Q4 is coming for your CPL

👋 Hi friends -

Welcome to The Newsletter Growth Memo. I run The Feed, the largest newsletter growth agency - 2x a month I share short reflections with my clients and other operators.

Zero formality or ads - just a guy sharing learnings from running paid ads & launching digital products for operators doing $50k-$5M / month with newsletters.

New reader highlights: Kevin, Founder @ CEOs and ABCs | Ben, Founder @ Everything In Moderation | Wyndo, Founder @ AI Maker

I always keep it real with you - Q4 is a bloodbath for newsletter ads on Meta.

Here's what the holidays did to our newsletter ad accounts last year:

The majority of newsletters spending $50k-$1M/month on Meta work with my agency.

Obviously it's in my best interest for you to spend more on Meta.

But I'd much rather you spend more at the right times.

If you didn’t already know - January is the single best time all year for paid growth, and I'd rather you re-invest your dollars then.

So I'll walk you through:

(Quick note: this applies if you make most of your money from sponsorships. If your newsletter mainly sells paid subscriptions, communities, info products, or services, you're in a much better spot. I explain why below.)

Every brand and their mother wants to get in front of you for Black Friday and Christmas.

Your CPM on Meta is the price of getting in front of people. More advertisers chasing the same people means way, way higher prices.

For - as an example - an e-commerce brand, their conversion rate might 2x during the holidays, so while they pay more to reach buyers, they generate significantly more revenue.

Unfortunately, your sponsors don't pay you double in December.

A subscriber you acquire on Black Friday is worth exactly what they were worth in September.

You just paid 45% more for them.

Nearly 9 in 10 of our newsletters paid more on a CPM basis over the holidays. The worst hit paid almost 70% more.

The window runs roughly November 15 through December 26. That's the stretch to plan around.

December 26 hits.

Advertisers pull back and demand for Meta ads drops off a cliff.

Erika Burghardt, head of growth at 1440 (spending ~$800k a month on ads), calls this period Q5.

I call it the golden quarter (it only lasts 2 to 6 weeks depending on the year - you have to move fast!).

Last year our CPMs hit $17.21 the week after Christmas. That's 29% below the Sep-Oct average and half the Black Friday peak.

It's the single best time of the year to buy subscribers.

One of our clients spends $200k/month on Meta.

They're budgeting $400k for January!

I’ll tell you what I told SparkLoop’s founder.

This year, we’re not seeing any impact yet, so I think you’ll want to act right at the beginning of November:

Here's the mistake I see every year: newsletters wait until December to start testing seriously for January.

They don't find winners in time. They spend January testing when they should be scaling.

And they waste the 4 most valuable weeks of the year.

They miss 50% of the subscribers they could have acquired and start Q1 with less negotiating power with sponsors and fewer buyers.

We want to help you skip that mistake.

My team and I just went through the 2,000+ ads we’ve run in 2026 and pulled our top 50. Winners from B2B and B2C. For newsletters doing affiliate, sponsorships, info products, you name it.

For November and December only, we'll take our top performers and install them straight into your ad account.

We're calling it Launchpad.

→ Get Launchpad set up before January

No retainer or long-term commitment.

Works fine alongside your current agency or your in-house growth team.

You show up to January with ads that already work.

Now, promises are nothing without proof:

We’ve driven millions of subscribers and sales across SecretCFO, MarketBeat, The Points Guy, Workweek, Tyler Denk, Jay Shetty, The Rundown, The Neuron, and 70+ other world-class newsletters and audience-first founders.

There’s only one catch:

I have 1,500+ founders from the largest newsletters and info product businesses on this list, but The Feed only has capacity to do this for 10-15 folks.

Many of your peers will be interested (if they don’t already work with us).

So if you want our help with ads that will crush it for you in January, see if we’d be a good fit here.

Buying ads in other newsletters.

These are the highest quality readers you can buy. This is precisely why:

Why? Subscribers from newsletters already read newsletters - and not only do they read that newsletter, they just clicked an ad (your ad!).

And their costs do not change in November / December like Meta’s.

But it’s very operationally difficult to do well.

Meta creative flops in a newsletter ad slot and every newsletter you talk to will tell you they have top performance.

So we now run it end to end for newsletters.

We’ll source, negotiate, and build creative that gets you A+ quality subscribers from other newsletters.

Many folks have asked us for it and after trialing this year, we’ve found we excel at:

If you’d like to learn more, get in touch here.

That's the letter.

- Nathan May