beehiiv's leadership on rented attention, what Ramp and HubSpot built instead, and the 12-month rule for your own newsletter.

Someone opens Google, types a question, reads the answer sitting right there, and closes the tab. No site visited, nobody paid. That was how 68% of US searches ended in early 2026, up from about 60% two years earlier, per SparkToro's zero-click research onSimilarweb data.

Attention is pooling in fewer places, most of them a brand can purposefully reach. The inbox is the largest of them, and the categories with the biggest media budgets have not shown up there yet.

Dan Krenitsyn is COO of beehiiv, which is a platform that sits behind more than 60,000 newsletter publishers. He led growth at The Information before moving to Meta and DoorDash, so he has bought rented reach at scale and now builds the alternative.

Ask him why the big spenders are missing and he doesn't soften it. "Those buyers honestly aren't super accustomed to buying email, and they haven't had a reason to learn how to buy it yet.”

Here's what they're leaving on the table.

Key Takeaways

• Inbox CPMs stay low partly because most consumer categories have not bid on them yet
• Brands that grade a placement against their own lifecycle numbers walk away from a channel that never got a fair test
• Two or three hand-picked sponsorships cost less than the read they give you on whether the channel works

Why the biggest budgets haven't tested the inbox

Follow the money through beehiiv's network and it lands in a predictable set of categories. SaaS leads by revenue and advertiser count. AI companies come next, along with media brands and newsletters paying to grow their own subscriber lists, and finance runs second by deal volume after doubling since last year.

Now look at who isn't there.

Brian Schneider, beehiiv's Chief of Staff, splits the traditional categories rather than lumping them:

Travel is early but real.

CPG runs further along than the label suggests, though it skews internet-native rather than ones on retail shelves.

Auto hasn't converted (yet) and the reason is simpler than a lost deal.

Inbound interest has come in across travel and CPG. Auto has had inbound interest that hasn't closed, and no real outbound has gone the other way either. "There is opportunity to expand in the future," Brian says, "but we just haven't focused on it to date."

Supply isn't the hold up, since publications covering travel, cars, and food and beverage are already on the platform, which puts the gap on the buy side.

We've seen why that gap stays open. Consumer brands already send an enormous amount of email, so the inbox looks like handled territory. A placement inside somebody else's newsletter never gets priced, because the box it would sit in already looks full.

Brian points at what goes wrong from there. Lifecycle email is owned, opted-in, and costs roughly nothing to send, while a newsletter placement is rented attention borrowed from a writer the reader let in.

The mismatch breaks in three predictable places:

Buyers benchmark against their own open and click rates, which were never comparable

A sponsorship gets held to a performance channel's CPA, the wrong yardstick entirely

Acquisition money gets graded like retention money

"Compare those against the same target and the test is designed to fail," Brian explains.

Brian would rather see it relabeled as "creator media that happens to be delivered by email," and the relabel does real work, because read that way the money already sits in somebody's budget. As of November 2025, the IAB has projected US creator spend reaching $44 billion in 2026, with CPG second only to retail.

Ramp hired an economist

A few brands looked at the rate card and decided to become the publisher instead.

Ramp employs a lead economist and runs a research arm that turns anonymized transactions from tens of thousands of businesses into a weekly read on where corporate money is moving, and that data now gets cited by the Federal Reserve and the New York Times. 

Dan puts the whole decision behind one question:

"What content can we create that nobody else can create because we have the data that nobody else has?"

The alternative most brands reach for is repackaging blog posts through an email template, which he wouldn't bother with, since the engagement usually never follows.

HubSpot built the same idea at industrial scale, running roughly 70 people across 17 YouTube channels, six newsletters, and about 150 creators under contract, for more than 50 million monthly engagements by their own count. None of it exists to make somebody click an ad and sign a six-figure CRM contract by lunch.

"Nobody's waking up and saying we need to change our CRM," Dan adds. The payoff arrives two years later, on a morning when the person making that call has been engaging with the brand and morning cup of coffee. 

The mattress version of that logic makes the clock plain, since you're in market once every few years. Read a newsletter daily for a year with the same brand inside it and you already know which one comes to mind when the moment to purchase shows up.

Trust travels further from a practitioner than a salesperson, which is why a CFO reading other CFOs describe what Ramp did for them hears something no Ramp rep can say: "I can see myself in this person's shoes."

What gets underestimated is the bill, since a media operation and a media buy come from different budgets and answer to different people.

Prices will follow

Price is what makes the inbox interesting this year. It stays in the plan because no one can rewrite the terms while you sleep. 

Dan's answer for where money is burning is banner ads bought through automated auctions across the open web, where almost nobody checks where the ads land. 

"Two years from now that spend will look like the direct mail of the 2020s: cheap, easy, and forgotten the second it's seen."

The ANA has since put a number on that gap in its Q1 2026 benchmark. It found the top cohort of advertisers paying $7.46 per thousand qualified impressions while the bottom cohort paid $19.04, off a raw CPM difference of $1.95.

Unsurprisingly, his previous experience at Meta and DoorDash shaped where he puts a budget.

"I would not feel comfortable leaving my investment to the whims of a handful of product executives who decide what the flavor of the month is," he said, citing that nobody is turning off scaled reach, and not something he would even suggest.

Which leaves the last dollar, and Dan sends it wherever the evidence is thinnest. Unproven, hand-pick two or three sponsorships and call it a test, then push into scale across a vetted network once you know it works. Your own newsletter comes last and only with 12 months of funding behind it, "because owned audience compounds too slowly to justify a single budget cycle."

That threshold tends to be what most brand newsletters skip, launching without anyone naming how long they get before someone asks what it returned.

Dan compares the moment to buying property near a subway stop that hasn't opened yet, cheap for exactly as long as the block stays quiet, until the station opens and the prices follow.

Whoever holds that corner will have signed when theirs was the only offer on the table, back when the neighborhood didn't know what it was worth.

FAQs

Is newsletter advertising priced on CPM or CPC?
Both. beehiiv lets advertisers buy on either basis, and publishers set their own price floors on programmatic inventory.

Can a brand pick which newsletters its ads appear in?
Not individually. Advertisers choose content types to appear in and content types to avoid, and the platform matches ads to specific publications from there.

How is newsletter targeting done today?
Through content tags, which means targeting sits at the publication level rather than the individual subscriber level. beehiiv has said it is working on subscriber-level profiling.

Why do newsletter open rates get treated as unreliable?
Apple's privacy changes and machine-driven opens both inflate the number. Verified click data gives a closer read on human engagement.