👋 Happy New Year! Let’s make some ad sales predictions for 2025

My 1,746 resolutions aside, let’s dive in! 🚀

🎇 2025 🎇 

🎯 Riches In The Niches

* pun intended

There are a lot of broad tech audiences nowadays. Unfortunately, that simply makes direct ad sales harder. Too much supply.

I’m not saying it’s impossible to build a Morning Brew-ish business in 2025, but you’ll need a differentiating factor, like a genuine content USP, brand or scale.

To be niche, you DON’T have to go B2B. Controversial take, I know. Hear me out.

At our agency, our best-performing clients, in terms of leads-generated/reply rates, have been a mix of B2B and B2C. The top 3 niches have been:

• Health & Wellness, B2C

• Agriculture Technology, B2B

• Psychedelics, mainly B2C but slightly B2B.

Yes, B2B is likely going to give you higher CPMs, and an overall higher chance of building an audience that advertisers are eager for. But don’t ignore seemingly ‘too obvious’ consumer niches.

I think sports, gaming and health are criminally underserved in the newsletter space. All have an angle unique enough to get sponsors aroused, plus frothy ad markets.

☠️ Industry Growth Will Slow?!

The growth of the creator economy, newsletters, and podcasts is overall positive. But there are some mixed signals in the data…

👂 Podcasts

• Listenership - In 2023, global podcast listeners increased 9.6%. Early projections for 2024 give 8,6% growth, 504.9 million (source). Whilst still healthy, growth is slowing.

• Ad Spend - In the U.S., podcast advertising revenue reached $2.28 billion in 2024, 15.9% YoY growth.

Interestingly, ad spend growth is outpacing listener growth. Revepod anyone?

📰 Newsletters

The number of newsletters continues to ramp up sensationally. It’s hard to put a figure to it, but whatever your source. Number going up. But is number going up as fast as it was before?

That is not clear. As in I’m not actually sure.

Despite doomsdayers saying ‘inboxes are too cluttered, no one uses email anymore’. The number of email users continues to climb. Expected to reach 4.5 billion this year.

👋 More (and more) Non-Media Companies Follow Suit

27% of creators plan to launch a newsletter in 2025. The key reasons being:

• Owning more of their channels.

• Building deeper connections with their audiences.

• Higher open rates of up to 45% vs 10% for social media.

• Greater monetization opportunities

(Thanks Whop).

Subjectively, I also speak to more and more businesses that are launching newsletters. Whether they’re VCs, CPG or agencies, its often to drive more customers. This trend isn’t new.

I’m expecting it to continue. When these ‘non-media’ newsletters reach a certain size, it mostly makes sense to start monetizing it. Voila, you have free client acquisition.

P.S. Need help selling more sponsorships? My agency Ad Sales as a Service helps media companies do just that.