I analyzed 32,000 newsletters. If you're under 25K subscribers, the sponsorship economy barely exists yet, here's the data.
There are a lot of posts here asking "how do I land my first sponsor" at 300, 1K, 2K subscribers. I build a newsletter analytics tool and pulled sponsor data across the whole index to see what the actual numbers say.
The short version: if you're small, it's not you. The sponsorship economy genuinely doesn't exist yet at your size.
96% of newsletters have ZERO detected sponsors.
Out of 32,667 newsletters tracked, only 1,201 have any sponsor at all. Only 116 have 10+.
Sponsor adoption scales ~9x with audience size:
1K-5K subs: 5% have any sponsor 5K-25K: 5% 25K-100K: 14% 100K-500K: 29% 500K+: 43%
If you're under 25K, ~95% of newsletters your size have no sponsors. That's not a you problem. Subscriptions, products, or affiliate revenue are usually a better path until you're bigger.
Your topic matters as much as your size.
Crypto newsletters: 20% have sponsors. Education: 3%. Travel: 3%. A 7x gap. Below 100K subs, niche matters more than subscriber count for whether a sponsor economy exists for you at all.
The brands actually buying are concentrated.
Half the top advertisers by placement count are B2B SaaS for engineering/PM audiences (Vanta, Attio, Harmonic, Tracksuit, Anthropic). Three are DTC health/supplements (Momentous, LMNT, Maui Nui Venison). If your audience isn't one those brands want, sponsorship is harder regardless of size.
Methodology: 32,667 non-LinkedIn newsletters across Substack, Beehiiv, Ghost. Detection runs on public post content, so it misses some inline Substack mentions — real rates may be ~20% higher, especially on paid Substacks.
If you're under 25K subs and you DO have sponsors, you're a genuine exception — would love to hear how you landed them.