Prior to joining The Daily Upside, Divney most recently served as the CRO for the travel, finance, and auto sub-verticals at People Inc. Starns, who joins from 6AM City, was its vice president of revenue operations. Prior to Divney joining, Trousdale had handled much of the partnership and revenue work himself.
The growth push is primarily centered on the company’s B2B offerings. Its flagship newsletter, The Daily Upside, is aimed at retail investors and reaches an audience of roughly 1 million.
Its B2B arm, the Advisor Upside vertical, caters more specifically to financial advisors.
Its newsletter product, Advisor Upside, has more than 100,000 subscribers and includes two sub-verticals: ETF Upside, which has about 30,000 subscribers, and Retirement Upside, which has about 15,000. In total, the Advisor group now has six full-time editorial staffers.
In the coming months, the company plans to expand even further. This fall, the publisher is launching a CFO-focused publication, after its audience data indicated a high readership among accountants and other financial operators. To build out the vertical, the company plans to repeat its standard procedure: hire a leading journalist in the space, then build coverage around them.
The publisher launched a weekly podcast for the Advisor vertical two months ago, which includes a video component whose clips it is distributing on LinkedIn. It is also pushing into video and events more broadly, experimenting with virtual webinars as it explores moving into in-person events if the format proves successful.
Taken together, the expansion marks the growth of yet another highly targeted newsletter publisher, further proof that the bulk of sustainable growth in the digital media sector is coming from lightweight, business-oriented operations.
The Daily Upside has also employed a talent-centric approach, building its verticals around highly visible journalists who are experts in their subject matter. While the first component helps draw in advertisers, the second element draws in audiences, who respond more enthusiastically to trusted, individual creators.
The business is still comparatively small, and a change of leadership is always a delicate moment. But the publisher has built a solid foundation for growth as it transitions into its next chapter.
Talking Heds
Politico Prose (EXCLUSIVE): Next month, Politico is debuting four new energy and environment newsletters on the same day, Aug. 31, alongside a retooled Morning Energy anchoring the lineup. The investment in the roster, which includes Surge, State Power, Power Moves, and Morning Environment, is, in part, a response to the increased demand from Politico Pro subscribers for such content: From July 2025 to June 2026, Pro Energy saw readership more than double, increasing 113%, according to a spokesperson. With the Iran War spiking oil prices, data centers guzzling electricity, and global warming upending historic climate patterns, the Axel Springer outlet is betting that interest in energy policy and climate economics will only increase in the coming years.
Google Goners: Earlier this month, I reported on the fascinating, if once unimaginable, trend of publishers preparing to opt out of Google Search. On Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal confirmed much of my reporting, speaking with executives from USA Today, Politico, the Economist, People Inc., and Reuters who were weighing their options. The report also flagged that Reddit, which signed a $60 million-a-year deal in 2024 that allowed Google to use its material to train its AI models, is also reconsidering whether it wants to renew that agreement. No single publisher has as much leverage in these negotiations as Reddit does, which would make its involvement notable. Although Reddit differs in significant ways from most websites, primarily in that it relies on user-generated content and does receive some compensation from Google, the platform is the latest website to realize that the current state of search is untenable for almost everyone involved. Could Wikipedia be next?
