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Comment by arkitaip | Hacker News Reader

So what newsletters out there are actually making money (besides Substack ones)?

In the dev/hacker world, https://cooperpress.com/

Morningbrew will be the top example.

Forbes: "Morning Brew’s native advertising revenue averages $200,000 a week thanks to more than 40 active clients, including Microsoft, JPMorgan and Allbirds."

Here's a nice writeup on Morning Brew's formula: https://medium.com/marketing-and-entrepreneurship/reverse-en...

It really depends on what you count. Are we counting finance industry newsletters that charge hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to subscribe? What about large venture backed newsletters like Thrillist? Or newsletters by a single author, but where that author is someone super famous like Lena Dunham or Kylie Jenner?

There are lots of examples of newsletters that make money, but if you're only counting single authors who aren't venture backed and who don't have a following from some other medium and aren't already famous within their industry, and who are making money off of paying subscribers or ads rather than from consulting, the number is fairly low.

I'm sure it also helps if your target audience is in the wealthy subset of population.

For example, a newsletter providing curated governmental data related to animal welfare can't charge much because most animal welfare groups are struggling to operate on the small donations they get. However, a newsletter tailored for the opposite group (commercial farming) will make a lot more money because its audience is willing and able to spend 10x compared to the former.

Same goes for finance vs human rights (not that they are necessarily opposed), and so on.

I make around $40,000/year with my newsletter as the main sales channel for infoproducts. It really is quite powerful.

I tried to sign up on your site, but I got:

> Recaptcha not valid (0)

(There was no visible recaptcha to fill)

Of course a lot of newsletters aren’t trying to make money directly. I receive a bunch of newsletters that are basically content marketing for consultants etc.

I send out a newsletter, but it's about the newsletter app that sending out the newsletter itself.

So, yo dawg.

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