I just talked to a B2B creator friend who has stopped responding to inbound requests from new ad partners. Their newsletter ads are sold out for months, yet they’re still getting multiple messages per day from prospective partners.

It’s wild how much power has shifted toward creators. This started in B2C (👋 AG1 paying Joe Rogan a reported $10 million per year) and keeps spreading like wildfire.

B2B was late to the party, but it has arrived.

B2B creators aren’t your Insta or TikTok influencer making viral reels. They’re practitioners with deep experience in a particular niche (the more niche, the better). You’ll find them writing newsletters, posting on LinkedIn, and running private communities. Their audiences are smaller (in the thousands usually) yet have substantial purchasing power.

Today I’m bringing you a crash course in B2B creator partnerships. It features what I’ve learned from partnering with some amazing B2B brands, building a 7-figure solo business driven mostly from advertising, and conversations with 10+ fellow creators. This is written for both brands and for aspiring writers looking to build a business.

I partnered with my friends at beehiiv, including head of growth Tony Varghese and creator partnerships lead Luke MccGwire. beehiiv has the unique vantage point of seeing multiple sides: they’re the newsletter platform for serious writers, they run a Newsletter Ad Network that’s paid out more than $37M to writers, and they’re one of the biggest advertisers in B2B newsletters.

There are a million places brands can advertise. Most of them are built to be scrolled past.

Newsletters are different:

My ad partners tell me they like Growth Unhinged because their ad shows up next to the topics their buyers care about. I safeguard this by picking one partner for each theme I plan to cover in the upcoming quarter.

Some newsletters are informal side projects. Others are multi-million dollar operations with dedicated sales teams and operations staff. Then there’s the broad, messy middle.

A shorthand is to segment newsletters based on audience size: emerging (<2,500 subs), small (2,500-10,000 subs), medium (10,000-40,000 subs), and large (>40,000 subs). I’d encourage brands to diversify their mix with lots of small creators for ROI (programmatic), a few medium creators that perfectly fit your niche, plus select large creators to maximize reach.

These are usually too small for meaningful ad revenue. Focus on growth instead, which comes from consistently writing great content that readers want to share and from finding an initial channel you can scale. (The best ones for me are LinkedIn, AI search and beehiiv Recommendations).

While small, these newsletters are monetizable, especially if they have high engagement and are in a valuable niche. ROI can be fantastic for advertisers who can scale across lots of these creators.

Advertising is usually programmatic (ex: through the beehiiv Ad Network). Top-decile creators make $100-$200 per month from the beehiiv Ad Network, enough to offset the cost to run the newsletter.

Pro-tips to increase earnings:

Monetization potential starts to increase materially after 10,000 subscribers with creators combining direct sales with an Ad Network for remaining inventory.

Top-decile creators might earn $300-800 per month from the Ad Network and even more from direct partnerships. Typical pricing is about $1,000-$5,000 per collab.

Pro-tips to increase earnings:

While earnings vary wildly, many large B2B creators generate $20,000-$100,000+ per month from advertising partnerships. Typical pricing might be $5,000-$15,000+ per collab. These creators have much more professionalized operations including dedicated sales teams or agencies (although I still manage all partnerships myself).

There are relatively few large B2B newsletters, and the balance of power shifts here from brands to the creators themselves. Large creators tend to be in high demand and often sell out at least 3 months in advance. Test with small or medium creators before making a bigger bet with larger ones.

Pro-tips to increase earnings:

I started running ads in Growth Unhinged about a year ago and have now partnered with about a dozen different brands. I can tell you: results vary.

Brand partners see the best results when three factors come together:

When beehiiv partners with writers, their partnerships team starts with a long list of every possible newsletter that could be relevant. They run an initial screen before reaching out to the creator: (a) English-speaking, (b) in the technology, business, or entrepreneurship space, (c) have partnered with similar brands in the past, (d) have quality, relevant content.

If that checks out, the partnerships team has a conversation with the creator and collects more detailed information: (a) audience geography, (b) audience age, (c) any available audience insights (role, income, company size).

beehiiv requires creators to actually use their product (“this newsletter is powered by beehiiv” is a great message). That doesn’t need to be a requirement for other products, especially for enterprise-focused B2B products, although it is a nice bonus.

A softer factor that’s harder to measure: is this partner easy to work with?

Pro-tip for writers: Set up a three-question onboarding survey for new subscribers. Great questions for advertisers include (a) their role, (b) their seniority, and (c) their company info. Here’s a snapshot for Growth Unhinged — y’all are mostly in marketing/growth or are founders/CEOs.

I’ve found that getting your first sale with an ad partner is relatively easy. Lots of brands want to pilot a newsletter ad partnership or promote a new product launch.

My own first deal took less than a week. I’d written Growth Unhinged for more than four years while working in venture capital, where I didn’t monetize it at all. The week I went full-time, I emailed my pricing to a company that had been asking to advertise. They committed immediately and then I had to scramble to set up a proper LLC, a business bank account, and invoicing.

That renewal is far harder. I had to compile a bunch of reporting to make a case that the ads were working. Procurement got involved and I entered into a multi-month negotiation. Brands expect to see real quantifiable ROI or they won’t write another check.

Said differently, you land in brand marketing and expand in growth marketing.

The beehiiv creator team looks for brand fit and ICP alignment, and also considers the expected CPM, or cost per thousand impressions. Their model considers total list size x the unique open rate to estimate the number of unique impressions. They’re aiming for a CPM under $40, although there's flexibility for exceptionally well-aligned brands and creators. (For example, a newsletter with 40,000 subscribers and a 50% open rate could expect about $800 per ad slot.)

After the initial partnership, beehiiv now has far better data: UTM clicks, the signup rate from these clicks, discount code redemptions.

I’d advocate a different approach for brands selling a high-ticket product ($50,000+ ACV) with a longer sales cycle. If a brand closes one $100,000 deal after a quarter of ads, the CPM barely matters. It’s far more important to gauge influence and engagement among target buyers. (I’ll note that my own CPMs are >5x of beehiiv’s target yet this doesn’t come up in renewal discussions.)

Pro-tip for writers: Your brand partners may not know how to get the best ROI from their placements. It’s your job to help them. Guide them to which offers see the best click-through rates and insist that they have an attribution process that gives your newsletter credit.

You might think that a newsletter ad is a newsletter ad. It turns out there are four common types of newsletter placements. The value to brands can vary by an order of magnitude or more.

I personally like the primary ad placement format for a couple reasons. Software products are complex and can’t be easily explained in one sentence. It also cleanly delineates the ad from the content rather than weaving it in.

That being said, I’m seeing a bunch of newsletters shift toward secondary ad placements with between two and four brand partners per issue. There’s obvious appeal for creators (more money from the same inventory). I’d love to see an A/B test on the performance impact.

Pro-tip for writers: Start with the primary ad placement, which means you have less inventory you need to sell and greater scarcity. Expand into other formats once you’re consistently selling out. I think of it like airline seats: once a slot is sold, it’s gone. As the plane fills up, you can raise prices or add a second flight.

If a B2B creator has a successful newsletter, odds are they’re active on other platforms as well. This likely includes some combination of LinkedIn, X, YouTube, and a podcast. Multiple formats together tend to be better than a single channel alone:

I offer a Good-Better-Best menu of quarterly partnerships. The newsletter ads are the foundation for each package, then other formats and benefits get layered on top: (a) speaking at events, (b) sponsored LinkedIn posts, and (c) category exclusivity. I also write every ad myself, in my voice, and most partnerships now run for a full year.

For creators, the earning potential can add up fast: sold out inventory, multiple brands per newsletter, collabs across platforms. Just beware that this only works long-term if your model is aligned.

The winning formula is to partner with brands that genuinely make sense for your audience, your audience then sees ads that feel relevant, the brand gets conversions, everybody wins. And the more selective you are about partners, the more pricing power you have.

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