How to grow a creator-based newsletter business, with Puck’s Sarah Personette

The news outlet debuted in 2021 with its journalists as the company’s audience-facing focal point, not the publication. People would subscribe less so to Puck than to Matthew Belloni’s or Julia Ioffe’s newsletters via Puck. And Puck’s journalists were, in part, compensated directly for the subscribers they attracted. Lately though, Puck’s newsletters have come to resemble publications in their own right.

“You almost have sub-brands under Puck that are franchises anchored by core talent versus in probably that first two years, it was a newsletter anchored by core talent,” said Puck CEO Sarah Personette on the latest Digiday Podcast episode.

Belloni’s entertainment-oriented “What I’m Hearing” newsletter, for example, has enlisted contributors like legal expert Eriq Gardner and, most recently, former The Hollywood Reporter editor Kim Masters. Similarly, Lauren Sherman’s fashion-centric “Line Sheet” regularly features entries from retail writer Sarah Shapiro and beauty journalist Rachel Strugatz. This development has coincided with Puck’s paid subscriber base growing by 30% in the past year, with Personette expecting the company to become profitable this year.

“Putting journalists at the center of our model still exists, but what we are trying to do, as our subscriber base has experienced incredible growth over the last few years, we want to make sure that we’re rounding out the stories and we’re rounding out the coverage by bringing other journalists in,” said Personette.

The expanding nature of Puck’s newsletters raises the question of to what extent does Puck’s compensation model also have to change. Puck gained a lot of initial attention for paying bonuses to its journalists for the new subscribers their articles attract as well as for the subscribers they retain. But how’s that work if an article by Masters attracts a subscriber via Belloni’s newsletter?

“So [Belloni] is a franchise manager, and there are different benefits to being a franchise manager. And he also is driving a ton of his own subs. And then we also want to make sure that the individuals that are contributing to that franchise also get bonus-ed,” Personette said.

Here are a few highlights from the conversation, which have been edited for length and clarity.

Puck’s average newsletter open rate

One of the reasons for that pretty significant boom in newsletter subscriptions relative to social media platforms, where engagement rates are much smaller, on average they’re around 30% for newsletters, and we see about 70% in terms of our open rates overall.

Puck’s compensation model

In addition, obviously to base salaries, we do a bonus [paid to Puck’s journalists] for new subscribers and we do a bonus for retained subscribers. So you are both bonus-ed on who is coming in for your particular article, and then if you retain those subscribers, that also gets paid out. We’re really thinking about the lifetime value of our customers and the way that we want our sustainable growth rates to continue to grow over the course of time.

Puck’s “revenue per head” metric

Our four strategic pillars are audience growth, revenue growth, operational excellence and brand protection. And under operational excellence, one of our core metrics is RPH, revenue per head. So the way that we think about sustainably growing the company and setting those key growth metrics across audience and across revenue have to be done in a way that also enable us to stay lean.

Puck’s potential next coverage area

I think we still have the opportunity to get tech, and in particular the tip of the spear around AI, right. That’s one key area of focus for us right now.