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🧞 Newsletter Rugs & Acquisitions
In this week's ALTS by Flippa: Selling a fake 4M subscriber list, acquiring a real $2M subscriber list, goodbye Revue, Onfolio acquires Content Ellect, CNET using AI content, losing all your NFTs...
Hey there 👋,
In this week’s ALTs by Flippa newsletter, I discuss:
Selling a fake 4M customer/subscriber list to JPMorgan for $175M
Selling a real 2M subscriber list to an industry newsletter firm
The end of Twitter’s email platform Revue
Onfolio acquires Content Ellect in its 4th acquisition
CNET and Bankrate start ranking articles with AI
Using ChatGPT to build a business that got acquired within 2 days
How to avoid getting hacked and losing your entire NFT portfolio
Every heading is a discussion channel in the ALTS by Flippa discord community - come join over 2250 of us.
Cheers!
#newsletters
This story is wild.
JPMorgan acquired Frank, a student financial aid platform, for $175M back in 2021. The 30 year startup founder of Frank, Charlie Javice, sold the startup based on the claim that it had over over 4 million customers.
But when it sent out a marketing campaign to Frank's customer list, they were apparently all fake. CBS News states:
JPMC sent marketing test emails to what it believed were 400,000 unique Frank customers," the suit alleges. "Of the individuals contacted, only 28% of emails were delivered, compared to a 99% delivery rate JPMC usually sees with similar campaigns. Just 1.1% of the delivered emails were opened, compared to 30% for a typical JPMC campaign.
Javice had reportedly paid a data scientist $18K to forge over 4M fake customers, and in total $175K for the email list which, as Bucco Capital puts it, is a 1000x ROI rug pull:
On the totally legitimate end of the spectrum, They Got Acquired did a great write up on how the executive job search site Ladders sold its daily newsletter arm (which actually had 2.2 million subscribers), rather than the entire business.
The acquirer, is the industry newsletter firm Industry Drive which has a portfolio of publications that reach over 12M business leaders.
As of today, the newsletter platform Revue is no more:
Revue was acquired by Twitter back in January of 2021, and I started my own Revue newsletter Crypto Communities shortly afterward. But due to a lack of innovation, and the need to focus, Elon Musk has quite rightly shut the platform down.
I exported everything from my Revue into a brand new substack at pledge.substack.com - this subdomain is a bit of a domain hack as Substack recently launched pledges!
And finally, there’s been some really great threads on how to grow and monetize newsletters recently such as:
So I tried my hand at one too:
#acquire
Big news in the acquisitions space, as Onfolio announces another acquisition. This time it’s the well known and loved content service Content Ellect, founded by Mark Whitman.
In the press release, Dom Wells the CEO stated:
Contentellect brings to Onfolio another strong, compelling and diverse business to add to our portfolio, Contentellect’s unique ability to serve its clients as a full SEO service fits into our existing businesses and further supplements our other SEO service providers. We continue to advance our strategy of acquiring niche, profitable online businesses, and we welcome the Contentellect team to Onfolio.
Our pipeline of M&A target opportunities remains robust, and we continue to believe there are ample opportunities ahead. Our team’s ability to discover and operate digital businesses while growing cash flows consistently has allowed us to execute on our strategy set forth with our entrance into the public markets.
#contentsites
Gael at Authority Hackers noticed that CNET and Bankrate (owned by Red Ventures) are now publishing AI generated content:
They are including this disclaimer at the end of their articles such as this one:
This article was generated using automation technology and thoroughly edited and fact-checked by an editor on our editorial staff.
Gael goes on to say that Google doesn’t seem to mind as they are generating strong search traffic.
In other content AI news, this was a really enjoyable twitter thread on how someone used ChatGPT (when it’s not at capacity) to build and install a chatbot on a website, and then sold it to Originality.ai (mentioned in this newsletter) for $10K two days later:
#nfts
NFT God is one of the biggest influencers in the NFT space, with almost 100K followers on Twitter and a great substack (I’m a paid sub). But even he was susceptible to being hacked:
The TLDR is that you should never connect or sign with a cold wallet. Or possibly nest, if you’re a Moonbird ;)
This guide by Boring Security (an Apecoin DAO funded project) explains how to keep your NFTs safe, but essentially it’s about having 3 different wallets:
Mint wallet address (hot wallet)
Sell wallet address
Vault wallet address
With your vault wallet, you should only do gasless signatures, you should not make approvals of any kind:
Ok that’s it for this week. If you’re reading this on the web and you’re not yet subscribed you can do so above.
ALTS by Flippa is owned by Flippa. Nothing in this email is financial advice and we are not professional investment advisers. We send weekly updates on what we're doing personally - consider it informational and for entertainment purposes only.
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