Why I killed my paid newsletter
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Running a paid newsletter is all the rage. You can turn on paid subscriptions on Kit or Substack by connecting them to your Stripe account, pressing a button, and asking people to subscribe. A paid newsletter looks crazy attractive. Substack even slapped a calculator on the homepage at one point so aspiring newsletter owners could salivate over potential monthly profits. All you have to do is write your newsletter and forget about all that marketing. What creator wouldn’t love that type of business model? The paid newsletter option is lucrative if you already have a massive and or committed audience. This model worked for Bob Dunning, a former American journo turned big Substack writer. Authors like Hanif Kureishi and Salman Rushdie have also succeeded with this model. However, all three had audiences before starting their paid newsletters. The paid newsletter model is proven for specific niches like investing, business≤ and tech. Think the Morning Brew or Bankless. That’s because readers in those niches have a good chunk of disposable income. I’m not a massive fan of paid newsletters for every creator. Running a paid newsletter can feel like pouring water into a bucket with holes. You’re constantly pouring in new subscribers while others leak out through churn. The churn rate of a typical paid newsletter subscriber is about three months. So unless you’re onboarding more paid subs than you lose every week, you’ll hit an income ceiling. You’re also committing to a content hamster wheel. With a newsletter as the product, you must deliver on time to paying subs. If you enjoy writing a regular newsletter, that’s not an issue, but some creators hate the idea of productizing something for $5–10 a month. Creating a paid newsletter means keeping your best content for paying subs. But gatewalling top-tier content slows down the organic growth rate of a newsletter. That, in turn, can slow down monetization unless you’re a whizz with ads. Granted, Substack addresses this problem somewhat by enabling newsletter owners to send free and paid newsletters to their lists. I experimented with a paid newsletter for a few months. It was somewhat profitable, but I hardly earned quit my job money. Plus, my newsletter grows organically via the Kit creator network, so I don’t like gating my content as it slows my flywheel down. I turned off paid subs and focused on promoting my offers and landing sponsors. I’ll probably try a paid newsletter in another niche in 2025. In short: try the paid model and see if it works for your niche. Write on, Bryan Collins PS If you like reading these daily emails, you’ll love my private, no-cost Telegram channel. I share behind-the-scenes content about how I’m growing my content business. My goal is to help you add $3–5k to your business in 2025. Join here​ ​ |