Creators embrace Beehiiv’s push beyond newsletters

“They are adding more stuff that a business owner would want,” said Ryan Broderick, journalist and founder of newsletter Garbage Day, which is hosted on the Beehiiv platform.

Four creators who host their newsletters on Beehiiv told Digiday Beehiv’s new tools, aimed at helping them expand their businesses, have come at the right time. Sportswriter Joe Posnanski said he feels the newsletter genre is “getting stale.”

The next chapter of the creator economy goes beyond social media followings and newsletter mailing lists; it’s about creators becoming full-fledged business owners. But that expansion is coupled with the fact that the lion’s share of creator marketing spend goes to the most in-demand influencers, making it tough for smaller creators to grow. 

“There are just so many of us out there now, and it’s more difficult than ever to stand out. More and more, creators have to build businesses, and not just mailing lists,” said Posnanski.

Beehiv’s updates take it a step closer to becoming an all-in-one operating system for creator-led brands. 

Ethan Keshishian, co-founder of Unicorner newsletter that covers start-ups, said Beehiiv’s updates “seem to provide creators like ourselves with tools to keep up with that evolving ecosystem.”

Unicorner moved to Beehiiv from Substack in 2023. It now reaches nearly 100,000 readers and is a six-figure company.

“A lot of the updates are positioned around trying to help people who are building newsletters leverage a lot of different channels,” added Arek Der-Sarkissian, Unicorner co-founder.

Before Thursday’s updates, creators on Beehiiv would need an external website hosting platform, digital product storefront and external analytics tools to understand where their website audiences were coming from and what they were reading. These would all be extra costs for the creators. 

Last year, Beehiiv acquired an AI website builder called Typedream, and launched its own version of a website builder in July. These latest updates mean Beehiiv creators can use that builder to create their own websites by chatting with an AI tool, and then using a drag-and-drop feature to tweak the design. They can create dedicated homepages for their podcast or YouTube feeds too.

CEO Tyler Denk told Digiday this will help Beehiiv creators “simplify [their] tech stack [and] pay for less platforms.”

For now, the creators were most excited about the improved website analytics, which are launching in beta this quarter and will roll out fully next year. 

“Substack’s analytics were kind of fuzzy and strange,” Broderick said. He moved his blog to Beehiiv from Substack earlier this year. On Beehiiv’s analytics dashboard, “you can see where people are coming from, what’s making people want to read more, want to pay more,” he said.

Denk said Beehiiv creators can now see where their website traffic is coming from (including device type, browsers, time spent) – and combined with their email analytics data – can determine who to offer paid subscriptions to, identify the most engaged readers, and optimize content based on what people are clicking on. Beehiiv is also working on tools that will allow creators to import historical website data from other platforms.

Beehiiv isn’t charging creators extra for these new features, nor will it take a cut of creators’ digital product sales, such as from selling consulting services, merch, or subscriptions. Keshishian believes this is a way to incentivize more people to move over to Beehiiv from competitors like Substack. (Beehiiv’s pricing tiers start at about $500 a year for up to 1,000 newsletter subscribers.)

“Most of the creators’ platforms out there take 10%. Beehiiv takes a flat rate subscription, and that means I’m not losing tens of thousands of dollars a year to support a creator start-up,” Broderick said.

Keshishian said he’s having conversations with Der-Sarkissian, his co-founder, about creating their own merch now that they could sell it on the Beehiiv platform.

“It’s something that we really have wanted to do for a long time, and from what we’re seeing this could be that opportunity to do it,” he said.

Beehiiv is also revamping its ad platform. It will send out ad offers in a weekly email to creators, who can choose to accept or reject the newsletter ad opportunities. Beehiiv takes a 20% cut of those ads, Denk said. (In total, creators are earning around $2.5 to $3 million a month on the Beehiiv ad network and from paid subscriptions, he noted.)

“That incentivizes us to start actually working with Beehiiv on building those relationships with the sponsors, as opposed to just having to do a lot of the hard lifting ourselves. Because right now, we have to email our sponsors, we have to build those kinds of connections. Definitely a lot of those upgrades to the existing infrastructure is really exciting to us,” Der-Sarkissian said.

But it’ll all come down to how well all these tools actually perform, Posnanski noted.

The move comes as platforms from Shopify to Substack are vying to own more of the creator economy tech stack, making Beehiv’s expansion both a strategic necessity and a test of whether creators want to consolidate their business tools in one place.

“Right now, I use Shopify, Gumroad, Kajabi, Printful, Good Analytics and others. There could be real value in simplifying. But, again, it all comes down to execution,” Posnanski said.