“We never relied only on advertising. I think one of the keys to our success is we had a very good and robust mixed revenue model. And that has [helped] us over a long period of time.”
Earlier this summer, Newsmax CEO and founder Christopher Ruddy announced plans for an initial public offering, which aims to take place this year or in early 2025. Having founded the company in 1998, Mr. Ruddy has since grown Newsmax into a multi-faceted media company that distributes its content through its website, a print magazine, and a cable television channel called Newsmax TV. According to Reuters, “the company reaches more than 40 million Americans through its television, streaming, online and print platforms,” and, in his conversation here with Merion West editor-in-chief Erich J. Prince, Mr. Ruddy affirms his desire for Newsmax to continue to compete strongly with the traditional big three in cable television news: Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN. In their conversation, Mr. Prince and Mr. Ruddy discuss Newsmax’s business model, the company’s competitors, methods of content delivery, and the demographics of the television news business.
To set the stage, can you give us the latest? I understand you have this private placement, and I understand you’re eyeing an IPO.
Erich, thank you very much for having me. Newsmax, as you know, has been around for a long time: 25 years, a long time for the Internet world. We’re one of the pioneers of conservative media online.
And [Newsmax] has done very well through the years. We entered the TV world about 10 years ago and now have a very significant cable news channel and TV operation. And we felt like maybe this is the time for us to go public [when] we’re so close to overtaking CNN in our ratings.
Oftentimes, we beat them in what’s known as the Nielsen coverage rating. And we felt like this might be an opportunity where we would partner with tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of Americans that were shareholders. So that was one of the thoughts. We saw the success of President Trump’s Trump Media, where he went out [as a] public company, and it’s worth billions of dollars. And we thought that proves that there’s tremendous demand in our mind for conservative media. So far, we’ve had a tremendous response.
We announced it early this summer. We plan to go public—do an IPO—either later this year or early next year. And the response has been off the charts. The Wall Street Journal did stories about it. We’ve had over 40,000 investors go to invest.newsmax.com, our online portal, and say they plan to invest with us or they have [already] invested. It’s an exciting moment for us, and we think it’s going to be really bringing us to the next level.
You’ve been doing this since 1998. Can you talk about some of the milestones for Newsmax along the way up to this point? Obviously, this is a big milestone, but what are some of the other ones as you look back, leading to this point of going public?
I think founding Newsmax was very significant in September of 1998. Three years later, we started a print magazine. So who would believe we would go from online to being a print publication in 2001? And Newsmax magazine really has taken off. It is the largest conservative monthly in the United States and has over 700,000 monthly readers.
So that was a big milestone. Then, in 2005, we launched our newsletter division. We did health and financial newsletters. I would say [in] about 2009 to 2010, we started doing a lot of video content on Newsmax. And that really sparked the interest for a TV channel. And, in 2014, we launched Newsmax TV on cable.
We were told at the time: “You’re not going to get into cable homes.” We’re on all the major cable systems today. I think it’s been a great success. We’re the number four cable news channel in the United States. And, in the month of July, Nielsen said we were the number seven cable channel overall for daytime watching. That’s—I think—a pretty significant achievement for a company that’s not considered establishment.
You mentioned CNN. There’s also NewsNation that, as you know, has been trying to get in this space, presenting itself as representing various sides [of the political spectrum]. Obviously Fox is the standard-bearer, so to speak, on the conservative side. What do you think you’re doing differently or better than some of your competitors?
It’s content, and it’s also talent. So it’s a formula. It’s a mix of things that lead to success on television. I think we hit a number of those points that people are looking for. We also have, I think, a better business approach. We built a tremendous digital media company: Newsmax.com, one of the highest traffic websites. We have email news alerts. We have push notifications. We have the magazine and a lot of social media. We have over 16 million social media followers. So when companies like One America News or NewsNation come along, they just don’t have that infrastructure.
In today’s world, you really need to have that infrastructure to build an audience on any market platform, whether it be television or wherever. We had it. So it gave us a huge advantage over these other companies. I think our approach also is a big tent approach with the Republican Party, for instance. We like all points of view. We’re not keeping people out.
NewsNation will claim that they’re center politics, but if you look at it, most of their hosts and people that run that are [on the] Left, left-leaning at the very least. Chris Cuomo—I wouldn’t call him a conservative. Dan Abrams, as you know, used to run MSNBC—not a conservative. They all like to claim the center, but, if you talk about their politics, they’re all pretty left. And the public sees through it. They see it, and they see what CNN is about. And they’re turning it off, and they’re coming to new media.
I’m glad you mentioned newsletters. That’s a space where there’s been a lot of activity. I think of The Skimm or Morning Brew. A lot of companies are trying to get into that space. You already mentioned it a little bit, but can you talk about how your newsletter fits into Newsmax’s overall strategy?
Early on, we had email news alerts. And so those news alerts have been integral to Newsmax almost from the very beginning. A lot of our people tend to be 50 plus. They still rely on email. They like looking at their email; they like acting on their email. It’s a very important part of their communication setup. And Newsmax has importantly always sent a lot of good content through email. We send about three breaking news alerts at least every day, and people stick with it. We have millions of subscribers; I think there’s about 4 million altogether. We have a lot of people on text messaging, and they want push notifications, and we provide millions of those—maybe around 10 million subscribers.
We also have print and digital newsletters that are paid subscriptions for health and financial newsletters. We have about a dozen of those that have been very successful, everything from a heart health newsletter to an alternative health newsletter to financial dividend stock reports, income stock reports, and other types of investment letters. And it’s proven quite successful to us. We never relied only on advertising. I think one of the keys to our success is we had a very good and robust mixed revenue model. And that has [helped] us over a long period of time.
In the conservative media space, there are a lot of outlets and platforms that I would say are primarily opinion-focused. News is notoriously expensive to produce in that it requires a ground game, getting people out reporting. I’ve been watching some of your programming in anticipation of talking to you and saw, for instance, your journalists on the ground interviewing people in New Hampshire [about the upcoming election]. Maybe your raising of capital is related to this, but how do you see your ground game? How many journalists, for instance, do you have out on the street, so to speak?
I would say that we have at least 100 members of our staff who are dedicated to reporting, collecting news, and collecting information. That could be digital. That could be newsletters. That could be television and broadcasting. We make a pretty big investment. It’s not as big as some media companies, but it’s enough for us. And that allows us to have like we have with Israel being big in the news. We have two correspondents there. We’ve been covering Ukraine. We have a reporter in London. We have a reporter in Rome. The pope’s been on a trip to Asia. We’re covering that. We have people throughout the United States.
James Rosen, a very famous Fox News correspondent, is our White House correspondent and does a great job. We’re excited about what he’s doing. We’re going to continue to grow, and content is king. It really is. Good content. This podcast—obviously you’re asking very thoughtful questions. And you may not always get the number one ratings and things, but you’re going to get a thoughtful audience that likes what you’re doing.
A lot is frequently made about the so-called aging demographics of cable news. Can you talk about maybe how you’re reaching younger people and how you’re encouraging them either to watch the channel or engage with them by other means. I know you mentioned social media.
Our main mission is to provide news to the public, so we don’t we don’t necessarily say we are doing this to target an age group. The truth is the people that tune into news programming, either cable news networks or nightly news programming…they’re all over 50. They’re older, more mature viewers. They’re not younger viewers. And, as much as you say you’d like to have younger viewers there, they’re either busy with their career, busy dating, busy entertainment-wise, and they are more likely to get their news from a comedy channel or YouTube videos or TikTok. Now, TikTok is the place they go. In fact, a recent survey I saw showed that most young people think they get their news from TikTok.
The Washington Post, for instance, has been trying to reach people on TikTok.
There’s not necessarily a big revenue bang there for companies to justify it. But we certainly have a presence on TikTok, and it’s fine. We have a big presence on social media, but most of our audience is now what we call 35 to 64, which is the young folks in our world. That number has been growing for us. We like having younger viewers. We have a lot of young people on the network and a lot of young anchors and correspondents in their 20s and early 30s. I think sometimes speaking to that generation is just having them represented. We do that, but the truth is it’s a “baby boomer plus” audience I call it—[those] 45 plus tuning into Newsmax are doing it in very big numbers. Our average age is probably 60 [or] in the low 60s. Fox News is 70. It’s just a function of the news business. I do think appealing to younger people is extremely important. It’s just not necessarily our main focus.
I appreciate you talking with me, Mr. Ruddy. It sounds like you have some exciting things happening at Newsmax, so I’m glad we were able to chat.
And people interested in learning more about our upcoming IPO or how they can participate, just go to invest.newsmax.com. And there’s an email sign up there as well, so we have a tremendous amount of interest, and we’re excited about the future there.
