• by Sara Guaglione , January 21, 2016

The 5-year-old Web site made a profit for the first time last year, and Greatist is collecting funds to create custom, high-touch programs with sponsorships from Kind, FitBit and other advertisers.

According to Fortune, Greatist plans to use half of its new funding to invest in sales, support, and video content. The rest will be for research into ways to “go deeper” with its audience, Flanzraich said.

He also told AdExchanger he plans to design more custom programs, such as original content and events.

Direct buys for Greatist have mostly included display ads as a value-add. The site also appears to be running regular banner ads.

While Flanzraich hopes continued growth will help it reach the brands and agencies wanting more scale than Greatist can provide just yet, he’s also hoping advertisers will change the way they think about scale. (Greatist had just 4.4 million uniques in November, according to comScore and 2 million subscribers to its email newsletter.)

He believes smaller publishers with focused audiences can yield more engagement.

“The quality of the size matters,” Flanzraich told AdExchanger, “and I think that will be a big shift in the industry.”

CEO Derek Flanzraich has a different approach to the website’s content, compared to other brands geared towards millennials: low-output, high-quality.

Greatist only publishes two to three posts a day and has a staff of 26.

The site takes the Internet’s confusing mix of information about health, weight loss and fitness and publishes evergreen articles backed up by scientific research and vetted by at least two experts.

“We’re not taking shortcuts and compromising to generate page views,” Flanzraich told Fortune.

While unconventional in the age of clickbait, this strategy has helped Greatist grow 250% year over year. Their mix of traffic is unusual for a start-up digital publisher as well, with less than 25% of traffic coming from social and more than half from search.

Readers average as much as six to seven minutes on many of Greatist’s articles, which Fortune calls an uncommon metric these days.

The investors betting on Greatist include the Floodgate Fund, an early investor in Refinery29, as well as other big names in the media business: Strauss Zelnick of ZelnickMedia, David Bach of FinishRich, Andy Russell of DailyCandy, Thrillist and PureWow, John Gardner of LearnVest and David Pecker of AMI.