🔴 4 ways to get paid, based on your audience type

This year, we've profiled creators earning a living in several distinct ways — a local newsletter operator in Boise, a games reporter with 1,400 paying subscribers, a LinkedIn creator closing $28,000 deals, a tech analyst whose newsletter is mostly a funnel for consulting.

We pulled their best tactics into a playbook organized around what makes each audience valuable, and who ultimately pays to reach the audience, access the work, or hire the creator.

— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor

On Tuesday, October 6, Creator Spotlight will be hosting our first official event in Manhattan, together with ElevenLabs.

You may know ElevenLabs as a voice AI platform, but recently they’ve expanded into a broader creative toolkit for producing, editing, and localizing audio and video content.

So we’re bringing creators together for The New Reach: How Creators are Growing with AI Tooling, a wide-ranging conversation about how AI tools like ElevenLabs' dubbing and text to speech models are changing how creators grow their audiences.

I’ll be joined by newsletter growth expert Nathan May, creator and creative strategist Dara Denney, and Ryan Bast from ElevenLabs’ Creators team to dig into what’s working, how creators are using these tools to grow their audiences and revenue, and where the technology is headed next.

Space is very limited, so RSVP now to hear firsthand how creators are using generative AI audio tooling to expand their reach and connect with new audiences. Really hope to (literally, actually) see you there.

RSVP now.

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A bigger audience doesn’t automatically make for a more successful business. What matters is why your audience is valuable, and how to build an enduring business around that value.

Across the creators we’ve profiled this year, four audience types call for different revenue models:

Marissa Lovell launched From Boise in March 2021, when there was no local newsletter playbook to follow. By mid-2025, she hadn't paid herself in months and was close to going back to full-time work. Six months later, by the end of the year, the twice-weekly newsletter had crossed $100,000 in annual revenue.

Roughly $93,000 of it came from 56 sponsors, against a list of about 23,000 subscribers. That’s about $4 in sponsorship revenue per subscriber, and the business case for local in a nutshell: the audience may be small, but its geographic concentration makes each reader more valuable to businesses trying to reach that market.

Sponsorship sales had always been Marissa’s weakest link. When her daughter arrived a month earlier than expected, her revenue problem became urgent, and she had even less bandwidth to solve it.

Then she met Leslie, a recent graduate with a marketing background who was already a From Boise reader. Marissa hired her almost immediately with a clear mandate: multiply sponsorship revenue by year’s end, or there might not be a newsletter left to sell.

Leslie rebuilt the media kit and shifted the pitch from one-off placements to longer-term partnerships, including a year-long deal with the Idaho Lottery. Between Q2 and Q3 2025, revenue tripled.

For years, Marissa assumed a local newsletter meant local advertisers, and local marketing budgets have a ceiling. Then sponsorship coach Justin Moore reframed it: You live in Boise, but do you only buy local products?

She doesn’t, and neither does her audience. Now, Marissa is looking beyond Boise businesses to national brands that want Boise customers. As the city’s airport expands, her dream partners for the year are Alaska and Delta: national companies with a clear reason to pay for concentrated local reach.

That shift is central to From Boise’s next stage of growth. Marissa is targeting $250,000 in revenue and 35,000 subscribers in 2026 — more than doubling revenue while growing the audience by roughly 50%.

Put it into practice:

Vin Matano made roughly $200,000 as a part-time creator in 2025 — up from $94,000 in 2024 and $34,000 in 2023 — with fewer than 54,000 LinkedIn followers.

Gigi Robinson has closed more than 100 brand deals, typically worth $3,000 to $10,000 each. Partnerships drive 60–65% of her revenue, and after three years earning around $200,000, she’s pacing toward $400,000.

Neither has a massive audience by creator standards, and they don’t need one. Their value comes from who’s paying attention: people with purchasing power, professional influence, or control over a budget.

Vin treats the first deal as an audition for the next one. If a brand asks for three Instagram Stories, he might deliver ten. It’s a little additional work for him, but meaningful added value for the partner.

He applies the same strategy to agencies. If you impress one team managing budgets across multiple brands, and make yourself easy to work with, that relationship can turn into several clients.

Gigi learned the same lesson in college, while working 13 campus ambassador. Brands came and went, but the agencies running their campaigns often stayed. She began treating those relationships as the durable asset, always following up after campaigns and asking what was coming next.

Gigi protects her rate by negotiating scope instead of discounting her prices. If a startup can’t afford her usual fee, she changes what their budget buys: fewer deliverables, less usage, or a shorter exclusivity window.

She prices three things separately:

Rule of thumb: Every deliverable, usage right, and exclusivity window has its own value; bundling them all into the price of “a post” leaves money on the table.

Put it into practice:

Stephen Totilo has 27,000 subscribers to Game File, his video game industry newsletter. About 1,400 of them pay, at $10 a month or $100 a year, generating over $140,000 in annualized revenue.

Matt Kiser has more than 200,000 subscribers to WTF Just Happened Today?, a daily political digest. About 2% support it, contributing an average of $5.93 a month, generating roughly $227,000 a year.

These are high-intent audiences: readers seek them out for specific information they value enough to fund. Stephen monetizes that intent by paywalling two of his three weekly issues; Matt keeps everything free and asks readers to support the work voluntarily.

Same revenue source, opposite mechanics. What matters is understanding exactly what your niche audience believes it’s paying for.

When Axios stopped funding Stephen’s newsletter, he turned two decades of reporting expertise into a paid product. He announced Game File on December 13, 2023. By New Year’s Day, 192 readers were already paying.

The paywall works, in this case, because he’s offering unique, specific value: original reporting, trusted sources, and information readers can’t find elsewhere.

One feature sent Stephen digging through legal filings about a Star Wars superfan suing a games company over four seconds of an old teaser trailer — the kind of reporting gives readers a reason to pay for his work.

High-intent audiences already have a reason to pay; Matt makes it his job is to understand exactly what pushes them to do it.

When someone supports WTFJHT, they get a receipt, followed by an email in Matt’s own voice asking what compelled them to give that day. He calls it his best audience-listening tool.

But timing is of the essense. He catches readers at the moment of conversion, when they can still articulate what tipped them from reader to supporter. He hears things like, “I’m on a fixed income, but this is worth more to me than a Times subscription. I’ve been meaning to do this for two years.”

Those answers become inputs for the next fundraising drive: which value propositions to emphasize, what language resonates, and what finally gets a high-intent reader to pay.

Put it into practice:

Evan Armstrong writes The Leverage for roughly 35,000 free subscribers—specifically, “people who can sign million-dollar checks”: investors, founders, and operators with budgets.

That purchasing power shapes his business. Subscriptions and advertising each generate 25–30% of his revenue, while consulting accounts for 40–50%. Startups and funds pay Evan to apply his analysis to specific problems — a “brain for hire with deep market context.”

The newsletter generates a minority of the revenue. Its bigger job is proving to the right readers that Evan is worth hiring.

The Leverage synthesizes other people’s reporting into something more valuable to his audience: a point of view on what matters and what to do about it.

That’s the same judgment clients hire him for. Every issue effectively demos his consulting product for free: if his analysis helps a founder or investor make a decision, it gives them a reason to pay for that thinking applied to their own problem.

The Leverage costs $15 a month, $145 a year, or $500 for a founding tier. Evan initially set those prices on instinct; now he sees price as both a revenue lever and a filter for the high-value audience he wants.

The $500 tier proved the point; most subscribers barely used its extra perks. They were paying to support the work, and for some, $500 simply wasn’t a meaningful expense.

Evan plans to keep raising prices until the numbers push back. Slower conversion or higher churn will tell him when he’s found the ceiling.

Put it into practice: