Two years after the New York Times wondered if we were “past peak newsletter,” the category continues to grow—and newsletter writers are getting more tools to bring eager advertisers on board.
On Friday, Beehiiv, a newsletter platform for creators, introduced a new tool that will let its users manage relationships with advertisers, giving newsletter creators the ability to insert ads directly into their newsletters, set rate cards, coordinate inventory, and send invoices.
The tool, called Direct Sponsorships, will allow publishers to sell their own inventory, Tyler Denk, Beehiiv’s co-founder and CEO, told Marketing Brew, and costs $10 for every ad placement. Denk said the tools are aimed at giving creators additional revenue options beyond subscriptions, which many do using platforms like Substack, a Beehiiv rival.
The tool is the latest new option to roll out in the big business of newsletters.
Substack, which was founded in 2017, this week said it had surpassed 5 million paid subscriptions, and publishers have also looked to lay claim to email inboxes. The New York Times’s The Morning newsletter has more than 17 million subscribers, the company has said, while early newsletter success story TheSkimm had more than 7 million subscribers as of 2022. Morning Brew’s flagship daily newsletter, meanwhile, has around 4 million subscribers. (Denk and Beehiiv’s two other founders, Jake Hurd and Benjamin Hargett, previously worked at Morning Brew, although this reporter never worked with them, and Morning Brew’s co-founders are investors in the company.)
Advertisers have begun to embrace newsletters on Substack, with one marketing exec previously telling Marketing Brew that newsletters are an attractive place since social media platforms have “become overloaded.” According to a Morning Brew Inc. survey of marketing industry decision-makers conducted in January, 51% said email marketing was an investment priority in 2025.
It hasn’t been seamless, especially for newsletters that don’t have the backing of a sales team. In January, the Wall Street Journal reported that some newsletter creators have finalized deals with Venmo and managed partnerships through Google Docs as they navigate ad-hoc advertising arrangements.
Beehiiv’s Direct Sponsorship tool aims to change that for its slate of creators.
“More people can make money by putting an ad that is relevant to their audience in their newsletter than charging $5, $10, $20 per month for their content,” Denk said. “It takes very differentiated content to be able to charge for it.”
“Line items”
Beehiiv’s Direct Sponsorship tool is an extension of its advertising network, which it began in 2023 and bolstered through the acquisition of Swapstack, an ad-tech platform. Within the ad network, creators can manually select which advertisers they would like to work with and slot ads into their newsletters. The new tool, Denk said, will give them more support to help sell their newsletter inventory.
Denk told us the ad network pays out nearly $1 million to newsletter creators per month, a 3.5x YoY increase, with a typical take rate of 10%–15%. Last year, the company brought in $15.5 million in revenue and is on pace for $35 million this year.
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The company is also laying the groundwork for a programmatic offering, where ads and inventory are bid on instantaneously, to roll out later this year, Denk said.
Paved, an ad-tech newsletter platform that works with NBC, Bloomberg, and TechCrunch, claims its newsletters reach 253 million subscribers, and this week, it was acquired by the Canadian investment firm RedBrick. Like Beehiiv, Paved manages a marketplace where advertisers and creators can work out direct deals, and it also operates a programmatic advertising network, where advertisers can set a budget and buy ads across a number of different newsletters on a cost-per-click model, meaning advertisers are only charged if someone clicks on an ad.
Though Paved’s marketplace and ad network businesses are roughly the same size, the ad network “is getting a lot more attention” than the direct business because advertisers can pay per click instead of paying larger sponsorship fees, John McLaughlin, Paved’s CEO and founder, told Marketing Brew.
Not every newsletter platform is pushing into the advertising space. Last year, Axios reported that Substack was testing a pilot program aimed at helping its creators sell ads, but the company has otherwise not made many advertising tools available. In an interview with Semafor published this week, CEO Hamish McKenzie said that while Substack “is not hostile to advertising,” he worried that ad dollars could lead to misaligned incentives between newsletter creators and their audiences.
“If you do it in the wrong way, you can really screw things up,” he said. Substack had not replied to a request for comment at publication time.
Ad buyers told Marketing Brew they are looking at newsletter advertising options favorably. Kandace Barker, head of B2B at the agency Initiative, said that, over the last year, the agency has “been buying newsletter inventory more frequently.”
Previously, “newsletters were a kind of like a piece of added value that you might get from a larger partnership,” she told Marketing Brew. “Now, you’re seeing line items for newsletters.”
There are a few reasons why. Newsletters can give valuable contextual signals to advertisers—someone who subscribes to a newsletter about jogging, for instance, is probably interested in eventually buying running shoes. The medium is also direct, since readers opt in to receive them, and the advertisements can appear more seamless, Barker said.
“That’s the biggest challenge that you have in advertising, right? Like, ‘Do they want to see this?’” she said. “It’s golden inventory.”
But they aren’t bulletproof. Even the largest newsletters are unlikely to reach the same scale as the infinite expanse of the open web.
They also don’t usually provide advertisers with the level of granular data they’re accustomed to. Instead of tracking cookies, newsletters often share metrics like click-through and open rates.
“There are some blind spots,” Tom Swierczewski, VP of media investment at the agency Goodway Group, said. “It’s a little bit more limited than what you would see from a standardized digital media.”
For that reason, not all ad buyers are sold; Swierczewski said he doesn’t heavily invest in newsletters.