# Monetize your newsletter with advertising.

How to design, price, and sell the inventory your audience is worth — from the team that sold $5M+ of newsletter ads building WhereBy.Us.

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## THE THESIS

## Your community is the product.

Newsletter advertising isn’t about impressions — it’s about a relationship a brand can’t buy anywhere else.

A list of 500 engaged readers who are all CMOs can be worth more than 500,000 anonymous addresses. Advertisers pay for attention, trust, and fit — the things an owned audience has and a programmatic exchange doesn’t. Your job is to package that into inventory you can price and sell.

## The one formula to start from

Nominal ad price = CPM × (subscribers ÷ 1,000). A 100,000-subscriber list at a $10 CPM earns about $1,000 per placement. Everything else — positioning, scarcity, performance — moves that number up.

Start with what you can deliver today, then add formats and raise rates as you book out. You don’t need a “magic” audience size to begin.

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## INSIDE THE GUIDE

## Three ways to sell.

### Strategy 01 · Programmatic

Easy money, with a ceiling.

Automated fill from a demand partner — drop in a block of code and image ads load per reader. Set-and-forget, lower rates ($0.10–$1.50 CPM). Run it on one slot and keep the rest direct.

### Strategy 02 · Advertiser-provided

Higher rates, no production.

Advertisers fill your slots with their own creative, sold self-service or direct. Most buyers already have assets to adapt — you supply the audience and the placement.

### Strategy 03 · Native

The highest rates — and the most work.

Your team writes the ad in your voice, the way Morning Brew and theSkimm do. Best performance and best reader experience, in exchange for editorial effort.

### The seven ad units

- Newsletter sponsorship — the whole send, presented by one brand.
- Native — an in-voice placement that reads like your content.
- Title & Text — lightweight, high-frequency units.
- Sponsored listing & Section sponsorship — own a recurring slot.
- House ad — promote your own products and grow the list.

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## WHERE TO START ON RATES

## What ads actually pay.

Real CPM ranges, not guesswork. Use these as a floor, then price up on scarcity and performance.

- Native & sponsorships: $20–50
- Banner & text ads: $10–20
- Listing ads: $5–15

## Add value instead of discounting

When a buyer pushes on price, add a bonus placement, a second send, or first-party performance reporting — keep the rate, grow the deal.

Where Letterhead fits: design inventory, place and track every ad across one newsletter or hundreds, and generate sponsor reports in seconds — direct, self-service, and programmatic in one place.

Read the full guide: presentations.tryletterhead.com • Book a no-cost test drive: tryletterhead.com/lp/test-drive.html