Published August 11
Newsletter platform Beehiiv — which powers content for independent creators as well as large publishers like Time and Newsweek — announced a slew of new features last month, calling it the “most significant expansion to date.”
Among them is a new AI tool called Copilot designed to help users with troubleshooting, analysis and more; Communities, where users can connect their podcasts, newsletters and websites together with audience discussion spaces and exclusive experiences for subscribers; a redesigned visual editor and writing experience.
Beehiiv is also making a major expansion of its ad network with the introduction of programmatic advertising, with plans to roll out dynamic ad insertion for podcasts soon.
We talked to Beehiiv CEO Tyler Denk about all these features and why they’re necessary in an ever-evolving web.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What has the response and momentum been like after the summer release event?
Overall really great. The big launch was Community, and the traction there out of the gate has been strong. I think an active rate above 30% is considered a really healthy community of members who are regularly contributing, and we have dozens and dozens of those types of communities that have already hit that threshold in just the past few weeks or so.
We have a rolling basis of accepting publishers into the programmatic ad beta. The data is straight up and to the right in terms of advertisers who were otherwise not using our ad network, and because of the ease of programmatic ads, they’re now using the ad network and monetizing.
My other favorite feature is probably the visual editor. It’s the most core feature of the entire product, essentially. It’s where people go to create their content on a daily basis, and we totally revamped that, and I think the experience is so much better.
So long story short, there were quite a few shots on goal from that summer release event. All of them are going just as well as we would have hoped.
How do the publishers now using programmatic differ from those that were already using the ad network?
A lot of those who are using programmatic were previously using other solutions and running ads that were typically banner ads in email; the type of publishers that are typically what we consider enterprise, larger publishers because they have a separation of church and state between editorial and monetization.
A lot of our users are either independent content creators, independent publishers and journalists, where they’re doing both monetization and the writing and creation of content.
The larger organizations, though, are a big bulk of the publishers that we have now converted into using our ad network because of programmatic.
And it’s about ease of use — the ability just to have an ad block that we automatically fill with a placement.
Why was expanding the ad network and introducing programmatic so important? Was it largely to serve those publishers that weren’t already utilizing it?
We have a long tail of content creators, some that have 3,000 or 5,000 subscribers, and if we can continue to build the ad network for them, we will. I think it’s very democratizing to give them access to monetization.
But most of the email sends go through our massive senders like the enterprise ones who are sending to 300,000 people every day, and those are the ones who were typically using other programmatic solutions. We could either convince one of them to run programmatic ads with us or we could convince 3,000 smaller publishers to run any sort of ads.
And programmatic is very publisher friendly. From a pure performance standpoint, with programmatic, we know that advertiser B, for instance, will perform the best with their audience, and we can show them that.
But, ultimately, the advertiser is who’s funding the ad network, and being super strict and identifying the best opportunity for these advertisers to perform well is always a top priority.
How will AI play a role in these new product features and capabilities?
The adoption of Copilot has already been really strong. Ten percent of users used it or adopted it within the first week, and we’re just starting to layer it into the different touchpoints in the app.
It’s great for user education, debugging and analysis of what’s going on in your content ecosystem. To have this AI that’s trained on all of your data and all of the best practices for the platform is a really valuable asset.
How can we position Beehiiv to be the critical infrastructure of a content creator? AI will play a part in every business going forward, whether you’re a content creator or not.
I was on a panel once where this content creator next to me said she spends five days of her week doing admin work and two days actually creating content, and I think that’s the bull case for AI. Ideally, we can flip that, and it’s five days of the week doing actual content and two days of analysis and admin work around that.
We’re not trying to replace writers. I don’t think AI writing is good at all, and I don’t think that many people enjoy reading it. It’s the stuff around the content that we can really augment using AI.
The web is facing a lot of structural changes right now, particularly from the rise of AI search and AI scraping. Do you see these new features helping your publishers and creators with these changes?
We’ve been putting a lot of work into AEO (answer engine optimization) and GEO (generative engine optimization) best practices. And we’ve partnered with Cloudflare on something called Crawl Controls, where you can actually see what AI crawlers are crawling your content, and you can either just visualize that because it’s helpful information or you can block that traffic entirely.
On the journalism side, if you are putting most of your stuff behind a paywall and you don’t want these crawlers accessing any of your content, you can block that at the source using this new Cloudflare integration.
We also recently revamped our recommendation network, so newsletters can recommend other newsletters within their ecosystem. And that avoids having to deal with AI search at all.
But I don’t think anyone has perfect answers. I think it’s the combination of how we build more network effects to help our publishers grow, and how we make our content and the websites performing at their best.
Is it fair to say that Beehiiv is evolving into more of a creator hub than a typical newsletter or website platform?
Our roadmap reflects that there’s been an evolution of what a successful creator looks like over the past few years. Five or so years ago, there were TikTokers and there were YouTubers and podcasters and newsletter operators, and I think the most successful content creators today are multichannel.
Newsletters are still at the core of what we do. It’s our strongest value prop. We are, I think, better at newsletters than any other platform in the world. I think that owning your audience and distribution with newsletters at the center of everything allows you to drive traffic to your website, allows you to not rely on search, allows you to drive people to your community, allows you to drive people to your podcast.
So I view newsletters as the hub of everything that we do, but we have also built a robust ecosystem around email.
There’s a huge opportunity in advertising in podcasts. It’s wide open.
We got a lot of requests to build podcasts, so that’s why we prioritized it. The reception in both the market and from our users was so much stronger than I expected. My big learning from podcasts is: When we talk to users and ask if they want to move their podcast over to Beehiiv and what they’re using for hosting, 8 out of 10 people were like, “I have no idea who I’m using for hosting.” There’s zero brand affinity there.
Meanwhile, there’s a lot of brand affinity for our platform. So I think being able to move that podcasting spend over to us, that’s a huge opportunity.
A year or two from now, what do you see as the most important aspects of Beehiiv? The AI features, the ad network, something else?
The ad network is going to be the story over the next two years. That’s our big bet. We can do what YouTube did for video content creators, for anyone who has a newsletter or podcast.
Ultimately, users, publishers and creators just want to build a business, support themselves, be able to keep reinvesting in their content.
There will always be Google and there will always be Meta. But audiences want a trusted environment, like a newsletter or a podcast, from a creator that they really trust and look forward to — not some algorithmic feed.
I want the heads of growth at companies to wake up and say, “Let’s put $100,000 next month into Beehiiv.” They can come to our platform and they can say they want to reach people interested in, for instance, health and wellness in their 20s and 30s, and they’re willing to do audio podcast ads and newsletter ads. We can do that full suite, end to end.
