Sizing the paid email newsletter market. Some thoughts.

I am recovering from personal challenges. I made some big mistakes, so bear with me. I am not saying this to get sympathy. This is disclosure.

The email newsletter as a business (subscription) is a very interesting entrepreneurial journey for me to analyze.

A few years ago, I was at Amazon. Most of you have heard of "Amazon Sellers". There were < 200 of them a decade ago, and now there are 2.5+ Million Amazon Sellers today. (source: https://www.marketplacepulse.com/marketplaces-year-in-review-2019).

Of those 2.5 Million sellers, about 20K make more $1 Million in sales. About 100K make over $100K annual in sales. (source: https://www.marketplacepulse.com/amazon/number-of-sellers)

These are entrepreneurs who mostly dont take control of inventory. They list their products on Amazon, source them from multiple locations (mostly China), ship them to Amazon warehouses (FBA) and have consumers purchase them directly, so Amazon Ships them. They are truly digital entrepreneurs.

With that background, lets move to paid email curators / writers.

There are likely about 1-2K PAID email curated entrepreneurs today (source: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/10/substack-revue-email-newsletter-startups-tinyletter/599557/)

Roughly about 100K subscribers pay for content. If you add the total subscriber list to all email (free included) then that is about 2-5% of all email subscribers who pay. (source: https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/03/the-dispatch-surpassed-1-million-in-revenue-by-being-newsletters-and-podcasts-first-and-taking-it-slow/)

If you take data from NYTimes, WSJ and Washington Post, the rough number to keep in mind is 7-10% of readers are subscribers. Rest are free, except for WSJ. So I am going to say there is still room for many "free readers" to becomes subscribers, given it is only 2-5% for paid to free email newsletter subscribers. (source: https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/346871/news-corp-records-35-million-subscribers-wsj-c.html)

The largest individual entrepreneur who has a paid newsletter is reportedly making $3 Million a year. (source - https://medium.com/hyperlinked/ben-thompsons-stratechery-should-be-crossing-3-million-in-profits-this-year-c146433f0458?)

If you roughly play this out a few years, (2020 - 2025) I estimate the 100K subscribers will increase to about 1 Million - 2 Million.

Why?

1. Data from FIPP and auditedmedia.com indicates 6 million overall subscribers to physical magazines (world) and over 12 Million for newspapers (source: https://knowledge.auditedmedia.com/news-views/6-things-learn-in-mm360-report).

These are people who already pay for "offline content" - think of this like going to the grocery store circa March 2020. A significant # of them moved to Instacart and others. That will happen to digital publications as well.

2. The growth in subscribers, if it mirrors the growth of Medium, Netflix or Spotify, will land about 10% of the existing within 5 years. So take 18 million subscribers above from point #1 and you end up with 10% at between 1 and 2 million. (source: https://www.businessinsider.com/netflix-subscribers-chart-2017-1)

This creates a LOT of opportunities for creators, newsletter publishers, software developers and others.

If I were to mirror the cottage industry around Amazon Sellers from before, the industry around helping Amazon Sellers itself is about 2-5% of the total sales that Amazon Sellers generate. There are over 600 tools, products and software solutions for Amazon Sellers (source: https://startupbros.com/amazon-seller-tools/)

Build away.