🔴 Local newsletter makes six figures

ft. Michael Kauffman of Catskill Crew and The Newsletter Club

Author

Francis Zierer
December 20, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 16 minutes

Your guide to the newsletter world — new stories every Friday. Brought to you by beehiiv.

Today’s guest is Michael Kauffman, a skilled local newsletter operator whose Catskill Crew weekly is projected to make over six figures this November and December alone. It’s barely one year old. He’s also the creator of The Newsletter Club, a private community for other local newsletter operators around the US and beyond.

In this issue:

  • 📖 Building and refining a playbook for the future of local news

  • 🪴 Validating an audience with organic growth leads to affordable paid growth

  • 📰 Balancing creative desire with business pragmatism

— Francis Zierer, Editor

P.S. We have a podcast! Listen to our full interview with Michael or watch it on YouTube.

Local media is dying; long live local media

As recently as 2005, there were 7,325 local newspapers across the US. That number dropped to 4,562 in 2024, as reported by the Medill School of Journalism.

Michael Kauffman’s newsletter, Catskill Crew, has the look and function of a country store bulletin board; events happening over the next week, an old photo here and there, bits of news there. It is categorically not a newspaper but offers a model for replenishing some of that number. (Check out a recent issue).

This is the second person I’ve interviewed this year to build a profitable business around a local newsletter (Ryan Sneddon was the first). More than he is a content creator, though Michael is a serial founder; in this case, the point is moot. He’s been building brands for a decade, “from beverage companies to digital health companies to hospitality.”

“I can't just create for the fun of it because I know in order to continue on that journey, there needs to be monetization, and you can't just thrust monetization into something without the cohesiveness of the long-term vision.

So how do you build something? I always use the word authentic. If it's not authentic, you ain't going too far in the long run. You identify those opportunities as a creator and then bring a perspective, or bring someone on board who has a perspective of, hey, long-term, this is how we can monetize.”

Michael started Catskill Crew in October 2023. His first subscriber was his mom. He “pretty quickly” gained 200, then 300 subscribers — just engaging on Reddit and Instagram, sharing the link with people he found looking for things to do in the Catskills.

By the time the list numbered around 1,000 subscribers, Michael started putting on ticketed events; they’ve all sold out. It’s a revenue stream, but all the more, a way to deepen relationships with his audience; he’s a small business owner interacting with members of his community, who are often small business owners themselves.

Today — just over a year on — the audience is around 12,000.

Meta ads (a first time for everything)

“I always thought, if I can't grow this thing organically, then I can't grow it from a paid standpoint.”

Once he’d caught enough traction — built up a large enough audience while sustaining open and click rates — Michael began running Meta ads. This was a year in; he had around 3,900 subscribers. A month after turning on ads, he had around 7,7000 subscribers. That number, as I write this, is nearly two months old; he’s since cracked 12,000.

A solid CPA — cost per acquisition, or how much you spend to acquire one subscriber on average — for a newsletter is around $2.00. Michael, probably due to the extremely specific nature of his audience, is operating at around a $0.20 to $0.50 CPA depending on the week. Another reason is he validated the organic audience first; he found content-market fit before spending money to ignite the market.

A currently live Catskill Crew ad. The caption reads: "If you live in the Catskills, you need to subscribe to Catskill Crew" - Julie A.

He’d never managed paid ads before, but he learned how from a member of The Newsletter Club, a peer group he started this past August for other local newsletter operators (more on that below).

The potential audience is quite large — the Catskills region is a popular tourist destination with population of 500,000 to above 1,000,000 depending on the season — but 12,000 people is more than enough for Michael to generate a healthy income.

One newsletter, multiple revenue streams

On any given week, newsletter sponsorships are probably Michael’s most reliable source of revenue. He didn’t share the average price per ad; he just sets prices that he thinks best represent the value of the audience to any given advertiser and works with them from there.

He’s also quick to clarify that the “next 60 days” described in the above tweet are better than average:

“Not every month is like that. There's been times when I say no to advertisers for two months straight. I said no to most advertisers for three months early on because I thought it would dilute the brand.

Yeah, there's some good money coming in right now. Who knows if that will sustain, but I think if you are patient and protective of your brand, it's almost inevitable.”

(Editor’s note: I followed up the day before publishing this piece to see if the 60-day revenue forecast had held. It hadn’t — manufacturing issues, including on a board game that represented at least $30,000 of the merch revenue, pushed the forecast out another 45 days.)

The Newsletter Club

At least 60 other people are running essentially the same playbook as Michael, just in different localities in the US and beyond. That’s the number of people in The Newsletter Club, a group Michael started in August to swap strategies with other local newsletter operators.

Shape the Future The Newsletter Club is pioneering a new model for local media: a collective of independently owned local newsletters that work together and grow together.

From The Newsletter Club’s homepage.

It immediately grew to 20 members. He set a $100 fee to join, not so much to take a profit as to require some “skin in the game,” to ensure people would take it seriously. “Otherwise, we’re going to dilute the entire community, and it’s going to be zero value.”

“What I started learning quite quickly is we all have different skillsets.

Some people know to speak to sponsors. Some people know branding. Some people know Meta ads. It's a science — shout out to Philip. Automations.

Everyone has this nuance and different backgrounds, and we can all learn this even though we're in different areas. It's relatively the same playbook. And now we're at 60 members. I'm not really sure what the future of it is, but what I've come to recognize is it does represent the future of local media and journalism.”

(Editor’s note: Two weeks passed between our interview and publication. Michael informed me that, as of publication, The Newsletter Club has 73 members. I’ve kept the original count in the piece.)

The future of local media is bright

Michael and his peers in The Newsletter Club are businesspeople, not journalists. I asked him if the group talks much about adding traditional journalism to their offerings — about hiring trained journalists to create original reporting on local news.

“I do think that as local newspapers continue to die out, and their quality just tanks, it opens up a gap in the market for local newsletters.

Most importantly, it actually creates a need because local businesses no longer have any way to communicate with the local community.”

Quality journalism is difficult to produce, and journalism, in general, provokes a more polarizing reaction than ever nowadays. It’s a risk and probably a revenue sink for products like Catskill Crew.

I asked Michael for more specifics on how he and his peers in The Newsletter Club talk about adding traditional reporting to their products. All 60-some members of the group, Michael says, have started with events. “It’s an easy way to drive early value for subscribers.” The service is curation; most communities have local calendars in existing local newspapers or on Facebook, but “they’re garbage.”

“I think we will see an expansion of content buckets. I'm looking at opportunities to partner with local journalists to have another version of proper Crew news, which I do not necessarily write. I want to have contributors, and I want to protect this brand and this voice.

Most of the [existing local] news here is like, how many ads do you have to read through, how much distrust is there?

How do you create a trustful, authentic voice in this region that actually drives real value?”

Over in Inbox Collective this week, Dan Oshinsky and Claire Zulkey asked 20 newsletter writers what they wish they’d known before launching their newsletter. Ryan Broderick, a journalist and former Spotlight guest) gave an answer I found telling.

“I wish I had been more aggressive in the beginning about figuring out the business side of Garbage Day. I didn’t have a ton of confidence in the project or belief that it could be a media company of any size. I thought it would just be a fun thing, and I treated it like that for too long. […]

I think it is a very journalistic impulse to write that stuff off, partly because of the culture of journalism — you shouldn’t know what’s going on the other side of the office. This attitude, “Good journalism will become good business,” isn’t useful when you’re on your own. Nobody is going to do it for you.”

Ryan Broderick in Inbox Collective

Michael and his peers started by planning “the business side” of their newsletters; they started with that “confidence in the project”. This business-journalist or business-creative divide is stark. Local newspapers will continue to die, and savvy businesspeople like Michael will continue to fill the gap with local newsletters. They’re not obliged to hire traditional journalists.

This model is still easily replicable. The local newsletter market is far from saturated. Journalists would do well to follow the playbook being refined in The Newsletter Club and create a sustainable platform for their reporting work — or find a way to work with these new media brands.

The opportunity is there. Take it from Michael:

“How do you create this audience in the right way, and how do you monetize it appropriately? The fun thing for me is every audience and every newsletter has a different puzzle to solve. It's a different opportunity to monetize.

I've been building startups for 14, 15 years. Doing a newsletter is the most fun I've ever had in my entire career. And I think everyone should do it. You all have an authentic voice.”

Connect with Michael on Twitter.
Join the waitlist for The Newsletter Club.
Subscribe to Catskill Crew.

🎙️ We covered much more on the pod than could fit in this newsletter. Listen for:

  • 🎩 Selling $30k worth of Catskills-themed board games

  • 🤔 How Michael validates and executes ideas for Catskill Crew spinoff business

  • 🎣 How launching a second newsletter is easier (i.e., Michael’s 1-800-FLY-FISH)

  • 🎨 Building a strong, scalable newsletter brand

  • 📧 More advice from Michael’s peers in The Newsletter Club

Listen on your preferred podcast platform or watch on YouTube.

Monetizing a newsletter is a matter of trust and partnerships

A platform-style newsletter business like Catskill Crew can be lucrative long-term, but you have to be patient short-term. Done well, a newsletter like this truly serves and brings a community together. It just needs to earn people’s trust.

It should be said that Michael was already financially stable going into this project. He didn’t need to be greedy. He could say no to advertisers. That ability and willingness to say no to partnerships that compromise a brand is hugely important.

“It's really hard to start a newsletter and start monetizing on day one.

If you have an existing audience, sure. But if you're starting from scratch, even if you dump a bunch of money into ads, no one trusts you. No one knows who you are. You have two newsletters out and you're still finding your voice.

Grow organic until you can really figure out who you're talking to, what your voice is, and build that trust.”

Audience trust is invaluable; it’s what allows Michael to build lucrative partnerships with local businesses.

“The biggest newsletters will continue to bring on big advertisers on a CPM basis. I don't work with CPMs.

I go to every different type of advertiser, and say, ‘Okay, this is what you want. This is what you need. This is what I think is fair.’

If they're like, ‘Whoa, that's ridiculous,’ I don't apologize; I try to work with them because I believe in the value of what I'm doing. Working with me is not an advertisement; it's a partnership. It's a true promotion — me giving you my blessing and then opening up the door to my subscribers.”

Here’s a slide from a workshop Michael recently ran for The Newsletter Club showing his process, including an occasional play of giving a partner free ad space at the start.

Listen to the latest episode of Tasteland, the weekly podcast about media, tech, and business hosted by Spotlight editor Francis Zierer and Dirt Media CEO Daisy Alioto.

This week we’re joined by Joshua Citarella, a writer, researcher, and podcaster known for covering online Gen Z political extremism.

On the docket: Josh defines accelerationism(s), how he'd redesign social media as part of the post office, envelopes as law and technology, manifestos, podcasting with Destiny, his Doomscroll pod, and more.

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