Are cheap newsletter subscribers lower quality?

Yes, in my experience the two are related. The faster and cheaper a list grows on Meta, the worse it opens. I've seen it enough times now that when Meta hands me 13-cent subscribers, I expect to clean up the list later.

That doesn't make cheap subscribers a bad deal. It means the price on the ads dashboard isn't your real price.

What did my six-market test show?

This is the cleanest comparison I've run. Six new local newsletters, each at the same $50 a day, same branding, same writers, essentially the same content. The areas ranged from about 90,000 people to 500,000 to a million.

Newsletter	What happened
Fastest-growing	Subscribers at 18 to 19 cents, then 22, then closer to 30. Open rate around 28% to 30%, the only bad one
Middle group	Still cheap, growing a bit slower, better open rates
Slowest-growing	Most expensive subscribers, highest open rates

"The slower you grow, the better the metrics are."

Because so much else was the same, that one stuck with me. Going slower can be a good thing. You spend less, and your open and click rates come out higher. It has me thinking about spending less per newsletter and launching more of them with the same money.

How bad can it get?

Bad. One of my newsletters got subscribers at 13 cents for a while, then around 20 cents for a long time. It was so exciting. The open rate was horrendous: 15% to 20% from day one, and it never got higher than 20%. Instead of the 40-plus I normally see, it sat around half that.

It's the only one I've ever had that fell apart. My guess, and it is a guess, is that Facebook put it in front of a bunch of people who didn't want it, too many of them marked it as spam, and once that happens you're almost jailed in Gmail's systems.

Even some of my good brands, where we write well and my partners do good stuff, open about 10 to 15 points below our best ones. On one team call, the other newsletters in the group were around 50% and the fast grower was much lower. I knew it was coming. It always happens.

Why do cheap subscribers skew lower quality?

"When things just start ripping and getting you super cheap subscribers, Meta just starts throwing it in front of more and more people, and sometimes probably not your ideal audience."

In very big populations, Meta can get so excited for you that it shows your ad to everybody, including people who just love to click on things. Meta also just clicks in some locations and puts the ad in front of the wrong people. Bigger cities usually get cheaper subscribers. That's been consistent across the 20-plus I've launched.

Ads also make signup easy. On my podcast, NoHo Nick shared an 84% open rate on about 3,000 subscribers he grew organically. My read is that his readers had to put in extra effort to sign up, so every one of them wanted it. Ads reach more people who live on social media and aren't really email people. It's size versus quality.

Why do early subscribers cost less?

Meta reaches the easiest people first: the moms and older folks who are on Facebook all day and sign up in a second. Once those obvious people are taken, it gets harder and the cost climbs. That's normal, and it doesn't mean the later subscribers are better or worse.

So are cheap subscribers still worth it?

Yes. You just have to price in the cleanup. Assume 20% to 30% of a very cheap batch won't be good, remove the non-openers, and add that to your cost.

• Subscribers at 15 cents where you delete one in two or one in three: still very cheap.
• Subscribers at 30 to 40 cents where you delete a quarter: really 50 or 60 cents. Still good.
• Subscribers at 20 cents with some cleanup: maybe it's really 40.

The bigger question is what a subscriber is worth to you. HubSpot will happily pay three times more for a subscriber who's three times more likely to buy HubSpot. A pure ad-supported local newsletter has no way to know one reader is worth more than another. On my podcast, Justin Gordon said he pays about $1 to $1.50 per subscriber for LA Grind, which reaches startup founders and investors. I'd rather pay that for an audience like his than 20 or 30 cents for mine. His is more valuable.

Cheap local subscribers can still pay off. I get ad requests every time we send. Ads alone probably top out around six figures for a local newsletter. The bigger value is influence in your town and leads for another business, like real estate if you're a realtor.

How do I clean them out?

1. Set up a segment of new subscribers who haven't opened in two weeks, three at most. It's sooner than you think.
2. Send a two-email sequence. First: we've noticed you haven't opened, we'd love you to, reply and tell us what we can do better.
3. Second: we hope you're still interested, but it seems like you're not, so we'll remove you now. No worries.
4. Remove the people who still don't open, within a month.
5. Recalculate your cost per good subscriber.

That's what I tell everyone to do. I'll admit that as of early 2026 I hadn't actually done the deleting on my own lists yet. I probably should, and it has pros and cons.

If a cheap list falls to about 30% to 33% opens, I switch it to sending mainly to recent openers. That protects deliverability while I work out what's different about that market. More on that in sending only to openers.

What makes list quality worse, and what should I track?

• Instant lead forms. One-tap forms attract people who love filling out forms, and Meta finds more of them.
• Traffic objectives. They find people who click on everything.
• Overspending in a small market. Past about $50 a day, Meta starts showing your ads all over the place.

Market size cuts both ways. Between my two neighboring Austin-suburb newsletters, the one with more people consistently got cheaper subscribers with the exact same ad, and it grew faster in four months than the other did in six, despite starting two months later. Cheap and big isn't the same as cheap and small.

Report cost per subscriber next to open rate by brand and survey completion. Cost tells you what growth costs today. The other two tell you whether those people actually read.

Paid growth and strong engagement can go together. One guest on my show scaled a seasonal shore-town newsletter with sustained Facebook spend to about 17,000 subscribers with open rates over 50%. Typical cost ranges are in what a local newsletter subscriber costs.