Why 1440 is evolving from a newsletter company to a destination of explainers

The newsletter’s co-founder and CEO Tim Huelskamp wants 1440 to respond to that change by becoming a destination for information driven by his belief that for all the hype, readers aren’t going to be satisfied by AI-generated summaries long term. 

“The future of learning is not AI and asking questions, but humans coming together to share knowledge,” said Huelskamp. “Our value prop is not, write explainers and then keep everything on our page and have them go and just read our explainer. Our value prop is, journalists are freaking amazing and are doing the work of their lifetime, spending months and sometimes years coming up with these wonderful pieces and no one can find them… Someone needs to be the connective tissue in the industry.”

1440 has generated 4.5 million newsletter subscribers with its model of curating news across areas like politics, business, science, and culture into a quick, digestible format, monetized via advertising and sponsorships. Now it wants to push beyond being a newsletter product alone and drive its newsletter audiences to landing pages on its own site, where they can get the information they’re seeking from a trusted source for free and monetize the content with advertising.

The explainers, called Topics, launched last October. Now there are over 200 Topics pages across categories like business & finance, science & technology, health & medicine, world history and society & culture. The goal is to get to 10,000 topics, Huelskamp said. Since February, the Topics website has attracted over 4.3 million unique visitors, 18 million pageviews, and a six-minute average session duration, according to Huelskamp.

1440 hasn’t had to get into the search referral traffic game due to its built-in newsletter audience, and now it’s relying on that channel to drive those readers directly to its own website. 1440 didn’t immediately provide traffic numbers.

“One of the reasons why all these companies are shifting into newsletters is because they need that direct relationship with the customer. We’ve had that from the get-go, and now it’s an advantage we can play off of,” Huelskamp said. “We think over time, [Topics will] naturally go up in SEO, but we’re not relying on that because then you’re taking a back seat to the direct traffic. We’re leaning into [our] big audience.”

This investment in Topics marks a repositioning of 1440’s brand from a newsletter-only product to an information database — a strategy Huelskamp regards as vital to remain competitive in the AI era. 1440 worked with Giant Spoon on its brand repositioning, said Michelle Denhart, vp of strategy and brand at 1440. So far, brands like Fidelity, Oura Ring, Fisher Investments and Apple card have sponsored Topics pages, according to Huelskamp. The initiative is already “in the black,” Huelskamp said (Daily Digest has been profitable for three years).]

1440’s business shift is also a push to grow its revenue opportunities at a competitive time for the newsletter space, according to Katherine Cartwright, co-founder of media buying agency Criterion Global. It also means more inventory for advertisers (and revenue opportunities for 1440), and more contextual alignment around the Topics categories, she said.

Google is moving the same way. Its AI research and note-taking assistant NotebookLM teamed up with publishers like The Economist and The Atlantic this summer to create databases of information that users can access to explore certain topics, by asking questions and reading coverage.

“Trusted content is being anxiously sought after now that news and information can be so easily faked. [1440’s] move to create more durable and discoverable content makes a lot of sense. They’ve checked three important boxes — there’s value for their existing subscribers, value for their business, and value for advertisers,” said Claire Russell, head of media at ad agency Fitzco.

Deep-dive topics curators 

1440 will launch free user accounts so that readers can share, like and save Topics pages to create their own libraries of information, according to Huelskamp. These features are being tested now and will likely rollout by Q1 2026, he said. Readers will also be able to upload suggested resources for potential inclusion into the Topics pages. All content will be fact-checked by the 1440 team, Huelskamp noted.

A “curator” is assigned a specific vertical and analyzes reader feedback, engagement data, and cultural or timely events to figure out which topic to write about next. For example, the “Steven Spielberg” Topic page went live for the 50th anniversary of Spielberg’s “Jaws” movie. They also look at topics trending on Google Search, Reddit and Wikipedia.

Each Topic page includes a written summary at the top, visual explainers, and a few sentences compiling information from outside sources (such as PBS, The New Yorker, and the Library of Congress). Terms range from cryptocurrency to national debt and biohacking. Huelskamp is aiming to have 30 to 40 deep-dive editors and curators to expand into travel, space, food and culture categories in the next 18 months. Right now, 1440 has five full-time editors dedicated to Topics.

It helps that 1440 already has a newsletter audience it can try to push to its Topics pages. Its Daily Digest now has a section dedicated to new Topics pages. 1440’s core advertising business model brings in about $20 million in revenue a year, Huelskamp said. Its newsletter has a 65% open rate, with a “double-digit” click rate, he said.

“This is maybe [1440’s] second chapter where they’re trying to specialize and [figure out], how do we keep those eyeballs within our properties and monetize accordingly? I think it’s a compelling evolution of the newsletter-first drive,” Cartwright said.