How do You Grow Local Newsletters?

While there are several ways to monetize a newsletter, local newsletters are primarily advertising businesses.

In the previous article, I introduced the “local newsletter” business model.

We observed that the particular advertisers with the highest willingness to pay for ads in a local newsletter fall in one of two categories:

1. Local businesses with high customer lifetime value (e.g. dentists, lawyers, cosmetic surgeons)
2. Large corporations with a significant local presence.

However, in order to sell ads, you need an audience.

So, how do local newsletters grow?

In this article, I’ll answer that question by again using the Naptown Scoop as a case study.

How Did the Naptown Scoop Grow?

While I don’t have access to the Naptown Scoop’s subscriber data, I’m able to piece together the Naptown Scoop’s growth from several external sources. ¹

Here’s what we find:

At the end of 2024, the Naptown Scoop has reached about 21,000 subscribers.

What can we say about the rate of the Naptown Scoop’s growth?

• In the first 16 months, from mid August 2020 to mid December 2021, the Naptown Scoop grew to 11,000 subscribers.
• In the 36 months since then, the Naptown Scoop has grown another 10,000 subscribers.

Why was the early growth so much faster? Two reasons.

First, Ryan was running hard at Facebook ads through 2021. However, on two occasions, he ran out of money. After the second incident, he shut down Facebook ads. ²

Second, the Naptown Scoop’s growth is naturally limited by the size of its total addressable market (TAM).

That begs the question: what is Naptown Scoop’s market?

Understanding the Annapolis Market

The Naptown Scoop primarily covers events and news in Annapolis: the state capitol of Maryland, and the home of the United States Naval Academy.

The core market includes Annapolis, which has a population of 41,000 people, but also includes some towns that surround it:

• Arnold: 25,000 people
• Parole: 16,000 people
• Kent Island: 20,000 people

These towns border Annapolis, and people in these towns will frequently visit Annapolis recreationally both during the week and on weekends.

We have an idea of the geography of the Naptown Scoop’s Total Addressable Market (TAM), but what do we know about the people living in this market?

Source: 2022 American Community Survey

The figure shows us that Annapolis is fairly demographically diverse. What about income?

Source: 2023 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates

There’s wide disparity in income by family type, but married-couple families are quite wealthy, with a median income of $162,236.

This is reflected additionally in the housing market: over half of single-family homes in Annapolis are worth more than $500,000:

Source: 2023 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates

Annapolis’s wealth is even more evident when we look at the income distribution, rather than simply at median income.

Source: 2022 American Community Survey

For most of the income distribution, Annapolis doesn’t vary that much from the national average.

However…

Look in particular all the way at the right hand side of the chart.

Over 19% of Annapolis households make more than $200,000 a year, compared to just 11% of households on average in the United States.

Ryan is aware of his market’s wealth, as demonstrated by this clip:

If you want to attract high-ticket advertisers - luxury real estate agents, for example - you want rich people in your market, and you want them reading your local newsletter. ³

So how did Ryan get these subscribers? To start - it was (almost) all Facebook ads.

Growth by Facebook Ads

Facebook ads are the number one tool for growing a local newsletter.

There are other growth methods - both organic and paid - but for local newsletters in particular, Facebook ads cannot be beat.

Why are Facebook ads so important?

Facebook allows unparalleled geographic targeting, demographic targeting, and optimization to find the best match between your offer and the audience most receptive to it.

So, who was most often signing up for the Naptown Scoop?

Middle-aged women!

Why does this demographic disproportionately sign up for newsletters?

I have some hypotheses:

• Women may care more about locally relevant news and events than men.
• Women may care more about being social than men.
• The personal branding of a “locally-owned” newsletter with a folksy/casual tone may resonate more emotionally with women.
• Older people may read newsletters more than younger people.
• Older women may use Facebook more than older men/younger women.

IMPORTANT: All of the above are speculative and concern averages.

But what’s certain is that something about the Naptown Scoop’s “offer” resonated with middle-aged women.

Cost of Facebook Ads

How much did Ryan spend on Facebook ads? In an earlier clip, Ryan states that he spent about $25,000 total on Facebook ads.

In this tweet, Ryan suggests he cut off ads once they exceeded $2/CPA:

In this video, Ryan suggests that he would sometimes have ads under $1.50/subscriber, and sometimes under $1/subscriber.

We can guesstimate that the Naptown Scoop’s Facebook ads cost about $1.50/subscriber.

How does this CPA compare to other local newsletters? I believe they’re quite high.

The best Facebook performing Facebook ads I’ve seen are those of Michael Kauffman’s “Catskill Crew” newsletter:

The differences in relative CAC between Naptown Scoop and Catskill Crew could reflect wealth differences in the markets or particular targeted demographics, but given their magnitude, the more likely explanation is differences in the quality of the ads themselves.

Let’s compare the ad which Ryan said he ran for half his Facebook ad spend to one of the Catskill Crew’s recent ads:

Which ad is better? Here’s a few things I notice:

• The Catskill Crew uses a scenic archetypal local background (likely generated with Midjourney), while the Naptown Scoop’s ad uses a generic woman.
  • Using a woman makes sense for ads targeting women, but the Catskill Crew’s ad imagery may be more of a pattern interrupt.
• The Catskill Crew’s ad precisely defines the pain point and the solution, whereas the Naptown Scoop’s ad text is more vague (“news” doesn’t always help you figure out “what’s happening”).

The main lesson is to study carefully other newsletters’ ads, test your ads ruthlessly, and to also look outside just newsletter ads for ad inspiration.

Other Growth Methods

While Facebook ads are by far the most important growth method for local newsletters, there are several other methods worth considering.

Note: Entire articles can be written on each of these methods, and I’ve barely scratched the surface on Facebook ads. I’ll unpack more details in future articles.

Instagram

The most important growth method other than Facebook ads is Instagram. Here’s Ryan assessment of top subscriber sources:

Instagram is useful as a method of acquiring newsletter subscribers, engaging with existing subscribers, and sourcing news and events.

However, additionally, an Instagram account is a valuable asset in its own right for additional advertising revenue.

Here’s an example of sponsored content with a Mazda dealership in the Instagram account of La Isla Flow, a Puerto Rico-based local newsletter:

There’s significant nuance to effectively using Instagram. I’ll write an article on Instagram strategy in the future.

Facebook Groups

Most cities will have Facebook groups where residents discuss community information and local events.

While many of these groups are filled with spam, you can find some groups with high engagement.

If you can thread the needle of plugging your newsletter without getting banned for self-promotion, a single post going viral in a targeted group can yield hundreds of free subscribers.

Ryan got over 600 new subscribers in one weekend when his newsletter was shared in a Facebook group:

Reddit

Reddit has a similar dynamic to Facebook with some important differences.

For most cities, there will only be a single subreddit for that market.

Reddit typically has more Internet savvy users than Facebook, which means you have to be even more careful about threading the needle between self-promotion and providing value.

A strategy worth trying is to post each week the top events this weekend, with a link to your newsletter at the bottom of the post. This way, people get value without having to go to your website.

Don’t be surprised when eventually Reddit gets tired of your posts… Redditors are a finicky bunch.

Other Paid Growth

Besides Facebook ads, there are a few other paid growth methods worth considering:

• Reddit ads
• TikTok ads (for now, only if you’re outside the United States)
• Deals with local influencers to advertise your newsletter.

A nice example of the latter is this post sponsored by the Denver-based newsletter DNVR Curated:

milehighandhungry is a Denver-based Instagram food influencer with 185,000 followers.

DNVR Curated collaborated with milehighandhungry on a sweepstakes where if a user likes the post, follows both milehighandhungry and the newsletter on IG, signs up for the weekly events text, and/or reposts the post on their story, they get $500 in cash and $800 in gift cards to local venues.

Is this a good deal for DNVR Curated? The two posts they made got 3700 likes in aggregate, so that’s an upper bound on the number of subscribers they got.

If they paid milehighandhungry $700, paid $1300 for the sweepstakes prize, and got 3000 subscribers, that’s a $0.60 CAC - which is pretty good.

These kinds of deals are definitely worth experimenting with - just measure your CAC and subscriber quality rigorously.

Offline Growth

Finally, you can always grow your newsletter through in-person interaction, i.e. shaking babies and kissing hands shaking hands and kissing babies.

Here’s a few offline strategies:

• Go to events and tell people about your newsletter.
• Wear clothing with your newsletter logo (or even a QR code).
• Do free photography for an event, and put the photos on your newsletter behind a “sign-up wall” which requires users to sign up for your newsletter to see the photos.

What Growth Methods Should You Use?

I’ve presented several options for growth. Which should you use? Here are my thoughts:

1. Everyone should run Facebook ads. If you don’t have $10-20/day for Facebook ads, you should not be running a newsletter.
2. Pursue subreddits/Facebook groups early on. However, recognize that eventually those groups will get tired of your posts, and quickly you’ll have acquired all subscribers available through these channels.
3. As soon as you have SoPs set up around newsletter content, start developing similar SoPs for Instagram.
4. Consider other growth methods after nailing Facebook/Instagram. But consider the value of your time when deciding on a growth method - you might be better off just working your day job and reinvesting that into Facebook ads than taking on a new growth method.

Conclusion

In this article, we’ve covered several growth methods for local newsletters.

However, in order to keep newsletter subscribers, you need to have a content strategy and an approach to efficiently create that content.

In the next article, we’ll do a comparative analysis of different local newsletters’ content strategies.

Footnotes

1. The sources are: the Naptown Scoop itself, the Life of Scoop newsletter, YouTube videos and podcasts where Ryan has discussed the Naptown Scoop, and Ryan’s Twitter account. ↩

2. We will discuss in more detail profitability in the next article. ↩

3. I’m making an economic claim here, not a normative one. ↩