It’s 2025. Is It Still Worth Launching a Newsletter?

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I run a business where I consult with newsrooms, non-profits, and independent writers about newsletter strategy. I run a website where I write all about newsletters. I even have a newsletter all about newsletters.

But a few days ago, I got a question from a reader that made me pause: “I’ve never launched a newsletter before, though I’ve been thinking about doing so for a few years. Am I too late? Is it still worth launching a newsletter?”

What I told that reader is that it’s both an incredibly exciting and challenging time to be building a strategy around the inbox. But I can’t ignore the second part of that statement: It is a challenging time to be working in the inbox.

So even though I’m one of the industry’s biggest cheerleaders for newsletters, I want to do something a little different today and take a closer look at the challenges facing the newsletter space. (Spoiler alert: I’ll also explain why I think there’s still a big enough opportunity to justify the investment in newsletters.)

Why you should be skeptical of the newsletter space

Competition in the inbox

Let’s start with the thing I hear most often from clients and readers: There are a lot of newsletters out there already — maybe too many newsletters. Pick just about any topic and you’ll find a newsletter about it. Go to the bookstore, grab a random book off the shelf, and search for the author’s name plus the word “newsletter,” and if they’re still alive, you’re pretty much guaranteed to find that they have a newsletter. I try to avoid mentioning to casual acquaintances that I work with newsletters — I never know what someone might ask if they find out. (One parent in the daycare pick-up line once asked me, “What’s Heather Cox Richardson like?”, as though all the newsletter writers in their inbox hang out in the same place after work.)

All of those newsletters mean that there is a lot of competition for a reader’s attention. If you’re a newsroom, for instance, you used to just compete with other traditional publications. Now, your biggest competition might be an independent writer on a platform like Beehiiv or Ghost.

The other piece of this: All of these new products mean that the bar for newsletters has been raised — significantly so. Ten years ago, a publisher like the New York Times could have a flagship newsletter that was basically just an RSS feed of their most recent stories. Now, readers expect to see something curated and written by a personality they trust. If you don’t deliver that for them, readers will be able to easily find an alternative newsletter that gives them the content, the format, and the perspectives they want.

The threat from algorithms and AI

One thing I’ve always loved about email: There’s no single company that controls the inbox. I worked at BuzzFeed at the absolute height of the social media era, when a single post on Facebook could immediately drive thousands of readers to our site. I always worried that one day, Facebook might change their algorithm and suddenly turn the traffic spigot off. (They eventually did.) But the inbox has always been different. There are so many crucial partners in the email space — the inboxes (Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo), the email service providers (AWeber, Klaviyo, SendGrid), and the security companies (Barracuda, Spamhaus). No one company decides what readers see in the inbox, which means that your audience gets to decide if your emails are worth reading.

In theory, at least.

But as inboxes like Apple Mail and Gmail continue to own a larger and larger piece of the email landscape, they are exerting more control over the inbox. Both Apple and Gmail offer a tabbed inbox, with certain “priority” messages landing at the top of the inbox, while other newsletters get pushed to other tabs. Gmail has started using artificial intelligence to summarize newsletters, meaning that a reader might not even see the content or the calls to action you’ve crafted inside that email — they could quickly read a summary, then move on. 

We’re still in the early days of the AI era, and it’s easy to imagine that AI will continue to worm its way into the inbox over the coming years. It’s entirely possible that in the future, readers might have less control over what they see in their inboxes — AI tools might decide for them.

Measuring success has never been harder

But forget about future threats from AI: Changes are happening right now that make it hard to truly understand what’s happening with your newsletters. Metrics like open rate or click rate have never been perfect, but they’ve at least pointed you in the right direction of how readers behaved. That started to change in 2021 when Apple rolled out their Mail Privacy Protection program (MPP), in which Apple will open emails on behalf of their users. That has led to significant inflation in open rates. Most of my clients are seeing open rates that are 10 to 20% higher than before MPP, and in some cases, the inflation in open rate even higher than that.

When MPP rolled out, many brands shifted towards using click rate as a key metric, but even click rates are now tough to measure. Security bots are clicking on links to try to keep users safe from spam, and it’s affecting your click rate. One email platform, Omeda, found that in the first three months of 2025, 71% of all clicks in newsletters came from a bot, not a human. (Not all email platforms are seeing this rate of bot clicks. Leaders at some platforms have told Inbox Collective that they see bot click rates in the single digits, though even that level of clicks is a trend worth monitoring.) I’ve seen cases where a newsletter might see several thousand clicks on a link, but the number of human clicks might number in the dozens. I think every team should spend more time using their data to make decisions — but what do you do if you can’t trust your own data?

Plus, there’s lots of data you can’t get from your email service provider. There are tools that can measure how long a reader spends reading a newsletter, but they only measure up to a few seconds of read time. That might be enough for an ecommerce brand, but what about the newsletter writer who just sent an essay that takes five or ten minutes to read? They don’t really know if a reader actually read to the end. Other digital platforms can offer far more robust data than email can.

It’s getting harder to grow an email list

Many publishers and businesses are seeing declines in traffic from social media or search platforms. If you’re a newsroom or a non-profit, fewer new readers on your site means fewer readers to convert to your newsletter. The tactics that teams used to run on their sites — like using pop-ups or registration walls to convert new readers to newsletter subscribers — are most effective if you’re continuing to bring in new readers. What happens if Google continues to cut off search traffic in favor of AI-powered results, or if more people shift towards using tools like ChatGPT as a primary search tool? 

Take Inbox Collective as a decent case study of a site that relies on search to bring in potential newsletter subscribers. In the four years I’ve been publishing stories on this website, Google has driven more than 71,000 visitors to my website. ChatGPT has driven 416.

There are new regulations that affect email

The United States is still a bit of a Wild West when it comes to the inbox — our main email law is the CAN-SPAM Act, which was passed more than 20 years ago. But to our north, there’s Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL), and Europe has the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), both of which put real restrictions on how senders can opt readers into certain newsletters or store subscriber data. To be clear: I think these laws are a very good thing for readers, and I wish the U.S. would update its email laws to keep unwanted email out of inboxes.

But if you’re operating a newsletter in Europe, there are going to be things you’re going to need to do in order to stay compliant with local email laws. One example: Many of my European clients used to send newsletters via popular email platforms like Mailchimp. After GDPR rolled out, Mailchimp couldn’t guarantee that all of their data would be stored within Europe — a GDPR requirement — and those clients moved all of their newsletters to Europe-based email service providers. These are additional factors that teams need to weigh before launching a newsletter strategy.

Why you should still invest in the newsletter space

The inbox is a unique digital space

Despite these challenges, there is still so much value in email. I like to think of the inbox as a digital living room — it’s a private space that is still largely controlled by your readers. They decide which newsletters they let in and which they kick out. On social media platforms, the algorithm will put content into your feed whether or not you’ve chosen to follow it. In the inbox, the only way in is for a reader to choose to subscribe to your newsletter.

What that means is that if you can get a reader’s email address, you can build a relationship with them for years to come. And there’s no immediate threat to the inbox as a core piece of a reader’s digital life. Plenty of tools, from social media to Slack, have promised to kill off email, and yet, the inbox is still here, and most of us check it multiple times per day (or per hour!). It’s still the most-commonly used tool to communicate with friends, family, and colleagues, and you need an email address to log into just about any site on the internet. If you’re investing in newsletters, you can be confident that your audience will still be using email for years to come.

Email plays a key role in every part of your strategy

When clients ask why I got so excited about email all those years ago, I always tell them: There’s nothing else that does what email can do.

Want to drive traffic to your website?

Need to grow your audience?

Trying to find a way to build reader habit and loyalty?

Want to drive revenue from your newsletter?

Looking to retain those paying supporters?

Email is the only digital tool I know of that can do all of that at scale.

Plus, newsletters are becoming a primary way for your audience to consume your content. I’ve yet to meet someone who says that checking their inbox is the best part of their day — but I’ve met so many people who say that they always look forward to reading a specific newsletter from a favorite brand or writer.

Email is the gateway to first-party data

An email address can be the first step to unlocking a lot of information about your readers. You can use strategies like progressive profiling to learn more about your newsletter list. Among the big data points I’m looking at with my clients:

• Demographic data — Where do they live? What do they do for work? Did they go to a university? How much money do they make?
• Behavioral data — What types of content do they like to read or engage with?
• Psychographic data — What topics do they care about? What are they interested in? 

That data can inform the content you create for your audience, but it can also be incredibly valuable if you’re building out an ad strategy for your newsletter list. Changes from companies like Apple or Google have hit the ad industry hard, and many of these advertisers are struggling to find the right types of readers to target. The more you know about your newsletter list, the more valuable your readers might be to an advertiser.

Plus, it is possible to use third-party tools to get more accurate open and click rate data, filtering out those bot opens to help you understand human behavior. 

Growth is still possible, even if the tactics have changed

In the 5+ years I worked at BuzzFeed, I think we spent less than $10,000 total to grow our email list. The truth was, we didn’t really need to spend money to grow. Every day, social media platforms would send millions of new readers to our website. All we needed to do was launch good newsletters — and then find different ways to promote them on our website.

But the rules for growth have changed. The fastest-growing newsletters aren’t necessarily those from large publishers anymore. In some cases, they barely even have a web presence besides a landing page to sign up for their newsletter. These days, it’s the writers and orgs that are leaning into paid growth or partnerships that are seeing list growth. 

Yes, if you have a website, you should still optimize it to convert readers to subscribers, but being willing to spend money on ads or to collaborate with other newsletters might be more important to your long-term growth strategy. The good news is that these pathways to growth still exist — it’s certainly not too late to grow your newsletter.

Automations are a superpower

There’s a reason that I prioritize building out a welcome series when I work with a new client: Automations like that give you the chance to engage, convert, and retain audiences on autopilot.

Every time a new reader joins your list, you can use automations to greet a reader, build a relationship with them, and encourage them to support your work. Once you’ve gotten them to pay, you can set up automations to keep them engaged and make sure they continue to support your work well into the future.

Other digital platforms might offer more reach — even the biggest newsletters might only reach a few million readers, while a post on a social platform like TikTok could potentially be seen by far more people — but no other digital channel gives you the chance to use automations to engage readers at crucial moments in the relationship. No matter what you might be sending via newsletter that week, you can use these automations to nudge readers to take the right next step at the right moment.

Nothing drives revenue like email

Your email audience is still incredibly valuable. Many of the teams that I work with find that email is their best digital tool for driving readers to pay and support their work. It’s the engine that consistently drives results for newsletters big and small.

The best part is that an email audience can be monetized in multiple ways. You can build out a reader revenue strategy — selling a paid subscription, offering a paid membership, or asking readers to donate. You can sell products or courses to this audience. You can monetize your list via advertising. You can nudge readers to pay for events or sell merch to them. Email is just so versatile when it comes to driving revenue.

Is email a perfect platform? Absolutely not. But it’s a surprisingly powerful and versatile tool for so many writers and teams — and it’s certainly not too late to launch that newsletter to take advantage of the inbox.

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