Last updated: June 29 at 11:12am | This post is live updated through Friday
Welcome back to a live blog of small business news! Every week, I scour the headlines, the forums, the social media networks, the group chats for the most important info you need to know to make smart business decisions (or just to impress your business friends.)
This week is shaping up to be slower in the business world with a lull in big conferences and happenings. I will be traveling most of the week but I'll still be here at least once a day bringing you my take on the news.
Here's what's shaping up this week...
Monday, June 29
Bad news for your mail club! The EU is now charging a €3 fine for any package sent by non-EU sellers. Thanks Temu.
If you're shipping small packages to the EU, you've now got to budget for this €3 fee the European Commission just added. They removed the "de minimis" exemption for parcels under €150 to take aim at Shein and Temu who are cramping their style. All imported packages will be fined now. Letters are safe, and you're also in the clear if you reside in the EU. This fee only targets sellers outside the EU because it's mainly about competing with China. It takes effect on July 1 and they're calling it a temporary measure.
beehiiv says "Subscription fatigue? Never heard of it!" with their State of Paid Newsletters report. Other than that, it's pretty useless.
beehiiv released a State of Paid Newsletters report and I don't find much interesting about it except I do really like this growth chart below which is just so vague it's perfect. Things are looking great for us! Keep going!
Below are a few takeaways for people who like reports.
Takeaway 1: This is a very low information report. They didn't say how they collected this data. Just that they "talked to the publishers actually doing the work." Based on the quotes, it's only their publishers. That makes sense. But it's not really the State of Paid Newsletters then is it. It's the State of Paid Newsletters ON BEEHIIV. They don't cite or annotate things properly, making the data pretty hard to rely on for a publisher.
Takeaway 2: beehiiv has a narrow view of what's going on in the paid subscription business and it's mostly finance and AI stuff. You can see that in their charts which highlight publishers in business, finance, economy, money and investing all as separate newsletter categories. They're only seeing a sliver of the market—notably missing a lot of us creative types spread across Ghost, Buttondown, Kit, Patreon and Substack—and it's really misleading to present this aggregated data from a lot of investing, startup, AI newsletters and then share quotes alongside them from journalists like Matt Brown at Extra Points, Sarah Wick at L.A. Material and Oliver Darcy at Status. They're trying to make it seem like they're the de facto home of paid newsletters across a wide spectrum but the (very few) numbers in their charts show a strong skew towards finance types.
Takeaway 3: Platforms love a percentage paid benchmark and beehiiv's is SAD. They said that, "The median paid conversion rate across beehiiv is 0.62%. For every 1,000 subscribers, about 6 are paying." If that's the state of your newsletter, you're not running a paid newsletter business. It's a casual setting you have on. This data is ONLY USEFUL if it comes from full time publishers who primarily rely on subscriptions. That's because when a publisher relies on paid subscriptions, they focus on paid sub growth over newsletter growth. When I interview indie publishers, the percentage of their newsletter/registered readers that are paid is typically 15-30%. A lot of beehiiv's newsletter publishers are primarily ad-backed so they have bigger lists and not so many paid subscribers. Regardless of your model, I don't think you should compare your percent paid metrics to anyone else's. It's not that important, nor is it a sign of health. If you're hitting your paid subscription goals, that's all that matters. Also, if your platform benchmark is that bad, maybe keep that to yourself beehiiv.
Takeaway 4: Aggregating pricing data is how you get people underpricing their newsletter. beehiiv says the "median monthly price is $10. The median yearly price is $100." Again combining a ton of different publishers with different offers and niches into one metric. How useful is that to you? It's not! Imagine if I took beehiiv's SaaS pricing and compared it to T-Mobile and my electric company just because they all run subscriptions. USELESS DATA. Do your own competitive analysis (not just other paid newsletters, but memberships, conferences, other alternatives) and price to what you deliver, rather than anchoring off some random data set.
Overall, there's not much for us in the beehiiv State of Paid Newsletters except a few charts I plan to throw at anyone who complains about subscription fatigue.
Instagram creators are reporting a shady new setting allows brands you tag to run your content as ads without paying you.
Creator Josh Rivera called out this hidden setting in Instagram that allows any brand you tag to run your content as an ad. It's called "Tagged content access" and Instagram describes its function as "Expand your reach by letting brands turn your existing content into partnership ads and other ad types." If you're using Instagram to run brand partnerships, Josh says you can find this setting under Tools > Partnership Ads > Tagged Content Access.
I can't find this setting in my app because I don't really use Instagram so I couldn't verify much about this except, I found a similar post from April from Savannah Gilbert who asked about it in a Facebook group for mom creators. 1000% agree with everyone in the mentions of both posts which say SHUT THAT SHIT OFF.
