The Email Mafia (PayPal's Got Nothing on Email) | Hacker News Reader

The Email Mafia (PayPal's Got Nothing on Email)

thestartupdigest.com

50 pointsCmccann724 comments

Ok, so DailyCandy is for fashion/style/shopping, Thrillist is for food/drink/shopping, IdealBite is for green, and Vital Juice is for fitness/nutrition ...

Seems like there are other huge markets that are ideal for email newsletters:

- Sports news/scores for your city

- Investing (daily stock tips and news)

- Real estate (select listings that just went on the market in your city with good pictures like jet setter does)

- Arts & entertainment (museum, gallery, theater, and movie stuff—though I think DailyCandy does some of this)

I'm sure some of these exist (especially investing) but weren't mentioned but I bet many are old-school and the spaces are ripe for improvement.

Great post and I agree... I think newsletters fit with what people are looking for these days and the market is wide open.

A newsletter/founder that probably isn't big enough to make it on that list, but that I would highly recommend is Mark Hurst's Good Experience newsletter - http://www.goodexperience.com.

It is what originally inspired me to want to create a newsletter (which ended up finally being Hacker Newsletter - http://www.hackernewsletter.com) and is the only newsletter that I open and read each one. To me it is just like getting your favorite magazine, but better since I don't have to do anything but open gmail.

Startup Digest is amazing. They started picking up our Hackers and Founders Silicon Valley events a few months ago, and our total membership has gone from 800 members to 1250 members in 3 months. Our San Francisco events have gotten 30% bigger per event.

Thanks Jonathan, your event rocks and people love attending HF

I know basically nothing about this business.

I just read Jason Baptiste's two articles about how this is "serious business" and that was a nice overview.

Anyone else have a suggested reading list for learning more?

Great idea, we will compile a list for our next post :)

I wrote this post in response to all of the recent HN discussions on email newsletters. Trying to shed more light on the profitable email industry that never gets talked about.

The one thing people don't talk about with these newsletters: most of these emails are "bacon. " That is what the email industry calls spam's pretty cousin. People don't try to block these emails because hey, they signed up to receive them. But most people also aren't reading these emails.

Is this serious? I'm reading this after the Steve Yegge blog and can't tell anymore.

Email newsletters are serious business.

Anybody care to explain how you actually make money from an email newsletter? This article, and all the ones linked from it (and the ones linked from them) just tells you how much people sold their lists for. Never is it mentioned why these lists are valuable.

I'm on a couple of the lists mentioned. They don't charge me anything. They don't try to sell me anything. How is this possibly valuable to anybody in terms of dollars?

Only thing I can think of is by sharing your email address with selected 3rd party companies.

Advertising. My employer makes big bucks on free email newsletters. The trick is having an engaged audience of people who advertisers want to reach. You can get ad rates that (at least in terms of CPM) are astronomical compared to the web

I feel like this article is missing a lot of information. The "Email Mafia" is listed, but only a few mention total subscriber counts -- which in itself isn't an important number until you talk about open and clickthrough rates.

I also didn't see the newsletters that I regularly get in my inbox: Groupon, LinkedIn, Mint, Yelp, etc.

Linkedin, Mint, and Yelp are somewhat different. Email is part of their communication with users. Groupon and the other email companies use email as their primary service. They curate information and deliver it to their readers.

I have been thinking about doing something in this space, but after some initial customer development decided to give up on it.

Interesting list of companies, another company I've seen is VitalJuice (city based, healthy lifestyle newsletter)

Yep the Pilot Group I believe also invested in VitalJuice

direct link: http://www.forbes.com/2009/11/18/vital-juice-marketing-cmo-n...

"In 2006 they left their jobs and started a wellness consulting outfit, and for three months, worked with Revolution Health, a Steve Case-backed company. In May 2007 they went out on their own, tapping their own funds to create Vital Juice. In October 2008 they raised $1 million in Series A funding from Bob Pittman's Pilot Group"

Do you monetize newsletters with ads only, or are there other ways? Also, what kind of ads can you use? I don't think AdSense can be used in emails.

There is no adsense for email (big opprotunity) but right now monetization is through directly selling ads or through ecommerce like groupon and thrillist do.

There actually are companies that do ad targeting into email newsletters (industrybrains comes to mind), but I think you're kind of missing the point by doing it that way.

You've got a list of people who are very interested in a particular topic. Hopefully you know some more about them too (read: you should be asking questions on the signup page that advertisers want to know the answers to). You can probably tell what kind of ads are going to do well with your audience better than a text analysis algorithm. And ideally you want advertisers who understand the value of an email newsletter over other media, not ones who are willing to appear next to certain keywords, wherever they may be.

There are some newsletters that charge directly for their content, though those are the exception. You couldn't do that for just any market. For example, The Hotline from National Journal is a paid email newsletter that lots of politicos here in DC subscribe to.

I've even seen people who charge for the newsletter, but you can get it for free if you fill out an extensive questionnaire and "qualify".

Lerter.ly Is trying to make charging for email newsletters easier. I agree that it's not right for every market though, we polled our audience and less that 1% were willing to pay $5/mo for the content. In the startup world there is just too much free info to justify paying for it.

I think that having actionable content would be the key. People who work in politics have a lot riding on being in the know, so Hotline succeeds. I think this is also part of the reason why WSJ can charge for their website, but USA Today can't.

Thanks for the tip on letter.ly

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