We’ve seen many examples of sponsoring working well for newsletters.
Two
winning formats are local newsletters like 6AM City or WhereBy.Us and the demographically focused newsletters like Morning Brew or TheSkimm.
And while sponsoring seems more difficult for indie authors without sales teams, there are many successful examples such as Ann Friedman’s classifieds, or Ernie Smith and Kai Brach offering sponsoring options for Tedium and Dense Discovery respectively.
Let’s look at some of the solutions in more detail.
Ann Friedman has been publishing her newsletter on NY culture since 2013 and has inspired many other newsletter editors. Her monetization model has not changed much and is a combination of a paid version with premium content and classified ads.
We can learn a lot from how she set up classified sales. There’s a
landing page with the available formats and costs and a possibility to book. It’s fully self-service and built using Squarespace’s commerce features. A classified is $120 for 150 characters and reaches 50,000 subscribers at a 45% open rate.