Partnering with Beehiiv, the next-gen newsletter platform
Considering that I’ve always been interested in upcoming tech, I’ve never done much writing in this area. That’s why I enjoy contributing to the Blocks with Benefits project (you can read more about it here).
First and foremost, that’s a newsletter explaining blockchain-related concepts and ideas to people without any previous experience. But what do you need to publish a newsletter? The perfect platform.
Before launching, we spent quite some time to find the best option. Newsletter platforms aren’t exactly in short supply. Eventually, we decided to use Beehiiv – and because it’s a great platform it made sense to join the Partner Program as well.
So what’s Beehiiv?
It’s a newsletter platform that is being actually built (mostly) by content creators. The founders came from Morning Brew, a pretty successful business newsletter company. They set out to build a platform that supports all creators – with many of the tools they used to grow the subscriber base of Morning Brew, as well as some new ones.
In a nutshell, Beehiiv wants to make it easy for authors to make money with newsletters. That’s why they didn’t follow the established models of big players such as Medium or Substack.
On Medium, creators drive traffic to the platform which makes money from subscriptions and then hands out a part of that money to creators, based on the attention they’re getting.
On Substack, writers have a lot more control as readers subscribe to individual publications. They can also discover related content so it’s great if you’re working in a specific niche. It’s also free to use for creators and it’s very simple to offer paid subscriptions. The only catch: Substack takes 10% of subscription revenues.
How do writers make money?
There are two ways for newsletter creators to make money: paid subscriptions or some kind of ads. That’s not really different from social media platforms, except that you have even less control over your audience.
You want to switch from Instagram from TikTok? Then you’ll have to start from scratch. With genuine newsletter platforms, at least you’ve got a list of subscribers that you can take to a new platform.
Paid subscriptions
Simple concept: Create interesting and unique content and find readers who are willing to pay for that. However, there is usually a ton of free stuff available on the internet so it’s not easy to find a niche where readers are actually willing to pay.
By and large, paid subscriptions work for highly specialised content. That can give you very stable income, but it’s hard to scale beyond a specific niche.
Advertising
Earning money through ads, sponsorships or similar placements requires a large audience. That’s hard work for any newsletter writer – but it’s possible when you’re providing interesting content in a great format.
So what’s the problem with ads then? You need to find advertisers. Not every content creator is good at developing partnerships with advertisers though. There are some platforms that can do the work for you – but they will also take a cut.
How does Beehiiv help?
Beehiiv has flipped the payment structure. When you’re writing a newsletter and you want to monetize it, you start by paying Beehiiv first.
How does that make sense? Easy: It’s a lot less expensive than the alternative.
Beehiiv provides different subscription tiers (including a free one for up to 2500 subscribers). The more you pay, the more you get – and it’s not too expensive (you can find an overview over the tiers and the pricing on the website).
Paying a monthly fee means fixed expenses. However, Beehiiv doesn’t take anything else.
You have a paid subscription feature? You’ll keep all revenues. You want to include sponsorships? Beehiiv has its own network of advertisers which is very much growing at the moment. You want to recommend other newsletters? Earn more money for every subscriber you have referred. You can even integrate your own merchandising without much hassle.
Summary
As you can see, Beehiiv has a lot of positive features. On top of that, it’s really, really simple to use.
If you’re thinking about starting to write your own newsletter, it makes sense to just sign up and try it yourself. You can try virtually everything for free for 30 days and continue using the free version after that so there’s no risk at all. (You should have some content ready to go though to start sending your first newsletters during the test period.)
And don’t worry if you want to migrate from a different platform. You’ll have to do a bit of design work in the background but it’s really not complicated. There’s also a very comprehensive Help section on the website. (We can’t say anything about the customer service response times because so far, we didn’t have any specific questions that we couldn’t solve through the Help section.)
In short, we’re really happy with Beehiiv so far.