OLD Media Moves

How Morning Brew more than tripled its revenue in 2019

Kayleigh Barber of Digiday looks at how business news email newsletter Morning Brew grew its revenue to $13 million in 2019 from $3 million in 2018.

Barber writes, “In addition, it increased its number of daily newsletter subscribers by more than 1 million over that same period and hired 23 new employees, for a total staff of 33. Many of those hires came on the sales side, which will have grown from a team of three in 2019 to 13 by the end of this month.

“The publisher’s daily newsletter, which goes out six days per week, is still the lion’s share of the company’s revenue, accounting for approximately 95% of the company’s overall revenue in 2019, CEO Alex Lieberman said. Currently, the daily newsletter has over 1.8 million subscribers and an open rate of 42%, with the goal being to reach 2 million by the end of the first quarter of 2020.

“But this year, Lieberman said that the daily product now makes up 89% of overall revenue, with Retail Brew and Emerging Tech Brew accounting for 10% and its new podcast division making up the rest. Emerging Tech Brew, which goes out three times a week and covers tech, now has 160,000 subscribers and an open rate of 50% after launching in March. Retail Brew, its newsletter covering the retail and e-commerce industries that recently increased its frequency to three times a week, launched in June and now reaches 100,000 subscribers with an open rate of 55%.”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.

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