SiteNews Took Big, Expensive Chances on its First Event. It Paid Off

As the final weeks closed in for the inaugural construction industry event SiteSummit in May, Andrew Hansen, the man behind the show, made some financial decisions that weren’t exactly “pragmatic,” including renting a 120-foot yacht without even having an advertiser in mind.

In this landscape, is it even pragmatic to launch brand-new events? It’s already a crowded market with media companies building out their events businesses with fervor. 

The appetite is there from both potential attendees and advertisers, Hansen told AMO.

“Advertisers connect with in-person events much easier—we can sell phenomenal digital products, but there is still, in this industry, specifically in B2B, events are extremely of interest to advertisers. The effort that it takes to sell digital products is significant… Events have been normalized for the last probably 100 years, it’s much easier to communicate the value of that and so we saw an immediate interest.”

The immediate interest comes from the brand equity that the event host, SiteNews, has built up since its launch in 2022. It now has around 10,000 executive subscribers to its daily newsletter and between 90,000 and 150,000 visits to its website per month, Hansen said.

“When we first started it, I was like, ‘oh, we’re going to get 100,000 subscribers. We’re going to be this big media firm for construction,’” Hansen said. “What actually happened was it skewed very executive and now our audience is manager, VP, all the way up to the owner. So it’s very executive level and so the purchasing power is extremely high.”

“When we do these events, it’s very in demand for advertisers because these are people that are doing $1 million software decisions,” he added. “They’re hard to reach individuals.”

A lot of ticket sales came in within the final weeks before the event, which was held in North Vancouver. That emboldened Hansen to go “above and beyond” and make some quick decisions to make the event memorable regardless of cost. These executives don’t have much time, so it’s about whether it’s worth their time rather than if it’s a high ticket cost, he said. Everything SiteNews does is priced toward that executive audience with events and products being synced to that group, he said.

He ultimately found sponsorship for the yacht from “major industrial trade businesses.” He declined to name them—they covered about 85% of the costs, with the rest paid for in-house. They were also selective with VIP guest invitations as well. 

“That was over six figures in costs that we decided just to say, ‘Hey, let’s do it, let’s invest in it. It’s going to be a great event,’” he said. “We ended up getting advertisers, we ended up getting some revenue, but that wasn’t the primary [goal].”

Despite the costs, the event was profitable—in line with industry standards, he said—and revenue came in somewhere between $400,000 and $500,000, he said.

A Valuable Book of Contacts

The executive experience has been the priority while building SiteNews. The news site sits within a group of organizations, under the moniker Site, which focus on the construction industry in Canada, with plans to expand into North America. The journey first started with SitePartners, a marketing agency he launched in 2018. He then developed SiteNews with a vision to “elevate the construction sector” after recognizing there was a gap in the digital marketplace for the stories he was hearing about organically through the agency and industry contacts.

Monetization took a back seat during the first three years as they focused on creating a beautiful product, uncluttered by ads, Hansen said. It was initially funded with profits from SitePartners. Hansen’s existing connections made it easier for the news site to get off the ground. He recognized that it would be extremely valuable to have access to a bespoke audience, through something like SiteNews, because in the tight-knit world of construction running something like Facebook or LinkedIn ads is too broad for targeting this group. A curated, and albeit smaller audience, could be much more valuable. 

“When you look at the industrial and the construction sector, like most of our clients, they can be $100 million, they can be $1 billion companies, [but] they only need, a lot of times, 20 to 30 customers,” Hansen said.

“Where we are today, seven, eight years later, we have the audience of choice for a lot of our clients,” he said. “And so we’re able to produce really creative thought leadership pieces, brand campaigns.”

SiteNews is now in monetization mode and is already profitable, Hansen said. What helped it reach this stage is a focus on solutions-based selling by creating custom media products and services, which could be ad-hoc products, like a press release newsletter, or a bespoke package that contains multiple offerings from across Site organizations. He estimated that around 30% to 40% of revenue comes from events, 30% to 40% from digital advertising, and then the remainder from custom packages.

“Almost everything we do is solutions-based selling,” he said.

A second SiteSummit is in the works for next year in Toronto, which Hansen says will likely be double the size to up to 700 attendees. Over the course of the year, there will also be six to seven smaller events ranging from private dinners to 150-person events, Hansen said. Earlier this year, SiteNews hosted an “industry icebreaker” event in collaboration with Independent Contractors and Businesses Association of Alberta where industry executives could network in the VIP suite of an ice hockey game between the Edmonton Oilers and the Los Angeles Kings.

“I need these executive audiences that don’t come to many events, I need them to come to our event and have an incredible time,” Hansen said.

Beyond events, Hansen is looking to branch into peer communities in 2026 as a way to connect the industry as well as getting into print where he sees the potential for “a beautiful print product” that would provide further value to SiteNews’ audience. The team already has experience in creating compelling video and audio content via its production house and new studio.

“Our primary goal is we want to be the modern growth partner for the industrial sector—if that has to be talent, recruitment, media, we want to help drive growth for our clients,” Hansen said. “We’re set up so we’ve got different capabilities and different products to solve any client’s needs.”

This setup also creates a natural tension where SiteNews may be writing about contentious news related to clients who also work with the other Site groups. Hansen notes that the organization walks this line by keeping focus on the news site’s original mission of “elevating the industry.”

“We’re not a clickbait media entity where there’s a workplace accident and we want to put a bunch of articles out there because that doesn’t tie back to our original goal, which is to be a thought leadership space where we’re elevating,” Hansen said. “It doesn’t mean we stay away from difficult conversations. We definitely dive in. But we also use that as a way to train our journalists and our editors to look through stories through a different angle, a positive angle.”