The Email Mafia (PayPal's Got Nothing on Email)

Ok, so DailyCandy is for fashion/style/shopping, Thrillist is for food/drink/shopping, IdealBite is for green, and Vital Juice is for fitness/nutrition ...<p>Seems like there are other huge markets that are ideal for email newsletters:<p>- Sports news/scores for your city<p>- Investing (daily stock tips and news)<p>- Real estate (select listings that just went on the market in your city with good pictures like jet setter does)<p>- Arts &#38; entertainment (museum, gallery, theater, and movie stuff—though I think DailyCandy does some of this)<p>I'm sure some of these exist (especially investing) but weren't mentioned but I bet many are old-school and the spaces are ripe for improvement.

Great post and I agree... I think newsletters fit with what people are looking for these days and the market is wide open.<p>A newsletter/founder that probably isn't big enough to make it on that list, but that I would highly recommend is Mark Hurst's Good Experience newsletter - <a href="http://www.goodexperience.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.goodexperience.com</a>.<p>It is what originally inspired me to want to create a newsletter (which ended up finally being Hacker Newsletter - <a href="http://www.hackernewsletter.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.hackernewsletter.com</a>) and is the only newsletter that I open and read each one. To me it is just like getting your favorite magazine, but better since I don't have to do anything but open gmail.

Startup Digest is amazing. They started picking up our Hackers and Founders Silicon Valley events a few months ago, and our total membership has gone from 800 members to 1250 members in 3 months. Our San Francisco events have gotten 30% bigger per event.

I know basically nothing about this business.<p>I just read Jason Baptiste's two articles about how this is "serious business" and that was a nice overview.<p>Anyone else have a suggested reading list for learning more?

I wrote this post in response to all of the recent HN discussions on email newsletters. Trying to shed more light on the profitable email industry that never gets talked about.

The one thing people don't talk about with these newsletters: most of these emails are "bacon. " That is what the email industry calls spam's pretty cousin. People don't try to block these emails because hey, they signed up to receive them. But most people also aren't reading these emails.

Is this serious? I'm reading this after the Steve Yegge blog and can't tell anymore.

Anybody care to explain how you actually make money from an email newsletter? This article, and all the ones linked from it (and the ones linked from them) just tells you how much people sold their lists for. Never is it mentioned <i>why</i> these lists are valuable.<p>I'm on a couple of the lists mentioned. They don't charge me anything. They don't try to sell me anything. How is this possibly valuable to anybody in terms of dollars?

I feel like this article is missing a lot of information. The "Email Mafia" is listed, but only a few mention total subscriber counts -- which in itself isn't an important number until you talk about open and clickthrough rates.<p>I also didn't see the newsletters that I regularly get in my inbox: Groupon, LinkedIn, Mint, Yelp, etc.

Interesting list of companies, another company I've seen is VitalJuice (city based, healthy lifestyle newsletter)

Do you monetize newsletters with ads only, or are there other ways? Also, what kind of ads can you use? I don't think AdSense can be used in emails.