It Is Da*n Hard to Monetize a Newsletter 2024

Although everyone online makes it sound super easy

Monetizing a newsletter is way harder than most people make it out to be.

Who would have thought...

Everyone talks about how you can easily make money with sponsorships, affiliate marketing, and subscriptions once you build an audience.

Yeah, I am guilty too.

But the truth is, it takes a ton of work to get to that point. And it ain't paid.

Here are a few reasons why monetize a newsletter is so challenging:

You need hundreds of paying subscribers to make real money

On platforms like Substack, writers keep 90% of subscription revenue. On Beehiiv it's 100% minus the monthly fee. Both also exclude payment processing fees.

Still, sounds cool at first. Getting true fans to pay for your words and making a living from it.

But...

If you charge $5/month for your newsletter, you'd need 100 paying subscribers just to clear $500 and some more to net $500.

And where I live, $500 a month is nothing.

To make a respectable $3,000 per month ( a closer estimate of what making a living would mean in many places), yo…