After years of burning through cash and a restructuring effort begun a year and a half ago that is now complete, TheStreet, Inc. (NASDAQ:TST) is now headed into a growth phase. “We have set the stage for margin expansion,” says Elisabeth DeMarse, Chairman, President and CEO of the financial media company.
“As the country recovers from the financial crisis,” says DeMarse, “we are seeing an uptick in interest in all of our products. Also, as weaker competitors drop out and decline, we’ve been gaining market share. There’s a ‘winner-take-all’ effect when the industry consolidates during a period of secular weakness. We are well positioned to compete and gain in market share.”
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Pleased with the year-old acquisition of The Deal that increased TheStreet’s institutional presence, the company has an active M&A program in place with the cash to fund it. Future acquisitions must be accretive, according to DeMarse, and will focus on the finance sector, both B2B and B2C. With their dual-monetization model — 80% of revenue comes from subscriptions and 20% from advertising — DeMarse believes they are “the only natural buyer for about 200 companies.” TheStreet’s advantage, she explains, is its ability to “monetize Internet uniques through advertising and through subscriptions.”
The company is also developing a robust publishing platform, which they will launch in Q1 of 2014. The platform will allow them to host contributor blogs, provide social sharing, videos in articles and support SEO. The platform will allow them to promote contributors who write especially compelling, insightful analysis across their four different websites or 14 different subscription products or via their Twitter and Facebook pages. Furthermore, they plan to spend 2014 upgrading the utilities on their sites.
“Our goal is to tie our readers’ portfolios, watch lists and alerts to our website and provide our readers with all the pricing and fundamental data that they need,” says DeMarse. “We will then overlay our advice on top of that platform. It will be a very powerful and unique combination.”
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