Six in a Thousand (Free-to-Paid Newsletter Conversion in 2026)

My Medium friends can read this over .

Two years ago I wrote that monetizing a newsletter is way harder than most people make it out to be. I used a rule of thumb in that piece (with my own stats as the foundation). Two to five percent of my free list turns into paying subscribers.

That's not much. Sure, a newsletter is cool. You "own" that list. All the things people tell you online. Mostly true. All with a caveat. Growing an email list is hard. I'd say even harder than growing a social media following. And converting free to paid subs is even harder.

Case in point: Popular newsletter platform Beehiiv published their numbers for conversions in June 2026. The median of the report is 0.62 percent.

Six readers in a thousand...

Let that sink in.

Numbers

The report came out on June 22 and it runs on first-party platform data, thousands of paid publications on beehiiv, 2021 through 2026, aggregated by industry and list size. Medians unless they say otherwise.

So, this is only Beehiiv data. Not representative for Substack or other. Though I would guess that others are not too far off here. Substack might be a bit better due to Notes, but overall same ball park.

For Beehiiv, the overall median free-to-paid conversion is 0.62 percent. Sports leads the medians at 1.93 percent, interestingly. I would have never guessed that.

Btw, the median publication switches paid on 45 days after starting. That's a quite interesting number too.

Let's do some math

I ran this with the two-to-five-percent assumption back in my old article. At five percent, 100 paying subscribers means a list of 2,000 people. Doable, I thought, in a year or two of steady work. Not for everybody, of course. Not in every niche. Just generally speaking.

At 0.62 percent the same 100 paying subscribers need a list of roughly 16,000.

That's quite the list!

The median price in the report is $10 a month, or $100 a year. So 100 paying subscribers is about $1,000 a month before the platform's cut, before Stripe, before taxes.

Sixteen thousand free readers for that.

And that is the middle. Median. Half of all these publications do worse. A lot worse. Some do better. by a factor of five. Ouch.

Pricing

$10 a month and $100 a year at the median, so the annual plan is the cheaper one almost everywhere. By industry the medians run from $7 to $27 a month, and $80 to $292 a year.

The top of that range is business and investing. People there can expense it. Sure.

The bottom is where most of us start.

Churn

Monthly churn is the number I didn't have two years ago, apart from my own stats. Those were crucial. Because I lost subs at half the rate I gained new ones.

On Beehiiv: Food and Drink sits lowest at 5.06 percent for churn rates, News at 5.47, Sports at 7.76, AI at 13.33, Money highest at 16.67 percent.

At 16.67 percent a month you replace your entire paid list inside a year.

Beehiiv puts subscriber lifetime somewhere between 6 and 20 months depending on the vertical, and lifetime value between $230 in Investing and $83 in Community.

Getting someone to pay is one job. Keeping them is the other one, and it never stops.

Who is it for then?

The top ten percent tell a slightly different story. We know that from Substack as well. On Beehiiv, economy niches convert at 30.80 percent up there, Finance at 20.00, Investing at 18.69.

One in three. One in five. Those are crazy numbers.

I guess a subscription that might pay for itself is an easier sell than one that pays you back in reading pleasure. Money topics, tax topics, anything a reader can write off or turn into a decision.

There is always a catch

These are Beehiiv publications and nobody else's. Substack, Ghost, Kit and the rest are not in here, and a platform attracts a certain kind of writer. I mentioned that before.

The same report notes Beehiiv's own subscription revenue at $19 million for 2025 with $35 million projected for 2026, so they have an interest in this market looking healthy. Understandably so. Then again, I don't suspect any "enhanced" numbers from this report here.

First-party platform data beats a survey of what creators think they earn, in my eyes. Anecdotes hardly align with real stats. Science knows this well. Applies here too.

But, again, it's one platform, and a median flattens the shape completely. 0.62 percent tells you nothing about how many of those publications turned paid on, sold four subscriptions and went away, gave up, or whatever.

The Bottom Line

Nevertheless, I think the numbers from this June Beehiiv report are super interesting. Rates, niches, churn.

None of this really changes how I write or work with my newsletter. But I love to read stats.

What about you?

Btw: Letters is free

Letters by Burk is free. And I'll keep it that way. Paid subs are cool. But it's not really my business strategy right now.

I have written about making money on Substack without paid subscribers, and that piece is two years old now. Still holds up pretty well, though.

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