Hey there 👋,
Every time beehiiv publishes a State of the Industry report, the same style of responses follows.
Not thoughtful disagreement.
Not deeper analysis.
But a familiar checklist of surface-level objections.
“Survivorship bias.”
“Vanity metrics.”
“Big numbers without context.”
“This is just marketing.”
On the surface, these responses sound smart. In reality, they add very little value for anyone actually operating a newsletter business.
Let’s talk about why.
1. Complaining about survivorship bias misses the point
Yes, the beehiiv report focuses on newsletters that exist, send, grow, and monetize.
That is not a flaw. That is the dataset.
Every serious industry analysis does the same thing:
SaaS reports study companies with revenue
Media reports study publications with audiences
Newsletter reports study newsletters that are being opened and read
Saying “but many newsletters fail” is not insight. Everyone already knows this.
The real question is not whether failure exists. It is what the surviving newsletters are doing differently. That is exactly what large platform datasets help reveal.
2. Big numbers are not the claim critics think they are
The beehiiv report includes figures like billions of emails sent and hundreds of millions of readers reached.
Critics often respond as if the claim is:
“You will personally achieve this.”
That is not the claim.
The claim is structural:
Newsletters remain a viable owned channel
Engagement has not collapsed
Monetization is real and growing
Dismissing macro-level data because it does not guarantee individual success is a category error, not analysis.
3. Revenue concentration is not a scandal
Another common response to the beehiiv report is outrage that revenue is unevenly distributed.
Of course it is.
Revenue is uneven in:
Books
Podcasts
YouTube
SaaS
Consulting
Every creator-driven market that has ever existed
Pointing this out does not weaken the data. It confirms that newsletters behave like real businesses, not hobbies with equal outcomes.
Operators do not need comforting averages. They need signals about what works at the top and why.
4. Open-rate skepticism has become lazy reflex
Yes, email tracking is imperfect.
Yes, privacy features exist.
Yes, opens should not be treated as gospel.
Serious operators already know this.
The beehiiv report is not suggesting open rate obsession. It is showing directional engagement at scale, over time, across millions of sends.
Throwing out engagement data entirely because it is not perfect is not sophistication. It is avoidance.
5. “It’s just marketing” is not a serious dismissal
Yes, the beehiiv report benefits beehiiv.
That does not make the data useless.
Platforms like beehiiv are the only entities with access to:
Billions of sends
Cross-vertical comparisons
Longitudinal reader behavior
Monetization timelines at scale
Independent critics do not have better data. They just have stronger opinions.
The correct posture is calibration, not cynicism.
What actually matters for operators
If you run a newsletter as a business, the question is not whether the beehiiv report is perfectly neutral.
The question is:
What can I extract from it that improves my decisions?
The report makes several things clear:
Owned email distribution remains resilient
Specialization outperforms general commentary
Consistency compounds
Monetization happens faster when designed intentionally
Those are not marketing slogans. They are operational signals.
The real problem with most critiques
The biggest issue with the backlash to the beehiiv report is not that it is wrong.
It is that it produces no leverage.
It does not help you:
Write better
Position more clearly
Retain readers longer
Monetize sustainably
Build something durable
It performs skepticism instead of creating insight.
As operators, our job is not to sound clever reacting to reports.
Our job is to use imperfect data better than everyone else.
That is how real newsletter businesses are built.
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– Richard & Maciej