In the age of newsletters, every publication creates a community of its own. One of the most notable creator platforms right now is trying to pitch advertisers on mass play.
Beehiiv, the creator platform that works with Time and Status, is hiring more sales staff to pitch to advertisers across its network of publications. “A one-time newsletter purchase of your favorite cryptocurrency or AI newsletter will probably work in a silo once or twice,” says company co-founder Tyler Denk. “We act as a big intermediary to drive outcomes for advertisers, and of course publishers can make a lot of money out of that, too.”
The company has hired Andrew McManis, named vice president of advertising sales and customer success, and appointed him to focus on brand and agency partnerships. Beehiiv also plans to double the size of its advertising solutions team across other divisions.
Beehiiv says its ad network pays publishers more than $1 million a month across its platforms and supports newsletters with subscriber bases ranging from 1,000 to more than 1 million people. Creators don’t have to accept Beehiiv’s advertising, Denk said. Many of them sell their own advertising inventory on their own. Beehiiv counts Notion, Google, Netflix, HubSpot, Deel, and Roku as advertisers.
Maneuvers like this show newsletter platforms trying to assimilate individual creators and publishers and give Madison Avenue something they regularly crave: scale. Beehiiv believes it can offer advertisers more reasonable rates while giving them more choice when pitching.
Many of the advertisers coming to the company have traditionally partnered with large independent newsletter publishers like Axios, but the company needs to make more of its money work for them. “They realize it’s a very positive growth channel and it works very well for them, but it’s very expensive and it’s very tedious to do this 100 times across 100 different newsletters,” said Jake Schomberger, head of strategy and operations at Beehiiv. “Thanks to the network, we can go find 5,000 newsletters that provide results, and we can do all the work for them.” Some companies are looking to reexpress the money they spent on social media, and there is also a small amount of business from executives piqued by one of the platform’s newsletters.
For sizable creators, advertising fees can represent increased revenue. However, “many of our users and content creators don’t have a dedicated sales team, so we drive the majority of their revenue through this ad network,” Denk says.
