Newsletter business guru James Cridland tells all

We started this report with a question: How does solopreneur James Cridland publish a daily e-newsletter that pulls in revenues we estimate at $500,00 to $600,000  a year – all in about an hour a day?

In short, what does Cridland know that we don’t know?

To answer the question, NichePublisher took a deep dive into Podnews.net’s newsletter and followed up with an hour-long interview  – he lives in Australia, so there really was no “good time” to meet.

Click to play the interview, edited to 33 minutes, below, read an edited transcript here, or continue for a summary of how he does it and what lessons could be applied to other forms of niche media.

Click here to read the transcript.

Continue below for our take, a summary of the model with screenshots and takeaways for niche media.

Why newsletters matter

The newsletter-as-a-business represents a way of thinking about media that, at first glance, seems foreign to more traditional publishers, even niche publishers with a deeper understanding of how value is created.

However, an increasing number of niche publishers, some of the smartest and most entrepreneurial in the media industry today, including industry behemoth Industry Dive, now find that they sell more newsletter advertising than website banner ad revenue.

Even LION, the Local Independent Online Newspapers associations, reported in July, 2024 that the % of their members who sell newsletter products exceeds any other product.

It’s not the only super-profitable model. We’ve covered ParentsCanada’s  hugely profitable but very different video-based content marketing revenue model, as well. 

However, most niche media already have newsletters, and the model is part of what media watcher Guy Tasaka, who turned us on to Cridland, calls “Media 3.0.”

Podnews.net provides a valuable glimpse at how some niche media could expand revenues and publishing efficiency, even if they don’t deploy the full business model. 

Here’s how Podnews.net does it.

The newsletter is the business

The first thing to grasp about Podnews.net is that Cridland doesn’t believe in the traditional model of selling banner ads against niche news posted on a media company’s website. The stripped-down website of Podnews.net doesn’t look like a media website, so don’t expect the lead story on the home page.

“I don’t want people actually visiting the website,” Cridland said.

“The website is not what I do. The newsletter is why I’m there.”

All the ads are text-based and sold against the newsletter audience of about 32,500 “serious podcasters,” Cridland said. Many are solo podcasters, but others work for the podcasting divisions of big media like BBC and ABC.

Content is king, but the newsletter is mostly curated

The fundamental purpose of the newsletter is to provide the core content and audience rather than to drive readers back to a website where advertisers are.

This has a number of profound implications.

First, it allows Cridland to curate most of the content, so the Podnews.net newsletter can both provide complete daily news for an industry at a glance, and do so efficiently.

There is no need to worry about readers clicking off to someone else’s website because the revenue is already captured.

And while Cridland does write some of the content, he doesn’t have to hire writers to cover the podcasting industry, post each story on a web page, and use the newsletters to drive readership there.

“In most cases, you don’t need to do that,” Cridland said. “That’s the whole benefit of the internet; you need to link to the news already out there.”

Hyper-focus on automating the workflow

The next critical element of the model is how Cridland relentlessly focused on cutting down steps in the workflow.

As a solopreneur and popular speaker whose other job is to provide radio consulting worldwide, he needs to push the daily newsletter out quickly. In an hour is the goal.

“I am focusing on the things that are good, fun, and creative. So anything that you can get away with getting rid of, another little drudgery and boring thing, even if it’s just a button to press, for example, then that’s a good plan.”

The focus on efficiency required by solopreneurship, for Cridland,  meant embracing inventiveness.

In the case of Podnews.net, publishing a daily newsletter along with managing clients and traveling to conferences would otherwise not be manageable for one person. Substack is a solution for some solopreneurs, but Cridland’s approach is more inventive and captures more revenue.

It helps that Cridland has a radio rather than print news background, and writes his own code in PHP “and a bit of Java”. The resulting scripts can look a bit crude, like a minimum viable product, but the job gets done and is super light and fast-loading.

“For a long time, I didn’t even bother with nice-looking systems. I was using a very clunky tool,” he said.

Self-serve entry for both advertising and free user-generated content is key, but not the only part of the “problem to solve” for Podnews to scale efficiently.

Cridland has also found ways to automate just about every possible step to populate a document published into an email with minimal writing.

He writes the content he neds to in IA Writer, a text editor that eliminates the need to click buttons to add links, and can be dropped into an ESP.

For niche media without developers on the team, he suggests WordPress, which has a lot of plug-ins and e-commerce [advertising] plug-ins.

“There will be classified systems built into that,” he said.

“I ended up coding everything myself because I’m like that.”

Why it’s a daily

“I’ve run newsletters in the past for the radio industry and I learned a couple of things from that,” he explained.

“One thing is that it’s really hard to monetize a weekly or monthly newsletter efficiently because there is not enough inventory to go out and sell. It all of a sudden changes if you’re selling a daily.”

The newsletter’s email distribution,  Monday through Friday, means “that’s five times the amount of money that you can make.”

Where the revenues come from

Cridland says that revenues – which NichePublisher crudely estimated at about $600,000 – comes in from three directions, each providing a roughly equivalent revenue stream.

1. Classified ads

Podnews’net’s model limits the classified ads in the newsletter to six. The first one is the least expensive, at $29, and appears first. The next is priced at $60, then $90, and so on.

“The last one gets expensive,” Cridland said, creating some urgency. Also, it helps with the newsletters’ brevity. Most of the daily newsletters we looked at had about three classified ads.

Cridland, who founded PodNews in 2017, said when he came up with this idea, he didn’t know if it would work.

“I don’t suppose anybody will buy any classified ads,” he thought. “I’m sure it’s a complete waste of time.”

So, as a solopreneur concerned about time spent, he set a goal to write the entire classified system in a day.

“I thought to myself, if I can do that, I haven’t wasted too much time.” So one day, he built the system.

“Then I went to sleep.”

Because of the time zone in Australia, he is asleep when “the lot of you were awake.” By the he awoke the next morning, “There was already an order for classified advertising, and it was for $500,” he said, with a sense of wonderment.

“And I thought to myself, I should probably spend some time making this look better.”

Moral of the story for niche publishers:  Plan on spending some time and money on tech R&D to test possible revenue streams, as well as to cut down the time spent on workflow.

Promos for classified ads show that the ads appear:

• in our newsletter (sent to 32,400  subscribers every weekday)
• permanently on our website (like this example)
• within our podcast shownotes
• in our RSS feed, for RSS readers like Feedly

2. Patreon supporters

The second revenue stream is from Patreon supporters. “They get a logo on the newsletter. That’s it.”  The bottom section of the newsletter is filled with supporters’ logos.

“It’s really just a badge for you to show off,” Cridland said.

Patreon is a popular way for creators and solopreneurs to raise money from donors who support their work. In the case of Podnews.net, it did a lot of the heavy lifting. First, it tapped into the supporter/donor ethos of the passion economy.

Also, it provided an instant recurring revenue model.

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.

We did the math. This comes out to somewhere around $200,000 a year.  Note to local niche media, and those participating in the passion economy (Pickleball News, for example), may find some easy new revenues here from those in the community that supports them, without paywall blocking content.

In the case of Podnews, supporters include podcasters and companies that service the podcasting industry.  In short, Podnews.net’s Patreon supporters look an awful lot like advertisers. There’s an experts directory as well on the website, but that is primarily for SEO value. The profiles include links to stories about a company that appeared in the newsletter, driving more traffic there.

Here’s how the Patreon promo looks, rewarding supporters with a logo and link on the newsletter.

 

Cridland says he attempted to build the supporter program onto a directory on website, but something about the Patreon ethos, along with the fact that so many are already using Patreon, means that it continues to host the bulk of this revenue stream. Here’s a few of the Patreon Gold Supporters in the daily newsletter:

 

3. Sponsorships

The last third of the revenue comes from the newsletter’s title and section sponsors.

The title sponsor, who buys a month at a time, not only gets the top position on the newsletter but is also named in the subject line of the newsletter itself, and has a promotion on the podcast version.

So, for example, when Podpage Websites was the title sponsor, in September, every email went out with “Podnews with Podpage” in the subject line. Podpage gets brand views whether the email is opened or not.

When the newsletter is opened, the title sponsor’s text message is at the top and, of course, permanently on the newsletter that is posted on the website for SEO purposes.

 

The Content

The newsletter’s goal is to provide short,  meaningful news for the industry that day at a glance – that is the least amount of time for the reader.

Just above the title sponsor’s message, Cridland gives the exact time it takes to read that day’s newsletter – in the above case 4.6 minutes, a data point that is also automated.

In fact, Cridland says people unsubscribe mainly because they get too many emails in general. He partially solved the problem when he acquired Podcast Business Journal in 2023 and curated the content even further into a U.S.-only, business news-only weekly digest. The weekly digest gave people exhausted by their in-box an option with less frequency, but “kept them in the family.”  Larger advertisers who want the extra distribution of about 10,000 also buy both audiences, so there’s a commercial element.

The rest of the day’s newsletter – aside from the section sponsors – is composed of about ten or so news items each written in couple of conversational sentences with a link out to the story.

On a recent day, stories included a Spotify initiative,  a news item on a podcast incubator launched in the UK, another about a podcast that won an award, and so on.

Though Cridland writes some content and plows through Google alerts for interesting news nuggets, most of the news is now incoming, emailed to him by marketers.

Other content sections include classifieds, jobs and events (also self-serve, but free, which appear as one-liners and link back to a section on the website), podcast data, and logos from the 80+ Patreon supporters.

Building the audience

To initially build an audience, Cridland utilized his relationships with podcasting conference producers, lavishing them with promotions in return for support.

Often, he exchanged promotions on his newsletter for a subscription checkbox on theirs.  He is also visible as a speaker and in industry discussion groups.

Finally, Cridland said, the Podcast Business Journal, helped build the number as well. Surprisingly, there was little audience overlap.

A competitive newsletter, HotPod, acquired by Vox in 2021, went “on hiatus” in 2024 after its lead writer left. Slowly,  as the  audience, grew the industry converged around Podnews.net.

So what’s the website for?

The website itself is brilliantly utilitarian, though it may look a tad stripped down to some more traditional media publishers. Everything on it has a specific purpose.

There is no lead story on the home page, just a top navigation tab for “articles.” If you click there it links to a list of daily newsletters by date.

This adds SEO value to drive newsletter registrations and for newsletter advertisers.

The website is also where advertisers can buy self-serve classified ads or post self-serve content like jobs and events and press releases.

This keeps the newsletter brief and scannable but allows those who want a deeper dive to find the content created by Podnews.com rather than external sources.

“The press releases are on the website because you have to link to something,” Cridland said.

The hero position on the website home page is not a lead story but a standing call to action to register for, guess what?  The newsletter.

 

Takeaways

Here are a few takeaways from the model that niche publishers could use to grow new revenue streams or increase efficiency.  We know all your models are different, so pick what fits your own strategy.

• Embrace the newsletter. Not just as the driver of web traffic and a recipe for search independence but also as a core revenue producer with a critical audience.  Some niche publishers generate as much or more revenues from the email newsletter as from banner ads.
• Build the email audience everywhere, all the time.  Gate everything with a registration, even access to see and place self-serve ads. If you are not an event producer, lavish the event producers in your industry with attention and promotions in return for the registration check box when possible.
• When following the workflow, every extra button click counts. If you start thinking, “It’s only 30 seconds,” you are already starting out with the wrong mindset.  Most niche publishers get this, but it’s still worth saying: 30 seconds for each of 5 admin tasks in a workflow that produces, say, one piece of content on a newsletter,  and there are ten elements a week, is 108 hours a month.  We did the math twice.
• One “follow the workflow’ exercise if you are not a solopreneur, is to think about how solopreneur would do it. Another exercise is to assign a time goal – such as an hour to produce the newsletter – and get anyone on the team who can to help brainstorm and research solutions.  There are now many ways to automate newsletter production, including the use of AI to re-purpose content on the website into a newsletter and turn it into HTML text. See the AI prompt library in the Media Library section.
• Along these lines, plan to invest time and money in tech R&D that allows you to be creative with revenue products, develop self-serve, and automate the workflow. If you use an off-the-shelf magazine CMS, make sure they know what you want, typically they iterate from customer-driven ideas.
• There may be untapped revenue in self-serve classifieds, marketplaces, and important UG content, such as events and jobs.   Podnews.net is not the only niche publisher discovering this need in small niche communities.
• Recurring revenues are not just for subscription models but can also be applied to advertising models.  Patreon is just one example and may be useful for companies with community support who do not want to implement a subscription-based model that restricts traffic.
• On the other hand, if your niche model is mainly subscription sales, a curated newsletter is an opportunity to add an advertising revenue stream that does not compete.
• We liked the idea of adding advertiser value by a. putting the name of the newsletter sponsor in the subject line, b. using text-based newsletter ads, and publishing the newsletter on the website to add SEO.
• Finally, in the inspirational category, I have spent a lot of time talking with media brokers  – and business brokers in general – recently. What kills media company valuation: a. Over-reliance on the owner, b. Advertising-only models, which are today perceived as risky.  What adds to valuation are events, research databases, and turnkey models with recurring revenues. Many thanks to Guy Tasaka for recommending that we look at the PodNews model, and to James Cridland for so generously sharing his time and expertise with us.