Is audience size or sales effort what limits a local newsletter's revenue?

Everyone wants more subscribers before they sell. That's backwards. I've got the proof in my own portfolio.

What do operators with small lists actually make?

• A 21-year-old in Georgia with about 11,000 subscribers makes $8,000 to $10,000 a month in recurring revenue. He closes about 30% of advertiser calls at around $700 a month, on terms of three months or longer. Sales comes first. Content and automation come second.
• A 24-year-old operator in Canada, who told me he had no sales skill, makes about $7,500 a month in ads.
• An operator in Boise made very little for four and a half years. Then she hired a salesperson around 22 years old on commission and hit $25,000 in a month, on a 25,000-subscriber newsletter plus a 40,000-follower Instagram.
• An operator in Canada with a similar-sized list reported about $45,000 in a month from hunting companies full time. I haven't verified that one.
• Ken Jee of Austin Founders Feed told me on my podcast they were past 30 sponsorships for the year at about 6,500 subscribers. He called the business "a lot of sales" and prefers a three-month $2,000 deal over one-off $200 sponsorships.

None of these people have giant lists. All of them sell.

What do the operators making real money have in common?

Focus. One operator told me he works on it ten hours a day:

He hunts people down for sales, doesn't let it go, and never puts anything free in the newsletter: if you want to be in it, you pay.

One regional newsletter I know of makes multiple six figures. Somebody runs that brand 40 hours a week, and at least 20 of those hours are sales. Another operator I talked to put it simply: this is all he does. He creates content, hires people to create content, chases advertisers and goes to events.

The people making six figures are in their community. They go to the chamber. They make sales calls or DM business owners on Instagram every day. They post frequent 30-second videos, because the more of that you do, the more people's radars you get on, and the easier it is to sell.

Compare that with a partner network I know that reached about 60,000 subscribers across six cities in roughly six months, around 10,000 each. Great numbers. But the expectation was that sales would fall in their lap and someone would just close. You have to go actually sell.

Why isn't my bigger list making money?

"I don't spend any energy on sales, like at all."

That's me, about one of my own Williamson County brands. By those benchmarks my 30,000-subscriber county newsletter should already be doing $200,000 to $300,000 a year. It makes close to zero. The model is cheap to run. The list is big. Nobody is selling.

Across the whole portfolio it's the same story. We're big enough to have 170,000 subscribers and a huge attention pool, but not making enough to hire salespeople. That's a tough middle spot. Most of the people I help run newsletters treat it as a side hustle. They thought it was a cool idea, then put no effort into the sales side. Their audiences are huge anyway.

I've even built software that would crush for me if I had advertisers to put in it. I don't, because I'm not pushing ads. None of my other people are either.

When the model is already cheap and revenue is still near zero, cutting more cost won't fix it. The gap is sales activity. I saw it when ads brought me 250+ advertiser leads in two weeks and I'd guess my partners and I called about 20 of them.

Why do most local newsletters struggle to sell ads?

Two reasons, and neither is audience size.

1. An education gap. Local business owners understand print. They don't understand newsletters yet, so you have to teach them.
2. No sales talent. Most people running local newsletters don't know how to sell and don't have time to. The free direct-mail magazines figured this out years ago: they're run by strong salespeople. Nobody has copied that in digital, even though our numbers beat theirs.

Local is amazing for attention, subscribers and engagement. It's also one of the hardest things to monetize. Every location is different, and local businesses are less sophisticated than companies with marketing departments.

The good salespeople at local magazines make $150,000 to $300,000 per magazine in an area, with a product I'd say is about four times worse than ours. I consult for some legacy local media companies on Meta ads. Their engagement numbers are far worse than ours and their audiences are smaller, yet they make multiple six figures a year, some seven. The reason is they have salespeople who go after it.

The hardest single step is getting a person with the money on a call. Many operators have full-time jobs, so they end up playing phone tag: the advertiser missed the meeting, got busy, needs a new time. Cold email doesn't work, DMs get a few replies, and I haven't gotten much inbound myself. Too many people think two hours a week and $400 will make them rich. That's not how this goes.

Should I spend on growth or on sales?

Once you have a real audience, sales. On two newsletters I run with a partner, we had about 13,000 subscribers combined and were spending around $1,500 a month on growth ads. My proposal was to pause that for a couple of months and spend the money on a part-time content creator instead.

• Help edit the newsletter. An hour or two, since about 80% of it is done for them.
• Make short-form video.
• Most important: network with business owners and get us in front of advertisers.

Adding another 1,500 or 2,000 subscribers a month wasn't going to bring in more money, because subscriber count wasn't the issue.

Growing a list is relatively easy if you learn Meta ads and engagement. Monetizing it takes a different skill set, one that kind of sucks or really sucks depending on your personality. If sponsorships are the plan, know what you're getting into. It absolutely can work, but it won't fall in your lap. The other options are a back-end business the newsletter feeds, or being the go-getter who puts your name on it and meets the city council, the chamber and advertisers.

What do I do about it?

Inbound alone won't get you to $5,000 a month. Either you sell, or you hire someone who will. I've said I'm willing to pay a commission-only rep 50% on the brand that's sitting at zero. I just want proof.

Getting past $10,000 a month takes somebody on the ground 40 hours a week, pounding the pavement and creating great content. That's how you get to $10,000, $20,000 or even $30,000 a month. The split I floated for that kind of role was about 35% of their time on content and 65% on sales. Funding a full-time person is a risk I haven't been able to take yet.

The operators who win also have creator energy around them: family, friends and locals making restaurant videos and posts. That's the piece most people miss.

If I could reliably get any newsletter to $2,000 a month, it would change my whole model. That number is a sales problem, not a subscriber problem. See how to set up a commission rep and why I'd sell it myself first.