The 3 channels behind $10-100M newsletters

👋 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 Cooper, Head of New Business & Growth @Money Group | Brian, VP of Subscriptions @Vox Media | Jennifer, VP of DiveMarketplace @Industry Dive | Sondra, Senior Director of Audience Growth Marketing & Retention @Industry Dive | McKay, VP of Growth at The Daily Upside

How did most newsletters doing $10-100M a year grow? 

It’s not co-registration.

Or referrals (Sans Morning Brew, which drove 20-30% of its reader base from referrals).

This is important!

See, there’s ‘doing the thing right’ and then there’s ‘doing the right things’.

You don’t want to spend your time overoptimizing initiatives that don’t move the needle - you have finite resources against infinite ways to grow/monetize your newsletter.

Over the next 3 minutes I’ll share the channels you want to dedicate most of your execution focus to.

1. Converting web traffic to your newsletter

This is the SEO play.

A publisher getting millions in web traffic can drive a newsletter to 500k-1M subscribers simply by optimizing opt-ins across its site.

Who has done this well?

1. The Points Guy

2. Allrecipes

3. People

4. Etc.

Here your goal is to scoop up as much traffic as possible to begin supporting an independent newsletters sales rep, ideally 1M+ readers if you’re in B2C and significantly less than that if you’re in B2B. 

Why an independent sales team?

Among the large media companies we talk to, it has been difficult to get an existing sales team incentivized on newsletter inventory on top of direct web deals or other sources of inventory.

If I had to pick one company as the blueprint for web → free newsletter opt-in, it would be the Red Ventures portfolio; The Points Guy is a great place to start.

Many of their pop-ups / in-line offers are currently dedicated to pushing their Cardmatch Tool, but look at where they use real estate and build your newsletter opt-ins around that.

2. Building organically off of Twitter / Instagram / LinkedIn

Organic social is a great way to bootstrap a newsletter-first business (media or otherwise).

These businesses always end up shifting to paid advertising as organic slows, but it’s possible to get to 7-figures this way:

1. My buddy Rowan added 300k+ subscribers to The Rundown by becoming the most-followed AI news voice on Twitter

2. The Hustle grabbed its first 150k readers going viral with Reddit posts that drove to articles like how a guy lived on Soylent for 30 days 

3. Mason Doerr built an 80k email list off of TikTok / Instagram and now runs a copywriting education company doing $5M a year at 25 years old

3. Paid social (Meta)

Paid social is how most media brands continue to scale over time.

Within paid, Meta is by far the largest channel for media brands like…

1. The Hustle (Sold for $27M to Hubspot)

2. Morning Brew (sold majority stake for $75M)

3. Milk Road (Sold for 7-figures to private buyers)

4. 1440 (doing $20M+ in revenue with 20 employees)

But the paid landscape has changed dramatically over the past 2 years.

Facebook has made a shift from manual targeting (e.g., choose a demo or interest group to reach)…

To creative-based targeting where a combination of AI and ML algorithms are used to build an audience around your ads.

This is bad news for generic, “learn about X in just 5 minutes a day” newsletter ads paired with manual targeting.

And great news for companies with a strong creative strategy.

Let’s use 1440 as an example -

The old way of writing newsletter ads: How I say informed about what’s happening in the news in one place every day

The new way: Americans are cutting ties with Zuckerberg’s news feed filtering

The second ad was done by someone who clearly understands that at least 1 segment of 1440’s readership distrusts media censorship. 

And by the way - that’s a hook from a real ad.

We’ve used a similar hook for a client and saw <$1 CPLs. 

Try to speak to everyone in your ads and you speak to no one - specificity is everything. 

We’ll get more into tactical marketing advice another day.

But for now, I want to be extremely clear about two things:

1. Meta is where newsletter growth teams should allocate most of their time

2. Media buyers are a commodity - 80% of your paid ads effort needs to go into the creative strategy + copywriting

So I made two things (completely free) that you should use for your 2025 ad planning:

1. A breakdown of 1440’s creative strategy (founders loved this one - CEOs at brands like 6AM City, Nice News, and HW Media all nabbed it for their teams)

2. A 60-minute masterclass on paid ad campaign structure, research, copywriting, and design (this was done in partnership with beehiiv and is more tactical - perfect for your VP / head of marketing)

One last thing…

Most ad-supported media companies have built their paid acquisition programs around the wrong KPI. 

80% of them optimize ads to users who sign up for their newsletters.

They live and die by CPLs. 

That’s so strange - what is the value to you of a sign-up?

Zero dollars. 

It is the exact same thing as running an e-commerce company and optimizing to web visitors who add your product to their cart.

No value is created until the visitor checks out.

And no value is created for you until your reader opens a newsletter or clicks an ad.

And unless you give Meta that information, it has no idea who to look for.

You need to send open or click events back to Meta and optimize your campaigns to this.

1440 did this and saw a gigantic increase in its paid ads ROI and I would bet money that 4 out of 5 times the same would happen for your newsletter.

Now, look - I’m not 100% sure if we could be helpful to you.

But if you’re interested in a growth partner that is an extension of your existing marketing team + focused on quality, we’ve helped add hundreds of thousands of high-LTV subscribers across media newsletters, personal brands, and B2B companies like:

1. Tyler Denk’s personal newsletter

2. The Rundown AI

3. The Neuron

4. Jesse Pujji

If you’d like to book a brainstorming session on how you can hit the ground running in 2025 growing your audience and converting readers into revenue, get in touch here.

That’s the letter.

- Nathan

1. Find me on LinkedIn

2. Have a question on growth/monetization? Hit reply!

3. This is a private newsletter - if you want a teammate added, please reach out with their email

4. The Feed Media drives hundreds of thousands of subscribers and sales with newsletters every month - book a brainstorming session with me here