Paid Newsletters: Conversion Rates, Newsletter Bundles, Building a Six-Figure Newsletter

A bundle essentially lets a group of newsletter-writers dynamically price-discriminate: most readers are subscribing because one or two components of the bundle are great and the rest are nice-to-have, so Everything’s $20/month sticker price is implicitly charging something like $15 for one newsletter in the bundle, $1 for another, $0 for another—b... See more

This is all very good news, for writers and for readers. Filtering news and adding useful commentary is a nontrivial task, it’s hard to scale, and scaling it in one domain doesn’t imply skill in doing it somewhere else (if I switched places with someone who wrote a sports newsletter, we’d both lose all our readers). But the subscription newsletter ... See more

Focused, quality-obsessed publications will take advantage of bundle economics to collect “stars” and monetize them through some combination of subscriptions (less likely) or alternate media forms. Said media forms, like podcasts, are tough to grow on their own, but again, that is what makes them such a great match for writing, which is perfect for... See more

Lesson One : Newsletters will become like social networks.

ICYMI newsletter creator Lia Haberman has a hot take to start us off: She thinks newsletters will become more like social in 2025. (Just... without the trolls, bots, and flame wars.)

“By 2025, I think we'll see newsletters transition into being more like social networks. It’s going to be a r... See more