The number of paid newsletters is about 131K (Substack, Beehiiv, Revue, MailerLite, etc.) across all the major subscription services.

Since I have an email list of about 300 email newsletter owners (none of them believe they are in the top 100 overall by newsletter subscription revenue), I thought I’d run a survey (via email – so meta).

Here are the numbers, without all the drama of charts and graphs.

The average newsletter has over 20+ paid subscribers and 100’s of free subscribers.

If you segment the newsletters there are 5 segments you can come up with.

1. Topic / category : News , technology, finance, etc.
2. Price of newsletter per month: <$5, $5 – $10, $10 – $25 and > $25
3. By # of paying subscribers: < 100, 100 – 500, > 500
4. By primary revenue model: Subscriptions or Sponsorships (advertising)
5. By frequency of publication: Daily, Multiple times a week, Weekly

Topical news, politics and general news / sports make up the top categories.

Most newsletters are priced between $5 and $10 per month.

Over 87% of newsletters have fewer than 100 paying subscribers.

Only 21% of newsletters have ads / sponsors while 79% exclusively rely on paid subscriptions.

91% of subscribers publish multiple times a week, while 6% once a week and the rest daily.