$25,000/mo from a boring niche news website

I was pretty shocked when I saw this.

A listing was added to Motion Invest today for this Canadian immigration news site (← my affiliate link cause why not lol).

The price?

$944,000.

The site earns an average of $25,000/month from ad revenue. It peaked in September, at $46,617. Insane.

It looks like the site earns money from yearly ad-free memberships as well, which cost $120. However, this isn’t mentioned anywhere in the listing.

I had no idea there was that much traffic and earnings to be had in a location-specific immigration news niche.

Quick break to let you know that I just created a Medium account and am starting to publish my past newsletters there. If you like reading my emails, I’d love it if you go follow me on Medium and clap for my articles. 😊 

The listing reveals lots more fascinating info.

For example, the website was launched in August, 2021. Just over three years ago. That’s incredibly young for a content site to have this much success.

Another fascinating tidbit:

The site has amassed 37,000,000+ pageviews and nearly 7,000,000 unique visitors in 2024 so far, with a peak of 561,227 pageviews in a single day. Pretty crazy, considering Canada has a total population of 40 million.

According to the traffic source breakdown, most traffic comes from Google organic search (this is for October, 2024).

Second most is from (direct), which is most likely Google Discover traffic.

Instagram, X (t.co), Facebook, and Google News also drive significant traffic.

The site has a very active social presence, with nearly a million followers across all accounts. These accounts drive tons of traffic as you can see above.

I’m quite familiar with X (formerly Twitter). So, I checked out their X account and saw that most of their recent posts get well over 10K impressions. What’s most impressive about this is that they’re all link posts. Links posts are usually suppressed, but evidently not in this case!

I checked today’s analytics for the site, and saw that there have been over 400 visits from X (and their post on X today has 10K impressions so far). I checked yesterday’s analytics, and total visits from X were 8,957!

9,000 visitors from X in a day is insane, but still pales in comparison to Google organic and Discover traffic. I’m absolutely flabbergasted by the traffic potential in this news sub-niche.

Most of the traffic is going to articles related to government benefit and pension plan news. Here are the top articles by traffic so far in November:

The top article - about new CPP payments - ranks second in Google News (Canada) for the keyword “new cpp payments”. Yesterday alone, the site had over 43,000 visitors just from Google News.

Seller FAQs

The seller FAQ section on Motion Invest provides a lot more detail about the site and how it gets managed.

For instance, the seller spends about 2 hours per day working on the site, mainly publishing articles and guest posts (which apparently are paid).

Perhaps the most fascinating thing is that the site content is created using ChatGPT:

There are a bunch more FAQs, but those were the most interesting to me.

The opportunity I see

This site opened my eyes to the opportunity that exists in news sub-niches. Particularly related to government benefits and other programs.

It makes me wonder… would a site like this work for a particular state, like California (which has 39 million people, basically the same size as Canada)?

What about other news sub-niches?

Like, say, a site dedicated exclusively to covering a particular newsworthy topic - like travel bans, new laws, business deals, recalls, etc…?

Or go for even more niche, less newsworthy topics, like… farming (this guy makes $20 million/year writing a farming newsletter lol).

The news niche is massive, and wide open for new entrants. I don’t think it can ever become “too saturated”.

If you have an existing niche site, I’d recommend posting some news articles. Share them on Facebook, X, whatever. Keep at it consistently for a few months, and see what happens.

Here’s some inspiration:

$3,331 in a single day, just from Facebook traffic to a news article. Crazy. I believe this is for her main site, which is in the travel niche.

To create news content, you could either write it yourself or use AI (like the Immigration News Canada site does). If you use AI, you’ll still need to review it yourself to verify accuracy.

As far as what AI tool to use, ChatGPT is an obvious choice. Another option is to use a tool specifically built for writing articles that uses real-time data to produce factual, up-to-date content. My favorite AI writing tool is Koala, and they’re currently running a Black Friday sale where you can get 40% off any plan. Snag it before it’s gone.

Hope this email has inspired you!

Thanks for reading,

Ian

Things you might be interested in:

• Use Site Stats Database to find winning sites and fascinating niche ideas. (I’ll add new traffic data as soon as I can. I’m waiting for the November Core update to complete, and for my traffic data source to update.)

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