Information E-mail Startup 1440 reaches 4 million subscribers and launches its first internet product

Independent press publisher 1440 said it had exceeded four million free subscribers on October 17 and unveiled its first web product, a series of evergreen landing pages called 1440 Topics.

The newsletter features news coverage on a variety of topics including politics, business and science and is on track to record its third consecutive year of profitability in 2024. 1440 will generate more than $20 million in revenue this year through to his team of 19 people. , according to co-founder Tim Huelskamp.

The company has only one editorial product: its flagship newsletter called Daily Digest. Its expansion towards the open Web therefore marks a strategic evolution. Rather than only sending newsletter readers to links from external publishers, Topics aims to create a library of landing pages that it can direct email readers to. at the appropriate time.

“We want to be the Pinterest of knowledge, as if Reddit and Wikipedia had a baby,” Huelskamp said. “The goal is for Topics to be the go-to place to learn about a specific topic, like the gut microbiome, Burning Man, or the Federal Reserve.”

The new product addresses a common goal among publishers – the desire to maintain traffic within their proprietary ecosystem – from a fresh perspective. Rather than directing readers to individual articles, 1440 groups the audience of its newsletter into a series of landing pages, which can be continually updated, expanded and optimized.

Go deeper into topics

At launch, Topics will only have one section – business and finance – but it plans to eventually include four more: entertainment and culture; science and technology, health and medicine and world history. The four new sections will go live on January 1st.

The goal of Topics is to enable 1440 to sell brand sponsorships and create more context around its content.

1440 has a team of four full-time people dedicated to the topics, and plans to hire another person by the end of the year. So far, he has produced about 60 topic pages with the goal of creating 100 pages by the time the remaining sections launch.

The editor decides which topics will be turned into topics using editorial instinct and research data. Once the team identifies a suitable topic, its editors study the field, gather quality material on it, and create a one-stop shop for anyone wanting to gain a comprehensive understanding of the concept.

In this way, individual topic pages reflect the curatorial ethos that underpins 1440 more broadly. Pages will include content on the subject created by the 1440 team, but they will also contain links to writings, data, podcasts, videos and other materials from external publishers.

“We’re sending all these clicks to other sites, but soon at least some of them will come to our site,” Huelskamp said. “We’re going to do paid SEO and social, but if we don’t do anything else, instead of five minutes of people’s time, we’ll have maybe twenty.”

Develop activity 1440

Since its launch in 2017, 1440 has grown by applying the rigor of consumer acquisition strategies to its newsletter product.

According to Huelskamp, ​​the flagship Daily Digest newsletter sells ads that cost around $100,000 per day. About half of its advertisers work in financial services, while the other half come from wellness and consumer packaged goods brands.

The publisher invests around $1 million per month in user acquisition. About a third of its subscribers discover 1,440 of them organically, while the rest comes from paid efforts.

Of its paid user acquisition, about 50% comes from Facebook and Instagram, 20% from other newsletters, and the remaining 30% comes from a mix of X, Pinterest, Quora, and Reddit. Every month, 1440 adds about 300,000 new subscribers and about half, or 150,000, stick around.

The newsletter generates more than a million clicks per day on the Internet, including between 10,000 and 50,000 clicks on advertisements. It has a rebooking rate (a metric that measures how many first-time advertisers sign up for other deals) of about 75%, according to Huelskamp.

With the addition of Topics, 1440 will drive a certain percentage of its outbound clicks to its owned properties, allowing the publisher to monetize those readers twice. This will also allow 1440 to sell different and more expensive sponsorship packages to its partners.

“The topics give a double whammy to our advertisers,” Huelskamp said. “They can reach a broad, intellectually curious audience, but they can also reach readers interested in delving deeper into a specific niche, like finance.”