The Strategy That Scaled Benzinga Into a High-Margin Data Empire | Joined by Robert Checchia

Benzinga recently pivoted from a traditional media publication into a high margin data licensing business.

Before we dive into a couple of S&B questions, can you explain what that means to the audience?

Absolutely.

When we started out, we covered U.S. markets.

We've always covered U.S. markets, again, trying to level the playing field between institutional and retail investors.

When we When we wanted to shift, we have multiple business lines.

Today, our main driver, the locomotive of Benzinga is our data API business.

And what that is, is we compile, we factor in all information related to financial markets.

Today, that's just a commodity.

Where Benzinga really shines is the layer above that, which is analysis, insights, actionable pieces of information.

We have a plumbing system where we provide all those data to U.S. brokerages.

It's all the big brokerages in the U.S., and we're being very successful in international expansion.

It's basically B2B2C, right? So the user of our pieces of information analysis are always retail investors, right? But how they get that piece of information is through a brokerage or through another platform, right? And we provide that information.

And today, you know, when, again, we're a PE-backed company, this model, this recurring revenue model, this high audience, valuable audience model is the higher, more valuable in terms of valuation multiple, right? So this is where Benzinga is shining and growing massively.

So what, and all this started really was from an internal demand, okay? So we had our desk of journalists and analysts and they came to the engineering team and said, hey, we need to have these pieces of information in a more timely manner so we can put out our content faster and with more quality.

And then when the engineering team built that for our internal journalists and analysts, we identified, hey, There are other companies that are interested in this right, so this all this started as a to attend an internal request right, and then we built it out and massively and the rest is history right, so this this started out as you know.

A small request internally and then we started identifying and outwards demand for this type of service and we've been very successful.

This was not an unsubstantial amount of work.

You know, you added employees, I'm guessing, and time and took stuff, other budgetary projects on hold and stuff like that.

Absolutely.

Absolutely, Seth.

This is a great example where we've had, you know, Benzing has a lot of different, that entrepreneur spirit at Benzinga.

There's a lot of different things that we do.

test out and develop and grow but to do this we've had to say no to a lot of other things and to focus today we have 10x the amount of employees on this business than we had a few years ago right and that's because uh uh we have to have more stable data uh uh pipes we have to have better quality we have to have better aggregations and not only that but product development right so quality audit attending uh a sales team you know everything that that that goes around to supply this business with the support it needs.

But yeah, to do this we had to say no to a lot of other competing businesses internally so we could allocate the resources here.