🗞️ Newsletter Rollups

How I became aware of a new sponsorship platform, and a media rollup that will have 2.5M newsletter subscribers by year end

Author

Richard Patey
June 02, 2023

Hey there 👋,

In this week’s newsletter I discuss:

  • How negative reviews led to me discovering a new newsletter sponsorship platform

  • A media rollup with 30 newsletters and 2.5M subscribers by year end

Cheers!

Richard Patey (@richardpatey)

🗣️ One Way of Building Awareness

I’ve previously covered newsletter sponsorship platforms such as Swapstack, and I’ve just been made aware of a new one called Jardy in this tweet by Tobi from Sponsorgap😀 

Neo had been leaving negative reviews on Product Hunt on newsletter sponsorship platforms such as PostApex, Reletter, Hecto, Letterwell. He is apparently an intern at Jardy.com, the ‘one-stop shop for newsletter placements’ who he has been recommending instead.

The company who owns Jardy.com is the venture backed Tatem Inc founded by Christopher LaFerla, who has taken full responsibility on Twitter:

Whilst this type of zero-sum marketing isn’t pretty, I kind of do appreciate how Neo varied the star ratings from 1 to 3, and he certainly has built awareness of a new player in the newsletter sponsorships arena!

Edit since sending - Neo has since apologised:

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🗞️ Over 2.5M Subscribers By Year End

In last week’s issue, I mentioned how Scott Oldford acquired sponsorships.com and his intention for his media rollup. (I also mentioned a workshop and if you missed it there is an offer instead).

Then in this week’s Digital Asset Investor newsletter, I wrote how Scott thinks there’s only three ways to make the newsletter business model work (a must read).

Scott has just dropped another issue of his investing newsletter where he gave an update on his newsletter acquisitions:

❝

We’ve made a massive bet on the future of online media and have spent the last year building the infrastructure required to scale— as I write this, we now own 15 newsletters with a total audience size of over 800,000 subscribers.

That’s obviously a huge number of subscribers, but over the next six months Scott expects to have doubled the number of newsletters that Wisdom Media is operating, and 3x the total number of subscribers to 2.5M!

I’m only aware of one newsletter business with more subscribers, that of course being Morning Brew, which has over 4M to its main newsletter, and over 6M in total with its other publications.

In his post, Scott shares an update on one newsletter property he acquired last year called The Early Checkout (also on beehiiv), where he culled the subscribers from 32K down to 19K. He talks about the challenges of running multiple newsletters (don’t I know that!), and how many different people/roles you need. And he states his future intentions for the business:

❝

1) That we are able to start growing the email list by a minimum of 2,000 eCommerce owners/managers per month.

2) That we are able to generate at least $75,000 per month with operational costs of $20,000 and growth costs of $20,000, allowing for a profitable growth curve.

3) This allows us to have a model of being able to purchase a newsletter-only business that has limited revenues, grow it and then sell it.

Rolling up and flipping newsletters will start to become far more common going forward. You can read more here.

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Disclaimer: Nothing in this email is business advice and I am not a professional business adviser. I send weekly updates on the creator economy and what I'm doing personally - consider it informational and for entertainment purposes only. This newsletter is monetized through sponsorship and product revenue.