
Ask HN: Who's running a profitable newsletter? - cronjobma
How do you do it and how much are you making?
======
duck
Hacker Newsletter ([http://hackernewsletter.com](http://hackernewsletter.com))
makes a few thousand a month from sponsors. It could easily make more if I
were more of a salesperson, but I'm happy with it as is. Just to be clear
though, it took some time to get to that. I'm actually about to hit the seven
year mark and issue #357. Speaking of... I'm working on tomorrow's issue as I
type this!

~~~
calebsurfs
I'd really like something like this in podcast form. Summarize the best links
and maybe invite some highly rated commenters on for discussion.

~~~
owenwil
We do that for tech on Charged podcast, and phone people in the industry for
comment (recent guests include Keen.io, CEO of DigitalOcean etc). Try it out?
[https://char.gd/podcast](https://char.gd/podcast)

~~~
j_s
The podcast appears to be hosts discussing their life in tech along with some
current tech topics instead of focusing on summaries of specific content --
very reminiscent of TechZingLive. John definitely has a lot of connections in
the valley!

------
DanLivesHere
I am, at [http://nowiknow.com](http://nowiknow.com)

It's a general trivia email. Every day I send a fun fact of the true story
behind it.

Been writing for seven years. Not going to disclose how much I make a month,
but I describe it as not quite full time job money but a lot more than beer
money.

~~~
deegles
How do you monetize?

~~~
refrigerator
Patreon
([https://www.patreon.com/NowIKnow](https://www.patreon.com/NowIKnow)), and
I'm guessing some other sources like syndication to other sites

~~~
DanLivesHere
I actually very rarely get paid to syndicate my content out.

------
decryption
I run The Sizzle ([https://thesizzle.com.au](https://thesizzle.com.au)), which
is a daily roundup of tech news with an Aussie slant. Any Australians who
enjoy HN should check it out!

I've got 445 subscribers that pay $5/m or $50/yr for it. No ads, no tracking,
but I do insert affiliate links - primarily eBay.

Costs me about ~$1000/yr to run (Mailchimp, web hosting for a Wordpress blog &
Discourse forum and Zapier costs mainly).

This financial year (July 1st 2016 to June 30th 2017), revenue sits at about
AUD$18,000. I expect around ~$30,000 next year if there's 0% paid subscriber
growth and affiliate link revenue stays the same.

~~~
movedx
I'll checkout your news letter mate, cheers.

Those running costs, the $1,000/year, seems a bit high. Should be able to get
that down I reckon? I'm willing to help out on this front for a free sub' :)

Let me know.

~~~
decryption
Thanks for subscribing! I reckon you'll like The Sizzle.

I'm working on getting costs down, but prefer to put my energy into content
and marketing at this stage.

~~~
movedx
I'd love to get your insights on marketing, actually. A friend and I have
started a YouTube channel which we're getting back to this next few weeks.

Any reading tips and ideas on marketing?

~~~
decryption
I don't really have any insights into marketing. I'd say that's what I
struggle with the most. I was able to cheat a bit by having a bit of a
following already via other projects I've been part of. Expanding out of that
circle has been pretty hard.

~~~
movedx
Thanks for the heads up. I have a better idea of what to expect, then :)

------
shortformblog
I run Tedium ([http://tedium.co](http://tedium.co)), a twice-weekly newsletter
that covers obscure topics—half the time tech, half the time not. I've been
doing it two and a half years.

I make money from a variety of sources on it, including affiliate links,
sponsorships (I recently had some success with
[http://upstart.me](http://upstart.me) on this front), donations from readers
(both Patreon and PayPal, because folks want options), banner ads, and fees
for syndicating the content to outlets like Vice's Motherboard.

The pieces are written more like stories than link roundups, giving them an
evergreen appeal. This week I wrote about the history of the 911 system; last
week I wrote about CGA graphics and Windex. It actually has a smaller profile
than my last project, ShortFormBlog, but it's more sustainable from a
financial and work-life balance perspective.

Last month, I did a T-shirt sale with the help of a vendor (Vacord Screen
Printing, [http://vacord.com](http://vacord.com)) and made a few hundred
dollars through that.

All of this together is not enough to stop me from working a day job, but the
mixture of sources and the fact that I syndicate content helps build exposure
and ensures that if one source is weaker than another on a different month,
the whole machine doesn't fall apart.

If you want to run a profitable newsletter, be willing to rely on more than
one revenue stream.

~~~
have_faith
I signed up. Well, I clicked the button and it turned blue. No idea if it went
through. Perhaps a success message would be more clear?

~~~
shortformblog
It has a success message—a script runs that forwards you to a different page
in case of a successful signup.

------
refrigerator
I don't run these but here's a couple that I know of:

\- Stratechery (Ben Thompson) - $100k/month (conservative estimate) via
subscriptions ([https://www.stratechery.com](https://www.stratechery.com))

\- WTF Just Happened Today (Matt Kiser) - $8k/month via Patreon
([https://www.patreon.com/wtfjht](https://www.patreon.com/wtfjht))

~~~
andruby
The monthly subscription price for Stratechery is $10/month. Are you saying
10K people are paying for it?

~~~
refrigerator
Yeah, at the very least - there were 1K people paying back in November 2014
([https://stratechery.com/2014/update-stratechery-
membership-p...](https://stratechery.com/2014/update-stratechery-membership-
program/)) and it's almost surely grown exponentially since.

~~~
jsm386
I've been a happy paying sub of Stratechery since October 2015, and would be
glad to discover that subs have 'almost surely grown exponentially since
[November 2014].' Just wondering what your basis for that assertion is?
Looking at (admittedly poor) proxies like Twitter followers, Facebook fans,
and estimate domain visits from various sources I don't see any sort of
exponential growth...though to be fair the sources I am looking at go back to
mid-2015. Again, poor proxies and would be happy to know Ben is doing this
well.

~~~
achompas
What do you get out of your subscription? I love Ben's podcast (exponent.fm)
but cannot bring myself to pay the monthly subscription.

------
tittietime
[http://www.tittietime.com](http://www.tittietime.com)

(though the landing page is SFW, the newsletter is not)

I use the newsletter to market tshirts. I sell through about 100 of each
design over the course of 2 months. It pays for hosting and funds the next
shirt.

List growth has been slow and steady and im looking to increase my shirt order
on the next design.

~~~
mattbgates
Haha what a great domain name! I'll have to check it out when I'm not at work.

------
stanislavb
I'm running and moderating all the newsletters of the LibHunt Network -
[https://www.libhunt.com](https://www.libhunt.com) . There are 18 "Awesome"
Newsletters with around 5,000 subscribers altogether. The newsletters are
making some money and there is interest in them definitely. The sales part is
the most difficult one though.

My most popular newsletters are about Python
([https://python.libhunt.com/newsletter/58](https://python.libhunt.com/newsletter/58)),
Go
([https://go.libhunt.com/newsletter/58](https://go.libhunt.com/newsletter/58))
& Ruby
([https://ruby.libhunt.com/newsletter/58](https://ruby.libhunt.com/newsletter/58))

P.S. it took me around 13 months to reach the 5k subs...

------
asanwal
CB Insights (www.cbinsights.com/newsletter)

We have 289,000 on the newsletter which represents a large group of VC, tech
M&A, corporate strategy and startup folks interested in data-driven discussion
of technology trends. It's the primary way we sell subscriptions to our SaaS
platform.

We messed around with ads in the newsletter but they don't monetize nearly as
well as the "house ads" to our data/product or to our events.

It's our company's golden goose.

~~~
exogeny
Dude, I love your newsletter. It is literally an immediate open, every time.
It is my goal to get my sporadic thoughts on tech published at the bottom.

That and the Quora digest are the only non-work emails I read.

~~~
asanwal
Awesome to hear. Love you :)

------
jkmcf
I don't know if they are profitable, but Peter Cooper has a whole bunch of
good ones at [https://cooperpress.com/](https://cooperpress.com/)

~~~
ryan-allen
They'd have to be, he has staff and everything!

I've been subscribed to many of his newsletters for years. They are very
valuable and well curated, and going through the previous editions is a good
way to catch up on a few months of trends and things.

~~~
petercooper
Thank you for your support! :)

~~~
ryan-allen
No, thank you! (:

------
sampl
According to Indie Hackers, Scotts Cheap Flights (discount airfare newsletter)
does $320k/mo

Interview here: [https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/scotts-cheap-
flights](https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/scotts-cheap-flights)

~~~
miranda_rights
I believe it. I happily pay the $5/month for tips on upcoming flights. I love
solo travel but I haven't been to a lot of places (just getting out of
college) so I don't have too many specific preferences about where I want to
go. Saving ~$400 per each of the 2 trips I've booked because of Scott's Cheap
Flights actually makes my trips affordable.

------
davidverhasselt
HNDigest ([https://hndigest.com](https://hndigest.com)) is profitable some
months, others not so much. Turns out it's quite expensive to send a ton of
emails if you don't have sponsors.

I should probably spend more time finding sponsorship.

~~~
raybb
I read hndigest every day! Thanks for making it :)

Question: Is there any way you could make the newsletter so that long titles
don't text wrap on wide screens? Example:
[http://imgur.com/a/vlCE8](http://imgur.com/a/vlCE8)

~~~
davidverhasselt
Hey raybb, thanks for being a subscriber :-)

I see what you mean. I'll investigate it, however designing html emails is
kinda like black magic (although less nowadays since Gmail supports responsive
design from October 2016) so no promises!

------
stevesearer
My site [https://officesnapshots.com](https://officesnapshots.com) has a
weekly newsletter which is basically an email update of the previous week's
new content. It is profitable, though just an extension of the advertising
options on the rest of the site.

I have a sign up form at the bottom of my site and use double opt-in to make
sure people really want to subscribe. I also periodically trim the list down
by removing people who don't open or click anything. I figure 1000 subscribers
and a 50% open rate is better than 5000 and a 10% open rate as the list is
more highly engaged. Plus on MailChimp you're wasting $$ sending to people who
don't engage.

~~~
justinavery
I've looked at doing this a couple of times by segmenting subscribers that
never open or click a campaign. Instead of silently unsubscribing them I send
them an email with a GIANT UNSUBSCRIBE BUTTON and explain why they fell into
that segment.

The two times I've tried this I've had a number of responses asking why they
made their way onto the list as they enjoy the email but block any tracking.
Just a word of warning.

~~~
petercooper
Removing "inactive" subs has proven to be a dud for me in many ways as well.

The first time I tried it silently and got a lot of people very annoyed they
were removed. The second time I actively emailed people and they were
similarly offended. I now don't bother (though if open rates were low, I'd
probably just do it again).

------
Mojah
Hi there!

I write cron.weekly [1], a weekly newsletter on Linux & open source. When I
started around 2y ago there wasn't much competition.

I'm at 6k subscribers now and making roughly 1k (eur) a month via
sponsorships. Members don't pay, it's entirely sponsor driven.

It took a little over a year of hard work for free before the first sponsor
landed, right now it's pretty good value for the time I put in. As the
subscribers grow, that ratio should only get better.

[1] [https://www.cronweekly.com](https://www.cronweekly.com)

~~~
kalev
Learned a lot of new tools from your newsletter. Thank you!

~~~
Mojah
Cool, thank you!

------
DanBC
Off topic, but I'd pay (a small amount) for something like Need to Know.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need_to_Know_(newsletter)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need_to_Know_\(newsletter\))

NtK pioneered some things that got taken up elsewhere: dohgifs highlighted
terrible algorithmic placement of online ads next to news stories. Private Eye
now does this as Malgorithms.

A newsletter like this would fare better now we have things like Patreon.

------
fowkswe
The listings project is not mine, but I've always admired Stefanie and her
list:

[https://www.listingsproject.com/](https://www.listingsproject.com/)

It lists artist studios, coworking and apartment sublets, mostly in NYC and
probably does about $500k in revenue year.

Weekly newsletters have been averaging about 300-325 listings @ $30 per week.
There are also sponsored emails that I'm sure are in the thousands of dollars
per email.

------
ilamont
Timmerman Report (biotech) is doing well, judging by some comments I've seen
posted by its founder, a former Xconomy journalist who started the newsletter
full time about two years ago. Not sure if it's profitable, though.

In the indie book publishing world, I subscribe to a paid newsletter called
The Hot Sheet ([http://hotsheetpub.com/](http://hotsheetpub.com/)). I pay
$60/year or thereabouts, which I think is reasonable considering the insights,
analysis, and tips I get every 2 weeks. I doubt it's a full-time income for
the two writers, but on the other hand I don't think it's a full-time writing
gig, either.

It's worth noting that in many of these niches there is very little in the way
of established trade pubs as print magazines covering the industry have folded
or become shadows of their former selves when they moved online. It doesn't
surprise me that some of the more talented or insightful writers have decided
to launch their own brands and build their own audiences.

------
lathiat
Presumably not profitable at this stage, but inside.com founded by (I
believe...) Jason Calacanis to try out lots of different e-mail newsletters
currently he's funding it, they have some advertisers and I _think_ they are
experimenting with user pays?

Another one I know of that is successfully getting a good following is
www.thesizzle.com.au

------
justinavery
RWD Weekly
([http://responsivedesignweekly.com](http://responsivedesignweekly.com)) has
two advertising spots in each newsletter. The primary spot runs for $450-500
and promoted link runs at $130 a week.

The newsletter fills probably 3/4 of the placements and then I use the other
placements to promote conferences that I love. This is usually in exchange for
a ticket (which I give away if I can't attend) and media sponsorship which
gives the newsletter some extra exposure.

I only introduced advertising after the subscribers reached over 5000 and the
Mailchimp costs became a little too much, now it's sitting just over 29k
subscribers. It's a great side project that I'd love to invest more time
towards but at the moment it makes enough to cover mailchimp, servers,
cloudflare, speedcurve and allows me to patron a couple of other newsletters
that I love.

------
davepoon
[http://uxcurator.com](http://uxcurator.com) (UX newsletter) Posted my site on
Hacker News and Reddit for the first launch, and it got a few hundred
subscribers, and it has been gradually growing since last 2 years. And it
roughly makes ($AUD)1k a month via sponsorships.

------
guptabot
Run a small weekly newsletter that covers the Indian startup ecosystem. Will
be putting out Issue. 34 tomorrow. Gets me 10-12 beers a month. No initial
cost to it. Archived via github pages and send via the free mailchimp tier.
([https://www.tinyletter.com/harshalbot](https://www.tinyletter.com/harshalbot))
Archives:
([http://www.harshalgupta.me/categories/#newsletter](http://www.harshalgupta.me/categories/#newsletter))

------
milesaus
I run growth.email ([http://growth.email](http://growth.email)) which is a
weekly growth marketing email, listing 10 articles in each issue. I started it
at the beginning of this year, have around 1,700 subscribers and make $40 a
week from one single ad in each issue.

At this stage, my pitiful MRR covers costs, etc but not all the time I put in.
Soon as I get to 10k+, at $25/cpm it starts adding up to $1k a month, which is
a little less painful to look at. :)

------
sippndipp
We're running [http://androidweekly.net](http://androidweekly.net) and
[http://swiftweekly.com](http://swiftweekly.com)?

It was roundabout 5 years just editing and making no money. Now it's making
money - but just a side income.

1\. Content is king! 2\. Start to build a community (if you link someone in
your newsletter just ping him on twitter). 3\. Go to community events.

Doing ads on Facebook and Twitter actually didn't work that well.

------
eli
Newsletter ads are very effective (and therefore can be extremely profitable)
_if_ you have an audience that people who control marketing budgets want to
reach.

That said, email is just another medium. There's no one way to make money just
like there's no one way to make money with an app.

I'm guessing it's not the kind of newsletter you meant, but we make millions
selling ads in B2B email newsletters.

~~~
damir
I'm intrigued... What kind of newsletter it is then? Print? And what B2B
sector, if you don't mind telling. Thanks.

~~~
eli
Email newsletters, though that's just one way people get our content. You can
see essentially the same thing on our websites, or following us on twitter,
etc. Email is big, though. We have publications in over a dozen sectors see
e.g. retaildive.com, utilitydive.com, healthcaredive.com

(p.s. I'm hiring developers and data engineers)

------
nnn1234
Stratechery? Ben's monetisation is the newsletter

------
leandot
Hacker News Books [http://hackernewsbooks.com](http://hackernewsbooks.com) is
profitable from Amazon referrals, $200-300/month. I am planning to look for
some sponsorship but have not had the time. ~1500 tech-savvy readers in the
newsletter + several thousand on the web.

------
petercooper
Somehow I missed this interesting thread till now, but I run about 11 of them
with a total of around 370K subscribers in the developer space. I'm coy with
money but let's just say we're 'approaching' $1M revenue and we are 8 full-
timers plus several external curators.

~~~
wmeredith
How do you do subscriber acquisition?

------
blairanderson
FYI I don't know if the offer is still out but I remember seeing this a little
while back
[https://twitter.com/peterc/status/717393310080507904](https://twitter.com/peterc/status/717393310080507904)

------
khuknows
[https://uimovement.com](https://uimovement.com) \- ~16k subs, $500-1000+ a
month from sponsors. I hardly ever do sales and spend ~1 hour a week on this -
I'm sure it could be more profitable with more effort.

------
GoatOfAplomb
I worked at SmartBrief (smartbrief.com), a company that creates newsletters on
behalf of trade associations. The advertising would often yield impressive
rates because of valuable niche audience, e.g. heavy equipment financing
executives.

------
eibrahim
I run [http://frontendweekly.co/](http://frontendweekly.co/) but haven't
monetized it yet. It has ~2k subscribers (plus ~3500 on medium at
medium.com/front-end-hacking)

------
foundersgrid
I run [https://FoundersGrid.com](https://FoundersGrid.com) and we sell our
weekly sponsorships ($500 each) most weeks. I'm currently editing edition #358
right now :)

