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How Blockworks Operates 7 Daily Newsletters At Once
Learn the Secrets Behind a Newsletter-First Crypto Media Company
Kanishka & Brandon Storey
May 07, 2025
How many newsletters is too many?
3? 4? 5?
How about 7?
That’s how many newsletters the Cryptocurrency-focused media company Blockworks operates—and they hit send on all seven every single day.
In this case study, we’ll dive into how Blockworks is leading the way in the cryptocurrency space, why they pivoted to a newsletter-first media company, and how they simultaneously operate 7 newsletters in the crypto space.
Table of Contents
Meet Molly Jane Zuckerman, the senior newsletter strategist at Blockworks.
Managing Editor Michael McSweeney spearheaded the original strategy, and Molly’s role has been instrumental in scaling and shaping the editorial direction. She’s the brains behind the newsletter strategy at Blockworks, leading seven newsletters at once within the crypto media company.
Now, let’s dive into the behind-the-scenes of how she leads the newsletter division at Blockworks.
Before we dive into the specific strategies she’s using as a newsletter strategist, let’s touch base on the different newsletters she operates at Blockworks.
We asked Zuckerman to break it down for us.
She shared, “We have The Drop, which is a daily newsletter covering NFT, gaming, meme coins, and the consumer layer. We have a new newsletter called Supply Shock, which is about Bitcoin history. We have The Daily, which is a daily crypto newsletter, in a long style format.”
Zuckerman continued, “We have Empire, which is a daily general crypto newsletter. We have Lightspeed, which covers the Solana ecosystem. We have Forward Guidance, which covers macro, and we have OxResearch, which covers more data-driven analysis of the crypto market.”
Why Blockworks Pivoted to a Newsletter-First Media Company
Blockworks was founded 7 years ago in May 2024 by Jason Yanowitz and Michael Ippolito.
Since then, the company has grown to roughly $30 million in annual revenue and is positioned to continue growing.
Last year, they decided to pivot their operations to put their newsletters at the forefront of their business.
Zuckerman shared, “We have been a newsletter-first newsroom for about a year. Last year, our managing editor decided that the state of journalism has changed a lot since Blockworks was launched, and we really just wanted to make sure that our newsroom really owned our own audience and understood who our audience was.”
The reason they started investing more in newsletters was because of the shifting digital climate, transient algorithms, and a push to take back control from tech giants acting as barriers to their audience.
Zuckerman explained, “You can't really rely on the Google algorithm anymore. [X (Formerly Twitter)] has completely deprioritized link sharing. And so the funnels for people to actually read our journalism were shrinking or becoming unusable.”
So, Blockworks went all in on newsletters.
Zuckerman shared, “The idea is about owning our own audience in a newsletter. You have an email list. You see who opens it. You see who cares about it. It made a lot of sense for us.”
With the decision in 2024 to adjust their strategy, Zuckerman shared how all of their journalists took on their own newsletters within the company.
Zuckerman shared that throughout the past year, they’ve gradually shifted their skilled beat reporters into creating newsletters focused on their specific areas of expertise, aiming to ensure their journalism reaches and engages readers. She added that most of these newsletters are paired with a podcast, which he considers a crucial component.
On top of the newsletters they started, Blockworks also began acquiring different newsletters to take larger leaps in the crypto space.
Zuckerman shared, “In the past year, five of the newsletters have been internal launches and two of them were acquisitions that we acquired to add to our newsroom.”
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Day in the Life of Zuckerman’s Role as Newsletter Strategist
You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone with the job title “Newsletter Strategist” 10 years ago.
But, as email newsletters continue to rise in their dominance within modern media, that title is going to become much more popular.
The question is, what exactly does a newsletter strategist like Zuckerman do?
Zuckerman shared, “I got to sort of invent my own role, which has been pretty interesting. So with each of our newsletter teams, there's an editor and a writer, and they work together to come up with the content for the day.”
Instead of leading the news and content within each newsletter, Zuckerman lets the writer and editor lead the way.
Zuckerman explained, “I don't actually tell them what to write. They're independent of that. They do a very good job of finding the news, finding the scoops, the exclusives.”
Instead, Zuckerman takes a strategic approach to grow and earn more with the newsletter.
Zuckerman shared, “What I'm doing daily is trying to think about ways that we can grow that a writer and editor might not think of. So that might be cross-promotions with other newsletters. I might be looking at beehiiv data and thinking we have a lot of unsubscribes this day. There's something about our coverage that people didn't like.”
The primary goal for Zuckerman is to get a response out of their readers.
Zuckerman shared, “I really want to get all of our readers more engaged. So I'm constantly telling people to go on social media, respond to the readers via email.”
She continued, “I’m also reading every single newsletter before and after they're published — seven a day. And then reading all the other newsletters in the rest of the market to see what best practices are.”
Before taking the Newsletter Strategist role at Blockworks, Zuckerman was a journalist and editor.
Zuckerman said that, unlike her previous role where she was editing and writing a column, her current job is much more open-ended. Each day, she has to figure out on her own how to grow the newsletter, with no one giving her specific instructions, and her success is judged solely by the number of new subscribers they gain each month.
She shared, “It’s definitely a much different style than I'm used to, as opposed to just writing an article one day and then you're done. But hopefully, we have been seeing growth, and it's been hopefully going to be continuing. My job is a lot of sitting and thinking and then playing with some things and tracking to see if they work or not.”
Favorite beehiiv Features
We asked Zuckerman to share her favorite features of the beehiiv platform.
She shared, “I wasn't around for the launch of the newsletters themselves, but I do know what we like about beehiiv. The first is the design. So I think that having subscribed to every single cryptocurrency newsletter that exists, I think that ours looks very nice. Having those templates is very helpful.”
From a newsletter strategy perspective, one of the best ways beehiiv helps people succeed is through the backend technical features like segmentation and automations.
Zuckerman sets up automated re-engagement campaigns for each newsletter, making it easy to target users who haven’t taken a specific action within a set timeframe.
For segmentation, Zuckerman explained, “No one had really been looking that closely at unengaged subscribers that are doing certain things, and it's been really helpful to segment them in a certain way, especially as we recently relaunched a newsletter that had been acquired that had been dormant for about a year.”
Another feature Zuckerman likes is the smart warming for deliverability.
She leverages beehiiv’s smart warming feature and list segmentation, which allows her to avoid sending emails to the entire subscriber list at once—something that could lead to deliverability problems.
Protection from Being De-platformed
Cryptocurrency has a ton of regulations. And for some platforms, they also regulate how you talk about crypto.
Zuckerman explained, “Having worked at other cryptocurrency companies with newsletters, we had a very big problem being de-platformed because of the topics we were covering, which was very frustrating.”
Even though Zuckerman only worked on the news side, she seemed to regularly face trouble from email platforms when speaking about certain topics.
She shared, “The fact that we were kicked off several email platforms for having the keyword cryptocurrency when we were doing journalism was very frustrating. Inheriting beehiiv makes me feel happy and confident that we're not going to lose — all of a sudden — access to our emails, which has happened a few times in the past at crypto media outlets.”
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Most people operate a single newsletter.
So, how does Zuckerman manage seven all at once?
She shared, “It's very easy for me, at least to keep everything in one place because I just have the dropdown of the newsletters I can flick through.”
Zuckerman can easily switch between the different newsletters while logged into her beehiiv account.
She shared, “The analytics also are something that is helpful to me growing on beehiiv. Because I'm comparing seven newsletters, it helps me quickly see if one isn't growing as strongly as the other because we’re doing mainly organic acquisition.”
Zuckerman continued, “I would say that our overall goals, though, are just to really increase readership. So tracking, using the UTM links through beehiiv, and [seeing] where our readers are coming from is helping us [understand] where we can then push our content to grow more readers.”
How Blockworks Earns Revenue from Its Newsletters
We asked Zuckerman to share about Blockworks’ revenue strategy. Their main strategy is private ad packages with different brands, primarily through banner ads.
She explained, “Because we have so many newsletters, and they're all associated with the brand and podcast, we have our own sales team that sells ads and placements in the newsletters as part of a larger package across the podcast and even our events platform.”
She shared, “It’s helpful because we might have a newsletter that has a small audience, but a podcast that has a big audience, and so we're able to… leverage that to charge what we want to charge. We also have newsletters that have different audience sizes, so we could get an ad placed in a smaller one because we're using the bigger one’s numbers to also sell that ad.”
Time Saved With beehiiv
We asked Zuckerman to share how beehiiv makes her work more efficient, and she had plenty to share about several features that allow her to get more done in less time every day.
She explained, “At other companies, we used Mailchimp and other big email platforms. I don't remember them having the same type of templates and segmentation that beehiiv did. So for me, personally, in my day-to-day, having the beehiiv dashboard and the segmentation has been great.”
Zuckerman also shared how they’ll be launching their own referral program soon and will be leveraging beehiiv’s internal referral system.
She shared, “I was talking to some companies about product and merchandise and they're like, ‘Will you use Zapier for this and that’ and I was like, ‘We don't actually need that. It's just all in the platform. So, I can't tell you exactly how many hours it saves in my workday, but it’s definitely not an insignificant number.”
Zuckerman continued, “I haven't actually used the Referral Program feature yet, but watching the walkthrough videos, it seems like that's going to make my life a lot easier and the only holdup is on our end getting the designs done. So having it already built for me has felt pretty nice.”
Blockworks Goals for 2025
We asked Zuckerman to share a bit about Blockworks’ goals for the newsletter in 2025.
She shared, “What's really important to us is readership and engaged readership. So, we have been using organic growth channels. The idea is that if you put out amazing content, it will come. And it works for the most part.”
Zuckerman shared how they have an entire research division within Blockworks as well as a webinar and events section to help fuel the entire growth and engagement process.
She explained, “Our sales team and everything sort of works together in this funnel in a way that I think that other newsletter operators don't have. The idea is that our newsletter readers either are our research subscribers or they will soon be our research subscribers. And then they attend our events, they listen to our podcasts. And the [cycle] keeps going.”
We asked Zuckerman to share some tips for anyone looking to start their own newsletter. Her main advice is to be consistent with your publishing schedule.
She shared, “One is just consistency. So a monthly newsletter isn't going to gain ‘mind share’ in your reader. So weekly is a must, and then daily is something you could scale up to.”
Zuckerman also explained how you need to pick one primary acquisition channel and lean into it.
She shared, “It's very important to pick what funnel you want to use to get people to know about it. So if you pick [X (Formerly Twitter)], you have to really bear down on [X (Formerly Twitter)]. If you pick LinkedIn, if your newsletter is more like B2B marketing, then you really have to bear down on LinkedIn.”
Her final advice cautions against heavy use of artificial intelligence.
She shared, “Please don't use AI for anything. If you're going to do a newsletter, let's keep it creative. Let's keep it fun. And it has to be something you care about. Otherwise, you're never going to actually do it. Definitely not on a daily basis.”
Advice for Anyone on the Fence About beehiiv
We asked Zuckerman what she’d say to someone on the fence about using beehiiv.
She answered, “All of my friends who have their own newsletters are using Substack for now. I've never used Substack, but I will say that they have not been able to monetize very well.”
Zuckerman continued “If you want to have a newsletter and you're going to be consistent with it, at least weekly if not daily, then [I recommend] a platform like beehiiv that has an internal Ad Network, I might recommend them start there first because you're not searching for outside sponsors.”
After 6 years of building their crypto media company to over $30 million in annual revenue, Blockworks decided to pivot to a newsletter-first strategy.
Now, with beehiiv, they’ve emerged at the forefront of the crypto space with seven daily newsletters, led by Newsletter Strategist Molly Jane Zuckerman.
Want to launch a profitable newsletter? Get a 30-day, free trial of beehiiv now.
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