Problem: There’s a new wave of independent email newsletter subscription publishers; however, it’s hard to keep track of these and there’s no central platform to read their writings
Solution: As I see it, newsletters are simply the instantiation of syndicated publishers, columnists, or writers going directly to their audience rather than being at the whim and mercy of a larger news publisher. Before, a mark of a great writer was being syndicated in dozens of publications (having recurring columns that are published in multiple periodical publications). Now, and I argue moving forward, the mark of a great writer will be someone who has a dedicated and monetizable following (a la James Clear, Tim Ferris, Morning Brew, and more). Why not create a business that merges the prestige of syndicated columnists with the monetization of traditional independent email newsletter publishers.
One example of a publication that is moving in this direction is The Pudding recently released a newsletter called “Winning the Internet.” Every hour, a Google Script runs that parses the links from the emails and saves them to a log dump. Data for the charts are computed, including a a 7-day rolling average of rate of newsletter appearances. The purpose of the newsletter, as they describe, is as follows:
Problem: there is a lot of content on the internet. The surge in curated newsletters tries to help us by sifting through the daily garbage heap to find the good stuff. But now there isn't enough time to read all the newsletters.
Solution: We decided to curate the curators. What's one more newsletter, anyways? No more link FOMO, just the statistically best links + cute charts, weekly. That's our pitch. Subscribe! Or don't ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Some of the valuable newsletters that I subscribe to include fs.blog, Not Boring by Packy McCormick, and The Generalist. However, the only place it lives is in my email. This business would allow these newsletters (for all intents in purposes we can call them syndicated newsletters) to be read and stored online on a centralized website and media company.
While it’s hard to size the market, in their peaks some of the most popular contemporary syndication services were making tons of money every year. Andrews McMeel Syndication was making $250 million annually in 1999 through comics syndication, Hearst Entertainment & Syndication had 2018 revenues of $11.4 billion, and more. If this business could crack “new media” it would easily be a billion dollar company.
Monetization: Traditionally in syndication, well-known experts in specific topical areas would sell their columns. The columns would be sold by feature syndicates, often large newspaper publishing chains like Knight-Ridder and Tribune Co. The syndicates provide cartoons, puzzles, recipes, and general gestures (you can read more on the business model here). This is how the modernized version of this business would make money.
Contributed by: Michael Bervell (Billion Dollar Startup Ideas)