What is it?
Direct sold ads and sponsorships are agreements where brands pay to reach your newsletter audience.
The terms are often used interchangeably, but there’s a technical difference in what they do:
- Ads are upfront and promotional. They’re usually separate elements within the newsletter, grabbing attention with a clear sales message.
- Sponsorships are more subtle. They weave the brand's message into valuable content like interviews, experiments, or case studies. It’s subtle, un-intrusive promotion.
Direct ads are best for generating quick revenue with multiple brands, while sponsorships represent longer term, more strategic partnerships.
The Good and the Bad
- Sponsorship income scales as you grow. You can charge more with a large audience.
- RPMs range from $25 to $100+, depending on the niche.
- You don't have to paywall your best content.
- Outreaching and negotiating takes a lot of time.
- You have keep filling your sponsorship slots.
Examples to Steal
The main way that Morning Brew grew into the behemoth we know today was through direct-sold ads.
And the way they do them is super seamless and in-keeping with their witty, smart house style.
Within the news articles, there's a subtly embedded promotion for the day's sponsor, formatted just like the rest of the content.
Giving ads the same formatting as content reduces the risk of readers skimming over them.
It is so much more readable and engaging than the vast majority of ads we're used to seeing cluttering up the web.
And because these ads actually get read (and maybe even make us chuckle) they're much more likely to drive traffic to advertisers and justify high RPMs/repeat business.
It is these principles that led to Morning Brew generating over $20M in revenue just from ads in 2020.
The figure stands at more than double that today, albeit with a more diverse monetization strategy (roughly 50:50 split between 3rd party ads and promoting their own suite of tools/courses).
Ryan is able to generate over $200k in ad sales per year from just 18k subscribers, which is not typical. Especially for a local newsletter.
The key to this type of profitability is to work with advertisers for whom a low number of conversions still represents a great ROI.
For Ryan, that means high-ticket advertisers such as realtors, mortgage brokers, pressure-washing companies, and financial advisors looking to reach his local audience.
Ryan recommends waiting until around 5,000 subscribers before taking direct-sold ads seriously. Milestones like 5k and 10k validate your brand, and make advertisers exponentially easy to entice!
Initially, contracts were short-term but now they are longer, lasting six months or more like newspapers or magazines do. With the larger sums of money involved, Ryan uses a 20% non-refundable deposit to help protect against cancellations.
Marketing Examples (Sponsorship)
Harry Dry's 131k subscriber newsletter curates marketing insights (3 examples, 2 copywriting tips) and a favorite tweet weekly.
And his sponsorship collaboration with Hubspot showcases a perfect brand-creator partnership.
Harry sells newsletter spots for $7,500 a pop, and website sponsorship at $5,000 p/m. You can see on his site that he’s always booked out in advance - so he’s clearly raking it in.
