NerdWallet's Content Patience

A story about how NerdWallet succeeded by staying committed to quality content despite years of minimal traffic.

"NerdWallet was just two guys sitting in their room writing high-quality blogs. They decided to write higher quality content because other sites were just content farms trying to generate clicks. Year after year they kept writing, but it wasn't going very far. In the first two years, they never got more than 1,000 people visiting their website per month.

Then finally, Google updated their search engine which punished the low-quality blogs. NerdWallet jumped in the rankings. They went from making $0 a day to $7 a day in revenue from the traffic. A few months later, another update happened and it went to $70 a day. They never looked back and have been near or at the top for this kind of content since then.

I could have had that same idea, but I would have never stuck to it the way those guys did. They deserve every dollar they make off this. It's a tortoise and hare startup story that actually worked. If they were a startup doing this right now, I'd probably give them horrible advice like 'Look at these other companies shelling out content and getting way more traffic - do that instead.' But they trusted their gut and belief system that if they put the highest quality content out there, eventually they would get the traffic."