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Ask HN: how to monetize email list?
I'm fascinated by the story of Peter Shankman and Help-A-Reporter-Out making $1m / yr just from those little sponsorship paragraphs at the top of each email. Another interesting example is IdealBite.com, which sends out daily tips on eco-friendly living to several hundred thousand subscribers and sold for like $20m last year.
But what about the smaller end of the scale? Let's say you have a handful targeted email lists with 1000 - 5000 subscribers and you're sending out emails 1-5 times per week, with a typical open rate. What's the best way to monetize this? Is there a good provider of ads for something like this? Are there firms that you can outsource your ad sales to? Would love to hear any success or failure stories on this topic.
- russell 17y agoDon't see your lists to a third party. That breaks faith with your subscribers. I subscribe to email lists that have ads. The ads dont bother me much.
- ryanwaggoner 17y agoDo you know who provides the ads?
- russell 17y agoThey are mainly newspapers. I presume the ads are their own.
- effektz 17y agoI'm not mail list expert but I have a couple decent sized lists, and I usually use them to promote products I'm selling, or cross-promote some of my other websites. I've tried putting affiliate links at the end of the emails but that hasn't been very successful so far.
- there 17y agoi know at least the sourceforge.net email lists have ads on every mail going out. hotmail did this and may still (does anyone still use hotmail?). it seems like it would be difficult for a 3rd party to provide an ad network like the many web advertisers do because the ad generation would have to be integrated into your mailing list software and run on your server, which may put it out of the reach of many list operators. perhaps you should reach out to your own subscribers and see if any of them would be interested in advertising on the list. setup a web form, run your own ad at the bottom of list emails saying "to advertise here go to ...".
- thepanister 17y agouse Amazon referral program. Just add links to items they might be interested in buying. You will earn 4% to 10% of every purchase they make on Amazon!