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The email newsletter strategies actually working in 2025 are curated, high-value content newsletters (Morning Brew, Growth in Reverse), hyperlocal city newsletters that sell ads to regional businesses, and boomer-targeted newsletters most creators are ignoring. In this episode of the My Wife Quit Her Job podcast, my co-host Toni Anderson breaks down what she brought back from an email newsletter summit in Austin, including a genuine playbook from 6AM City’s Ryan for making a local newsletter profitable in six months.
The through-line across every session was that great content is still the only durable growth engine. Chanel Basilio grew Growth in Reverse to 40,000+ subscribers in about two years primarily through people sharing her posts, and Jay Klaus’s talk hammered home that social platforms are distribution, and your newsletter is the actual business.
Below you will find the specific newsletter models generating money right now, how to grow a list to 50,000 subscribers, four ways to monetize, and the ignored audience where the biggest opportunity is hiding.
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Table of Contents
Key takeaways
- Local city newsletters are one of the highest-ROI newsletter models. 6AM City targets a break-even at six months with a two-editor, one-sales-rep team.
- Content quality is the primary growth lever. Chanel Basilio hit 40k+ subscribers on Growth in Reverse in ~2 years driven almost entirely by organic sharing.
- Realistic timeline to 50,000 subscribers based on the creators Chanel profiled: 7% got there in 6 months, 14% in 12 months, 33% in 2 to 3 years.
- Great newsletter content usually does one of four things: makes you money, saves you money, saves you time, makes you laugh, or teaches you something.
- The four monetization models are affiliate links, native ad slots, ad blasts, and driving subscribers to your own paid product.
- Amazon Associates does not allow affiliate links in email newsletters. Many event attendees did not know this.
- The under-served audience is baby boomers. They open every email, they have disposable income, and almost no young creator is writing for them.
What kind of email newsletter can you actually make money with in 2025?
The four newsletter models with clear paths to real revenue in 2025 are local city newsletters (ads to regional businesses), curated industry digests (Morning Brew, The Points Guy), deep-dive research newsletters (Growth in Reverse), and boomer-audience niche newsletters. Each has a different growth engine and revenue model, but every one of them shares the same foundation: content someone actually looks forward to receiving.
Toni came back from the summit with a specific bias toward local newsletters and boomer newsletters, because both have real advertiser demand and neither is saturated. The B2B research newsletter model (Chanel, Jay Klaus, Steph Smith) is more competitive but also has the highest ceiling.
What is dead: ecommerce broadcast blasts as your only email strategy, and any newsletter that is a light rewrite of a YouTube video description. Those still exist. They do not grow anymore.
How to start a local newsletter (the 6AM City playbook)
To start a profitable local newsletter, target a mid-sized metro (population 200k to 1.5M) where the same regional advertisers (hospital systems, grocery chains, universities) can buy ads in your paper and in two or three neighboring newsletters. Staff it with two editors and one salesperson, and design the P&L for break-even by month six. This is the model Ryan runs at 6AM City, which now operates dozens of local newsletters across the US.
The content is intentionally feel-good: new restaurant openings, farmers’ market times, local sports, weekend event guides, community stories. It is what the local newspaper’s Thursday events section used to be, delivered by email. Print is in structural decline, so there is unmet demand and no local competitor for most cities.
The advertiser math is the important part. It is easier to close 10 customers at $10,000/month than 100 customers at $1,000/month. Targeting regional healthcare systems, grocery chains, and multi-location professional services lets you run a real business on 10 to 20 anchor advertisers.
You do not have to attend the events yourself. Ryan called this one of the biggest mistakes his team made early. Attendees will happily send you their photos and event notes. Your job is curation and distribution, not journalism.
How to grow a newsletter from zero to 50,000 subscribers
The realistic timeline to 50,000 subscribers, based on the creator interviews Chanel Basilio has run on Growth in Reverse, is 6 to 36 months, and only 7% of creators hit that milestone in the first six months. The 33% majority took two to three years of consistent publishing before crossing 50k.
The distribution of outcomes she shared:
- 7% of creators hit 50k subscribers within 6 months
- 14% hit it within 12 months
- 17% hit it within 24 months
- 33% (the largest group) hit it in 2 to 3 years
The single most-cited growth lever across every successful creator was “insanely valuable content that people cannot help sharing.” If your open replies do not include lines like “I feel like I’m stealing from you” or “I cannot believe this is free,” you have a content problem, not a distribution problem.
The second-most-cited lever was cross-promotion with other newsletters at a similar size. A 5,000-subscriber newsletter cannot get a 100,000-subscriber newsletter to swap. But two newsletters both under 10,000 subscribers can swap all day long, and it compounds.
Platform tools also matter. Kit (formerly ConvertKit) and Beehiiv both now offer built-in referral and recommendation features (Kit’s Creator Network, Beehiiv Boosts) that make organic sharing measurably easier to convert into subscribers.
What makes newsletter content go viral (the 5 hooks that work)
Great newsletter content that gets shared almost always does one of five things: makes the reader money, saves them money, saves them time, makes them laugh, or teaches them something that leaves them feeling smarter. Every high-growth newsletter Toni saw at the summit hit at least one of these, and most hit two.
The examples that map cleanly:
- Make money: Growth in Reverse (how creators built their businesses), Milk Road (crypto)
- Save money: The Points Guy (travel points and miles), Dave Ramsey’s newsletter
- Save time: Morning Brew (all the news you need in 5 minutes)
- Make them laugh: The Hustle (before it changed hands), most creator personal newsletters
- Teach them something: Steph Smith’s writing, most B2B industry deep-dives
The unifying idea is that a promotional broadcast is not content. If your newsletter is a repost of your YouTube video’s description or a “here’s our new product” email, there is nothing for the reader to share, and no reason to stay subscribed.
How to monetize an email newsletter (4 models compared)
| Model | Best for | Typical revenue | Risk / caveat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Affiliate links | Any content newsletter with buying intent | Highly variable, often 20-40% of total | Amazon Associates prohibits affiliate links in email newsletters |
| Native ad slots (in-newsletter) | Newsletters with 5k+ engaged subscribers | $25-$100 per 1,000 opens (CPM), on 3-6 month contracts | Best-fit advertisers only. Kit, Beehiiv, and Ezoic can help fill |
| Dedicated ad blast (sponsored send) | Large lists with tight topical fit | 3-10x a native slot | Wrong fit will burn unsubscribes. Reserve for perfectly-matched offers |
| Driving subscribers to your own product | Course creators, ecommerce owners, service providers | Highest per-subscriber value if the product is right | Requires the product to actually be there |
Rates on native ad slots are typically driven by open count rather than subscriber count. If you sell a slot for $500 and 10,000 people open the issue, that is $50 CPM against opens, which is competitive with mid-tier podcast and YouTube inventory.
For very small newsletters (under 5,000 subscribers), affiliate revenue almost always outperforms ad revenue on a per-hour basis. You keep 100% of the margin and you do not have to negotiate with an advertiser for every slot.
Why baby boomers are the most under-served newsletter audience
Baby boomers are the highest-value under-served newsletter audience because they open nearly every email they receive, they have disposable income (US households age 65+ hold roughly half of all US household wealth per Federal Reserve data), and almost no young creator is writing for them. Multiple people Toni met at the summit were quietly running profitable newsletters aimed specifically at retirees.
The examples that came up at the summit were a travel-for-retirees newsletter and a news-and-lifestyle digest for the 65+ crowd. Both were doing better than most of the trendy creator newsletters at the event, because their subscribers actually read every email and actually click the ads.
The pattern: most newsletter creators are in their 20s and 30s, and they instinctively write for their own demographic. Boomers get zero attention from that talent pool. If you have a genuine reason to serve that audience (a parent’s hobby, an industry that skews older, a health or retirement niche), the runway is wide open.
Why owning your email list matters more than any social platform
You should treat your email list as the platform and every social channel as distribution, because email is the only channel you can carry with you if a platform de-ranks, bans, or changes its algorithm overnight. This was the core of Jay Klaus’s talk at the summit and it lines up with everything we have seen over 15+ years of running online businesses.
Between TikTok, Instagram, X, Threads, LinkedIn, Bluesky, and YouTube Shorts, pick one (at most two) that matches your content style. Use them purely to drive subscribers into your newsletter, and evaluate every social post by whether it grew your list. If it did not, the post did not do its job.
The math Toni ran on brand deals versus her own product illustrates the same point: a $5,000 brand deal that takes 20 hours of back-and-forth pays $250/hour. A $5,000 webinar to her own email list takes about 5 hours end to end and pays $1,000/hour. Owning the audience makes every hour worth 4x more.
How AI is changing newsletter curation in 2025
AI is changing newsletter curation by making it possible to monitor hundreds of primary sources (government publications, industry sites, forums, YouTube transcripts) and surface the day’s or week’s most-relevant items in minutes instead of hours. This was the core of Steph Smith’s talk at the summit, and it does not mean using AI to write your newsletter; it means using AI as a research assistant that lets a solo publisher cover a beat a small team used to be needed for.
The workflow Steph outlined: feed a curated list of high-quality source URLs to Claude or ChatGPT, have it summarize and cluster the day’s activity, then write the connective narrative and commentary yourself. Automation for the boring part, human judgment on what actually matters.
The mistake to avoid is letting AI write the whole thing. AI-drafted newsletters are trivially detectable, they hallucinate, and they read generic. Every publisher who tried it and stuck with it also lost engagement.
How to pick the right newsletter platform (Kit, Beehiiv, ConvertKit alternatives)
For a content newsletter under 10,000 subscribers, both Kit (formerly ConvertKit) and Beehiiv are strong choices, and the specific pick usually comes down to whether you want Kit’s Creator Network for cross-promotion or Beehiiv’s Boosts marketplace for paid subscriber acquisition. Both offer built-in referral programs, native ad slot marketplaces, and simple monetization tools.
Substack is the right choice if your business model is paid subscriptions from day one and you want the discovery bump from Substack’s recommendation graph. It is the wrong choice if you plan to eventually run your own ads or move your list to another platform.
Ezoic is worth knowing about as an ad-network alternative for newsletters. They fill inventory the way an ad exchange does for websites, which removes the sales work but takes a meaningful revenue cut.
Frequently asked questions
How long does it take to grow an email newsletter to 50,000 subscribers?
Based on the interviews Chanel Basilio has run on Growth in Reverse, only 7% of creators hit 50,000 subscribers within 6 months, and the largest group (33%) took 2 to 3 years. Plan for a 24- to 36-month timeline if you are starting from zero and relying primarily on organic growth.
Can I put Amazon affiliate links in my email newsletter?
No. Amazon Associates explicitly prohibits Amazon affiliate links inside email newsletters, and they can (and do) terminate accounts that do it at scale. You can link to your own website or landing page that then contains the Amazon affiliate link.
What is the most profitable type of email newsletter to start in 2025?
Local city newsletters have the fastest and clearest path to profit because you can sell ads to regional businesses (hospital systems, grocery chains, universities) that all have real ad budgets and want geographic targeting. 6AM City’s model targets break-even by month six with a small team.
How much can I charge for an ad in my newsletter?
Newsletter ad rates are usually priced against open count rather than subscriber count, typically in the $25 to $100 CPM (cost per 1,000 opens) range for a native in-newsletter slot. A newsletter with 10,000 opens per issue can typically charge $250 to $1,000 per slot, with sponsored blasts commanding 3x to 10x that number.
Should I use Kit, Beehiiv, or Substack for a new newsletter?
For a content newsletter aiming to be free with ad or affiliate revenue, Kit or Beehiiv are the strongest picks in 2025, with Beehiiv slightly ahead on built-in growth tools and Kit slightly ahead on the Creator Network. Substack is the right choice only if paid subscriptions are your day-one business model.
How many times per week should I email my newsletter list?
Once a week is the sweet spot for most content newsletters, especially research-driven ones like Growth in Reverse. Morning Brew and other digest-style newsletters send daily but require a full-time team. If you are running the newsletter as a side hustle, weekly is a proven, sustainable cadence.
What newsletter audience is the most under-served in 2025?
Baby boomers (roughly age 60 and up) are the most under-served newsletter audience, because they open nearly every email, hold most household wealth, and receive very little content built for them by young creators. Niches inside that audience (travel, retirement planning, health, hobbies, local community) have wide-open opportunity.
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