👋 Hi friends -
Welcome to The Newsletter Growth Memo. Twice a month, I share short reflections with my newsletter clients + other operators.
Zero formality, ads, or affiliate links - just a guy sharing learnings from working with media operators doing $25-500k+ / month with newsletters.
New reader highlights: Welcome to Sean, CEO + Co-founder @Industry Dive | Michael, SVP Global Consumer Revenue @Condé Nast | Rachel, Co-founder @Punchbowl News | Keith, SVP of Growth @CoinDesk
In case you missed it….
Jacob Donnelly hosted the AMO Summit last Tuesday.
It was fantastic (Jacob - if you’re reading this, you’re the man).
The newsletter conference in April felt a bit like summer camp, catching up with existing internet friends.
AMO was more about where the overall puck for media is going.
I’ve picked my 6 favorite conference takeaways - lil’ nuggets that you need to know to grow your business this year. Enjoy!
Web-first media companies need more newsletters
Surprise #1 for media companies this year was a fairly large set of changes in SEO that have hurt some web publishers (particularly on the affiliate side).
The second blow came from Google’s AI summaries taking real estate away from top organic search results.
Everyone likes to talk about building on social as using rented land.
But SEO is building on rented land too - even if the lease appears longer.
Of all the ways to diversify beyond SEO (oh, and defend against whatever Google decides it wants to do with 3rd party cookies) I still believe newsletters to be the most practical way for large media brands to build a 1P data moat.
The success of fairly young publishers like The Hustle, Morning Brew, and Axios has shown email is getting more bites at the apple.
Advertisers are pushing for clearer ROI
Industry Dive’s CRO is seeing tightened budgets among advertisers.
Increasingly, clicks and audience insights are not enough.
Sponsors want a connection between clicks and qualified leads/sales.
That can be hard when sponsors share limited data or you’re dealing with long sales cycles.
Industry Dive is doing the legwork to offer increased measurement by integrating with partner CRMs + recommends publishers follow suit with their most important advertisers.
People follow people, not brands
Axios is building premium content and events behind their journalist-led publications.
And it’s going pretty damn well.
The first is a $1,000 paid membership behind Eleanor Hawkins, who leads their PR professionals newsletter, Communicators.
The conversion rate has been 1-2% - a $10-$20 1-year APRU.
That’s a huge boost to typical ad-monetized user economics.
The 1-year ARPU of most sponsor-only monetized newsletters I see is perhaps $5, with lifetime ARPU in the $10-15 range.
Most successful premium subscriptions I’ve seen fall in that 1.5-2.5% CVR range, with rare exceptions like Lenny Rachitsky closer to 3-5%.
A leading man/woman on editorial can be the winning ingredient for a high-ticket backend.
Dan Primack (Axios Pro Rata) and Sarah Fischer (Axios Media Trends) are next up.
Events are hot - but the playbook has changed
Axios has seen 40-50% YoY growth in its events business over the past 2 years.
HW Media, Eric Newcomer, AMO, and several other media companies have all built events with hundreds of paid attendees from scratch during that same time.
But there is a lot that’s changing in the events space.
Registrations are happening closer to the event date than ever + attendees care about 1:1 connection over fancy keynote speakers.
One of our readers happens to be LinkedIn’s top voice for event marketing.
If you’re interested in what’s separating 7 & 8-figure events from duds, go check out the content from my buddy Julius Solaris.
How AI tools will create/save money for media companies is unclear
Admittedly, I think it’s pretty hard to describe AI workflows in live panels, so take this with a grain of salt…
…But I really wanted more use cases to come out of the AI interview questions.
Rowan (founder, The Rundown) wrote a fantastic thread on creating GPTs that can answer SOPs for newly onboarded team members.
This is a hyper-tactical workflow that you, a media founder or exec, could easily send to your team to go implement.
(Rowan, I know you’re reading this - bring that series back dude!).
There’s lots I’m interested in across the 3 core pillars of a media business:
Growth (AI UGC creators, voiceovers, generating ad concepts/hooks using GPTs, etc.)
Ad sales (personalized cold outbound, auto-generated draft replies to inbound sponsors, updating your CRM with information from recorded calls, etc.)
Content (Dan Shipper is building ‘Zapier for content repurposing’ with Spiral - I’m sure there are lots of other use cases)
I’ll share more on the AI tools/workflows I think media companies should be using in an upcoming issue.
If you or your team are doing anything across ad sales/content/marketing using aI, shoot me a note.
6. The riches are in niches
Readers don’t need another business or AI newsletter.
They need hyper-specific newsletters relevant to their career or interests.
Workweek has launched newsletters and paid communities/courses for niches including HR professionals, marketers, and healthcare.
It’s working - their flagship brands are doing $1-3M each, a 50/50 split between B2B ad revenue and membership/course revenue.
I don’t know if VC-funded media is a path that works (although, to WW’s credit, Doximity is a medical professional network with an $8B market cap).
Regardless, I think their products are really smart.
So many professional shortcuts come from asking who is the answer, not what is the answer + communities accelerate that.
When I was at BCG I’d spend hours every week on an app called Fishbowl.
Many knew it as “anonymous Reddit for professionals.”
I knew it as the place where all the BCG/Bain/McKinsey consultants went to complain about delayed flights and ask for referrals to Google product management.
And I loved it for that.
Other successful communities:
I helped a buddy + mentor of mine, Jesse Pujji, launch a 6-week, $5k/seat accelerator for B2B entrepreneurs. Attendees are already asking for a community.
Sam Parr’s Hampton is reportedly above $10M in revenue just 2.5 years in
Axios’s CRO, Jacquelyn Cameron, is in a membership community for female executives called Chief valued at over $1B
Want to learn how to run a good community? Start small amongst friends.
Andrew Wilkinson began one informally among 5 entrepreneur friends and says it’s changed his life.
A few founder buddies and I are using Wilkinson’s blueprint to do one amongst ourselves - any blueprint good enough for a billionaire is good enough for us.
That’s the letter.
- Nathan May
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