65,000 Monthly Traffic = $1.1 Million Sale

John Bardos tweets…

Ludwig-van, a classical music and opera newsletter, sold for $1.1m to ZoomerMedia.

The website says they have 150k readers, but the press release says 65,000.

SimilarWeb says the site gets 59.9k visits per month.

I did some digging and it looks like the site was originally called Musical Toronto 🎶 started in 2011 “by former Toronto Star Critic, John Terauds.” (source)

Then, according to the timeline on this page…

2014: Michael Vincent takes over a blog to write about the cool things happening in Toronto

2015: The dinky little blog starts getting popular and wins an award

Michael was also a music journalist working for the Toronto Star, but left that job in 2017 to go full time with the blog 😎

According to a press release, his mission with the site was “to keep arts coverage alive and change how media companies operate.”

Over the years, Ludwing Van kept growing steadily 👇

• Publishing 1000 articles per year
• Became Canada’s largest classical music community
• Ranked #1 on Google for “Classical Music” in Canada
• Started doing events
• Launched a couple of podcasts
• Reached 65K monthly readers

Unclear what kind of revenue they were earning before the sale, but the advertising form linked from this page suggests their rates started at $1000 a pop, all the way up to $50,000 🤑

And while $1.1 million is a nice chunk of change – especially for a site with only 65,000 monthly visitors – it sounds like it took a ton of work to achieve that outcome.

Then again, I doubt Michael could have ended up with a $1.1 million payday if he’d stuck with his old journalism job at the Toronto Star.

Also encouraging to see that a blog about such a niche topic – classical music in Canada – can do well 💪