The Newsletter Boom Is Real. The Risk Is Bigger.

I’m writing this from the Financial Marketing Summit.

Between sessions, dinners, and hallway conversations, I’ve been catching up with friends, partners, and clients… many of whom I worked closely with during the Yahoo downturn in early 2025.

That period keeps coming up.

Not because it was dramatic (it was), but because it forced a lot of hard lessons into the open. Lessons most of the industry still hasn’t internalized.

Which brings me to a piece Beehiiv just published: “The State of Newsletters 2026.”

They’re not wrong.

Newsletters are booming.

But if you’ve operated at scale over the last 18 months, you know the headline misses the most important part.

So is the survivorship bias.

Beehiiv’s data highlights:

All true.

But here’s what those charts don’t show:

I’m not speculating.

I sat with multiple teams this week who watched Yahoo quietly defer or throttle nearly their entire list in early 2025.

No spam folder, just… nothing showing up.

And the scariest part?

If you weren’t watching delivery signals, you didn’t even know it was happening.

They won’t save you in 2026 either.

One of the most dangerous takeaways people will pull from the “State of Newsletters” report is:

During the Yahoo issues, we saw plenty of lists with:

…that still couldn’t safely send to more than a small fraction of their file.

Why?

Because opens are not delivery.

And they’re definitely not intent.

This is exactly why, inside Audience Bridge, we stopped treating opens as a primary signal years ago.

Instead, we:

That approach wasn’t theoretical — it’s what allowed us and our clients to keep sending while others were frozen.

Another thing the report celebrates is list growth.

Again, directionally correct.

But here’s the operational reality we kept running into in 2025:

Most lists don’t break because they’re too small.

They break because they grow faster than their deliverability envelope.

When you:

You’re not growing a list.

You’re creating tomorrow’s suppression problem.

Inside Audience Bridge, we dogfood this daily.

We don’t send to our full file.

We don’t treat Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook the same.

We don’t permanently expand volume just because we can.

We:

That discipline is what kept our own sending infrastructure alive during the Yahoo downturn, and it’s the same playbook clients here at the summit keep thanking us for.

Beehiiv also highlights how quickly newsletters are monetizing now.

That’s good news.

It’s also why inbox failures are more damaging than ever.

More monetization usually means:

During 2025, we watched lists with aggressive monetization strategies implode.

Not because the offers were bad, but because delivery couldn’t keep up.

That’s why we shifted to:

Those ideas aren’t coming from a blog post.

They’re coming from watching real revenue disappear, and figuring out how to stop it from happening again.

After a few days at this summit, one thing is obvious.

In 2026, the divide won’t be between:

It will be between publishers who understand signals and publishers who rely on surface metrics.

The teams I’m meeting here who came out of the Yahoo downturn stronger all did the same thing:

They stopped guessing.

They stopped trusting vanity dashboards.

They built systems that respond to how inbox providers actually behave.

That’s what we’ve built, and what we run ourselves inside Audience Bridge.

If you’re growing, sending frequently, or monetizing aggressively — and you’re not completely sure how much of your list is actually reachable — that’s usually worth pressure-testing.

Sometimes everything’s fine.

Sometimes you’re closer to the edge than you think.

Either way, clarity beats surprises.

Time to leave the summit,

Chris Miquel

PS: Everything I’m describing here is what we built Audience Bridge around, not growth for growth’s sake, but controlled expansion that survives ISP mood swings.

BEFORE YOU GO