🔴 820k subscribers in 3 years

Making a profit sharing only positive news, ft. Sean Devlin of Nice News

Author

Francis Zierer
August 16, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 14 minutes

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

Today’s guest is Sean Devlin, a media entrepreneur whose Nice News newsletter has grown from 0 to 820k subscribers in less than three years. The company currently has seven full-time employees and at least four freelancers, and it’s been profitable for just under one year.

In this issue:

  • 🤝 Building a profitable media company through sponsored newsletters

  • 🔍️ How Nice News sources and sifts through 100s of stories every day

  • 📈 Growing the audience by hundreds of thousands yearly

— Francis Zierer, Editor

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

P.P.S. We want to hear from you. What do you think about this issue? Use the poll at the bottom to let us know.

Got any good news?

“I got to the point where I entirely disengaged with news, and through conversations with friends, family, I realized that a lot of people felt that same way. […] And it felt like, why does it have to be that way?”

One year into doomscrolling through the pandemic, having read headline after headline about fresh outbreaks and new death tallies, Sean Devlin wanted some good news. Working, at the time, as a producer at Optimism (then known as Likemind), an incubator for email-based media brands, he figured other people probably did too, and he was well-situated to bring it to them.

By October 2021, Sean had left his role at Optimism to build Nice News. His previous employer would fully fund the new initiative; he’d shifted from incubator to incubatee. By October 2023, Nice News was sending to 450k email addresses every day. They’re on track to double that this year, with Sean sharing a current subscriber count of more than 820k.

At the time of this writing, the Nice News team includes seven full-time employees and at least four additional freelancers.

Sean has owned the general manager role since the start, focusing mainly on growth and sales. He recently hired a director of partnerships, freeing him up to focus on “overall strategy for the newsletter, supporting the team, and launching new initiatives.”

The first member of the team besides Sean was Natalie Stone, who came over from People magazine as a managing editor for the new publication. She brought an associate editor with her, and a few months later, they hired a staff writer, who has grown into an assistant editor role; they’ve since hired an additional staff writer. Rounding out the full-time staff is a campaign coordinator.

Key to editorial operations, though, is a team of four freelance curators in the Philippines.

Not all good news is Nice News

A typical daily edition of the newsletter consists of: a couple of “Must Reads,” one larger story from at least three of Nice News’ eight coverage areas, five items “In Other News,” one “Something We Love,” one “Inspiring Story,” currently an “Eyes of Paris” Olympics section, and at least four “Odds & Ends.”

Add an intro note, a few ads, a referral module, and a quote of the day — you’ve got a full issue of Nice News.

But what defines nice news? Sean says it’s not strictly clear-cut: “Pretty early on, we realized that there is a gray area. It's going to be impossible to please everyone.” They’ve developed editorial guidelines to determine what makes the cut:

“[Does] this piece of content make me feel more optimistic about the world? Does this piece of content help others feel more connected to each other, or more inspired, or connected to the planet as a whole?

There are questions that allow us to determine [if], ideally, the greater majority of our subscribers are going to consider this to be nice.”

The full-time editorial staff makes the final call, but it’s the team of freelance curators, based in the Philippines, that sources the bulk of the daily content crop. By the time they’re done, it’s still early morning for the California-based editorial team and the content slate is full.

“They have a list of publications that they're referencing. In total, across the four curators, it's around 100, 120 outlets that they're referencing.

And they will provide us, through Airtable, a variety of stories for our editorial team to then look through.

Our editorial team is, of course, still looking at new stories [themselves], making sure that we're not missing anything, but it really is helpful to have that kind of initial database of content to select from.”

In other words, Nice News is primarily a tightly curated aggregation product. There’s original reporting, too, but Sean says that the majority of the daily digest is aggregated. He says they try to include at least one story that links out to the Nice News website in each daily email, with the Sunday edition always leading with an original story.

Two years to profitability

Nice News became profitable in November 2023, two years after its founding. Since September 2023, says Sean, “We’ve more than doubled revenue just because we’ve been really focused on sales.” Sean says they’ve not drastically increased costs since becoming profitable, either — the biggest cost increase came when hiring their director of partnerships.

“Over 90% of our revenue is generated in the inbox, which isn't surprising. That's our core product. It's through partnerships with brands.

So we have that format that everyone's familiar with, the local incorporation in the header. We have a primary sponsorship under the first featured story. We also added, in our evolution in March, a secondary sponsorship placement.

And then sometimes we'll feature products as well, like in the ‘Something We Love’ section or ‘Odds and Ends’, but the greater majority of our revenue is from the primary and secondary sponsorship slots within the email, working directly with brands or working through agencies.”

There is no podcast, no YouTube channel. The Instagram account does boast a following of 184k, largely built through aggregated (and credited) Reel reposts. They hadn’t posted a Reel until the week of this newsletter’s publication — this time, it’s original reporting from the Olympics. The still post still-images referencing stories from their site multiple times a week. The social channels, though, are “not a core focus,” Sean says; this is decidedly a newsletter business.

The X account is active and well-followed, but has near-zero engagement. Four times per day, it posts an article (from sources like The Guardian, Reuters, and NPR). These posts rarely get more than one like and 300 views, even though the account has 33k followers. This is hardly surprising; people don’t seem to come to the platform formerly known as Twitter for good news. Nice News and X — oil and water situation.

Sean says the newsletter itself will continue to be the core focus for the near future. As the audience grows, so too will the advertising rates — "in terms of our inventory, we’re already in a really good position.”

He also mentioned nascent plans for a “news model, in terms of the types of stories we could be producing for brands.” For example, he sees an opportunity to work with brands on corporate social responsibility initiatives.

Aggregation newsletters seem easy on the surface — just put a bunch of related links together — but they take a lot of work to do well. It’s a crowded market. Take former Spotlight guest Casey Lewis as another example; it’s a combination of research and a clear niche.

“Good news” is such a vague niche, not even really a niche; you’d think it might not work. But it wasn’t easy; it did take two years to become profitable, and it takes a team of 11+ a full day of work to maintain; 7 salaries and at least 4 freelance fees. Add infrastructural overhead and yearly operating costs are probably pushing closer to $1 million than $500k. But I’d be shocked to hear Nice News isn’t on track to bring in multiple millions in revenue this year. Given their ads run on a CPM basis, revenue will likely have doubled between their second and third anniversaries.

An ever-growing audience

A significant advantage, unfair in growing Nice News early on was cross-pollination with the full suite of media products in Optimism’s portfolio. These days, growth comes more through collaborative giveaways with other publications and paid ad campaigns. Word of mouth is big, too — people like to share good news.

The ambition is to build an email list numbering in the millions, looking at large-scale outlets like 1440, which has a reported 3.8 million subscribers, as a model — the potential audience is essentially anyone “genuinely interested in nice news in the US and Canada.” They’re well on their way.

Read or subscribe to Nice News.

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

🎙️ It’s impossible to fit every topic we talk about in this newsletter — here’s some of what we touch on in the podcast:

  • 🌞 How Nice News relates to the broader media landscape

  • 💼 What Sean learned launching 10 email media brands at Optimism

  • 🧠 Thinking about audience in terms of psychographics

To monetize through advertising, start sooner rather than later

It took about two years and 450k subscribers for Nice News to become profitable. To be fair, this was not a long-gestating creator passion project that slowly bloomed into a business; it was more of a venture capital-funded media business from the get-go. They burnt cash on salaries and advertising spend for a greater payoff down the line.

Still, Sean says they “didn’t have a ton of resources early on.” But it didn’t take them long to sell ads. I asked him for advice:

“As you start to scale, there's more opportunity for you to get in front of those brands and ultimately create relationships and do something on a flat fee basis, even if those flat fees are a little bit lower.

Maybe you bring on board one or two agencies that really prioritize your newsletter so you're not having to spend all of your time on sales and partnerships, and that can help you focus on on other things that are important. “

Henry Winslow, who we featured for his Tricycle Day newsletter in January, had similar advice. Very early on, he built out full-on “ads” for affiliate links so he’d have proven examples to show proper advertisers down the line.

It’s not just about the advertisers; effective newsletter advertising is about understanding how readers interact with a newsletter and designing it to get them in the habit of clicking the ad (at least, if that ad is cost-per-click).

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

    • This week: music festival curation, what choice of font says about AI brands, we chat Dirt editorial decisions, and Anthony Bourdain starter packs are cursed.

  • Want another story about an aggregation newsletter that built a multi-hundred-thousand subscriber list this quickly? Read our piece on AI Tool Report, ‘0–500k subscribers in 10 months’.

Thank you for reading. For more, listen to Sean’s episode of our podcast or watch it on YouTube.

Next week’s guest is Cole Derochie, a design professional who creates a daily newsletter curating design news, the fittingly named Today in Design. He’s built a list of nearly 5,000 subscribers in the last year, fully organic and word-of-mouth. It’s one of the most simply but beautifully designed newsletters we’ve featured this year.

And if you missed last week’s issue, about journalist Ambreen Ali’s grant-funded newsletter Central Desi, serving the New Jersey South Asian community while (and by) running a fellowship program training young journalists, read it here.

Talk soon,
Francis Zierer, Editor
Twitter / LinkedIn
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