Welcome to a Revenews written on a sunny Saturday, it finally feels like spring here in London.

☀️ Today we’re looking at how to transcend being ‘just a newsletter’.

Spiritual awakenings of media properties aside, let’s dive in! 🚀

1. Newsletter News

2. Pros and cons of expanding to each channel

3. What CPMs are newsletters charging?

4. What a meme!

^{From ‘Just’ a Newsletter to a Media Empire}

Firstly, I feel slightly fraudulent writing about this, so I want to make sure it doesn’t come across as if I am claiming to have done something I haven’t.

I haven’t personally founded a newsletter and then scaled it into being a media empire. But here’s why I do feel somewhat qualified to ramble on about this topic:

• As the 10th employee, I saw Finimize to an £85m exit, they’d launched various products after newsletter beginnings.

• I’ve worked with various newsletter businesses that’ve achieved this and/or a large exit.

• I study and research newsletters a lot!

Anyway, now that imposter-syndrome-fueled justification is out of the way. Here are the key channels to consider and their pros and cons.

🤷 Why Expand Channels..?

The obvious reason is to increase revenue and grow your business. Some less obvious benefits are diversification, risk management, research & learning, networking, operational convenience, and so on.

It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, you’ll become more diversified in terms of consumption and revenue. However, your diversified revenue will still be diversified within media, so one could argue that it’s not true diversification (i.e. no SaaS, services, etc.)

Another nuance of the above-mentioned benefits; whilst you won’t have to fundamentally change what you do (i.e. creating content), you will have to at least change how you’re doing it.

Anyway, let’s not get caught in the weeds about how beneficial expanding channels is. Let’s look at the different options…

🧲 Website

This involves building out content offerings on a site, in addition to your standard hosted articles from the newsletter. One example of a newsletter business with a fantastic website is They Got Acquired.

Shout out to The Daily Upside too, who used a website launch to unify 3 different newsletters into one cohesive brand.

Aside from just more content, on a new site you can get creative, build something cool that your audience really wants. Check out the interactive AI tool finder that OpenTools has built.

✅ Pros

• It opens up various new advertising formats, both programmatic and custom

• You can offer unique and innovative formats (like OpenTools)

• If you’re already writing newsletter content, creating website content isn’t a huge change

• Fairly easy to set up, with plenty of no-code options

• Content longevity

❌ Cons

• Building traffic times take.

• SEO is so competitive nowadays, especially if you’re not in an underserved niche.

• Whilst the newsletter for initial traffic boosts is great, there is the risk that you lose newsletter subscribers to your site, which is a much less ‘sticky’ channel.

📅 Events/Webinars

These can range from huge yearly conferences like The Newsletter Conference (see you there!), to small weekly webinars for 20 people. Physical events aren’t appropriate for everyone, for example, I had thought about hosting newsletter events, but the fact that most of you lot are across the pond is a bit of a blocker.

While I was at Finimize, webinars were a key part of community engagement, with multiple happening each week.

✅ Pros

• Large events can be super profitable & boost brand awareness

• Depending on your topic and attendees, brands will pay handsomely for sponsorship/booths

• Sponsored webinars will increase the real and perceived value of your campaigns

• Webinars are fairly easy to put on (and fun!)

 ❌ Cons

• Live events are obviously time-consuming and can be expensive

• Webinars are fairly hard to do well

• Operationally they’re different to written content

• Getting attendees can be tough/expensive, and ultimately leave you reliant on your newsletter

❤️ Community

Some may bark at including communities as a media channel, but oh well, you gotta break some eggs to write a newsletter.

I am defining communities here as; any (non-newsletter) paid interactive communication platform, where members interact with each other as well as administrators.

Houcks Founder Membership is a solid example of how to do community.

✅ Pros

• Recurring membership revenue (read how one made $5k in week 1)

• Opportunity for promotional revenue (done strategically)

• Fantastic for research, networking and uncovering audience wants/problems

 ❌ Cons

• They can be extremely time-consuming, especially if they’re connected to a personal brand

• Only appropriate for some B2B and/or valuable niches

• Getting initial momentum is hard

👂 Podcast

The trendiest of media channels. Done right, podcasts can be extremely lucrative, fun and engaging.

Done wrong, they can be time-consuming, expensive and sap brand equity.

So do it right.

✅ Pros

• Really deep advertising market (read about how big here)

• Advertisers are generally less performance-focused with podcast ads (versus newsletter ads)

• Recent developments have made it fairly accessible

• Growth can be viral, unlike newsletters

• Newsletter readers and podcast listeners have quite similar personas

• The biggest podcasts are bigger than the biggest newsletters

 ❌ Cons

• Might take subscribers away from your newsletter

• It’s hard/expensive to do really well

• It’s an extremely competitive landscape now

• Growth will likely be slow

• You might be accused of being a Rogan-loving-podcast-bro