Diversify, Monetize, Share: The Republic’s Strategy to Build a Mission-Led Newsletter

This case study is presented by Beefree, an email and landing page builder that helps you create better, and faster. With over 1,700 free templates and an intuitive drag-and-drop editor, freelancers and teams can quickly design high-performing emails and landing pages. Build emails in a fraction of the time and deploy them easily through platforms like ActiveCampaign, HubSpot, or Mailchimp. 82% of users say they build emails faster thanks to Beefree — and 63% have seen click-through rates improve by more than 11%. Start creating better, faster emails today. Get started for free, and upgrade as you grow.

The Republic, a website and newsletter published in Nigeria, has a feature that most digital-first publishers nowadays lack: a print edition.

Wale Lawal founded the Republic in 2018 as a student publication with the aim of publishing academic writing about critical African issues. He got his start writing opinion pieces in college before going on to intern at the U.K.-based think tank Chatham House, which published its own magazines and journals. “Based on that experience, I saw that it only took about two to three people to do it,” Wale says. “They were able to ask critical questions. I left thinking, ‘I want to do that.’”

In 2019, the Republic expanded into a print edition using inexpensive local printers to create a high-quality print product that stood out in the Nigerian market. In 2020, a social justice movement against police brutality called #EndSars inspired Lawal and his team to expand their coverage. “Nobody was talking about it,” Wale says. “Legacy media in Nigeria has a lot of media capture; there was a lot of censorship.” He began to hire freelance writers to contribute articles.

That moment led to massive expansion for the Republic, based out of Lagos, the largest city in Nigeria. In the years since, they’ve grown from a student publication into a publication with eight full-time staffers, six interns, and more than 1,000 freelance contributors across Africa. And as the Republic has grown the team, they’ve expanded their business. Like the New Yorker, they’ve got a print subscription business, an ad business, and a shop where readers can purchase prints or merch. Like the Financial Times, they both publish original reporting and also have a consulting arm. And like many indie operators, they’re thinking about launching subscriber-only newsletters and also have a donation strategy.

The Republic has raised a fundraising round to allow for continued expansion. Nigeria is a massive market, with a population larger than that of Germany, the United Kingdom, and France combined. There’s still room for the Republic to build a publication with a significant reach.

Currently, the Republic’s newsletter goes out to about 13,000 subscribers through three products:

• The Republic Today, a daily newsletter
• The Republic This Week, a weekly edition
• First Draft, an interview series about books

Their newsletter is free and funded partly by donations and quarterly sponsorship agreements. Subscribers can expect emails covering cultural topics like African food, architecture, music, and female filmmakers, as well as deeper dives on issues like misogyny and feminism in Nigerian culture, what drives some Nigerians to pay for citizenship in other countries, and the role of protests in Africa. Plus, issues that ask big questions like, “Why is food so expensive in Nigeria?” 

So for the latest edition of The International Inbox, our series of conversations with newsletter operators based outside the United States, we talked about what the Republic will do with its fundraising round, how Wale approaches growth in such a large market, the challenges of building a paid product in a country where the minimum wage is just $44 per month; why print products make sense in Nigeria; and why newsletters matter in Africa. 

(This interview has been condensed and edited.)

What have you been focusing on lately at the Republic?

We raised $800,000 as of earlier this year. By last year, I knew we had raised enough for me to work on the Republic full-time. A lot of that funding is to help us to become more of a fully-fledged media company. A company that we’re trying to model the way that we work after is the Juggernaut. They focus on smart stories covering South Asia, but they primarily focus on the South Asian diaspora. Then we also look at Politico because they run a hybrid publication, similar to how we run a hybrid publication, where we also publish in print. A lot of our print strategy is modeled after that but adapted for Nigerian and African audiences.

Can we, using the funds that we’ve raised, start to become more like those companies? We’re trying to transition from a student publication into becoming a fully-fledged media company in terms of the kinds of coverage we could do and the types of multimedia formats. Some exciting areas for us include a lot more work on video, doing a lot more work with audio, and making upgrades to our websites. 

What currency do you use to fund the Republic?

We’re registered in Nigeria and the U.S. We have a lot of funding or revenue in [Nigeria’s currency,] Naira, dollars, euros, and pounds. We do all of our fundraising, planning, and budgeting in dollars because the Nigerian Naira is very volatile.

How does fundraising relate to your subscription model for the newsletter?

Our business model cuts across four key areas. The first is paid subscriptions, which happens to be the largest. The idea is that people pay to read our website. We’ve always been website-first. When we started, we put the newsletters on the backseat. We thought it was nice to have. It’s only over the years that we realized that newsletters are an actual product. You need somebody focused on the newsletter.

The other way that we make revenue is through direct sales. Our websites also have our online shop, where you can buy merchandise. By 2019, we had launched subscriptions because we had this bet that if people liked what we were doing, they would pay for it. We also decided to launch in print because we saw the market landscape, and there were a lot of digital, Africa-focused publications out across Nigeria and many other African markets. The print quality tends to be very low. Imagine you could produce something that is even, in terms of quality, much better than the New Yorker or the Economist, and we could do this locally and cheaply. If you could do that, that would beat any print magazine in the market, and that would help us stand out. 

The strategy works by placing the print magazine in random locations or in places where we’ve partnered with businesses, like airlines, hotels, bookstores, wherever. You pick up the magazine; if you want to read the magazine, if you want to share it, you then scan the QR code, you can register, and then we can begin that journey. 

The newsletters also operate on their own. When you’re reading an article on the website, you might see a nudge: “Subscribe to receive articles like this, directly to your mailbox.” We also generate revenue through advertising and sponsorship. 

The final way that we generate revenue is through what we call professional services. We offer a lot of advisory work — consulting work to corporate clients. We’ve done work for the U.N., we’ve done work for the Open Society Foundations, we’ve done work for a number of organizations who are either looking to research the African landscape or looking to work with us on a particular project, and that tends to deliver a lot of revenue as well. There’s grant income that comes in as well. 

Where the newsletter fits into this is: We were paying a lot of attention to social media platforms. Twitter, for example, used to be a very good source for just putting out links to buy a subscription. Over the years, Twitter became very unreliable, so we started to think about how we could even own our own distribution channels.

Newsletters felt like low-hanging fruit because all we needed to do was pay for a Mailchimp subscription and then just start to pay attention to how we connect our newsletters to our website.

We’ve now realized that there’s a way that you can monetize this even further and separate it from the bigger website work that we’ve been doing. We’ve started to see a lot of revenue lines open in terms of advertising, sponsorships, and even partnerships. Now, the big question for us is, as we’re moving to or transitioning into this fully-fledged media company, can we create a paid-for newsletter service? Either one that is combined with our existing paid subscriptions or one that we set up independently and can run separately. That’s how we’re looking at it. But for now, we’ve been able to generate advertising and sponsorships, even just direct sales. We were able to integrate with WooCommerce, which allows people to pay directly when they click on a link on our website. It takes them to our shop immediately, and we can register them through our newsletter as well. It’s become a three-way thing for us. 

How much are you personally writing and editing versus what other editors and freelancers handle?

We have a team of eight core staff members and six interns who also work with us. That’s a team of fourteen people working full-time.

We work exclusively with a network of over 1,000 African freelancers spread across the continent under the diaspora who send us articles. 

I will write the Monday newsletter, and then other editors will manage the Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Sunday newsletter in collaboration with our editors, but we tend to keep the newsletters very collaborative. We have different editors who write the intros of each newsletter. 

We have the commercial newsletters, and these are more company announcements, internal updates if we’re launching a campaign, sales, deals, those types of things — taking our readers more through the business side of the work that we do.

Every quarter, we review the performance of our newsletters. I lead that conversation, to think through the design aspects of that. We also have a data analyst on the team who measures the performance on a weekly basis to figure out the open rates, the click-through rates, why certain stories are doing better than others, and what kinds of feedback we should incorporate. Then there are quarterly surveys that we send out to our audience via newsletters.

What is the newsletter landscape like in Nigeria?

The Nigerian newsletter market is very emergent, and it’s been emergent for a long time. It’s very small. It’s not as big or as developed as markets like South Africa’s, where you have a ton of different newsletter platforms, like Daily Maverick, that run into the millions in subscribers. The top newsletter in our markets would be TechCabal. They’re a tech-focused publication. They run a daily newsletter with 150,000 subscribers [as of 2023]. They’ve also been doing this for much longer. In terms of seed funding, and in terms of growth, they’re way ahead of us. We’re learning a lot of lessons from them. They raised $2.3 million for their seed funding, and they were founded in 2013; between that time, they were able to generate 150,000 subscribers for their newsletters, and the newsletter is free as well. 

The big challenge with newsletters in Nigeria is the cost of data. Data typically costs around 39 cents per gigabyte. Up until this year, the minimum wage in Nigeria was $20 a month. That lets you in on just how expensive it is. As of this year, the minimum wage has been increased to $44. It’s still not that much per month, and so data tends to be a very high cost.

The data cost also explains why there’s still such a strong print play in Nigeria because most people find data very expensive. However, Nigeria also has a very high mobile penetration. Mobile phones are everywhere, and a lot of these mobile phones are able to host platforms like WhatsApp. 

WhatsApp tends to be a very powerful platform for messaging and for sharing information. We’ve been learning a lot from platforms like South Africa’s the Continent, a WhatsApp newspaper that was launched in 2021.

The Continent can do this because they create these PDFs and they distribute them through WhatsApp. WhatsApp compresses the sizes, so it’s a lot easier to manage. They’ve been able to use this WhatsApp newspaper as a way to combat misinformation and to meet people where they are. [Editor’s note: A 2024 report from Pew Research Center found that 54% of adults in Nigeria use WhatsApp. In South Africa, where the Continent is based, that number is 71%.)

A big question that we’ve been asking ourselves is, what integration with WhatsApp can we have to explore that platform as a potential distribution channel?

Where is the majority of your readership from? 

40% of our readers are based in Nigeria, and the other 60% are spread across the diaspora. Our top five countries are the U.S., the U.K., Canada, South Africa, and Kenya, in that order. 

How do you describe your audience when you pitch the Republic to advertisers?

We describe our audience as thought leaders or people who are trying to become thought leaders. I think a lot of our readers are very interested in a more rigorous understanding of Africa. They tend to be researchers, or they tend to be professional executives who do a lot of research but are not usually able to find the information that they need in journal articles in databases. 

We think of our readers as people connected across the board by a need for research. This includes academics who need to do research for papers, students, consultants, and business people who need industry overviews and industry reports. It includes cultural organizations and embassies who need to understand more of the cultural landscape of where they’re in. 

When you send out your surveys, what is your favorite response to get, that makes you think, “We’re doing what we set out to do”?

It’s the question of how likely they are to share the newsletter with other people. We typically get a rate of 80%. That’s very important to us, especially when we’re thinking about our newsletter growth strategy because it’s going to involve a lot of our existing subscribers. 

The big question that we had when we hit 10,000 subscribers was asking ourselves where the next 10,000 were going to come from. What if we could set up our existing subscribers as ambassadors? That involves different types of things, from looking at referral programs to rewards we can give to subscribers who share our newsletter.

That ambassadorship and the likelihood of sharing the newsletter are good sources of confidence and validation. There’s a big thing in the media space today about mission-led publications, and we like to think of ourselves as a mission-led publication, trying to tell a more progressive story about Nigeria and the broader African continent. 

When people tell us that they’re likely to share our work and likely to share our newsletter, it helps us understand that they see themselves in us. That’s crucial to our branding and to our reader experience overall.

What are other growth tactics you rely on?

We’re looking at how we can start to advertise our newsletters in other media outlets where we expect our readers to go; that’s one key area. The second is that we get a lot of people who sign up to submit articles to our site. We’re looking at how we can embed that newsletter pop-up form so that instead of, as part of your registration, we can sign you up for our newsletter automatically. One of the things that we’re even thinking about now is whether we can say, “Okay, to read this article, and instead of paying, just give us your email address and subscribe, and then you can unlock the article.” We’re thinking about ways that we could do that using our existing platforms. 

The strategy cuts across two formats. The first is working with existing subscribers and turning them into ambassadors. The second is finding new readers, wherever they are, by advertising in publications that they read or using the newsletters as a way to promote and drive promotion. If you want a free magazine, instead of paying for the magazine, just give us your email address. That strategy will then help us to identify readers who are interested in our work but may not know about us already.  

What have you learned about building newsletters at the Republic?

Newsletters are not just a platform; they’re a product. We made the mistake of just thinking about it as a subset of a platform. I’m glad that we learned over time, but I think if we had thought about it as a distinct product, we would have been able to rack up more attention early on. It’s not second-tier; it’s not behind the scenes. It’s an actual product, and it can actually give you its own audience, its own monetization stream, all of those things. It’s not a small space at all. 

The second thing is about innovation. There’s a group that we work with called the Nigeria Media Innovation Program. Their lead, Bilal Randeree, told me that innovation isn’t just this grand thing. It doesn’t just mean paying a big amount to get AI to write your newsletters. Innovation is literally taking things a step up. I think that that really changed the way that we approach newsletters. 

Initially, I thought that if we scaled this newsletter, we would need to invest in huge technology and do all of these fancy things. What I’ve learned over time is that it’s not really about those fancy technologies. It’s more about upgrading the work that you’re doing in as simple a way as possible. What that has meant for us is thinking about things like the design of the newsletters. It’s exploring different platforms. It’s re-introducing daily quizzes. We have done it in the past, and we retired it because I felt we probably needed more tech investment. But we found that those daily quizzes have helped us build and retain audiences because readers look forward to the answers in the next edition. 

Little things like that can actually make a big difference. A newsletter doesn’t have to require so much investment. You can actually start small but just have a very unique and interesting way of doing things. And that’s innovation as well.

Four things newsletters can learn from the Republic

1.) Diversify your revenue — The Republic leans into several distinct revenue opportunities: Paid subscriptions, ads, consulting, donations, sales from their shop, and grants. A solo newsletter operator might be able to rely on just one or two revenue streams, but building out into different streams gives you more stability in the months when sales or subscriptions may lag. 

2.) Know your audience and who they want to be — Nigeria is a massive country, but instead of trying to reach everyone, the Republic is focused on a core audience: thought leaders with a connection to Nigeria. That focus helps them identify the right types of content that they should be producing for their readers.

3.) Treat newsletters as their own distinct product — Many publications still treat newsletters as a platform whose primary purpose is driving traffic back to their website. Newsletters absolutely can be a good traffic driver, but they can be their own valuable product, with their own audience and monetization strategies, too. 

4.) Identify others around the world who you can learn from — The Republic looks to other orgs around the world for inspiration, from more niche media (the Juggernaut) to legacy publications (the Economist). Their goal isn’t simply to copy — instead, they try to adapt certain tactics from multiple sources and blend them together to make their own unique media property.

Thanks to our sponsor

The stories you’re reading on inboxcollective.com are brought to you by Beefree, which makes designing great emails and landing pages better and faster. Their drag-and-drop builder and mobile-friendly templates work seamlessly in all email clients, from Gmail to Outlook. With Beefree, you can save time and still create standout designs that drive results. Easily deploy your emails to platforms like ActiveCampaign, HubSpot, or Mailchimp. Get started for free, and upgrade as you grow.