The Economics of Local Newsletters

Hey HN - I'm an economist studying the newsletter industry. Thought you may be interested in this analysis I did studying monetization in local newsletters.

Local newsletter: a newsletter serving some local population with events info, business updates, local politics, etc. Typically operated by a single operator or a small staff.

They have become increasingly popular in many metros as local newspapers have been shutting down.

For this analysis, I wrote a Python scraper to parse 765 issues of one local newsletter - the Naptown Scoop. I used gpt-4o to help identify and classify the advertisers in each issue, which allowed me to analyze what types of advertisers are most common, and what types of advertisers drive the most revenue in local newsletters.

Happy to answer any questions both about the analysis and the data collection.

This is a good read! Do you have a list of other players in this field and the data or other info they shared (through interviews, blog posts, …)?