Hi friends,

Psychology Today is a fascinating business.

By my calculations, they make over $100M a year.

They’ve also been around since 1967, get over twenty million website hits each month and were once owned by the American Psychological Association.

Pretty interesting, right?

They’re an important player in our ecosystem. They have a large influence over how clients flow to therapists as well as the public’s perception of psychology and mental health more broadly.

In this edition of The Hemingway Report, I tell the story of Psychology Today; how they came to be the number one destination for mental health online, and what we can learn from what’s happening with their business today.

Let’s get into it.

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The Story of Psychology Today

Nicholas Charney was just twenty-five when he decided to team up wth George Reynolds and Winslow Marston to start a new magazine on psychology. The year was 1967, and the magazine was called Psychology Today (PT).

Their vision was to bring psychology to the masses by making it understandable for the average Joe or Jane. An admirable goal.

The magazine was an instant hit, and by 1976, they were selling over one million copies per issue with a readership of over ten million people in the US. The magazine also gained an impressive reputation. The top behavioural scientists and psychologists in the country all wanted to get published in its pages.

The business was a commercial success, and in the late 70s, Charney decided to sell the magazine to Boise Cascade, a large paper company. Boise Cascade didn’t hang onto it for long and sold it to Ziff-Davis, a New York Publishing company, a few years later.

Ziff-Davis wanted to further “popularise” the magazine, so they fired many of the original editors and “softened” the content. Unfortunately for Ziff-Davis, this was a bad move, and readership quickly declined.

Enter the APA

In 1983, in an apparently quite secretive deal, the American Psychological Association decided to buy Psychology Today. While this may have seemed like a good idea (due to the alignment of the two organisations’ missions), in reality, it turned out to be a nightmare. A lot of the members of the APA were unhappy with how much the organisation had spent to buy the magazine (not to mention the fact that they hadn’t been consulted on it), as well as the fact that most of the magazine’s income came from cigarette and alcohol ads.

After a lot of pushback from their members, in 1987, the APA decided to sell Psychology Today at the substantial loss of $16M. This was such a hit that, apparently, the APA had to sell their New York buildings just to avoid going bankrupt.

Finding a forever home

For a few years, Psychology Today actually ceased to exist. But then in 1991, it found its forever home.

New York-based Sussex Publishing decided to acquire the magazine and revive it - to this day, they remain the sole owners. Under this new ownership, the business ran a super lean operation, kept the content “soft and popular”, found new advertising markets and steadily grew a profitable business. However, because of the magazine’s history with the APA, they were almost completely separated from the actual professionals working in psychology and mental health.

In 1999, Psychology Today appointed Robert Epstein as Editor in Chief. Epstein had no journalism experience, but he did have a clear plan for growing PT. He wanted to return to the model of the 60s and 70s, where articles were written by psychologists (not journalists) and then rewritten by professional writers. Over time, Epstein believed this would improve the damaged reputation of the magazine and rebuild ties with the professional organisations. Growth during this period was modest, maintaining a readership of about three hundred and fifty thousand. Although readership didn’t grow, Epstein was right, their new editorial position allowed PT to rebuild their reputation and their relationships with the professional organisations of America. A critical asset for what was to come.

A new, digital world

In the early 2000’s print magazines were getting destroyed as the online world developed. Psychology Today were ahead of the game, however and had started to publish blogs from as early as the 90s. Their digital readership grew.

Then, in 2003, they made one of the most pivotal moves in their history: they launched “Find a Therapist”. For the first time, readers could go beyond simply reading about psychology - they could actually find a therapist through the site. Little did they know how important a product this would become.

Psychology Today, Today

Throughout the 2010s and 2020s, Psychology Today grew steadily. Under stable ownership and editorial leadership, they maintained a solid readership of their print magazine, but most importantly, they became the number one destination for psychology-related content online.

As people spent more time online and online therapy grew in popularity, so did Psychology Today. Just look at the growth in their website traffic from 2012 to 2018.

Today, their print magazine has a circulation of 275,000, they get over 20 million visits to their website each month, have expanded to multiple countries and languages around the world and make over 1 million referrals to mental health professionals each year.

I bet the APA wished they’d hung on to the struggling magazine…

A $100m Revenue business

Now that you know the history of Psychology Today, let’s break down their business a bit. We’ll start with how they make their money.

I estimate that Psychology Today makes over $100M a year in revenue through three revenue lines. While they don’t release their financials, we can back into their numbers through publicly available data.

Let me break it down for you.

Magazine Subscription Revenue: $16.5M (estimated)

PT still distribute their magazine all around the world and people pay $10 to read it.

• Circulation in 2023: 275,000

• Price: $10

• Sold 6 times a year

• Total Revenue = $16.5M

Sponsorship Revenue: $10M (estimated)

Psychology Today gets a lot of eyeballs. And one way those eyeballs can be monetised is through sponsorships.

I won’t bore you with all my calculations, but based on their readership, I estimate that the print magazine makes about $2M a year in sponsorship. With over 20 million website visits per month, a relatively conservative estimate for their website sponsorship revenue would be $8M.

That’s a total of $10M in sponsorship revenue a year.

Listing Revenue: $81M (estimated)

“Find a Therapist” is Psychology Today’s killer product. Almost every mental health professional has a profile on their website, and it’s a super high-margin product. For therapists, it’s a source of new clients and a sign of credibility. It’s become the default platform for therapists to host their profiles. Any product that becomes a default for a large audience is destined to make a lot of money. Here’s the breakdown of my revenue estimates.

• Price: $30 per month ($360 per year)

• Members: 225,000 (from their 2023 media kit)

...that means Listings makes $81M a year.

Combining these three revenue sources, we can estimate that Psychology Today makes over $100M a year. Of course, these are estimates and include many assumptions that may be wrong. However, when we sense check these numbers against similar businesses, they seem very reasonable (if not on the conservative end of the spectrum). Over $100M a year, that’s wild!

One interesting thing I learned is that the company is now based in the Cayman Islands - I’m sure because of the clinical talent in the area… So whatever profit they derive from that $100M in revenue, you can be sure the US taxman is not seeing much of it.

The secret sauce of SEO

How can Psychology Today make over $100M a year? That’s the question I couldn’t stop asking myself once I did these calculations. But the answer is actually quite simple: they built an SEO juggernaut that owns client demand for mental health services and combined that with the perfect monetisation strategy.

Because they’ve been publishing quality content at high volumes for years, they’ve developed incredible organic ranking in search engines. As a result, they get a huge amount of free, organic traffic. Like, 20 million people every single month. That makes them one of the most popular sites on the internet!

If anyone searches for a therapist online, it’s very likely that the first link is Psychology Today. Just try it for yourself. Psychology Today owns a large portion of the flow of mental health clients.

Because they control the flow of clients, they hold distribution power. But instead of monetising the clients directly, they made a smarter choice: to monetise the therapists who are actively looking for those clients. Therapists need new clients to sustain their practice, and if they get them through Psychology Today, a $30 monthly listing fee is an easy investment to justify. It’s a near-perfect monetisation model - delivering free value to the public while generating revenue from the professionals who benefit financially from being part of the network.

Every mental health business would love the organic traffic of PT. But they’ll never get the domain reputation or be able to publish the amount of content required to meaningfully compete.

Two Trends I’ve Spotted

1. PT as an acquisition source for MH companies

Every mental health company wants more clients. For years, many clients and practices realised that Psychology Today was responsible for a large chunk of referrals and tried to tap into that source. But as large mental health tech companies have emerged, some of them have taken this to a whole new level.

Michael Fulwiler’s analysis shows that in February 2025, 35% of all outgoing traffic from Psychology Today went to Headway, and a further 7% to Alma.

These companies are paying Psychology Today to promote their therapists. When a client clicks on the link in a therapist’s profile, they are then brought to that therapist’s profile on the mental health company’s platform. As long as this is all above board, it’s a clever tactic.

2. The end of an era?

Psychology Today’s business model is undeniably clever, but it hinges heavily on its ability to drive client referrals to therapists. If that flow slows down, therapists will have less reason to maintain a profile on the platform, leading to a drop in memberships. If enough therapists leave, Psychology Today risks losing its position as the go-to directory for finding a therapist. And if that dominance slips, the entire model could unravel.

Cracks may already be appearing, with many therapists reporting lower levels of referrals from PT.

Website data shows that PT traffic peaked during COVID and has been declining since 2020.

I thought this might be because the overall search volume for therapists may have declined. But this doesn’t seem to be the case.

In the US, search volume for “therapist” has consistently increased since 2012 until today. While PT’s traffic is not exclusively from people looking for therapists, this data would suggest that they could be losing share of the flow of clients looking for therapy. This would explain the reduction in referrals seen by therapists.

As more mental health companies have emerged, from Talkspace and BetterHelp to Grow and Headway, the competition for organic traffic has increased. It may be the case that PT is losing traffic to these new destinations.

Below, we can see the growth in searches of “BetterHelp” relative to “PsychologyToday”. We can’t say with certainty that PT’s organic traffic is declining due to increased competition from mental health tech companies, but this data does point in that direction.

Psychology Today quietly built one of the most successful businesses in mental health by owning the flow of clients and monetising the providers who want access to that demand. They are a reminder that those who own distribution have a massive competitive advantage.

But owning distribution often comes from non-obvious strategies. When Nicholas Charney started his print magazine in 1967, he wasn’t thinking about telehealth or “Find a Therapist”. But he built something real people wanted. Over the years, the organisation built its reputation as a trusted source of information that could help people live a healthier, happier life and ultimately, that reputation and relationship with clients turned into a great business model.

But perhaps PT’s ownership of this space is coming to an end. Many people are already going directly to mental health businesses whose brand name they have seen in an Instagram ad or heard on a podcast.

If PT had missed the shift from print to online, we wouldn’t be talking to them right now. Companies need to think about how distribution is shifting today. Who has relationships with the clients you want to reach? Who has a credible reputation? Who has their attention?

Answers to those questions will help us understand how the sources of demand for mental health services may be shifting. And if we can understand that, we have a shot at developing a unique, defensible distribution channel - something every mental health company dreams of.

That’s all for this week.

As always, reach out and let me know what you think.

Keep fighting the good fight!

Steve

Founder of The Hemingway Group

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