Case Study: Why Morning Brew is doubling down on the beehiiv Ad Network

We launched the beehiiv Ad Network in November with a handful of advertiser campaigns. The premise of the Ad Network is simple and twofold:

For Advertisers: beehiiv is home to thousands of the top newsletters in the world. With over 125M monthly impressions, nearly 10M unique readers, and an abundance of reliable first party data, it’s the most scalable, cost-efficient, and convenient platform to invest your ad dollars in the newsletter ecosystem.

For Newsletters: beehiiv is partnering with dozens of the most reputable brands and bringing these sponsorship opportunities directly to your inbox. Writers can remove themselves from the arduous process of ad sales (selling, scheduling, copywriting, testing, reporting, invoicing) and instead focus their efforts on creating tremendous content.

One of the ad partners we launched with in November was Morning Brew, the newsletter-first media company redefining business news.

Campaign Overview

To showcase the growth potential beehiiv’s Ad Network offers, here’s a glimpse at Morning Brew’s ad campaign and results.

Goal

Expand their readership and drive new subscribers to their ecosystem

Target Audience 

People over the age of 25 interested in business, entrepreneurship, finance, tech, education, science and history

Target Impressions

250,000

Campaign Length

1 month (November 1st - 30th)

Campaign Performance

Over the course of the month, Morning Brew’s ads were displayed across 17 unique newsletters via the beehiiv Ad Network, driving thousands of unique visitors to their site.

With over a quarter million unique impressions, served across nearly two dozen distinct audiences, the campaign delivered both significant brand awareness and a meaningful volume of conversions.

The real power of the beehiiv Ad Network, however, is the ability to continuously test new audiences and ad copy, and to rigorously optimize the campaign over the course of the flight. Towards the end of the campaign we were able to deliver CTRs exceeding 1.25% and CPCs under $3.50 on specific sends.

As we scale the Ad Network and collect more data over time, we expect the performance of these campaigns to drive considerably more conversions–especially for repeat advertisers.

And while brand awareness can be difficult to measure, the campaign also drove meaningful subscriber growth. Morning Brew met their target CPAs, and they renewed for another campaign kicking off in January 2023.

Newsletter Monetization

While Morning Brew experienced considerable subscriber growth from the campaign, newsletters on beehiiv generated meaningful revenue for their bottom line.

Participating newsletters varied in content categories, audience size, experience, and scale. Some of the participating newsletters are generating over $1m annually, while others got their very first taste of ad dollars from this campaign.

We’ll highlight a few to showcase how our users are leveraging the beehiiv Ad Network.

The Street Sheet

The Street Sheet is a weekly business and finance newsletter delivered directly to investors’ inboxes each Sunday. The newsletter regularly features sponsors, but leveraged the beehiiv Ad Network to augment their existing processes to diversify ad partners and re-allocate internal resources.

After receiving their initial payout from the campaign, their founder proactively reached out to our team with the following:

Morning Huddle

The Morning Huddle newsletter finds and summarizes the best fantasy football articles, advice, and memes each day into a three-minute morning read. Based on our data, we had a strong signal that this audience would perform well for Morning Brew’s placements–and it delivered.

Despite being one of the smaller newsletters participating in the campaign, Morning Huddle received several hundred dollars for just a single sponsored send.

Wall St. Rank

Wall St. Rank, which features analyst-vetted stock ideas daily, was a brand new user who recently migrated over to beehiiv. Within their first few weeks on beehiiv, they ran two separate ad campaigns, both of which performed really well.

What This Means for You…

If you’re an advertiser looking to reach millions of highly engaged readers in one of best performing mediums in digital advertising, beehiiv has a seamless and cost-effective solution to help you reach your goals. And it’s only getting better as we continue to launch new campaigns and collect more historical performance data. Learn more here.

And if you have a newsletter and are looking to monetize—beehiiv can help drive meaningful revenue and help you scale quicker. At the end of the day, anything we can do to help you grow and monetize your newsletter is our top priority, and we have a full team dedicated to building solutions to help you achieve your goals.

Get started on beehiiv for free today.