Newsletters are two a penny: but if the content is good, the penny can be large.
Bloomberg is launching $2,000 annual-subscription newsletters for selected sectors of the financial markets. It already has free ones and is relaunching its magazine Bloomberg Markets. It has also bought Business Week, the now ailing US business magazine.
This shows that content counts. Bloomberg has plenty of content and will add more with the reportedly 100 journalists it intends to hire.
Content + Community = Cash
This shows that if you have quality content you can create a community and turn that into cash: the three C’s of online publishing: Content makes Community makes Cash.
Bloomberg will have to learn the economics of newsletter publishing, learned by me and my partner in newsletter publishing Margaret Coffey:
- Keep gaining new subscribers at a lower cost than you pay for them;
- Get the price right to attract the new subscriber;
- Keep the quality of the content high; and
- Keep marketing to your existing subscriber base to make sure they renew their subscription.
Bloomberg should be able to do all 4 of these.
A price of $2,000 is high. But one tip in a newsletter can earn its readership many more than that.
The question is: can you give the readers something they can make money out of?
We did. Bloomberg can.