beehiiv for Enterprise 2026: How Businesses Build Owned Audiences

Most companies already create content. 

But does that content build relationships a company can keep?

A useful article may earn a visit from a search. A founder’s post may travel across social media. A product launch may generate a burst of attention.

But each of these moments can disappear as quickly as they arrive unless the business gives people a reason to stay connected.

That’s where publishing—and especially email—has taken on a larger role.

• A software company can use a newsletter to teach its market, nurture prospective customers, and help new users reach value. 

• A consumer brand can turn expertise into trust, repeat purchases, and higher customer lifetime value. 

• A financial marketplace can use editorial storytelling to build the conviction required for a transaction. 

• A media organization can operate dozens of titles from one system, while an independent publisher can build products, events, subscriptions, and communities around a single editorial idea.  

These businesses sell very different things, but they share the same underlying asset: a direct audience relationship.

To understand the scale of building a digital media business in 2026, we analyzed a sample of top publications on beehiiv, including 4,755 custom domain publications across 799 of the largest business organizations on beehiiv, including 56 publications with more than 1 million subscribers. 

This sample includes both content-led businesses and businesses that use content to educate, nurture, and drive adoption of other offerings, from software and professional services to consumer goods.

Together, they represent more than:

• 200 million subscribers

• 60 billion lifetime sends

• $23 million in revenue generated on beehiiv over the past 24 months

The key finding: the newsletter is increasingly the first layer of an owned-audience business.

Studying this group gave us a clear view of what businesses are building around direct audience relationships. Media brands are running publishing portfolios. Computer software companies are using content to attract, educate, and onboard customers. Independent publishers are adding products, events, subscriptions, and communities around their work.

The data also shows that these audiences can grow quickly, hold reader attention at scale, and create value before a publication turns on a direct revenue stream.

Key Takeaways

• Publishing is becoming business infrastructure. Technology companies, consumer brands, financial firms, and service businesses are using newsletters to educate customers, generate demand, support onboarding, drive transactions, and remain relevant between purchases.

• Expansion is becoming the default. Enterprise customers are adding publications, subscribers, audience segments, products, revenue streams, and new formats.

• AI search is making direct audience ownership more valuable. As more searches end without a click, and AI crawlers generate far more activity than direct referrals, businesses have greater incentive to turn discovery into a measurable subscriber relationship they can continue to reach.

• Business publications can scale quickly while retaining reader attention. The median business publication reaches 100,000 subscribers in 197 days. Median open rates decline by only about four percentage points between publications with 1,000–10,000 subscribers and those with more than 250,000. Engagement improves after the first six months.

• The economic value extends beyond newsletter revenue. Publications can support subscriptions and advertising while also influencing product sales, pipeline, events, customer activation, retention, and operating costs.

• Larger teams need connected infrastructure. Customer relationship management (CRM) and warehouse sync, application programming interfaces (APIs) and webhooks, role-based permissions, cross-publication analytics, shared workflows, and attribution reporting allow publishing data to become part of the wider business.

The Business Publication Landscape at a Glance

Together, these publications show how quickly an owned audience can grow, how reliably it can be reached, and how much economic value it can create. From the sample of beehiiv customers:

Tyler Denk, CEO and Cofounder of beehiiv, sharing his thoughts on these numbers, said:

“Large publishers, media companies, and brands have woken up to the idea of an owned audience and content that can serve multiple purposes to benefit their business. I think we have built the most powerful platform to do that at scale.”

What Are People Actually Building on beehiiv?

When we looked across the beehiiv ecosystem, three broad groups stood out:

1. Non-Media Companies

2. Media Brands

3. Large Independent Newsletters

1. Non-Media Companies: Connecting Content to the Customer Journey

Software companies, financial firms, education businesses, and other non-media organizations use publications to explain complex topics, build trust, support customers, and stay relevant during long buying cycles.

• Open Source CEO, founded by Athyna CEO Bill Kerr, reaches more than 400,000 subscribers and has generated approximately $375,000 in trailing-12-month revenue. Up to 17% of Athyna's pipeline has been attributed to Kerr's broader ecosystem of newsletter, social audience, and professional network.
  

  

• Brex reaches 70,000 subscribers and sources approximately one in four registrations across more than 530 events from its newsletter. One person produces the publication in fewer than two hours per week.

  

• Fiscal.ai uses free weekly equity research to demonstrate the value of its financial-data platform. More than 50,000 customers have moved through its onboarding automation, while twice-yearly discount campaigns have produced more than a 10% lift in annual recurring revenue.

  

• Guday, a Brazilian wellness brand, launched a weekly publication built around an 80/20 mix of education and product promotion. Within two months, newsletter-driven sales generated more than twice the combined operating cost of beehiiv and its newsletter agency.

  

Here, the newsletter is a bridge between education, acquisition, product adoption, retention, and revenue.

Codie Sanchez’s Contrarian Thinking shows what happens when a newsletter becomes the center of a broader business. Her company operates across media, education, business acquisition, and investment, with two newsletters on beehiiv: The Main Street Minute and Contrarian Thinking.

She continued, “beehiiv makes it easier to see who started where and talk to specific segments without getting our messaging confused or hitting people with the wrong offers.” 

The newsletter is therefore doing more than generating readership: it introduces people to the company’s ideas, helps identify their interests, and guides them toward the products or opportunities most relevant to them.

Taking a closer look at the businesses building on beehiiv, here are the top industries: 

1. Computer software (34.82%)

2. Professional training and coaching (10.32%)

3. Publishing (7.69%)

4. Entertainment (5.47%)

5. Capital markets (4.45%)

6. Consumer services (3.64%)

7. Broadcast media (3.44%)

8. Education management (2.83%)

9. Other (27.3%)

2. Media Brands: Operating Publishing Portfolios at Scale

For media brands, content is the core product.  

Scaling this is difficult: you have to help editors work faster, manage multiple newsletters, track subscriber data, find new ways to make money, and understand how everything is performing.

• TIME migrated 13 newsletters and more than 2 million subscribers to beehiiv with zero downtime. Editors gained the ability to publish without developer involvement, while the Inside TIME newsletter saw a 63.8% increase in open rate after the transition.

• The Texas Tribune operates more than 12 newsletters and has built more than 20 automations supporting welcome journeys, renewals, list cleaning, and other lifecycle needs. Since migrating, it has launched two additional newsletters and reports saving as much as 60 minutes per send on editorial formatting.

• Community Impact manages more than 40 daily newsletters across more than 60 Texas communities. Its operation sends over 300,000 emails every morning, reaching more than 130,000 unique subscribers. In a single year, 1,234 businesses advertised in the CI Morning Impact.

Media brand portfolios need shared infrastructure. Cross-publication analytics, segmentation, and integrations help teams keep the operation connected while each publication keeps its own voice.

3. Large Independent Newsletters: Turning One Publication Into a Company

Many independent publishers start with one person, one topic, and one clear promise. The publication becomes the first product, the first distribution channel, and the first proof that a larger business could exist.

From there, publishers can add subscriptions, ads, digital products, memberships, podcasts, events, or additional publications.

• Status News reached more than 70,000 subscribers in its first six months while building four versions of its media product: free email, free web, paid email, and paid web.

• Milk Road began with no subscribers, content archive, or technical team. It used referrals, Recommendations, audience polls, acquisition-source data, and paid social to grow beyond 250,000 subscribers and reach an acquisition in under ten months.

• There’s an AI for That grew from an AI-tool discovery website into a daily newsletter. The site helps readers find tools, while the newsletter turns that occasional discovery into a recurring habit and sponsorship channel.

John Hayes, Editor at There’s an AI for That, shared:

The publication’s growth reflects a broader opportunity for independent newsletters: a website can capture intent, while an inbox relationship creates consistency, context, and a reason for readers to return.

What the Data Tells Us About Business Publishing

The businesses we studied vary greatly in terms of size, industry, audience, and business model, yet their behavior points in the same direction.

1. Expansion is becoming the default.

Expansion is the top trend among publications we studied, as newsletters grow, publishers are finding more ways to build on that momentum and deepen their relationship with their audience.

That growth can take several forms:

• Adding more subscribers or reaching new audience segments

• Launching another publication

• Introducing a paid tier or digital product

• Building automations to improve onboarding and engagement

• Adding advertising or another monetization channel

• Expanding into community, podcasts, or events

• Bringing multiple publications together under one operating system

The bigger picture is clear: a growing audience creates room to build more around it. 

As publishers develop direct relationships with their readers, newsletters become a foundation for launching new publications, products, revenue streams, and experiences, all while continuing to grow the audience itself.

2. AI search makes a direct audience more valuable.

For years, content businesses have relied on search and social platforms to turn content into traffic. But that model is becoming less reliable as more discovery happens without a click.

Today, 68% of Google searches end without a click. And when an AI Overview appears in search, click-through rates can fall from roughly 15% to 8%. The implication for content businesses is significant, because even when your content is being discovered, that discovery is increasingly happening without a visit to your site.

Across beehiiv publications, AI crawlers made 448 million requests in the past 30 days, more than twice the volume of traditional search crawlers. Yet those crawlers generated just 58,000 direct referrals, or approximately 0.2% of total referrals traffic. AI summaries can increase visibility without sending traffic back to the source, which makes each visit more valuable. 

A publisher’s website allows its original reporting, expertise, and ideas to be discovered through search and AI, while a clear subscribe form can turn that moment of discovery into a direct relationship the publisher can measure and continue.

Unlike search and social platforms, that relationship isn’t dependent on an algorithm deciding when or whether to surface your content, making an owned audience one of the most durable assets a publisher can build as AI search reshapes discovery.

The newsletter is increasingly becoming that bridge: from being discovered by an algorithm to building an audience you can reach directly.

3. Reader attention holds as audiences scale.

Publications on beehiiv with between 1,000 and 10,000 subscribers have a 44.54% median open rate. Publications with more than 250,000 subscribers have a 40.12% median open rate.

Even with 250 times more subscribers, the largest publications see only a 4.42 percentage-point difference in median open rates.

“Growth and engagement are a trade-off. The best publishers I work with prove they aren’t.” said Juliet Cote, Senior Manager, Customer Success at beehiiv.

Even with hundreds of thousands of subscribers, reader attention remains high if publications keep a clear editorial focus and practice good list management.

4. Publications get stronger after the first six months.

The engagement data becomes even more interesting when we examine publication age.

Contrary to the belief that lists inevitably decay, publication engagement actually peaks after the first six months, proving that newsletters become more effective as they establish themselves.

5. Enterprise infrastructure turns publishing into a connected operation.

A growing audience means more complex operations, such as multiple publications, contributors, subscriber segments, and revenue models, which introduce more places for data and workflows to break.

The infrastructure supporting this cohort increasingly combines the following:

• Multi-publication workspaces

• Shared templates and organization-wide content blocks

• Role-based permissions and collaboration workflows

• Dynamic content based on subscriber and behavioral data

• Cross-publication and subscriber-level analytics

• REST APIs, send APIs, and real-time webhooks

These capabilities solve different problems for different organizations. 

A software company can push engagement data into its warehouse and connect readership with product behavior. A consumer brand can sync newsletter data with its CRM and personalize content by customer segment. A media portfolio can manage shared templates, permissions, subscriber preferences, and analytics across dozens of titles.

Reliable delivery remains the foundation, with 98.90% of emails in the cohort successfully delivered. At larger volumes, dedicated migration planning, staged IP warming, monitoring, and access to deliverability specialists help teams protect that connection as they grow.

6. Publications can reach meaningful scale quickly.

The growth data offers a clearer benchmark for how long it takes a business publication to reach its first major audience milestones.

The fastest 10% reach 100,000 in 26 days. (Editor’s note: Some publications joined beehiiv with an existing list, so these figures do not always reflect growth from zero.)

Businesses still use paid ads, social media, search, and partnerships to find readers. The bigger shift is what happens next: they turn that first interaction into a direct relationship.

Owned and earned sources account for more than 99% of monthly subscriber acquisition in the available data. The share of subscribers classified as bought fell from about 3.5% in late 2024 to around 0.5% through much of 2026.

Recommendations are a major growth channel. 

One AI news media brand, for example, has referred more than 1M subscribers through Recommendations. 

Lead magnet automation is another meaningful growth channel, with publications across categories enrolling hundreds of thousands of subscribers through gated content, pop-ups, and newsletter automation. Mindstream, for example, has enrolled more than 311,540 subscribers through Lead Magnet Automation.

7. Publications monetize in more ways than one.

Business publications in the cohort generated $23 million on beehiiv over the past 24 months. That includes paid subscriptions, the Ad Network, Paid Recommendations, and digital products.

That figure captures only revenue generated through beehiiv’s built-in monetization tools. It does not capture sponsorships and branded partnerships, event tickets, software and product sales, courses and consulting, affiliate commissions, E-commerce, or memberships processed through other systems.

Tyler Denk’s newsletter Big Desk Energy illustrates the broader opportunity. The publication has generated more than $12,000 in digital-product revenue from 173,029 active subscribers, but its value extends beyond that tracked revenue. 

Denk’s newsletter audience is made up largely of startup founders and decision-makers, allowing the publication to command premium advertising rates and create higher-value offers, including a biannual founder mastermind in Costa Rica.

Denk adds, “Big Desk Energy has 173,029 readers, primarily startup founders and employees who are decision-makers at different companies. Because of that, I’ve been able to charge a premium for advertising and unlock additional ways to monetize this audience and provide value.”

Athyna founder Bill Kerr has taken this one step further with Open Source CEO. The newsletter generates $10,000–$15,000 in advertising revenue per send while also contributing up to 17% of Athyna’s pipeline. In one example, a single client with an $80,000 lifetime value was acquired after the newsletter had generated $15,000 in advertising revenue, effectively turning the audience into a negative-CAC acquisition channel. 

The lesson here is that an audience can pay for itself in several ways. The value of a publication can include the following:

• Customer acquisition

• Product education and onboarding

• Event registrations

• Pipeline and sales conversations

• Retention and reactivation

• Donations or memberships

• Marketplace transactions

• Operating savings

Why Owning Your Audience Matters for Business Growth

The data in this report points to a broader change in how businesses build distribution. 

An email subscription turns a moment of discovery into a relationship a business can continue earning. It creates another opportunity to be useful next week and another path into a product, event, transaction, membership, or publication later.

That relationship becomes more valuable when it is built on infrastructure that can grow with it. The operating path can be summarized in six stages:

The same publication can support several business outcomes at once. That makes it more useful to think about the job the audience performs than to label the newsletter strictly as “marketing” or “media.”

Publications can drive both direct revenue, like ads and subscriptions, and wider business goals, such as generating leads, supporting events, and fueling long-term growth through podcasts or new products.

The Owned Audience Playbook: 5 Lessons From the Publishers Building It

The numbers tell you what is happening in business publishing, but the publishers themselves show you how it works in the real world. 

In this section, we step beyond the data to look at the actual decisions, trade-offs, and pivot points that shaped these successful publications.

Think of these lessons as your tactical guide to the reasoning behind the benchmarks—direct insights from operators who built their audience into a thriving business.

1. Run a media portfolio like one connected operation.

A single publication can survive on informal workflows, but a portfolio can’t. As more titles, editors, audience segments, and revenue streams enter the operation, every manual handoff becomes harder to manage.

For brands like Positano Media, beehiiv makes this possible. 

Adam Rosen, Founder of Positano Media, shares:

The value of this scales when you have more publications. “The most valuable thing we share is what we learn. When one publication finds that shorter issues do better or a certain subject-line style lifts opens, that gets applied across the other titles pretty quickly,” Rosen said.

Celeb Insider Report also runs a high volume operation with more than 1M readers across three brands. 

2. Give the publication a clear job in the business model.

A newsletter can drive value in many ways, from ads and subscriptions to customer leads, but it’s vital to pin down its “economic job” first. That core purpose shapes everything from your editorial strategy to the metrics that matter most.

Open Source CEO illustrates how the lines between media and marketing can converge. The publication has its own revenue engine while also supporting awareness and demand for Athyna. 

That broader role changes the economics of content: the newsletter can contribute directly to revenue and improve the efficiency of customer acquisition across the larger business.

Define your value path before picking your tactics. Whether you're chasing paid subscriptions or qualified leads, your strategy should follow. When you're clear on the outcome you want to drive, your audience becomes a truly durable asset.

3. Educate readers before asking them to buy.

Complex products often have an understanding problem before they have a conversion problem.

Fiscal.ai uses equity research to demonstrate the value of its financial-data platform. The content delivers a useful result on its own while showing readers what deeper analysis the product can unlock. The publication also extends into onboarding, helping customers reach value after they sign up.

This works best when the editorial product mirrors the way people learn. A useful issue answers the immediate question. A series, archive, or automation can build understanding over time. The product becomes the logical next step because the reader already understands the problem it solves.

4. Stay relevant between transactions.

Many businesses solve problems that arise only occasionally. People look for a mortgage, update a résumé, change insurance, hire a specialist, or plan a major trip during a specific window. A company that communicates only when someone is ready to buy may spend heavily to reacquire the same attention later.

Resume Worded uses its newsletter Coached to remain relevant beyond an active job search. The publication serves the broader arc of a reader’s career, giving the company a useful role long before the next résumé update or job application.

The lesson applies across long and irregular buying cycles. The editorial strategy should address the questions, ambitions, and decisions that surround the transaction. This approach gives readers a reason to stay connected and gives the business a warmer relationship when the next need appears.

5. Measure the relationship, not just the signup.

Open and click rates show attention. The strongest business case often appears after the click: a reader registers for an event, starts a trial, activates a feature, makes a purchase, books a meeting, or joins another part of the business.

Subscriber growth is most valuable when the people joining continue to open, click, refer others, convert, or participate over time. Recommendations, referrals, lead magnets, cross-promotion, and existing websites can all bring in readers. 

Measure sources beyond cost per signup. Track retention, engagement, referrals, and downstream actions. This shows which channels create a lasting audience and real business value.

Finding the Right Role for Your Publication

You don’t need to begin by deciding that your organization will “become a media company.” Start with the business problem.

• Do you need a better way to educate the market?

• Do you want to stay relevant through a long or irregular buying cycle?

• Are you spending heavily to reacquire the same attention?

• Do you have expertise your market would choose to receive every week?

• Do your events need a reliable source of registrations?

• Could a publication generate revenue while supporting customer acquisition?

• Do you already have an audience without a clear monetization strategy?

• Are several publications being managed across disconnected tools?

• Do your editors, marketers, revenue teams, and developers lack a shared view of the audience?

• Would a direct audience relationship give the organization more room to launch new products, formats, or revenue streams?

The businesses in this report have answered those questions in different ways. 

For Open Source CEO, the publication supports demand generation and revenue for another company. Fiscal.ai uses content to educate prospective customers and accelerate activation. Resume Worded extends its relationship with readers beyond the immediate job search. Brex uses its publication to drive real-world events.

There is no single blueprint. A newsletter can become a media business, a customer-acquisition engine, a product-education layer, an events channel, a paid community, a digital storefront, or the operating system for a complex publishing portfolio.

The common thread is a decision to treat the audience relationship as something worth owning, understanding, and building on.

Ready to see what your business could build? Explore beehiiv for enterprise or talk with our team.

Sources and Methodology

• This report includes data from beehiiv.

• Written by Taylor Cromwell and Kanishka Kumawat

• Edited by Julie Turner

• Insights from Adam Rosen, Bill Kerr, Codie Sanchez, John Hayes, Juliet Cote, and Tyler Denk

• Publications featured include Big Desk Energy, Brex, Celeb Insider Report, Community Impact, Contrarian Thinking, Fiscal.ai, Guday, Milk Road, Open Source CEO, Positano Media, Resume Worded, Status News, The Main Street Minute, The Texas Tribune, There's an AI for That, and TIME

Data Scope

This report analyzes proprietary, aggregated platform data from 4,755 publications across 799 organizations in beehiiv’s business cohort. A single organization may operate more than one publication, so publication and organization counts should not be treated as interchangeable.

The analysis reflects an internal data pull completed in September 2026. Because publications continue to gain subscribers, send emails, adopt features, change plans, and generate revenue, some figures may be refreshed immediately before publication.

Unless otherwise noted:

• Monetary figures are reported in U.S. dollars.

• Percentages and monetary values may be rounded for readability.

• Median figures are used to limit the influence of unusually large publications and extreme results.

• Lifetime figures cover the publication’s full recorded history on beehiiv.

• Figures labeled “over the past 24 months” cover the 24 months preceding the final data pull.

• Publishing-frequency data covers the 90 days preceding the final data pull.

Growth Measurements

Time-to-milestone figures measure the time between a publication’s creation date on beehiiv and the date it reached 1,000, 10,000, or 100,000 subscribers.

To focus on durable audience growth, we required the subscribers counted toward each milestone to remain subscribed for at least 180 days. The figures therefore reflect a retained audience rather than a short-lived spike.

We kept subscribers added through bulk CSV imports and API connections in the analysis. This means the dataset includes both of the following types of publications:

• Publications that built most of their audience after joining beehiiv

• Publications that arrived with an existing audience and continued growing on beehiiv

The underlying publication data distinguishes between these groups. The overall time-to-milestone figures should be read as benchmarks for publications on beehiiv, rather than as measures of purely organic growth after launch.

The top-decile figure represents the fastest 10% of eligible publications to reach each milestone.

Engagement and Deliverability

Open-rate figures are based on recorded email opens and are subject to the same privacy-related measurement limitations affecting the wider email industry. Results should be interpreted as directional benchmarks rather than a perfect measure of human readership.

Publications with materially anomalous open-to-click patterns or other clear data-quality concerns were reviewed and excluded from relevant leaderboard analysis where appropriate.

Delivery, bounce, and spam-complaint rates are based on sends recorded within the cohort. Publication-age and list-size comparisons group eligible publications into the corresponding dashboard categories.

Revenue and Monetization

Revenue figures include transactions recorded through monetization channels supported and tracked by beehiiv during the stated period. Depending on the publication, these may include the Ad Network, paid recommendations, paid subscriptions, and digital products.

The analysis does not include revenue that beehiiv cannot observe, including independently sold sponsorships, consulting, software subscriptions, events, services, affiliate programs, donations, commerce, marketplace transactions, or sales influenced by newsletter readership. 

Pipeline, customer acquisition, retention, and operating savings are also excluded unless supplied directly by a featured organization.

“Days to first dollar” measures the time between an eligible publication’s start and its first recorded revenue through a tracked beehiiv monetization channel. Feature-adoption figures indicate that a publication has used the feature; they do not measure the frequency, sophistication, or business impact of that use.

Plan Movements

Expansion reflects observed growth within existing beehiiv enterprise accounts. It can include growing an existing audience, adding subscribers or audience segments, launching additional publications, introducing new products or monetization channels, or expanding usage across the platform. These are recorded account movements based on actual customer activity, not survey responses or publishers’ stated future plans.

Publisher Examples

Individual company and publication examples draw from beehiiv case studies, first-party publisher materials, publicly available information, and interviews conducted for this report. Case-study figures reflect the period in which the original study was published unless a more recent figure is clearly identified.

Publisher examples are included to illustrate how the patterns in the aggregated data appear inside individual businesses. They should not be interpreted as typical or guaranteed outcomes.

Limitations

This report describes behavior within beehiiv’s selected business cohort and should not be treated as a census of the entire publishing industry. The analysis identifies patterns and associations within the available data; it does not establish that a particular feature or strategy caused a specific outcome.

Links to case studies and external sources are included throughout the report. Proprietary platform findings are published here for the first time.