Most publishers panic when their list shrinks.
Matt Paulson is about to slice his in half - on purpose.
This week on Audience Bridge Insights, I sat down with Matt Paulson, founder and CEO of MarketBeat, at his brand new Sioux Falls studio. (Funny side note: Matt was my very first guest when I launched this show. So this one is technically the bookend to season one.)
Matt has been in financial publishing for 15+ years. His list is one of the biggest in the industry.
And what he shared in this conversation isn’t theory, it’s what he’s actually doing inside MarketBeat right now, in the wake of the Yahoo deliverability collapse, Apple’s tightening grip, and Gmail’s increasingly aggressive engagement filtering.
This one is dense. Grab a coffee.
You can watch the entire podcast now or scroll down to get the full breakdown.
“Active” Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means
Here’s the line that stopped me cold:
“We won’t have 6 million subscribers anymore. We might have three.”
That’s roughly a 50% cut. On purpose.
Why?
Because Matt and his team finally admitted something most publishers refuse to say out loud:
A “recent open” with zero clicks over 12 months isn’t a real subscriber.
Some of these accounts have received 500+ MarketBeat emails. Never clicked once.
In reality?
They’re not buying
They’re not clicking
They’re dragging down sender reputation
They’re inflating the “active” number publishers brag about at conferences
MarketBeat’s list is 15 years old. There is a lot of accumulated noise in there.
So they’re doing the most aggressive scrub in their history, and they’re doing it because they trust the math more than they trust the dashboard.
That’s the move most operators won’t make.
It feels like burning revenue.
In reality, it’s protecting it.
The 5-Minute Rule That Killed Half Their “Opens”
Here’s another shift Matt detailed that I hadn’t heard a publisher articulate this clearly.
When MarketBeat sends to a Gmail subscriber, if the open pixel fires within the first five minutes, they now treat it as automated. Not a real human open. Filtered out of every engagement metric.
Why does that matter?
Because Gmail’s image proxy and security scanners are firing those pixels at scale. If you’re treating every pixel hit as engagement, you’re:
Triggering automations off bots
Misreading your domain reputation
Sending more email to people who never wanted it
Building an audience model on fiction
When MarketBeat applied the rule, a much higher percentage of their opens reclassified as automated.
That cascaded into fewer triggered sends, less noisy automation, and a more honest picture of who’s actually paying attention.
“It just kind of reset the bar for all of our metrics.”
If your open rate is your key metric right now, this is the question to sit with:
👉 How much of it is human?
All Eggs, One Basket: The Beehiiv Diversification Play
A year ago, when Yahoo torched the financial publishing industry, Matt had a moment most publishers never let themselves have:
“We’ve got all of our eggs in the SendGrid basket. This is a very risky thing we’re doing.”
One blocked domain. One flagged IP range. The whole business model wobbles.
So he ran two parallel experiments:
A Beehiiv list for one of MarketBeat’s brands
A Substack list for another
Substack didn’t work. The open rates were weak, the signup flow was clunky, and they eventually killed it and converted it into a second Beehiiv list.
Today? MarketBeat operates four Beehiiv lists in parallel with their main sending domain.
The flow is clean: when someone signs up at MarketBeat.com, an API call to Beehiiv automatically subscribes them to “American Market News” (one of the secondary brands).
Now that subscriber lives in two places.
If anything goes sideways on the main sending domain, MarketBeat still has a direct relationship with that reader.
Open rates on those Beehiiv lists?
40–50% globally. Healthy click-through.
And Matt is planning to migrate more of his existing brands off the main sending domain, partly to reduce how many distinct daily emails Gmail sees coming from a single root identity.
This is what real risk management looks like in 2026.
Not a prayer. A second sender.
This is one of those concepts that sounds dumb until you see what it does to revenue.
Inside Beehiiv, MarketBeat built an automation that takes their most recently active subscribers (clicked something in the last 7 days) and triggers their highest-converting emails at that segment, top advertiser offers, best in-house product pitches, the stuff that actually pays.
Matt named it “the make money button.”
Newsletter Guru Matt McGarry made a whole video walking through how to set it up, and credited the concept to Matt Paulson.
The whole thing rests on a simple insight:
If someone clicked something in the last 7 days, they’re paying attention. That’s the moment to monetize. Not next Tuesday because the calendar says so.
Most publishers do the opposite. They send their best offer to the entire list on a fixed cadence.
Matt’s system sends the best offer to the people whose behavior just told you they’re listening.
“We make so much money from the ‘make money button’ series.”
If you’re on Beehiiv and you haven’t built this yet, you’re leaving money on the table every single day.
The Bot War (and Why ASN-Level Filtering Matters)
We spent a real chunk of the conversation on bot hunting, and Matt has gotten aggressive.
The problem: corporate security scanners, AWS-based bots, and Microsoft Azure click farms are clicking links inside your emails before any human ever sees them.
If you’re triggering automations off every click, you’re feeding the wrong signal to your ESP and corrupting your own data warehouse.
MarketBeat’s approach:
Filter clicks by ASN. A click originating from Google Cloud, AWS, or Azure IP ranges is almost certainly not a person.
Send suspicious clicks through a Cloudflare interstitial before they ever hit the redirect script. Real humans pass it. Bots don’t.
Layer two checks. ASN filter first, bot detection on redirect second.
Don’t unsubscribe the address. A security scanner can be running on a real person’s mailbox. Scanner clicks. Person clicks. You want to discount the scanner, not throw the human away.
That last point is the one most publishers miss. They either ignore bot clicks (corrupting their data) or unsubscribe the address (losing a real reader).
The right move is in the middle: discount the bot signal, keep the human.
“If you send a triggered email off every click or every open, you’re going to have a bad day.”
Matt’s #1 Piece of Advice for Newsletter Publishers
When I asked Matt for the single thing publishers should focus on right now, he didn’t hesitate:
Activation rate by channel.
For every 1,000 leads from a given source, Twitter, Meta, co-reg, organic, partnerships, what percentage actually click on anything within the first 30 days?
If your Meta leads activate at 20% and your co-reg leads activate at 5%, you don’t have an audience growth problem.
You have an audience quality problem.
And the fix is upstream of every deliverability tactic in this newsletter.
Most publishers track CPL.
Almost nobody tracks activation by channel.
Matt does. And that’s why MarketBeat can keep scaling paid acquisition profitably while a lot of their peers are quietly struggling.
My Take After This Conversation
Three things stood out to me:
1. The willingness to cut. Matt is about to delete 3 million “active” subscribers because he doesn’t believe they’re real. That’s a level of intellectual honesty most operators can’t bring themselves to.
2. The discipline of measurement. The 5-minute pixel rule. The ASN filter. The activation-rate-by-channel metric. These are the things that separate publishers who talk about engagement from publishers who operationalize it.
3. The diversification mindset. Beehiiv as risk insurance, not a primary platform. Four lists, not one. Don’t wait for Yahoo (or Gmail, or Apple) to teach you the hard way.
If you publish a newsletter, especially in any vertical ISPs treat as “high risk” (finance, health, opportunity-style content), this episode is required listening.
See you next week,
Chris Miquel
P.S. The reason most publishers can’t make Matt’s moves is they don’t have the data. They can’t see which subscribers are real, which channels activate, which ISPs are throttling.
That’s exactly what we built Smart Delivery to fix, domain-level deliverability monitoring so you know what Gmail is actually doing with your mail before your numbers fall off a cliff.
And for the 3 million subscribers Matt is about to scrub? They don’t have to disappear forever.
That’s where Smart Reactivation comes in, using cross-network click signals to bring dormant readers back at the right time. Book a call if you want to talk through it.
