Its ad rates run around $100,000 per day for the flagship newsletter, with a majority rebooking.
The discipline extends to how it thinks about product. Rather than launching new editorial verticals, 1440 has used Topics to deepen engagement with existing readers and sell more expensive sponsorship packages.
Its YouTube strategy follows the same logic: roughly 80% of viewers are net-new to 1440, but the videos are built from the same curatorial work that already powers the newsletter, so the marginal cost of production is low.
“We are always asking: How can we do the work once,” Huelskamp said, “then use it to our advantage multiple times?”
That ethos of efficiency as strategy is what part of what makes its $1 million in revenue per employee a differentiating metric. That figure, according to Berstein, signals capital efficiency to investors, but it is also straightforward enough to make sense to people in the organization.
Still, key questions remain to be answered. The company is doubling down on generalist, evergreen content at a time in which artificial intelligence makes such a strategy uncertain. It is also determining what kind of events strategy might best suit its content offering, which so far has eluded an easy answer.
But its financial discipline, engaged readership, and self-governance mean 1440 has more time than most to find solutions to those questions.
Talking Heds
Axios Eyes AI (EXCLUSIVE): In the spring of 2023, Axios Local hit the brakes. After rapidly expanding its network of city-based news outlets, Axios paused the program to focus on profitability. Now, expansion has resumed, bankrolled in part by a partnership with OpenAI, which has underwritten the cost of launching up to nine new markets by the end of the year. In exchange, OpenAI gets access to Axios data. The resumption of the program coincides with a broader upswing at Axios, which beat its first-half revenue target in May, capping a fourth straight year of double-digit growth. The company, as a whole, is profitable, although Local is still losing money. I have often pegged Axios Local as the most likely candidate for reviving local news, a goal now aided by a suite of new applications of AI.
Weiss Guys: On Tuesday, following a showdown between CBS News journalist Scott Pelley and the newly hired executive producer of 60 Minutes Nick Bilton, CBS fired Pelley, citing his outburst in a company town hall. The move is another indication that CBS editor in chief Bari Weiss, who hired Bilton, has the full backing of her Paramount leadership. The firing comes just two weeks after Puck reported that Paramount leadership had begun reconsidering its appointment of Weiss, a claim the company subsequently denied. This 60 Minutes dustup seems further proof that David Ellison and Paramount are willing to stand behind their woman, despite—or because of—her tendency to alienate key CBS staff.
NorCal CaPo: The California Post, the recently launched Western division of the New York Post, expanded print operations to Northern California this week, meaning editions of the conservative tabloid will now be available in San Francisco, among other metro areas. The timing could not be more apt. Silicon Valley, once a liberal haven, has seen the political valence of its technocratic elite swing, en masse, to the right. Further south, a former reality television star is running for mayor of Los Angeles, weaponizing concerns over homelessness with lurid, AI-generated ads. Meanwhile, California governor Gavin Newsom is a likely candidate for the 2028 presidential election, all of which have put the politics of the state under a nationwide microscope.
