👋 Hi friends -
Welcome to The Newsletter Growth Memo. Twice a month, I share short reflections with my newsletter clients + other operators.
Zero formality, ads, or affiliate links - just a guy sharing learnings from working with media operators doing $25k-$5M+ / month with newsletters.
New reader highlights: Jake, CEO @ Structured | Scott, COO / CFO @ The Onion | Mark, Founder @ Ninety
We've doubled The Feed Media over the last six months and are now the largest newsletter growth agency in the world.
This means I see a lot of newsletter data and get to nerd out with you even more than ever.
Here's my honest belief: Everyone needs to own their audience and have an email list.
Newsletters are one of the best distribution mechanisms for selling anything. Information, ads, services, physical products - doesn't matter.
Because there are so many choices, a lot of folks get caught up on what to sell and what to expect from a revenue perspective.
And because so many different offers exist in the newsletter space, it can be hard to find a set of peers to benchmark yourself against.
So here are five funnels I see working right now and what "good" benchmarks look like in each.
This data comes from a few places -
We work with many of the largest sponsor-monetized newsletters and know their metrics
Katy Huff (ex-The Hustle) shared benchmarks across her ad sales clients in my Newsletter Accelerator
We have rate card databases from two other large newsletter sponsorship agencies that include folks like 1440, Morning Brew, The Assist, and a bunch of other household names
I'm not publishing anyone's individual numbers, but this is real, aggregated data across 100+ top newsletters.
B2C newsletters (multi-million subs, broad appeal, 1440-esque): CPM $10-25, ad CTR 0.02-0.2% average, 0.5%+ elite, cost per click $1.50-3 best case, $5-11 worst case
Prosumer newsletters (tighter audience, think The Rundown or Morning Brew): CPM $20-40, ad CTR 0.20-0.90% average, 1%+ elite, cost per click $3-7 best case
B2B newsletters (smaller lists, sponsors who overlap with the audience, think Industry Dive-types): CPM $50-100+, expect an $8-15 ad CPC and if they’re particularly niche, $20-50+
The vast majority of these newsletters earn $2.50-$5 per subscriber per year.
If you go niche B2B (think CXO level in a very specific industry) these can reach $20-40 per subscriber per year.
Are your readers not clicking on your sponsorships? I did a cool write up on how I think about triaging sponsorship churn, read this to diagnose why.
2. Affiliate funnels
Two camps here.
Financial publishers, higher churn, faster funnels: ~100% ROAS target in 30-60 days, revenue as high as $10-12 per subscriber per year
Everyone else: 20-35% ROAS target in 30 days, long payback (60-90+ days), revenue typically $8-10 per subscriber per year
These funnels are very difficult to scale without paid ads long term.
But if you get things right they can be significantly more profitable than traditional sponsor-monetized newsletters.
Also related: Negative CAC at $70k/month in ad spend
3. Webinar funnels
Fantastic for information products (cohort-based courses, coaching, community) and service offers.
We run growth for offers anywhere between $1,500-$15,000 right now.
The webinar can route to a booked call or straight to cart checkout. Both work.
Cost per registration: $8-12 typical, full range $5-15
Reminder email open rate: 40-60% average
Show rate (cold, broad traffic): 20% average, 25%+ strong
Retention rate (peak attendance vs. pitch start attendance): 80%
Close rate, direct-to-checkout: 8-10% average, can be as high as 12-15% for products in the $1k-$2k range
Booking rate, if CTA is book-a-call: 20-30%+ target, with a 70-80% show rate and 30-50% close rate
When done right, you can make $10-$100 per newsletter subscriber per year with these funnels.
Alex Hormozi did a $100M book launch via a webinar last year - I broke the full deck down slide-by-slide, lots of nuggets in here.
4. Book-a-call funnels
This is the core funnel for paid ads to a service.
I get many questions from the readers here on when to start paid ads to their newsletter for their coaching/consulting/agency.
My answer is not until you’re doing $1M ARR or more. You’ll see why:
CAC: $1,500-4,500, plan around $3,000
Cost per qualified booked call: $150-600, budget for $200-300
Show rate: 50-75%
Close rate: 10-30%
Booking window: don't let people book more than 4 days out. Show rates decay past that
CAC is expensive! And you end up fronting a lot of money before a client pays you.
Spend $1,000/day at $250 a call.
It takes 10 days to spend $10k where you have a steady volume of calls.
Add a 2-day gap from booking to the call, then a 10-day sales cycle, and even in the best case, you sign your first client on day 14-21.
Even when the first deal closes that revenue basically just covers the ad spend you've already burned over three weeks.
Do you HAVE to have $1M+ in ARR? Technically no, but be very careful and make sure you can comfortably support the $20-30k upfront cash required to figure out ads.
5. Paid subscription funnels
Paid ads into a subscription funnel is a long game.
We're running one right now for a consumer paid newsletter. CAC is $150. They’re profitable on day 366, when the renewal hits.
B2B is the exception. Structure it as a qualified lead funnel, get people to self-identify as your ICP before they hit a paywall, and paid ads have a much stronger shot at an in-year return on ad spend above 1x.
B2B paid sub AOV: $200-340
Consumer paid sub AOV: ~$100 or less
For consumer, grow organically and buy placements in other people's newsletters.
Only the top 5-10% can make paid ads work - the stronger the voice, the better it converts.
The rest, courtesy of beehiiv's 2026 paid newsletter report:
Platform-wide median conversion: 0.62%. Top 10% in finance and investing convert 18-20%
What we actually see: 2-7% at scale, for mature, mostly-organic newsletters doing $300k-$5M. beehiiv's number spans every publisher on the platform, including brand new ones.
That's the letter.
- Nathan
Find me on LinkedIn
The Feed Media drives hundreds of thousands of subscribers and sales for over half of the largest newsletter advertisers in the US. See if you qualify to work with us here
