Newsletter Monetisation Methods in 2024

👋 If you haven’t noticed already, I’ve started sending Revenew every 2 weeks, mainly because:

• My agency (AdSales as a Service) has taken off and become rather demanding.

• I want to ensure that I’m creating quality stuff, not just writing for the sake of it.

Downgrading anything, even send frequency, can feel like a failure sometimes. We all overthink little decisions like this, but ultimately it’s made for good reasons, and the world will keep spinning.

Personal note aside, let’s dive in! 🚀

ALL the Monetisation Methods

This is an evergreen topic that I’ve written about a year ago. But a lot changes in a year, both the macro-newsletter-environment and my perspective.

Here are all the options, in order:

• 🥅 Sponsorships/ad sales

• 🏷️ Other Promotional Revenue

• ✍️ Services

• 🔒 Premium Newsletter

• 🕵🏻‍♂️ Business Intelligence

• 🫡 Asynch Coaching

• 🫣 Selling data & email addresses

• 🖇️ Affiliate marketing

• 🐣 Selling Your Own Products

• 🤔 Side note

🥅 Sponsorships/ad sales

The main revenue model for most of the big newsletters, such as Morning Brew, 1440, and The Daily Upside. Fundamentally, this involves selling advertising space to brands, ideally, in exchange for an upfront fee.

Why it’s a scalable revenue channel

The amount you can charge per ad depends on; subscriber numbers, engagement rates (clicks/opens) and how niche or valuable your audience is. Once you’ve figured out how to excel in any one of the previous elements, you can start selling high-ticket deals and you’ll have a serious sales operation. I personally know newsletters with ~20k subscribers that earn as much newsletters with 500k, simply because of their valuable readership.

Pros 👍

• It’s pretty scalable, whether you’re super niche, or general news.

• It’s an efficient use of resources. Direct sales will (most likely) drive much higher numbers per ad slot/subscriber versus affiliate, CPC agencies, or ad networks.

• It can lead to long-term, repeat client relationships which become very lucrative.

Cons 👎

• Sales is (very) time-consuming and not for everyone.

• Marketing budgets for tests/new channels are the first things to be cut in tough economic times.

• If you intend to remain a solopreneur, you’re going to struggle to sell out multiple ad slots per week (in addition to writing, growth, etc.).

🏷️ Other Promotional Revenue

Including all the less popular relatives of sponsorships, like hosted content, webinars, events and more.

These are often a great way to increase existing ad revenue if you have the demand and operational bandwidth.

✍️ Services

Offering a service that closely aligns with your niche and using your newsletter to drive business for that service. This can be ad hoc consulting, fractional work, coaching or a full-blown agency.

This mainly works well for niche b2b newsletters. It can be a fantastic revenue driver with relatively low subscribers.

A great example is Matt McGarry’s agency Growletter and newsletter.

Another stupendous example is this newsletter and my agency (huge bias alert). I started writing Revenews without a clear plan, after talking to numerous subscribers I figured out what people wanted and built a service around that.

If done successfully, this quickly becomes a full-time business and is anything but a plug-and-play money maker. But if a services business if what you want to do, then go for it.

🔒 Premium Newsletter

In a nutshell, this is offering more content, of a higher quality, quantity, or more practical format, for a monthly/yearly fee.

WHAT exactly you offer is crucial. Common examples include:

• Deeper analysis

• Simply more of the same content

• Insights/data. As an example, I could share data around sponsors or cold outreach in a premium newsletter.

• Specific sub-topics that are generally more valuable areas than your free stuff.

• Practical guides or tools, e.g. nutritional insight or marathon training plans.

The key to success is to be in a niche that (a) can afford paid content, (b) will see real value, and (c) has a nice organic way of promoting the paid option within your free content.

Some topics are easier to charge readers. I’ve worked with a couple of high-quality political newsletters that have huge subscription revenues.

Two good examples are Justin Gordon @ JustGoGrind and The Lever.

If you can make this work, it’s a pretty sexy revenue stream. So is the next one…

❤️ Community

You probably know what a community is already. But launching one on the back of a newsletter is probably the best way to do it.

It’s pretty scalable. But I think it’s really hard to do well and sustain.

If you’re B2B or fairly niche and you don’t see any/many digital communities out there, then you’re probably right for this.

The best example I can think of is A Media Operator.

🕵🏻‍♂️ Business Intelligence

Helping businesses make better decisions by distilling and packaging your expertise, journalistic quality or unique insight.

This is quite a rare approach, but it’s cool (for lack of a better word). It’s also scalable. Very cool.

Here’s an example of a newsletter aspiring to do this.

🫡 Asynch Coaching

I only discovered this one last week, but I REALLY like it. It involved charging people a monthly fee for coaching is a defined structure and format.

Justin Moore has been making $10k a month doing this, here’s Louis’s LinkedIn post explaining how.

This would most likely suit niche/b2b newsletters best.

🫣 Selling data & email addresses

This is one of the more morally dubious options. Less common but can be very lucrative. Personally not a massive fan of this one, but hey, there’s no judgment here.

Just make sure that your local regulations allow you to do this and you’ve acquired the relevant permissions.

🖇️ Affiliate marketing

This includes joining affiliate/referral schemes for strategic brands and promoting them in your content. This is a less favourable and dependable revenue stream than ad sales. A lot of newsletters shun affiliate when it has the potential to be an effective source of ancillary revenue.

The most efficient way to approach it is:

• Focus on products you use, you’ll be able to promote them better

• Include them in your welcome sequence

• Include loads of less prominent touchpoints

• Fill empty sponsorship inventory

• Focus on programs with referring revenue or large payouts

• Invest time in signing up for programs then be consistent with including the links

• Use the links if/when you naturally talk about relevant topics (e.g. when I talk about newsletter ad operations, I mention Sponsy).

🐣 Selling Your Own Products

Info products like courses or guides (e.g. marathon training plans) can be a fantastic, low-cost, scalable revenue stream. That can add real value to readers.

One high-profile example of this is Finimize. Whilst they do sell sponsorships for the newsletter, they also use it as a funnel for the Finimize premium app, as well as b2b content solutions.

The Hustle was acquired by Hubspot, ultimately to become a (very expensive) funnel for the Hubspot CRM. So there can be a lot of value in this model!

🤔 Side note 

A few of these monetisation methods present a philosophical newsletter conundrum. If your primary revenue stream becomes services, community or your own products, you may start to pose yourself this question…