The Rise of the $100k Newsletter Operator

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When I talk with people who run their own newsletters, one aspiration comes up repeatedly: They want to make the newsletter their full-time job, but feel they can’t until they hit a certain revenue goal.

When I ask what that milestone is, I hear a common answer: $100,000 in annual revenue.

There’s nothing magic about that number — there are lots of writers who leave their jobs and work full-time on their newsletter when they hit $50k or $75k in revenue, and some who maintain a side project long after they’ve crossed the $100k mark. But there’s something about reaching six figures in revenue that feels lucrative and legitimate to many newsletter operators. Making that first dollar is an achievement; making the hundred-thousandth is a milestone.

But how do you make that leap from $1 to $100,000? What are all the ways that a newsletter can bring in revenue? Is it better to focus on just one monetization tactic or try multiple options? And what can we learn from newsletter operators who’ve broken through that $100k ceiling?

Let’s learn from three newsletter operators — Zain Kahn of Superhuman; Quinn Emmett of Important, Not Important; and Pete Huang of The Neuron — who have reached the six-figure milestone and hear about the different tactics they used to get there. 

How newsletters can make money

There are a few routes by which newsletters typically earn money. Before we talk about how to get to that $100k milestone, let’s review some of the common ways newsletters make money.

Selling a subscription or membership

Some of the biggest newsletters on the internet monetize through either subscriptions or membership. Much of the success with modern paid newsletter products can be traced back to one newsletter: Stratechery, by Ben Thompson. (It’s considered the standard of the paid newsletter space — many of the most successful paid newsletters can be described as “Stratechery for (insert your topic area here).”

Paid newsletters typically build around one of these four pillars:

• Content — This is the most common benefit of a paid offering. You create some sort of content — like premium articles or podcasts — on a regular basis for your readers, and they pay for access to it.
• Conversation — Some newsletters offer discussions as part of their paid offering. This might mean regular interviews with experts, like live videoconference conversations where paying supporters can join and ask you and your experts questions. Or it might mean creating opportunities for you to engage directly with readers, either 1-to-1 or in a group setting.
• Community — You may want to build out a private community through Discord or a Facebook group, where readers can engage with and learn from one another. This might work particularly well if you regularly join in to ask questions or share ideas.
• Desire to support you — Readers may want to pay for your newsletter simply because they like you and want to see you do well. They care less about the benefits — they just want to support your work.

What’s the difference between a subscription and a membership? The terms are often used interchangeably, but if you want to be precise, subscription usually refers to a newsletter where access to exclusive content is the sole benefit, while membership refers to newsletters that offer access to something else — like conversation or community — instead of or in addition to content.

Pricing for a paid product can vary based on a handful of factors, like how niche an audience is, whether it’s a B2B or B2C product and the exclusivity of the content. Matt Navarra’s newsletter about social media, Geekout, for instance, offers access to an exclusive WhatsApp group for $6 a month. Ottawa Lookout, a newsletter covering local news in Canada’s capital city, encourages readers to become members ($125 per year) to access bonus newsletters and support their work. Last Money In has a paid weekly newsletter where investors can find startups they can finance. It’s a product that might help someone make money, so the pricing is in a completely different ballpark, costing $3,000 a year. (I’ve written more about specific pricing tactics here.)

Something to consider if you’re rolling out a paid product: You’ll probably end up using Stripe to process payments. Stripe is free to set up, but it takes $0.30 of every payment you collect plus 2.9% of the total payment amount.

There’s not much you can do about Stripe’s costs, but you may end up paying fees to your email platform on top of Stripe’s cut. Some platforms, like Beehiiv, take 0% of any payments; others take up to 10% of your revenue as their cut. At the start, giving up a percentage of fees may not seem significant, but that could change as you grow your revenue stream. (I wrote more in this guide about understanding the impact of these fees on your newsletter.)

Asking readers for donations or tips

Some newsletters opt to use a digital tip jar, often with a platform like Buy Me a Coffee, where readers can voluntarily choose to support the writers they like. Other newsletters lean into the non-profit model, where they ask readers to donate on a one-time or recurring basis to support their work.

Selling advertising in your newsletter

Many newsletters monetize via ads. But there are a few different formats that tend to work for advertising in newsletters:

• Title sponsorships, where a newsletter is presented by a specific sponsor.
• Native ads, which might include a block of text highlighting a sponsor’s content, are usually written in your newsletter’s own voice.
• Secondary ads, like job listings, classifieds, or event listings, which are sold at a lower rate than title sponsorships or native ads.
• Banner ads, where a sponsor gets an image-based ad within the newsletter, including a link out to their brand.
• Dedicated emails, where the entire body of the newsletter promotes your advertiser.

You may be able to sell these directly to your advertisers — many newsletters can sell an ad for about $20 to $50 per every 1,000 readers who open your newsletter. (This rate is sometimes known as a CPM — cost per mille — or CPO — cost per opens.) But your email platform can also help you sell ads. Newsletters in Beehiiv’s ad network, for instance, are offered the opportunity to run ads that Beehiiv’s gone out and sold for them. The newsletter gets to choose which advertisers they want to run and how the ad should be displayed. After the ad runs, the newsletter gets paid out for the ad. (Last month, Beehiiv sold more than $1.2 million in ads across their ad network.) 

“I think it’s a very good place to start in the beginning,” Superhuman founder Zain Kahn said of Beehiiv’s ad network. “It gives you a chance to earn some money and work with sponsors, and test different ad formats.” For newsletters without a salesperson or that look to bring extra revenue via ads, an ad network like Beehiiv’s might be a great option for monetization.

Recommending other newsletters 

One of the fastest-growing monetization opportunities out there is also one of the simplest: Recommending other newsletters to your audience.

Tools like Beehiiv’s Boosts allow any newsletter to recommend other newsletters on the platform — and many of those newsletter will pay a set amount (often somewhere between $1-3) per email address you send their way. You could promote those newsletters within your newsletter, like Future Social does, or in a form after a reader signs up.

Even for a small newsletter, each promotion of another newsletter might bring in a few hundred dollars.

Selling courses or ebooks

Courses or ebooks can be a way to repackage what you know and sell it directly to readers.

Your newsletter doesn’t have to be huge to monetize through an ebook. Jen A. Miller, who writes Notes from a Hired Pen, has sold more than $12,000 in ebooks despite having fewer than 2,000 readers on her list. The secret: She’s got a loyal audience who loves reading about a specific topic (in her case, how to build your career as a freelance writer), and those readers are willing to buy her ebooks to learn from her.

More advanced newsletter operators may even build up a suite of products, like Miss Excel. As you’d probably guess from the name, Miss Excel, AKA Kat Norton, started with a series of on-demand courses about using Microsoft Excel but expanded to guides about other Microsoft products. Prices currently range from $44 (for a one-hour course on building Excel dashboards) to $1,197 (for a bundle of seven courses on products including Excel, Teams, and Word).

These products don’t need to be connected to work — or even designed to be taken online. Take Tricycle Day, a newsletter about psychedelics. They sell a $247 course all about how to grow your own mushrooms at home.

Selling merchandise or other products

Readers might want to show off their passion for your newsletter by purchasing original merch. Take Arnold’s Pump Club, a newsletter about health and wellness from Arnold Schwarzenegger. They sell T-shirts, sweatshirts, socks, and other original merchandise directly to readers through their store. (Shopify is a popular ecommerce option.)

Or take a newsletter like Exec Sum, which summarizes the latest news from Wall Street. Much of their merch has an ironic touch — a needlepoint pillow with the phrase, “Live. Laugh. Leverage.” sold out despite a $195 print point.

Using affiliate links

Many newsletters, like Amanda Stern’s How to Live, frequently recommend books to readers, driving readers to a store like Bookshop. When readers buy the book, the newsletter gets a small referral fee. (Bookshop pays affiliates 10% of all sales. Other platforms, like Amazon, typically offer a lower referral fee.)

Some newsletters carve out even more lucrative affiliate deals, like Daily Drop, a newsletter about earning and redeeming frequent flier miles. They’ve built out a series of guides about the benefits and drawbacks of different credit card options. If you apply for a card through their site, Daily Drop receives a payout from that credit card company.

Consulting, coaching, or teaching

For a business like mine, Inbox Collective, a newsletter is an amazing way to bring in new consulting clients. Readers who read my work get to see how I think through different challenges. Then, when they need help with their newsletter, I’m top-of-mind as someone who can help them.

I’m certainly not alone in this. Matt McGarry turned his list, Newsletter Operator, into a funnel for his paid marketing agency. Or take a look at David C. Baker, who has only 13,000 readers on his list but uses that as the engine of a consulting business that brought in $1.7 million last year.

Hosting events or workshops

Events can be a way to get a reader to engage more deeply with your content.

Take Blockworks, a daily newsletter all about crypto. They offer a variety of events, from their in-person conference, called Permissionless (tickets start at $199), to webinars, which are presented by sponsors.

Or look at Bulletpitch, which surfaces early-stage startups for investors and has run a series of IRL events presented by sponsors.

Indirect revenue

Your newsletter can make money in unexpected ways. Writing a newsletter might open doors for paid speaking gigs, freelance writing jobs, consulting time, or other paid opportunities. For many newsletter writers, these gigs can often be some of the most profitable work they do—and those opportunities are possible because the newsletter gave them a platform to reach a wider audience.

Any of these monetization opportunities could help you build a strong revenue model for your newsletter. But as we’ll learn from the teams at Superhuman, Important, Not Important, and The Neuron, it’s crucial to experiment with multiple revenue streams and see if you can identify the best ways to bring in revenue to reach that $100k threshold.

Superhuman: Hyperfocus on the ad business

There’s a lot that surprised Zain Kahn after he launched Superhuman, a newsletter about artificial intelligence, in February 2023. One was the potential size of the audience. “I mostly wrote the newsletter for myself,” he said. “A lot of stuff was happening in AI, and I was spending a lot of time learning about it. I said, ‘I bet that there’s thousands of other people like me.’” Kahn couldn’t have predicted how right he’d be. Thirteen months after its launch, Superhuman boasts 600,000 readers, with open rates between 42 and 46%.

Audience growth brought a series of major changes. What started as a weekly product became a daily newsletter. (“So much started to happen in AI so fast, we just couldn’t fit everything into one issue.”) The newsletter started as a generalist product, then shifted focus towards a B2B audience.

As Kahn made those changes, he also looked to roll out different monetization opportunities. He tested out a paid subscription product early on but quickly scrapped it. “The subscription product bombed,” Kahn said. The path to $100k might have seemed easier, on paper at least, with a high-priced subscription, but it didn’t match what readers actually wanted. “The sponsorship model with daily sends was more aligned to what the reader wanted versus dishing out $100 a month to get more in-depth stuff.”

So Kahn started selling ads when he reached 10,000 readers. He dropped a line in a newsletter that he was opening up sponsorships for the next eight weeks, with ads that cost about $250 each. “It literally sold out within 24 hours,” he said. It was the lightbulb moment that showed he’d found a model that worked for him. A few weeks later, he opened up another two months of slots, with ads at double the price: $500. All the slots sold out again in just a day.

With that $500-per-ad rate, Kahn would be able to sell up to $2,500 a week in ads, and he’d only need to sell out about 80% of his ad inventory to reach six figures in sales. But Kahn expanded into new ad formats, allowing him to maximize the revenue from each send. His newsletter started with one ad. Now, each edition of Superhuman might have up to three ads:

• A main ad featuring an image and a few sentences of text usually placed towards the top of the newsletter.
• A secondary ad, with a similar format, placed lower down in the newsletter.
• A featured tool, placed with a daily section that recommends five AI tools. 

He’s continued to raise his rates. That featured tool, for instance, now costs $2,499 per issue, but as Kahn noted, it “has always done well for us. And the reason why it does well is because it’s aligned with the reader experience. A lot of readers open our newsletter because they want to learn about the latest AI tools.” That price point might seem high for a one-sentence ad placed two-thirds of the way through a 1,500-word email, but as long as the ad continues to deliver strong results for the advertiser, he’ll see demand for that ad slot.

Kahn said the key to his success with ad sales has been his ability to answer two key questions. The first was: Is this a B2C or B2B product? He’s leaned into the B2B angle, which has helped Superhuman identify sponsors who are a better fit for a business audience. 

The other key question is crucial for a newsletter in a competitive market: Are you hyper-niche or hyper-scale?

“You either are very hyper targeted to a very, very specific niche that no one else is covering,” he said. “You can go to sponsors within that niche and go, ‘Hey, do you want to buy from us?’ Or you’re one of the big guys — you have hundreds of thousands or millions of readers, and then you can sell an advertiser at scale.” There are so many newsletters about AI these days, so understanding where you sit is crucial. Most advertisers either look to reach a broad audience or an incredibly targeted one, but a newsletter stuck in the middle might struggle to sell ads.

As Superhuman grew in revenue, Kahn reinvested back in the business. To save time, he brought on Passionfroot, a self-serve tool that allows advertisers to book ad slots and make payments in one place. Later on, he hired a head of sales, Nev Santana, who’d previously worked in the B2B ad space, to help him continue to scale the business.

Would Kahn consider expanding into other revenue streams, like bringing back a paid subscription? “I have thought about it,” he said. “It’s just at the point where the current thing is working so well that I want to scale this out as much as I can before I start to divert focus.”

Important, Not Important: Experimenting with new formats

Unlike Superhuman, Important, Not Important has been a slow build. Quinn Emmett started it in 2018 as a side project. He’d read about big issues in the world and ask himself, “What the hell am I supposed to do about this?” The newsletter was his way of figuring out how to get involved — and how to tell others how they could join in, too.

For a long time, Emmett focused on keeping things small and sustainable. But then came his lightbulb moment: “It suddenly became clear to me that it was my prerogative to put this in front of more people who were looking for it, and so I needed to spend some money to grow it. And if you want to spend some money to grow it, you go, ‘Well, I gotta bring some money in.’”

Monetization started via a small membership program: $50 a year for readers to support him and the project. He’s experimented with a handful of benefits for members, like access to a feed of the stories Emmett’s recently read and recommends. He added a list of recommended books towards the bottom of the newsletter and uses Bookshop to bring in affiliate revenue.

But building Important, Not Important required additional opportunities beyond membership and affiliates. The obvious next revenue stream was advertising. The challenge was finding the right ad partners — there were major brands in the cryptocurrency space, for instance, that wanted to reach his audience, but he felt like they didn’t align with his values. Over time, Emmett started to find the right advertisers, partly thanks to regular surveys he ran of his audience. Readers told him which other newsletters they read, and he reached out to the brands who advertised in those newsletters to see if they’d like to work with him.

“There are a lot of people and brands trying to do the right thing,” he said. “Either, like, a better-for-you version of food, or home cleaning supplies, or 401(k) stuff. The least I can do for people who give a shit is put that in front of them — and if it means we make some money to be able to do our job, then that’s great.”

Emmett said there’s still room for growth on the ad side. “I should charge more than I do,” he admitted, “but I’d rather get advertisers in the door.” As the newsletter continues to grow, there will likely be opportunities to raise rates or roll out new ad formats that can earn more revenue.

Plus, like many newsletter operators who’ve hit that $100k mark, Emmett’s experimented with a few nontraditional monetization strategies. His most recent experiment is a fascinating one: He offers up an hour of time to any reader to discuss whatever they want to talk about. The calls cost $499, and readers pay upfront. But he doesn’t pitch himself as an expert on any topic or promise specific results. “There’s a reason I don’t call it therapy, coaching, consulting, or any of those things,” he said. “[I’m like] an informed friend at a bar.” 

He’s loved the calls he’s done so far, but the challenge is making it work with his schedule. “I have to try to do things that are scalable as much as I can because of my limited time,” he said.

Emmett’s long-term strategy is one that any newsletter operator hoping to reach that $100k threshold should take to heart: Try lots of stuff, see what works, then invest more in the strategies that pay off. “I do want to make sure that if we’re going to take something on, we can — at least eventually — pay for the work that goes into it,” he said. “But at first, we’ll take some risks.”

(Full transparency: Superhuman’s Zain Kahn and Important, Not Important’s Quinn Emmett both made small investments in Beehiiv.)

The Neuron: Diversifying revenue streams

When Pete Huang and his co-founder, Noah Edelman, first came up with the idea for The Neuron, the plan was simple: “If we can get 10,000 people reading this in any capacity, then we’ll think about what’s next.”

As with many AI newsletters, that milestone came quickly — they hit it within a month of their January 203 launch.

But monetization was another matter. Like with Superhuman, Huang and Edelman were building a newsletter about AI, but theirs was focused on a general audience. Who would the ideal advertisers be? They weren’t sure. “I think our most important thing was to figure out the profile of the companies,” Huang said. “Was this going to be AI hiring and talent agencies? Was it going to be services? Was it going to be startups that are building software?”

And then, there was the other big question: What was an ad actually worth? “We had no idea about pricing,” Huang said. “We were learning all this from scratch.” They got their hands on an early media kit from Morning Brew and used that to set the initial ad rates. They set up a Google Form so advertisers could contact them directly. 

Over time, they’ve figured out a lot of the answers for The Neuron. That ideal advertiser? It’s AI software startups, like sales tools or note-takers. The format for the ad? A sponsor’s logo at the top of the newsletter, and a native ad in the middle. What about their audience? It’s large and engaged — 400,000 subscribers, with a 45% open rate and 6% click-through rate. Huang and Edelman collected data to help advertisers understand why their audience is valuable (50% of their readers have a master’s degree or PhD, they said), and as they’ve grown, they’ve acquired four other AI newsletters and folded them into The Neuron. And as for the Google Form to process sales leads? Well, they’re still using it. (Sometimes, the simplest tactics just work.) They’re also thinking about using Beehiiv’s ad network to help fill any unsold ad inventory.

As they’ve successfully built up their ad business, that’s given The Neuron team the freedom to invest in other monetization channels that might not pay off for a while. “The long-term game requires you to build a lot of long-term relationships and trust, and that just takes time,” Huang said.

First, they launched a curated list of AI tools for business. The goal, as Huang described it, is to build “a true buyer’s guide” — a few dozen tools with reviews and recommendations. Some of the tools have affiliate links, but others don’t. “Having affiliate income not be your primary thing gives us the opportunity” to build something useful, Huang said, as opposed to a product designed to drive the highest possible commissions. Right now, it drives some revenue, but it’s a secondary source of revenue with long-term potential.

The other revenue opportunity is around courses. Huang and Edelman rolled out an Intro to ChatGPT course, but instead of charging for it, they decided to release it for free. They have a library of other courses they want to build with waitlists interested students can join. Future courses could sell for a few hundred dollars each or potentially more. And there’s always the chance that they could take even bigger swings. Huang throws out one idea they’ve discussed: “If we can build an AI-powered marketing system that allows a one-person business to operate as if they had five to ten marketers on their team, that is valuable, and we would charge for that.” That kind of course could sell for several thousand dollars per user, and they’ve already got a list of readers interested in purchasing if The Neuron team can roll it out.

So much of what they launch, Huang said, starts with what readers directly ask for. “Every email that we send, we always get back a few threads that’s like, ‘What do you think about this? I‘m working on this particular use case — do you have any advice?’ I think it’s just a growing sign of people trusting us to give that advice and show them the way.” From there, it’s up to Huang and Edelman to figure out what they can create to serve those readers and then figure out how to monetize that content strategy as they grow.

“It puts that pressure on us to always be testing out new things,” he said. “It’s fun to be able to do that.”

When can I start to monetize? And how long does it take?

Sure, newsletters like Superhuman, Important, Not Important, and The Neuron have built large, loyal audiences, but you don’t have to have a massive readership to monetize successfully. There are some revenue streams that any newsletter, with any list size, can tap into right away. Beehiiv’s Boosts tool, for instance, works even if you only have a handful of subscribers.

For other formats, it’s ideal to build up a bit of a list first. But it doesn’t have to be big. For instance:

• If you sell ebooks or other products, you can start to monetize even if your list is as few as 100 readers.
• If you build around consulting, teaching, or workshops, you may be able to monetize with as few as 500 readers as long as those readers are eager to learn from you.
• If you build around a reader revenue model — a subscription, membership, or donation — you may be able to monetize with as few as 1,000 readers.
• If you sell ads, you probably need at least 2,000 readers to start monetizing. Anything smaller than that and the rates you’ll charge will be too small to be worth the effort of incorporating ads. (The one exception: A B2B newsletter covering a really specific topic may be able to sell ads even if it has just a few hundred readers on its list.)

But growing from there takes time. As I’ve written before:

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.

Some newsletters break the rule. Superhuman and The Neuron both scaled their revenue strategy in just a year, while Important, Not Important remained a side project for years. My advice? When you start to monetize, assume you’ll be the rule — not the exception. The $100k threshold is something many newsletters hit, but you should start out with the mindset that it’ll take at least two years to hit your monetization goals. Setting realistic goals gives you a timeline you can actually measure your newsletter’s progress against — and build in a buffer for life’s unexpected changes, like illness or parental leave.

Huang offered some parting thoughts for an operator trying to reach that $100k milestone. “I think for people starting newsletters,” he said, “it would help them a lot if they started with building out a business model and understanding what goes on behind the newsletter business.” He pointed out that for The Neuron, certain content decisions, like reviewing AI tools, are connected to long-term business decisions. “It’s not to say that the business model should drive everything, but understanding what your levers are, what are all the things that you could do in order to make a change to the bottom line, is useful.”

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