Websites just don’t get as much traffic as they used to. (Thanks a lot, AI search.)
But publishers and content creators are bullish on email newsletters as a way to reach their most engaged readers directly, free from the algorithmic whims of search and social platforms. As a result, we’re seeing some of their most tried-and-true monetization tools migrate to the inbox.
For example, last week, newsletter and podcasting platform beehiiv rolled out programmatic ads for the first time, which is a key part of beehiiv’s plan to build a one-stop shop for creators, CEO Tyler Denk told AdExchanger.
Beehiiv also added subscriber-to-subscriber messaging that makes newsletters feel more like a social network, along with an AI copilot that advises publishers on audience growth and monetization.
Community-building tools was one of beehiiv’s most requested features, regardless of a publisher’s size, Denk said. During a recent breakfast with major publishers that the company co-hosted with The Rebooting’s Brian Morrissey, he said he was struck by how even the biggest names were clamoring for more direct control over community building and ways to cultivate their followings.
Advertising philosophy
But community building is just one part of the equation for publishers. Once you’ve built your audience, you need to monetize it. And unlike rival newsletter platform Substack, which has avoided building its own ad platform in favor of prioritizing paid subscriptions, beehiiv has always had both subscriptions and ads in its monetization mix.
Beehiiv initially launched its ad network two and a half years ago to support direct deals between brands and publishers, including both large premium pubs and small independent creators, Denk said. But beehiiv’s publishers had been asking for programmatic to complement their direct sales efforts for a while.
During his time at newsletter and podcasting platform Morning Brew, Denk saw firsthand how hard it is to scale direct sales for both individual creators and larger organizations. He designed Morning Brew’s content and ad management systems before the company was acquired by Business Insider in 2020.
“I saw how operationally intensive it was to have this team of 20 sellers out in market building these relationships,” Denk said. On top of that, individual newsletter creators don’t have the capacity to reach out to dozens of advertising partners while trying to create high-quality content.
Beehiiv has been laying the groundwork for programmatic since it launched in 2021, Denk said. It built an internal SSP-like system to place ads across its network of 60,000 publishers and introduced a tracking pixel for measurement and attribution.
Going programmatic
Beehiiv gives publishers full control to set pricing floors for their programmatic ads, and advertisers can buy inventory on a cost-per-click or CPM basis.
For now, the programmatic offering is limited to text-and-image-based native ad placements in email newsletters, which beehiiv tailors to blend into a publisher’s content, including copying the font and formatting.
But adding programmatic to a newsletter is just step one in a broader rollout that will eventually also include programmatic ads on publisher sites and dynamically inserted podcast ads.
On the sell side, beehiiv doesn’t rely on outside parties because it has its own SSP, Denk said. Although he added that DSPs could play a bigger role over time on the buy side when beehiiv extends programmatic to websites.
Today, beehiiv mainly works directly with advertisers and only a handful of agency partners, but programmatic could change that and help attract more agency interest, Denk said.
Currently, beehiiv only offers contextual targeting for programmatic ads. However, it also analyzes a publisher’s logged-in user base to get a better sense of audience reach beyond looking at the topics the publisher covers. Beehiiv is also “actively working on” subscriber-level targeting, Denk said, so advertisers can target audience profiles across multiple publishers.
But advertisers can already choose which types of content their ads appear in, as well as what to avoid. And buyers can measure a newsletter’s open rate, click-through rate and whether a publisher has previously run a brand’s ad and how well that ad performed.
Looking ahead to the next two or three years, Denk said beehiiv’s strategy is to become “the go-to destination for advertisers to invest in sponsoring high-quality niche content at scale.”
Its most pressing challenge, he said, will be to help publishers navigate the new era of AI-driven search and the drag on their referral traffic. To that end, the platform recently completed a series of updates for publishers that use it for website infrastructure so their sites are better optimized to appear in AI search results.
To zoom out, all of beehiiv’s recent changes boil down to giving publishers more say over the parts of their business where they have direct control, like newsletters, at a time when more of their distribution is controlled by third-party platforms and their algorithms.
“We can only control so much,” Denk said, “and we are just doing whatever we can to equip our publishers to find success in this new media ecosystem.”
