Is It Worth Starting a Newsletter? A Data-Backed Answer

Starting a newsletter is worth it if you sell digital products, courses, or services — and you treat it as a revenue channel rather than a vanity project. Email generates an average of $36 in return for every $1 spent. And newsletters launched in 2025 reached their first dollar in a median of 66 days, according to beehiiv's State of Newsletters report.

But those industry stats hide something important: subscriber count alone means almost nothing. I've seen a creator with just 2,000 subscribers generate $27,000 in six months. Meanwhile, lists 10x that size sit idle because nobody tracks which subscribers actually buy.

After running newsletters for over a decade, here's what the data says about when a newsletter is worth your time, when it's a waste of energy, and how to tell the difference once you start.

Email Still Outperforms Every Other Channel

You've probably heard "email is dead" at least once a year since 2010. And every year, the data says the opposite.

Email marketing returns $36 for every $1 spent. That's not a cherry-picked stat — it's the average across industries, reported by HubSpot. No social media platform comes close.

Paid newsletter subscriptions on beehiiv alone generated $19 million in 2025, up from $8 million in 2024. That's a 138% increase in a single year. And 25% of newsletter creators reported meaningful profit growth in 2025, with 45% expecting even more in 2026.

The reason is simple. When someone gives you their email address, they're inviting you into their inbox. That's a different level of attention than someone scrolling past your post in a feed. Email reaches 4.73 billion users worldwide, and unlike social platforms, there's no algorithm deciding whether your message gets seen.

The average email open rate sits around 21.3% across all industries. That sounds low until you compare it to social media, where organic reach on most platforms hovers between 1–5%.

And those are just averages. Creators who write for a specific audience consistently outperform them. Justin Welsh, who runs a newsletter for 200,000+ solopreneurs, reports a 50% open rate and a 3.5% click-through rate — well above the 2.6% industry average.

The takeaway: email isn't just alive. For creators selling their own products, it's still the most profitable channel available.

You Own Your Audience

In 2020, Facebook banned me for life. Five years of audience building on their platform — gone overnight.

I wasn't doing anything shady. One day, the account just disappeared. No warning, no appeal process that went anywhere, no way to contact the people who followed me.

But I didn't panic. Because I had my email list.

That list was sitting in my email service provider, fully exportable. If that provider had shut me down too, I could have downloaded a CSV file and moved to a different one by the end of the day. Try doing that with your Instagram followers or your YouTube subscribers.

This isn't a hypothetical risk. Facebook's organic reach collapsed from roughly 30% to 2% over a few years, killing thousands of businesses that depended on it. Instagram shifts its algorithm regularly. TikTok's future in some countries is uncertain at best.

Email doesn't have a single point of failure. There's no one company that controls the inbox. Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, and dozens of others all operate independently. No algorithm decides if your subscribers see your message. You write it, you send it, it lands.

One important note: if you can't export your subscriber list, you don't really own it. Some platforms make this easy (Kit, MailerLite, AWeber). Others make it harder. Check before you commit.

A Small List Can Generate Serious Revenue

There's a myth in the creator world that you need tens of thousands of subscribers before a newsletter can make money.

The math tells a different story.

A health practitioner I worked with had roughly 2,000 email subscribers. Not 20,000. Two thousand. By emailing consistently and promoting his offers, he generated $27,000 in six months.

Run the numbers yourself: 100 qualified subscribers who each buy a $100 product per month equals $120,000 a year. Bump the average to $200 per month and it gets even friendlier.

Justin Welsh — who has one of the most successful solo creator businesses online — says his newsletter is his highest-converting sales channel. He sells more on Saturdays (his newsletter day) than any other day of the week. That's not because Saturday is magic. It's because his subscribers trust him, and email gives him a direct line to make offers.

The flip side is also worth mentioning. A list of 10,000 subscribers who never open your emails isn't an asset — it's an expense. Autoresponders charge per subscriber. Unengaged subscribers hurt your deliverability. And a list full of people who signed up for a freebie but have zero interest in your paid offers is just an expensive address book you're afraid to use.

50 qualified subscribers who open, read, and buy will always outperform 5,000 ghosts.

The Real Work Behind Running a Newsletter

I'm not going to pretend this is easy. Running a newsletter takes real, ongoing effort.

It's more than writing one email a week. You're committing to consistent content production — coming up with topics, writing drafts, editing, formatting, crafting subject lines, and promoting each issue. Then there's the list building: creating lead magnets, setting up landing pages, finding partnerships, maybe running sponsorships.

And it costs money. Email service providers aren't free once your list grows past a few hundred subscribers. As Justin Welsh has said, email marketing is his single largest business expense — and he runs a very lean operation.

Time investment varies. If you're repurposing content you've already created elsewhere, you might spend an hour a week. If you're writing original long-form content, expect 3–5 hours per issue. Be honest with yourself about which camp you're in before committing.

This is where most newsletters die. The creator underestimates the consistency requirement, sends a handful of issues, gets discouraged by slow growth, and quietly stops. If you're going to start, go in knowing that the first few months will feel like shouting into an empty room. That's normal. It gets better — but only if you keep showing up.

Newsletter Metrics Are Broken

Open rates and click rates — the two numbers every newsletter creator obsesses over — are increasingly unreliable. And most creators don't know it.

Since 2021, Apple's Mail Privacy Protection has inflated open rates by 10–20% across the board. Apple's system "opens" emails on behalf of users whether they actually read them or not. So that 45% open rate you're proud of? A chunk of it is Apple bots, not real humans.

Click rates aren't much better. An email platform called Omeda found that 71% of all newsletter clicks in the first quarter of 2025 came from security bots, not actual people. These bots click links to check for malware and spam — and your analytics tool counts them as real engagement.

On top of that, Gmail has started using AI to summarize newsletters. Your subscribers might read a machine-generated two-line summary and never actually open your email. They got the gist without seeing your call to action, your offer, or the content you spent hours writing.

So if you're using open rates or click rates to decide what content to create more of, you're making decisions based on data that's partly fiction.

The metric that actually matters is simpler: did the subscriber buy? But almost no creator tracks that — because the standard tools don't connect email engagement to revenue.

When a Newsletter Makes Sense

A newsletter is worth starting when a few conditions are in place:

• You sell something. Courses, coaching, consulting, digital products, memberships — any of these. A newsletter without something to sell is a hobby with overhead.
• You have knowledge or experience that's hard to find elsewhere. This is your edge. If you can teach, explain, or help people solve a specific problem based on your real-world experience, a newsletter is one of the best ways to build trust and convert readers into buyers.
• You're willing to play the long game. Beehiiv's data shows the median time to first dollar is 66 days. That's realistic — not overnight. If you need income next week, a newsletter isn't the answer. If you're building something for the next 2–5 years, it absolutely is.
• You want to own your audience. If you're tired of algorithm changes dictating whether your content gets seen, email gives you a direct, stable channel that no platform can take away.

When a Newsletter Is a Waste of Time

Not every creator needs a newsletter. And starting one without a clear purpose is worse than not starting at all.

Skip it if you don't have a clear niche or audience yet. Figure out who you're serving and what problem you're solving first. A newsletter amplifies clarity — it doesn't create it.

Skip it if you have nothing to sell and no plan to monetize. You can always add products later, but going in with zero revenue model means you'll burn out before you get there. Without a reason to email beyond "sharing thoughts," the commitment won't feel worth it.

Skip it if you can't commit to at least one email per month. Sporadic publishing trains subscribers to forget you exist. When you finally do email them three months later, they'll wonder who you are and hit unsubscribe. Or worse — mark you as spam.

And skip it if the only reason you're considering a newsletter is because it feels like everyone else has one. That's how you end up in the pile of newsletters that die before issue 10.

The Metric That Actually Tells You if Your Newsletter Is Working

Every article about newsletters talks about whether they're worth starting.

Almost none of them tell you how to know if yours is actually working once you do start.

Open rates won't tell you — they're inflated by bots. Subscriber count won't tell you — a big list of unengaged people is a liability, not an asset. Click rates won't tell you — 71% of clicks might be security bots.

The question that matters is this: which piece of content brought this subscriber to my list, and did they ever buy anything?

I learned this the hard way. I ran a newsletter swap with another creator that brought in only 27 subscribers. By any normal metric, that looks like a failure. But one of those 27 spent $1,500 on my products and services. Without tracking that connection, I would have written off the entire campaign.

The opposite happens too. I had a YouTube video with over 154,000 views. Impressive, right? It generated zero paying customers. Not one. Meanwhile, a different video with under 3,000 views brought in thousands of dollars in course sales.

If I had relied on platform metrics — views, likes, subscriber count — I would have doubled down on the viral content and killed the stuff that was quietly paying the bills.

This is the blind spot. Instagram won't tell you which posts generated email subscribers. LinkedIn won't show you which articles led to course sales. YouTube won't connect video views to revenue.

Standard analytics tools like Google Analytics show you traffic. Your email platform shows you open rates. Your payment processor shows you revenue. But none of them connect the three.

That's the exact problem I built BestSubscribers to solve. It tracks where every subscriber comes from — down to the specific piece of content — and shows you whether they ever bought anything. Takes about 15 minutes to set up, then it runs in the background while you focus on creating.

Because the real question isn't "is a newsletter worth starting?" It's "which of my efforts are actually making me money?"

How to Start a Newsletter the Right Way

If you've decided a newsletter is worth it, here's the minimum viable setup. No months of planning required.

Pick a platform. If you're selling your own products (courses, coaching, digital products), go with Kit (formerly ConvertKit), MailerLite, or AWeber. They give you full control over automations, segmentation, and your sales funnel. If you're monetizing the newsletter itself through paid subscriptions or sponsorships, Substack or beehiiv have built-in tools for that.

Create one lead magnet. A PDF, a checklist, a short video — something that solves a specific problem for your ideal subscriber. Don't overthink it. A 2-page checklist that's genuinely useful will outperform a 50-page ebook that feels like homework.

Set up a welcome sequence. Three to five automated emails that go out after someone subscribes. Introduce yourself, deliver value, and make one offer. This sequence sells for you on autopilot while you focus on your regular content.

Commit to a cadence you can sustain. Start biweekly or weekly — not daily. You can always increase frequency later. What you can't recover from is burning out in month two and disappearing from inboxes for six months.

Connect your payment processor. Whether it's Stripe, Teachable, or something else — link it from day one. This lets you track revenue from the start, instead of retroactively trying to figure out what worked three months from now.

The Bottom Line

A newsletter is worth starting if you have knowledge to share, something to sell, and the willingness to show up consistently. The data supports it — email still outperforms every other channel for creators selling digital products, and the economics are getting better, not worse.

But the creators who win aren't the ones with the biggest lists.

They're the ones who know which subscribers actually buy — and which content brought them in.

If you're starting a newsletter (or already running one), don't just track opens and clicks. Track which content brings in subscribers who become customers. That's the data that tells you where to spend your limited time.

BestSubscribers connects the dots from content to subscriber to revenue. 15 minutes to set up. Then it works in the background so you can focus on creating the right stuff. Start your free 14-day trial.