‘Tis the time of year to look at next year, the ReveNewYear if you will.

📈 We’re looking at the trends I see likely to materialise in the Newsletter Land, specifically in the ad sales market…

Assuming that you care about my whimsical opinion aside, let’s jump in! 🚀

1. The biggest trend I see in media buying

2. Limited opportunity to hire one of the best NL growth agencies

3. Funding galore

4. My favourite email meme ever

^{🗓️ Newsletter Sponsorships in 2024}

I speak to newsletter founders and media buyers every day, here’s what I think is going to happen this coming leap year.

Emanuel Cinca’s 2024 predictions inspired Matt McGary’s, and Matt’s inspired mine.

🥇General Newsletter Trends

The number of newsletters will continue to skyrocket, but the key question will be, are we in a bubble?

TLDR: slightly, but a bubble that won’t burst, one that’ll continue to inflate whilst leaking.

Your surname doesn’t have to be Holmes to recognise that A LOT of newsletters are being launched. Some great, some good, and some not so much. The initial allure of budding creators/entrepreneurs I think stems from success stories like the Morning Brew, Milk Road, and The Peak. Plus, Beehiiv marketing the shit out of how ‘easy’ it is to launch & run a newsletter now.

A huge portion of newsletters will falter, as the creators realise that it’s not as easy as it seems, consistency matters, growth is a slog/expensive and monetisation is tough.

Nominally, the number of newsletters will continue to grow, whilst filtering out less committed founders.

Acquisitions will consolidate the industry a little, but nothing too dramatic.

AI newsletters will continue to flourish, personally, I don’t see the interest in how to implement AI into your life waning soon. Yes, the initial hype may fizzle slightly, but more and more people will flock to AI newsletters to learn about AI. I did some primary research for this one. I asked 5 of my hometown friends if they use AI for work, 1 said yes, 2 said ‘a little’, and 2 said not at all. They’re all smart 20-somethings, so there’s still plenty of scope/demand for growth for AI newsletters (in my pub-fuelled opinion).

🤑 Ad sales predictions

🫣 Deep Dive or Die

This is the BIGGEST trend I’ve noticed in the newsletter sponsorships market. A growing number of brands are only interested in spending in newsletters if they can do a dedicated option. Differentiated from a longer-form ad wrapped around an organic deep-dive story.

The reasoning behind this is obvious, the performance is generally fantastic. Here are the defining features of the type of deep dive I’m seeing demand for:

• Has to be a dedicated email and not include other main stories or ads.

• Ideally, brand alignment is very good, but doesn’t have to be completely perfect to get the marketer excited.

• Educational, ‘together with XYZ’, not a sales-fest.

• Have multiple CTAs throughout the article, ideally hosted afterwards.

• The brand submits an article that they like/know works, which you edit into your style.

Here’s an example from JustGoGrind.

📈 How to profit from this trend

Offer dedicated deep dives. You can quite easily charge 3x your rate versus a primary, it’ll generate much more leads, with much higher intent (for the brand).

If you really don’t want to offer dedicated emails, you can sell hosted articles and drive traffic to them, or you can offer longer-form sponsorships. But these are much less likely to satiate the marketer’s dedicated-appetite.

Here’s one hosted article example by The Daily Upside.

🛑 Things to be wary of

Deep dives can piss off your readers, for obvious reasons, it is quite literally, not what they signed up for. But, you gotta make money, and ideally lots of it.

You can never please everyone, you’ll have to go with your gut and do a cost-benefit analysis. What will readers think about this? Will 1% hate it? 5%? 20%? 50%?!

Test a deep dive with a brand partner that you genuinely think readers would love. That way, you can assess the ‘best case level of list damage’.

🖇️ Demand will catch up with supply

It’s generally accepted that it’s harder to sell ads now versus 2 or 3 years ago. This is mainly due to two reasons:

1. Market crashes and tighter economic times resulted in constricting marketing budgets (demand).

2. There are simply a lot more newsletters around now, so the supply has increased massively.

Economics 101: This decrease in demand and increase in supply has made ad sales a tougher job since spring 2022. With exceptions including AI, or if you’re in a largely underserved niche.

Why do I think that this dynamic is changing for the better?

1. Demand. The economy, and more importantly marketing budgets, seem to be on the up, colloquially and statistically. 94% of small businesses plan to increase marketing spend in 2024, according to Forbes. WARC predicts that ad spend will almost double to 8.2%. A smaller survey showed that 53% of businesses plan to spend more in 2024, with only 7% decreasing budgets. Another showed that 84% of marketing decision-makers plan on upping investments, with a 40% YoY increase in branding.

   All in all, assuming no more black swans or expanding global conflicts, we have a very positive outlook.

   Marketers at the usual-newsletter-suspects like Masterworks will change companies, bringing their positive perspective on newsletters with them. A less, but still significant factor that I’ve witnessed first-hand.

2. Supply will continue to increase as more newsletters are born and grow subscribers. The reason I think demand will close the gap with supply is that rising supply will actually fuel more demand. Hear me out on this one…

   As more newsletters appear in previously untouched niches, this will catch the attention of brands in these niches, either naturally or at the mercy of cold emails. Sucking them into the newsletter universe, more will start to see newsletters as an essential tool in a marketer’s channel mix. I’ve seen this firsthand, the cohort of brands who spend lavishly in newsletters has increased massively in recent years.

   Also, as more newsletters achieve bragging rights of millions of subscribers, this will open up more interest from enterprise marketers and agencies. This will have a trickle-down effect. So far, only super big (or super niche) newsletters have managed to break into the agency world. This is already a top priority for any newsletter with over 1 million readers.

Other trends not mentioned due to the desire to maintain a reasonable wordcount:

• The increase in quality ad networks that offer a decent CPC. My previous conclusion is that ad networks (mostly) aren’t worth it for newsletter publishers. This could change if we see more programmatic options offer $3+ CPCs.

• More (non-newsletter) companies will begin monetisation. Plenty of SaaS and service businesses have been leaning into email madness. I’ve spoken to a dozen who’ve hit that critical mass and now want another revenue stream. Read more here.

🧐 Recommended Reading Agency

💗 Looking to grow your subscribers? A friend who runs one of the best newsletter growth agencies, after huge demand, now has room for new clients. They regularly drive a CAC as low as $0.50, plus Sparkloop revenue on top of that…

I don’t expect them to have room for clients for more than a week or 2. If you’re interested click here, I’ll register the click and intro you. Or just hit reply.

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