News Email Startup 1440 Hits 4 Million Subscribers and Launches First Web Product

The independent news publisher 1440 said that it surpassed 4 million free subscribers on Oct. 17 and unveiled its first web product, a series of evergreen landing pages called 1440 Topics. The newsletter curates news coverage from across a variety of topics like 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 across its 19-person team, according to co-founder Tim Huelskamp. The company has just one editorial product—its flagship newsletter called Daily Digest—so its expansion into the open web marks a strategic evolution. Rather than solely refer newsletter readers to links from external publishers, Topics aims to create a library of landing pages to which it can drive email readers to when appropriate. “We want to be the Pinterest for knowledge—like if Reddit and Wikipedia had a baby,” Huelskamp said. “The goal is for Topics to be the go-to place to learn more about a specific subject, like the gut microbiome, Burning Man, or the Federal Reserve.” The new product approaches a common goal among publishers—the desire to keep traffic within their owned ecosystem—from a novel perspective. Rather than funnel readers to individual articles, 1440 corrals its newsletter audience into a series of landing pages, which can be continuously updated, expanded, and optimized. Going deep on Topics At launch, Topics will have just one section—business and finance—but it plans to eventually include four others: entertainment and culture; science and technology, health and medicine, and world history. The four new sections will be live by Jan. 1. The goal of Topics is to allow 1440 to sell brand sponsorships and create more context around its content. 1440 has a team of four full-time staff dedicated to Topics, with plans for hire another person by the end of the year. So far, it has produced around 60 Topics pages with the goal of creating 100 pages by the time the remaining sections launch. The publisher decides what subjects get turned into Topics using editorial instinct and search data. Once the team identifies a suitable subject, its writers study the area, aggregate quality material on it, and create a one-stop shop for anyone interested in gaining a comprehensive understanding of the concept. In this way, the individual Topics pages reflect the curatorial ethos that undergirds 1440 more broadly. The pages will include content about the subject created by 1440's team, but they will also link to writing, data, podcasts, videos, and other materials from outside publishers. “We send all these clicks to other sites, but pretty soon at least some of them will be coming to our site,” Huelskamp said. “We’ll be doing SEO and paid social, but if we do nothing else, instead of five minutes of people’s time maybe now we’ll get twenty.” Growing the 1440 business 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. Roughly half of its advertisers are in the financial services space, while the other half comes from wellness and consumer packaged goods brands. The publisher invests around $1 million per month into user acquisition. Roughly one-third of its subscribers discover 1440 organically, while the remainder come from paid efforts. Of its paid user acquisition, around 50% come from Facebook and Instagram, 20% come from other newsletters, and the remaining 30% come from a mix of X, Pinterest, Quora, and Reddit. Each month, 1440 adds around 300,000 new subscribers and around half—150,000—stick around. The newsletter drives more than one million clicks a day across the internet, including between 10,000 and 50,000 clicks on ads. It has a rebooking rate—a metric that measures how many first-time advertisers sign up for further business—of around 75%, according to Huelskamp. With the addition of Topics, 1440 will drive some percentage of its outbound clicks to its owned properties, allowing the publisher to monetize these readers twice. It will also enable 1440 to sell different, and more expensive, sponsorship packages to its partners. “Topics gives our advertisers a one-two punch,” Huelskamp said. “They get to reach a broad, intellectually curious audience, but they can also reach readers who are interested in going deep on a specific niche, like finance.”

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News Email Startup 1440 Hits 4 Million Subscribers and Launches First Web Product

The expansion aims to create evergreen landing pages

Mark Stenberg

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