🔴 beehiiv's bet on the "content economy"

Last Thursday, beehiiv released a slate of new features at its inaugural Winter Release Event.

Creator Spotlight is owned by beehiiv, so to mark four years since the company launched, I had Tyler Denk, the CEO and co-founder, join me for our very first in-person recording.

I think the in-person atmosphere is more fun than the remote recording I’m used to. Please tell me if you’d like to see us record in-person episodes more often!

— Francis Zierer, Editor

🎧 If you prefer a podcast platform other than YouTube, we’re on Apple, Spotify, and all the rest.

By Francis Zierer

What is a beehiiv? When I say ‘an Instagram’ or ‘a Twitter,’ if you’ve consumed content on either of those platforms, you probably have some idea what I mean — or at least you used to.

All creator platforms start offering one thing, then expand as their user base expands. ‘An Instagram’ was an individual’s informal square photo diary. ‘A Twitter’ was a catalogue of an individual’s brief thoughts.

A beehiiv was a Morning Brew-style newsletter — opinionated aggregation —monetized through ads. It is now more than that, particularly in the wake of the company’s Winter Release Event last week, which brought the launch of native digital products, a link-in-bio tool, and dynamic newsletter content, among other features.

To bring you a picture of what beehiiv is today and where it’s going, I spoke with Tyler Denk, beehiiv’s CEO and co-founder. (Full disclosure, he is also my boss.) He’s a power-user of the platform. I’ve been wanting to bring him on the podcast for a while to talk about his own newsletter, Big Desk Energy, which I believe exemplifies the solo-creator version of a newsletter product built on beehiiv.

But again, there’s no such thing as a beehiiv, which is the point.

There are many beehiivs: Creator Spotlight, TIME, and Arnold Schwarzenegger all publish on the platform. These are all markedly different products.

What unifies all beehiiv users with more than 2,500 subscribers (the limit on the free plan), however, is that they can justify paying for the product. Which typically means they’re making enough money through using the product to justify the cost; they have a business, budding or booming.

Tyler situates creators on a spectrum from “hobbyist to outcome-oriented digital entrepreneur,” all within the content economy. beehiiv, he says, skews towards serving the right side of that spectrum best, though it serves the hobbyists as well. “You’re not just writing content for content’s sake,” if you’re an outcome-oriented digital entrepreneur, he explained to me:

Beyond the features, what stands out to me in this Winter Release campaign is Tyler’s first-time use of the term “the content economy.”

His use of this term instead of “creator economy” signals beehiiv’s roadmap and is thus a diagnosis of what the creator economy has already become.

When discussing my work with people who don’t work in content or media, to simplify things, I tend to tell them that content is anything you look at on your phone. No matter who made it and for what purpose, it’s all the stuff you consume on your phone.

This is the content economy: where the site of consumption weights meaning more than the source of production.

Whenever we use the word creator in this newsletter, it’s preceded by a silent ‘content.’ The word ‘creator,’ as we use it, was coined by YouTube in 2011 as a replacement for something like ‘user uploading videos to YouTube.’

To be absolutely clear, our status as part of beehiiv shapes our definition of the term.

This is the problem with the term ‘creator’: its meaning varies from platform to platform. Instagram’s definition is different from YouTube’s, from beehiiv’s, from OnlyFans’. What unifies all definitions is: a user uploading content to a platform.

‘Creator’ used to imply independence, too, a party separate from and even in opposition to media organizations like Fox or The New York Times. But those organizations post to platforms too, and creators are forming media organizations, and everyone is posting short-form clips.

As a consumer of “the feed,” it’s decreasingly possible to differentiate the provenance of a given content unit. Your friend from high school, your favorite creator, and your favorite actor marketing their new movie are all producing the exact same style of content on the exact same platforms.

The creator economy is only growing. The number of participants and the market value are increasing every year. It’s not easy to make a living as a solo creator working on just one platform and monetizing only through, for example, YouTube or TikTok ad revenue share.

The content economy contains the creator economy. And that, as Tyler says at the end of the Winter Release presentation, is why beehiiv is becoming “the operating system for the content economy.”

Until Friday, November 21, beehiiv is offering 20% off annual plans with the code WRE2025. Sign up here.

Tyler started his newsletter, Big Desk Energy, nearly two years ago. He now has over 120,000 subscribers. Yes, as the founder of the company whose software he uses, he’s had a few advantages in getting there, but there’s much that’s replicable.

There are few newsletters on beehiiv using as many features as effectively as Big Desk Energy, which is why the newsletter exists. It’s a way for him to test and understand the features, to better understand the beehiiv user’s perspective, and, of course, to market the product.

Tyler currently has over 89k followers across LinkedIn and Twitter combined, both of which are fruitful sources of newsletter subscribers.

A “lead magnet” is something of value offered in exchange for an email address; typically, a digital product (ebook, course, even a webinar) with zero marginal cost.

When it works, it works — we’ve spoken to a few creators with success stories here.

Tyler has four, all explicitly geared to his audience of founders.

Tyler’s is one of the most visible beehiiv newsletters. This is an unfair advantage. He has between 400 and 500 publishers recommending Big Desk Energy through the recommendation system, which has become a significant source of growth.

You don’t need to be the CEO to use recommendations well. Every publication can recommend four publications at once, but can be recommended by as many as are willing to add your publication to their top four.

beehiiv has a guide to setting up recommendations, but it really comes down to relationships — finding other newsletters that complement yours, reaching out to the publisher, and suggesting a recommendation exchange.

On the paid network side, he also maintains a Boosts balance to incentivize paid recommendations. (See beehiiv’s guide to the Boost marketplace.)

Tyler didn’t invest in paid growth until after he broke 20,000 subscribers. Since then, he’s usually had a few campaigns going on Meta or Google. It’s easy to justify the spend, not just because of the marketing value for his company; he monetizes most of his newsletters by selling ad space.

The most effective ad campaigns, he told me, are those where he’s promoting one of his lead magnets — not the newsletter content itself.

For a detailed guide to growing a newsletter audience through paid advertising, I recommend this presentation from Nathan May (we work with him at Creator Spotlight and have previously interviewed him).