Full circle

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Last week I was in New York to speak at Oliver Darcy's Status Summit.

I got to share the stage with some of the biggest names in media: Andrew Ross Sorkin, Don Lemon, Kara Swisher, Kaitlan Collins, Meredith Kopit Levien, and lots of others.

Giving a presentation at his summit was a bit of a full circle moment. Oliver was the inspiration for the beehiiv Media Collective, and here I was two years later speaking at his first big event.

Here's a recap of the presentation I gave…

Oliver worked at CNN for seven years before leaving to go independent in 2024. He decided to launch his new media company, Status, on beehiiv.

In September 2024, I had a trip planned to New York. Our Head of Talent introduced me to Oliver and suggested I meet him while I was in town. We met for breakfast at Empire Diner on 10th and 22nd, and sat right here.

There wasn't much of an agenda, but we ended up talking for nearly two hours. He began to share the difficulties of going independent: no health insurance, no legal coverage, having to manage his own books and accounting. He wasn't asking for anything, but was just acknowledging that a lot of the support he previously had at CNN was now solely his responsibility.

Maybe I was feeling extra generous after raising our $33M Series B a few months prior, but as I listened to him, I felt like there was something more that we as a platform could be doing to support him and others looking to go independent.

So I hopped in a cab and began drafting notes for a VIP journalist program to pitch it to the team. The pitch quickly became a Google doc, and then a Slack channel, and eventually the beehiiv Media Collective, which we launched that November (fittingly at Oliver's launch party).

So what is the beehiiv Media Collective? It's a multimillion-dollar investment we've made at beehiiv to support the next generation of independent media. Today, it's a collection of 30+ outlets and journalists like Hope King, David Begnaud, Joanna Stern, and many of the others you see on this page.

As part of the program, participants receive legal coverage, health insurance, Getty Images, and VIP support from beehiiv. We basically took that list of complaints Oliver shared back in September of that year and turned it into a full program that select other journalists could join.

The Collective now reaches more than 1M active subscribers, and members have generated over $5M in revenue (and that’s just the on-platform earnings that we can measure).

Since launching almost two years ago, we've had some pretty incredible success stories:

Your great-grandparents got the news from one paper. Your parents got it from three networks. You get it from whoever you want.

That's a much better world, and I'm proud that the Media Collective exists to make sure the people doing that work can actually make a living at it.

But it's not just those select journalists who are having success. beehiiv has delivered on its promise and has become the infrastructure for tens of thousands of successful creators and publishers.

This is probably my favorite slide I've ever created because of what it represents. These are all people who came to beehiiv with nothing but an idea and have built something of significance over these past few years.

In addition to those on this slide, there are countless examples like Kyle Poyar, who started Growth Unhinged as a side project. In August of last year he went full-time, with a goal of generating $1M+ in 2026. He smashed that goal this month, with more than 3 months to spare.

There are riches in the niches too (I love saying that aloud). One Ahead is a newsletter for working magicians (nothing is too niche). With less than 10,000 readers, Rory Adams is generating nearly six figures on beehiiv.

These are all examples of something much bigger happening. People are sharing and monetizing their passions and expertise more now than ever before.

On beehiiv, there are 120 categories represented from AI to psychedelics and over 450M unique readers consuming that content. Nearly 17,000 creators have earned money directly on the platform: $40M in recurring subscription revenue, and over $20M generated from the Ad Network.

How is this all possible? And what changed?

Back in 2017 I joined Morning Brew as the second employee. There I ran product, engineering, and growth.

Things looked a lot different back then. This is what the tech ecosystem looked like for publishers:

We would copy and paste our content from our WordPress website into Mailchimp every single night.

If publishers wanted to monetize with ads, they could use LiveIntent. If they wanted to offer paid subscriptions, they could integrate with Stripe and Memberful. If they wanted to run data analysis, they could use Fivetran to pipe data into Tableau.

We eventually built everything in-house at Morning Brew: the referral program, the CMS, the ad management platform. That became our secret sauce to scale past 4M readers and the $75M acquisition by Business Insider.

Which became the impetus for launching beehiiv — we took that chaotic tech ecosystem above and turned it into this:

You can design and send beautiful newsletters that match your brand and aesthetic. You can build a totally bespoke site using our website builder. You can host, distribute, and monetize your podcast directly on beehiiv. You can sell digital products like ebooks, guides, templates, courses, and consulting (with 0% transaction fees). And as of July, you can host private communities for your audience to meet and connect.

Yeah, you can do all of that in a single platform. beehiiv gives you every primitive you need to be a successful creator and go direct to your audience. And unlike other creator platforms (YouTube, Instagram, Substack, Patreon) — beehiiv isn't the destination. The destination is your owned and operated website, podcast, newsletter, and community.

We are just the infrastructure. We are building the Shopify of the creator economy.

Creator sovereignty is the future, but there are four things standing in the way:

There is no such thing as audience ownership when you can't reliably reach the people who follow you. And today, an algorithm decides who sees what. The track record:

In 2018, Facebook deprioritized content from publishers, which led to the destruction of businesses like VICE, Mic, BuzzFeed, and thousands of others.

In 2023, Twitter deprioritized external links, crushing traffic back to the websites of publishers and creators.

In 2024, Google launched AI Overviews in search. Click-through rates to publisher sites have since fallen by as much as 58%.

Substack is just the latest example of a company that promises distribution in exchange for control. But the pattern here is pretty clear…

Creators with paying subscribers on Patreon are essentially stuck on Patreon indefinitely. There is no way to transfer those paid subscriptions without asking people to cancel, take out their card again, and resubscribe with payment.

Last year, Substack announced that all writers would be required to offer Apple's in-app purchase (IAP) payment option. That means that if writers choose to leave Substack, they won't be able to port those paid subscriptions over to another platform like they could previously.

This is predatory platform lock-in and is incredibly dangerous for writers. It strips away data and control, while locking them into the platform.

The take-rate model unfairly penalizes content creators for their success.

There are publishers on Substack who are paying the platform more than $1M in fees each year for providing the same basic services it provided back when they were just getting started.

The thing about take rates: they only go up. Patreon increased its take rate from 5% to as high as 13%. Gumroad increased theirs from 3.5% to 10%. Etsy increased its transaction fee from 3.5% to 6.5%.

The most successful creators today need ownership, flexibility, and control.

They integrate their newsletter with HubSpot, sync their Discord community and Slack workspace, and take advantage of the countless tools available on the open web.

Closed platforms keep users in a silo.

But it doesn't have to be that way. Because beehiiv has open APIs and webhooks, publishers like Overstory Media can integrate with whatever software they want to help optimize their chances of success.

The future of media is open, without take rates, without platform lock-in, and without algorithmic feeds.

Game on.

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I’ll be spending a lot of time in New York these next couple of weeks… unfortunately not working from an office that looks like this.

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