Audience Bridge Insights #16 - CPM vs CPC vs CPA: How Newsletter Ad Money Actually Works

And large publishers, like, didn't care about the product. They used it to drive traffic to, like, more profitable content.

In the end, it's like, if your content sucks, it's going to suck. If it's good, it's going to be good.

We're in the ad sales business and we know that what we're selling has to be digestible for an advertiser to run their, their ads against that content.

I recommend to everyone that you should be doing multiple types of growth, running Facebook, running Google.

The family member at the time that was running that business told me I had to learn marketing and advertising to be successful.

You gotta be bringing ads in from other methods, not just count on their internal network.

How do we measure opens? How do we measure list sizes? How do we measure clicks? And then ultimately, like, down to conversions. I don't wanna waste time running with publishers that have questionable audiences.

Welcome back to another episode of AudienceBridge Insights. Today I have Jeff Eisenberg, co-founder of Media Intercept here. Jeff, how you doing?

I'm doing great. Thanks for having me, Chris.

Appreciate it. Awesome. We actually got together at the newsletter conference last week. You know, we had some conversations and we did discuss about monetization, advertising, which, you know, kind of shocked us a little bit that there wasn't a lot of talk about that at the conference. So I said, well, let's get you up on the podcast and let's talk about monetization because that's a very important part about owning a newsletter. Newsletter and email marketing in general. So that's what we're going to discuss today. Why don't we get started and just let the audience know a little bit about your background, how you kind of got in this. I know, you know, just looking back through your profile, I think you were in law school, went that route. Not sure if you actually became a lawyer and did any legal work, but then you went kind of like, I think, radio, video, and then got pushed to newsletter. If you want to kind of tell how that kind of transformation happened.

Yeah. Yeah. So yes, I did go to law school. I mean, you know, fortunately or unfortunately, however, you know, however you want to look at it, I did not choose to pursue a career in law. I think fortunately for me personally, I don't think I would've been well suited for that. And I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do. And I thought I wanted to get into a family business running consumer shows. So like home shows, auto shows, boat shows. And the family member at the time that was running that business told me I had to learn marketing and advertising to be successful. So the first job I was able to get was selling radio for a station in Miami, which you may know called Power 96.

Yeah, maybe. It's the Power Hour.

So went from, you know, law school and interning at law firms to hitting used car lots in Hialeah, trying to drum up business. And I would tell anybody, you know, anyone who's been in radio, and there's a lot of really successful digital ad executives that started in radio because it's really hard, right? Local radio sales is very difficult. When I got there, they're like, here's the phone book. Good luck. You know, there was no— we're talking, I'm going to date myself, like 20 years You didn't have like a lot of the monitoring services you have today. It was just a lot less sophisticated. But then had an opportunity after doing that for a short period of time to move back to New York and work for a national radio company, Westwood One, selling traffic and weather. And then after about a year and a half, had an opportunity to go to get into digital video, which, you know, at the time we're talking 2008, it's early. You know, I certainly saw it as the future. I mean, you have to remember that it's hard. It's hard to think about a day, a time before YouTube or, you know, how ubiquitous video is on your phone now or your iPad. Had, but at that time, digital video was considered to be a fringe product. TV still ruled, right? So I did that for a few years, worked for, you know, YouTube MCNs for a few years, worked for a company called Demand Media, which then became Leaf Group, which now is nothing, but they were a pretty large company that was capitalizing on search traffic, which is probably an interesting subject for us to discuss as far as it relates to newsletters. And then I moved on and ran national sales for a company called Dailymotion, which is the second largest video platform in the world, currently owned by Vivendi Group, and wanted to get back into startups after working in, you know, for big corporate for a few years and worked for a video technology company, Shoppable Video. So that was my first taste of commerce and understanding like, you know, outcome-driven media as opposed to like branding and just awareness. And subsequent to that, moved to Florida, started consulting, consulted for several companies, one of which was a company called Stack Commerce. Yeah, I helped them build their media business there. Primarily focused on articles initially, and then we got into newsletter. And what we quickly realized was that newsletter was much more scalable. It was a much more interesting sort of underserved channel at the time. I mean, we're talking 2019, 2020 pandemic, which is really when you saw the newsletter space start to pick up some steam. You know, you had a lot of CPG companies or direct-to-consumer companies that were, you know, everyone was at home, right? So those companies started to explode, subscription services. Home education services. And much like podcasts, newsletters became, you know, a space where you could reach niche audiences at scale. And so my current business partner and I thought, you know, there's a real business here focusing specifically on the newsletter space, you know, doing some components of performance, but also looking a little bit further up funnel into awareness, which to this day is still not typically how the channel is viewed. And that's, that's how we're here. So we launched Media Intercept early 2023, and about 6 weeks in, we were profitable and we haven't looked back since.

Is there anything you were able to take from your experience at Dailymotion and doing the video stuff that you've brought into the newsletter space advertising?

Anything there? Yeah, I mean, listen, you know, having worked for large media companies, I think that like what you've seen in the newsletter space is sort of a lack of maturity to this point in terms of like true understanding of what large advertisers are looking for, the way that they buy, the way that they operate. You just currently have like a massive amount of fragmentation. It's like the most fragmented space possible. And so what we're trying to do is bring some discipline to the space in terms of true uniform metrics, like how do we measure opens? How do we measure list sizes? How do we measure clicks? And then ultimately, like down to conversions. And if you ask 10 people in the space, you'll probably get 10 answers. And so, you know, my background in media sales, understanding what advertisers need to see to give them confidence in what we're doing, you know, that sort of directs everything that we're doing. And my partner and I have both have long experience backgrounds in media sales and building media teams and understanding the operational side, which I think, you know, is also really important. It's very easy if you're a single operator to run your calendar. You're like, okay, I'm going to send out an email every day. I've got 2 or 3 ad slots in that email. That's a fairly simple business. But when you're selling inventory across thousands of newsletters, you know, and hundreds of advertisers, it becomes a much more complicated proposition and it requires a background of understanding how to run a media business. At scale. So yeah, that's, that's certainly been— it's, it's been helpful to have had that experience.

Let's kind of get into the newsletter monetization business model. You know, a lot of— I mean, historically, you know, newsletter ads and then the industry has been sold on a CPM basis. Uh, there's your list. Who am I sending to? Um, which caused a bunch of issues, uh, obviously on the deliverability side. Things aren't happening. You're not really getting the results you want because you're not, but you still have to perform based on what the commitments to the advertiser were. Then you're doing make goods because it's not working for them. Just a whole mess of logistics to deal with to all the different formats, the, you know, the flat fee, CPC, CPA, all the other different types out there. What are you guys doing at Media Intercept? I believe it's mostly a lot of it's CPC. And then I guess you're doing some, you know, you have your native ad placements, you're doing some dedicated creatives as well. Kind of share like what you guys are doing there, what might be different than the old model, why whatever you guys doing probably better. I know at the newsletter conference, which I've been preaching for years now, is like, listen, size doesn't matter anymore. It's your engaged audience. How, how large is your engaged audience? Not how large your subscribers are. So what, where do you guys, uh, fit there?

Yeah, I mean, you know, so there's, there's a lot to unpack there. I think like it's interesting when you say like traditionally flat rate CPM, but I would even go further back and like the big initial issue really in this space was let's pre-Morning Brew. I, I wouldn't say pre-Skim because Skim's been around now for quite a while, but you know, before you had like this real creator economy that's sort of boomed in newsletters the way that it Nvidia or other, other channels, the primary deliverers of newsletters from like a content perspective were large publishers. And large publishers like didn't care about the product, right? So they used it for one of two things. They used it to drive traffic to like more profitable, you know, content, right? Use it to drive it to video that they're publishing on site, brand new content, articles, what have you, or using it as a retention tool, you know, for their audiences like, hey, here are the top 10 articles in the New York Times or whatever. And in terms of selling it, you know, it was really a tool to drive drive sales in other areas. So it was pretty much given as value add. Here, I'm going to buy a million dollar package with XYZ publisher. And newsletters were typically thrown in there as like a zero dollar line item. And so that devalued—

Right, freebie, here's a little bonus.

That's right. And, you know, and then so in those cases, like list size becomes like, it's like it matters because you can sort of pork belly in those impressions into the overall buy to artificially lower like a CPM. So it's like, okay, our list size is a million. We're going to tell you our open rate is 40%, 50% or higher in some cases where, you know, they're not realizing that those emails are actually not being opened even though, you know, their server is telling them that they are. And there's a lot of reasons why that'll happen. And then you can just sort of add those impressions to an overall goal and at a $0 cost, like, like make it appear to be more efficient. And so, you know, that always posed a challenge, I think, like for big advertisers to enter into the space because they're like, why should I pay for this? Like when I get it for free anyway? But then to your point, like, You know, we, we started with CPC a long time ago and we came to that conclusion really for, for two reasons. You know, on, on the one side you have flat rate CPM. So that's like top of funnel, bottom of funnel, you have CPA. I think like when you look at CPM and flat rate, you know, you need metrics today currently beyond simply list size and open rate to justify that. And I think the only way you can get to that is by having done some more performance-oriented campaigns. So you can go to an advertiser and say, hey, like my list size is X and you should pay me for that. And I know it's real because when I ran this campaign on CPC or CPA, this advertiser saw these results that back up, you know, what I'm telling you in terms of my audience size. And then, you know, again, it depends on the publisher, right? Whether we can get into this, like whether they're B2B or general interests. Like I think the way that those two types of publishers sell have to be different just because like you might have a list of 20,000 highly engaged business leaders and that's incredibly valuable and you're not going to sell that on a CPC because it's not going to generate enough volume for it to make sense for the publisher. So you can justify a CPM or flat rate spend because like, you know, a brand is going to say, hey, this is a really engaged audience versus like just general news where you need a much larger audience because they're not specialized. They're, you know, a wide range of people that are probably more interested in consumer products that have much lower CPA goals. I think on the flip side, like CPA has always been a challenge because, you know, everything that has to do with attribution on the affiliate side and the way that people buy like you could be responsible for a huge halo effect or a huge number of leads that get brought in the funnel, but they might not convert through like your last click for any number of reasons, right? It could be like they comparison shop and that's a big issue, right? I click on a pair of Nikes in a newsletter. Oh, that's great. Let me see where else I can buy that for less money. If I find it, I'll buy it there. And then that person gets the credit and the publisher who actually generated the interest gets sort of left out in the cold. That's CommonStory and affiliate to like the other end of the spectrum. You know, the company that's advertising has like a poor product or it's poorly priced or the checkout process is super convoluted and people drop off or whatever. Like all these different reasons for why a conversion won't happen based on the lead that a publisher generates, which again, not fair to the publisher. So you've got these two ends of the spectrum on the CPM flat rate side. All the risk is on the advertiser side. On the CPA side, all the risk is on the publisher side, but CPC is more of a shared risk model and it has its own issues as well. And we can get into bot traffic and bot clicks and all that stuff. But ultimately, we've sort of realized that it's at least the most fair way to judge a campaign if what you're trying to do is drive like some sort of action. I do still, and we are moving into this space quickly, believe that there is a world where, you know, brand dollars start to flow into newsletter. And there is no call to action like you're selling like a can of Coke or you're selling a car or whatever, and you're not really trying to get someone to click out to somewhere. You're— you want to share information, create awareness, be top of mind as a part of the media mix the same way you would with like a TV commercial or radio commercial, like anything that's just sort of making a consumer aware that a product is out there so that hopefully when they're ready to buy that, that you're in the consideration set because they've seen it so often. But yeah, I mean, that's a long answer to your question. I think like you can, you can come up with 10 or 20 or 30 or 100 different ways to go about it. You know, so CPC is primarily how we operate, but we do recognize there are other, other ways to do it and we're exploring those. And it sort of led us to expanding our offerings across the board from having a flat rate CPM product for certain advertisers, but backing those recommendations with data that we've collected over the years in terms of how these publishers perform for more performance-oriented advertisers. And then, you know, on the opposite end of the spectrum, opening up what we call a non-guaranteed channel that allows advertisers to bid whatever CPC they want, understanding that some products, like, they have lower, you know, lower CPA goals. And so, like, if you're selling, like, if you're T-Mobile and you're selling, like, a new phone, like, the CPA on that is, like, $10 to $15 for a new subscription. It's very low. So it's hard to justify a CPC above a certain price because your conversion rate is going to have to be like really high. But a publisher, it can be pretty lucrative because that offer might click much better. You can do more volume, albeit at a lower unit cost. And so, you know, we've long felt that you have certain advertisers that are shut out just based on like sort of unit economics that have existed for a long time. So we're trying to change that as well.

Yeah, I mean, I like how you say that, you know, the CPC model is kind of a shared risk. I know from just years of experience and stuff. And we had a network in the health space way back, we got out of that, but managing the publishers trying, who are trying to always say that, no, our audience is good, it's your, it's your offer. And then the advertisers say, no, your, your traffic sucks. And it's like you're trying to balance the who's right, who's not, you know, having to play that, you know, mediary, kind of a pain in the ass, uh, to be able to kind seperate that and put them on an even playing field. One of the worst things that I always used to see were, you know, advertisers coming out with a new offer or new product. They want you to test this on a CPA. They got no, no proof to the pudding. You're like, I'm not going to be your guinea pig. If you want to, you know, pay me a flat rate to run it so you can get learnings and see if your offer is good, I'll do that. But I'm not going to just send traffic hoping that, that it's going to convert for me.

Yeah, I mean, I also think like It depends on like, again, like what you are as an operator, right? Like there have been friends of mine who have asked for advice, like how do I start getting ads like into my newsletter? And they might have like a very small list. And my advice to them in those cases, because I know they're too small to individually go out to pitch to advertisers, like it's just not going to make any sense. And working with someone like me, they won't make enough money on a CPC. It just won't be worth their time. But like to those people, I would say, hey, like take it, take an affiliate deal. Just pick like the brand that you think resonates with your audience that you would you know, want to sell to your audience because it's just great fit and you believe in it and whatever. And then you can start to generate some data that says, hey, we only have 10,000 subscribers, but like I put this super expensive infrared sauna, you know, offer into my newsletter because I'm trying to reach, you know, this is actually a real example, like women who are interested in like perimenopausal information. It's a big market, but, but this person is just starting out and, you know, maybe they sell like 20 of them. And that's worth like a huge amount of money, you know, that like way out punches what their audience size is, they can then take that data and start to justify like, here, even though I'm smaller, this audience is super engaged. They buy the products that I pitch. Like, you should pay me on a flat rate. But I don't think you can get there without having some sort of proof point that shows that your audience is legitimately engaged.

What specific niches are, are kind of performing the best right now? In terms of like content or in terms of advertiser advertising as far as publishers making more money because the offer is good and it actually working for the advertiser on the backside.

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, it's really like for us, like we work with just such a wide range of companies. You know, we work with insurance companies, we work with credit card companies, you know, financial services, things like that. Those tend to do really well. But then on the other hand, like a huge number of health health, right? Like supplement brands, health and awareness, you know, health awareness brands, a lot of sort of biohacking brands. Those seem to do very well. Mental health does very well. And then, you know, education, right? So like e-learning classes, language learning classes. We've seen apparel do really well. So there's a lot of different things. I think it's really the key is the match between the advertiser and the publisher. You're not going to necessarily run like a mental health ad in like a travel newsletter. I mean, you could.

Unless you have anxiety flying like I do and you take a Xanax.

Well, or you could say, hey, like, you know, take a vacation because you're stressed out, something like that. I mean, you have to come up with an angle that makes sense. And I think that's actually the beauty of newsletter advertising is the fact that, you know, you can tailor— it's what we do. We tailor the message to the specific audience. So when you can create true native ads, HTML5 hardcoded, you can have each ad be individual to the newsletter and then it's going to be much more effective. But, you know, you don't want to try to fit a square peg into a round hole. So you wouldn't run— you know, I was on Tyler Moran's podcast and I was like, yeah, we're not going to run like lip balm or beauty, like women's beauty on your newsletter, which is financial news. It just doesn't— it's like you don't have the right audience and they don't care about that.

So what about the wart removal offer?

We haven't picked that one up yet. We haven't done toenail fungus. You know, a lot of the stuff you see programmatically, we haven't, we haven't dipped into. And I think, you know, unfortunately those type of ads have sort of poisoned the well to a certain extent with, with creators. So we try to avoid those things. We try to focus on quality brands. And then on the flip side, you know, we don't just accept every publisher into our network either. Like, I don't want to waste time running with publishers that have questionable audiences or, you know, subject matter that we know is not going to be a fit for advertisers. Like, it's great if they want to do it, that's fine.

But like, we're in the ad sales business.

And we know that what we're selling has to ultimately be digestible for an advertiser to run their ads against that content.

Yeah, I was actually just gonna ask you what publishers consistently deliver versus the ones that don't.

I mean, you know, it's not necessarily a subject matter thing. We have a few that do really well, like no matter what we run there. And they could be, you know, I do think, you know, when we see content that's like newsletters that are body copy, like are actually well-written, typically not by AI, have actual things to say to people that are reading them, like people are more engaged, right? So if I get a newsletter with someone's opinion or point of view or news and there's a lot in there that's not just simply an RSS feed linking out to other things, those are going to perform better than like, here are the top 20 articles from around the country with like no description of them because there's no real content there and someone's just going to scroll through it. And any ad that's in there is going to— if it looks like those thumbnails, people are going to ignore it. It's not going to perform well. And if it doesn't, it's going to be jarring, right? It's going to be like the ad is the content and then the rest of the content is what? So that's one good rule of thumb. Like something that has like a lot of body copy tends to perform really well regardless of the vertical. We do see like positivity, you know, is something that typically does well, like content that has a positive spin. And that's across You know, again, it's news, it's health, business, things that are funny, things that make people feel good tend to increase engagement. And then obviously, like, higher engagement leads to better ad performance.

When you have, say, and I know you're opening up, like, I think other types of creatives, offers, whatever you want to call them, but you have your native kind of placements and then you do have your dedicated, I guess, creatives. Is there a difference in the CPCs or the money per click off of those, or are they kind of the same? And the dedicated, you're probably getting more traffic because you're just focusing in on that, on that.

You're getting more traffic, but we do charge a premium for dedicated because, like, we want to pay the publisher a premium for that. Ultimately, like, there's a trade-off for a publisher. You know, you can make more money doing dedicated, but potentially you're going to have more churn on your audience if you do it too often or you do it with products that just aren't a fit. Like people are like, okay, what is this? Why am I getting this? I didn't sign up for that. I signed up for your content. And so you have to respect your audience, right? And we understand, you know, if someone's going to promote, like use their list and their audience that they've spent a lot of time building and earning trust with to promote one of our products that we're representing, it's a potential risk. And so, you know, in order to mitigate that risk, we want to pay more and make sure, you know, and make sure we're getting the best inventory we can for our advertising clients. And so We do pay out higher for dedicated. I think like, you know, it's better for brands because obviously, you know, you have 100% share of voice, like it's just you. So certainly more clicks, more engagement, and then more room to tell your story. So as opposed to 40 to 100 words in like a true native ad that's within the content of a regular newsletter, I mean, you can do whatever you want. You can make it 1,000 words and you can write something like that's pretty in-depth and complicated, which for a lot of brands is a huge it's a huge bonus to be able to do that.

Talking about dedicated, obviously, and I've been experiencing this over the years, like you said, it'd be a lot more churn. There's additional issues that can come from dedicated as well, which are fingerprinting of the creative, which it's getting sent down on, you know, 150 different newsletters and that, you know, it gets harder and harder to possibly hit the inbox in some of those creatives over time, depending on how strong your deliverability is. Are the publishers at all allowed to play with the creative to get it more into their voice? Are they stuck to how— I know some, you know, obviously in the FinPub space, they're pretty strict because of compliance, legal, and all that stuff because of all the lawsuits over the years. Obviously they have a lot more requirements. So it's harder to get them to do that. They almost have to like make one for you if you have enough volume for them. What's going on over there from you guys?

Yeah, I mean, everything we do, we certainly encourage the publisher to make it their own, obviously understanding that it has to be approved by the client. Like there's nothing like, we're never going to take a copy, ship it to a publisher and say, hey, you can tweak it and then not have it come back for approval. And then as you said, certainly some verticals or industries are much more strict. And I think the key is like if there's any disclosures or disclaimers, like those have to be very clear and they have, you have to be sure that the reader is going to see them. I mean, we just ran into an issue where one publisher, like, published the ad. This is not in a dedicated, this is in a native, but they published the ad, like, somewhere in the middle of the newsletter. And then they had a disclaimer, like, all the way at the bottom, completely separate. And, you know, the advertiser couldn't use any of those leads because there's a high probability that if, you know, the user got through half the newsletter, clicked on that ad, they might not have finished the rest of the newsletter. So they never saw the disclaimer or disclosure. And then they're open to potential exposure there to say, hey, I didn't know that. Well, I didn't know that because you didn't have it right there. So, you know, we review everything, but certainly, you know, it is to everyone's benefit to have a publisher write it in their voice. And because that's the voice that ultimately has generated the audience growth, right? That's what's captured the audience. That's why people are there. They're not there to just read like ad copy from, you know, someone like me who's just going to write it or whatever.

You think there's a there's room for— I mean, obviously AI is taking over freaking everything. A way that AI can kind of spin up these creatives, the content for, you know, there's an advertiser has their creative, here's the content, the topic, and then the, the, the publisher can kind of put a prompt in that has to fit certain requirements that the advertiser says and then spins it up.

Yeah, I mean, it's— listen, that's— I don't have any issue with that as like a starting point. Right? So it's like you want to put in a prompt or you want to, you know, train like some, you know, an agent to create all your ad copy and all your creatives. That's fine. But, you know, you also need to have human eyes on it because those things are not 100% accurate, you know, and ultimately, you know, it's like anything else with AI. I think that it can, it can certainly speed things up and create efficiencies, but it's not like a 100% solution. And I think we've seen that You know, whether it's in ad copy or people that like, I mean, and we can get into this, but, you know, a huge proliferation of newsletters are just like AI slop. Like it's sort of gaming the system. Like I'm going to go onto one of these platforms. I'm going to create a bunch of newsletters. I'm just going to have AI write them. It's like an automated thing. And they get plugged into those ad networks and they're just making money without like what— there's no real content there. And people aren't going to really read that. They'll catch on. This is nonsense gibberish. So I think it's like, you know, it's like a cyborg, right? You need, you need the human component and then you have the AI that certainly can accelerate things and maybe give you a head start. But, but I wouldn't just leave it to that alone.

Earlier you mentioned obviously quality bots, things of that nature. What are you guys doing to try to help police that, protect that for, for your advertisers? Is there anything you guys are doing as far as validating traffic, anything like that?

So we do a ton. It's, it's a game that, that will go on forever, right? Like, you know, you'll figure out like, here's this, this, this is a suspicious person or suspicious traffic and you'll capture that and you'll sort of use that now as like a, you know, a marker for what might not be legitimate. And then, you know, fraudsters will come up with some new way to mask it. I think, you know, we use certainly software that, that can filter things out. We typically, though, we don't block traffic at this point. We let it all go through and then we will go back after the fact and clean it. The reason for that is like you have, I mean, there's certain things that are very obvious, right? So it's like if you get like a burst of repeat clicks, duplicate clicks from the same IP address, like, you know, in a 5-second period, like that's very obviously not legitimate. And that, but it's not, you know, and I always like to say illegitimate, not fraud. Fraud implies that like I am trying to steal when we know that particularly if you're a B2B newsletter and you've got a lot of business emails, for example, you're going to have antiviral software that's going to go through those emails before you ever open them and click on all the links. And there might be multiple. So you might get the same one clicks it 3 times like in a row. It's not necessarily an indicator of fraud, but it's also not a real person. So you shouldn't pay for it as an advertiser. And that's so that's one extreme and obvious thing, you know, or like clicks from weird geos or, you know, that don't make any sense and are not worth anything to an advertiser. They shouldn't pay for that. On the other hand, there's things that are more nebulous. You know, the examples of those would be proxy clicks and VPN clicks. And, you know, VPN is a big sort of discussion now, particularly in the CPC space, because, you know, you have a lot of the affiliate dashboards that are filtering all of it out. They're just saying anything that comes from a VPN, like, we consider to be illegitimate. And I don't know if that's because they have no way to determine the difference between what's legitimate and what's not. I think that's That's part of it. I think the other part of it is, you know, for them, they can increase revenue per click and like look, look better. And so that's like one way they can do that. For us, like it's more of a gray area. And so what we'll end up doing is looking at like the deeper metrics. But the reason it's a gray area, like on the one hand, you could say, yes, there is incentive to commit fraud there. Like there's incentive to spoof a US IP address from a foreign country because US traffic is more valuable. Right? People pay more for a click from a US user than a user in Pakistan or wherever. But on the other hand, you've got 50 million+ people in the US that use VPNs. So there's no way that you can say those people are all— that it's all illegitimate traffic. And if you block all of it, you're going to be blocking potential conversions. So we'd rather those clicks come in and then, you know, ultimately we'll look at the further down funnel metrics. And sort of have an idea of like what we should be giving credit to and what we should not. You know, if, if an ad has a really high conversion rate and we see a good amount of VPN traffic, like we're going to let that go through and we're going to pay the publisher out on that because the advertiser is happy and like, that's fine. If we see something do like 2,000 clicks and generate like 1 lead or 2 leads for a product that typically would do 100, then we have a higher degree of certainty that a lot of that, you know, gray area traffic is probably not legitimate. And we're very transparent with with our publishers on that. You know, we will share all our reporting and how we sort of will justify like what we think, you know, we should be paying out based on the traffic. And, you know, ultimately you do have some people that can be disappointed by that. But I think, you know, it only serves them for us to be open and honest about what's happening because, you know, we can become sort of the canary in the coal mine in the sense that we're just doing such a large amount of volume. We can identify issues for publishers. Perhaps more quickly than they can on their own because they're only seeing their own traffic. And I'd rather— it's probably better for them that I tell them and they could say, okay, maybe I have a problem here. I have to clean up my traffic as opposed to like all of a sudden they've got 30 super pissed off advertisers because like they ran ads on flat rate and like it was all illegitimate traffic. But yeah, it's an ever-evolving process for us. You know, we never— we will be honest with publishers and we don't We don't ever like to burn bridges, but if we do see a pattern, we'll say, look, you know, we need to take a break. We need to figure out what's going on with your list and come back to me in 3 months when you've done some diligence and we'll test again and see where we're at. And some of them do correct it. Like we've seen that for sure. Others, like, it will always be bad because like the foundation of their audience of what they've been built on, depending on how they've done their growth, is just like rotten to the core and they can't ever fix it.

Got it.

Yeah.

I mean, VPNs, obviously. I mean, I see NordVPN freaking ads like all over the place. Yeah.

I mean, you know, And one thing we talk about as a company, like, by the way, it's like we have 3 responsibilities as like the core of our business. So like one, obviously, like we're in business to make money, right? We have to be profitable and pay employees and all that, certainly. But like our mission is twofold in terms of how we do that. It's one, like make advertisers happy in the newsletter channel. So in order to do that, you know, you have to make sure that you're being efficient, you're buying the right properties on their behalf or placing them and that it's performing really well., you know, that they're seeing the efficiency on a per-click basis, or if they're buying flat, they're still seeing the value, you know, their ROAS is higher than what they paid. And then on the other side, and these, these are not necessarily tied together, is making publishers happy. So, you know, making sure that a publisher, when they take one of our ads, they're happy with the revenue they're seeing and they're happy with the brands that they're putting in front of their audience. And so, you know, one can happen without the other happening or both can happen, you know, independently of each other. And, you know, we just have to make sure that we're keeping our eye on both balls at the same time because it is a bit of a balancing act for sure.

In your guys' situation, are you, are the publishers able to get postback pixels for backend conversions after the click or since it's CPC, that's really the conversion point because that's what they're getting or so they can see the performance and, you know, back out later down the road, like you said, like, oh, here's the stats from down the funnel that, performs if you do try to get a flat rate deal? Like, yeah, we have buyers, we're doing this, you know, this is how results are. They able to see that through the network or is that something you have to get from the advertiser then provide them, get the insights?

We get it from the advertiser. We don't just like publish that stuff on the dashboard because it's proprietary, right? Like, and different advertisers use, like, I mean, you know, if you've got 100 advertisers, they're all going to have 100 different attribution models. And some of them are purely like last click attribution, which obviously like we don't think is fair. And they're going to be selling themselves short in the long run by just looking at like that metric. You're going to end up sort of in an echo chamber of like, I'm only going to spend where people are buying. Well, okay, but they might not have gotten to that point without these other channels. So I think if you're not looking at, you know, a full attribution picture, a full funnel picture of like the consumer journey, you're not going to have success. But there are obviously degrees to that. You know, again, it gets into what the advertiser's objectives are, what they're selling, you know, the sales cycle for it. Like someone who's selling, you know, a $50 pair of sneakers, like that's a fairly immediate decision. Like I'm either buying it or I'm not. Now I might have gone to 2 places to buy it, but it's not like I'm going to think about it for weeks and weeks and weeks versus like homeowner's insurance, which is a fairly significant purchase in someone's life. Like it costs a lot of money. The implications of the coverage are really high. Like the stakes are high. You have to have a much more sophisticated funnel and like patience to understand that like even if the policy didn't come from here, I need to look at like all the different places that that consumer went before they ultimately, you know, bought that policy. And that's going to look a lot different, obviously, than something that's like fairly straightforward. So it's even if we shared it, it would never look the same. Like no two advertisers would look the same to a publisher. And it's, you know, it's better for us to take that data from the advertiser and distill it for the publishers so they understand, you know, success can look different for different people. And, you know, it's not one size fits all.. And so it wouldn't serve our publishers for us to just like, here, this is, this is, these are all the conversions and it looks the same whether you're selling a pair of sneakers or homeowner's insurance. There's more nuance to it. So we, we take that data from the advertisers. We then share feedback and information to the publishers.

For new publishers or publishers that are getting started and want to start monetizing, what, what would you say would be the first step for them or what they, what should they do? What should they do to begin the monetization process?

Yeah, I mean, we talked about it a little bit earlier. I think it depends on like, what is, again, like, what is their goal? What sort of content are they creating? Like, who is their audience or who do they want their audience to be? If you're trying to start a general news site, it's hard, you know, you need like some real scale there to make that work from a monetization perspective. You know, I don't think like 20,000 or 30,000 people really cut it on a list. To make it attractive to an advertiser. You're talking, you need hundreds of thousands, if not millions, because it's like sort of this general information. You're going to have a generalized audience and the things these people are going to be interested in purchasing are sort of, you know, lower, lower price point typically, as opposed to I'm going to create like a newsletter for real estate investors, you know, and I want that list to be made up of people that are looking to invest in real estate have assets that are capable of being deployed to invest in real estate or people that are sort of adjacent to that business. And in that case, like, I might only need 10,000 people to make it like a super valuable list for an advertiser. And then the way that you sell that is going to be different. So, you know, you're going to do— you could do CPM flat rate for a very large general news list. You have to do that for a B2B list like that because the other ways of operating aren't necessarily going to make sense. But when you're first getting started, you need to have those proof points. You need to be able to go to an advertiser and say, hey, whether your list is a million, you know, general market people or 10,000, like very specific, valuable, potentially valuable people, you have to have a story to tell that explains why you're trying to sell at a certain price and justify that price. And I think the only way you can do that is to, you know, yeah, maybe you have a friend who is a marketer and you can get them to throw you a few bucks and test it out. But more likely, like pick up a couple of affiliate ads or pick up a couple of links, see what that does from a sales perspective and try to get data in terms of, you know, just beyond last click. Like you can go in and see, you know, maybe shared attribution or shared credit for a sale. And then you have a story to tell to go out and start to pitch your audience. But, you know, I think, and you know, a lot of people talk about this and this is probably a big part of the subject matter of the conference we were just at, like focusing on building your audience properly, creating really good content, things that people are interested in, they're going to want to read. You know, there's no shortcut to that. There's no shortcut to quality. And so that's, that's the first step is making sure that what you're writing is worth somebody's time and engagement.

Do you guys do— I think you said you might be doing some CPM flat rate stuff now. When you're doing CPM flat rate, what would be your— I mean, you guys, I guess, have your, your own pricing model that you're doing. You're working out with the advertisers and figuring that out. Out if someone's doing their own flat rate sales or CPM sales, what would you— what advice would you give them as to how you should properly price your list or your spot?

Yeah, I mean, you know, obviously you have to start with the basic vanity metrics like list size and open rate, and you need to take— but, but understand that people are going to take that with a grain of salt, right? Like, if I say I have a million subscribers, like, okay, like, maybe, right? How many are you actually sending out to you know, what is the quality of that list? And then if you say your open rate is like 50 or 60%, well, is that actually true? Because we know that iOS devices count every email as an open. Like, that's just sort of like the new privacy tools that Apple's deployed have made it like very difficult to know what a true open is. And I think, again, it gets back to proof points. So you can certainly use those numbers as, as a starting point. And then you need to use previous performance for other advertisers to sort of close that deal to say, hey, We're pricing it as if there are 400,000 opens and we can justify that because we ran these other advertisers and these are the results that they saw that tell us that these numbers were accurate. Ultimately, that's like it comes down to like how you tell your story and how you convince somebody that like your audience is, is real but also engaged and is the right audience for that brand. So it's certainly the data. It's also like what your subject matter is, like who you're trying to reach. And how well you engage that audience, that's ultimately how you're going to convince somebody to sort of take all the risk. You know, talking about a shared risk model, like I'm going to give you a flat fee with no guarantee that anything's going to happen for me. You better have like a lot of data that says, well, it's happened for other people like you, so it's likely that it's going to work for you as well.

With, with all the campaigns you guys have run and all the data you guys have seen is— and I think you talked about it earlier, obviously, you depending on how your list is growing, if you're, you know, if you're not adding new— actually, this might have been a different conversation I had the other day that just popped in my head, but how frequently do you think someone should run a specific offer in a time window?

You know, obviously if you're sending an offer like every day, it's not going to perform.

They might perform the first time they see it. The second time it's going to keep on getting worse. And then it's going to, you know, especially if you're not growing your audience, you're not getting new subscribers in there to see stuff.

Stuff.

Do you guys have any insights on that, on like, or any recommendations or tips you guys give your publishers? Like, hey, you shouldn't run this or run it every— like that. Obviously there's different creatives for different offers too that you can put in the mix. But what do you think people should do there?

Yeah, I mean, yeah, certainly like audience fatigue is very real in the newsletter space because the audiences are more static, right? Your list is your list. So as opposed to, you know, publishing a video like on the web or through Instagram or whatever, where like it could be seen by, you know, one set of people one time and then like a whole different audience another time, generally. Your list is your list. So if you have a million subscribers today, like even if you increase it by 20,000, you know, a month from now, like the first million are still the same people. So yes, audience fatigue happens. If you send an ad out every day, like it ceases to be effective and you've basically destroyed that audience. It's, there's no definitive answer. It is dependent on publisher and it is dependent on advertiser. Like a good rule of thumb, like twice a month is probably the max that I would go with. It's just, you want it, you would rather be able to run an ad 15 to 20 times in a year as opposed to run an ad 8 times in 2 months and then never see that advertiser again. So, you know, think long-term. I would say once a month is optimal, but I understand like, you know, there's pressure, right? If you need to fill something, you need to fill inventory to take, you know, an ad from an advertiser more than once, I would say 2 is the most that I would do. And then certainly for dedicated, like, honestly, we, we would never run something more than like once a quarter with the same publisher on a dedicated just because like we know if we do that, like you have the double effect, the dedicated becoming less effective, but then that's the same audience that's reading the regular newsletter and they're just going to get pissed off. So those are just sort of general rules of thumb. But again, the smaller the list, like maybe those numbers change, right? Like there's just less people to reach. You have with large list sizes possibilities that like the audiences can be varied when they open it, right? So if you're talking about like like a 1440 as an example where you're talking about, you know, 4.5, 5 million subscribers, you might run an ad one week and you have like this million people see it and then you run an ad like 2 or 3 weeks later and like there's maybe half of that. People that see it are different. And so there's more opportunity to reach different people than if your list is like 20,000 and you have a fairly consistent open rate, even if like different segments of that audience are opening it. There's just less opportunities because the list size is so much smaller.

Any thoughts on locking in long-term deals, too long of a deal versus shorter deals or?

Listen, I think that like trying to do an upfront deal is a great idea. And I think the trade-off, like, hey, like I normally, if you're a publisher, you're saying I want $5,000 per placement, but someone's like willing to commit to one a month for the next year. Like, okay, great. I'll give them to you for four, you know? So it's like a 20% discount, but you're locking in that revenue for the year. Like that's like one ad slot every month that you don't have to think about in terms of selling. And that certainly creates a floor for revenue that's attractive and you're willing to trade, you know, some of the higher-end opportunity to do that. And that's great if you can accomplish that as an operator, for sure.

Cool. Let's switch topics a little bit. Let's talk about more of like the future, what's been happening, what's going on, what's on the horizon. We mentioned this before, obviously this conversation, but, you know, Some of the ESPs, creator platforms, you want to call it, they're more than just ESPs these days. They're trying to be the do-all, everything. Seems to be also adding ad networks, like Beehive has an ad network that has some decent success. Not, I don't know if it's the end-all be-all right at this moment in time. It needs a lot of work and it needs more volume and stuff to really monetize. For the publishers, I don't know, Substack and Kit might be getting into it some. What are your thoughts on them trying to, are them doing that? You know, are they a competitor? Do you look at my competitors? Is it adding more credibility to the newsletter advertising industry that helps everyone in the ecosystem? What are your thoughts on the future of ad networks and the blend and all that?

Yeah, I mean, I, so as far as the competitive component, like we don't really view them as competitors to what we do. Like I think that that, I mean, whether it's Beehive or Kit or any of them that are trying to create sort of an in-house network, I think that like the first purpose of that is it's like a benefit they're offering their creators. It's attractive, right? So they want to get people to be on their platform versus another, like, okay, you're going to potentially provide ad revenue to me. Like that's attractive. And I'm going to, you know, that's just a feature that I'm going to want, right? So you, you're offering something there. And that's, I think, a big motivator behind why they've done on it. Just generally though, you know, when you buy into those networks, like they're good places for smaller operators to start their ad business. What you tend to see within those ad networks is that the larger operators are not accepting ads from those, from those businesses because the rates are lower or the advertisers aren't who they want to run versus like the smaller creators that don't have a lot of choice, right? They're like, we're just going to take what we can get. You know, so we're not competitive because for us as a company, like we focus on larger publishers, we focus on quality and large doesn't always mean quality, but like there is some correlation there, right? If you've been successful enough to be around to build up a large audience, you know, you probably have something going for you. And I think the other, you know, angle of that is like we work with creators that are on Beehive. We work with creators that are, you know, published on Kit that are in Substack or none of them, right? They have their own ESPs, like their standalone newsletter businesses that don't need to be a part of that network or what have you. You know, so like sort of our pitch in the market is like, you know, we're not limited to any one of them versus like those ad networks are, right? Like it's like that you can only buy what's on the platform. So we don't, you know, that's, that's maybe a differentiator, but it's also why like we don't sell the same way. You know, we, we don't pitch the same thing. I think that, yeah, there are challenges like that last piece is a big challenge, you know? So if you're, whether you're Beehiiv or Kit or whoever, like, yeah, it's, it's a super interesting product to say, hey, it's a one, one size fits all. And if you're an advertiser, come in here and access our 20,000 or 50,000 or 100,000 creators, whatever whatever it may be, but you're limited to that. And I think when you talk about a world where there's fragmentation, that's a challenge for an advertiser that says, well, okay, great, I want those newsletters, but I also want to work with, you know, independent big publishers, whether they're legacy publishers or a Morning Brew or 1440 or a Skimm who are sort of their own thing. Or I want to work with creators that are on Kit or I want to, you know, then you're sort of taking away like the efficiency of it. And So I think it also depends on like what you're trying to do. Like Beehive has like a lot of tech and B2B publishers. So I think they tend to over-index that way with their advertisers, which is great for them. Like that's a good selling point versus what you see on Kit is much more, you know, celebrity driven or health and wellness or whatever. And that's a different story altogether. And then Substack is anything and everything like a lot of journalists, things like that, bloggers. So I think it's important because they're aggregating and we believe in aggregation. Like, you know, I've made this point a million times that the only way that this business is going to scale, like the ad business is going to scale, is for some aggregator to come in and make a huge offering to an advertiser. Because like for a lot of these advertisers that are, that are spending like billions of dollars in marketing, if they can't spend $100 million like, like that, it's just not worth their time. It's like too much work to go through and figure out like, oh, I want to buy this one and I want to buy that one, or I want to buy from 10,000 creators in this space and 10,000 there. And so like you do need people to partner up, whether it's like someone like us who's saying, okay, I want to work with like the 500 best newsletters. I don't care about having 10,000. You know, I want this premium network or I want to have a massive network. Like, you know, the Beehive play is really like, okay, whether it was 30,000, whatever the number is of creators, but a lot of them are smaller, you know, very specific audiences.

Or like 55,000.

Something, whatever it is. But you might have, and I don't want to speak for them, it's their business, but you might have like, you know, 40,000 of those that have audiences that are sub-10,000 people or that are very specific niche subject matter. And those ads on a per newsletter basis, if you were to buy them individually, you might do like 2 clicks or 3 clicks or 4 clicks. But if you lump together a bunch of them, it can do some scale. And it is a good solution for, it allows those creators to make some money. It allows advertisers a way to like reach those audiences. Be it longer tail, smaller audiences. So, you know, as I said earlier, there's a lot of approaches to this business that can make sense. I think ultimately what has to happen, and I've made this point several times, is that whether it's Beehive or Substack or Kit or any of the others or companies like ours, there has to be at some point like a standardization across the board, like whether it's an IAB thing or something like that that says this is what an impression is, this is what an open is, this is what a click is. And like we all agree on that. And an advertiser can then have confidence when they're buying to know what they're actually getting. And that's ultimately when that occurs, and hopefully it will, and it's something we're trying to achieve, that's when you're going to really see like massive amounts of money flow into this space because the confidence will be there that like what they're buying is real.

I think it's a kind of a brilliant business move on Beehive's part as far as like, look, their ad network is never going to be doesn't seem like going to be someone's like number one source of revenue from ads for publishing. It's not going to— it's not going to change your life for a lot of smaller people. But for them, by bringing it all together, like you're saying, the scale is there. So yeah, now they can do these big deals with HubSpot or Nike or whatever because now they have, instead of someone, these one-on-one trying to sell 5,000, 10,000, 20,000, 4,000 lists, now they're like, oh, we can reach 2 billion people. People or whatever. So now they're getting, you know, million-dollar ad buys from them, and then they're able to distribute that across everyone. Everyone gets a little money. A lot of it's kind of feeding that start with their monetization journey to like, oh, this is turning into something. Will it be life-changing? Don't know. It's got a lot of work to get there. But I still think you need to, no matter what the networks are, like you said, you got to be bringing ads in from other methods, not just count on their internal network.

Yeah, per For sure.

I saw that you guys are starting to get into the sponsoring podcasts game, something?

No, I think that that was something early on as a company we had looked at just simply because like a lot of the advertisers that were in newsletter were in podcast. It didn't make sense to us. Like there are companies that do that and they're, they're more boutique sort of rep firms, I would say, as opposed to like we're more of a, we're trying to be a platform and network play. And the challenge is like the measurement is just so radically different. Different. Like, so like if you're selling all flat fee, like, yeah, you can make that work because like it's the same cost basis. It's hard to be selling newsletters on a cost per click and then try to figure out how to sell podcasts. But what I will say is like, you know, we certainly partner with a lot of companies that have both, you know, and we'll refer advertisers to their podcast business and vice versa. They'll refer them to our newsletter business. So that's one way that we partner. And obviously, you know, we certainly Prospect in the podcast space quite heavily because we know advertisers that it's all creators, right? It's all individual content creators, whether they're a celebrity and a known person or, you know, someone that's focused on just business insights and is not that well known, but is well known to a specific community. It's the same idea whether you're saying it like we are or typing it. And so companies that have success in one space tend to have success in another. And so there is a correlation. There. But yeah, it's not something that we sell actively. It's more of a referral business for us.

We're coming to the back end of this. Just go through some rapid-fire questions here. A little speed round. See what we got. What's the most overrated newsletter monetization tactic?

Overrated? That's a hard question. I mean, I think like this could get me into some trouble. Like I don't think that there's a tactic that's overrated. I think that there is certainly like an issue currently in like the newsletter growth space, which, you know, you certainly know more about that than I do. So, you know, you can share your opinion, but like there has become a big economy around that, like around people making money from selling subscribers to other people. And some of that, like we do some of that and but we do it in a way that's like very, very custom in particular and like where we have track records of success with certain operators and we tend to do it for the larger operators and we tend to place them with the larger operators. So it works really well versus some of the other referral businesses where it's a little bit more questionable. And like, is that really a sustainable business? You know, I'm not sure. I don't know. I, you know, we've— and we've talked a little bit about this, like they're all passing around the same subscribers, right? It's like if you've got 10,000 newsletters that have, you know, bought into one of these growth engines and the, like the original list was a million people, like they're all just just signing up the same people, assuming they're real people to begin with, right? So I think that might be, I want to say overrated, but a questionable practice. And again, you know better than I, like in terms of audience growth, like how effective that can be. But from what we've seen, like people that lean on that heavily tend to have more difficulty when it comes to the quality of their list.

Yeah, I mean, it's, I mean, first of all, it's got to come down to the quality of the subscriber to begin with that, that being, you know, shared or the lead being sent over to a specific newsletter or however it's getting marked or whatever kind of lead gen program it is. But in the end, it's going to come down to the quality of is it like you're saying, is it a real subscriber? Is it even had the right interest for the person? Is it, you know, what type of the click-to-opt-in was it? What type of the co-reg? What was the sign signup process.

Did they actually sign up or like did they go to your newsletter and all of a sudden they're getting 10 other ones somehow because you're right?

Like, well, yeah, there's— we have product Smart Pixel. Not that it's not going to that other newsletter, but it's matching the people coming to your website, the identity resolution, and then based on what they're doing there, how many repeat visits they have, what's their time on site, then we say, okay, this is going to be a good subscriber for you. And then we'll send you that person. And that actually does very, very well for people and LTV on those people. But of course they're— they know your brand or go to your site or they're consuming it. They just never subscribe for whatever reason. Maybe you suck at acquiring the traffic that comes to you. You don't want to have too many pop-ups or calls to action to subscribe because you want them to consume the content on your site. But that works very well. But then in the end, it's like it comes— it's a combination of the quality of the leads and then the product itself. If your content sucks, it's going to suck. If it's good, it's going to be good. So, you know, the churn really, really comes down to the publisher on that side. And then obviously the initial quality.

Yeah. So I think the point that I'm making though, it's like if you're, if you built your business on that, like you're, you're a lot of your revenue is dependent upon like that component. Like I think that that's like a tough way to operate.

Yeah, I would, I would probably recommend that, that I mean, I recommend to everyone that that you should be doing multiple types of growth, running Facebook, running Google, running YouTube ads. If you're doing any, any SmartPixel or any other type of lead gen, CoReg is another one. CoReg is, you know, also one that's like, yeah, they signed up, but they don't really remember they signed up for you. Most time, just like a checkbox for, hey, you're signing up for this one, you're also going to get this one, whatever that whole spiel is. So the quality is going to be different. So you also got to treat— actually did a newsletter My newsletter this, this past week Wednesday kind of talked about this and like the 7 days you have to know the quality of subscribers going to be quality or not. And then, you know, different types of traffic, you might have different onboarding practices, churn, sunset policies to where, all right, a co-res leads, I'm going to send them 3 to 5 emails. If they don't engage, they don't do whatever, just throw them out. I mean, obviously these are a lot cheaper leads than than if you're buying a Facebook lead or YouTube or things like that. Obviously, if someone signs up organically, just come inside, they fill it out. Obviously, that person is probably going to be, you know, give that person as long as possible.

Right.

So it's a game. What's the most underrated monetization strategy?

We don't do this. So like, it's like I have no skin in this game, but like I've seen some operators that are like have very specific subject matter, like sell their own products. So like it's not, it's not even like it's not like affiliate and CPA. You're not working on behalf of someone else. Like you do, you're using your newsletter to sell your own stuff, like whether it's your own courses or, you know, books or health products or whatever.

We call them internal offers.

Yeah. And I think like some of them are quite interesting that I've seen and I think that can work really well. And it's not something like, I don't think most operators like, or content creators go into content creation initially with like that objective in mind.

What's a piece of common newsletter advice you flatly disagree with?

I mean, like, I think that advice— I don't know if that's the right word that I would use for this. Like, you know, we again, we only care about monetization. So we care about advertisers, we care about like paying publishers. That's it. I think that like one thing, you know, we mentioned earlier that I push back against is like this idea that newsletters are a bottom of funnel channel. Like they're really not. And if you treat it that way, you're going to be disappointed. So if an advertiser comes in and is like, I need to hit 5x ROAS like on your last click attribution, like we'll just tell them like, that's not what this is about. You know, you can buy, you know, you can, you can buy traffic elsewhere that's going to be cheaper on, on that basis. But what it really is is a mid-funnel solution in the sense that, you know, it brings people into funnel like it serves as a lead generator. It can also convert because like you can track it in the way that you— someone clicks on a link, you can track that person. So you have the benefits of real attribution that you may not have with some other branding channels like, like video or audio or whatever, where like you have a general idea of how something did because you see a halo effect, but you don't really know, you know, you don't, there's no click to whatever. I don't care what any of them tell you. So like, it's like a blended channel. And I think that like my advice is I would say to publishers or anyone that's out there pitching, you know, newsletters to understand that and convey that to brands. Like to be open and honest about what this is and the way that it should be viewed and set expectations properly. And if you can do that, you're going to have people that are going to be happier with the money they've spent and spend more as opposed to trying to position it as some like performance channel when it's not like it can be, but it's not ultimately going to be like the best bottom of funnel solution. So I guess that's— I don't know if that answered your question, but it's going to have to.

So you're in Orlando. Are you a big Disney fan?

Yeah, I've got kids 7 and 10. So we do it all— Disney, Universal, SeaWorld.

What's your favorite ride?

My favorite ride is— well, so Universal right now, I guess it's still VelociCoaster. I really enjoy that coaster. And then at Disney, it's probably Guardians of the Galaxy at EPCOT. But there's a lot of new stuff coming. So we're excited for all of that. As summer heats up, we'll get to the parks a little bit before my kids go away to camp. Camp. And, um, but yeah, I guess my favorite park is Epcot because it's the most adult, right? I can go there with my wife.

Yeah, well, I mean, we— for probably like 5 years, uh, my brother and I's birthdays are like a week apart, and we'd always celebrate our birthdays during Food and Wine Festival.

There you go.

And I mean, that's some of the most fun. I remember one time we went, um, there was probably like 20 of us, like 10 couples, and we stuffed ourselves all in this small taxi taxi. We look like a clown car. Yeah. Took a picture just to get to the freakin'— that was kind of funny.

Yeah. No, it's a lot of fun, man.

Yeah. Always, always start left. Hit up Mexico first. Get your tequila.

During Food and Wine Fest, I don't know that I agree with that. But if you're just doing a regular around the world kind of deal, it's probably the safest way to go. You can get in trouble going the other way for sure.

Last question. The newsletter operator listening right now sitting between 5,000, 50,000 subscribers, And the thing of when am I ready for sponsors? What is your one sentence answer?

I don't have a one. It's a long answer, so I'm not going to give it. I would just say, you know, the market will tell you, right? Like, if you think you're ready for advertisers, go out there and pitch. And if they sign up and you get ads, then you're ready. If you go out and you get crickets, then you're probably not. So, and then you can talk to people like you to grow or people like me to maybe help. But yeah, I think the market will tell you that you're ready or you're not.

Cool. And then you want to plug where people can find you? Yeah.

Media Intercept. You know, Media Intercept, www.mediaintercept.com. I mean, the one thing I would love to plug is we've just spent 2 years building our own technology and our own platform. And so like we now have just launched that actually last week. It's like incredibly exciting and it's just built specifically for monetization in the newsletter. Space. So there's not really anything else like it that crosses again, like across all the platforms, gets inventory from publishers across the board and is built to measure and deliver assets at scale specifically for this space. So, you know, I guess I'm plugging it, but I'm just excited and proud of it. It's going to change the way certainly that we operate and hopefully change the way that advertisers engage with publishers in the newsletter space.

Cool. Prior to the new tech stack you built, were you guys like on Everflow or one of these other networks? We operated on Everflow.

Kerflow and then a few other of the affiliate platforms. And then we use like a hodgepodge of tools, like whether it's like Airtable or whatever, you know, it's not super efficient. And, and again, I know we're kind of coming up on the end, but as opposed to ad serving, you know, what we're doing with the HTML5, like hard-coded copy, it's just a different operational game and it can be slow, right? Slow manual process, a lot of back and forth. I mean, we tend to have a lot of conversations with our publishers. They have them all in Slack channels. Channels. And so now with our platform, a lot of that is automated and it just saves a lot of time and hopefully will allow like what we know is the best way to advertise in newsletters, which is like with the true native and the voice of the publisher to really scale in a way that wasn't possible before when it was all just sort of this manual mix, you know, mix mishmash of different SaaS platforms that you're using to sort of manage the business. We've kind of rolled it all up into one. So, you know, everything's got a Slack API connect, for example. So when we push assets out, they go to your Slack channel, they go to your email, you can pull them from there, you can ship them back through there. We connected to all the affiliate dashboards. So you can automatically import data from all those if you're an advertiser and things like that, that sort of bring together all these different components that have to exist to make an ad business run. We now have it all in one place. So that's, that's pretty exciting.

Awesome. Congrats. We're actually in the middle of refactoring our entire system right I'll be excited when that's done as well.

Yeah, it's tough to build the plane while you're flying in it, right? Yeah. And that's kind of what we've all had to do. But, you know, it's certainly satisfying when you get to the end. Well, it's never really over, right? Like every day.

No, I mean, you're going to keep on building and keep on adding features, but at least you got the base product launched.

So that's great.

Jeff, thanks for coming on, sharing those insights. Appreciate the talk. I think there's a lot of good value there for the audience. Everyone, be sure to subscribe to AudienceBridge Insights and to my AudienceBridge Insights newsletter that goes out every Wednesday, audiencebridge.io/subscribe. You can always find Jeff over at mediaintercept.com and, you know, he's got his like Dym profile. You on X, Twitter?

I don't publish there.

Is that— Okay.

So there's nothing to follow there.

I'll provide his LinkedIn, website information will be, be be in the, uh, descriptions below. But hey, thanks for your time. Appreciate it.

Yeah, I know. I really appreciate you having me. This was fun.

All right, man. All right, take care.

Thanks.