How do I choose a niche for a local newsletter business?

I use a two-gate screen for any niche or audience. Gate one: can I acquire the audience cheaply? Gate two: will advertisers pay well to reach it? For any idea, I want to know which gate it fails.

Why do most niches fail?

Because cheap and valuable usually pull in opposite directions. An audience that's cheap to reach on Meta is often cheap because nobody wants to advertise to it.

A general local newsletter is the clearest case. Covering your community for everyone is a good opportunity in the right hands, but it's the lowest-value audience you can have. Nothing binds the readers together for advertisers except the location. It could be 23-year-old kids, 75-year-old grandmas and 36-year-old moms with young kids.

55-plus is the exception I've found. My senior subscribers have cost about 20 to 40 cents, and I believe high-value advertisers like estate planners will pay well to reach them, though I haven't closed senior advertiser revenue yet. I call it 100 percent underused. Details in is a 55+ newsletter a good niche.

Is local itself the niche?

I used to think so. I've realized local is a big niche with sub-niches underneath it. A general town newsletter is great as a large umbrella brand. People check it out because they want to know what's going on. But nobody feels a deep connection to it, because the only thing readers share is liking where they live.

A sub-niche changes that. Seniors in Williamson County are bored, they have money, they want things to do and people to meet. If you're into wellness in Austin, you want to meet the other people and go to those events. That engagement is way higher than a general suburb newsletter, so even a smaller audience can crush.

Dan Oshinsky, who ran newsletters at BuzzFeed and worked on strategy at The New Yorker, gave me the simplest version on my podcast: wherever you think your niche is, go down one level. The way I put it: don't just be a marketing newsletter, be marketing for a specific group. Don't just be local, be local for a specific audience. That matched my thesis, and I think more competition is coming, which is another reason to niche down.

Should I start broad or niche?

For a local media brand, my default is to start broad and niche down later. Cover everything: events, news, restaurants, local businesses, local people. Get the whole town watching you, then segment that audience. A general local audience gives you the most optionality, since you can sell to almost anyone. It's the best base layer.

I've told people who wanted to start with a local politics newsletter to build the regular one first, then pitch the politics spin-off to readers who raise their hand.

There's one exception. If you're building a creator brand around a specific group, commit to it.

"When you go more niche, you have a smaller audience, but you have a more engaged audience. So you need to decide which one of those you're doing and go all in on it."

I gave that advice to a creator launching a newsletter for women. Would you rather have 10,000 readers where 7,000 are women, or 5,000 where all 5,000 are women? The focused list wins with advertisers who want that customer, like med spas. Local newsletters already run about 70 to 75% female anyway. With scale, run both under one company. With only one, I'd do the focused one. Don't float in the middle.

Which niches do I like?

• 55-plus seniors. The one that clears both gates.
• Local business owners (B2B). Local B2B is gaining traction. A Meta ad targeting $1M+ local business owners landed three qualified leads quickly when an operator I work with replicated it in his market. See is a B2B local newsletter worth it.
• A cultural or immigrant community. In LA there are about 400,000 Vietnamese people. Their media exists, but it's print magazines and crappy websites with no social and no newsletters. Around Austin's suburbs there are about 40,000 Indian residents, and I think they'd be insanely engaged in their own newsletter. It's culture plus local.
• The real estate industry. A media brand for real estate pros, a B2B play. A successful local person I talked to agreed it's a good idea. Execution is the hard part.
• Wellness, in a city that cares about it. Readers love it if it's done right. The catch is the content has to be more custom than general local news.

Cultural communities have a built-in moat: only an insider can do it. I told a creator in one that even though the audience is much smaller, the excitement could be 10x higher than a general city list. Partner offers also land better. You can throw a rock and hit a real estate agent in my suburb, but an agent from your specific community is harder to find, so more people click. My estimate is that a one-person version could make $250,000 to $750,000 a year, possibly seven figures over time. That's a guess, not a result.

The hard part with communities I'm not part of is content. My idea there, which I haven't built, is a rev share: someone from the community creates the content and gets paid a share of what the brand earns.

Which niches would I avoid?

• National topics with no location hook. We tried a national senior newsletter and it didn't work. A national newsletter about home insurance gets nobody's interest. People care about their location, which is why I'd test any niche inside a place first.
• Big, broad topics. From about 2017 to 2023 everyone said start a Morning Brew-style newsletter on AI or tech and advertisers would pay. Everyone figured it out. A broad newsletter for everybody is a bad idea now.
• Niches too small to pay. You don't want to be too niche unless each reader is insanely valuable, like 500 CEOs. My own podcast and newsletter about newsletters has people who love it, but I'm still not really able to make much money from it.

Regular local media is still a good business, but it's crowded with excited new entrants.

Small but valuable can be amazing. There are B2B newsletters with 800 people on them that make a million dollars a year. I'd trade all my newsletters for that one. Industry newsletters, like one for the RV business, are where a lot of the claimed seven-figure newsletter businesses come from.

How do I find a good industry niche?

Look for an industry with outdated media, a lot of money and almost nobody who understands both the industry and modern newsletters. Insurance fits. Most insurance media is 1980s, newsletters that are just links, in a trillion-dollar industry. The overlap of people who understand insurance and understand modern media companies is zero.

Go narrower than the category. A national newsletter only about flipping homes beats a generic real estate newsletter, because a flipper feels they have to read it. With insurance I started with sales content only, because content for the whole industry wouldn't resonate with anyone.

When I tested an insurance sales newsletter, I got 130 subscribers for about $1.40 each and roughly a 70% survey fill-out rate. About 30% wanted help hiring, about 70% wanted help with AI, and six spent $40,000 a month or more on leads. Those are leads.

The best niches often come from stacking skills. I'm obsessed with taking two things that work and fitting them together. If you know newsletters and you know accounting, or insurance adjusting, you're probably the only person who knows both. It's too small for a VC, but great for you.

How do I test a niche cheaply?

• Test it inside one location first, unless it's an industry niche with no location.
• Frame the ad around the place, even if the content is about the niche.
• Check gate one with real cost per subscriber.
• Put a survey right after signup to learn what readers spend and want.
• Check gate two by naming who would pay to reach these readers.
• Write down which gate it fails. If it fails either, move on.

The niche also decides who fronts it. I'm the face of my business-facing brand, while my local consumer newsletters are fronted by local people.