Can you make real money on a paid newsletter while only writing part-time?
You’d probably be better off if you embrace business models other than paid subscriptions.
Welcome! I'm Simon Owens and this is my media newsletter. You can subscribe by clicking on this handy little button:
Hey folks! Today I’m answering questions from readers. If you have a question you want me to answer in a future newsletter, leave it in this thread.
Can you make real money on a paid newsletter while only writing part-time?
The first question comes from Arpit Choudhury
Do you believe that folks who are not full-time writers/journalists can make decent revenue from a paid Substack publication?
Let me simplify your question a little bit: Can you work on a paid newsletter part-time and still make decent money?
We’ll define “part-time” as a maximum of 10 hours a week and “decent money” as a minimum of $2,000 a month. And let’s say, for the sake of this argument, that your full-time job doesn’t involve journalism.
So, can a writer generate between 200 and 400 paying subscribers while working on their newsletter for only 10 hours a week?
It would be extremely difficult to pull this off. When I launched my paid newsletter in February 2020, it was after six years of building up my free list, and I more or less worked on the paid version on a full-time basis. Even then, it took me until November 2020 — a full nine months — before I hit my first 100 paying subscribers.
Even with all my advantages, I still found it immensely challenging to grow my paid list. Subscription economics are brutal, mostly because it’s extremely difficult to get a reader to turn over their credit card information, especially when you’re competing with so much free content.
That’s not to say that the feat would be impossible — and of course there are always outlier cases one can point to — but you probably won’t see anything close to overnight success if you pursue this path.
In fact, you’d probably be better off if you embrace business models other than paid subscriptions. With only 10 hours to work with, you should maximize the time spent on creating free content that will help you build your audience. For roughly six years, I leveraged my free content to drive leads for my consulting business. You could also monetize through advertising or affiliate marketing.
Paid subscription models require a tremendous amount of work and experimentation. If your time is limited, then don’t burn yourself out on such an uphill climb.
What do you think?
Want to reach my influential audience?
I recently polled my audience and found that a combined 86% of readers work in media, marketing, and tech. And I’ve never used any “growth hacking” gimmicks to grow my list, which means that these people 100% opted in to receiving my newsletter after reading my stuff. It’s a highly engaged audience, and I only feature one sponsor per week.
Want to learn more? Check out my sponsorship page for more details, including pricing and availability.
Quick hits
Digital news sites don't really benefit much from the increase in campaign ad spending during election years. Most of that ad spend goes toward video. [Digiday]
This author pitched her book idea to TikTok, and after the video generated millions of views, she landed a massive book contract. [Guardian]
"Adblockers typically don’t convert when encountering an adblock wall. Instead they just get annoyed at the intrusion and head off to find alternative content sources." [Spiny Trends]
A New York Times bestselling author is serializing a story on Kindle Vella and letting her Patreon subscribers vote on potential plot twists. This is a neat way to collaborate with an audience. [SLJ]
The Recommendations feature is Substack’s “moat,” the biggest reason writers will stick around even if it means paying 10% of revenue into perpetuity. [Twitter]
What are the best ways to measure newsletter performance?
The next question comes from Ryan Heafy:
We're hearing that some newsletter publishers are evolving the calculation of [click-through rate]. We have historically tracked CTR as Total Clicks / Total Opens (Impressions), but in many instances with newsletters, there are repeat opens so it suppresses the CTR. (Example: If a bot is pinging one newsletter repeatedly, it may increase total opens(impressions) and therefore negatively impact the CTR).
We're hearing that some publishers are using both of the following in reporting to clients now, or on marketing materials: CTR = Total Clicks / Unique Opens and CTOR = Unique Clicks / Unique Opens. The challenge with varying reporting is in the analysis from various media buyers. We're seeing an advertiser compare 2 different newsletter brands and seeing higher performance from one over the other, simply because of the way in which they are calculating performance. We also see challenges on local and regional levels with less sophisticated buyers. What is the generally accepted practice? What are most people using to showcase newsletter performance? What do you believe are the top 5 metrics that should be shared to showcase newsletter performance?
Let’s start with some context: Newsletter measurement has always been difficult, mainly because the newsletter is consumed on a website that’s not owned by the actual publisher. As a result of this dynamic, newsletter publishers have been limited to three main reporting metrics:
Total number of email subscribers: This is pretty self-explanatory
Open rate: Most email service providers insert a customized invisible pixel in every newsletter, and when the reader opens the email it automatically pings the ESP’s server. The open rate is simply the number of unique opens divided by the total number of email subscribers.
Click-through rate: ESPs take all the links you include in your newsletter and replace them with customized links that are generated for each email address. That way, when someone clicks on the link, it pings the ESP’s server in such a way that the ESP knows who clicked on the link (or rather, which email address they use) and which exact link they clicked on. The click-through rate is usually measured as the total number of unique clicks divided by the unique number of opens.
Of course, all of these metrics have flaws. The number of total subscribers is misleading because it doesn’t account for all the people who signed up for the newsletter but never opened it — or abandoned their email address entirely. If you run a B2B newsletter, for instance, then you probably have a higher-than-average rate of abandoned email addresses because of people leaving their jobs.
Open rates have long been skewed by email clients that block tracking pixels for privacy reasons, and they became especially unreliable once Apple rolled out new iOS updates that automatically opened all emails for its users. This inflated open rates by as much as 10%.
Click-through rates have traditionally been the most reliable, since the user is taking a definitive action by clicking on a link that pings the ESP’s server. But as Ryan alluded to in his question, the CTR can be thrown off by the distorted open rates caused by iOS. What’s more, clicks aren’t always a great way to measure true audience. To understand what I mean, consider these two hypothetical newsletters:
Newsletter #1 mostly aggregates headlines and links out to articles on the publisher’s website.
Newsletter #2 is an editorial newsletter (much like the one you’re reading now), and most of its content is self-contained, meaning that readers have few reasons to click on links.
In these two scenarios, Newsletter #1 is likely to have a much higher click-through rate than Newsletter #2, even if Newsletter #2 has a larger readership.
So to answer your question directly: I don’t think there’s an established “industry standard” for calculating CTR, especially since programmatic newsletter advertising is still so nascent. The most common practice is probably Unique Clicks divided by Unique Opens.
But how do you mitigate these discrepancies between your CTRs and your competitors’ CTRs? A few thoughts come to mind.
The first is that you can easily boost your click-through rates by embedding things like polls and quizzes (you probably noticed that my last several newsletters have included polls). This will not only drive up your click-through rate by several percentage points, but I also think it’s a good way to drive up interaction with your audience. A person who clicks on a poll or participates in a quiz is a lot more likely to develop an affinity with your brand than someone who simply reads your newsletter and then deletes it.
The second is that you can encourage your advertisers to create custom tracking links so they can actually measure the ROI of the ad. For instance, my sponsor Memberful this week created a special tracking link for the URL memberful.com/simonowens. That way, if one of my readers clicks on that link and then signs up for an account, then I get credit for that conversion.
Beyond the normal metrics, I think it’s key to tell potential sponsors a story about the influence of your publication. Companies don’t advertise in Vogue because of its circulation; they advertise in Vogue because it’s the fashion bible.
Take a look at the sponsorships page for my newsletter. I of course include all the normal metrics like list size and open rate, but I also surveyed my readers about the industries they work in. I then performed the laborious task of going through my entire email list and listing out all of the most influential companies my readers work for. I do everything to communicate to potential advertisers that my audience is incredibly influential.
Those are the kind of details that can make your newsletter stand out. So many media companies out there use shady tactics to build their traffic, and their readerships often have very little brand affinity for the publications themselves. You need to emphasize that your audience doesn’t just consist of fly-by Google News visitors, but instead that you have a deeply engaged readership that hangs off of your every word.
If you have a great newsletter, then that means you’re probably a great storyteller. So leverage those storytelling skills when pitching advertisers!