Newsletter publishing expanded sharply on beehiiv in 2024, while survey data shows creators are also adapting their channels, metrics, personalization, and use of AI. For campus organizations and student-life publishers, the figures below provide context for reach, timing, content, and sustainability.
Contents
- Newsletter growth and scale
- Open rates, clicks, and timing
- Publishing frequency and subject lines
- Revenue and creator economics
- Audience strategy and personalization
- AI, content, and measurement
- Email benchmarks for education and campus audiences
Newsletter growth and scale
Beehiiv reported 26,911 newsletters on its platform in 2023 and 52,809 in 2024, a 96.2% year-over-year increase. Those figures come from the beehiiv 2025 State of Email Newsletters and describe beehiiv publications, not the entire newsletter market.
The platform analyzed 15,682,102,484 total email newsletters sent across its publications during 2024. Its overall 2024 open rate was 37.67%, compared with 38.7% in 2023. In the same benchmark, alternative newsletter platforms averaged open rates between 19% and 23%.
Beehiiv also reports that 96.2% of global internet users access the internet through mobile phones, while 62.8% access the internet through laptops and desktop computers. For mobile readability, beehiiv recommends a font size of at least 16 pixels. These are global internet-user figures, so they should not be treated as measurements of a particular campus population.
HubSpot’s 2025 State of Newsletters surveyed more than 400 newsletter professionals. In that survey, 52% published content on LinkedIn, 50% on Facebook, and 42% through traditional email. Separately, 62% said web-based platforms such as Substack and beehiiv would help newsletter creators get ahead.
Open rates, clicks, and timing
Beehiiv’s 2024 data shows that engagement varied by day and sending hour. Tuesday had the highest open rate, at 38.25%, but also the lowest click-through rate, at 4.49%. Saturday had the lowest open rate, at 35.48%.
The highest average open rate by sending hour was 42.87% at 11 a.m. UTC. The corresponding rate at 10 a.m. UTC was 42.06%, and at 8 a.m. UTC it was 39.96%. The lowest listed rate was 27.33% at 5 a.m. UTC. These times are UTC and should be converted before applying them to a local student schedule.
Beehiiv reported a 37.74% open rate for regular newsletter sends. Automated emails had a 35.12% open rate and a 13.48% click-through rate, while newsletter posts had a 4.59% click-through rate. The measures use different email types, so they are useful as benchmarks but are not interchangeable performance guarantees.
Subject-line length was also associated with different results in beehiiv’s data. Subject lines of 20 or fewer characters had a 37.6% open rate. Subject lines of 80 or more characters had a 28.68% open rate. The figures describe observed platform benchmarks rather than a controlled experiment proving that length alone caused the difference.
Publishing frequency and subject lines
Beehiiv’s user mix changed between 2023 and 2024. Daily newsletters represented 4.9% of users in 2023 and 15.82% in 2024. Weekly newsletters represented 37.9% in 2023 and 65.62% in 2024.
| Beehiiv newsletter schedule | 2023 | 2024 |
|---|---|---|
| Daily | 4.9% | 15.82% |
| Weekly | 37.9% | 65.62% |
The shift gives campus publishers two useful reference points: weekly publishing was the larger reported schedule in both years, while daily publishing became more common in the 2024 user distribution. The data does not identify whether a newsletter served students, staff, alumni, or another audience.
HubSpot found that 30% of respondents used industry-related opinions, tips, or hot takes as their main content anchor. Another 42% focused primarily on industry, professional-field, or similar career-path content, while 25% covered a blend of career, hobbies, and entertainment. These categories may overlap in a survey context and should not be summed as a single audience segmentation.
Revenue and creator economics
Beehiiv reported that its Ad Network paid 4,728 newsletters in 2024. Beehiiv Boosts generated revenue for 3,112 newsletters, and the paid subscription model generated revenue for 1,498 newsletters.
Across those monetization methods, beehiiv reported $3,726,453.84 from its Ad Network, $2,093,152.21 from Boosts, and $8,675,284.94 from paid subscriptions. The sources identify platform-reported totals; they do not establish an average newsletter income or a typical creator’s earnings.
Three beehiiv examples illustrate the range of reported outcomes. LA Raver grew to 16,000 subscribers and generated $100,000 in one year. Catskill Crew reached more than $100,000 in revenue with 10,000 subscribers. Tech Safari grew to more than 15,000 subscribers in one year and reached six figures in revenue. These are individual case examples, not representative averages.
HubSpot found that 25% of respondents saw substantial profit growth from newsletters over the previous year, while 45% expected profits to increase significantly over the next 12 months. At the same time, 55% believed earning newsletter revenue would become substantially more difficult by 2030. Forty-six percent agreed that newsletters generate ad revenue more quickly than podcasts, videos, or websites.
Tool choice was another part of the HubSpot results. Outside email hosting, 34% said subscriber relationship platforms were the highest-return tool category. Thirty percent selected lead-generation or revenue-attribution tools, 22% selected social-listening or trend dashboards, and 21% selected editorial tools.
Audience strategy and personalization
HubSpot reported that 90% of newsletter creators tailored their strategy to their most prominent subscriber demographics. Sixty-seven percent expected newsletters to have a much higher level of personalization by 2030.
Direct recommendations from current subscribers ranked as the most effective growth strategy for 42% of respondents. The result is relevant to student-life newsletters because recommendations can come from existing readers, clubs, departments, residence communities, or alumni networks, although the survey does not report those groups separately.
The same HubSpot survey associated personalization with reported revenue differences. Among respondents who did not personalize, 23% reported earning $0 per month and 43% reported earning $1 to $100 per month. The dataset also reports that 7% of respondents who did not use personalization were among those bringing in lower revenue. These figures describe survey responses and do not prove that personalization caused a particular income level.
HubSpot also found that 45% followed news or trends related to their newsletter platform or channel. Thirty percent followed generative-AI and automation trends in newsletters, while 27% followed email or subscriber-data privacy shifts such as GDPR and Gmail privacy updates.
AI, content, and measurement
In HubSpot’s survey, 28% of newsletter professionals used AI for brainstorming and planning, and 25% used AI for content creation. Another 23% did not yet use AI but planned to within 12 months, while 4% did not use AI and did not plan to.
Among AI-using newsletter professionals, 42% said they saved one to three hours per week. Looking further ahead, 64% agreed that newsletters would be AI-generated by 2030. These are expectations and self-reported behavior, not forecasts of a specific campus publication’s workflow.
Measurement practices varied. Fifty-eight percent tracked views most often, 35% tracked clicks or click rate, and 30% tracked engagement metrics. Litmus reported that 40% of email marketers still used open rates as a primary success metric, while 55% of all opens were attributed to Apple Mail Privacy Protection as of March 2024. This makes open-rate comparisons especially dependent on the platform, audience, and measurement method.
Litmus also reported that more than 80% of respondents saw at least some performance improvement from subject-line personalization, live content, and dynamic content. More than 90% said segmentation improved performance at least somewhat. Sixty percent saw some improvement from annotations, schema, emojis in subject lines, and AI-generated copy. More than 85% reported improvements from omnichannel marketing, multivariate testing, action-triggered email, advanced performance analytics, and customer-data platforms.
Email benchmarks for education and campus audiences
Older benchmarks remain useful for comparison when their measurement periods are stated clearly. Campaign Monitor analyzed more than 100 billion emails sent across its platforms in 2021. Its all-industry averages were a 21.5% open rate, a 2.3% click-through rate, a 10.5% click-to-open rate, and a 0.1% unsubscribe rate.
In Campaign Monitor’s 2021 industry table, education had the highest open rate at 28.5% and the highest click-through rate at 4.4%. Retail had the lowest open rate at 17.1%. Real estate, design, and construction had the highest click-to-open rate, at 17.2%.
| Campaign Monitor 2021 benchmark | Result |
|---|---|
| All-industry open rate | 21.5% |
| Education open rate | 28.5% |
| All-industry click-through rate | 2.3% |
| Education click-through rate | 4.4% |
| All-industry click-to-open rate | 10.5% |
| All-industry unsubscribe rate | 0.1% |
Campaign Monitor’s day-of-week benchmark recorded the lowest open rate on Sunday, at 20.3%. Tuesday had the highest click-through rate by day, at 2.4%, while Saturday and Sunday tied for the lowest click-through rate, at 2.1%.
Mailchimp says its benchmark page analyzed billions of emails delivered by its system and was last updated in December 2023. It tracked campaigns that reached at least 1,000 subscribers. Campaign Monitor says its team maintains an average 99% delivery rate in its ultimate email best-practices guide and notes that an unsubscribe rate above 0.5% could indicate frequency fatigue or content misalignment.
A Mailchimp case study reported that Totally Chocolate maintained a 40% average email open rate, twice the 19%–20% B2B manufacturing benchmark cited in the case study. The company cut trade-show follow-up time by 95%, reducing it from three to four days to three to four hours, and collected more than 5,000 leads in an afternoon at an industry event. The case study also reported 10% year-over-year revenue growth in 2025 and described an event with 6,000 supplier booths. These are company-specific results, not general newsletter benchmarks.