How four publishers turned newsletters into a major revenue stream
To turn newsletter revenues into 30% or more of company revenues requires a shift in thinking. These four publishers with major revenues from newsletters get three things right:
The Golden Formula
A. The Golden Combination: Content/Frequency/Audience
The content has to be exclusive and valuable enough to drive engagement. Frequency provides enough inventory to sell to gain a significant revenue stream, but not too much to encourage unsubscribes. The audience needs to be large enough, typically at least 10,000 or more, to power results for the advertisers.
B. Products
The right ad products, packaged to be exciting and priced to be profitable, may include ad subscriptions or annual sales and have exclusivity options. Some include website ads as the value-add instead of the other way around.
C. Tech Stack
The email provider and AI tools to enhance efficiency—especially as frequency is added—is critical. To increase frequency without adding unsubscribes, the ESP has to allow the audience to select the type of email and frequency. More conrrol equals more engagement and fewer opt-outs.
Case Study 1: The Newsletter-First Model at Podnews.net
To see how these concepts work in the real world, a great example to look at is Podnews.net, founded by James Cridland. Cridland says he does not actually want people visiting the website for news, and in fact there are no news channels or ads against content on the website at all.
The business is the newsletter, which generates an estimated $600,000 to $800,000 in revenues.
Content/Audience/Frequency
The content is almost entirely curated, which means it doesn’t even have to be produced. Readers skim the newsletter and click on the links out to read more if they are interested. The ad revenue has already been captured by the newsletter.
Monday to Thursday the content covers new podcasts, celebrity podcasters and other industry news with wide appeal to podcast aficionados, and has 30,000+ subscribers.
When Cridland also took over the Podcast Business Journal a few years ago, he changed Friday’s send to a B2B, U.S.-only focus, with an additional audience of 10,000.
As Cridland puts it, “It’s really hard to monetize a weekly or monthly newsletter efficiently because there is not enough inventory to sell. If you’re selling a daily, that’s five times the amount of money.“ However, there is still a Friday-only option.
This setup allows Cridland to keep subscribers exhausted by daily frequency “in the family” because they still have the Friday-only option. He can also upsell advertisers to both audiences if they need additional reach.
Ad Products
There are three basic products in Podnews.net, two with a built-in exclusivity factor:
a. Classifieds
Classified ads in the newsletter are limited to five. The first one is the least expensive, at $29, and appears first. The next is priced at $60, then $90, and so on, creating FOMO.
Also, limiting ads helps keep newsletters brief and skimmable. Most of the daily newsletters we looked at had about three classified ads.
Promos for classified ads show that the ads appear:
- in our newsletter (sent to 32,400 subscribers every weekday)
- permanently on our website
- within our podcast show notes
- in our RSS feed, for RSS readers like Feedly
b. Recurring Revenues from Patreon
The second revenue stream is from Patreon supporters. “They get a logo on the newsletter. That’s it,” Cridland said.
The bottom section of the newsletter is filled with these supporter logos.
“It’s really just a badge for you to show off.”
On a recent day in September, we counted 25 Gold sponsors at $300 a month and 60 Silver sponsors at $150 a month on the newsletter, all on recurring credit card billing plans. There is also a $4-a-month supporter that gets only the supporter’s name published. This comes out to somewhere around $200,000 a year.
For niche media that do not want to use Patreon, Jotform can provide online ordering with recurring revenues, self-entry of logos and other information, and can be embedded or linked to from the media website. WordPress also has a variety of plug-ins that can do the same thing, such as Gravitas.
c. Sponsorships
The last third of Podnews.net revenue comes from the newsletter sponsors.
The title sponsor, who buys a month at a time, gets the top position on the newsletter.
In addition, the sponsor of the month has its company name in the subject line of the newsletter, reaching 100% of subscribers.
For example, when Podpage Websites was the title sponsor, every email went out with “Podnews with Podpage” in the subject line. Podpage gets brand views whether the email is opened or not for the month of the sponsorship.
Tech Stack
Cridland has a background in programming so has built the website and the self-serve ad tools himself.
Case Study 2: The Newsletter-First Model – Insightful Accountant
Gary DeHart is another niche publisher with a newsletter model that accounts for about 30% of the company’s total revenues, and a daily + frequency.
Content/Audience/Frequency
The original newsletter, Insightful Accountant, focuses on general industry news and technology around accounting, and has 11,000+ subscribers. A newer newsletter, Tax Practice News, focuses on news specifically for tax practitioners, and goes to 3,500.
Both are daily, but DeHart also offers Monday and Friday only options. Monday newsletters promote webinars, and Friday is a round-up of the week.
Part of DeHart’s thinking was that 15 articles in Insightful Accountant are too much to consume in one sitting, but frequency also adds revenues.
“Once a week you can monetize one time, and five times a week you can monetize five times,“ he said.
Products
DeHart has settled on a model with one main advertiser per newsletter, “Takeover” that evolved as the core model primarily after selling exclusive sends caused too many unsubscribes, and it was an easier sell than including 4 banner ads.
The newsletter “Takeover” is essentially a large banner at the top of the newsletter, and a smaller matching banner ad at the bottom.
Both are positionned to wraps around Insightful Accountant editorial content.
- A 728×360 banner at the top
- Approximately 100 words of descriptive text
- A 728×180 banner at the bottom
Each day sells for $3,000 Tuesday to Friday and $5,000 for the total run.
Advertisers buy about 100 days a year, with a typical buy of about five days.
DeHart is still not convinced that the takeover format is ideal, since the takeover format can make the newsletter look like an advertisement. He plans to test swapping the ads, so the smaller banner ad is at the top and see if the results change at all.
Recently, Indeed approached DeHart about partnering on a job board for accounting jobs, so Insightful Accountant is building a job board; Indeed will supply the job ads and Insightful Accountant will promote the board.
Tech Stack
In the past year DeHart also changed out the CMS. The former CMS was built on Magazine Manager, a popular magazine-oriented platform, and used a fairly advanced ESP, ActiveCampaign, for the email sends.
With a limited number of advertisers in the market—and anticipating a drop in search traffic as AI adoption kicks in—one way to increase revenues was to embrace reader revenue and selling memberships that include educational courses.
The decision to focus on reader revenues prompted him to switch the website to HubSpot, which powers email for the newsletter and has more powerful built-in CRM.
So a new membership model which gives members access to courses sells for $400 to $500 a year. The company has sold about 85 so far.
HubSpot is great for tracking progress of readers through the funnel, and the data points can suggest which type of emails they open and eventually what they are interested in purchasing.
Case Study 3: Fishing Tackle Retailer’s AI-Curated Daily
When Angie Thompson purchased Fishing Tackle Retailer with a list of 24,000 in 2023, newsletters were already a steady source of revenues. She added a curated with a different unique explained in the video below.
Content/Audience/Frequency
The Fishing Tackle Weekly newsletter is the B2B newsletter that curates their own content, industry news aimed at retailers, wholesalers and manufacturers. A daily curated newsletter, Fishing Newswire, however, is a short, skimmable format that goes to a list of 12,000 both the consumer—passionate fishermen—as well as the industry.
“You have to be an avid fisherman to want to get a daily newsletter on fishing,” Thompson said.
To find 10 to 15 brief, skimmable items every day, the editor curates content from non-profits, government agencies like the State Game and Fishing Commission and fishing tournaments, as well as a list of website sources. Today, the editor uses an AI agent to gather the “new” articles from a list of sites, along with press releases from corporate members.
Products
The B2B weekly offers five ads display on the newsletter, which are sold out. They also sell about 120 dedicated e-blasts a year with a rate card rate of $2,000. Because this newsletter is weekly, the exclusives have not impacted subscription numbers.
The much larger daily, on the other hand, is sold on a membership model to corporate members who are able to distribute as much of their own content as they want with the news. 200 corporate members pay $1,000 a year for this privilege.
Content is typically images and text, but recently corporate members have been sending in video clips.
Recently the American Sportfishing Association, a trade association for the fishing manufacturing industry, an industry challenged by tariffs, approached them about sponsoring a job board, and offering it as a member benefit.
They agreed to barter. The association promotes the job board to their list, and “makes a big deal out of it.”
“If you put someone else’s name with your name it enhances it,” Thompson said.
To provide a discount to Association members as a benefit, she raised the rate card from $250 to $300.
Tech Stack
The main technological innovation Fishing Tackle Retailer came up with is using AI to extract articles from a list of websites, a task the editor used to do. Today that editor still keeps track of incoming daily emails with content from members and the AI agent, but does not need to check dozens of websites to see if new articles have posted.
With the time freed up, he now edits a video version of the top stories, Newsbreak from the Fishing Wire, that runs on Outdoor America, streaming network for outdoor shows, as well as Fishing Tackle Retailer’s platforms.
See how they did it here.
Case Study 4: The Raincross Gazette Model
The highest over-performer in newsletter ad sales as a percentage of total revenues—although not total revenues—in the 2025 Niche Revenue Survey was Justin Pardee, founder and publisher of 4-year-old The Raincross Gazette, serving Riverside, California. Pardee built a newsletter-first model from the inception of the publication in 2021.
He obtained 10,000 unpaid opt-in emails by early 2025, and is on track for newsletter sales of $375,000 that year.
Content/Audience/Frequency
Initially, Pardee published on Tuesdays, the day of the County Council meeting, and Thursdays, covering civic news. After selling out, he increased frequency by adding a Sunday newsletter, covering lifestyle news. “The only way I could think of to add more revenues was to add another day.”
His goal is 26,000 subscribers—almost 50% of website visitor traffic—in 2026.
Products
Initially Pardee copied the Morning Brew model with three ad positions on the newsletter: top, middle and lower.
Soon, he realized that selling ads piecemeal created an insurmountable workload. Today, almost all advertising is sold in annual partnerships that have exclusivity built in, in addition to some short-run options.
The top two tiers:
- Community Pillar at $30,000
- Local Authority at $10,000
Both include industry exclusivity. The top tier also has just five advertisers who also get a sponsored story per month.
The lowest tier:
- Good Neighbor at $5,000 for the year (does not include exclusivity)
The Good Neighbor allows 20 advertisers, with a corresponding number of sponsored news stories.
Technology
Pardee uses Ghost, an open-source platform, purchasing the theme for $175. Although there are not a huge number of plug-ins, when he needs some changes, he simply hires the theme’s developer.
Key Takeaways
These four models are all different but demonstrate some common factors that drive revenues:
Content, Frequency and Audience of Newsletters
All the publishers we interviewed have at least 3 newsletters per week, and at least 10,000 subscribrs.
If you add both weekly and daily, Insightful Accountant has ten newsletters per week and Fishing Tackle Retailer has six.
Varied content also allows an increases in frequency; both these publishers offer two different kinds of newsletters. Raincross Gazette has a different focus for each of the three days a week. AI can also be used to add a curated newsletter with higher frequency.
Managing Frequency vs. Opt-outs
There is a trade-off between too much frequency and opt-outs, so providing lower frequency options to subscribers is key to “keeping them in the family.”
Fishing Tackle Retailer offers a weekly option, and Insightful Accountant offers a Monday and Friday option for this purpose. Converting exclusive sends to “Newsletter takeovers” if the frequency gets too high is one way to sell the higher price exclusive option while avoiding high opt-outs.
Diverse Advertising Models
Advertising does not always mean banner ads. Classifieds, content marketing and advertising membership models are also used by these top performers. Exclusivity is also still highly valued by advertisers, and part of each of these models.
The Right Tech Stack
The right tech stack needs to power the model effectively. In general, a better and more flexible CMS and more powerful ESP are well worth the investment.
Many thanks to these four publishers for sharing their journey!
