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👋 Hey!
There is a particular kind of joy in watching a click rate come in hot (yay!). You wrote the thing, you picked the link, the dashboard lit up, and for one afternoon you were a genius.
This week is about the gap between the number and the truth. 16% of consumer clicks now come from bots, and advertisers have started asking publishers to prove otherwise (nay?). AI crawlers hit newsletter content half a billion times last month, and beehiiv just shipped the switches to decide who gets in. Meanwhile, a guy with a Substack talked his way into a Capitol Hill press credential and turned that access into a two-audience subscription business.
Plus, we built a leaderboard where the only number that means anything is the one you paid. More on that below.
Let's dive in! 👇
Meme of the Week
This Week's Hot Takes
beehiiv now writes the structured data that gets your posts cited by AI. Every post ships machine-readable markup and a dynamic llms.txt. AI Crawl Control, built with Cloudflare, blocks specific bots at the edge instead of politely asking.
16% of consumer clicks are from bots, and advertisers have started asking. Omnivery clocked Gmail contamination climbing from 2% to over 20% this year. beehiiv already bills its advertisers on verified clicks only.
Google Postmaster Tools V1 is switching off for real this time. The pause is lifted and access is vanishing account by account. V2 ships no IP or domain reputation scores to replace it.
TikTok launched a newsletter that lives on Substack. The Creator Cut runs livestream advice written by creators themselves. A platform with a billion users still wants a spot in your inbox.
Your cutting room floor is the content your superfans want most. Buttondown's Ryan Farley makes the case for newsletters as director's commentary. Save one scrap per work session and you'll never face a blank page.
Tool of the Week
InboxBid: the newsletter leaderboard where the ranking formula is the price
Why You'll Love It: We built InboxBid because every other newsletter directory is a popularity contest run by a secret algorithm. This one has no algorithm. Bids are whole dollars starting at $1, taking a seat costs $1 more than the total that seat holds, and your bids stack into a running total, so climbing later only costs the gap. Your first payment mints a claim key that proves the listing is yours.
Best For: Operators who want a discovery listing they can actually understand, and anyone who enjoys the sport of watching a leaderboard move.
Deal of the Week
InboxBid: Bid once, get a month of HeyNews on us
What the deal is: Place any paid bid on InboxBid and we'll hand you a free month of HeyNews membership, the Hobbyist plan, which is worth $39. Bids start at $1, so the cheapest seat on the board also buys you a month of the tool that some of the most successful newsletter operators use. First 25 bidders only, and the board just opened, so the seats near the top are still absurdly cheap.
How the deal works: After you make your bid, if you’re among the first 25 people to make a bid, you’ll get the free monthly HeyNews at the checkout page. Just accept that and you’re good to go. Email us if you encounter any problems.
Who should take the deal: Operators who want a discovery listing and a real look at HeyNews in the same transaction, and anyone who has been meaning to try us but wanted a reason.
Growth Hack of the Week
Publish the same edition in five places before you write anything new
How: Take this week's edition, the actual 500 to 2,000 word piece, and paste it word for word into five destinations: a blog post on your own site, a Substack post, a LinkedIn newsletter, an X article, and a Medium article. No rewriting, no reformatting, no new angle. beehiiv can push the blog version automatically and exclude the sections you want to keep email-only.
Why: Newsletter Operator's new distribution playbook argues a weekly newsletter should be the raw material for 20+ pieces of content a week, and copy-paste is the tier that costs you nothing. Those platforms carry more domain authority than your site, so your work turns up in Google and gets pulled into AI answers with your name attached. This only works if your edition contains original writing. Pure link roundups have nothing to distribute.
Expected Result: Thousands of extra impressions on writing you already finished. Dan Koe, who has 4.3M social followers and 49M YouTube views, republished one old newsletter as an X article and watched it pull 219 million views.
Spotlight: Once Upon a Hill by Michael Jones
What works:
He bought access nobody could copy. Jones spent roughly a year convincing the U.S. House Periodical Press Gallery that his one-person Substack was a real news organization. In 2022, he became the first Substack journalist with a Capitol Hill press credential.
The free and paid tiers serve different people. Free readers are political obsessives. Paying readers are political professionals who, in his words, cannot afford to get Congress wrong.
The schedule is the funnel. A free flagship every Sunday does acquisition and showcases the paid product. Monday through Thursday, a daily edition goes to the whole list, with portions reserved for subscribers, so free readers hit a preview wall within the content they are already reading.
It reads like a magazine. Every edition runs a lead story followed by the same recurring sections on power and leadership, policy, and campaigns and elections. Readers know the furniture, so they skim to what they need.
Friday is not a publishing day. He spends it on analytics, planning, sources, and thinking about Sunday's lead.
He renamed the whole thing to remove friction. The old title, Supercreator, forced him to explain what a creator was before he could ask a lawmaker a question. In 2023, he relaunched as Once Upon a Hill and stopped losing the first thirty seconds of every conversation.
Creator quote: On what drives revenue: "Having original reporting, getting exclusives, getting scoops, that's what generates paid subscriptions."
Your takeaway: Ask what your paying readers get penalized for not knowing. If nobody's Monday morning gets worse without your newsletter, you have a hobby tier, that’s all. Jones charges $15 a month because being wrong about Congress costs his readers real money.
A/B Test of the Week
Test: Travis Hazlewood, who runs email and SMS deliverability at Ortto, pulled apart real campaigns account by account to find what actually moves click rates. Two questions worth stealing: does your Primary CTA need to be visible the moment someone opens, and should it be a button or a linked image?
Result: Between 70% and 95% of clicks land on the Primary CTA even when Secondary CTAs are everywhere, and he never saw it drop below 30%. Campaigns where the Primary CTA sat two scrolls down, under a hero image and a text block, performed the same as ones with the button up top. On format, the preference flipped by role: buttons beat images for Primary CTAs, images beat buttons for Secondary CTAs.
Takeaway: Stop treating button styling as an optimization and start treating CTA format as a question with two different answers. Also, link count is not the villain. Senders with clean reputations run 20+ links without trouble. Messy, competing blocks are what kill clicks. Then watch where your Secondary clicks land, because that is your audience telling you what your next Primary should be.
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Questions? Just write a comment below. We read all the comments and respond to them.
Thanks for reading,
Eren & Cagri