👋 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 $25k-$2M+ / month with newsletters.
New reader highlights: Helena, Founder @ Food Fix | Ryan, VP, Brand Strategy @ Morning Brew | Fergus, Director @ Collingwood
Jacob Donnelly hosted the AMO (A Media Operator) Summit last week.
The summit always reminds me how incredibly supportive the media community is (this is inside the AMO Pro Slack - if you’re in media, I highly recommend joining)
I always come away with pages of notes jotted down on my iPhone.
Here are a few of my biggest takeaways from AMO 2025.
1/ Niche B2B continues to get love
I’m all about B2B these days - if you're worried about AI in content, it follows you need to create original content that can’t have been scraped from the Web by Altman and team.
The Ankler is on track to hit $10M in revenue with 15 people.
They own newsletters like Reel AI, which does deep coverage on AI’s impact on everything from copyright law to post-production in Hollywood.
Their mix is (roughly) 50% subscriptions/35% advertising/35% events.
Mo Islam runs (among other things) Payload, the #1 space newsletter and media company.
Their article on predicting SpaceX's revenue is one of the most cited pieces of content around SpaceX and is the kind of deep modeling only a finance guy could do.
Niche B2B newsletters where the readers have real buying power have a far easier time launching events, subscriptions, and a myriad of other high LTV products with their readers.
2/ Events are getting hotter, but the format is changing
Events are growing like crazy.
People want in-person connection.
And the unit economics can be pretty good - Jacob has mentioned his events typically run 30-40% margin.
STAT, a pharma/biotech newsletter under The Boston Globe, runs 3-hour pop-up events adjacent to industry events like the JP Morgan Health Conference.
They’ll sell 1-3 sponsor slots, sponsor dinners, and do a live podcast.
For one of their most recent events, 1,000 people RSVP'd, of which 400 were net new subscribers.
My takeaway: They got paid to do reader acquisition. Not bad!
They aren’t the only ones:
Morning Brew is investing heavily in digital and in-person events (they very kindly let me sneak into the Marketing Brew Summit last-minute - it was great).
Axios has seen 40-50% YoY growth in events over the past 2 years.
I talked to two separate media companies planning to make events part of their strategy in 2026.
The most notable thing about events is that the formats are evolving:
People want deeper 1:1 connections - roundtables/matchmaking in traditional venues and new formats like curated retreats
Less alcohol, more workouts/activities
Allocating speaker budgets to things like live podcasts that push event discovery
3/ We’re starting to see practical AI use cases
Last year's AMO felt like everyone was figuring out what to do with AI.
This year people are putting their vanity aside and realizing every team member now has a $20/month junior copywriter and researcher in Claude/ChatGPT.
The Wall Street Journal is using AI to scrape far-right news sources and synthesize analysis.
I’ve talked to multiple newsletters in recent weeks using Claude (trained on past posts) to help first draft and/or edit.
The quality ceiling hasn't changed - great writing and original reporting still win.
But the speed to first draft on everything (newsletters, software, ads, etc.) is going way down.
4/ Creator-first media is a shortcut to valuable audiences
I've seen under the hood of many creator-first newsletters.
The leads they drive are ridiculously high quality - above and beyond even ad buys in other newsletters (which typically drive the most engaged subscribers of any paid acquisition source).
Vox Media has revenue-sharing agreements with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway, launching high-profile podcasts like Pivot and On with Kara Swisher.
The NYT reported Swisher and Galloway get 70% of revenue in their partnerships.
Vox gets credibility and audience development.
Creators get the infrastructure and upside without building their own media company.
Smart play.
HubSpot’s media division (via acquisition), Workweek (via partnership), and The Rundown (in-house) are all great examples of personal brand-first newsletter properties.
5/ B2B > B2C subscriptions
I loved Jacob’s session with STAT.
I was sitting next to Jason Yanowitz from Blockworks and was joking this was totally live research for Jacob’s paid subscription business.
It didn’t disappoint:
Boston Globe's STAT does $15-20M in revenue. 50% subscriptions, 45% advertising/events, 5% grants.
50,000 people paying $395 per year!
Their funnel: hard paywall in-house and no enterprise subscriptions at the beginning (e.g., group sales to companies).
Great content led the way - demand was generated with individuals first.
Then STAT began going to companies with 5-10+ individual subscribers and pitching steep discounts on seats for those readers.
Land and expand - more readers from those companies joined and the enterprise subscriptions never, ever churn.
More than half of revenue today comes from individuals, but most new subscribers come from enterprise because of group discounts.
6/ Founders need to extract themselves
Rich Antoniello (founder of Complex Networks, now running UPROXX Studios) said something that stuck with me.
He’s constantly trying to “extract himself from the middle” of meetings - he's either big strategy or down in the minutiae. Nothing in between.
This is a pattern I’ve noticed in many successful founders:
Sam Parr and his Hampton co-founder transitioned out their CEO and got back into the business earlier this year
Tim Huelskamp (1440) emails every reader who replies to the newsletter
Rowan Cheung (The Rundown) stays on top of his Facebook ad account like a hawk
Faris Kojok (The Deep View) is the same way
They say CXOs have all the authority, but none of the context.
And that employees have all the context, but none of the authority.
Delegation can spiral into abdication very easily - don’t confuse the two!
That's the letter.
- Nathan
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