The news: Newsletter platform Beehiiv is doubling its advertising solutions team, and it hired former LiveIntent executive Andrew MacMannis as VP of Ad Sales and Customer Success, per Adweek. The platform also hired its first Chief Marketing Officer, Darren Chait, as it looks to make a name for itself in the creator economy.

The company expects revenues to nearly double to $50 million in 2026, CEO Tyler Denk told Reuters, as it challenges Substack for a larger share of the creator newsletter market.

Why it matters: Marketers are shifting budgets toward newsletters as measurable, first-party media. Marketers who work with newsletter sponsorship platform Paved ran 40% more newsletter campaigns in 2025 than the year prior, per Paved, as some brands diversified spend away from walled gardens Meta, Google, and Amazon.

Beehiiv's flat-fee model and built-in ad network differentiate it from Substack's subscription-first approach. Substack takes a 10% cut of writers' subscription earnings and doesn’t offer a native ad marketplace. Beehiiv charges creators a monthly platform fee and runs an ad network that pays out more than $1 million a month to publishers. Creators on Beehiiv who diversify across ads, boosts (paid recommendations), and subscriptions earn roughly three times more than those tied to a single revenue stream, per self-reported data.

The broader newsletter market is growing in parallel. Social media creator revenues will increase 16.2% in 2026 to $21.1 billion, per our forecast, and creators are expanding beyond social platforms into newsletters, podcasts, and live events. Email remains a strong channel: 44% of US small businesses cited email as their most effective marketing channel in 2025, nearly double the prior year, per Constant Contact.

Beehiiv is growing quickly but remains far smaller than Substack. Beehiiv draws more than 40,000 monthly active users and nearly 15,000 paying subscribers, with roughly 1 in 7 new writers arriving from Substack, per Reuters. The company has raised $49.7 million at a $225 million valuation but does not expect to turn profitable until 2027, Denk told Press Gazette.

Implications for advertisers: Beehiiv's ad expansion creates new inventory for brands seeking direct access to engaged, opt-in audiences outside algorithmic feeds. Newsletters deliver content without platform fees or algorithmic suppression, and the channel's attribution clarity appeals to performance marketers under pressure to prove spend efficiency.

But newsletter advertising carries risks that social platforms have already solved. Measurement remains fragmented across newsletter networks; creative formats are limited compared with display and video; and audience scale trails major platforms. And Beehiiv's $50 million revenue target—impressive for a 4-year-old startup—is a fraction of what Meta and Google generate in a single day.

Advertisers should test newsletter buys for niche, high-intent audiences while tracking whether Beehiiv's expanded sales team delivers the cross-publisher reporting and targeting improvements needed to support larger allocations.