[mitchellst]

Reading down the answers, lots of people are confusing two things: marketing emails (mostly from e-commerce sites) versus content-driven newsletters.

Open rate and CTR on marketing emails is very low and their production quality (cost) needs to be high to make a dent.

Newsletters are a different beast. If you have some product-market fit for the content, your open rate and CTR can be very high. Scaling them can be tricky, because if your content is niche you hit a ceiling, and if it’s not you hit the general problem of acquiring customers lots of other people are after.

…but, after you solve that, you have a scaled up newsletter that you can both sell ads against and use to activate your own monetization flows. Does it work? Yeah, it does. Very, very well, in my experience.