The List-Size Lie: What Advertisers Really Pay For in Newsletters

Most newsletter operators are pricing their inventory wrong — and most advertisers are buying it wrong.

In this episode, Jeff Eisenberg, co-founder of Media Intercept, breaks down how newsletter monetization actually works: why list size and open rate are vanity metrics, the real trade-offs between CPM, CPC, and CPA, and why treating newsletters as a pure bottom-of-funnel performance channel sets everyone up to be disappointed.

Jeff and Chris met at a newsletter conference where — surprisingly — almost nobody was talking about monetization. So they fixed that here.

From bot and VPN traffic to dedicated-send fatigue, AI ad copy, and the case for industry-wide metric standardization, this is a working operator's guide to making your audience monetizable, not just big.

⏱️ CHAPTERS

• 00:00 Intro & meeting at the newsletter conference
• 01:33 Jeff's path: law → radio → video → newsletters
• 07:05 The models explained: CPM, CPC & CPA
• 08:16 The list-size lie & fake open rates
• 12:30 Why newsletters aren't bottom-of-funnel
• 21:03 Native vs. dedicated (pricing, churn, deliverability)
• 24:50 AI ad copy & the rise of newsletter slop
• 26:16 Bots, VPNs & validating traffic
• 37:28 Pricing your spot & ad frequency
• 43:00 Beehiiv, Kit, Substack & the standardization problem
• 51:28 Rapid fire: overrated, underrated & ready for sponsors
• 1:00:30 Inside Media Intercept's new platform

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Transcript

Intro & meeting at the newsletter conference

0:00

And large publishers like didn't care about the product. They used it to drive traffic to like more profitable content. In the end, it's like if your content sucks, it's gonna suck. If it's good, it's gonna be good. We're in the ad sales business and we know that what we're selling has to be digestible for an advertiser to run their ads against that content. I recommend to everyone that you should be doing multiple types of growth, running Facebook, running Google. The family member at the time that was running that business told me I had to learn marketing and advertising to be successful. You gotta be bringing ads in from other methods, not just count on their internal network. How do we measure opens? How do we measure list sizes? How do we measure clicks? And then ultimately, like down to conversions. I don't want to waste time running with publishers that have questionable audiences. Welcome back to another episode of Audience Birds Insights. Today I have Jeff Eisenberg, co-founder of Media Intercept here. Jeff, how are you doing? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me, Chris. Appreciate it. Awesome. We uh we actually uh got together at the newsletter conference last week. You know, we were having some conversations and we did discuss about monetization, advertising, which you know kind of shocked us a little bit that there wasn't a lot of talk about that at the conference. So I said, well, let's get you up on the podcast and let's talk about monetization because uh that's a very important part about owning a newsletter and email marking in general. So um that's what we're gonna discuss today. Why don't we get started and just let the audience know a little bit back about your background, how you kind of got

Jeff's path: law → radio → video → newsletters

1:33

in in this? I know uh, you know, just looking back through your profile, I think you were law school, you went that route. Not sure if you actually became a lawyer and did any legal work, but then you went kind of like like radio, video, and then got pushed to newsletter. If you want to kind of tell how that kind of transformation happened, yeah, yeah. So um, yes, I did go to law school. I mean, you know, fortunately or unfortunately, however, you know, however you want to look at it, I did not choose to pursue a career in law. Um, I think fortunately for me personally, I don't think I would have been well suited for that. And I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do. Um, and I thought I wanted to get into a family business running uh consumer shows, so like home shows, auto shows, boat shows. And uh the family member at the time that that was running that business told me um I had to learn marketing and advertising to be successful. So the first job I was able to get was selling radio for a station in Miami, which you may know called Power 96. Yeah, maybe power hour. So went from um, you know, law school and and interning at law firms to hitting used car lots in Haileah, uh trying to drum up business. And I would tell anybody, you know, anyone who's been in radio, and there's a lot of really successful digital ad executives that started in radio because it's really hard, right? Local radio sales is very difficult. When I got there, they're like, here's the phone book. Good luck. You know, there was no, we're talking, I'm gonna date myself, like 20 years ago. You didn't have like a lot of the monitoring services you have today. It was just a lot less sophisticated. But then had an opportunity, after doing that for a short period of time, to move back to New York and work for a national radio company, Westwood One, um selling traffic and weather. And then after about a year and a half, had an opportunity to go to get into digital video, which, you know, at the time we're talking 2008. It's early. You know, I certainly saw it as the future. I mean, and you have to remember that it's hard, it's hard to think about a day, a time before YouTube or you know how ubiquitous video is on your phone now or your an iPad. But at that time, digital video was considered to be a fringe product. TV still ruled, right? So I did that for a few years, worked for, you know, YouTube MCNs for a few years, worked for a company called Demand Media, which then became Leaf Group, which now is nothing. But they were a pretty large company that was capitalizing on search traffic, which is probably an interesting subject for us to discuss as far as it relates to newsletters. And then I moved on and ran national sales for a company called Daily Motion, which is the second largest video platform in the world, currently owned by Vivendi Group, and wanted to get back into startups after working in, you know, for big corporate for a few years and worked for a video technology company, shoppable video. So that was my first taste of commerce and understanding like, you know, outcome-driven media as opposed to like branding and just just awareness. And subsequent to that, moved to Florida, started consulting, consulted for several companies, one of which was a company called Stack Commerce. You know, I helped them build their media business there, uh, primarily focused on articles initially, and then we got into newsletter. And what we quickly realized was that newsletter was much more scalable. It was a much more interesting, sort of underserved channel at the time. I mean, we're talking 2019, 2020 pandemic, uh, which is really when you saw the newsletter space start to pick up some steam. You know, you had a lot of CPG companies or direct consumer companies that were, you know, everyone was at home, right? So those companies started to explode, subscription services, home education services, and much like podcasts, newsletters became, you know, a space where you could reach niche audiences at scale. And so my current business partner and I thought, you know, there's a real business here, focusing specifically on the newsletter space, you know, doing some components of performance, but also looking a little bit further up funnel into awareness, which to this day is still not typically how the channel is viewed. And that's that's how we're here. So we launched Media Intercept early 2023. And about six weeks in, we we were profitable and and we haven't looked back since. Is there anything you were able to take from your experience at Daily Motion and doing the video stuff that you've brought into the newsletter space, advertising, anything there? Yeah, I mean, listen, you know, uh having worked for large media companies, I think that like what you've seen in the newsletter space is sort of a lack of maturity to this point in terms of like true understanding of what large advertisers are looking for, the way that they buy, um, the way that they operate. You just currently have like a massive amount of fragmentation. It's like the most fragmented space possible. And so what we're trying to do is bring some discipline to the space in terms of true uniform metrics, like how do we measure opens? How do we measure list sizes? How do we measure clicks? And then ultimately like down to conversions. And if you ask 10 people in the space, you'll probably get 10 answers. And so, you know, my background in media sales, uh understanding what advertisers need to see to give them confidence in what we're doing, you know, that sort of directs everything that we're doing. And my partner and I have both had long experienced backgrounds in media sales and building media teams and understanding the operational side, which I think, you know, is also really important. It's very easy if you're a single operator to run your calendar. You're like, okay, I'm gonna send out an email every day. I've got two or three ad slots in that email. It's a fairly simple business. But when you're selling inventory across thousands of newsletters, you know, and hundreds of advertisers, it becomes a much more complicated proposition and it requires a background of understanding how to run a media business at scale. So yeah, that's that's certainly been it's it's been helpful to have had that experience. Let's kind of get into the newsletter monetization business model. You know, a lot of, I mean, historically, you know, newsletter ads and then the industry's been sold on a CPM basis. Uh, big is

The models explained: CPM, CPC & CPA

7:05

your list, who am I sending to, um, which caused a bunch of issues. Uh, obviously at the deliverability side, things aren't happening, you're not really getting the results you want because you're done, but you still have to perform based on what the commitments to the advertiser were. Then you're doing make goods because it's not working for them, just a full mess of logistics to deal with to all the different formats, the you know, the FlatFeak, CPC, CPA, all the other different types uh out there. Um, what are you guys doing at Media Intercept? I believe it's mostly a lot of it's CPC. And then I guess you're doing some uh you got your native app place, unless you're doing some dedicated creatives as well, kind of share like what you guys are doing there, what might be different than the old model, why whatever you guys are doing probably better. I know I think there's a newsletter conference which I've been preaching for years now, is like list size doesn't matter anymore. It's your engaged audience, how how large is your engaged audience, not how large your subscribers are. So what where do you guys uh fit there? Yeah, I mean, you know, so there's there's a lot to unpack there. I think like it's interesting when you say like traditionally flat rate CPM, but I would even go further back and like the big initial issue really in this space was let's pre-morning brew.

The list-size lie & fake open rates

8:16

I I wouldn't say pre-Skim, because Skim's been around now for quite a while. But you know, before you had like this real creator economy that's sort of boomed in newsletters the way that it has in video or or other channels, the primary deliverers of newsletters from like a content perspective were large publishers. And large publishers like didn't care about the product, right? So they used it for one of two things. They used it to drive traffic to like more profitable, you know, content, right? Use it to drive it to video that they're publishing on site, brand new content, articles, what have you, or using it as a retention tool, you know, for their audiences. Like, hey, here are the top 10 articles in the New York Times or whatever. And in terms of selling it, you know, it was really a tool to drive sales in other areas. So it's pretty much given as value add. Here, I'm gonna buy a million dollar package with XYZ publisher, and newsletters were typically thrown in there as like a zero dollar line item. And so that devalued here's a little bonus. That's right. And, you know, and then so in those cases, like list size becomes like it's like it matters because you can sort of pork belly in those in those impressions into the overall buy to artificially lower like a CPM. So it's like, okay, our list size is a million. We're gonna tell you our open rate is 40, 50, or or higher in some cases where you know they're not realizing that those emails are are actually not being opened, even though you know their their servers telling them that they are. And there's a lot of reasons why that'll happen. Um, and then you can just sort of add those impressions to an overall goal and at a zero dollar cost, like like make it appear to be more efficient. And so, you know, that always pose posed a challenge, I think, like for big advertisers to enter into the space because they're like, why should I pay for this like when I get it for free anyway? But then to your point, like, you know, we we started with CPC a long time ago and we came to that conclusion really for for two reasons. You know, on on the one side you have flat rate CPM, so that's like top of funnel, bottom of funnel, you have CPA. I think like when you look at CPM and flat rate, you know, you you need metrics today, currently beyond simply list size and open rate to justify that. And I think the only way you can get to that is by have having done some more performance-oriented campaigns. So you can go to an advertiser and say, hey, like my list size is X and you should pay me for that. And I know it's real because when I ran this campaign on a CPC or a CPA, this advertiser saw these results that back up, you know, what I'm telling you in terms of my audience size. And then it, you know, again, it depends on the publisher, right? Whether we can get into this, like whether they're B2B or general interests. Like, I think the way that those two types of publishers sell have to be different. Just because like you might have a list of 20,000 highly engaged business leaders, and that's incredibly valuable. And you're not gonna sell that on a CPC because it's not gonna generate enough volume for it to make sense for the publisher. So you can justify a CPM or flat rate spend because, like, you know, a brand's gonna say, hey, this is a really engaged audience, versus like just general news, or you need a much larger audience because they're not specialized. They're they're, you know, a wide range of people that are probably more interested in consumer products that have much lower CPA goals. I think on the flip side, like CPA has always been a challenge because, you know, everything that has to do with attribution on the affiliate side and the way that people buy, like you could be responsible for a huge halo effect or a huge number of leads that get brought in the funnel, but they might not convert through like your last click for any number of reasons, right? It could be like they comparison shop, and that's a big issue, right? I click on a pair of Nikes in a newsletter. Oh, that's great. Let me see where else I can buy that for less money. If I find it, I'll buy it there. And then that person gets the credit, and the publisher who actually generated the interest gets sort of left out in the cold. That's a common story in affiliate. Uh, to like the other end of the spectrum, you know, the company that's advertising has like a poor product or it's poorly priced, or the checkout process is super convoluted and people drop off or whatever. Like all these different reasons for why a conversion won't happen based on the lead that a publisher generates, which again, not fair to the publisher. So you've got these two ends of the spectrum on the CPM flat rate side, all the risk isn't on the advertiser side. On the CPA side, all the risk is on the publisher side. But CPC is more of a shared risk model and it has its own issues as well. And we can get into bot traffic and

Why newsletters aren't bottom-of-funnel

12:30

bot clicks and all that stuff, but ultimately we've sort of realized that it's at least the most fair way to judge a campaign if what you're trying to do is drive like some sort of action. I do still, and we are moving into this space quickly, believe that there is a world where, you know, brand dollars start to flow into newsletter and there is no call to action. Like you're selling like a can of Coke or you're selling a car or whatever, and you're not really trying to get someone to click out to somewhere. You're just get you want to share information, create awareness, be top of mind as a part of the media mix, the same way you would with like a TV commercial, a radio commercial, like anything that's just sort of making a consumer aware that a product is out there. So that hopefully when they're ready to buy, that that you're in the consideration set because they've seen it so often. Um, but yeah, I mean, that's a long answer to your question. I think like you can you can come up with 10 or 20 or 30 or 100 different ways to go about it. Um, you know, so CPC is primarily how we operate, but we do recognize there are other other ways to do it, and we're exploring those. And and it sort of led us to expanding our offerings across the board from having a flat rate CPM product for certain advertisers, but backing those recommendations with data that we've collected over the years in terms of how these publishers perform from more performance performance-oriented advertisers. And then, you know, on the opposite end of the spectrum, opening up what we call a non-guaranteed channel that allows advertisers to bid whatever CPC they want, understanding that some products like they have lower, you know, lower CPA goals. And so, like, if if you're selling like if you're T-Mobile and you're selling like a new phone, like the CPA on that is like $10 to $15 for a new subscription. It's very low. So it's hard to justify a CPC above a certain price because your conversion rate's gonna have to be like really high. But the publisher, it can be pretty lucrative because that offer might click much better. You're gonna do more volume, albeit at a lower unit cost. And so, you know, we've long felt that you have certain advertisers that are shut out just based on like sort of unit economics that have existed for a long time. So we're trying to change that as well. Yeah, I mean, I like how you say that you know, the CBC model is kind of a shared risk. I know from just years of experience and stuff, and we had a network in the health space way back that we got out of that, but managing the publishers trying who are trying to always say that no, our audience is good, it's your it's your offer. And then the advertisers say, no, your your your traffic sucks. And it's like you're trying to balance the who's right, who's not, you know, having to play that, you know, mediary, it's kind of a pain in the ass uh to be able to kind of separate that and put them even playing field. One of the worst things that I always used to see were you know, advertisers coming out with a new offer or a new product, they want you to test this on a CPA, and they got no no proof to the pudding. You're like, I'm not gonna be your guinea pig. If you want to, you know, pay me a flat rate to run it so you can get learnings and see if your offer is good, I'll do that. But I'm not gonna just send traffic hoping that that it's gonna convert for me. Yeah, I mean, I I also think like it depends on like again, like what you are as an operator, right? Like, I there have been friends of mine who have asked for advice, like, how do I start getting ads like into my newsletter? And they might have like a very small list. And my advice to them in those cases, because I know they're too small to individually go out to pitch the advertisers, like it's just not gonna make any sense. And working with someone like me, they won't make enough money on a CPC. It just won't be worth their time. But like to those people, I would say, hey, like take it, take an affiliate, you'll just pick like the brand that you think resonates with your audience that you would, you know, want to sell to your audience because it's this great fit and you believe in it and whatever, and then you can start to generate some data that says, hey, we only have 10,000 subscribers, but like I put this super expensive infrared sauna, you know, offer into my newsletter because I'm trying to reach, you know, this is actually a real example, like women who are interested in like perimenopausal information. It's a big market, but but this person's just starting out, and you know, maybe they sell like 20 of them, and that's worth like a huge amount of money, you know, that like way out punches what their audience size is. They can then take that data and start to justify, like, here, even though I'm smaller, this audience is super engaged. They buy the products that I pitch, like you should pay me on a flat rate. Um, but I don't think you can get there without having some sort of proof point that's that shows that your audience is legitimately engaged. What specific niches are are kind of performing the best right now in terms of like content or in terms of advertiser? Advertising as far as publishers making more money because the offer's good and then it it actually working for the advertiser on the backside. Yeah, I mean, I I think you know, it's really like for us, like we we work with just such a wide range of companies. You know, we work with insurance companies, we work with credit card companies, you know, financial services, things like that, those tend to do really well. Um, but then on the other hand, like a huge number of health, right? Like supplement brands, health and awareness, you know, health awareness brands, a lot of sort of biohacking brands, those seem to do very well. Mental health does very well. And then, you know, education, right? So like e-learning classes, language learning classes, we've seen apparel do really well. So there's a lot of different things. I think it's really the key is the match between the advertiser and the publisher. You're not going to necessarily run like a mental health ad in like a travel newsletter. It I mean, you you could unless you have anxiety, anxiety flying like I do, and then you take a Xanax. Well, or you could say, hey, like, you know, take a vacation because you're stressed out, something like that. I mean, you have to come up with an angle that makes sense. And I think that's actually the beauty of newsletter advertising is the fact that, you know, you can tailor, it's what we do, we tailor the message to the specific audience. So when you can create true native ads, HTML5 card-coded, you can have each ad be individual to the newsletter, and then it's gonna be much more effective. But, you know, you don't want to try to fit a square peg into a round hole. So you wouldn't run, you know, I was on Tyler Morin's podcast, and I was like, Yeah, we're not gonna run like lip balm or beauty, like women's beauty on your newsletter, which is financial news. It just doesn't, it's like you don't have the right audience and they don't care about that. So what about what about the warping mobile offer? We haven't picked that one up yet. Um, we haven't done toenail fungus, you know, a lot of the stuff you see programmatically we haven't we haven't dipped into. And I think, you know, unfortunately, those type of ads have sort of poisoned the well to a certain extent with with creators. Um, so we try to avoid those things. We try to focus on quality brands. And then on the flip side, you know, we don't just accept every publisher into our network either. Like, I don't want to waste time running with publishers that have questionable audiences or, you know, subject matter that we know is not gonna be a fit for advertisers. Like it's great. If they want to do it, that's fine. But like we're in the ad sales business and we know that what we're selling has to ultimately be digestible for an advertiser to run their ads against that content. Yeah, I was actually just gonna about to ask you the uh what what publishers consistently deliver versus the ones that don't. Um, I mean, I you know, it's not necessarily a subject matter thing. We have a few that that do really well, like no matter what we run there. And they could be, you know, I I do think, you know, when we see content that's like newsletters that are body copy, like are actually well written, typically not by AI, have actual things to say to people that are reading them. Like they're people are more engaged, right? So if I get a newsletter with someone's opinion or point of view or news, and there's a lot in there that's not just simply an RSS feed linking out to other things, those are gonna perform better than like here are the top 20 articles from around the country with like no description of them because there's no real content there. And someone's just gonna scroll through it. And any ad that's in there is gonna, if it if it looks like those thumbnails, people are gonna ignore it. It's not gonna perform well. And if it doesn't, it's gonna be jarring, right? It's gonna be like the ad is the content, and then the rest of the content is what. So that's one good rule of thumb. Like something that has like a lot of body copy tends to perform really well regardless of the vertical. We do see like positivity, you know, is is something that typically does well, like content that has a positive spin, and and that's across, you know, again, it's news, it's health, business, things that are funny, things that make people feel good tend to increase engagement. And then obviously, like higher engagement leads to better ad performance. When you have, say, and I know you're opening up like I think other types of creatives offers, whatever you we want to call them, but you have your native kind of placements, and then you do have your your dedicated, I guess, creatives. Um, is there a difference in the uh CPCs or the money per click off of

Native vs. dedicated (pricing, churn, deliverability)

21:03

those? Or are they kind of the same? And the dedicated, you're probably just getting more of traffic because you're just focusing in on that, on that? You're getting more traffic, but we do charge a premium for dedicated because like we want to pay the publisher a premium for that. Ultimately, like there's a a trade-off for a publisher. You know, you can make more money doing dedicated, but potentially you're gonna have more churn on your audience if you do it too often, or you do it with products that just aren't a fit. Like, people are like, okay, what is this? Why am I getting this? I didn't sign up for that. I signed up for your content. And so you have to respect your audience, right? And we understand, you know, if someone's going to promote, like use their list and their audience that they've spent a lot of time building and earning trust with to promote one of our products that we're we're you know representing, it's a potential risk. And so, you know, in order to mitigate that risk, we want to pay more and make sure, you know, and make sure we're getting the best inventory we can for our advertising clients. And so we do pay out higher for dedicated. I think like, you know, it's better for brands. brands because obviously, you know, um, you have a hundred percent share of voice, like it's just you. So certainly more clicks, more engagement, and then more room to tell your story. So as opposed to 40 to 100 words in like a true native ad, it's within the content of a regular newsletter, I mean, you can do whatever you want. You can make it a thousand words and you can write something like that's pretty in-depth and complicated, which for a lot of brands is a huge, it's a huge bonus to be able to do that. Talking about dedicated, obviously, and that I've been experiencing this over the years, um, like you said, it'd be a lot more churn. Uh there's additional issues that can come from dedicated as well, which are fingerprinting of the of the the creative, which it's getting sent down on you know 150 different newsletters, and that, you know, it gets harder and harder to possibly hit the inbox of some of those creatives over time, uh depending on how strong your deliverability is. Are the publishers at all allowed to play with the creative um to get it more into their voice? Are they stuck to have I know some, you know, obviously in the FinPUP space, they're pretty strict because of compliance, legal and all that stuff because of all the lawsuits over the years. Obviously they have a lot more um requirements. So it's harder to get them to do that. They almost have to like make one for you if you have enough volume for them. What's going on over there uh from you guys? Yeah I mean everything we do we we certainly encourage the publisher to make it their own obviously understanding that it has to be approved by the client. Like there's not there's nothing like we're never going to take a copy ship it to a publisher and say hey you can tweak it and then not have it come back for approval. And then as you said certainly um some verticals or industries are much more strict. And I think the key is like if there's any disclosures or disclaimers like those have to be very clear and they have that you have to be sure that the reader is going to see them. I mean we just ran into an issue where one publisher like published the ad. This is not in a dedicated this isn't a native but they published the ad like somewhere in the middle of the newsletter and then they had the disclaimer like all the way at the bottom completely separate and you know the advertiser couldn't use any of those leads because there's a high level high probability that if you know the user got through half the newsletter clicked on that ad they might not have finished the rest of the newsletter so they never saw the disclaimer or disclosure. And then they're open to potential exposure there to say, hey I didn't know that well I didn't know that because you didn't have it right there. So you know we review everything but certainly you know it is to everyone's benefit to have a publisher write it in their voice and because that's the voice that ultimately has generated the audience growth right that's what's captured the audience that's why people are there. They're not there to just read like ad copy from you know someone like me who's just gonna write it or whatever. You think there is uh there's room for I mean obviously AI's taking over freaking everything um a way that AI can kind of spin up these creatives uh the content for you know there's an advertiser

AI ad copy & the rise of newsletter slop

24:50

has their creative here's the comp that the the topic and then the the this is the publisher can kind of put a prompt in that has to fit certain requirements that the advertiser says and then it spins it up. Yeah I mean that's listen that's there's I don't have any issue with that as like a starting point right so it's like you want to put in a prompt or you want to you know you train like some you know an agent to to create all your ad copy and all your creatives, that's fine. But you know you also need to have human eyes on it because those things are not a hundred percent accurate, you know, and ultimately you know it's like anything else with AI, I think that it can it can certainly speed things up and create efficiencies um but it's not like a a 100% solution. And I think we've seen that you know whether it's in ad copy or people that like I mean and we can get into this but you know a huge proliferation of newsletters are just like AI slop. Like it's it's sort of gaming the system like I'm gonna go onto one of these platforms I'm gonna create a bunch of newsletters I'm just gonna have AI write them. It's like an automated thing and they get plugged into those ad networks and they're just making money without like what there's no real content there. And people aren't going to really read like they'll catch on that this is nonsense gibberish so I think it's like you know it's like a cyborg right you you need you need the human component and then you have the AI that that certainly can accelerate things and and maybe give you a head start uh but but I wouldn't just leave it to to that alone. Earlier you mentioned obviously quality

Bots, VPNs & validating traffic

26:16

bots things of that nature what are you guys doing to try to help police that protect that for for your advertisers is there anything you guys are doing as far as validating traffic anything like that? So we do a ton it's it's a game that that will go on forever right like you know you'll figure out like here's this this is this is a suspicious person or suspicious suspicious traffic and you'll capture that and you'll sort of use that now as like a you know a marker for what might not be legitimate and then you know broadsters will f come up with some new way to to mask it. I think you know we use certainly software that that can filter things out. We we typically though we we don't block traffic at this point we let it all go through and then we will go back after the fact and clean it the reason for that is like you have I mean there's certain things that are very obvious right so it's like if you get like a burst of repeat clicks duplicate clicks from the same IP address like you know in a five second period like that's very obviously not legitimate. And that but it's not you know and I always like to say illegitimate not fraud fraud implies that like I am trying to steal when we know that particularly if you're a B2B newsletter and you've got a lot of business emails for example you're gonna have antiviral software that's gonna go through those emails before you ever open them and click on all the links. And there might be multiple. So you might get the same one clicks it three times like in a row. It's not necessarily an indicator of fraud but it's also not a real person. So you shouldn't pay for it as an advertiser. And that's so that's one extreme and obvious thing, you know, or like clicks from weird geos or you know that don't make any sense and are not worth anything to an advertiser. They shouldn't pay for that. On the other hand, there's things that are more nebulous you know the examples of those would be proxy clicks and VPN clicks. And you know VPN is a big sort of discussion now particularly in the CPC space because you know you have a lot of the affiliate dashboards that are filtering all of it out. They're just saying anything that comes from a VPN like we consider to be illegitimate. And I don't know if that's because they have no way to determine the difference between what's legitimate and what's not. I think that's part of it. I think the other part of it is you know for them they can increase revenue per click and like look look better. And so that's like one way they can do that. For us like it's more of a gray area. And so what we'll end up doing is looking at like the deeper metrics but the reason it's a gray area like on the one hand you could say yes there is incentive to commit fraud there. Like there's incentive to spoof a US IP address from a foreign country because US traffic is more valuable, right? People will pay more for a click from a US user than a user in Pakistan or or wherever. But on the other hand you've got 50 million plus people in the US that use VPNs. So there's no way that you can say those people are all that it's all illegitimate traffic. And if you block all of it, you're gonna be blocking potential conversions. So we'd rather those clicks come in and then you know ultimately we'll look at the further down funnel metrics and and sort of have an idea of like what we should be giving credit to and what we should not. You know if if an ad has a really high conversion rate and we see a good amount of VPN traffic like we're gonna let that go through and we're gonna pay the publisher out on that because the advertiser is happy and like that's fine. If we see something do like 2000 clicks and generate like one lead or two leads for a product that typically would do a hundred then we have a higher degree of certainty that a lot of that you know gray area traffic is probably not legitimate. And we're very transparent with with our publishers on that. You know, we will share all our all reporting and how we sort of will justify like what we think you know we should be paying out based on the traffic. And you know ultimately you you do have some people that can be disappointed by that. But I think you know it only serves them for us to be open and honest about what's happening because you know we can become sort of the canary in the coal mine in the sense that we're just doing such a a large amount of volume we can identify issues for publishers perhaps more quickly than they can on their own because they're only seeing their own traffic. And I'd rather it's probably better for them that I tell them and they could say okay maybe I have a problem here I have to clean up my traffic as opposed to like all of a sudden they've got 30 super pissed off advertisers because like they ran ads on flat rate and like it was all illegitimate traffic. But yeah, it's an ever-evolving process for us. You know we never we will be honest with publishers and we don't ever like to burn bridges but if we do see a pattern we'll say look you know we need to take a break and you need to figure out what's going on with your list and come back to me in three months when you've done some diligence and we'll test again and see where we're at. Uh and some of them do correct it like we've seen that for sure. Others like it will always be bad because like the foundation of their audience of what they've been built on depending on how they've done their growth is just like rotten to the core and they can't ever fix it. Got it. Yeah I mean V uh VPN's obvious I mean that's ignored VPN freaking ads like all over the place. Yeah I mean you know and and one thing we talk about as a company like by the way it's like we have three responsibilities as like the core of our business. So like one obviously like we're in business to make money right we have to be profitable and and pay employees and all that certainly um but like our mission is twofold in terms of how we do that. It's one like make advertisers happy in the newsletter channel. So in order to do that, you know you have to make sure that you're being efficient you're buying the right properties on their behalf, replacing them and that it's performing really well, you know, that they're they're seeing the efficiency on a per click basis or if they're buying flat, they're still seeing the value, you know, their their their row ads is higher than what they've paid. And then on the other side and these these are not necessarily tied together is making publishers happy. So you know making sure that a publisher when they take one of our ads they're happy with the revenue they're seeing and they're happy with the brands that they're putting in front of their audience. And so you know one can happen without the other happening or both can happen you know independently of each other. And you know we just make have to make sure that we're keeping our eye on both both balls at the same time because it is a bit of a balancing act for sure. And your guys' situation are you are are the publishers able to get post back pixels for back end conversions after the click or since it's CPC that's really the conversion point because that's what they're getting or so they can see the performance and you know back out later down the road like you said like oh here's the stats from down the funnel that it performs if you do try to get a flat regulatory like yeah we have buyers we're doing this you know this is how result are they able to see that through the through the network or is that something you got to gotta get from the advertiser to then provide them get the insights we get it from the advertiser we don't just like publish that stuff on the dashboard because it's proprietary right like and different advertisers use like I mean you know if you've got a hundred advertisers they're all gonna have a hundred you know a hundred different attribution models and some of them are purely like last click attribution which obviously like we don't think is fair. And they're gonna be selling themselves short in the long run by just looking at like that metric, you're gonna end up sort of in an echo chamber of like I'm only going to spend where people are buying well okay but they might not have gotten to that point without these other channels. So I think if you're not looking at you know a fuel a full attribution picture, a full funnel picture of like the consumer journey, you're not gonna have success. But there are obviously degrees to that you know again it gets into what the advertisers' objectives are, what they're selling, you know, the the sales cycle for it like someone who's selling you know a $50 pair of sneakers, like that's a fairly immediate decision. Like I'm either buying it or I'm not. Now I might have gone to two places to buy it but it's not like I'm gonna think about it for weeks and weeks and weeks versus like homeowner's insurance, which is a fairly significant purchase in someone's life. Like it's it costs a lot of money. The implications of the coverage are really high like the stakes are high. You have to have a much more sophisticated funnel and like patience to understand that like even if the policy didn't come from here, I need to look at like all the different places that that consumer went before they ultimately you know bought that policy. And that's going to look a lot different obviously than something that's like fairly straightforward. So it's even if we shared it it would never look the same like no two advertisers would look the same to a publisher. It's you know it's better for us to take that data from the advertiser and distill it for the publishers so they understand you know success can look different for different people and you know it's not one size fits all. And so it wouldn't serve our publishers for us to just like here this is this is these are all the conversions and it looks the same whether you're selling a pair of sneakers or home loaders insurance. There's more nuance to it. So we we take that data from the advertisers we then share feedback and information to the publishers. For new publishers or publishers that are getting started and and want to start monetizing, what what would you say would be the first step for them or what they what should shade what should they do to begin the monetization process? Yeah I mean we talked about a little bit earlier I think it depends on like what is again like what is their goal what what sort of content are they creating? Like who is their audience or who do they want their audience to be if you're trying to start a general news site it's hard you know you need like some real scale there to make that work from a monetization perspective. You know, I don't think like 20 or 30 thousand people really cut it on a list to make it attracted to an advertiser. You're talking you need hundreds of thousands if not millions because it's like sort of this general information you're gonna have a generalized audience and the things these people are going to be interested in purchasing are are sort of you know lower, lower price point typically as opposed to I'm gonna create like a newsletter for real estate investors, you know, and I want that list to be made up of people that are looking to invest in real estate, have assets that are capable of being deployed to invest in real estate or people that are sort of adjacent to that business. And in that case like I might only need 10,000 people to make it like a super valuable list for an advertiser. And then the way that you sell that is going to be different. So you know you're gonna do you could do CPM flat rate for a very large general news list. You have to do that for a B2B list like that because the other ways of operating aren't necessarily going to make sense. But when you're first getting started you need to have those proof points you need to be able to go to an advertiser and say hey whether your list is a million you know general market people or 10,000 like very specific valuable potential potentially valuable people, you have to have a story to tell that explains why you're trying to sell at a certain price and justify that price. And I think the only way you can do that is to you know yeah maybe you have a friend who is a marketer and you can get them to throw you a few bucks and and test it out but more likely like pick up a couple of affiliate ads or pick up a couple of links see what that does from a sales perspective and try to get data in terms of you know just beyond last click like you can go in and see you know maybe shared attribution or shared credit for a sale and then you have a story to tell to go out and start to pitch your audience. But you know I I think and a lot of people talk about this and this is probably a big part of the subject matter of the conference we were just at like focusing on building your audience properly creating really good content things that people are interested in they're gonna want to read you know there's no shortcut to that there's no shortcut to quality. And so that's that's the first step is making sure that what you're writing is worth somebody's time and engagement. Do you guys do I think you said you might be doing some CPM flat rate stuff now when when you're doing CPM flat rate what would be your I mean you guys

Pricing your spot & ad frequency

37:28

I guess have your your own pricing model that you're doing you're working out with the advertisers and and figuring that out. If someone's doing their own flat rate sales or CPM sales what would you what advice would you give them as to how you should properly price your list or your spot? Yeah I mean you know obviously you have to start with the basic vanity metrics like list size and open rate and you need to take but but understand that people are going to take that with a grain of salt right like if I say have a million subscribers like okay like maybe right how many are you actually sending out to you know what is the quality of that list and then if you say your open rate is like 50 or 60% well is that actually true? Because we know that iOS devices count every email as an open like that's just sort of like the new privacy tools that Apple's deployed have made it like very difficult to know what a true open is. And I think again it gets back to to proof points. So you can certainly use those numbers as as a starting point and then you need to use previous performance for other advertisers to sort of close that deal to say hey we're pricing it as if there are 4000 opens and we can justify that because we ran these other advertisers and these are the results that they saw that tell us that these numbers are accurate. Ultimately that's like it it comes down to like how you tell your story and how you convince somebody that like your audience is is real but also engaged and is the right audience for that brand. So it's certainly the data it's also like what your subject matter is like who you're trying to reach and how well you engage that audience that's ultimately how you're gonna convince somebody to sort of take all the risk you know talking about a shared risk model like I'm gonna give you a flat fee with no guarantee that anything's gonna happen for me. You better have like a lot of data that says well it's happened for other people like you so it's likely that it's gonna work for you as well. With with all the campaigns you guys have run and and all the data you guys have seen is and I think you talked about it earlier obviously depending on how your list is growing if you're you know if you're not adding new actually this might have been a different conversation I had the other day that just popped in my head but how frequently do you think someone should run a specific offer in a in a in a time window? You know obviously if you're if you're sending an offer like every day it's not going to perform they might perform the first time they see it the second time it's gonna keep on getting worse and then it's gonna, you know, especially if you're not growing your audience you're not getting new subscribers in there to see stuff. Do you guys have any insights on that on like or any recommendations or or tips you guys give your publishers like hey you shouldn't run this or run it every like that obviously there's different creatives for different offers too that you can put in the mix but what do you think uh people should do there? Yeah I mean yeah certainly like audience fatigue is very real in the newsletter space um because the audiences are more static right your list is your list so as opposed to you know publishing a video like on the web or or or through Instagram or whatever where like it could be seen by you know one set of people one time and then like a whole different audience another time generally um your list is your list. So if you have a million subscribers today like even if you increase it by 20,000 you know a month from now like the first million are still the same people. So yes audience fatigue happens if you send an ad out every day like it it ceases to be effective and you've basically destroyed that audience it's there's no definitive answer. It is dependent on publisher and it is dependent on advertiser like a good rule of thumb like twice a month is probably the max that I would go with it's just you you want it you would rather be able to run an ad 15 to 20 times in a year as opposed to run an ad eight times in two months and then never see that advertiser again. So you know think long term I would say once a month is optimal but I understand like you know there's pressure right if you need to fill something you need to fill inventory to take you know an ad from an advertiser more than once I would say two is the most that I would do. And then certainly for dedicated like honestly we we would never run something more than like once a quarter with the same publisher on a dedicated just because like we know if we do that like you have the double effect the dedicated becoming less effective but then that's the same audience that's reading the regular newsletter and they're just going to get pissed off. So those are just sort of general rules of thumb um but again the smaller the list like maybe those numbers change right like there's just less people to reach you have with large list sizes possibilities that like the audiences can be varied when they open it, right? So if you're talking about like a 1440 as an example where you're talking about you know four and a half, five million subscribers, you might write an ad one week and you have like this million people see it and then you run an ad like two or two or three weeks later and like there's maybe half of that people that see it are different. And so there's more opportunity to reach different people than if your list is like 2000 and you have a fairly consistent open rate even if like different segments of that audience are opening it, there's just less opportunities because the list size is so much smaller. Any thoughts on on locking in long-term deals of too long or too long of a deal versus shorter deals or I listen I think that like trying to do an upfront deal is a great idea. And I think the trade-off like hey like I normally if you're a publisher you're saying I want $5,000 per placement but someone's like willing to commit to one a month for the next year like okay great I'll give them to you for four you know so it's like a 20% discount but you're locking in that revenue for the year. Like that's like one ad spot every month that you don't have to think about in terms of selling and that certainly creates a a floor for revenue that's attractive and you're willing to trade you know some of the the higher end opportunity to do that. And and and that's great if you can accomplish that as an as an operator for sure.

Beehiiv, Kit, Substack & the standardization problem

43:00

Well let's let's switch uh topics a little bit let's talk about more of like the future what's been happening what's going on uh what's on the horizon we we mentioned this before obviously this conversation but you know some of the ESPs creative creator platforms you want to call it they got that they're more than just ESPs these days uh they're trying to be the do all everything um seems to be also adding ad networks like Beehive has an ad network that has some some decent success not I don't know if it's it's then I'll be all right at this moment in time that needs a lot of work and it needs more more volume and stuff to really monetize for their publishers I don't know Substack and Kit might be getting into it some what are your thoughts on them trying to are them doing that you know are they a competitor do you look at my competitors is it's adding more credibility to the newsletter advertising industry that helps everyone in the ecosystem what are your what are your thoughts on the future of of ad networks and the blend and all that yeah I mean I so as far as the competition Competitive component, like we don't really view them as competitors to what we do. Like, I think that I mean, whether it's Beehive or Kit or or any of them that are trying to create sort of an in-house network, I think that like the first purpose of that is it's like a benefit they're offering their creators. It's attractive, right? So they want to get people to be on their platform versus another. Like, okay, you're gonna potentially provide ad revenue to me. Like that's attractive. And I'm gonna, you know, that's just a feature that I'm gonna want, right? So you you you're offering something there, and that's I think a big motivator behind why they've done it. Just generally, though, you know, when you buy into those networks, like they're good places for smaller operators to start their ad business. What you tend to see within those ad networks is that the larger operators are not accepting ads from those, from those uh businesses because the rates are lower or the advertisers aren't who they want to run versus like the smaller creators that don't have a lot of choice, right? They're like, we're just gonna take what we can get. You know, so if we're not competitive because for us as a company, like we focus on larger publishers, we focus on quality, and large doesn't always mean quality, but like there is some correlation there, right? If you've been successful enough to be around to build up a large audience, you know, you probably have something going for you. And I think the other, you know, angle of that is like we work with creators that are on Beehive, we work with creators that are, you know, publish on kit that are in Substack or none of them, right? They have their own ESPs, like their standalone newsletter businesses that don't be a part of that network or or what have you. You know, so like sort of our pitch in the in the market is like, you know, we're not limited to any one of them versus like those ad networks are, right? Like it's like that you can only buy what's on the platform. So we don't, you know, that's that's maybe a differentiator, but it's also why like we don't sell the same way, you know, we we don't pitch the same thing. I think that, yeah, there are challenges like that last piece is a big challenge, you know. So if you're whether you're beehive or kid or whoever, like, yeah, it's it's a super interesting product to say, hey, it's a one size fits all. And if you're an advertiser, come in here and access our 20,000 or 50,000 or 100,000 creators, whatever it may be, but you're limited to that. And I think when you talk about a world where there's fragmentation, that's a challenge for an advertiser that says, well, okay, great. I want those newsletters, but I also want to work with, you know, independent big publishers, whether they're legacy publishers or a morning brew or 1440 or a skim or sort of their own thing, or I want to work with creators that are on kit, or I want to, you know, then you're sort of taking away like the efficiency of it. And so I think it it also depends on like what you're trying to do. Like Beehive has like a lot of tech and B2B publishers. So I think they tend to over-index that way with their advertisers, which is great for them. Like that's a good selling point versus what you see on kit is much more, you know, celebrity driven or health and wellness or whatever. And that's a different story altogether. Um, and then Substack is anything and everything, like a lot of journalists, things like that, bloggers. So it I think it's important because they're aggregating and we believe in aggregation. Like, you know, I've made this point a million times that the only way that this business is going to scale, like the ad business is going to scale, is for some aggregator to come in and make a huge offering to to an advertiser. Because, like, for a lot of these advertisers that are that are spending like billions of dollars in marketing, if they can't spend $100 million like that, it's just not worth their time. It's like too much work to go through and figure out, like, oh, I want to buy this one and I want to buy that one, or I want to buy from 10,000 creators in this space and 10,000 there. And so, like, you do need people to partner up, whether it's like someone like us who's saying, okay, I want to work with like the 500 best newsletters. I don't care about having 10,000. You know, I want this premium network, or I want to have a massive network, like, you know, the beehive play is really like, okay, what are they 30,000, for whatever the number is of creators, but a lot of them are smaller, you know, very specific audiences. I think they're like 55,000, something, whatever it is. But you might have, and I I don't want to speak for them, it's their business, but you might have like, you know, 40,000 of those that have audiences that are sub-10,000 people or that are very specific niche subject matter. And those ads on a per newsletter basis, if you were to buy them individually, it might do like two clicks or three clicks or four clicks. But if you lump together a bunch of them, it can do some scale. And it is a good solution for allows those creators to make some money, it allows advertisers a way to like reach those audiences, albeit longer tail, smaller audiences. So, you know, as I said earlier, there's a lot of approaches to this business that can make sense. I think ultimately what has to happen, and I've made this point several times, is that whether it's Beehive or Substack or Kit or any of the others or companies like ours, there has to be at some point like a standardization across the board, like whether it's an IAB thing or something like that, that says this is what an impression is, this is what an open is, this is what a click is. And like we all agree on that. And an advertiser can then have confidence when they're buying to know what they're actually getting. And that's ultimately when that occurs, and hopefully it will, and it's something we're trying to achieve. That's when you're gonna really see like massive amounts of money flow into this space because the confidence will be there that like what they're buying is real. I think it's a is a kind of a brilliant business move up on beehive part as far as like look, their their ad network is never gonna be, doesn't seem like gonna be someone's like number one source of of revenue from ads for publishing. It's not gonna, it's not gonna change your your life uh for a lot of these smaller people, but for them by bringing it all together, like you're saying, the scale is there. So yeah, now they can do these big deals with a HubSpot or a Nike or whatever, because now they have instead of someone these one-on-one trying to sell 5,000, 10,000, 20,000, 4,000 lists, now they're like, oh, we can reach 2 billion people or whatever. So now they're getting you know million-dollar ad buys from them, and then they're able to distribute that across everyone, everyone gets a little money. A lot of it's kind of feeding that start with their monetization journey to like, oh, this is turning into something. Will it be life-changing? Don't know. It's got a lot of work to get there. But I still think you need to, no matter what the networks are, like you said, you gotta be bringing ads in from other methods, not just count on their internal network per se. For sure. I saw that you guys are starting to get into the sponsoring podcasts game, something. No, I think that that was something early on as a company we had looked at just simply because like a lot of the advertisers that were in newsletter were in podcasts. It didn't make sense to us. Like, there are companies that do that, and they're they're more boutique sort of rep firms, I would say, as opposed to like we're more of a we're trying to be a platform and network play. And the challenge is like the measurement is just so radically different. Like, so like if you're selling all flat fee, like, yeah, you can make that work because like it's the same cost basis. It's hard to be selling newsletters on a cost per click and then try to figure out how to sell podcasts. But what I will say is like, you know, we certainly partner with a lot of companies that have both, you know, and we'll refer advertisers to their podcast business and vice versa, they'll refer them to our newsletter business. So that's one way that we partner. Um, and obviously, you know, we certainly prospect in the podcast space quite heavily because we know advertisers that it's it's all creators, right? It's all individual content creators, whether they're a celebrity and a known person or you know, someone that's focused on just business insights and is not that well known, but is well known to a specific community. It's the same idea, whether you're saying it like we are or typing it. Um, and so companies that have success in one space tend to have success in another. And so there is a correlation there. But yeah, it's not something that we sell actively, it's more of a

Rapid fire: overrated, underrated & ready for sponsors

51:28

referral business for us. We're coming to to the back end of this. Uh just go through some some rapid fire questions here. A little speed round, see uh, see what we got. What's the most overrated newsletter monetization tactic? Overrated. That's a hard question. I mean, I I think like this could get me into some trouble. Like, I I don't I don't think that there's a tactic that's overrated. I think that there is certainly like an issue currently in like the newsletter growth space, which you know, you certainly know more about that than I do. So, you know, you can share your opinion. But like there has become a big economy around that, like around people making money from selling subscribers to other people. And some of that, like we do some of that, and but we do it in a way that's like very, very custom and particular, and like where we have track records of success with certain operators. Uh, and we tend to do it for the larger operators and we tend to place them with the larger operators, so it it works really well, um, versus some of the other referral businesses where it's a little bit more questionable. And like, is that really a sustainable business? You know, I'm not sure. I I don't know. I I you know, we and we've talked a little bit about this, like they're all passing around the same subscribers, right? It's like if you've got 10,000 newsletters that have you know bought into one of these growth engines and the like the original list was a million people, like they're all just signing up the same people, assuming they're real people to begin with, right? So I think that might be, I want to say overrated, but a questionable practice. And again, you know better than I, like in terms of audience growth, like how effective that can be. But from what we've seen, like people that lean on that heavily tend to have um more difficulty when it comes to the quality of their list. Yeah, I mean, it's I mean, first of all, it's gotta come down to the quality of of the subscriber to begin with that that's being uh you know shared or or the lead being sent over to to a specific newsletter or however it's getting uh marked over, whatever kind of lead gen pro uh program it is. But in the end, it's gonna come down to the quality of is it a like you're saying, is it a real subscriber? Is it even have the right interest for the person? Is it you know what type of the clicked opt-in? Was it what type of with a co-reg? What what was the the sign-up process? Did they actually sign up or like did they go to your newsletter and all of a sudden they're getting 10 other ones somehow? Because you're right, like well, yeah. There's we have product product smart pixel. Not that it's not going to tell that other newsletter, but it's matching the people coming to your uh website, the identity resolution, and then based on what they're doing there, how many repeat visits they have, what's their time on site, then we say, okay, this is gonna be a good subscriber for you, and then we'll send you that person. Um, and that actually does very, very well for people and LTB on this people are, but of course, they're they know your brand, they're going to your site already, consuming it, they just never subscribe for whatever reason. Maybe you suck at acquiring the traffic that comes to you. You don't want to have too many pop-ups or calls to action to subscribe because you want them to consume the content on your site, but that works very well. But then in the end, it's like it comes, it's a combination of the quality of the leads and then the product itself. If your content sucks, it's gonna suck. If it's good, it's gonna be good. So, you know, the churn really really comes down to the publisher on that side and then obviously the the initial quality. Yeah, I so I think the point that I'm making though, it's like if you're if you built your business on that, like your your a lot of your revenue is dependent upon like that component, like I think that that's like a tough way to operate. Yeah, I would I would probably recommend that that. I mean, I recommend to everyone that you should be doing multiple types of of growth, running Facebook, running Google, running YouTube ads, if you're doing uh any any SmartPixel or any other type of of lead gen, Co-reg is another one. Co-reg is, you know, also one that's like, yeah, they signed up, but they don't really remember they signed up for you most of the time. It's just like a checkbox for hey, you're signing up for this one, you're also gonna get this one, whatever that whole uh spiel is. So the quality is gonna be different. So you also got a treat. I actually did a newsletter, uh, my newsletter this this past week, Wednesday, kind of talked about this and like the seven days you have to know the quality, if a subscriber is gonna be quality or not. And then, you know, different types of traffic, you might have different onboarding practices, churn uh sunset policies to where all right, a co-reg leads, I'm gonna send them three to five emails. If they don't engage, they don't do whatever, they just throw them out the lead. I mean, obviously, these are a lot cheaper leads than than if you're buying a Facebook lead or uh YouTube or things like that. Um, obviously, if someone signs up organically, you just come inside, they fill it out. Obviously, that person's probably gonna be, you know, give that person as long as possible. Right. So it's a game. What's the most underrated monetization strategy? We don't do this. So like it's like I have no skin in this game, but like I've seen some operators that are like have very specific subject matter, like sell their own products. So like it's not, it's not even like it's it's not like affiliate and CPA. You're not working on behalf of someone else. Like you do you're using your newsletter to sell your own stuff, like whether it's your own courses or you know, books or health products or whatever. We call them internal operas. Yeah. And I and I and I think like some of them are quite interesting that I've seen, and I think that can work really well. And it's not something like I don't think most operators like or content creators go into content creation initially with like that objective in mind. What's a piece of common newsletter advice you flatly disagree with? I I mean like I think that advice, I I don't know if that's the right word that I would use for for this. Like, you know, we again we only care about monetization. So we care about advertisers, we care about like paying publishers, that's it. I think that like one thing you know, we mentioned earlier that I push back against is like this idea that newsletters are a bottom of funnel channel. Like they're really not. And if you treat it that way, you're gonna be disappointed. So if an if an advertiser comes in and is like, I need to hit five X ROAS like on your last click attribution, like we'll just tell them like that's not what this is about. You know, you can buy, you know, you can you can buy traffic elsewhere that's gonna be cheaper on on that basis. But what it really is is a mid-funnel solution in the sense that you know it brings people into funnel, like it serves as a lead generator. It can also convert because like you can track it in the way that you someone clicks on a link, you can track that person. So you have the benefits of real attribution that you may not have with some other branding channels like like video or audio or whatever, where like you have a general idea of how something did because you see a halo effect, but you don't really know. You know, you don't there's no click to whatever. I don't care what any of them tell you. Um, so like it's like a blended channel. And I think that like my advice is I would say to publishers or anyone that's out there pitching, you know, newsletter is to understand that and convey that to brands, like to be open and honest about what this is and the way that it should be viewed and set expectations properly. And if you can do that, you're gonna have people that are gonna be happier with with the money they've spent and spend more, as opposed to trying to position it as some like performance channel when it's not. Like it can be, but it's not ultimately gonna be like the best bottom of funnel solution. So I guess that's I don't know if that answered your question, but it's gonna have to. So you're in Orlando. Are you a big Disney fan? Uh yeah, I've got kids seven and ten. So we do we do it all. Disney, Universal, SeaWorld, all what's your what's your favorite ride? My favorite ride is well, so Universal right now. I guess it's still Velocicoaster. I really enjoy that that coaster. Um, and then at Disney, it's probably Guardians of the Galaxy at Epcot. But there's a lot of new stuff coming, so we're excited for for all of that as as summer heats up. We'll get to the parks a little bit before my kids go away to camp. And um but yeah, I guess my favorite park is Epcot because it's the most adult, right? I can go there with my wife. Yeah, well, I mean, we for probably like five years. Uh my brother and I's birthdays are like a week apart, and we'd always celebrate our birthdays at the right food and wine festival. There you go. Epcot. And I mean, that's some of the most fun. I forgot one time we went, um, there was probably like 20 of us, like 10 couples, and we stuffed ourselves all in this small taxi. We look like a clown car. Yeah. Took up you just to get to the free Epcot. It's kind of funny. Yeah. No, it's it's a lot of fun, man. Yeah. Always always start left. Hit up Mexico first. Get your tequila. I during Food and Wine Fest, I don't know that I agree with that, but if you're just doing a regular around the world kind of deal, it's probably the safest way to go. You can get in trouble going the other way for sure. Last question. The newsletter operator listening right now, sitting between five, fifty thousand subscribers. And then thinking, when am I ready for sponsors? What is your one sentence answer? I don't have a one, it's a long answer, so I'm not going to give it. I would just say, you know, the market will tell you, right? Like if you think you're ready for advertisers, go out there and pitch. And if they they sign up and you get ads, then you're ready. If you go out and you get crickets, then you're probably not. So uh, and then you can talk to people like you to grow or people like me to maybe help. But yeah, I I think the market will will tell you that you're ready or

Inside Media Intercept's new platform

1:00:30

you're not. Cool. And then you want to plug where people can find you on media intercept. You know, media intercept, uh, www.mediaintercept.com. I mean, the one thing I would love to plug is is we've just spent two years building our own technology and our own platform. And so like we now have just launched that actually last week. It's like incredibly exciting, and it's just built specifically for monetization in the newsletter space. So there's not really anything else like it that crosses, again, like across all the platforms, gets inventory from publishers across the board, and is built to measure and deliver assets at scale specifically for this space. So, you know, I guess I'm plugging it, but I'm just excited and proud of it. Um, it's gonna change the way certainly that we operate and hopefully change the way that advertisers engage with publishers in the newsletter space. Cool. Uh, prior to the new tech stack you built, were you guys like on Everflow or one of these other networks? We operate on on Everflow and then a few other of the affiliate platforms, and then we use like a hodgepodge of tools, like whether it's like Airtable or whatever, you know, it's not super efficient. And yeah, and again, I know we're kind of coming up on the end, but as opposed to ad serving, you know, what we're doing with the HTML5, like hard-coded copy, it's just a different operational game. And it can be slow, right? Slow manual process, a lot of back and forth. I mean, we tend to have a lot of conversations with our publishers. They have them all in Slack channels. And so now with our platform, a lot of that is automated and it just saves a lot of time and hopefully will allow like what we know is the best way to advertise in newsletters, which is like with the true native and the voice of the publisher, to really scale in a way that wasn't possible before when it was all just sort of this manual mix uh, you know, mix mishmash of different SaaS platforms that you're using to sort of manage the business. We've kind of rolled it all into one. So, you know, everything's out of Slack API connect, for example. So when we push assets out, they go to your Slack channel, they go to your email, you can pull them from there, you can ship them back through there, reconnect them to all the affiliate dashboards so you're can you can automatically import data from all those if you're an advertiser and and things like that that sort of bring together all these different components that have to exist to make an ad business run. We now have it all in one place. So that's that's pretty exciting. Awesome. Congrats. We're actually in the middle of refactoring our entire system right now. I'll be excited when that's done as well. Yeah, it's tough to build the plane while you're flying in it, right? Uh and that's kind of what what we've all had to do. But you know, it's it's it's certainly satisfying when you get to the end. Well, it's never really over, right? Like every day or something. Yeah, I mean you're gonna keep on building, you gotta keep on adding features, but at least you got the base product launched, so that's great. Jeff, thanks for uh coming on, sharing those insights. Appreciate the talk. I think there's a lot of good good value there for the audience. Everyone, be sure to subscribe to Audience Bridge Insights and to my Audience Brage Insights newsletter that goes out every Wednesday, audiencebridge.io forward slash subscribe. Uh, you can always find Jeff over at Mediaintercept.com and uh you know he's got his like dim profile. Uh you on X, Twitter. I don't publish there. Um that's okay. So there's nothing to provide his LinkedIn, but I'll provide his LinkedIn website information will be in the uh descriptions below. But hey, thanks for your time, appreciate it. Yeah, I know. I really appreciate you having me. This is fun. All right, man. Take care. Thanks.