How Robinhood Built and Consolidated Its Media Arm

In 2012, two former college roommates started writing a daily financial newsletter outside their bank jobs in New York. Jack Kramer worked at Commerzbank, and Nick Martell worked at UBS. The two had met as freshman roommates at Middlebury College. Each morning, MarketSnacks broke down three to four business stories in plain language with a sense of humor. 7 years later, the stock-trading app Robinhood acquired the company. It was Robinhood's first acquisition, and it became the seed of a media operation that would eventually span multiple newsletters, a podcast franchise, a second acquisition, and a standalone news organization.

MarketSnacks grew slowly through its first years. Kramer and Martell wrote in their off hours, kept the tone conversational, and aimed the product at readers in their twenties who found traditional financial media dense and joyless. According to Fortune, 85% of subscribers were under 36. The company added a daily podcast alongside the newsletter and signed syndication deals with Fidelity and Betterment. By 2019, the subscriber count was reportedly in the six figures. While the audience was modest by media industry standards, its composition made it valuable.

In March 2019, Robinhood announced it had acquired MarketSnacks. Fortune reported it was the company's first acquisition, made when Robinhood was valued at more than $5 billion and served more than 6 million users. The newsletter was rebranded as Robinhood Snacks, the podcast became Snacks Daily, and Kramer and Martell joined as managing editors of news.

Robinhood gave Snacks access to millions of app users who wanted digestible market news. Snacks gave Robinhood an editorial voice. By January 2020, Robinhood announced that Snacks Daily had passed 10 million downloads, ranked third in Apple's Business News category, and together with Snacks Minute, its shorter companion show, reached more than 165,000 listeners every weekday. Robinhood also incorporated Snacks into its customer email communications, allowing newsletter distribution to expand as the brokerage's user base grew. When millions of new customers joined Robinhood during the retail trading boom of 2020 and 2021, the newsletter's reach grew with them. By April 2022, Robinhood said Snacks had reached 40 million subscribers.

In April 2022, Kramer and Martell left Robinhood and relaunched a podcast, The Best One Yet, with Robinhood as the exclusive sponsor. Their departure ended the first phase of Robinhood's media strategy.

In January 2023, Robinhood announced the formation of Sherwood Media, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary built on top of Snacks. The company said tens of millions of people read Snacks each week and described Sherwood Media as a home for news about markets, economics, business, technology, and the culture of money. To run it, Robinhood hired Joshua Topolsky as president and editor-in-chief of Sherwood. By June 2023, Axios reported that Sherwood planned to expand into events, podcasts, and a print magazine, and had hired a head of sales to begin building an advertising business.

On December 21, 2023, Robinhood acquired Chartr Limited and added it to the Sherwood Media portfolio. Chartr was a London-based publisher founded in 2018 and told business stories through data visualizations. Chartr had grown to around 500,000 newsletter subscribers with a team of about six people. Axios reported that Chartr would remain a standalone brand under Sherwood, while its visual storytelling would be integrated into Snacks, Sherwood's web products, and its social channels.

In April 2024, Sherwood launched Sherwood News, with original reporting across markets, business, tech, crypto, power, and culture. Topolsky told Axios the operation employed roughly 36 people, with teams in New York, California, and London. The site hired reporters from Bloomberg and The New York Times, ran without a paywall, and monetized through direct-sold advertising, with early advertisers including Apple and Nasdaq. Topolsky told Axios he wanted Sherwood News to become a revenue-driving business for Robinhood in its own right.

Business Insider reported a first round of layoffs at Sherwood in early 2025, which the company described as a move to streamline its team structure. In June 2026, Robinhood announced company-wide cuts affecting approximately 10% of its workforce, and the reductions also reached Sherwood's newsroom. Sherwood reduced its standalone newsroom and shifted its focus toward Snacks, Chartr, and breaking news for the Robinhood app. The Sherwood News website remained online with a smaller operation, while continuing to host original stories and the newsletter archives.

Robinhood's media strategy worked best when content was connected directly to distribution. MarketSnacks brought a young financial audience, while Robinhood supplied millions of customers and an established email channel. 

14 years after MarketSnacks launched, Snacks remains central to Robinhood's customer distribution strategy. It reaches customers outside the trading app, explains market developments that may influence their activity, and gives Robinhood a consistent presence between trades and account checks. Its value comes from the direct connection between financial content, a large audience, and Robinhood's core brokerage product. Robinhood’s media operation demonstrates how a company can leverage its existing customer base to scale its editorial products. That was the model Robinhood extended through podcasts, video, Chartr, and Sherwood News.

Introducing the Growth Curve Score

Starting today, we rate each media business we profile on five variables, each scored from 1 to 5 based solely on public evidence.

- Monetization Streams
- Owns Its Audience
- Runs Lean
- Feeds The Core Business
- Is Durable. 

The five scores add up to a total out of 25. 

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Over 14 years, MarketSnacks changed ownership, became Robinhood Snacks, lost its original founders, and moved under a new media subsidiary. Robinhood later expanded its operations through podcasts, video, Chartr, and Sherwood News before reducing its standalone newsroom. The core newsletter format remained consistent with a small number of financial stories explained in plain language and designed to be read quickly. 

A consistent format and publishing schedule helped Snacks retain its identity as its name, team, and organizational structure changed. Its larger advantage came from Robinhood’s distribution through customer email and the app. For operators building owned media, the lesson is to develop a product readers return to and connect it to channels the company can use repeatedly. See you next week.

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