Hey there 👋,
In 2021, Richard was booking out newsletter sponsorships at $750 per send.
That was a $190 CPM on 4,000 opens.
Today, that same audience would command around a $20-$30 flat rate, or more likely, $1 per click with performance bonuses.
What changed?
The sponsorship boom died. And most newsletter operators haven't updated their models.
Operators' biggest blind spot
Operators see their 2023 sponsorship revenue drop, so they raise rates. That doesn't work. They search for "better sponsors." Those don't exist. They try to grow subscriber count faster. Wrong metric.
They're solving for the wrong variable.
The market didn't get worse. It got more sophisticated.
Between 2020 and 2022, we saw the boom. VC money flooded into DTC brands. CAC inflated across all channels. Newsletters represented underpriced attention. The result: $30, $100, even $300+ CPMs became normal.
Then came 2023 through 2025. The correction. VC funding dried up. Performance marketing became table stakes. Newsletter inventory exploded because everyone launched one. The result: $1-3 per click, performance-based deals replaced flat CPMs.
The operators who saw $50+ CPMs and thought "this is the new normal" are now struggling.
The operators who built diversified revenue systems are fine.
When traditional media revenue stops working
Farm Journal just showed everyone the playbook.
The Problem: Social media traffic collapsed. The government data that formed their intelligence foundation stopped being collected. The traditional media model wasn't working anymore.
The Pivot: They stopped chasing traffic and focused on "attention" over "page views." They launched a data-as-a-service product providing predictive intelligence for the agriculture industry. They built first-party data combining behavioral, transactional, satellite, and land transaction information.
The Result: They relaunched their intelligence product in September. By mid-November, they hit $1M in new sales. Annual subscriptions range from $30K to $330K. Their revenue model flipped from 70% advertising to 70% recurring.
"People pay for information. They tolerate media."
— Prescott Shibles, CEO Farm Journal
The 2026 Model?
Tier 1 is recurring revenue. Target 50-60% of your total. This includes premium subscriptions, data products, community access, and recurring affiliate commissions. This is your foundation.
Tier 2 is performance sponsorships. Target 20-30%. These are $1-3 per click deals, hybrid flat plus performance arrangements, and long-term partnerships instead of one-off placements.
Tier 3 is direct offers. Target 10-20%. Your own products, consulting and services, high-ticket offers where you capture full margin.
Tier 4 is traditional ads. Target 0-10%. CPM-based deals if you can still get them, premium placements only, and accept these are dying.
If you're still building your newsletter business around sponsorship CPMs, you're building on sand.
Not because sponsorships are dead. They're not.
But because depending on ONE revenue stream in a market that fundamentally shifted is operator malpractice.
The question isn't "how do I get my CPMs back?"
The question is "what am I building that people will actually pay for?"
The Operator Advantage
Here's what most newsletter operators miss.
You're not in the sponsorship business. You're not in the content business. You're not even in the newsletter business.
You're in the audience access business.
The format (newsletter) is just distribution. The monetization (sponsorships, subs, products) is just conversion.
The asset is the audience relationship.
Strong operators monetize that relationship through multiple channels.
Weak operators depend on brands to rent that relationship at rates they don't control.
🧠 OPERATOR INTEL
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Kroger delivers AI-generated weekly newsletters to 600+ suppliers
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People Inc blocks millions of AI scraping attempts
Jon Roberts (Chief Innovation Officer): "On the first day, we blocked millions of unlicensed attempts to crawl our content. You can listen to what they say or you can look at what they do." People Inc is the largest consumer publisher in the US. Google Search dropped from 54% of their traffic to 24% in just two years. Their response: grow non-search traffic while building Microsoft's Publisher Content Marketplace for AI licensing.
Indie Hustle listed for sale: 6,130 subs, 1 year content backlog
The founder is selling due to health constraints. The package: 6,130+ subscribers, domain rating 25, extensive content library, and one year of pre-produced content ready to publish. Direct contact: [email protected].
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What topics would you like us to explore next?
Reply and let us know:
Content workflows (how to build copilot systems)
Technical deep dives (context engineering, tool design)
Research process (how we validate insights)
Business models (operator economics).
– Richard & Maciej