🌞 Future of Local Newsletters

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Despite my own struggles, I’ve told you that I still strongly believe in local newsletters as a business model.

And today, there’s some big news in the local media space that I want to point you to.

That’s what I wanna talk about. I’ve also got a perfect example of why the Vegas audience is literally the worst.

Before we jump in, I’ve got two sponsors today. First one is …

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So first, I just happen to have the perfect example to explain what’s so weird about the audience here in Vegas. And I think it really illustrates why I’m having such a struggle getting anyone to pay for anything.

Obviously, Vegas is close to Los Angeles, where there wildfires have displaced tons of people.

Well, there’s a local restaurant here that announced yesterday that if you dine in today, then they are donating the proceeds to World Central Kitchen, who are on the ground feeding the displaced people in LA.

So, it literally costs you nothing extra if you wanted to dine at this restaurant.

In yesterday’s local newsletter, we put this in the intro as well as in the subject line.

We got our highest unsubscribes after sending an issue ever.

wtf? People here are wild.

Even had a couple of long-time subscribers mark the email as spam!

Anyways, back to why I still love this business model…after this ad…

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In the local newsletter space, there are two big players that are in lots of markets here in the USA — 6AM City and Axios Local.

Personally, I think these media companies don’t do as good of a job as the solo people/couples who are doing local newsletters. They tend to not be as finely tuned to the local areas, even though they supposedly hire locals.

Anyways, Axios Local made this announcement today -

I know that a lot of people doing local newsletters are trying to do it with AI…and it doesn’t quite work. So, I find it super interesting that OpenAI is part of this.

You can view the Axios full announcement here. (It’s got a paywall, so just disable Javascript and reload the page to read it.)

For me, the most interesting tidbit was: “The company expects five of its current local markets to be profitable this year.“

They’re already in 30 markets, soon to be 34, and only 5 are expected to be profitable.

This wouldn’t be true for someone like me or you starting local newsletters cause we wouldn’t have the kind of overhead that Axios does.

Still, an interesting look into the industry.

Are you getting into the local newsletter space?

Coming up…

More on what I’m working on and how it’s going.

Stay awesome,

Shawna

P.S. If you’re looking for high level discussions or tips on things like local SEO and Rank & Rent, I highly recommend Jacky Chou’s Advise community. I’ve been in it for several months and there’s tons of value in it, including a SOP for local SEO.

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