With over 200 million creators and influencers vying for the same brand partners and social media audiences, many are realizing they need to extend beyond TikTok or Instagram to turn content creation into a sustainable full-time career. The latest medium creators are eyeing is newsletters—particularly the platforms Substack and Beehiiv—which have become an increasingly popular new revenue stream for those who got their start in short-form video. 

For brands, sponsoring one of these emerging creator newsletters can provide them access to the most engaged and loyal portion of that creator’s audience, several influencer marketers told Ad Age. 

“A lot of brands have come to us thinking that’s going to be much more of an engaged audience opportunity,” said Katherine Rundell, VP of creators at Beehiiv, noting that these newsletters attract creators’ biggest fans who are “going to actually read their newsletters and really engage with their content more than, like, a random advertisement on Instagram.”

Sign up for our influencer marketing newsletter here

Beehiiv, which was founded in 2021 by former Morning Brew employees Tyler Denk, Benjamin Hargett and Jake Hurd, is seeing “a rapid increase” in the number of brands reaching out to join the newsletter’s ad network, Rundell told Ad Age. The network functions similarly to the creator marketplaces of social platforms such as TikTok, allowing advertisers to specify their desired click-through rates and payment terms before extending sponsorship offers, Rundell said. Creators can then accept or decline their offers via the ad network.

Ad spending on Beehiiv newsletters has steadily grown this year, with May seeing 65 campaigns—nearly double the amount in January, Rundell said. Top advertising partners include Netflix, Hubspot, Penguin Random House and men’s telehealth company Hims, according to Beehiiv’s website.

Creator newsletters remove the “fairweather fans, the passerby, the person who just likes [a sponsored post] because it comes up in their feed,” said Victoria Bachan, president of Whalar Talent. “Whether they’re a free subscriber or a paid subscriber, they have had to share first-party data ... From a brand perspective, sure, you maybe don’t get a million eyeballs, but you’re probably getting 100,000 of the most engaged eyeballs.” 

The surge in advertiser interest in newsletters mirrors the growing number of creators that have explored the medium over the past year. Both Beehiiv and its rival Substack have recently courted short-form video creators with accelerator programs designed to help them start and monetize newsletters.

Of the more than 350 creators who applied for Beehiiv’s “Creator Accelerator” program in June, over 150 of them applied within the first 48 hours of the application period, Rundell said. Just that initial group of 150 together had roughly 200 million social media followers between them, she added. Beehiiv picked five fellows for its program. 

Substack unveiled its “Creator Studio” fellowship program in May to assist “the next wave of video stars” in turning “their TikTok channels into Substack shows and communities,” Substack’s video and podcasting partnerships lead Austin Tedesco wrote in a blog post announcing the fellowship. 

“This is an opportunity for video-native creators who want a more direct, intimate relationship with their audience and to make money from subscriptions,” he continued. “As instability hits their medium, they’re looking for a reliable platform where they can grow a business and have complete ownership over their work.” Substack selected 10 video creators as fellows, including Coco Mocoe, a creator, trendspotter and brand consultant with a TikTok audience of over 1.1 million, and Gabi Jones, a creator and vintage fashion curator with more than 1.6 million followers across TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. 

“I actually think that we’re going to see a renaissance of written communication,” Mocoe said in an April video about the looming threat of a U.S. TikTok ban. “I think creators have a fear around owning their content, especially when you know that you can wake up and TikTok can be gone tomorrow. So, I think that we’re going to see a lot of creators try to go toward mediums that they can control.” 

Rundell attributed Beehiiv’s popularity among social content creators to their anxiety surrounding the possible TikTok ban and general frustration with having to rely on the fickle algorithms of TikTok and Instagram. (TikTok is challenging the U.S. law that would ban the platform if it is not fully divested by ByteDance by 2025.)

“They’re worried about owning their audience, and a newsletter is the best way to do that,” she said. 

“When you have a person’s email and have them on your email list, that’s yours to own,” said Brett Dashevsky, head of content creators at crowdfunding platform Kickstarter and co-founder of comment section analytics tool Siftsy. “And when you own someone’s email address, that’s your contact, your ‘follower,’ that you can take wherever you go and have direct access to,” unlike on social media platforms. 

Building community 

In today’s saturated influencer landscape, many creators and their brand partners consider a small, highly engaged audience more valuable than having millions of followers whose relationship with a creator is limited to occasionally liking their content in their feed. Newsletters, along with other long-form types of content such as blog posts and podcasts, offer creators an opportunity to build a “deeper, more tangible” relationship with their most devoted audience members than brief video content, said Ben Harms, chief growth officer at youth culture agency Archrival.

“I think people, particularly Gen Z, are more and more aware of the fact that you can be a creator, but if you don’t build it for the long haul, you lose pretty quickly and everybody’s moving on to the next creator,” he said. “But if you actually nurture a real community that is invested in each other, those stand the test of time and they can evolve with you as a creator, and they provide longer-term value for everybody,” including creators and advertisers increasingly prioritizing micro- and nano-influencers with niche but devoted audiences in their creator marketing strategies. 

Leveraging newsletters for influencer marketing can be an especially effective strategy for brands targeting Gen Z consumers, many of whom are increasingly “fatigued with social media” and the plethora of sponsored influencer content they’re bombarded with on TikTok and Instagram, said Sarah Gerrish, senior director of creator & influencer at creative agency Movers+Shakers.

TikTok’s ongoing “underconsumption core” trend, for example, emerged as a rejection of the excessive product consumption ingrained in influencer culture. Because consumers need to explicitly opt in to a newsletter, they’re also more likely to accept the occasional ad or sponsorship because the content surrounding those ads is “something they want to subscribe to and read,” she said. 

Creators can also bundle their newsletters with social media posts or podcast ad reads as part of broader brand deals, which can help them establish longer-term and more holistic partnerships with brands, Dashevsky noted. “If you’re trying to build yourself sustainably as a creator, you want to come across more as a partner to brands, as opposed to a one-off type of creator where you’re just going to do a couple of posts for them.”  

Newsletters also offer a fair amount of flexibility in terms of what brand integrations can include, from a basic display ad at the top or bottom of the newsletter to “advertorial” content woven into the creator’s writing, Gerrish said. Substack in particular also gives creators the option to open a group chat within the platform connected to their newsletter. Through that chat, creators can directly interact with their subscribers, potentially opening another avenue for a brand to appear in front of the creator’s audience. 

Marketers can also leverage newsletters as an affiliate marketing medium and team up with creators to feature links to specific products or their larger influencer storefronts in their newsletters, said Sarah Boyd, co-CEO and chief revenue officer at influencer marketing and talent management firm The Digital Dept. With newsletters, “you have more attention, more loyalty and more trust, which obviously converts into sales better than a platform where you’re not looking to be sold [to] and you’re just seeking entertainment” scrolling, said Boyd.

At this point, relatively few brands are sponsoring creators’ newsletters compared to social posts or podcasts, and marketers haven’t begun inquiring en masse about newsletter integrations, Boyd said. But she has seen Substack grow among creators in the past year and and anticipates more social media creators will soon begin to experiment with newsletters, too.

“The [creators] that are kind of jumping on early, just like any platform, are the ones seeing a lot of success,” she said. “But I feel like this is only the beginning of the trend … and there’s still a lot of room for growth for creators.”