Billionaire Publisher Thinks There’s a Business From Shooting Straight in Tribal Times

Straight Arrow News launched in 2021 billing itself as a fact-based, unbiased media outlet after TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts became frustrated with the partisan press during the 2020 presidential election. 

The site – which prominently features the tag line “Unbiased. Straight Facts” — is set to undergo a relaunch next month after readership grew six-fold from October through February. Actual numbers were not divulged. According to Similarweb, the website saw 1.8 million visits in January, up 40% from the previous month. About 45% of traffic arrived directly to the website, 42% was organic and 0.07% was paid. Social and referrals represented about 6% each.

The billionaire recently hired a revenue team led by Ken Shapiro, previously of Morning Brew and Fandom. It also just introduced a mission statement: “To restore trust in the news by empowering the world with unbiased, fact-based journalism that fits within the daily life.”

“We’re building this from scratch, digital only and putting that together with trust at the center, and facts and unbias; those are the three things, if we can get right, we will continue to grow and be able to start our monetization process,” Shapiro told AMO.

To Shapiro, that begins by growing the audience, which is “relatively small.” He expects that by the second quarter, they can multiply readership 10-fold from October, mainly through SEO and paid ads on Google and Meta properties. The revenue team is currently focused on building a simplified ad product with the continued theme of trust at the center of it. The hope is to hit breakeven by 2027.

Gaining Readers

The relaunch of the website and app will allow for reading, watching or listening to stories as SAN targets a demographic of 35- to 55-year olds who are very affluent and time-constrained, Shapiro said.

“There’s so much noise, whether it’s the left, the right, social media, whatever it is. These are people that are like, ‘I just need to understand the facts,’” Shapiro said.

And SAN isn’t just reporting the news. Stories on the site break down the media bias of news coverage, showing whether the story is being slanted left or right. It also has a product called Media Miss that spotlights which stories right and left-leaning outlets aren’t covering. That, among other things, could possibly go behind a paywall at some point.

Tangle, a newsletter by Isaac Saul, follows a similar line. It illuminates how both the left and the right cover a particular high-profile news story, and then Saul chimes in with his own take. Last year, Tangle hit the $1 million revenue mark after five years in operation.

The main goal for now at SAN is to gain readers. They just hired a chief content officer to that end and are adding staff from editors and reporters and investing in social and advertising.

The new website will include fact cards, created both by the newsroom and by sponsors complete with sources, featured on the right hand side of the website that include sources. SAN will work with advertisers for their fact cards to make sure they are appropriately sourced, and not simply in their self-interest.

“We’re going to start very small with display ads, video ads, but then we’re going to build up to sponsorships,” Shapiro said. “We’re going to have native executions, custom content, and then eventually also have a subscription model, probably more late third quarter, into fourth quarter of next year.”

Shapiro expects ads to eventually make up 60% of revenue with the rest coming from subscriptions and non-traditional advertising.

There’s “a lot to be done over the next eight weeks, we’ve got a lot of moving parts here,” Shapiro said. “I love the way our audience is growing. We had a record February, which was awesome… We’re going to just test and learn. We’ve got a very startup mentality as a company, and we’re on a mission to deliver this to folks.”