Some Brief Updates

I am a radical advocate of transparency and want to let you know the current state of Young Money. Here are a few updates.

1. Young Money’s first two sponsors
2. Please fill out this 8-question survey.
3. I didn’t sell Forbes my blog for $5M (I love April Fools Day).

You may have noticed that the welcome email included an “audience questionnaire”. Since I started, my following has grown to include 5,000 readers around the globe.

To better understand you, I have created an anonymous eight-question survey. The goal of this survey is to help me understand you better, to continue to write content that’s relevant to you, and to partner with sponsors who will be interested in you. Please take 42 seconds to complete the survey below.

Let’s talk about sponsors. Companies will pay bloggers to include a brief statement and a sponsored image at the start/end of thier posts.

What a cool idea!

I have a multi-billion dollar sponsor that is changing the way we invest across many asset classes. You’ll see them soon; I hope you find them just as fascinating as I do.

Yes, I want sponsors to pay to advertise on my site. Every writer dreams of being paid for their work. But I can assure you of one thing. If I am to partner with a company, I must personally use their products or services. It is unlikely that I will promote a new cryptocurrency or an NFT project.

I have declined a few sponsors, including an NFT project (lmao), because they didn’t fit with what I was building. I will not compromise my brand or my relationship with you for quick money.

It is true that sponsors are an asset because they enable me to devote more time to this blog, without worrying about my next paycheck.

Please fill out the form above if you can spare a moment. Knowing my audience is key to finding sponsors. I’ll also mention the form in Thursday’s article, so those who missed today’s will be able to catch it this week.

Thanks, you guys rock

The actual article.

The Economics of Online Writing

I didn’t know how online writing made money until a few weeks ago. My finance course taught me to calculate the weighted average cost of capital and Career Services at Mercer University helped with my resume. But, how I turned keystrokes into cash flow remained a mystery.

Last week, I realized: Most of my readers probably don’t understand how this works.

Now that I am operating in the weeds, it’s interesting to see how the process works.

You’ve come to a good place if you want to blog online or are curious about how the “business” works.

There are three main ways to earn money by creating online content:

• Paid Subscription Model
• Cross-postings on other sites
• Free Content with Ads

Let’s take a look at them.

Paid Subscriptions

This is the simplest of all three. Your readers pay $____ a week, month or year to access your content. Paid subscriptions are used by publications of all sizes – from billion dollar corporations like Bloomberg to individual newsletters.

Paid Subscriptions are great for writers. Revenue is easily tracked, and they don’t need to spend their time on finding sponsors or building partnerships. They can just create content and have your audience pay. Paid subscriptions provide a steady stream of revenue that is less risky for writers.

The problem is that the majority of readers do not want to pay for content. A few years back, I received a discount on the Wall Street Journal for students. I do not recall ever paying for any online content. It’s a difficult situation for writers, as they have to sacrifice audience size for recurring income.

How can you encourage readers to pay for content?

Offer a great deal of value that you can’t find anywhere else. Niche Content is King. Edwin Dorsey is another writer my age who has done an amazing job with his newsletter, The Bear Cave .

In his newsletter, Dorsey highlights fraudulent and questionable corporate activities. Every week, he posts a free-curated list of management resignations, activist report, and relevant Tweets. He then releases premium report highlighting red-flags at certain public companies.

The reports are very valuable to investors. Hundreds of readers pay him 40 dollars a month in order to access his reports. What was the result? In June last year, he made $300k per month from subscriptions.

 

This is real after a year of free newsletters and six months as a paid one:

Subscribers: 750
Subscribe for free to 15,000 subscribers
$300k (before fees) ARR

For anyone thinking about launching a newsletter, some early learnings in the thread below https://t.co/iur4TA374r

Edwin Dorsey, @StockJabber
Jun 7, 2021

The content behind paywalls is not widely circulated, so it’s hard to scale up a premium email newsletter. Edwin’s marketing is based on his free content, which expands the audience. Over time, a percentage of free subscribers will convert into paid subscribers.

It doesn’t require many subscribers to earn a decent living. Just 1,000 readers can bring in $120k per year if you charge $10 a month. It’s not bad at all, is it?

Cross-Posts

A friend of mine, who writes a newsletter called the Alpha Letter that includes microcap stocks as well as broader market commentary reached out to ask if I’d like to guest post on his website.

I replied, “Sure!” and sent him a piece for publication the following week. His audience liked it, so I write a weekly guest post. I have benefited greatly from these guest posts for several reasons.

• The work is credited to me with an introduction paragraph that links back to my website
• I can cross-pollinate with his wider audience
• Cross-posting allows me to avoid additional work.
• I get a share of the advertising revenue generated by my cross-postings

The Alpha Letter also benefits from this agreement: He receives additional content for his newsletter, without having to write any new articles.

1+1 = 3.

As soon as I saw how successful my partnership with Alpha Letter was, I started looking for other opportunities. Since January, I’ve guest-posted on at least four different newsletters.

The first question in the survey I link to at the top this week is, “How did YOU find Young Money?” Results confirm my previous suspicions. cross posts work well. Nearly half of the 37 first responses indicated they found my work through 3rd-party websites and newsletters.

Some of these were guest posts that were carefully planned, and others were individuals who shared pieces they liked on their site. Cross-posting can be a great way to grow your audience.

Ad-free content

Internet advertising is as old as the Internet itself. AT&T placed the first banner advertisement on HotWired.com in 1994. Here’s a little piece of history:

This first banner advertisement had an astonishing click rate of 44%. Internet moves quickly, and banner advertisements today have a pathetic 0.05% click-through rate.

Advertisement space is always changing, as marketers understand that consumers dislike these ads. Brands are now looking to sponsor and partner with popular content instead of using ineffective banner/popup ads. Morning Brew is an excellent example. It was sold to Business Insider in 2020 for $75M.

Packy McCormick’s Not Boring, and Litquidity’s Exec sum are two young blogs/newsletters who have also taken advantage of ad sponsorship as a monetization method.

Packy publishes long-form blogs about tech and finance trends two times per week. Exec Sum, meanwhile, is a daily newsletter that covers headlines, stock exchange movements, deal flows across public and private markets, as well as memes.

The monetization methods are similar, despite the differences in content. Sponsors pay for advertising on both publications’ posts. Below are two examples of sponsored ads.

These sponsored ads, unlike annoying pop-ups, are at the start of the article, and do not disrupt the flow.

Apple’s iOS 14.5, which was released in September, has made email newsletters more valuable to marketing departments. Users must now opt-in before social media platforms like Facebook can see their data. While this change is harmless to users, it has caused a major disruption in Facebook’s ad system.

Email campaigns outperform social media campaigns because users tend to be more engaged with their email inboxes. Apple’s latest update has only increased this disparity.

Don’t be surprised if you see “Together With ______” near the top of your post.

This sponsored thing can be taken a step farther. Instead of paying for an advertisement to be placed on the newsletter, can be the advertisement.

Companies who want to increase exposure sometimes pay creators to write about their business in detail. Packy is a master of this technique, writing a sponsored “deep dive article” per week. Mario Gabrielle’s The Generalist, and Litquidity’s Exec Sum also use this model.

These deep dives are lucrative for the writer and increase brand awareness. They also create a good reference for the sponsor. The audience gets to read about exciting companies. This type of work can cost $50k+ to a large newsletter.

Some recent examples:

• Exec Sum’s FTX piece
• Not Boring’s Ramp Piece
• The Generalist’s OpenSea Piece ( This piece may or not be sponsored*).

What a neat idea, no?

Wrapping up

It’s not necessary to write for Bloomberg or Forbes in order to earn money online. You must produce consistently high-quality content. Your target audience and content area will determine whether you choose premium subscriptions or ads. You are the only one in the United States who writes a major newsletter about lacrosse? You could probably paywall this bad boy. You have a money blog named after Lil Wayne’s entertainment company. You should probably stick to sponsorships.

I hope this helped you understand what happens on the other end of this laptop. I’ll see you Thursday.