MarketWise reports Q1 net income $22.7M vs. $30.6M last year

Reports Q1 revenue $109M vs. $126.2M last year… “Our business continues to work through the impact of the “Covid bubble.” During 2020-2021, we experienced a huge increase in response to our marketing efforts as many investors, some for the very first time, entered the financial markets. This led our publishers to spend unprecedented amounts of money on marketing and brought to our company a huge number of new subscribers. As I’ve explained in previous letters, these new subscribers were “stimulus check-sporting speculators chasing momentum.” And “like the tide,” they washed into our business and then, just as quickly, receded. While our marketers spent aggressively to add these subscribers, this large cohort of new subscribers didn’t convert into long-term customers at anything like the expected rate. This left our company with disappointing results in 2022 and 2023. As I disclosed in my last letter, we had to wind down and reorganize one of our three main publishing groups because of serious departures from our ethical standards, including an editor who was being paid surreptitiously to recommend low-quality stocks to our readers. We are still in the process of strategically realigning and reorganizing our Legacy Research Group business and transitioning Legacy Research customers to comparable products within other MarketWise brands. I expect most of this work to be essentially complete in the first half of this year,” wrote management.