And now, the main event...

For such a simple technology, email can be a tricky business. Newsletter companies like Substack and Beehiiv now boast hundreds of thousands of independent publishers, a small portion of whom are making real money—generating eight-figure revenue for their host platforms in the process. Growth is impressive—Beehiiv recently said its paid subscriptions surpassed $19 million in 2025, up nearly 140 percent year over year—but slowing, especially on Substack, amid market saturation and inbox fatigue.

Indeed, the industry appears to be at an inflection point: It’s never been easier to start a newsletter, or for an established media business to launch one, but how much can the market stand? And, perhaps more importantly in the A.I. era, how can independent operators stand out from the crowd?

Earlier this week, Beehiiv co-founder Tyler Denk and his team published a massive report on the state of paid newsletters in 2026, providing some intriguing insights into what’s working, and not working, for media creators. Yes, this is Beehiiv’s own first-party data, meaning that trends may be different across Substack, Patreon, and elsewhere, but the team’s analysis is still relevant and applicable to anyone starting or growing a newsletter business. Naturally, I read the whole thing so you don’t have to. Here are three recommendations:

The median monthly newsletter subscription fee on Beehiiv is $10, a figure that hasn’t changed since 2024, per Beehiiv. But that’s just the mass-market price. More professionalized and prosumer offerings are typically able to charge significantly higher rates. For example, financial-investing newsletters across Beehiiv charge a median monthly rate of $27. (Some of the most successful finance newsletters on Substack charge far more: Citrini Research, the platform’s top-ranked email product, charges $125 a month.)

Even though investing newsletters have some of the highest churn rates (about 12 percent, compared to food newsletters, which boast about 5 percent monthly churn), the lifetime value of the customer is much higher. Niche and B2B newsletter topics, the category that finance and investing often fall into, don’t need to charge mass-market prices because they’re professional service products.

Since mass-market newsletters are more likely to contain commoditized information that can be found on other websites, it’s easier to scale them up front but harder to retain an audience in the long run. It’s the same lessons from the early digital media age, when mass-market content drove large audiences, which translated to strong advertising revenue. But a failure to invest in premium products with strong community ties, like newsletters, left these inflated and unessential brands at the mercy of social algorithms—and totally exposed with the advent of A.I. search.

One of the most surprising data points from Beehiiv’s report pertained to A.I. newsletters—not newsletters written by A.I., but newsletters about A.I. On Beehiiv, the category is the fourth-largest paid segment, with 301 publications, just behind general technology (305), finance (400), and business (634). Despite their popularity, A.I. newsletters also have some of the lowest free-to-paid conversion rates, with a median of about 0.3, putting the topic in the bottom five of all major industry newsletters. By comparison, the conversion rate for the top 10 percent of A.I. newsletters sits at over 6 percent.

A.I. is arguably the perfect illustration of a broader trend: An uptick in general interest around a given topic doesn’t necessarily lead to a commensurate uptick in paid subscribers. Not only are the conversion rates for A.I. newsletters on Beehiiv much lower, but their churn rate is 13.3 percent, making A.I. one of the leakiest categories on the platform. It’s not necessarily because the content isn’t good, but rather because there’s so much of it, including on free tech websites and within all-access news subscriptions.

When there are so many newsletters offering the same or similar content, individual products need to either hyperfocus on a specific aspect of a hot topic (Lenny Rachitsky’s concentration on A.I. and productivity or Azeem Azhar’s Exponential View, which includes consultant-level data analysis) or have built-in fan bases. Case in point: Kevin Roose and Casey Newton, who are leaving the Times and ending their Hard Fork podcast to launch their own media venture.

“Community” has quickly become one of those ubiquitous and appalling buzzwords tattooed on the neck of the modern media industry. Morning Brew’s Austin Rief has claimed that community will do more for media revenue and brand development in the next 10 years than content creation did in the previous decade. New New York magazine owner James Murdoch has been acquiring community through acquisitions of the Tribeca Film Festival and Art Basel. Atlantic C.E.O. Nick Thompson is taking readers on cruises. And John Fulton’s Eastside Rag, a newsletter with more than 6,000 subscribers, is accidentally playing matchmaker. Seriously.

The data from Beehiiv explains why the topic continues to vex media executives. While subscriptions are still the top revenue driver for Beehiiv’s paid creators, community memberships make up a growing part of the pie, per the report. This can include access to exclusive Discord groups, early access to events, or meetups, which Emily Sundberg has perfected. The Free Press has gotten into this game, too.

The value of community can’t be artificially manufactured. If audiences don’t feel a personal connection to the author or share intimate experiences with other members in the group—all of whom understand the same callback joke, or remember the same personal story—then they’ll drift elsewhere. And yet one of the challenges of this dynamic is that it’s hard to produce at scale. The journeys of Substack and Beehiiv suggest that most creators never make it to the level where they’ve built an authentic community. And those who have must hire operators and employees to pour as much attention into events as they have into their own writing. For all the attention paid to the newsletter economy, there are still few experts who know what it really leads to.

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