In the newsletter era, each and every publication spawns a community unto itself. Now one of the more notable creator platforms is trying to pitch advertisers on a mass play.
Beehiiv, a creator platform that works with Business Insider and Status, has been hiring more sale staff to pitch advertisers on its network of different publications. “Doing a one-off newsletter buy for your favorite crypto or AI newsletter works in a silo maybe once or twice,” says Tyler Denk, the company’s co founder. “We’re kind of playing this, like, massive middleman of being able to drive results for advertisers, and then obviously publishers getting paid a ton of revenue from this as well.”
The company has hired Andrew MacMannis, naming him vice p[resident of ad sales and customer success, and assigning him to focus on brand and agency partnerships. Beehiiv also intends to double the size of its ad solutions team across other functions.
Beehiiv says its ad network pays more than $1 million per month to its publishers across the platform, supporting newsletters ranging in subscriber bases from from 1,000 to more than one million. Creators don’t have to accept Beehiiv’s ads, says Denk. Many of them also sell their own advertising inventory independently. Beehiiv has counted Notion, Google, Netflix, HubSpot, Deel, and Roku as advertisers.
Such a maneuver shows newsletter platforms, which assimilate individual creators and publishers, trying to give Madison Avenue something it regularly craves: scale. Beehiiv thinks it can offer more reasonable rates to advertisers while also giving them many options around which to place a pitch.
Many advertisers who come to the company have previously run with big independent newsletter publishers like Axios but need to make their money work harder for them. “They recognize that that’s a really positive growth channel, and it works really well for them, but it’s very expensive, and it’s also very cumbersome for them to do that a 100 times across 100 different newsletters,” says Jake Schonberger, Beehiiv’s head of strategy and operations. “The network really enables us to go find the 5000 newsletters that deliver results, and we can do all that work on their behalf.” Others are looking to re-express dollars they spend on social media, and a smaller amount of business comes from executives whose interest is spurred by one of the platform’s newsletters.
For sizable creators, the ad money might represent incremental revenue. But” a lot of our users and content creators don’t have a dedicated sales team,” says Denk, “and so we are driving the majority of their revenue through this ad network.”
