The Five Types of Indie Newsletter Business Models

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Everyone has a newsletter these days — or, at least, it feels like that’s true. Your favorite musician has one, and so do your favorite writers on Twitter, and there’s a decent chance that you have at least one cousin who’s tried to convince you to sign up for their newsletter about fantasy football or knitting or Goldendoodles. (Actually, the Goldendoodle newsletter sounds kinda interesting. Sign us up.) Newsletters are to the early 2020s what blogging was to the 2000s, and what social media was to the 2010s. It truly feels like everyone’s using it, even if it’s not entirely clear why some decided to use it.

And that last part is why we’re seeing so many newsletters launch and then vanish, sometimes within weeks. Launching a newsletter is ridiculously easy. Writing a really good newsletter — one that audiences are excited to read, share with their friends, and maybe even pay for — is remarkably hard.

There are lots of different types of newsletters out there, but we want to focus here on the indie newsletter space. These are newsletters launched by an individual or small team without the support or financial backing of a larger, established organization — they’re looking to build something on their own. (This is often referred to as the Creator space, though we’re using the phrase “indie newsletters” instead. The Creator label sometimes unintentionally excludes small, independent teams that are doing great things with their newsletters.)

Let’s start with the good news: The past decade, and particularly the last three years, has given us countless indie newsletter success stories. Readers tend to be careful about who they allow into their inbox: Family, friends, co-workers, and maybe even your indie newsletter. But if you can make it to the inbox, you have the chance to build a powerful and personal connection with readers for years to come. With that relationship comes the opportunity to drive revenue — through subscriptions, ads, courses, or dozens of other monetization opportunities. It might be easier to scale an audience on other platforms, like Instagram or Twitter, but no platform offers the return on investment that email does.

Now here comes the cold water: You may have read a success story or two that makes it seem like growing a newsletter and monetizing it is something that can happen quickly and easily. Neither of those things are true. There is a path to success, and we’re going to detail different opportunities to monetize your indie newsletter. But it’s important to be realistic about the timeline for success. We’ve seen that independent writers often need two years — or more! — to build an audience they can monetize.

Of course, there’s a bigger question you should be asking yourself before you think about monetization or growth:

Should you launch a newsletter?

Often, that answer is “No.”

Read this before you start a newsletter

To would-be writers in the indie newsletter space, we offer this simple advice: Don’t launch a newsletter. Or at least, don’t launch it until you’ve answered these four questions:

• Does this newsletter have a specific audience? — If your intended audience is “anyone and everyone!”, you’re going to want to think more carefully about who you’re really writing for. The best newsletters are written for someone specific.
• Do you have something unique to share with that audience? — It might be original reporting, or a unique perspective on a topic based on your expertise, or maybe you’re curating content that’s difficult to find elsewhere. Whatever it is, it’s something this audience is looking for.
• Can that audience get similar types of content elsewhere? — If your audience is served by a larger, existing newsletter, it may be tough to build and grow your own audience for this newsletter. You may need to go back to the first two questions and rethink what you’re building and who it’s for.
• Do you already have your own audience you can reach out to at launch? — It’s infinitely easier to grow an audience if you already have followers or fans of your own, whether on social media, a podcast you host, or a website or blog you maintain. It’s possible to launch something from the ground up, but be prepared for a long road ahead.

If you answered those four questions correctly — “Yes,” “Yes,” “No,” “Yes” were the answers we were looking for — then you might have a newsletter worth launching. So let’s talk about the next step: Identifying which type of newsletter you want to launch.

Why start there? In working with and talking to the teams behind hundreds of indie newsletters, we’ve found that specific categories of newsletters tend to work best with specific business models. The more you understand about the type of newsletter you’re building, the easier it is to understand how to monetize. (Understanding how to monetize is no guarantee that you’ll actually make money, but at least you’ll know where to start.)

We’ve found that there are five big categories in the indie newsletter space, each of which corresponds with specific business models. The five are:

• The Analyst
• The Curator 
• The Expert
• The Reporter
• The Writer

So let’s look at each of these five models: What they are, how newsletters in that category grow, and how they make money.

The Analyst

What does it mean to have an Analyst newsletter?

The original Analyst newsletter is Stratechery, which Ben Thompson launched in 2013 to analyze what’s happening in tech and media. It’s the Uber of the newsletter space — a product so successful, you can describe many of the Analyst newsletters that followed as “Stratechery for X.” There’s Stratechery for crypto, for Web3, for European tech, and even for the X’s and O’s of college basketball. Name a niche, and someone is probably trying to become the Ben Thompson of that space.

How big are the audiences for Analyst newsletters?

Some run well into the six figures — The Pomp Letter, for instance, claims to reach nearly 200,000 readers. Many are more niche, with a reach in the low thousands. The size of the newsletter depends on the size of the potential audience. Some newsletters, like Lenny Rachitsky’s newsletter, start with a niche topic (his was writing for product managers at tech companies) and expand into a broader topic (he now covers startups and growth).

How do Analyst newsletters grow?

These types of newsletters commonly utilize a few key tactics to grow:

• Producing original content, available for free — These analysts usually write and write often. (Sometimes, they produce original videos or podcasts, too.) They produce explainers, write essays, and use their expertise to help others understand a specific topic, and this content lives in front of a paywall. As long as these stories have clear calls to action to subscribe, they can use original content to funnel readers from a story to their email list. An advantage of producing original content: Readers may choose to share these stories in public places, from forums, like Hacker News or Reddit, to small listservs or groups, where they can quickly reach a broad audience of potential readers.
• Leveraging earned media — Analysts tend to have strong, informed opinions about their chosen topic, which makes them great guests on podcasts or sources for news articles. Anytime they’re given a chance to appear on someone else’s platform, that’s an opportunity to drive that audience to their newsletter.
• Word of mouth — Many analysts are writing for a professional community — their readers are taking the lessons from these newsletters and applying them directly to their work. These readers often have colleagues or friends in the same industry, and if they get value from that newsletter, they’ll happily pass the newsletter along to friends.

How do Analyst newsletters make money?

Again, here’s where Analyst newsletters take their cues from Stratechery: They’re driven primarily by paid subscriptions or memberships. With a subscription model, where readers are paying for exclusive content, subscriptions often range from $100 to $200 per year. With a membership model, where readers get access to premium content plus some sort of community, like a Discord, the rates are often higher. (The Generalist, for instance, charges $499 per year.) As for Thompson and Stratechery: His subscription costs $120 per year. (If you want to go deeper on pricing for a subscription or membership, I put together this guide for you.)

Many Analysts also offer a free newsletter — a weekly email is a popular option among these types of products — which they might monetize through native ads. As these newsletters grow, some Analysts expand into podcasts, which opens up additional opportunities for advertising.

There are some exceptions in this space. Packy McCormick’s Not Boring leverages sponsored case studies to monetize his newsletter, and both McCormick and Rachitsky have built job boards, using Pallet, where companies pay to advertise openings to newsletter readers. 

The Curator

What does it mean to have a Curator newsletter?

Curators pull together links and content into a single newsletter. Some of the biggest independent newsletters on the web, like TheSkimm or Morning Brew, started as Curation products, bringing daily roundups for their specific audiences (millennial women and millennials in finance, respectively). Many of these products are daily, covering everything from general news (NextDraft) to sports, written for women (The Gist) to Canadian business news (The Peak) to culture and business (TheFutureParty) to summaries of long articles (The Browser). Some curate local news, like 730DC. Some come from a generic brand voice; some come from individual writers, like Caitlin Dewey’s Links I Would Gchat You If We Were Friends or Austin Kleon’s weekly list of 10 things worth sharing; some come from individual writers and are super niche, like Mandy Hofmockel’s Journalism jobs and a photo of my dog. While many Curation newsletters focus on synthesizing information, they can also be good vehicles for shopping content or product discovery, as Claire Mazur and Erica Cerulo have done with A Thing or Two.

How big are the audiences for Curator newsletters?

Curation products can be massive — the biggest newsletters in this category reach millions of readers a day. Some are incredibly niche, reaching a few hundred or thousand readers.

Curation tends to be one of the hardest products to build an audience around. There are so many newsletters that compete in this space, including established newsrooms and brands, so trying to stand out can be tough. Many of the newsletters that launch and then quickly disappear come from this category — if you don’t have an established audience already, a Curator newsletter takes time, or significant investment, to grow.

(Newsletters in this category can also tread well-worn ground. While we hate to dismiss any newsletter idea out of hand, we’re begging you: Please, the world does not need another newsletter that highlights five things you read this week.)

How do Curator newsletters grow?

The biggest curation products, which are often supported by a small team and have a significant annual budget devoted to growth, grow differently than smaller newsletters. The biggest newsletters in this category grow via:

• Paid acquisition — Some of the largest Curator products spend $100,000 or more per month on paid acquisition, which might include running ads on social media channels like Facebook or TikTok, or paying for promotion in other newsletters.
• Earned media — This was one of the biggest early growth channels for TheSkimm, whose founders had previously worked in the PR space. They did countless interviews, with everyone from national TV outlets to small bloggers, to promote TheSkimm, which helped them build their initial base of subscribers.
• Referral program — Here’s another growth tactic first pioneered by TheSkimm, and later copied by Morning Brew (and many, many other Curator products). These referral programs offer rewards — from inside access to branded merchandise — if readers share the newsletter with friends. Many of the early Curator newsletters built their own referral tools; now, many utilize an app like SparkLoop to set up a referral program in just an hour or two. Some ESPs, like beehiiv and ConvertKit, have even built a referral program into their feature set.

Smaller Curation products grow differently. Without a big budget to spend, these newsletters tend to grow thanks to collaborations with other newsletters, earned media, or word-of-mouth sharing.

How do Curator newsletters make money?

Most Curator products, whether big or small, lean heavily on native advertising in newsletters. These ads are usually sold based on the number of readers who open and engage with a newsletter, a metric known as cost per opens, or CPO. (Some writers refer to this as CPM per opens.) We’ve seen rates anywhere from $15 per thousand readers who open the newsletter up to about $50 per thousand. For larger newsletters, CPO-priced sponsorship of a single newsletter might run into the thousands of dollars. Smaller newsletters might choose to price ads based on a flat fee, perhaps as low as $75-100 per day. By and large, Curator newsletters do not have paywalls, so there’s a correlation between overall list size and the ability to effectively monetize through ads. 

Another advertising opportunity that’s common among Curator products, particularly smaller newsletters, are classified ads. Curated newsletters like Ann Friedman’s weekly newsletter, Kai Brach’s Dense Discovery, or Delia Cai’s Deez Links, have monetized through low-cost classified ads, in which an advertiser might spend anywhere from $25 to $200 for a short blurb and a link within the newsletter.

For more on ad-based opportunities for newsletters, check out this guide.

There are other monetization opportunities, which vary based on the product. The Future Party built a successful events business off of their newsletter. The Browser offers a paid subscription for access to additional curated newsletters sent every week. Several products in this category have had success with affiliate links, and some writer-driven newsletters have used these as a springboard for paid freelance writing gigs.

The Expert

What does it mean to have an Expert newsletter?

Experts are those with deep knowledge about a specific topic, ranging from SEO for publishers to getting more out of Google Sheets to the business of hip hop to writing great marketing copy to understanding Amazon Web Services to creating great newsletters. Sometimes, these can be broad topics, like marketing, but for now, let’s focus on people with very specific niches. They’re leading voices in these spaces, frequently appearing at conferences or quoted in articles about their expertise. They’re also building an audience of readers who care deeply about that expertise, often because it’s tied to their job or hobby, and they turn to these experts to learn more.

During the pandemic, we also saw scientists jump into the Expert space, like with Katelyn Jetelina’s Your Local Epidemiologist newsletter.

One differentiator between the Expert and Analyst models is that Expert newsletters are typically free and open to all, since the goal is typically to funnel as many readers as possible towards paid courses, coaching, consulting, workshops, or books. The larger the engaged audience, the more chances these experts have to convert a reader.

How big are the audiences for Expert newsletters?

James Clear, an expert on the topic of personal productivity, has a newsletter that reaches more than a million readers every week. Others reach just a few thousand. But for most Expert newsletters, audience size is irrelevant. A newsletter on a niche topic might only need a thousand readers to be successful and profitable.

How do Expert newsletters grow?

• Producing original content — Like with Analyst newsletters, free articles and posts — which get read and shared, particularly on social media, in small groups, or on listservs — are key to the growth of these newsletters.
• Creating lead magnets — One way to prove expertise is by creating deep dives into tactics around your topic. Ben Collins, a Google Sheets expert, produced a guide with 100 tips and tricks for Google Sheets. That lead magnet is available for free to any reader, as long as they first sign up for Collins’s newsletter. These sorts of lead magnets provide immediate value for the reader, and give them the nudge they need to hand over their email address.
• 1-to-1 interaction with their community — Many of these topics already have small digital communities or forums where interested readers spend time. These could be Facebook groups, listservs, public Slack rooms, or LinkedIn. Experts might find the spaces where their readers are spending time and engage directly with them, sharing tips, ideas, and links to relevant articles or lead magnets. Experts tend to focus first on providing value to the community before promoting themselves too heavily.
• Earned media — Experts are often quoted in news stories about their topic, appear as guests on podcasts, or speak at conferences, where they can then promote their newsletters for free.
• Word of mouth — Another overlap with the Analyst model is how these products grow when readers share the newsletter with friends in the industry. Some Experts, like Clear, use a referral program as an incentive to drive sharing. (SparkLoop powers Clear’s referral program, as well as others in this space.)

How do Expert newsletters make money?

There’s a lot of overlap between Analyst newsletters and Expert newsletters. The biggest difference, from our perspective, is in how they monetize. While Analyst newsletters primarily leverage subscriptions or advertising for revenue, Experts typically use their newsletter to drive sales of whatever it is they do professionally. That might mean:

• Selling books they’ve written, so readers can go deeper on a topic.
• Selling tickets to events or workshops, where readers can learn directly from the Expert.
• Consulting, coaching, or teaching, so readers can work with the Expert. This could range from high-priced consulting work to online, on-demand courses, sold through a platform like Teachable or Skillshare.
• Affiliate links, where Experts recommend products they personally use, and then receive a commission when one of their readers buys that product.

Many Experts eventually introduce advertising into their newsletters, though that is usually not their primary revenue stream.

Some of the science-based Expert newsletters are a bit different — these are often run by scientists who do these as a side project. In the case of the “Your Local Epidemiologist” newsletter, the content is free, but is supported by members.

The Reporter

What does it mean to have a Reporter newsletter?

The Reporter model is straightforward: A reporter, typically one with significant reporting experience on a specific beat, decides to go out on their own — or to partner with a few other reporters — to cover that beat. We’re seeing these pop up in the local space, like The Charlotte Ledger, in North Carolina, or Hell Gate, in New York; in national politics, like The Dispatch or Popular Information; or on specific topics, like indigenous reporting, from Indigenously, or climate change, from HEATED. Some Reporter newsletters blend reporting and curation, like Tangle.

How big are the audiences for Reporter newsletters?

National or international products sometimes reach hundreds of thousands of free subscribers. More niche or local publications might have a ceiling in the low thousands.

How do Reporter newsletters grow?

Here’s a “well, duh!” kind of statement: Reporter newsletters grow based on the quality of their reporting. Reporters who break news or do one-of-a-kind reporting in their newsletters tend to get noticed over time. (This is especially true because many of these reporters have already established a reputation in their community, so they have existing networks or audiences that follow their work as they move to the indie newsletter space.) And great reporting doesn’t just have to be in politics or hard news. Fútbol with Grant Wahl, a newsletter primarily about American soccer by a former Sports Illustrated reporter, saw growth after Wahl traveled to cover every U.S. men’s World Cup qualifier. (He was the only English-language reporter to do so.) Exclusive reporting or storytelling often gets read and shared by that reporter’s audience — and, in turn, the sharing of those stories brings in new newsletter subscribers.

Two other ways that Reporter newsletters grow:

• Earned media — When news organizations or podcasts are looking for commentary or analysis on a certain topic, they often bring in a reporter who covers that topic. Reporters who succeed in this space are frequent guests on these shows, or may have their work cited and linked to by other newsrooms.
• Paid acquisition — Reinvesting revenue back into audience growth, like through paid promotion of the newsletter in other newsletters or on social channels like Facebook, can be an effective way to continue to grow an audience. Their investment is usually relatively small (at least compared to those in the Curator model) — maybe just a few thousand dollars per year. Still, that’s often enough to provide an additional boost to a list, and if these newsletters can convert a fraction of that audience to a paid product, they may see a profit on their investment.

How do Reporter newsletters make money?

Two main ways: Through paid subscriptions or memberships, or advertising.

Readers are often willing to pay to directly support reporters who cover a specific beat. Many Reporter newsletters put some content behind a paywall, which helps incentivize readers to pay. The Dispatch has more than 30,000 paid subscribers, which makes it one of the largest paid indie newsletters in any category. (A subscription costs $100 per year, though some premium members pay up to $1,500 per year.) Tangle now has more than 6,500 paying subscribers, which drives $30,000 in revenue per month. Pricing depends on how niche the topic area is; 340B Report, which covers a federal drug prescription program in the U.S., charges upwards of $749 per year for a subscription. Since so few news outlets cover that beat, they’re able to charge a premium for access. But that’s the exception, not the norm. $50 to $150 per year is a more typical price point for a Reporter newsletter.

Advertising can also be a supplemental source of income for these newsletters, though we’ve seen that local newsletters are typically more likely to include ads than other sorts of Reporter newsletters. (Some reporters, fairly, see a potential conflict of interest if they take advertising — they worry it may limit their ability to accurately report out stories. With a local newsletter, advertising is often a more natural match.) For a local newsletter, advertising can bring in tens of thousands of dollars or more in additional revenue, depending on the size and engagement of the audience.

One more revenue stream to mention: Some Reporter newsletters, like the Charlotte Ledger, are branching out into local events. These open up possibilities for both ticket sales and advertising partnerships. 

The Writer

What does it mean to have a Writer newsletter?

Newsletters are a natural fit for prolific writers — it’s an easy outlet for writing and publishing essays and other creative work for their audience. Chris La Tray uses An Irritable Métis for personal essays and updates. Lyz Lenz includes a mix of reported stories and recommendations in Men Yell at Me. Necole Kane shares personal stories and reflections in Hello Necole. Rega Jha writes twice-monthly essays in Small Scenes. Kara Cutruzzula created Brass Ring Daily to share daily tips for creativity

But these Writer newsletters go beyond essays or brief notes — and sometimes, beyond writing itself. Edith Zimmerman shares original comics in Drawing Links, Isaac Fitzgerald interviews other writers (while walking around New York) for Walk It Off, and Robin Sloan writes a newsletter that changes topics so frequently, it’s tough to even describe it.

The Writer newsletter is simply that: A platform for writers to share their work, in whatever format they choose, with fans.

How big are the audiences for Writer newsletters?

Compared to other types of newsletters, the Writer newsletter is limited by one thing: The size of a writer’s existing audience. A national name, like Chuck Palahniuk, might be able to build an audience of tens or hundreds of thousands of readers. For many writers, even reaching a few thousand readers might be a more realistic goal. That being said, these readers tend to be loyal, regular readers who genuinely look forward to seeing a favorite author’s name in their inbox — and they may also be the types of readers who buy that writer’s next book or attend their next live reading.

How do Writer newsletters grow?

These newsletters typically see an initial surge, mostly through social media promotion, when a writer first announces the newsletter. Additional growth may come via sharing or shout-outs from other authors or publications in their field.

How do Writer newsletters make money?

For many in this space, the primary goal isn’t to monetize the newsletter — it’s to build an audience who’ll be willing to buy their next book or creative work.

But many writers do still choose to monetize through a subscription, which often costs $50 to $100 per year, with readers receiving essays or original content in exchange for the subscription fee. Some writers are even using newsletters to publish new books, with chapters delivered exclusively to paying supporters.

What happens if my newsletter or goals are a little different?

Most of the newsletters we’ve worked with or looked at fit into one of these five categories, and several blur between multiple categories. But if your newsletter doesn’t fit, it doesn’t mean that you can’t grow or monetize it. What you’re doing might be so unique that the result is uncategorizable — but if you have a unique perspective plus a unique audience, that’s still a great combination for a newsletter concept. From there, it’s up to you to build it into something your readers will love.

Or maybe you have a different question: Is my newsletter a failure if I don’t monetize it? The answer: Of course not!

Many in the newsletter space are using email as a platform for personal or professional growth, and that’s often a wise strategic play. If that’s the case, you might be setting goals that you can’t track in your email service provider or Google Analytics. Think about these four categories of goals:

• Personal goals — Something you try just for yourself (i.e. I want to use my newsletter to build a weekly writing habit).
• Professional goals — Something to help grow your career (i.e. I want to do more public speaking, and my newsletter can open doors for me to do that).
• Leadership goals — Something you want to do for your industry (i.e. I want to build a space where others can learn from my experience).
• Learning goals — Something you want to get better at through your newsletter (i.e. I want to code, so I’ll learn the basics of HTML/CSS and use those skills to create email templates for my newsletter).

Try to set a few different goals. You might find that your newsletter can be hugely successful even if it doesn’t make a single dollar. Or perhaps you’re happy with a smaller amount of monetization that gives your newsletter a wider reach and keeps your potential options open. 

Whatever you choose, there is no single path here — it’s up to you to decide how to get the most out of your newsletter.

Starting a newsletter can be an important business and creative development. It’s one we recommend approaching with care and consideration so you can set yourself up for success, however you choose to define it.

So what’s next?

Once you’ve identified the right model for your newsletter, there’s a key next step: Picking the right email platform. We looked at six great options:

• AWeber
• Beehiiv
• ConvertKit
• Ghost
• Mailchimp
• Substack

In this guide, we’ll walk through what makes each of these platforms so useful, what they cost, and why they might be right for you.

AWeber, Beehiiv, ConvertKit, Ghost, Mailchimp, or Substack: Which Is The Right ESP For Your Indie Newsletter?

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