Is it easier to grow a local newsletter than a national one?

We tried running a national newsletter for seniors. It didn't work. It's too hard. The same audience, approached locally, signs up for about 50 cents a subscriber.

The short version of everything I've learned since: growth is easy locally, but everything else is harder. Both halves matter.

Why does local beat national for growth?

Location is the hook. If you run ads or talk about things locally, that's all you have to do to get people's interest. They're highly engaged because they care about their community.

"Nobody cares, and nobody's going to sign up, but they all care about their location."

Compare that with a national newsletter about home insurance. There's no built-in reason to care. You also don't have to win people over to loving you. They already love the place. You just fit yourself in, helping them love it more or learn more about it.

The ad targeting is the other half. On Facebook I basically say: anybody within 10 miles of this area. That's it. Going that broad keeps prices low. Interest targeting costs far more:

Audience	Rough cost
Everyone near my town (my numbers then)	About 50 cents a subscriber
Dads in my town (an ad expert's estimate)	At least $2.50, about 5x
People interested in investing in storage	Something like $20 to $50 a lead

Isn't local a smaller market?

The total audience is smaller. My target audience at most is about 300,000 people near Round Rock. Countrywide it's 300 million. But my 300,000 are hyper interested because it's about them. A national topic is more of a "maybe you'll be interested."

Building a media brand is especially hard at a national level or in popular niches like entrepreneurship, AI or tech. I did AI stuff before and called building an audience there impossible. I've done crypto. So hard. People all over the world will spend 20 hours a day on those topics, and you can't compete unless you have some special insight. A well-known newsletter founder warns people off tech newsletters because you'd have 10,000 competitors. In an affluent suburb, there's often no real competitor at all.

Local is fractured by nature, and that's the opportunity. Every location has to be a different business. Nobody in Texas is going to read a New Jersey paper. A national digital product has a huge market, but anyone in the world can copy you. In a town of 250,000, your competition is whoever else is there. A guest on my show put the other half of it well: local total addressable market is smaller, but value per subscriber can be much higher.

Everyone is told to be a creator and build an audience. Try to build a national audience like a famous author's right now and you'll fail unless you're amazing. Be that voice for your own community, though, and you can win.

What's harder about local?

Monetizing. I'm open about this: we've done a horrendous job selling advertising in our local newsletters. It's easy to get subscribers, but to monetize is harder.

• The buyers. You're mostly dealing with unsophisticated businesses that don't get newsletters or marketing numbers. Sales are slow and time consuming, and each location is different.
• The ceiling. On Meta, local can't scale. You're never going to reach more than, at the absolute maximum, 100,000 people who live in or care about your town. Spend too much and Meta crushes you because there aren't enough people.
• The value cap. A small engaged audience in one area isn't interesting to anyone outside that area.

My problem has been being too local. That's great for a person on the ground running one market, but it limits the big picture for me.

When does national make sense?

When each reader is worth a lot, or when you can grow without losing money. Morning Brew and B2B newsletters can make a ton from the newsletter alone because every reader is valuable to advertisers. A local reader is worth less per impression, which is why local operators build a full media brand around the newsletter. See can a local newsletter make money from the newsletter alone.

The scale math is what pulls me toward national. If a subscriber costs a dollar and the signup offers bring in $1.20, you can 10x your spend. You can't 10x your spend locally. With a topic that a million or 5 million people care about, you could take Meta from $20 a day to $200 a day and grow ten times faster at no net cost, if people take the offers at the same rate. There are 60 million seniors in the U.S. That's where a greetform-style survey and offer system that breaks even on each subscriber matters most.

National advertisers are also easier. They're real companies, they know what a CPM is, and they'll ask for your numbers. My planning assumption for a national niche is around $30 per CPM, which is a guess, not a result. The niches I'd pick:

• Higher value, where the businesses selling to that audience spend real money.
• Highly engaged, like parents who homeschool and actively choose to spend time and money on their kids' learning.
• Served by legacy brands that don't know how to run a Meta ad, newsletter and survey funnel.

Statewide brands like the Texas Tribune are doing well partly because their audience potential is so much larger. I'm honest that I'm less certain about national. I've proven the local version. Everything I'm good at for ads is about local events, and the scary question for a national list is: what's the concept for why somebody would join? I still think it's worth a test, because what if national really is 10x more valuable?

So should every brand be purely local?

No. My senior brand plan mixes the two. The model is a national media brand plus a business directory, with local senior newsletters around the country where about 80% of the content is national and 20% is local. The ads stay local, because that's how we get leads cheaply. The local framing does the acquisition work even when most of the content is shared.

The same template works for other niches: a national media site for a group like commercial insurance brokers or public adjusters, with directory pages broken out by state or city. For a niche creator already running a local newsletter, I'd keep it as the quality product and the face of the brand, and add a national one for reach, bigger advertisers and more sources to write about.

What to do with this

• If you're picking a first newsletter, go local. It's one of the easier lifestyle businesses because paid growth is so much easier.
• Expect the hard part to be ad sales, not subscribers.
• If you want a niche, test it inside a location: seniors in one county, business owners in one metro.
• Frame every ad around the place, even if the content is broader.
• Go national only when you know the hook and have a way to pay back each subscriber.