US: Investor's Business Daily, success of the unknown paper

Posted by Lauren Drablier on October 15, 2008 at 9:38 AM

Investor's Business Daily is a national business newspaper that has been published since 1984 by investor and entrepreneur William O'Neil. The paper has more than 150,000 subscribers and won a Pulitzer Prize last year for editorial cartoons.

However, according to The Big Money in an article titled, America's Strangest Newspaper, it is "the biggest newspaper no one has ever heard of."

O'Neil founded the paper because he wanted to publish a paper that presented his personal investment philosophy on stock picking.

The paper's articles are short and do not include anonymous sources, leaked documents or investigations about financial scandals. According to The Big Money, O'Neil believed that papers like the Wall Street Journal were overly negative and only focused on "bad news". IBD "wanted its readers to make money and celebrate American capitalism."

IBD is not just a newspaper. It acts more as a marketing device for seminars, books and conferences run by O'Neil. And even though within the last ten years the paper has seen a decline in readership of 35 percent, IBD has managed to become a financial success. IBD makes approximately $10 million in annual revenue from its seminar business alone.

IBD offers an alternative option, a different business model for traditional newspapers. O'Neil demonstrates the success of finding a media niche coupled with multiple sources of revenue.

According to The Big Money, "As newspapers shed advertising and circulation revenue and morph from physical print products into online communities of like-minded readers, the audience, and their willingness to pay to be members of the community, is the path to profitability."

Source: The Big Money