Make $1 million/yr by cleaning up free data

GM. This is Work "After" Work. Hope you had a great weekend and a better holiday for all celebrating Easter!

Like my WAW egg? 😊

Here's how we're starting the week:

• 🧑‍💻 Social Blade for Spotify

• 😂 Meme of the day

SOCIAL BLADE FOR SPOTIFY

For YouTubers, it's common to go on Social Blade to see:

• how fast other YouTubers are growing

• how much YouTubers are potentially making

• how they rank compared to other creators on the platform

The site also provides useful charts like these:

What you probably didn’t know about Social Blade is that they make $12 million a year. Did you just spit out your coffee? Cause same.

I was shocked when I saw this number, so I did some digging.

Social Blade makes its revenue from 2 main streams:

#1 Advertisements on the site - it got over 18M visits last month, advertisers pay to be seen.

#2 Subscriptions - social blade offers some free analytics, but to see more in-depth data you have to upgrade through their subscription stack. The highest subscription gives you access to all their data and costs $1,000 a year.

Here are their subscription prices:

• Bronze: $3.99 per month, $3.34 per month (billed annually)

• Silver: $9.99 per month, $8.34 per month (billed annually)

• Gold: $39.99 per month, $33.34 per month (billed annually)

• Platinum: $99.99 per month, $83.34 per month (billed annually)

Social Blade does offer a few other things like YouTube consultations to grow your channel and custom reports (most likely for advertisers) but these are smaller income streams.

And they do all this with just 5 employees (and probably some side contractors that aren’t listed).

They cover a ton of platforms:

The one platform they don’t cover? Spotify. And trust me, I’ve checked. There’s no dominant website offering this.

There’s chartmetric.com but it costs money and is more geared toward companies, not consumers. And there’s a site called SongStats, which almost has $1M in ARR (annual recurring revenue) but it’s still early days - last month SongStats had 300K visits, well below Social Blade’s 18M.

I think this could be a six-figure business relatively quickly.

Who are Social Blade’s customers?Mostly platform competitors (other YouTubers), and social media and advertising departments inside companies that track artist growth and engagement.

How does Social Blade get this data and how can you do it too?This is definitely not my expertise so I’m going to explain this like a 5 year old.

The short answer is they use YouTube’s public API. This acts as a gateway for you to access and read all the data that YouTube allows you to.

From there Social Blade has all this data, now they need to make it user-friendly so users can search by artist and see their growth over the past year.

Just like this. Here’s my YouTube channel for example:

Lucky for you, the same can be done with artists as Spotify also has a public API that lets you retrieve information about tracks, albums, artists, and playlists. Then from there, you can start to put your spin on it, just like Social Blade does with guesstimating YouTubers' earnings.

This business model is great for 3 reasons:

#1 It’s taking free data that’s messy and making it user-friendly for end-user analytics - my favorite business model

#2 You have a company to “copy” - put your spin on it of course but you can reverse engineer everything Social Blade has done

#3 Spotify is set to grow to 1 billion users by 2030 - these analytics are only going to become more valuable

Now how would I go about starting this with no engineering background?I’d call up my engineering friends. Tell them my idea and ask them to help.

If you’re code-savvy or can use ChatGPT to walk you through the steps, then perfect. If not, and you don’t have nerdy friends, check out Fiverr or TopTal - you can find affordable options.

You’ll be in charge of the other heavy lifting - getting people to the site.

There will be two main ways to do this:

#1 SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Whenever someone types in “YouTube channel analytics” guess what site pops up first? You guessed it - Social Blade.

You want the same thing happening when people search “Spotify channel analytics”.

To do this make sure those words are on each page of your website and its metadata (the data the search engine reads aka code)

#2 Reach out to smaller artists to get them to use your site

Smaller artists are well… small and are more likely to respond. Ask them for feedback on the site, get their opinions of how it could be better for them, add those features, and keep reaching out.

Pretty soon you’ll have a rolodex of artist contact information that you can reach back out to when the time is right to officially launch. If you’re providing value for them, a simple free subscription could mean a shoutout for your site!

You could also:

• Use paid ads - target music lovers and artists

• Invest in influencer marketing - target smaller creators that have niche but loyal music audiences

• Do some marketing of your own - make videos on how to use the site, send out emails to all your music contacts about the features your site offers, etc

This will take time to grow but as I’ve shown, these two friends have figured it out and are doing $1M a year!

It’s still early days for music analytics. Start now and ride the wave for the millions of users set to come into the space!

MEME OF THE DAY

😂😂 Uder driver: 1 Orderer: 0

That's all I got for ya today folks!

DISCLAIMER: None of this is financial advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. Please be careful and do your own research.