AMA: $31,400/mo from six boring newsletter sites. Ask me anything

Did an AMA here two years ago at $9k/mo. Different business now, so here is another one.

The business
Six newsletters, six niches, all deliberately dull: commercial HVAC, veterinary practice management, UK private landlords, industrial coatings, school procurement, small-fleet logistics. Combined 141,000 subscribers.

Last month
Revenue $31,400 — sponsorships $24,100, affiliate $4,800, paid tier $2,500
Costs $9,860 — three writers $7,200, sending $980, tooling $410, paid acquisition $1,270
Net $21,540

Why newsletters and not sites
I still run sites. The newsletters were a hedge against exactly what happened to my content portfolio last year, and the hedge worked: search traffic halved, newsletter revenue did not move at all.

Numbers people usually ask for
Open rates 38-52% depending on niche. Sponsorship rates $42-$180 CPM, highest in veterinary. Subscriber acquisition cost $1.90 blended. Churn 1.4%/mo.

Ask away. I will answer anything except the exact domains, for the obvious reason.

How do you sell a $180 CPM sponsorship to a veterinary supplier? That is the part I cannot imagine doing, not the writing.

Badly, for the first year. Now it is a one-page PDF with open rates, a subscriber job-title breakdown and two past sponsor results. The job-title breakdown closes it — they are buying the audience list, not the impressions.

What does $1.90 acquisition actually come from? Paid, organic, something else?

Blended. Roughly 60% from search traffic on the sites, 30% from LinkedIn, 10% paid at about $4.20 which drags the average up. If I only counted paid it would be a much less impressive number.

Churn at 1.4% is extremely low for B2B newsletters. Is that real churn or unsubscribes only? Dead addresses do not unsubscribe.

Good catch, it is unsubscribes. If I include 90-day non-openers as churned it is about 4.8%, which is a more honest figure and I should have led with it.

Could someone start one of these today with no audience and no money?

Yes, slowly. Pick a niche where you can name twenty companies that sell into it, because those are your sponsors. If you cannot name twenty, there is no revenue at the end of the work.

What do the three writers cost per issue, and do they write or do they curate?