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Discover how the best media brands and solo operators are winning at newsletter growth & monetization.
Hosted by SparkLoop's cofounder Louis Nicholls and SparkLoop's newsletter nerd, Dylan Redekop—we take you behind the scenes and share the strategies, trends, and tactics you need to know to build your email audience and revenue.
Featuring exclusive interviews with the smartest media experts and operators out there today. Including from the Hustle, Morning Brew, Workweek, The Pour Over, and more.
EP 17: Ryan & Jesse - Who Sponsors Stuff
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Louis Nicholls: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Send and Grow podcast. I'm your host, Louis Nichols. In my day job at Spark Loop, I spend all my time helping the best newsletter operators and media brands in the world to grow their audiences. So I get to see firsthand what growth tactics, strategies, and channels actually work, which ones you should copy, and what mistakes you should avoid.
And now with this podcast, you get that access too. Every week I sit down with a different guest from industry experts to successful operators, and we go deep on the stuff that you need to know so you can become really effective at growing and monetizing your email audience. Today on the podcast, I'm joined by Ryan Sager and Jesse Watkins.
They're the co-founders of WHO sponsors Stuff, a database that tracks which brands and businesses are advertising in email newsletters, and brings that data straight to you. Ryan and Jesse have a wealth of [00:01:00] combined knowledge and. Success working in the newsletter ad space. And in this episode I'm gonna pepper them with questions about how to prospect for sponsors, how to price your newsletter, ads and sponsorships, what not to do when selling your ads, and so much more.
I guess a a, a place that I'd like to start with is we've had you. Come and do a masterclass for us. We've talked before about newsletter sponsorships and things like that. There's a really interesting situation at the moment in the world with a potential recession, lots of layoffs happening, marketing budgets, in some cases getting cut back, looking ahead to 2023 for newsletters that rely on advertising and sponsorships as their main source of of revenue.
How do you predict or what do you predict 2023 is gonna look like from that point of view? What do you think people need to be to be watching out for? Maybe Ryan, you can start so people know who's who and then Jesse can come in later.
Ryan Sager: Sure. Great to be here, Louie. [00:02:00] So you know what we're seeing overall in the market, cuz you know, we have a pretty good 20,000 foot view of the market.
You know, we track 280 or so newsletters in our database, tracking all the direct sponsorships, so, Just raw numbers as far as like how many new sponsors are appearing every month in our tracking. You know, that's been very insistent in 2001, 2000. Of 2000 now, 21, 22 coming into 23 that it's been about 50 a week.
Yeah, I just pulled those numbers yesterday and yeah, it was by exactly 200 January. Really not a slowdown of people coming in. You'll sector specific things. Certainly that like as with everything else, crypto has had, uh, you know, Has tanked a bit, but really overall we're seeing a strong market. Jesse,
Louis Nicholls: let's say we're sitting here again, we're having this conversation in, in 12 months from now towards the, the end or the, you know, the beginning of 2024.
How do you think the, the market for newsletter ads looks then compared to how it looks now? [00:03:00] Yeah, kind
Jesse Watkins: of like Ryan said, I think that spending has been consistent across the space. Looking forward, I think there's a lot of opportunities for. Newsletter sponsorships, especially as Twitter becomes less, a less reliable source for news and content, as well as for advertisers.
As other advertising channels become less and less reliable, it's stronger positions for newsletters, so I think they'll be in the same spot, if not a little bit of a stronger position.
Louis Nicholls: Interesting. Okay. And what do you think will, or, or if, if anything, do you think will change about how we do use other sponsorships in, in these 12 months?
Because it does seem to be like a, a rapidly developing sort of, Whole niche industry. I've seen anecdotally a lot of people caring a lot more about performance and pay per conversion and pay per click. I've seen less brand sort of dollars being thrown at at newsletters in the last couple of months.
What do you think that looks like in. In 12 months if you had to guess.
Jesse Watkins: [00:04:00] Yeah, I think it's important to, to drive strong conversions for your sponsors that you're working with. It's interesting because there's so many new publishers and creators enter this space, you'll see more and more marketplaces and third party solutions pop up, so it'll be interesting to see how they play out against like building your own first party sales org and advertiser table.
Louis Nicholls: Yeah. Which, which does very much seem to be like the newsletters that seem to be making a lot of money from advertising and sponsorships. They do seem to have in internal teams driving a lot of that revenue. Right. It seems, at least to me at the moment, to be something that is, is a requirement if you really want to, to do well in terms of, of revenue.
Yeah. I
Ryan Sager: mean, we've always viewed for, you know, owning your own sales, uh, you know, third party, what if we've done third party sales, but like, if you. If you're building a really serious publishing business, like at the end of the day, you have to have, uh, if you're starting out in a solopreneur position, you have to do it yourself or hire somebody, uh, part-time to help you, or you've [00:05:00] got to, you know, build out an actual sales team.
But, you know, for smaller players who, you know, sometimes are hobbyists or just a, a different position, I mean, yeah, the two things to watch are really these. The marketplace. ESPs are trying. Beehiiv is obviously making a big push in this and a ConvertKit with their partner network, so it'll be interesting to see.
I, I've got a beehiiv newsletter myself that I run. I do a lot of direct sales, almost all direct sales on that, but, I put myself on the test. I'm running a few things through their network and it'll be interesting to see how those evolve.
Louis Nicholls: So let's change text a little bit and let's talk about people who are in the very early days of starting their sort of newsletter, sponsorships journey.
Let's say we have someone who. They, they've been writing their newsletter for, I don't know, a couple of months. It's in a niche field. Maybe it's a marketing newsletter, for example. They send it weekly to marketing professionals. They've got maybe two, 3000 subscribers, decent open rates. They're not monetizing at the moment, and they think, well, I [00:06:00] don't have a product to sell to people.
I'd love to, to make some money from this newsletter. Now that it's starting to actually cost me some, some money to, to run as well. Where would you start?
Ryan Sager: Yeah, I think. Level, and we get a lot of people, you know, coming to us with that. You know, certainly in a B2B or a niche space like marketing, there are advertisers who will buy on newsletters that size.
So you know, in some ways you can start doing mini version of what we do and who sponsor stuff. Who are your five top competitors who have marketing newsletters that look something like yours? And who's running a sponsored link there? Who's running a, a logo sponsorship there and then just reach out? I mean, it's, yeah, you find their contact information.
It's, it's definitely some extra hand work, but like you can go and reach out and then, you know, pricing is its own thing. We've got a pricing calculator on our website that we send people to. You really need to think about like, what's your open rate, what's your click through rate, like how many clicks can you generate from them?
And then kind of ultimately price where your clicks are gonna back out for them to a [00:07:00] decent value. And if you're really early, you can do CPA stuff like cost per acquisition or cost per click. For that. You might, you know, you might look at a swap stack or somebody who's down marketplace with those types of deals or post Apex who's done something like that also.
Louis Nicholls: Yeah. Interesting, interesting. So when you're starting out, at that point, obviously there become, there comes a point in where you have that very first sponsorship that you want to run or you, you want to try and acquire, but you won't have any sort of proof, you won't have any stats in terms of what you can drive, that kind of thing.
How do you get around that sort of like chicken and egg problem?
Jesse Watkins: Yeah, flexibility and communication. So you know, sort of. The way we did it, going back a bit at ladders, we never really ran like logo sponsorships, so we didn't have a ton of data on how performance would be, and we were just flexible on pricing, packaging and just working with the advertiser.
In the scenario that you gave a marketing newsletter like that, I think, yeah, it would, it would make sense to have that kind of conversation, especially with another marketing professional.
Louis Nicholls: Great. So if [00:08:00] I'm reaching out to one of these sponsors, I've identified someone. You know, maybe I've used to sponsor stuff or, or whatever to, to figure out a brand that is sponsoring a newsletter that's similar to mine.
And I, I reach out and I say, look, well firstly, what, what do I say? And secondly, what am I asking them for? I guess?
Jesse Watkins: Yeah, introducing yourself, introducing your brand, and just asking if they'd like to, to hear more. Uh, with outreach, I'm a big believer that less is more like short, simple to the point. And your, your goal of like your outreach email is just to jump on a call.
Hear what their marketing needs are, hear how their funnels set up, and then see if it's a fit for, for your audience. Really, who am I
Louis Nicholls: reaching out to at a brand? Because if it's another newsletter sponsoring the newsletter, it's always pretty easy to find, to find the right person, which is more sort of the the domain that we play and it spark loop.
But if it's a brand that's probably like 500 people at the company who might be the right person, and they all have titles that sound. Plausible, but also not quite right. How? How do I, how do I figure that out? So
Jesse Watkins: prospecting, in [00:09:00] my experience, it's a little bit of like detective work and digging through.
You really wanna find somebody. A lot of times at brands, it's gonna be in the newsletter space growth titles seem to be fairly common. So like a growth manager, growth marketing, I know you wanna avoid. Typically, especially on larger brands, any email marketing managers, those are. Internal emails or like a company email, you're always pretty much good shooting for a marketing manager, a VP of marketing, or somebody with a, a gross marketing title.
Louis Nicholls: And what am I then pitching them on? So obviously when I, when I, if I get 'em onto a call or if we get into a discussion, are we talking like a one-off test? Am I trying to book them into a package? Obviously we've talked about. How you would calculate that, that pricing, you have that really good pricing calculator on the site that we'll, we'll drop a link to in the show notes so that people can go and check that out.
Cause that's, that's super useful to get just a ballpark idea of kind of what you would be expecting. Yeah. What am I pitching them on packaging wise?
Jesse Watkins: Really bundling test bundles. Like in this scenario, it's somebody new, new inventory, new [00:10:00] sponsor. You just really wanna run in. A one-off is sort of useless.
It's not a great test of the audience, it's not a great test of the product. Something I, I like running tests of three or four, whatever that is. If this is a weekly, so three or four weeks and just testing ab, testing copy maybe, or try and to see what sticks and what resonates best with the audience.
Louis Nicholls: So let, let's try and if we can, let's try and be a little bit more concrete.
Let's take an example. So I, I think that that helps people to sort of, to visualize it. So I think that a newsletter we all know, let's take And who sponsors stuff? You have a, a weekly, A weekly newsletter. Is it weekly? Yeah. Yeah, weekly. So you have your newsletter there. Let's say that something terrible happens and.
People don't need who sponsor, they don't need to, who sponsor stuff. They don't need sales Pro, they don't do, they don't need any of this stuff anymore. So you're left with just the newsletter and for some weird reason, the only way that you can monetize it is through sponsorships and advertising. What are you doing tomorrow to make that happen?
Ryan Sager: So, I mean, we run, we run our weekly email [00:11:00] intelligence newsletter that goes out to about 3000, you know, people in the newsletter, uh, publishing and marketing space. And so, Yeah, we currently don't monetize that through logo sponsorships, but we do classified ads, which is, you know, another thing people don't like experiment.
So yeah, I mean, concretely looking at that, we would wanna look ads, you know, what to rate and how many clicks can that spot generate? And then since we're B2B and the people who we wanna reach our audience are like vendors who might be selling software or some kind of service to other companies, yeah, that's a place where like our calculator is gonna say, You can go up to like, you know, six, $8 a click.
So I'd run a test of something, get that test, however, get SparkLoop partner network thing that's relevant or uh, whatever to put in that spot. If you couldn't sell the first one, you know, straight off, just run something to get a test to get baselined click number to take out to other people. So then you do that and you say, okay, we're generating, you know, 200 clicks.
These are valuable B2B [00:12:00] people. So then, you know, do that 200 clicks times the cost per click that you're trying to go for, and then come up with a, a rate card, uh, bring that rate card out to people and then, you know, do a discount off that rate card to get a, a test bundle of, as Jesse was saying, like three runs in.
So yeah, pretend that's I six on two, like 1200 a run. Do three of them for like 2,500 or something.
Louis Nicholls: And how are you finding the people in that case to, to, to pitch this, to? Like, what, what's the actual steps you going, okay, first I'm gonna pitch my existing audience second. I'm gonna go and look on what we've just said, that who sponsor stuff and stuff doesn't exist anymore.
Let's pretend it does exist, but you don't own it. You know? Are you hitting LinkedIn? I don't know. Do you have an old book somewhere with all of your contacts in it? What are you doing? Like a Rolodex kind of thing? How does that
Ryan Sager: work? Yeah. One of the first things, especially with, you know, smaller and B2B publishers we always recommend is like, your advertiser is probably in your audience.
So you know, one of your first ones is probably in your audience, so definitely call out like, You know, wanna [00:13:00] advertise space, get in touch, that's, that's likely to shake some stuff out. I know past that, you know, you probably already are subscribed to the top five, 10 newsletters in your niche. So, you know, just keep a running list of everyone who's appearing there and then reach out to those companies.
And another, another little prospecting trick. This is one Jesse and I used Lot back at Ladders, which is a job search company where we, where we press a newsletter about the career space. Uh, we just, we followed everything on Instagram that was sort in the space and saw what Instagram ads we started getting fed.
So that's just another little prospecting check is trick cuz you always wanna kind of. Hone your social media feeds to like be relevant to your space and then see who's spending on those social tests. That's another place you can go fishing.
Jesse Watkins: Yeah. To piggyback on that, hacking the social feed was actually really useful for us at back when we were at Ladders newsletter advertising was just starting to blow up then.
So somebody that was spending heavily on like a retargeting campaign on Instagram, [00:14:00] Was like the perfect fit for a newsletter advertiser. So that, that's also a great way to, to prospect.
Louis Nicholls: And then when it comes to where you are placing those, those ads or those sponsorships in the newsletter, we've talked about classifieds, we've talked about sort of logo, sponsorships.
There's also obviously other kinds of things you can do. You can do one-off. You know, blasts for example, you can do some sort of advertorial takeover and I'm sure there's loads of other stuff that I don't know about. How are you deciding what you are doing in terms of like where you're placing ads and what you should be pitching people on?
Jesse Watkins: I think logo, sponsorship, especially here, if you're starting out, you know, back to like the, the less is more. I think you really have to conquer the basics and do the simple things, right? So I think it's always best to start with a logo sponsorship.
And run it well and make sure you're converting, make sure your inventory is full.
Then once you need more inventory for more revenue, then start thinking of additional revenue driving products. But first and foremost is getting that logo, sponsorship up and running.
Ryan Sager: So yeah, to piggyback on that, I mean we definitely go [00:15:00] into publishers times and they, they aren't filling their logo spot, but they've got a menu.
Oh, we've got a logo spot for shit. Got a secondary, got a tertiary, and you know, maybe, oh, maybe we can get someone to bite on the really cheap one first. Like, that is a terrible way to undercut yourself because the first person is interested. Okay, I'll, I'll test the, the $50 product first. So that's really gonna shoot yourself on the foot with that.
So like, hit the logo, sponsorship, get that filled, and then you're great when you can be like, well, you know, February and March you're booked up. Like we can talk about April. That's, that really gets that fomo, you know, conversation going and that's, that's a great way to do it.
Louis Nicholls: I, I love that. One thing I've heard of more recently is this idea of sort of running, I, I guess, running social ads based on your own audience for another brand.
Is that something you've come across much? Is that something that only the. So the big boys are really playing out, or is that something that smaller newsletters should be be aware of too? It's
Ryan Sager: definitely, I'm assuming the big players are doing, I mean, that [00:16:00] that is a big part of their business. I'm not sure kinda how far down the size scale I've seen it, but it's, you know, it is definitely a great way to add on services and value add after you've, you know, Made that first sale of the, the main sponsorship.
Louis Nicholls: Yeah. Perfect. So let's say you've been really successful. We've, we found the, the advertiser, the, the brand. They've agreed to do a logo, sponsorship. They've agreed to pay what we want for a run of three, run the three. Let's talk about if it goes well first. So we, we think it's gone well. How do we go back to them and get them to do it again?
Pay more next time? What does that look like? What should we be sharing with them in terms of like, Data.
Jesse Watkins: Yeah, so really you want to find out how it converted on their end data that you're gonna want to send over. Are your audience sends, like how many you sent it to, what the opens were, the open rate and then the traffic that you drove over to them, and maybe like a CTOR, your click to open rate on the ad slot, and then sort of figuring out how [00:17:00] they converted against the traffic you gave them.
My goal is there is to find. Right. So when we're talking about scaling the sponsorship program, it's to first make sure I have consistent logo sponsors. So I want the sponsor to be able to run consistently at like a certain frequency mix. So if the sponsors like running once a week or once every other week, I want to get them to to that phase.
So yeah, you just wanna make sure that that audience converted well against the traffic that you sent and that you hit there. Their KPI goals or their, their acquisition goals.
Louis Nicholls: Got it. And I'm guessing you're asking for those, those goals up upfront rather than, than afterwards, right? Ideally you'd know that beforehand,
Jesse Watkins: correct.
Yeah. You'd, you'd wanna have an idea of how, what their, what their expectation is. A lot of it is managing expectations on, on this part of it.
Louis Nicholls: Awesome. So are you saying this is something where you do like a test run of a couple and then try and lock them in for, uh, like, like a package for a couple of weeks or on a regular [00:18:00] cadence?
So it's not every week, but once a month, something like that?
Jesse Watkins: Yeah. So I mean, in this case you're, you're really new. This is a weekly newsletter in this scenario, so, You probably would want to sell maybe monthly to start, cuz you're gonna want to test a bunch of other sponsors and you only have one inventory slot a week if you're gonna scale it.
But if you're a larger newsletter adding quarterly deals are, are fine.
Louis Nicholls: Well, let's talk about what happens if it didn't go so well. What do you do then?
Ryan Sager: Yeah, I mean then it's really important to have, sorry. I mean, then it's just, that's when it's really important to have flexibility to be able to do. You know, depending on what your hopes are for the future and how salvageable it is, you know, to be able to do, make good send and, you know, test out some other messaging or at least make them feel that they didn't get, you know, completely ripped off.
Maybe make good secondary or tertiary send or to look if it's just a sponsor that's the product doesn't fit with the audience, it's just not gonna go anywhere, then, you know, you just try and get to where, you know, there's not [00:19:00] too hard feelings and, and you know, let that one go and test another category, test another product.
Louis Nicholls: Got it. Okay. Okay. So are you. Seeing that it's common, especially for an initial send or maybe if the, the pricing is slightly higher, but there's a little bit of risk in there. Are you seeing newsletters offering like guarantees around clicks or opens or anything like that where they, they're forced to do make goods or is it more just sort of a, well, you know, technically we don't have to do anything here. It's performed terribly, but. We wanna help
Jesse Watkins: the more, the latter in, especially in my experience, just that freedom to give them. I should also add, is like a way to avoid like bad experiences or burning an advertiser is again, that initial like managing expectations upfront, being transparent, honest about your data, not inflating numbers and so on.
Louis Nicholls: Yeah, no, that, that, that makes a lot of sense. So let's, let's skip slightly ahead. Let's talk about slightly bigger newsletters now. Cause obviously with Sales Pro you work with a lot of major newsletters out there that are. You know, monetizing via ads and [00:20:00] sponsorships. Without naming any names. Cause, cause I've just said you, you work with a lot of them.
What's something that you think that sort of, let's say sales teams or you know, brand development, partnerships, people, newsletters, whatever you wanna call them, what's something that you think that they're doing wrong or a mistake you see them making?
Ryan Sager: Sure. I mean, I think what's always important, and I go from best practices, is yeah, the teams that we see doing, The best. I mean, we have a certain, you know, sense of who's in the platform using it every day from user activity. I mean, the ones who are out there crushing it are the ones we see back in the platform day after day after day. And that really tells us, you know, so who we have the basic information, who's sponsoring what newsletters?
We have the contact information or you know, who you wanna reach out to at the brand. And then we have extensive creative archives of all the creative and the ads themselves that ran. So the people who are back every day are clearly looking through those creative archives and really honing their pitches.
They're seeing, [00:21:00] okay, this sponsor is doing this campaign to this audience, and like they're, they're obviously really doing a tailored tailored pitch as opposed to, you know, what's called spray-n-pray of like, Just kind of sending everybody in the database kind of a really generic pitch and hoping mething good to come back and look.
There's enough out there, you'll, you'll get something back with the spray-n-pray. Right. But yeah, you really want to be doing some like tailored stuff. And like another, another little trick we added in our little feature I plug, we added into our downloads where there's a field for like, what's the last newsletter they appeared on?
Can do like a targeted automated campaign where you say, you know, Hey, I saw your recent ad in. The elevator and that, you know, that shows you, that shows them, like, you know, where they're running, you know, what they're up to. Like they, they do need to feel they're not just getting spammed with something that's relevant, you know, that's trying to be relevant to everyone as opposed to like, You're a travel brand.
I'm a travel audience. This is why I'm in your inbox.
Louis Nicholls: Anything else, Jesse? Maybe [00:22:00] on just of things, we can also turn the question on its head and say what's something you've seen one newsletter do particularly well when it comes to, to running sponsorships or acquiring brand partners that others maybe haven't followed on and, and done yet?
Jesse Watkins: Yeah, I think the teams that that work well on brand partnerships are always prospecting, so that could be, yeah. Some of the teams that we see perform really well are in who sponsor stuff a lot and probably very heavily in the creative archive, understanding the strategy like marketing strategy of a brand, but also the brands that are prospecting.
Outside of that. Prospecting is a never ending job, so. You know, like Ryan said, the social feed or the grocery store or you know, walking around the city, what's on the, the taxi cabs or billboards. Just always prospecting and thinking of angles.
Louis Nicholls: Yeah, it's, it is an interesting one cause I always think about this in terms of like maybe like a, like a general sort of, you know, like a morning brew style newsletter or like a B2B kind of niche newsletter.
But I never think about like the, if you have [00:23:00] like a local newsletter, for example, I'm guessing a lot of the avenues open to you for sponsorships are gonna be, or like good sponsorships are gonna be quite different. You probably have to do a lot more on like the, the local level. I'm, I'm guessing, Have you seen any, any tips that that work well there?
Ryan Sager: Yeah. I mean, in the local, in the local markets, I do think you get to where a lot of your advertisers are in the audience. And, and so then that gets to the question like, are you talking about somebody who has like, uh, a newsletter that's just in a local market or are you talking about like a, like a 6AM City who's, a client of, of ours on Sales Pro like.
You know, a network of those. Now, I think when it comes to those, they do a lot of their, yes. Now, I mean, they're obviously not the only one model, but they do a lot of their business on a national level. Local is really tough. There's, there's a reason local news and local media has been so tough for so long.
Is that like, You know, it, it's hard to have a sales team in every location, in every market that you're in. If you're one of these networks, it's your only market. You [00:24:00] know, you can go out there and prospect aggressively, but like, you know, how much are you really gonna get outta, you know, Joe's Diner or down on the corner, or the little car dealership Probably doesn't, you know, get newsletter advertising at all versus like, The networks, they can really play with the scale that they have and can run.
Louis Nicholls: Yeah. Awesome. Let's end on something slightly more, more positive than the death of, of, of local media. Let, let's talk about predictions for, for the year ahead. So one, what we've already talked about, you know, how the, the market in general is, is going to do what I wanna talk about a little bit is the other side of things.
So newsletters, embracing. Advertising or not. Cuz I've seen sort of two trends really at SparkLoop that seem to be happening at the same time. One of them is a lot more newsletters that a year ago, two years ago would never have considered running ads or sponsorships. And now super happy to, to do that and asking where can I, where can I find sponsors for my newsletter?
And then the second thing is, a lot of newsletters that are running [00:25:00] sponsorships or have been, are going, hang on. Why am I just getting paid? You know, whatever it is, whatever. It works out to a couple of cents per subscriber to run an ad for someone else when I could be. Selling my own products, running events, doing affiliate stuff, courses, services, hundreds of other monetization channels.
Right. So they seem to be expanding into those. How do you think advertising is gonna fit in from a newsletter's perspective over the next year or so? Do you think we see more? Is that trend gonna continue? Is it a bubble? What do you think?
Ryan Sager: I think we'll see more and more. I mean, it is getting easier to find advertisers.
I mean, you know, obviously there's tools like us, there's the networks that are coming online, people who don't code. Have the bandwidth to do their own sales. And we talked to founders and newsletter operators who are worried about advertising. They think they like detract from the product or they have a premium tier and like their, the promise on the premium tier is, wants see ads.
But I just, you know, I just don't think that is how the consumer sees these sorts of ads. Like, there's a reason [00:26:00] you don't want Netflix with ads because it actually interrupts your show and interrupts, you know, usually something not that relevant. Newsletter advertising, you know, is not, you know, this isn't time limited so you can just skip it if you don't care about it.
And usually we find it to be additive. Especially like in the B2B space. It's like, here's products that might help you run your business better. And for know newsletters don't understand their audiences and understand what kinds of sponsors to work with, again, you're hearing about a cool product and it's not taking up any of your time.
You read it or you don't. So that's a long-winded way, way of saying I think, you know, advertising will keep growing and I think diversification, everybody in media gets it, I think, at this point, or is starting to get it. If you're an ad only model, you should be adding something else. You should be adding events or a membership tier or something.
Everybody should be diversifying cuz any one channel could, could go south for a couple quarters or for a year. So you gotta have that to diversification.
Louis Nicholls: Yeah, totally. That, that makes a lot of sense to me. Let's finish with, with one question I always like to ask, which is obviously you spend a ridiculous amount of time [00:27:00] looking at who's sponsoring different newsletters, what newsletters are doing in terms of improving their sponsorships and getting more sponsorships.
You spend more time on that than probably almost anybody else out there, and you have a lot of data about that. What's one question that I should have asked you today that I didn't?
Ryan Sager: Yeah, I guess one thing we didn't touch on is like sort of creative best practices. What should a newsletter looking to make their ad the most successful they can do for their client?
So there it is. So they, you know, two things I'd say on that. Uh, one is to be careful on tracking and to be, uh, to encourage the sponsor to be careful on tracking apple privacy and all kinds of things. Break a lot of UTM tracking, a lot of stacks that you see in our ESPs. So if they create a dedicated landing page or anything, or a code or anything that helps them track conversions, Lee, that's always helpful.
And then, you know, think about the voice of the ad, the most successful showing up. And again, morning Brew was really a big [00:28:00] pioneer in this. Really, you know, getting under the hood in terms of like the copy and the creative with those brands. So, you know, you can add a lot of value and improve conversions by making sure the brand, you know, the brand ad matches the voice of what you're doing in the newsletter.
Jesse Watkins: Yeah. Because if you're not really focusing on the, the creative and running really good ads, your user experience isn't that great, and then the ad just becomes like another banner ad on the internet. So I do think like running good creative is important for. Every aspect, whether it's the advertiser, the publisher, everybody involved, and the end user.
The consumer.
Louis Nicholls: Awesome. Well that sounds like a perfect place to, to leave that. Where can everyone go and find out more about who sponsors stuff and Sales Pro and your newsletter and you and who knows what else.
Ryan Sager: Sure, just, uh, who sponsor stuff.com has, you know, the free site and, uh, lead to our newsletters.
Everything is on there. And yeah, if you're, if you're get just getting into ads, definitely look. Newsletter ad calculator, uh, it'll [00:29:00] drop in the show notes that. Yep. We see a lot of clients looking at that and it's, it's, it's a pretty good guide.
Louis Nicholls: Awesome. Ryan, Jesse, thanks so much for joining me. Thanks for having us.
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