money, if anything at all, other than maybe their time. don’t get discouraged. I would say if you’re in these tough times, there are marketing activities that you can do to stay in front of your ideal audience.

Tom Nixon (02:46.597)
Yeah, for sure. In sort of part and parcel to this conversation, which is going to segue into our guest that we’re going to invite on in just a minute is two different marketing experts who I respect greatly have differing opinions. One is Mark Schaefer, who has been preaching that you absolutely must build on rented land, meaning

We need to go where the people are. We used to want to have everyone come to our home base and our website and do our marketing there, but the people actually living out in the social network. So you need to build your campaigns on rented land.

Curtis Hays (03:17.403)
So now you’re talking about a little bit of the peso model, right?

Tom Nixon (03:20.101)
Yep. Going back to the peso model. So look through our episode guide. If you want to find a whole exploration into the peso model paid, earned, shared, and owned. obviously the things that you own then are not going to be as expensive in this other person who I really respect by the name of Brian Clark, who practically invented content marketing is a huge advocate for email because it’s the one platform that you own. you won’t go away. You own your list.

Email is probably not dying anytime soon. So we haven’t talked a lot about email so far as a major platform.

Curtis Hays (03:55.962)
Nope, nope. And I got connected with the company and thought, you know what? Hey, you guys seem to know what you’re doing with email. Let’s get you on and let’s talk about what you’re doing for companies.

Tom Nixon (04:04.529)
Ahem.

Tom Nixon (04:09.893)
Well, let’s get him on and let’s have him talk without further ado. I want to welcome Moshe Zippel who is the senior lead advertiser success at Beehive. Moshe, welcome to the podcast.

Moshe Zippel (04:20.802)
Thanks so much, great to be here.

Tom Nixon (04:22.597)
First, if you’re looking at them, Beehive has no E at the end, but it does have two in the middle. So if you like E’s, you’ll have them. Tell us a little bit about what Beehive is.

Moshe Zippel (04:31.81)
Sure, Beehive is a software that helps anyone and everyone create newsletters and websites now so that you can fully own your media, kind of like what you were saying earlier. You have the ability to customize your content.

create it and really kind of own every aspect of it from your subscribers and revenue to creating ads and monetizing the content that you’re creating. So we help creators of all sizes from the smallest of influencers sending out a newsletter to their 20 friends to large publications like the LA Times, Boston Times, Time Magazine and lots of other big names out there.

Tom Nixon (05:03.953)
So would it for lack of or for fear of oversimplifying? Is it closer to say a male chimp or a substack?

Moshe Zippel (05:11.242)
It is a combo of the both, I’d say. So we act as an ESP, as an email service provider, similar to MailChimp, where any of these publishers can come and create their content. But then we also act like Substack, where we’re giving them tools to help monetize and make money from the content that they’re sending out.

What makes us different than Substack is here with premium subscribers, for example, the actual publisher and creator keeps all of the revenue. We just charge our monthly SAS fee. So that kind of differentiates us. We also have a vast ad network, which is the team that I’m on, and helping kind of build out, which is additional ways for these publishers to monetize and make money from the content that they’re already creating.

Tom Nixon (05:48.477)
If you would speak to what Curtis and I were just talking about in terms of if budgets are shrinking or they’re less predictable. So we have to maybe save some cash. The business case for focusing on email is what we said, right? Is you own your network. You own your list. You own your content. You own the platform more or less.

Moshe Zippel (06:09.614)
Yeah, absolutely. So the reason advertisers like coming to our ad network and why we’re seeing tremendous growth there over the last year is because similar to what these influencers or content creators are doing across social, Instagram, TikTok, whatever it is, they’re creating their content. They’re engaging with their communities and subscribers that they already have, but now they’re doing it in a different format and in a different medium. So they’re getting users that are clearly engaged. They want to see what the content that’s being created out there. They’ve already double opted in. They subscribe via email address.

right, submitted to the content creator. They’re now opening up the email. So they’re already a highly engaged audience. And now they’re reading all the content that the publisher is putting out there in their voice. So advertisers now have a great opportunity to be a part of that messaging, where they can create native ads that are inserted per the publisher’s choice within their content that they’re already putting out there, which creates a really useful kind of

ad variety that is not just performance, it’s not just branding, it’s kind of this weird, nice hybrid mix of the two, so that you’re able to get in front of the right messaging, be aligned with the right verticals, but also have a user base and subscriber base that’s truly engaged and actually engaging with the ad content itself driving performance downstream.

Tom Nixon (07:22.971)
Curtis, you are the one that introduced me to Beehive and you apparently you stumbled into a conversation on LinkedIn as you like to do, right? And someone that you met on LinkedIn or did you know Moshe’s colleague before LinkedIn?

Curtis Hays (07:34.984)
Not before this. Just, you know, connecting and well, I see, you know, it’s the algorithm doing its thing inside of LinkedIn and connecting me with people after I’ve commented on something and, know, suggesting posts and those types of things. And then seeing somebody who’s posting something interesting and saying, you know, Oh, hey, you’ve got something interesting to say. Let’s talk about that. So I don’t remember this specific post, you know, that caught my attention, but

Tom Nixon (07:37.039)
Yeah. So tell us the story.

Tom Nixon (07:44.497)
Mm-hmm.

Curtis Hays (08:05.127)
Uh, you know, for me, it’s, it’s been, uh, you know, s I want to tell my clients is, you know, be relevant and frequency, right? It’s like your clients have short attention spans, spans. So you need to be frequent. It’s that sort of like the Google 10, 11, seven rule we talked about. So frequency, make sure the content’s relevant. But, um, you know, also we have short.

attention spans and short memories, especially being bombarded with so many things. So just an email or being frequent with your content and those types of things on social media keeps you top of mind, right? So that when you are in market, you know, hopefully your product, your service, whatever was the last thing that that person saw that then you become, you know, recent relevant, all those types of things and you’re who they turn to.

It’s just email is just such an easy way to execute on something like that.

Tom Nixon (09:05.627)
Well, I love email. Again, the Brian Clark side of me. Here’s the angel on the shoulder. It’s classic middle of the funnel activity, right? We were talking about top of the funnel, middle of the funnel and bottom of the funnel. And I feel like B2B brands too quickly fall out of love with their middle of their funnel. And that’s where all the business comes from. We ask all these, how do you get your clients? 90 % come from referral.

the, are you chasing so many people outside of the funnel? If you have all this business right in your funnel, that’s like, right.

Curtis Hays (09:36.199)
When was the last time you asked for a referral? Right? It’s like, it all comes for referrals, but when was the last time you asked? Right?

Tom Nixon (09:41.585)
Right. What are you doing to stay in front of people? What are these brands doing to stay in front of these referral sources who are sending them out of their business? For lack of email, the answer is nothing. So how do you are you working with brands that are relatively dormant on email and you’re sort of making the business case that email is not a dead soldier?

Moshe Zippel (10:01.024)
Yeah, it goes beyond that as well. So a common issue that we run into is people either view us as email marketing strictly in the sense of like,

we’re going to help you send out emails for your own brand, which is not what we do. We do offer that as a solution if these brands want to create their own email newsletters and some of them do, but it’s a lot less common. Or we get bucketed under performance media where we’re, they’re looking to equate us with Facebook and put us on the bottom of the funnel kind of CPA oriented KPIs, which is not exactly where we are either. I think you said it very well, Tom, we’re kind of in that mid funnel area.

where we’re able to get you really great exposure, really great alignment with the categories and verticals that are of interest, while also getting high qualified users and engagement there to start boosting up, whether it’s lead generation, booking calls, getting people just in the door and familiar with your brand. And that’s truly where we have a lot of success.

Tom Nixon (10:53.403)
So explain that the business model again for, for Beehive. So if, cause we don’t want them to think of you as MailChimp, right? So a brand comes to you and says, we want to get in front of decision makers in the IT space, who, you know, this size company, how do you match their audience with what you can deliver?

Moshe Zippel (11:13.486)
Yeah, and just to clarify real quick, we definitely do have a MailChimp side of our business and that’s what we call the publisher side of our business. That’s where our bread and butter is. That’s where all this inventory is coming from. What we’re strictly talking about, what my team is focused on, is the advertisers. So brands come to us and say, I want to advertise and get in front of my ICP wherever they may be. So if they’re a finance brand, if they’re a B2B kind of software, we were working with some companies yesterday that helped.

set up accounting and financial technology on behalf of solopreneurs. They come to us and say, I want to just clients and people of interest that are relevant to myself and start building my brand and building my lead gen funnels. They come to us and then we start building out who their ideal target profile is. So we get an understanding of their ICP. We get an understanding of their budgets, their funnels. We have a pixel if they’re interested in doing some really kind of nifty optimization and getting deeper into the data. But then what we’re doing is we have thousands of these publications now across our network.

which we begin to monetize. We create ad opportunities to these publishers. We say, here publisher, we have this brand who’s coming onto our ad network. They want to advertise. Here’s how much they’re willing to pay. Here’s what their budget is. And we offer our advertisers to pay on a straight CPC basis. They set up their cost per click or on a CPM. And we basically provide that opportunity to hundreds of publishers at scale so that they have the choice now to review the creative, review the brand at hand, and choose if they want to opt into this partnership.

And we do a really great job of finding the right pairings, finding the right verticals that match between both advertiser and publisher that make it a success for both sides.

Tom Nixon (12:50.297)
Is it dynamic that you’re buying the person or are you typically buying ad space in a specific publication? So the old school models you used to buy an ad in the newspaper and it was like whoever reads the New York Times is going to get this ad. know what? Curtis and I do is we say I want to buy this person. I don’t care where they are. I just want to buy the person. How does your platform?

Moshe Zippel (12:57.154)
What do you mean by the person?

Moshe Zippel (13:04.682)
Yep.

Moshe Zippel (13:10.956)
Yeah, so right now we definitely still are the first one where the advertisers are buying the entire publication or rather that entire send for the day for whenever the newsletter is being sent out on. We actually are working on more of a programmatic approach like you were defining where you’re buying the ad unit for the individual person. We’re doing a lot to beef up our ad network and add capabilities, doing a lot of AI and machine learning as well to feed that optimization. For now though, it is still entire newsletter based, which also gives a nice little opportunity though for that logo

appear at the top of the newsletter so that, again, when this trusted content creator is sending out their newsletter and the user opens it, they see right away this newsletter is sponsored by Coca-Cola or whoever the brand is, which gives a nice little sense of esteem both to the content creator, no matter how small or large they are, but then also to the reader. They see this as a kind of a trusted partner being told to them in the voice of the creator that they’ve already kind of been of interest in, and it creates that kind of nice little effect as well.

Tom Nixon (14:08.219)
Curtis, I got to imagine you’re intrigued at least a part by some of the analytics in metrics that.

Curtis Hays (14:13.719)
Yeah, well, I’m also intrigued. Are you seeing businesses come over to you then on the ad network side who were say advertising and Google to display network or something like that, who really seeing a lot of waste in those? mean, so first of all, we’re seeing ads costs increase in the Google ad network and across other channels. But we’re also just, there’s less controls for us and less

Tom Nixon (14:28.753)
Thank

Curtis Hays (14:43.175)
targeting for the ICPs we want to go after. so inherently then there ends up being more waste. I spend more time adding negative placements to campaigns because I can’t get the targeting in the system right to begin with. And it just seems a real opposite way to approach things. Hey, Google, give me the tools to select the placements I want and the audience I want. Don’t make me start out broad and then have to work to narrow everything back down.

Tom Nixon (15:11.889)
You don’t want to spend all that money on useless clicks because that’s what Google wants.

Curtis Hays (15:13.541)
So, right? of course that’s what they want. So I’m really intrigued now at what Moshe said here and like what Beehive is doing in this space and how, so do you see clients coming over from the Google and other ad network sides and what advantage are you guys providing in benefits to those companies?

Moshe Zippel (15:36.94)
Yeah, we get a bunch of different teams and different companies coming from the various kind of formats that they’re used to buying in. Like I said earlier, sometimes we get unfortunately bucketed under the same kind of buying group as like the performance marketing team from a brand, which we’re not going to stack up against one-to-one. It’s not a fair comparison because again, we’re not doing that targeted ad unit. But at the same time, we are able to offer, sorry,

that added level of targeting and alignment on a vertical basis that, like you said, Google won’t give you and lots of other partners won’t give you, that marketers feel like they have a good control over and it makes them kind of more at ease with partnering with us. So I think just being able to offer them both of that while still offering analytics and reporting in a dashboard that makes it easy for them to digest what the results are of their campaign, it just creates a really kind of sticky offering that we’re really proud of.

Tom Nixon (16:16.706)
you

Tom Nixon (16:27.601)
would think too. So there’s thousands and thousands who you may have the number of newsletters that are just out there in the world. And I’ve got a small fraction of those are actually offering advertising inventory and currently, which is what the mission you’re on to fix. But like I would imagine it’s a nice quiet environment for the user to be fed a brand message. So as opposed to say go to anything, is it Gannett that owns USA Today and the free press? Like you can’t even consume those websites without an ad blocker because it’s just

You know, everything is just firing at you. And so either you just ignore it all or you put an ad blocker up to ignore it all. Or I never go back to USA Today again. I just can’t. I can’t experience. But now because they’re somewhat limited or limited in what they could do within an email client. Right. Is it a nice, quiet space? I mean, are you finding that the metrics are probably much higher going back to the thing that I know Curtis likes because it’s a singular sort of

brand impression as opposed to just getting bombarded.

Moshe Zippel (17:28.406)
Yeah, agreed. And there are some publishers out there who do choose to put multiple ad offers within their newsletter if they have a lengthy piece of content. That’s okay. That being said, part of our job is to guide them on what the best practices are, what is it that’s really gonna drive them success. Part of our payout model as well is these publishers will only get paid out for the clicks that they drive since that’s how our advertisers are paying us. So we want them to actually give ads that will drive engagement, will drive success for them.

If you’re gonna put 17 ads in a piece of content, you’re probably gonna throw off your user, no one’s gonna click, no one’s gonna be of interest, and then you’re not really winning that way. So we wanna help kind of provide, like I said, that win-win for both the publisher and the advertiser, and being, like you said, in that quiet format where it’s focused, their writing content, it usually matches pretty well within the tone and the messaging that the newsletter creator is writing in. It does a really good job of driving that engagement.

Tom Nixon (18:20.995)
It’s, funny because I think a lot of people, because there’s so many sexy things out there nowadays with AI and programmatic and whatever. think people want to fall in love with the new shiny object and I get it. And so do we, because we’re using those platforms. But I feel like email gets dismissed. Curtis is like, that’s so such an old school way of doing things. But it’s like, if you need to get in front of a business professional, that business professional probably has to be in front of his or her email about six hours a day.

They don’t have to go on LinkedIn. They don’t have to go on TikTok. They don’t even have to go on YouTube, but they are tethered to their email, right? So I would feel like this is something that we shouldn’t be overlooking. Now I’m talking more on the publishing side, but maybe the advertising side too. so Curtis, are you of the mind that we need to kind of keep email in the marketing mix going back to pay? So

Curtis Hays (19:08.903)
I do. It depends on the ICP again. I think there are certain ICPs, you know, take the head of any organization, superintendent of a school, CEO of a company, they’re likely not in their email. They might have an assistant, a secretary, somebody else who’s in their email who’s filtering that stuff out. And I know that’s who everybody wants to go after, those decision makers that are at the bottom of the funnel. But I think the expectation that they’re going to read, they’re going to click, you know, something that you’re sending, is it…

is a pretty high leap. So if we truly drill down into the right ICPs of maybe who those influencers are, who those individuals are that are part of the buying decision, those who are experiencing the pain or whatever you solve, and you can get in front of them, those people who are working at their computer, going through work, responding to emails, and if done right, think email is a delicate form of communication.

There are definitely ways of doing it wrong and getting unsubscribes or getting people to just delete. And we are still inundated with tons of emails every day. But it still works. 25 plus percent open rates and getting good clicks and just being, again, that frequency, that relevancy, and Moshe, you mentioned that double opt-in. So these are subscribers who do want to receive the content.

And it’s not like you’re sending a publication to somebody who wasn’t expecting it. so you’re more likely to get people to read it at that point. You’re more likely to get them to engage and possibly then click. And I’m really curious then of like, so Moshe, you guys, you asked me earlier, Tom, about data and analytics. I get really excited, Moshe, about attribution and proving ROI and those types of things. So you mentioned Pixel, certainly a lot of

things on the cost side of CPCs and CPMs and those different models, but how are you guys tying back for clients to actual success that’s leading to a contact form, Phil, on a website or a phone call or replying maybe possibly to an email? What are you guys doing on that side?

Moshe Zippel (21:26.062)
Sure, so at a base level, every click URL that we set up in a platform for the creatives automatically include a dynamic macro within the UTM parameters to pass back the identifier.

of the publication or the publication ID specifically that drove the user to the site. So this way, without even us grading our own homework, the actual advertiser can go to their Google Analytics, go to whatever platform they’re using for analytics, and understand exactly how much traffic they’re getting from each publisher within our network that we’re sending them.

Beyond that, from an attribution standpoint, we did start to build out our Pixel product a couple of months ago. It’s still very much in its early phases, but that’s already proving a lot of traction and value to us as a company. As now, as an email service provider, we’re always able to see how many opens and clicks we’re driving on behalf of our brands for the advertisers. But we kind of had a blind spot after that, right? So once the user gets taken to the advertiser site, we didn’t know previously what they’re doing. Are they engaging? Are they subscribing? Are they converting? Whatever the action was.

So now we built out that pixel so that we’re actually able to share in that data, get transparency into those actions, and then A, report on it, but B, more importantly, optimize off of it. So whereas we were previously kind of relying on optimizing our campaigns to publishers who were showing the highest click-through rates or most amount of click volume, we’re taking it a step beyond that now. So if advertisers are seeing publications that are driving a really high-quality user,

that are converting at a higher level, regardless of what click-through rate is, we could use that signal to kind of feed into our algorithm of which other publications should we share our ad opportunities with, who should we kind of spend more money on and maybe adjust the bid and the CPC offering. And vice versa, if someone’s not performing, they’re driving a ton of clicks, but there’s no down funnel engagement beyond that, we can start to weed them out of our system so that we’re not wasting the advertisers dollars, we’re being efficient, and we’re truly driving them success that they’re looking for.

Curtis Hays (23:19.431)
That segmentation is so important. It’s so critical that you can take those segments of those subscribers who engage, know, and remarket to them or, you know, segment and do something with them is critical. mean, and you find those people who are in market to purchase or in their research phases, like you can, you can almost kind of like build out your funnel based off the engagement, the type of content they’re looking at on your website, the types of things that they’re clicking.

Tom Nixon (23:19.556)
Yeah.

Curtis Hays (23:47.449)
and then build that sequence of additional messaging around those behaviors. It’s, super smart.

Moshe Zippel (23:53.72)
For sure. And if I may add, just one thing you just kind of reminded me on that we’re really excited about here on the Beehive side is with the growth and ever adoption of AI and machine learning, one of the tools that we were kind of positioning is we have this data on users. We have these data on the subscribers that we know are taking action from a specific publication. If we know that those types of users are working well for this brand, how can we go find more similar advertisers, more similar users for this advertiser or similar publications even?

Curtis Hays (24:20.241)
Mm-hmm.

Moshe Zippel (24:22.542)
because we have thousands across our network and it’s sometimes hard to keep track of on a manual basis. So we’ve created tools internally with our machine learning team.

to create lookalikes now, similar to what Facebook’s doing with lookalike audiences. But if we see that a specific publication or subset group and cohorts of subscribers are working, we can plug that into our system now to spit out a lookalikes that we can find even more similar publications with a similar style of reader that matched that same ICP that we can now bring to the advertiser based on the success that we know we’ve driven for them from our pixel, from the data that they’re providing us.

Tom Nixon (24:55.953)
How much visibility do advertisers have into that user data? So like going back to the old school example of New York times, you know, they have a media kit, they, know, 30 % are affluent business decision makers and they would brag up, boast all these numbers, some of which I, know, when you’re talking in the print realm are practically impossible to prove, but you have the data now. So like, what are you, do you allow advertisers to see?

Moshe Zippel (25:20.96)
see it is different than kind of what we use. So.

On a reporting basis, we’re giving them kind of obviously budget breakdowns, monthly, daily, et cetera. We rely on our advertising partners to give us the restrictions that they have. So for example, I’m a product that’s US only, I can only serve US only newsletters. So we do core targeting based on their requirements. Beyond that, we kind of keep that proprietary to ourselves. So we don’t do a whole lot of reporting as it relates to titles of the users. There’s obviously a certain level we don’t know either. We’re relying on our publishers to collect that information. But we keep the sides of the house fairly

private in that regard as the publication it’s their data they obviously built up their subscribers they own it we don’t want to intervene and kind of take away from their transparency in that regard so if they know that a certain basis of their subscribers are CEOs or people who work at these fortune 500 companies that’s their data to share we don’t necessarily want to take that to all of our advertisers but at the same time we definitely share vertical information which our category

we share kind of the bare targeting expectations that advertisers, think, are used to.

Tom Nixon (26:28.049)
point you made earlier, Curtis, about like the busy CEO, like just think of that is a composite persona who isn’t going to read his own email or her own email and won’t read your newsletter. What I love about this model, Moshe, is that they’re going to read something like I have a friend who’s a CEO of $20 million company or so doesn’t have time to read, right? But he’s constantly sending me. Hey, did you see this 3000 word expose the economist? Or do you see this 2400 word article about so and so and fast? He wants to read. He just wants to choose what he wants to

Moshe Zippel (26:57.911)
Exactly.

Tom Nixon (26:58.147)
What I love about this model is that kind of allows you to get into this double opt in this person who is subscribed to the thing that’s very important to them, but for not reading all your other emails and seeing all your other marketing messages, they might see this.

Moshe Zippel (27:12.142)
100%. And I think a good example of this is, which I’m happy to share publicly, is our CEO runs his own newsletter that he’s built over the years. It’s called Big Desk Energy. And he has a really unique voice when it comes to talking to his audiences. It’s a mixture of full transparency. I don’t know if you know much about our CEO, Tyler Dank, but he is very active across all socials sharing how he built Beehive and built the company.

the good, the bad, the ugly, all of it. And a lot of his voice and his messaging is just sharing everything that he’s gone through candidly. And he’s built up organically, just a really huge subscriber base of highly engaged users, a lot of startup founders, VCs, and he’s able to kind of vouch and talk to the subscribers that he’s built out and advertise that accordingly.

because now he’s able to monetize his audience. So he knows he has X amount of VCs that read his newsletter. He knows he has like-minded founders who are in similar positions to him who are want to learn from his kind of building story, who follow his journey and follow his newsletter. So now he can take all of that information and go to advertisers and say, this is my market. These are my readers. You clearly are interested in reaching founders. You’re clearly interested in reaching VCs. Here’s my media kit. Here’s my package. And here’s how you can advertise in here. And that’s something we also recently

built out on the Beehive platform is a direct sponsorship storefront. So now publishers can choose to either use our ad network or we bring deals to them and are paying them out on that flat CPC or CPM. Or they can choose to just use our storefront and sell their newsletter to whoever they want. They use our technology. They pay a very small SaaS fee just for setting it up and scheduling it all. But then they take the lion’s share of the revenue.

through setting up a direct partnership with advertisers. So we just want them to be happy. We want them to be successful and use the data that they have to kind of find the right pairings for themselves.

Tom Nixon (29:04.785)
Cool. Curtis, what other do you have any other questions about like you mentioned attribution? So what is do we already answer your curiosities about attribution? Yeah.

Curtis Hays (29:13.275)
We did. Yeah. And I think, you at the end of the day, attribution is all, what did I get out of this? Like, you know, I bought these ads, I did this publication, you know, sponsored this post, whatever. You know, you sort of have the click metrics, who clicked, you know, maybe who did X, Y or Z, but at the end of the day, you want to know what actually came into the funnel. Whether it was who went to the cart and checked out or who now got into

my funneled the list of leads that I can then then sell to that in essence is attribution and something that every performance marketer needs to prove with any money they’re spending, right? Hey, I went and spent $30,000 over the last quarter. This is what we got for that $30,000. And so, you know, the pixel tracking the UTMs is one level of that, which you could get sort of what is really

kind of basic rudimentary stuff these days in, say, Google Analytics. But really today, we’re taking that a step further to really understand those journeys, get that data into the CRMs. And then ultimately, Moshe, at least with the conversion APIs, so I don’t know if you guys are eventually, this is on the horizon, but.

We’ve seen the most success with conversion APIs, that if you’re using any kind of AI and you can in real time, real time being daily, send your qualified leads or converted leads back to any sort of advertising platform, you’re setting yourself up in a position to win. Because that training is creating efficiency in a real time basis that no human can do.

And every single client of ours on the meta side, on the Google advertising side that’s doing offline conversions in some sort of lead gen space is actually killing it right now. mean, you know, performance far beyond anyone else. I’ve got one client where at basically a $17 last month, $17 cost per qualified lead in a market.

Curtis Hays (31:29.125)
where most average CPCs are in the range of $15 to $80. Their cost per qualified lead last month was $17. So we’ve trained Google over a year plus with sending offline conversions, who our ideal customer is, and getting $1.30 CPCs inside the platform, but those, the majority of which fill out a form.

pick up the phone and call, send an email, whatever it is, and that data sent back, and you’re effectively at one out of 10 of those actions ends up being qualified. So it’s totally powerful. So I’ll stop talking, Moshe, don’t know if you know about conversion APIs and you guys have something like that on the horizon?

Moshe Zippel (32:20.566)
Yeah, definitely within our roadmap. right now, like I said, our Pixel is still very much in its early stages. We’re working on adding post-back conversions, conversion API, of just as many ways as we can ingest conversion data from our clients as possible. As to your point, it’s obviously super powerful. The more data that we’re able to ingest and understand who our deal customers are for our clients, the better, right? We want to drive success for them. That’s what makes us good partners. So that’s definitely on the roadmap and things that we’re working to build out.

Tom Nixon (32:49.381)
Great. Well, you could tell probably Moshe who on this podcast is more enamored with bulls eyes and who is more enamored with bull horns. I’m sorry. Yeah, bull horns. Because if I were making a case for this, like to a client of mine, to me, the value prop is what I said earlier. It’s in the impression, like the impression of an engaged audience without the

noise and all this stuff going on is way more valuable than whatever people are spending on these websites that are just throwing crap on the screen. All you’re trying to do is look for the X to get rid of it, right? You’re not even it’s not even a valuable impression. So that’s my final thought is whether the people whether you’re measuring it by performance or just brand impression. I think the value props there, Curtis, what any final thoughts or final questions?

Curtis Hays (33:37.704)
I agree with you 100 % on that. I while I still want precision and accuracy and I want to track it all, it is again, from a performance marketing place, you want that money to go somewhere that’s well spent. you know, if you’re going to put the effort into actual marketing, knowing somebody actually read and saw and looked at and engaged with your content, I think is critical. And so if you can…

Tom Nixon (33:42.342)
Mm-hmm.

Curtis Hays (34:04.039)
If you have a platform that can connect these dots for you, it can be pretty powerful.

Tom Nixon (34:10.905)
Moshe maybe final thought to you. I’m curious. So are you in the sales side? Are you making the pitch to clients or are you

Moshe Zippel (34:18.622)
Not so much. I’m more so a behind the scenes type of guy. I work on understanding our product strategy in terms of what we should be adding to make our advertisers successful. Also kind of pre and post launch, I’m involved in helping in the onboarding just so we’re understanding what our advertisers KPIs are, we’re understanding what we’re going to be doing from a targeting and setup standpoint to set them up for success. So I kind of work across the board, but for the most part, I would say behind the scenes and supporting our customers once they’re live.

Tom Nixon (34:43.929)
Yeah. And I was going to ask you about customer acquisitions for, so for publishers that come to you and they want to sell their ad inventory. do you work within their network or do you convert them over to be hive and they’re going to be working on your platform.

Moshe Zippel (34:57.038)
So our advertising network is only for publishers who are already publishers on the Beehive platform. As I mentioned earlier, up until about a month or two ago, if publishers wanted advertisements in their newsletters that they weren’t having their own sales teams going out to market and finding, they were using our marketplace, which is where we’re providing multiple opportunities based on a CPC or CPM value. And they were opting into that. We recently created our direct sponsorship storefront product

which is where we’re helping these publishers who are already going out with their own sales teams to find their own advertising deals. They’re obviously able to make more money that way, create direct partnerships, but they were struggling to find the right tools to help them support that without managing multiple Google Sheets and then.

logins across multiple other platforms out there. So now everything is available in-house for them to do. They could list their storefront. We create a nice little UI for them that they could share with any advertiser of interest. And then the publisher and advertiser figure out the deal between themselves. We take a very small SaaS fee for facilitating that deal. But it really helps publishers manage their own inventory on their own basis. So if they have partners in mind, and if they don’t, then they’re still able to use our marketplace as a fallback as a way to keep filling inventory.

Tom Nixon (36:10.341)
Yeah, cool. Well, we will link to be hive.com in the show notes. But for the listeners and viewers, I mentioned to ease. There’s also two eyes. Be HIV.com in Curtis. You’ll like the why. So I think this is aimed at their creator audience. So above the fold, hero messaging is own your audience, own your future. And I’m going back to what we said earlier about building on rented land for sure. But you got to have your own property as well.

Curtis Hays (36:39.751)
Is there a newsletter for the Yacht Rock podcast?

Moshe Zippel (36:39.854)
Thanks,

Tom Nixon (36:45.681)
What’s funny is is we have subscribers but no newsletter because it was always my intent to write a newsletter and I haven’t gotten around to it yet. So we’ve got about thousand subscribers waiting for their first issue. So I just Exactly. So now I know where I’m going. Yeah for sure What you made fun of me last episode? I didn’t even try to work in the yacht rock thing. So alright, this is a new bit new bit for season two. I love it

Moshe Zippel (36:57.886)
I know I know what’s wrong for you.

Curtis Hays (37:10.031)
I did it for you. I did it for you.

Tom Nixon (37:13.457)
All right, well, we’ll have people check out your platform. looks really cool. I’m going to check it out myself. So, outrock podcast or not. So in the meantime, welcome. Thank you for coming to this podcast, which is of course it is bullhorns and bullseyes. See y’all.