When starting to kick around the idea of building your own newsletter, perhaps the first thing you consider is how much can you make from it. After all, it’s fun to dream big, right?
Is it realistic to build a full-time income with newsletters?
How do other newsletters make their money?
How many subscribers and how long did it take before newsletter giants sold for 8 figure paydays?
We’ll talk about all that, and more.
First, here’s data that Sparkloop collected from surveying over 1,000 newsletter owners. Note that these are a rough guide, and we’ll talk about the factors affecting lifetime value in a minute.
|
Type of Newsletter |
Lifetime Value Per Subscriber |
|
Niche, consumer newsletter |
$10 - $20 |
|
Niche, B2B newsletter |
$15 - $25 |
|
Broad appeal / news newsletter |
$8 - $15 |
|
Personal / personality driven newsletter |
$3 - $10 |
|
Newsletters with info products |
$30 - $50 |
So, what does this mean?
This is roughly how much you can expect to earn in revenue for each subscriber on your list. Of course, this assumes that you have decent monetization strategies in place.
For example, let’s say that your newsletter is geared towards developers. That would fall in the niche B2B category. If you have 10,000 subscribers, you could expect to earn $150k - $250k over the lifespan of those subscribers!
On other hand, if your newsletter focuses on general life advice, those same subscribers may be worth $30,000 to $100,000. Still a lot of money, but significantly less.
Perhaps you’ve heard of people with small lists having 6-figure product launches—they fall into that final category.
This could be a fitness newsletter owner selling an info product on how to become a personal trainer. Teaching others how to make money has incredible monetization potential.
Let’s have some fun. Here are some of the publicly available information about large newsletter acquisitions, total value, or revenue numbers:
Those, of course, are more the exception than the rule, but there are countless other newsletters run by individuals pulling in an easy 6 figures per year.
The biggest factor is clearly the type of newsletter you run, as shown in the table at the top of the post. However, here are other impactful factors that affect how much you can earn:
Step into your audience’s shoes for a minute and how that affects the money you can earn.
For example, if your audience is primarily CEOs earning $200k per year, you’ll have sponsors lining up to market to them. If you sell products, those CEOs have more money to burn.
If your audience is, well, everyone—like if you cover the news or write about general-interest topics—it’s much harder to find excited sponsors.
New leads vary tremendously in quality. A lead that clicked an ad and subscribed is almost certainly of lower quality than someone who actively searched out your website and joined your list.
Of course, there’s no faster growth method than dropping a bundle on PPC ads, so it’s still a tremendous growth strategy.
However, let’s say you’ve taken the time to create a blog with high-quality content, or you’re a thought leader on YouTube and X. People who follow you from there over to your newsletter are going to be more engaged by far.
Sponsors often pay you by how many views your newsletter is going to get.
Consider two different lists in the same niche, each with 10,000 subscribers.
One gets 50% opens, while the other gets 20% opens. With 2.5 times the open rate, you can command vastly higher rates despite your list being the same size.
Work to increase your engagement by:
Similar to engagement, it comes down to numbers.
Again, consider two lists with 10k subscribers in the same niche.
One sends every day, while the other sends weekly. That’s seven times the opportunity to have opens and clicks, meaning more views for your sponsors.
We’ll get to specific strategies here in a minute, but just understand that the model you choose can change your income tremendously.
Some people craft highly engaged lists of just 1,000 subscribers and then sell products for $10k. A 1% conversion means a $100,000 product launch.
On the other end of the spectrum are newsletters that focus on sponsorships alone. The income per subscriber is much less, but it makes sense for creators focused on getting tons of subscribers and don’t care about charging for content.
Most newsletter experts recommend waiting until you get to around 2,000 subscribers before it makes sense to start monetizing.
In the beginning, the monetization potential is so low that it’s more effective to continue improving your content. As you find your stride, you’ll often get more subscribers organically (e.g., subscribers forwarding to their friends or an industry outlet writing a blog post about you).
You can’t get sponsors in the beginning anyway, so that strategy is out. There’s no real reason to include affiliate links when there’s only a few people to click them.
There are still a few ways to earn money each time you get a new subscriber, and we’ll cover those in the next section.
Let’s get into the top ways that newsletters earn.
This isn’t the most common strategy, but we’re including this one first because it’s simple and you can use it even with your first subscriber.
Here’s how it works:
When you get a new subscriber, they immediately see a page that recommends other newsletters. If they decide to subscribe to any of the other ones, you get paid for it!
One platform that you can set this up through is Sparkloop, and you can earn an extra $2 - $3 per subscriber! That’s a great way to kickstart your earnings and offset some (or all!) of your acquisition cost.
When you think of newsletters making money, your first thought is likely advertising!
Today in Design, a small, daily newsletter with about 5k subscribers, charges $99 per day for their top spot:
If he posts every weekday, he’ll earn about $2,200 per month, or about $0.44 per subscriber.
That may not seem like a lot, but it’s still a small newsletter and that may be just one monetization strategy he employs.
At $0.44 per subscriber per month, that means earnings of $44k per month at 100k subscribers. Not bad.
Of course, there are several different types of advertising, so let’s dive in.
We’ll start here because it’s essentially what Today in Design does. Here’s the top section of a recent newsletter:
Sponsoring a newsletter usually means you get the primary spot. The entire newsletter is essentially for you.
Marketing Brew has their sponsor name-dropped just under their header image:
Then, they also get space in the newsletter body itself.
Similar to sponsoring a newsletter, this is when a newsletter has a content block in the middle of the email that’s paid for by an advertiser.
Sometimes, the content block will look and feel like the rest of the newsletter to hopefully get more readers. By law, the newsletter owner does have to specify that it’s paid content.
Here’s an example from Money with Katie, which has this section coming right in the middle of newsletter content:
To get a real life example of earning from newsletter ads, let’s look at Dense Discovery. They send out to 37k subscribers once per week. Here are their rates:
The classified ads (essentially sponsored content within the newsletter) earns them about $1,600 per month. That’s not a ton per subscriber, but if you include their main sponsor ads, they earn about $4k per month—not bad for a once-per-week newsletter that’s not in a well-defined niche.
Display ads are often advertisements that are obviously ads. They are usually an image with some text—essentially the types of ads you see on websites all over the internet.
They’re less popular than other types of advertisements because they’re so obviously ads and usually don’t have a tie-in with the content.
However, the biggest newsletter in the world (run by the New York Times) uses display ads, and they certainly know what they’re doing:
Sending traffic to an affiliate link means promoting someone else’s product and you get a cut of any sales they make.
The easiest ones to set up are from companies like Amazon and eBay. They sell everything and have robust systems to make setup a breeze.
Here’s The Newsette with a master class in using tons of affiliate links in their writing:
All those pink underlines are links. About half of them are products on Amazon, a few go to websites like Sephora (where they make a commission on sales), and the rest are purely content links to Instagram or online articles.
Affiliate links to e-commerce sites rarely generate significant commission (most Amazon sales result in a few dollars or less), but a high subscriber volume can result in terrific income.
On the other hand, significant commissions per sale can be made with affiliate products in other spaces.
For example, promoting someone else’s high-ticket coaching can result in hundreds or even thousands in commissions.
Or, sites that sell recurring services often pay well. Here’s Bluehost, the massive web hosting company. They pay out a huge percentage of each sale because so many of their customers stay for many years:
Most affiliates make about $65 per sale, even when selling the cheaper webhosting plans. You can find similar products in most niches.
Along with advertisers, this is the other most common way that newsletters make money. There are two main ways to do this: freemium or paid only.
This is the more common model. The newsletter creator offers both a free and paid version. Upon signup, subscribers are given the choice of which version they’d like to get.
If you sign up for the free version, you’ll likely see plenty of offers to join the paid version throughout future newsletters.
Here’s how Untethered Mind promotes their paid version, which costs $50/year:
It’s very common for newsletters to charge $5 or $10 per month for the paid version.
The paid version, of course, must offer more value. This can be in the form of:
There are plenty more. People who pay just want more content. How can you give it to them?
While less common, some newsletters charge right from the get-go. These newsletters must prove their value so well that people will pay before getting a taste.
This works if you’re in a high-value space, or if you’ve established yourself as a leader in your niche. Also, you might just be really good at selling your newsletter, perhaps through an email sales sequence or a video sales letter.
Ben Thompson runs one of the more popular paid newsletters, focusing on tech and business. He charges $15/month or $150/year.
If you’re in a niche where this makes sense, and you’re willing to put in the work, this is by far the most lucrative strategy.
For example, Ben Settle is one of the world’s premier email marketing experts. His emails don’t even have a structured newsletter-style approach. They’re 100% long-form text.
However, he does 7 figures per year by mostly selling a monthly physical newsletter (yes, a newsletter selling a newsletter!) to his list. He also puts together courses and books, and none of them are cheap.
Here are a few ideas for products or services that you can offer:
The possibilities (and income!) are practically endless. There’s no real “per subscriber” income numbers here because each niche is very different. The best at this make millions per year, even with small-ish lists.
In the beginning, as said above, it’s a great idea to focus almost exclusively on content and subscriber growth.
However, there are platforms that will automatically match you up with advertisers. You don’t have to worry about it, yet revenue will start coming in.
That’s one of the great features of Letterhead—in addition to using AI to help streamline your content, our automated ad-fill options make monetization easier than ever.
Schedule a time, and let’s chat about how we can grow your newsletter.