Who's advertising in Email Newsletters?

Hey there- I'm Kit, and I'm building NewsletterRadar (https://newsletterradar.com), with the goal of creating the premier tool for Email Newsletter Ad research and alerts. That means I've had to collect, read and categorise a BUNCH of email newsletter advertisements, and I wanted to share some insights from the first tranche (938) I ever collected.

First, a note on the data- this first batch comes from reading about 20 popular newsletters and collecting the advertisements within from a period of October 2022 - October 2023. This has already generated a bunch of questions about how to categorise ads. I'm still figuring this out, but I've started by collecting data on the Topics, Creative Strategies (e.g. did the ad feature celebrities, offer discounts, free trials, free webinars, etc), Advertiser names and Product names available. Given this is a reasonably small sample, take the below with a big grain of salt- but it's the first step on the journey, and I hope you'll get some useful insights out of it all the same!

'What is an ad' was a surprisingly tricky fundamental question- I've tried to avoid including teasers for related newsletters, and focus on what appear to be paid sponsorship opportunities for discrete products or companies.

The first thing I wanted to share was the breakdown of the top primary topics I saw within the dataset- see the image above. I wasn't surprised to see Technology as a large driver of advertising, but Food and Drink as a runner up surprised me.

A number of large household names are seeking the reach huge newsletters such as Morning Brew can bring- Wendy's is a good example, highlighting time-limited offers on breakfast items in-store. There were also some classic direct-to-consumer ecommerce companies in this space, such as ButcherBox, selling their subscription box offerings. I suspect subscription boxes would be an interesting category to study in their own right.

Large technology companies are also taking advantage of the unique voice and reach of newsletter ads. Ads for various Apple products and services (including credit cards and Apple Arcade) made up just under 1% of the entire dataset, though anecdotally I'd note they seem to have a far more casual voice than any other Apple advertising I've seen. SAAS scale ups such as Lingopie are also well represented across our sample.

Another surprise was that NFT and Metaverse advertising was almost entirely absent from the sample- I had imagined that it would be lower than the manic highs of 2021, but I found only 3 references to Metavers and NFTs in the database, and two of those were used as unfavourable comparisons to other 'alternative asset' investment classes.

Speaking of financial products, direct investment and pre-IPO share sales were very popular topics. This included financial product aggregators such as Masterworks as well as individual companies such as LiquidPiston. I suspect these companies have a significantly easier time advertising in newsletters compared to more restrictive platforms such as Facebook or Google display advertising.

Not directly present in the graph but a notable runner-up were adult toys, I suspect for similar platform reasons as the investment category. These are likely captured within the 'Technology' and 'Health' metagroups. Notably, they use careful, friendly language to speak to a mass audience in mainstream publications- none of the newsletters would be described as 'adult'/NSFW. (By the way- if you're a professional marketer, I'd really appreciate your advise as to whether to include a SafeSearch option or NSFW filter on our database search.)

I'll probably revisit the topic selection algorithm to avoid what seem to be strategies biasing the results (a lot of ads offered 'limited edition' artwork for example, resulting in an odd topic label making the top 20), but thought to share. I might also dive into specific topics and share how the creative strategies change between topics.

Next up I'll share some stats on ad frequency and uniqueness, and explore the 'long tail' of advertisers big and small.

What are your thoughts on the breakdown?
Is there anything that surprised you, or you'd like me to investigate next?