The Daily Signal - Christopher Ruddy Shares Vision for Newsmax's Future Ahead of IPO

Episode Date: June 21, 2024

Newsmax announced this month that it’s planning for an initial public offering later this year or in 2025—a big leap for a media outlet that began more than 25 years ago as a website delivering news on the internet. Christopher Ruddy, Newsmax’s founder and CEO, spoke with The Daily Signal about his plans for the company and explained how eligible investors are able to take advantage of a private placement offering before the company goes public on the stock market. “Thousands of people would tell us they wanted to buy shares in Newsmax through the years,” Ruddy said. “And we thought, wouldn't it be great to have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of co-owners [and] partners with Newsmax that are fighting for us [and] have a stake in our success? And so that was the biggest reason.” Now more than ever, especially in this election year of 2024, America needs Newsmax, and you can join with us as an investor,” Ruddy said. After working as a journalist at the New York Post and Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Ruddy started Newsmax in 1998. In the years that followed, he transformed Newsmax into a broadcasting and multimedia powerhouse reaching more than 40 million people. Newsmax’s TV channel is the fourth-highest-rated on cable news. And it’s just one of several media properties in addition to its website, Newsmax.com: There’s also a free streaming channel at Newsmax2, a smartphone app, a streaming service called Newsmax+, and Newsmax Magazine. Now, as he prepares for Newsmax’s initial public offering and eventual listing on Nasdaq or the New York Stock Exchange, Ruddy is seeking to raise $225 million as part of a private offering for accredited investors. More details are available at NewsmaxInvest.com. Listen to our interview with Ruddy on “The Daily Signal Podcast” to hear his vision for Newsmax, the threats and challenges facing conservative media, and why he's optimistic about the future. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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More than 25 years ago, way back in 1998, Chris Ruddy started a media organization called Newsmax. What began as a website delivering news on the internet is today a broadcasting and multimedia company reaching more than 40 million people. Newsmax's TV channel is the fourth highest rated on cable news and is just one of several properties launched under Ruddy's direction. There's also a free streaming channel at Newsmax. a smartphone app, a streaming service called Newsmax Plus, and its website, newsmax.com, and even print publications like Newsmax magazine. Now Ruddy is taking a big leap by making Newsmax a public company. As he prepares for Newsmax's initial public offering,

Reddy spoke with the Daily Signal about his future plans and how qualified investors can purchase shares of stock. Stay tuned for our interview right after this. Conservative women are problematic. Women. Why? Because we don't adhere to the agenda of the radical left. Every Thursday morning on the Problematic Women podcast, Kristen I-Cammer, Lauren Evans, and me, Virginia Allen, are joined by other conservative women to break down the big issues and news you care about. Whether you're interested in hot takes and conversations on pop culture or what Congress is up to, Problematic women has you covered. We sort through the news to keep you up to date on the issues that

that are a particular interest to conservative leaning, that is problematic women. Find problematic women wherever you like to listen to podcasts and follow the show on Instagram. We are joined on The Daily Signal today by Newsmax CEO Chris Reddy, who has just announced plans to take his company public on NASDAQ or the New York Stock Exchange in the coming months. Chris, congrats on the big news,

and it's great to have you here on the show with us today. Well, Rob, it's always terrific to be on with you and the Daily Signal a publication that I really like, and I'm so glad that you have your own podcast, too. Well, and of course, you can catch Daily Signal reporters and editors on Newsmax quite frequently, so we are grateful for the opportunity to reach your audience as well on a regular basis. Well, it's important because probably, you know, there's Fox News, but Fox is changing, and Newsmax is it. And we are promoting people that share American values and making sure that they have a platform.

So we're playing, I think, an important mission in this very evolving, changing situation in the media. Well, and Newsmax has had significant growth. You're currently America's fourth highest-rated cable news channel. What are some of the factors that you would attribute to the recent success? Well, I think the American public has seen what's going up. And the media has a lock trip. It's gone left. It was always liberal now.

It's far left. Become woke. In the AP, you can't call somebody in the legal alien, even. if they are. You can't, you have to say everything, affirmative, affirming care for gender people. I don't think surgery and giving a 12-year-old harsh drugs is affirming care. So you're seeing this throughout terrorists in Israel are not called terrorists. They're called militants. And this trickles through the whole media. And we thought that with the internet there'd be a lot more conservative and alternative viewpoints.

No, the left is taking control of big tech. Big tech is censoring the voices of conservatives. So Newsmax, other than Fox, you could argue that Fox is becoming more establishment. They certainly don't like Donald Trump or have much love for him. So Newsmax has been the place to go. And that's why our audience, we're now the fourth highest rated cable news channel in the United States. We reach 40 million people regularly. We're becoming, as Forbes magazine says, a news powerhouse.

And I think it's important that we keep growing, and that's why we are, thanks to your listeners, our viewers, and others. Let's take a step back. You founded Newsmax over 25 years ago. What was that initial vision that you had? And did you ever imagine that it would grow into the size and the influence it has today? Well, I don't think too much about the future. I just think about the work that's before us right now. So I didn't have a full imagination.

I had no idea what's going to get into cable television and television news and streaming. news. There wasn't much streaming television at all at that point. The video concept was pretty dull. So there's been a lot of technological changes during that period, but I did feel that we could make an impact. And newsmax.com, as you know, has become one of the biggest online websites for conservatives that's had a big impact on presidential elections. Newsmax was one of the first to give Donald Trump talk about being president. That was Newsmax. People forget back in the 2011, 2012 election, he was thinking of running. We had them on our cover, I believe, two times in that period.

So Newsmax was first. We often are. We're ahead of the curve on so many issues. But we saw the power and the influence of streaming back in 2012 to 14, and we launched Newsmax TV in 2014, and people said, you're not going to get on cable systems. And we got on all the cable systems within four or five years. They said, you're not going to get cable license fees. We got on all of the beginning cable license fees from our various distributors.

And now, you know, the big news is we're planning to go public. And tell us about that decision, because obviously it's a momentous one for any CEO to make. What does that mean for Newsmax's audience in your business in the future? Yeah, well, Newsmax has been a private company for 25 years, and we've had a lot of success for it within the majority. shareholder, but I have others. And we felt, you know, we really should become a public company. And here's why. Thousands of people would tell us they wanted to buy shares in Newsmax through the years. And we stayed public, private. And we thought, you know what, wouldn't it be great to have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of co-owners or partners with Newsmex that are fighting for us,

have our shares or have a stake in our success. And so that was a very, that was the biggest reason. We thought this was the moment. We're very close to overtaking CNN. We're taking a big chunk of Fox. The President Trump values Newsmex's affair and unbiased media source. And then we also saw the successive President Trump's true social. His app and his public company. He went, it was just an idea.

They're worth anywhere from $5 to $7 to $10 billion on any given market day. And he did revenues last year. of $4 million on that company. Newsmax did over $100 million. This year was slated to do $180 million in revenue. And we're feeling, hey, if there's such a market for a conservative meaning in the public sphere, this is an opportunity for us to open the gates and let people in. And so we decided we made an announcement last week,

and we've made a press release and other information for investors. It's online at newsmax invest.com. newsmax invest.com. And if people go there, they can actually watch the presentation, see other things, and they can buy pre-IPO shares with a 7% dividend. It's a great, they'll have shares that will be tradable after we go public, which we're planning to at the end of this year, subject to government approvals, which we expect.

And people should read the materials, but we have had phenomenal success so far. And we're really looking forward to your. listeners and others joining with us in this mission that we have. Again, we'll leave that website in the show notes and on daily signal.com. It's newsmaxinvest.com. Encourage you to check it out to all the listeners who are interested in learning more and potentially becoming investors. Chris, tell us why you believe it's important for your audience or our audience to make

an investment in a media company like Newsmax as opposed to, you know, the operations that you've done for the past 25 years. Why them having a stake in your future? Why does that matter? Well, because you have people more active and more interested in fighting for you. You know, we don't have a lot of allies. We don't have a lot of allies. You're an ally, Rob, but there aren't a lot of allies.

We don't have the New York Times. In fact, if the media writes about us, they write lies and they write fiction. And so we have to align with more partners and friends and allies. So that's why we, it's one of the key reasons. and we feel the more capital we get, the more we can grow bigger and increase our mission in the areas of cable television, in the area of streaming TV, in the area of social media, we read 16 million followers currently in the area of podcasts, which we also have. And there are other areas down the road that we like to get involved with radio and other new media.

And so that we are a profitable company this year. So it's not like we're desperate for the capital and we need the capital. We see this as an opportunity to share a piece of our company in exchange for us to build an even bigger company. That's why people usually go public. You have assembled a talented team of hosts, of reporters, of editors, of all sorts of content contributors, as you just spoke about, who are doing incredible work on a daily basis. What would something like an IPO be able to do in terms of new content initiatives or programming changes that you would look forward to in a Newsmax that exists, say, a year or two from now? Well, we're going to continue to grow the programming.

We have more to do on our streaming channel, which is Newsmax 2. We launched a free app service called Newsmax Plus, and that has great films and documentaries among our programs, archives of our hosts. It's about a month to join, and we already had a quarter of a million people close to it that have signed up for that service. And it's just out there. It's six months. We've had it out there. And it's been a huge success, but that can grow even more. We feel there needs to be competitors to Hulu and Disney Plus and Netflix, all these woke entertainment companies, and we think we're the vehicle.

So that could be an area of huge growth for us in the streaming area, but we obviously, it pays to have more capital to do those things. And if you have people that invests with you, they can grow with you. And I might add, when a shareholder comes in, they have to be an accredited investor, which is defined not by us by the SEC. They can come in early before the IPO and buy what they call preferred shares, which allows them to get a dividend until, until we go public later this year.

So it's a really good, I think, opportunity, and we explain a lot more of the details of why people should go public at newsmaxinvest.com. You've had particular growth in a couple of specific areas that I was hoping to that you could shed some light on, specifically in prime time.

Your viewership is up 137%. And then in that key demographic of adults between the ages of 35 and 64, you're also up nearly 100%. 93%, what do you attribute that success to? Well, Nielsen reported that we were the only cable news channel in 2023 to have significant increases in every single day part. Fox saw a declines in almost every day part. And then in Q1 of this year, we continue to see those increases.

You cited the statistics. And I think that people are tuning in because they're getting a message that they're not getting. Like, I'll give you an example, Fox News won't cover President Trump's rallies. Well, they didn't cover most of them last year. The head of Fox News was cited in an email saying they wanted to make President Trump a non-entity. The son of the founder of Fox News spent $20 million trying to defeat Trump in the last election. And they have reported on stories that are just not true, like this famous story that President Trump called people in an American veteran. in cemetery in Paris, losers and suckers, Fox News said that was a true story. And the facts

are that it was a false story. So, you know, Fox has been good in the years past, but the future is not Fox. The future is Newsmax. And that's why we're doing what we're doing. One of the things that we, at the Daily Signal, and I know you have experienced are some of the challenges that come along with running a media company, and that is in the area of censorship. You mentioned it earlier. Social media companies have made distributing content increasingly difficult as they've tweaked their algorithms to panelize, it seems, news sites, maybe conservatives in particular. But then you have had other organizations pop up that specifically rate news organizations and they do so, I think, in a way that potentially harms advertisers

from sponsoring content, or putting it running ads on your site or doing other things. What are some of the things that you're doing to combat and raise awareness about the threat that we face in the news industry? Well, we're seeing the censorship that's going on, which is just unbelievable, and it's not liberals like Matt Taibi and others have spoken out, Alan Dershowitz and others about this, that the left is trying to close down conservative viewpoints, and they're doing in a very clever way. What they've done is they've created these media rating agencies, groups like NewsGuard and GDI. NewsGuard's run by a very very... activist Democrat. He's a prolific Democratic donor named Stephen Brill. And he's been basically

rating all the media outlets online. Now he's going to TV and radio. What they do is, and this is the media research center did two annual studies, that conservative sites get low ratings and liberal sites get high ratings. Well, you know, it's fine. It's a free country. If they want to do rankings, they can. It's very subjective. They pick the stories they want to choose. But, They then use these rankings now at ad agencies, a lot of major ad agencies, and they block conservatives from getting any advertising or greatly restricting their advertising. And it's putting conservative media out of business. So it's a clever way of censorship by defunding and demonetizing.

And it's a very dangerous development that they're doing in that people are catching on. Congress passed the law that military recruitment. They can't use ad agencies that are using these services. and Congress is pretty strong about this. So I think you're going to see growing efforts on this. Oh, you've recently had the chairman of the Oversight Committee, James Comer, announced that he's going to do an investigation of NewsGuard. So absolutely, there are members of Congress who are taking this seriously. And as I've noted, the Daily Signal came under scrutiny.

For many years, we had a perfect rating with NewsGuard until recently, in fact, mostly since the post-COVID period, when they took issue with some of the content that we posted about COVID vaccine. means, content that we posted about the 2020 election, content that we published on climate change. And they obviously come at it from a different worldview than we do. And as a result, they've downgraded our score to 69 and a half, which is, I would say, lower on average, as the Media Research Center pointed out, than a lot of counterparts on the left would receive in their score. Well, the New York Times, like, had a near perfect score. And the New York Times was saying the Israelis bombed the hospital in Gaza, which turned out to be a total lie. It was NewsGuard that said that Hunter Biden, the laptop, was disinformation.

Steve Brill was on television show saying that. And so, you know, they can make their mistakes and their lies and bias, but they say conservatives when they're reporting the news or we're actually reporting accurate information. The COVID stuff did come from the Wuhan Laboratory. And what you have to remember about their rating is even if you have a high rating, some conservative site, within days, they can. lower that rating and then you're immediately locked in the algorithms at the ed agencies, your revenue goes off overnight. So they are controlling the flow of revenue to you,

and they can control what you report or don't report. Chris, when you started Newsmax in 1998, you could probably count on one or two hands the number of conservative media outlets that existed, and certainly that number has expanded significantly since then. What is your message to your team, obviously, as the competition has increased, to make sure that they're staying innovative, staying ahead of the curve, and continuing to deliver content to their audience, your audience. Well, and Rob, from the very beginning of Newsmax, we have always supported other conservative media, even though we are, quote-unquote, competitors. I don't really see, I think that the pie gets bigger as we all get bigger. We bought advertising on our competitors. We helped them that way.

We promoted them in their news stories. If they broke news, we would give them full credit, push that out there with a link. That worked. There's a lot more conservative media out there of all different types. When I launched the cable channel, we could have said we're not going to put anyone on from the Daily Caller or Breitbart or Daily Wire. We have them on all the time. We have them on all the time. We promote them.

I'm not afraid if they're going to make more money and, revenues, we're not afraid of that. We want to make sure that our readers feel they're getting accurate and important information. And if the daily signal is providing that, we're going to do it. So I'm a believer in the big pie. And so, and I think true capitalists are. I do think it's great danger that we have so much anti-competition. We're allowing these big monopolies, especially in big tech to come up. Conservatives have not been vocal on this. They feel that there should be a laissez-faire attitude. I believe that government should not regulate business, but if a business becomes monopolistic

and predatory, the government does have a role to break up monopolies, just as the Theodore Roosevelt concept on this, that it ultimately leads to more competition, more free enterprise. We're seeing in this country is the growing oligarchies and oligopies of various corporations. And it's disconcerning. If you take the five big tech companies, they have a market cap equal to the third GDP in the whole world. It's U.S., China, and big tech. And the reason they've been able to do this is they're monopolistic and they've been protected from lawsuits, which I think is also illegal. And so to the degree that they are a threat to our freedom, they are the biggest cause.

And I believe if you go to all of these woke things and everything else goes back to the power and influence. of big tech. Chris, I remember going to a meeting with Jim DeMint, who is president of the Heritage Foundation at the time in 2016, and Menlo Park, California with Mark Zuckerberg, of course, the CEO of Facebook. And it was, of course, at that time when Facebook was under tremendous scrutiny from conservatives for some of the bias that it was exhibiting. But we know that Donald Trump's election that year certainly sent shockwaves through Silicon

Valley. and they imposed a lot of these censorship tactics that we are continuing to suffer from today. So we appreciate your leadership. We appreciate your vision for helping to grow the pie, as you said, and give conservatives a voice. I think there's an audience out there certainly to be served. Well, we're going to continue fighting. We appreciate the good work you're doing at the Deli Signal. Heritage Foundation.

It's been really important. And we certainly wanted to continue. Well, Chris, if you could one last time share with our listeners, how they can learn more about your exciting news, about becoming a public company, and if they want to invest. Sure. Well, we'll have a – we're anticipating a public offering at the end of this year, an IPO, and if people are interested, they can find more information at NewsmaxInvest.com, all one word. They can also get pre-IPO shares in preferred shares with a 7% deferred video – it's with a preferred dividend.

But obviously, there's a lot of information on the page. it's very easy. You can even invest with your credit card, believe it or not now, and just swipe that as long as you're an eligible investor. So again, it's newsmaxinvest.com. Well, it's exciting news. Chris Reddy, thanks so much for spending time with the Daily Signal today. We appreciate the work you do. We appreciate the work you're doing, Rob, and let's keep in touch. Thank you. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thank you for listening to the Daily Signal podcast.

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