Geoff Sharpe

@MediaKing @beehiiv Begging for this as well. Same with templates

Dear @beehiiv, Please make the automation library be shareable between all of my publications. It is painful that I cannot copy an automation from one newsletter to the next. Pretty please. With ice cream on top. And sprinkles. Sincerely, The guy who brought the financial publishing industry to Beehiiv.

@mediaking The copy segment from one newsletter to another speaks to my biggest issue with it which is the newsletter siloing. Let me share templates, segments, data and everything between accounts!

My Beehiiv Christmas wishlist: - Native integration with StatCounter (or a textbox for third party analytics code) - One click integration with Google AdSense (let me run display ads!) - Web push support or one click integration with OneSignal. - Limit Beehiiv boosts applications to specific categories of sites - Ability to copy segments from one newsletter to another - SMS as a new delivery channel (I know, long-term project.) Hoping @beehiiv and @denk_tweets put these under my tree. I've been really good this year, I promise!

@kendallbaker I think it really depends. A lot of the time people value the writer and want access to that or to support the work. Small things like you outlined, from my experience running a paid subscription publication, rarely move the needle( though it is local news so who knows)

Another crazy idea: - For free subs, images are black and white. - For paid subs, they’re in color. Obviously there are instances (scoops, big interviews) where traditional paywalls work better than the ideas I’m spinning up. I’m just trying to encourage more experimentation

An example of a creative “paywall”: Only paid subscribers can see the footnotes. Instead of dropping a “subscribe to keep reading” paywall onto a post and hoping there’s enough intrigue contained within the locked paragraphs to convert a reader on the spot… this strategy is banking on a reader caving into FOMO after missing out over and over again on a section they’d enjoy. In other words: You give free subscribers a 9 out of 10 experience… while consistently giving them small peaks behind the curtain at the 10 out of 10 experience they could be having. Rather than putting up a tradition paywall mid-article and hoping readers decide to pay you money so they can unlock the rest of it, you can instead (a) create a free product that people love and (b) make it clear to them that paying for that product will instantly make it better.

“Sweepstake”

@HoodyAndShorts Puts greater importance for locks newsletters on personality and creators (humanizing content) and differentiated/exclusive content

Whewww. Nextdoor just announced they’re bringing over 3,500 local news sources onto their platform as part of their redesign. For those of us running local newsletters, what’s your take? Opportunity for wider distribution or potential threat to direct readership?

@ZaneSchwartz Do you have yearly subscription option? Usually far better from an life time value and churn perspective

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@HoodyAndShorts @beehiiv It’s wild they don’t exist yet. Probably the most frustrating non feature besides cross publication template sharing

All I want is saved content blocks. Please. I cannot stand C&Ping everything from old newsletters. @beehiiv

Good lesson here

@HoodyAndShorts 👋

Any local newsletters out there not solely focusing on events?

Okay you’ve, you’ve now got my attention

This is just a horrible understanding of what Bourdain meant to many of us

While this wasn't done by AI, it's fascinating to see an AI aesthetic be defined by the public and the resulting backlash to that aesthetic when it's done by real artists

Mark Ruffalo? In a crime series? On HBO? Take all my money

Canada's hardest-working local journalist!

The difference between art and making money, captured in a couple sentences

@nikhilwadx @beehiiv @denk_tweets +1 to this

When everyone talks about media companies, no one is talking about everything happening at the Ringer. From an outsiders perspective, they are absolutely killing it as they bring on more live events and add in video to their podcasts

@mannyyreyyes @louisnicholls_ I see this with all my local newsletters. Trying to scale quickly is almost impossible, especially for tiny jurisdictions. The nice thing is that those audiences tend to be extremely engaged

One thing to note on the local newsletter front that I’ve learned through a handful of clients is that low daily budgets is what can keep the CAC that low. If the daily spend is $20 getting $0.40 CPAs, there is very little chance that CPA will hold when trying to spend $120 a day. Also, lead forms. Seeing a lot more operators driving to landing pages now but there are still some ads where lead forms are at play and those will always come with a lower CAC rather than driving to landing page but the real cost is quality/engagement of the sub coming from an auto filled lead form may not be strong. Not being a pessimist or bursting bubbles but transparency around these results is pretty important nowadays instead of just a screenshot to not steer operators into wrong expectations when getting into paid ads 🤟🏼

"How do newsletters get subscribers for < $1 on meta ads!?" Just saw this question on reddit. Here's the answer 👇

@TJLarkin23 @louisnicholls_ I’d recommend trying it out for a month and seeing what sort of revenue you can generate. My leads are more expensive than smaller markets, so it’s around 22% of my ad costs covered. Autopilot works. Clear message at the top of the sparkloop form also helps readers

Have you done it and had success? Any ideas or advice? I think you're right that local readers likely don't even understand the suggestion engine as they likely haven't come across it before. So that's good. But just don't think most of them are super interested in newsletters that are paying for subs. But would love to be wrong.

Is Sparkloop a good idea for local newsletters? I tried Sparkloop over the last 2.5 weeks on my local Austin suburbs newsletter. After 24 hours, I was extremely impressed and excited about the results. I was spending $50 a day on facebook ads, and Sparkloop was estimating about $35 in payouts to me. This was a true game changer. If it would continue on a daily basis. And sadly, it not only didn't continue at that rate, it dropped an insane amount, to an estimated $3.80 a day. And it could still be lower than that. A lot of my suspicions I think were proven out by these results. That most local newsletter readers are not interested in reading the types of newsletters that are paying out on Sparkloop. Or really any newsletters for that matter. What makes the local newsletter space so interesting is that we are reaching people who don't normally read newsletters. Like with most things, there's a lot of good with that, but also a lot of bad. And this is one of the bad. There was also the big issue of the newsletters on there paying out, stopping their payouts somewhat frequently and for a lot of time. The way it works is, they set a budget and once the budget is gone, they don't pay anything out. Over two weeks, every single one stopped paying out for multiple days, and some stopped and started twice. Just a lot of time thinking about it and having to pay attention to the system that I did not want to be doing. Again, this isn't Sparkloop's fault, it's just a fault in the concept. And the fact that choices for local newsletter readers are quite limited in general. I will say that I will absolutely be using Sparkloop, or Beehiiv Boosts, in the future for any non-local newsletter I do (working on a b2b insurance one now). If your audience likes to learn, like most newsletter audiences, it's gold and a lot of these problems wouldn't be issues. It's just all dependent on who your reader is. I made a 10min youtube video explaining this in more detail, check it out if you want to dig deeper. My youtube channel is just my name.

@louisnicholls_ @TJLarkin23 I can attest that recommendation engines work well for local newsletters. The key reason? My theory is local subscribers are unlikely to be part of the sparkloop ecosystem, so they’re new and open to trying new newsletters

It will take a week or two to optimize, but yeah that should do it! Auto-pilot allows SparkLoop to automatically choose which recommendations we show to each new subscriber. That way, we can optimize your recommendations widget to always show the recs which will get you the highest payout. Right now, your hands-on approach results in ~0.17 recommendations picked per new subscriber. With autopilot turned on, that'll increase to 1.5-2 (more suitable) recs per subscriber... a 10-20x increase.