Making $9 Million From A Soap Opera Blog: The Story of Ramon van Meer

I just learned about this guy - Ramon van Meer - who started a website called SoapHub.com and sold it for just under $9 million USD. Not bad! He’s made even more money since then buying and scaling Alpha Paw - a company that creates breed-specific products for dogs.

Here’s what I learned from listening to him talk about building his blog on the My First Million podcast.

Test Multiple Markets As Quickly As You can.

Meer didn’t know much about television soaps. He didn’t watch them. He didn’t particularly like them. But what he did know eventually made him rich: Soaps have a rabid fan base.

And he learned this while testing the popularity of a bunch of niches on Facebook. Before Facebook became a friend-oriented platform, it wanted publishers to post on the site. And it rewarded those publishers with great reach. Knowing this, Meer tested different pages across niches to see what kind of traction he could get.

One quickly rose to the surface: his TV soap page. It had incredible engagement and the fans were crazy passionate. They clicked on links. They commented on posts. They liked / shared / talked soaps all day long.

Meer also liked that it was a niche with a TON of potential content. There’s a new soap episode every single day across four different shows. It wasn’t like Game of Thrones with 10 episodes a year. There were a lot of storylines, characters, and plots to talk about.

And he knew the more content he could create, the more traffic he’d get.

Create A Simple Formula To Make Money.

Meer recognized the potential of a blog dedicated to all things TV soaps, so he quickly created a site using a WordPress template and started posting one article a day.

His money-making equation was dead simple:

More content = more traffic = more revenue

The revenue came from advertising on his blog.

And while he didn’t care much for soaps, he did enjoy finding new ways to drive traffic to his site. He was a “tinkerer” - always trying different ways to get more eyeballs.

And it started to work. As he played around with content ideas like quizzes (Which Soap Character Are You? Take The Quiz!), spoilers (She’s alive! Tomorrow on Days of Our Lives…), and new, up-to-the-day content, the money started rolling in.

Before long, he was making $5,000 a month.

Reinvest Your Profits Back Into The Business.

One thing Meer did immediately was to reinvest the profits back into the business. At $5,000 per month, he hired a full-time employee to run the day-to-day, leaving him to focus on growth.

He looked at market competitors and “borrowed” their tactics. He saw what they were doing right and what they were doing wrong. And he iterated on ideas from that.

Soon, he was driving so much traffic, he was making $400-$500K per month with around $100K in expenses.

It was time to consider selling.

Sell When It Makes Sense.

Meer considered selling every time one of the soap TV shows was renewed for another season. Why? Because he knew the major risk to the business was that one or two of the soaps on the air would get canceled. This would essentially cut his traffic (and his revenue) in half.

He eventually approached a broker to sell the business. The broker prices the business by taking its trailing twelve-month (TTM) profit, and putting a multiple on it - usually between 2x-5x depending on the industry, trends, and traffic sources.

When the broker priced SoapHub.com, it came out to $5 million. That was enough for Meer! But just as they were getting serious interest from a buyer, revenue started to skyrocket. His company was suddenly worth much more than he was selling for!

So he pulled the listing. But this just made the buyer more desperate to own the site, and a bidding war kicked in between three, and then eventually two buyers.

Boom! Meer sold for just under $9 million. Not bad for a guy who’s never seen an episode of a soap!

The lesson? You don’t have to be a genius to get rich. Just try more stuff.

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You can listen to Ramon van Meer tell his story on the My First Million podcast here.