If 2025 was the year newsletters proved their staying power, 2026 will be the year they become the center of the content economy.
While every social platform is wrestling with algorithm volatility, shifting content policies, and AI-curated feeds, email will continue doing what it has always done: reliably reaching opt-in audiences through creator-owned distribution.
It’s more predictable.
More measurable.
More owned.
When someone subscribes, they’re opting into an ongoing, permission-based relationship.
You commit to showing up with useful, relevant work; they commit to opening, reading, and responding. That mutual agreement is rare in a landscape where almost everything else is pushed by feeds and algorithms, rather than intentionally requested.
For this report, we pulled newsletter growth and monetization data from across beehiiv and spoke with leading newsletter founders, operators, and publishing experts to understand what’s driving the next phase of email-first publishing.
The data tells the story:
Publishers sent 28 billion emails last year and reached more than 255 million unique readers.
Engagement is rising too, with open rates hitting 41%+, even as inbox competition grows.
Publishers earned millions across ads, paid subscriptions, partnerships, boosts, and hybrid monetization stacks that didn't exist a few years ago.
New monetization tools helped creators earn faster: for newsletters launched in 2025, the median time to a first dollar dropped to 66 days.
Paid subscriptions, the strongest-performing revenue channel, generated $19M in 2025 vs. $8M in 2024, a 138% jump, driven by niche creators delivering specialized expertise.
It shows what actually worked in 2025 and what will drive results in 2026: the benchmarks, the growth engines, the revenue shifts, and the creative decisions behind breakout newsletters.
Newsletters you read every day — publishers like TIME, Half Baked, Girlboss, Status News, Generalist World, Garbage Day, LNI Media, The Pour Over, Tyler Denk, Austin Rief, and Michael Kauffman — are treating newsletters like media companies. They built communities, ran events, launched companion formats, and gave their audiences reasons to stick around.
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Snapshot: The State of Email Newsletters in 2025
To get an inside look at the newsletter industry, we went deep into the data: everything from open rates across dozens of industry newsletters to trends across paid subscriptions, subscriber growth, and more.
We also spoke to leading creators and newsletter publishers to get their take on where we’re at right now and where the biggest opportunities are in the year ahead.
In 2025, we saw the influence of several key trends in the email newsletter landscape:
