What to charge for sponsorships on your newsletter

TL;DR

Start with $.50/click. Adjust down if you're having trouble filling inventory; adjust up if you're consistently booked.

Where'd you come up with that number?

We looked at 170 newsletters across newsletter advertising marketplaces like Passionfroot, Sponsorgap, and Paved — selecting only newsletters which fit the following criteria:

1. Published subscriber counts and click rates;
2. Published sticker rates for pricing;
3. Actually had bookings.

From there, the math is simple: sticker_price / (subscriber_count * click_rate). The median came out to a very satisfying 0.52 cost-per-click.

This is, of course, a naive inquiry — these numbers vary based on niche, brand reputation, and a thousand other things. But if you're jumping into sponsorships for the first time (on either side of the table!), this is a good heuristic to anchor to.

What about affiliate pricing?

Some larger, more sophisticated sponsorships go instead with an affiliate model: rather than charging per click, they charge per conversion. Some examples as pulled from PostApex:

• DigitalOcean pays out an 8% affiliate fee for all sales generated
• 99designs pays out $4 per sale
• ClickUp pays out $15 per lead

Affiliate pricing can be very attractive for two reasons:

1. Most affiliate links are self-serve and require very little creative back-and-forth. They can be good 'mortar ads' to fill in empty slots in your booking schedule.
2. If you've got a particularly niche-y newsletter and a sponsor that's going to appeal strongly with the niche, you can capture more value by aligning your revenue with theirs.

...but it's hard to jump right into the affiliate game. Conversions are rare and noisy (meaning subject to statistical noise) relative to just having a simple sticker rate.