Highly Profitable Email Newsletters

By Ben Gross
in

In Email Newsletters Are Still A Serious Business, Jason Baptiste continues his survey of highly successful email newsletters. He discusses the recent sale of Help A Reporter Out (reportedly sold for twenty million), Thrillist (more than two million subscribers), Tasting Table, GeekChicDaily, DailyWorth (more than forty thousand subscribers), Letter.ly, Groupon, and ScoopSt. Jason’s original article from October 2009, Email Newsletters Are Serious Business, covered DailyCandy (sold for one hundred and twenty-five million), Thrillist, Help A Reporter Out, Jason Calacanis’, and Ideal Bite newsletters.

One interesting new development is the Letter.ly service from Sam Lessin the founder of Drop.io. In F*Ck Blogging: My Last Blog Post, Sam announces the launch of his platform for paid newsletters and says he will no longer posting to his blog and will instead published a paid subscription-based email newsletter for $1.99 a month. The Letter.ly service uses Amazon for payments, although I could not find any significant documentation or what cut Lessin takes. I will be watching how the service develops with interest.

In the comments to Jason’s article, I found Email newsletters still going strong from Gus Sentementes at the Baltimore Sun. Gus describes successful email newsletters for businesses around Washington DC and Baltimore including the CityBizList real estate newsletter, SmartBrief’s hundred and fifty email newsletters, and FierceMarkets with twenty-nine newsletters and more than nine-hundred thousand total subscribers.

Published July 9, 2010