Can a network of local newsletters sell to regional and national advertisers?

"With one newsletter you're not going to get in front of a national advertiser, where if you have 20 with 400,000 subscribers, you can. Scale just works out really well."

This is the thesis behind running many local newsletters instead of one. It's my assumption about how the math works at scale, not a measured result. I'm still working parts of it out.

Why does a network get bigger deals?

Coverage. Regional advertisers want regional reach. Twice the subscribers and more land area is a stronger pitch than one small town.

Think about it from the big brand's side. If I only had one newsletter in Leander, the bigger Austin brands would say that's cool, but they're trying to reach the whole metro. A main Austin newsletter plus the five major suburbs makes you regional, and that's an easier sell.

The money changes too. A bigger advertiser doesn't want to give you $500 for ads in one newsletter. They want to give you $2,500 for ads in all of the newsletters covering the whole state. You go from local to regional.

Then there are national brands that sell locally. A babysitting marketplace or a big retailer with stores in Austin has a huge budget but wants local customers. They don't have time to cut deals with dozens of newsletters at 8,000 to 15,000 subscribers each. They'd rather go to someone with 100,000 to 200,000 subscribers across 15 or 20 local newsletters.

When I first heard that, I wrote it off because I don't have a single newsletter over 100,000. Then I realized I'm over 100,000 combined, and a national company won't care that it's split across cities.

The same logic works across operators. If 20 independent operators each had 10,000 subscribers, that's 200,000 local readers. A regional advertiser would value that far more than any single list. I've wondered out loud what happens if 50 operators bundle into one network. I haven't proven that's viable.

How should you set up the brands?

• Start where you live. Launch in your home city, build relationships and prove the model. Add the next city when revenue or help justifies it.
• One umbrella brand, sub-brands underneath. A big metro or state brand with a sub-brand per suburb builds a regional media brand that's worth more than any single newsletter.
• The 100,000 rule. Any city or area over about 100,000 people that isn't within 15 minutes of the main city should get its own newsletter.
• Same name everywhere, for business audiences. A general local audience is hard to sell to a national software brand. A local business audience isn't. Keeping one name in every city makes one package easy to sell.
• Don't split one area in two. Beehiiv's built-in sponsor platform wouldn't let me sell two neighboring newsletters as one bundle price, so I now tell people not to run two newsletters in the same area if one will do.

What does a network deal look like?

My version is an all-or-none partnership across brands:

"We're only going to have one bank who's going to be in all of our newsletters. A B2B one, a seniors one, a general one: all or none. Do you want to pay us 25 grand to be our partner for the year?"

• One partner per category across every brand. One med spa, one apartment locator, one realtor.
• About 10 annual partners per newsletter. Once you've sold 10, you're done. Inventory is finite.
• About $20,000 to $25,000 a year for the full network.
• A bundle discount. If each newsletter is $7,000 a year, don't charge $21,000 for three. Charge about $16,000. One sale, one relationship, one ad repeated.
• Options for advertorial takeovers: an entire issue about the bank, with stories about a client, an owner or an employee. That's normal in local media, and you can charge a lot for it.

What do big regional brands actually pay?

The vision is the power company, the university, the biggest insurer in town. Those people will pay $1,000 to $4,000 a month. To them it's pocket change and they just want their name in front of people.

Who	What I heard
An operator with a smaller audience than my county newsletter	About $500,000 a year; one company at about $4,000 a month, several at $1,500 to $2,000
An operator with newsletters across one state plus a statewide brand	Big regional deals at $1,000 to $4,000 a month, mostly inbound through Instagram, after about three years
A national seniors newsletter operator	A $25,000 medical device sponsor

Those are other people's numbers, relayed to me, not mine. The lesson I took: bigger brands will turn you down if your price is too low, because it's not worth their energy. Price for them, not for $600 deals.

A statewide creator brand that guested on my podcast turned a $500 local advertiser into an introduction to that company's corporate marketing team for a bigger deal. He also said no to national advertisers with no tie to his state. Relevance still matters.

If you're just starting, keep selling $200 ads now. Just know where you're headed.

How do you split the money across newsletters?

By impressions, which in practice means opens. If four newsletters each deliver 25% of the opens on a deal, each gets 25% of the fee. A newsletter with 25% of the subscribers but a weak open rate gets less. That's usually how these brands think about it.

For a bigger network, my model is: sell the national or regional advertiser across, say, 75 brands, let them pick the locations, place the ads, and give the local owner 20%. The local owner can reject an ad, so you want to make accepting worth their while. They earn without having to sell.

What can a network afford that a solo operator can't?

A team making $50,000 to $100,000 a month could fund multiple cold callers, a tech backend that runs giveaways and deals for businesses, and pitches to nine-figure brands that want to reach upper-middle-class women. A solo operator can't justify a salesperson or serious software. At scale you can.

Once a brand makes $5,000 to $10,000 a month, you can hire a local person in that market for about $1,500 a month. Network-level deals up top, local people on the ground for local relationships. Those are working assumptions.

What's the catch?

Selling it. The difference between operators making real money and everyone else is how good they are at getting in front of bigger businesses with bigger budgets. Big organizations will pay $1,000 to $2,000 a month for ad slots, and you still need someone pitching their marketing teams.

It takes focus, probably a couple of hours a day. One operator I talked to reached $25,000 a month once she found the right salesperson. I'm not good at sales myself, so finding that person matters to me.

Not everyone agrees. Simon Owens told me on my podcast he's not bullish on centralized sales for local brands, because a salesperson who lives there and goes to the chamber and the farmers market has an edge. I agree for truly local sales. Where I think central selling works is regional players like hospital systems, whose media teams already understand newsletters. See selling to banks and hospitals.