🔴 Two decades of experience in digital media revenue

Today’s guest is Michelle Curb, co-founder of the women’s lifestyle newsletter Gloria and a digital media monetization expert with nearly two decades of experience working with outlets like Eater, Curbed, Racked, Lucky Peach, and PUNCH.

Gloria, which began publishing in early 2021, is her first venture as a founder, alongside Leslie Price, her editorial co-founder.

In this issue:

• 🥃 Selling ads in the early days of Eater, Curbed, and Racked

• 💹 Growing (and monetizing) a new digital media business

• 🤳 Building a brand that stands on its own, not a personal brand

— Francis Zierer, Editor

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

Selling ads in the mid 2000s

Michelle Curb’s first media job, in the mid 2000s, was a year-long stint at 7×7 Magazine, a Bay Area publication where she sold ad space to home, design, and real-estate businesses. By 2008, she was at Eater, where, when she left nearly 5 years later, she’d held the title of Sales Director for Eater, Curbed, and Racked.

At the time, a colleague told Michelle that Nick Denton, founder of Gawker and an investor in Curbed and Eater, had said he “didn’t think anyone would ever buy an ad on Eater; it’ll be Curbed that’ll make all the money.” She thought he had it all wrong — the reason she wanted the job was she knew liquor companies were clamoring for regional ad space. Food culture was evolving at the time: “Chefs were becoming celebrities and Top Chef was the hottest thing.”

She was right; she had no trouble selling ad space in Eater. The hardest brand in the portfolio to sell, she recalls, was Racked — “fashion didn’t like digital at the time. They thought it was too gutter. They [were] just like, ‘we don’t want to be on the internet. We still want to be glossy Vogue.’”

By the time Michelle moved on from that role, she’d met future Gloria co-founder, Leslie Price, who was the founding editor at Racked — “she was the voice behind that. And it was just incredible, [she’s] such a skilled editor and creator.”

Hello, Gloria

Gloria, launched in 2021, is a lifestyle media brand built for women who, as the brand says, aren’t yet “old,” but aren’t still “young.” Michelle and Leslie, both now mothers in their earlier 40s, saw a gap in the market — no outlets were serving a cohesive product covering what people them and their friends were talking about. Gloria is that product. It’s a mix of fashion recommendations, interviews with successful women authors and journalists, and articles about topics like sexual health, parenting, and divorce.

They first started discussing the concept in 2018, when, consulting for an undisclosed newsletter startup targeting women in their 20s, Michelle started noticing something:

She and Leslie started seriously talking about what would become Gloria but they wouldn’t send their first issue until April 2021. One problem they were grappling with: a sense in the industry that no one wanted to advertise to women their age. “I think that used to be true, but I don’t think that’s true anymore,” Michelle told me. Case in point: Gloria’s ad inventory has been sold out all year, with enough demand that they, as of this week, they’ve increased publishing cadence from one weekly send to two, in part to accommodate demand.

The other market state blocking the Gloria co-founders from moving forward was that “media was really about scale at that time.” Neither of them cared to produce mass quantities of content just to distribute on social media platforms where they wouldn’t really own or even reliably reach their audience.

Michelle and Leslie have purposefully designed the brand not to be about them — they have an Instagram, but you won’t see their faces on it. They’re “not people who like to live online,” and it’s “not what [they] want to build.” They dream of an eventual exit uncomplicated by the brand being tied to their personalities; the goal is for it to live on without them someday.

Doubling revenue every year

Three-and-a-half years — or around 170 weekly issues — in, Gloria is not yet profitable, but it’s been generating ad revenue since last year.

Michelle declined to share how many people currently subscribe to Gloria. She did say the open rate is currently “between 50% and 60%, and we do put a lot of links, so 30% of readers are clicking on something.”

The full-time team is just the two co-founders, who both work full-time on the business; they both “have pretty active family lives and never feel like this is pulling away from that. It’s actually perfect.” They work with freelance designers as needed. Every issue includes an original article, sometimes from Leslie, but usually from a cast of freelance writers.

Michelle’s responsibilities include paid advertising on Meta, sourcing new advertisers, working on ads with them, brand management — it’s all in the weeds. She says they hope to bring someone in soon, a support person who’ll allow them to work on more high-level business goals.

Growing, growing, Gloria

The Gloria audience has been built with four main tactics

• Word of mouth

• Trading recommendations with other newsletters

• Paid advertising

• Sparkloop

But that last piece comes with a caveat:

More women-run, women-focused newsletters figure in Michelle’s long-term dreams for Gloria. Asked where she’d like the project to be in five years, she mentions “a network of women’s newsletters, full of these great brands that speak to different groups of women.”

For now, the goal is clearly profitability. Since I spoke to Michelle last week, she and Leslie have begun rolling out three significant changes to help facilitate that:

• A redesign, including a move from Mailchimp to beehiiv

• A paid subscription option

• A second weekly email

The platform shift, Michelle says, will reduce their monthly email service spending to around one fifth of the former amount.

A paid subscription where there was none before is always a bet — will people subscribe? Currently, Gloria’s revenue mix is around 25% affiliate links and 75% ads; the goal is to take some of the pressure off the inherently volatile ad portion. Paid subscriptions will give access to in-person events (they’ve done book launch events in the past, moderated by Leslie). The idea is not to produce more content but to create a stronger community around the brand.

Up until now, there’s just been one email every Friday. The addition of a second newsletter, on Tuesdays, will mean producing slightly more content, but it’s more about splitting the stuffed Friday issue into two shorter, more digestible newsletters. They’d noticed readers coming back to the Friday issue multiple times over the weekend and the open rate dropping when an issue got two long — this play means to ease both pressures, while also creating more surface area for ad sales.

By the time Gloria is a profitable business, Michelle and her co-founder Leslie may have been working on it for four years. I asked if she ever misses being an employee:

Connect with Michelle on LinkedIn.
Read and subscribe to Gloria.

For the full story, listen to our podcast or watch it on YouTube.

🎙️ In the full interview on this week’s podcast:

• 💵 All of Michelle’s stories from her two decades monetizing digital media

• 📆 A closer look at the day-to-day of running Gloria

• 📈 More on how Gloria has grown

Listen on your preferred podcast platform or watch on YouTube.

Advice for creative-minded operators struggling to monetize

I asked Michelle what advice she’d give to more creative, less business-minded newsletterists based on her experience monetizing digital media brands:

Michelle says she didn’t start selling ads for Gloria until they hit 25,000 subscribers; it’s a general lifestyle brand, and maybe she would’ve started sooner if it was, for example, a high-value B2B niche.

And the type of salesperson Michelle describes here, one selling across multiple, separate newsletters, is the kind of service offered by something like beehiiv’s ad network. Any paying beehiiv user can access a slate of advertising opportunities. That long, drawn-out sales process still happens, but it’s beehiiv staff working behind the scenes to do it; it’s an economy of scale resulting in efficient access to a high number of publishers for the advertiser and easy access to a wide variety of advertisers for the publishers.

• Listen to the latest episode of Tasteland, hosted by Spotlight editor Francis Zierer and Dirt Media CEO Daisy Alioto.

  • This week: Charles Broskoski, CEO and Co-founder of Are.na, the stubbornly anti-algorithm social media platform, joins us to talk about their slow, sustainable business model, the culture the platform propagates, profound bathroom graffiti, life-changing “nodal points,” and email sign-offs.