Why Publishers Struggle to Sell More Sponsorships and Marketers Struggle to Prove They Work

Discover the real reason newsletter sponsorships underperform for marketers and undersell for publishers and how a smarter approach to funnel tracking changes everything.

Newsletter sponsorships sit at the intersection of content, distribution, and performance marketing. When they work, they deliver trusted attention and efficient acquisition. When they don’t, both publishers and marketers walk away frustrated, convinced the channel is broken. In reality, most of the friction comes from a shared blind spot: poor visibility into how audiences actually move through the funnel. Until that gap is addressed, sponsorship performance will continue to feel unpredictable on both sides.

Earlier this week, I listened to Jeanne DeWitt Grosser on Lenny’s Podcast, and something clicked for me in a way I was not expecting. Jeanne was talking about GTM challenges inside high-growth companies. Still, the more she described the real problems teams face, the more I realized she was describing the exact tension that lives at the center of the newsletter sponsorship ecosystem.

This tension rarely shows up in isolation. It appears as slow renewals, cautious test budgets, and stalled growth. Publishers interpret it as weak demand. Marketers interpret it as weak performance. But neither diagnosis is accurate. The real issue is that both sides are operating with incomplete information, which leads to conservative decisions that limit scale.

Publishers believe they should be having more success selling sponsorships.
Marketers believe they should be able to prove their effectiveness.
Both sides quietly assume the other side is the bottleneck.

Then Jeanne said something that made me press pause several times. Most GTM teams do not actually understand their real customer journey. They think they do. They talk like they do. But beneath the dashboards, the actual funnel is either untracked or under-instrumented, which means they are optimizing with very little real visibility.

And that is when I realized the obvious.
This is the root cause of under-performance for both sides of our market.

When sponsorships are evaluated without a clear understanding of the customer journey, confidence erodes quickly. Programs don’t fail because newsletters lack influence. They fail because that influence isn’t measured in a way that aligns with how buying decisions actually happen. Fixing this requires better instrumentation, not better persuasion.

The newsletter publisher’s side

From the publisher’s point of view, demand feels inconsistent. One month is strong, the next goes quiet. What’s invisible is the internal struggle happening on the advertiser’s side. Without visibility into upper- and mid-funnel engagement, marketers are forced to make decisions with too little data. This doesn’t mean the sponsorship failed. It means the marketer cannot explain its value internally. Over time, this dynamic suppresses renewals and caps publisher revenue, even when reader engagement is healthy.

When a marketer does not track their full funnel from click to landing page engagement, email capture, add to cart and conversion they are forced to judge sponsorships solely on the bottom of the funnel. And here is the real problem.

A marketer cannot evaluate a sponsorship channel based on one or two placements when the only signal they are using is last click conversion. There is insufficient data and insufficient statistical confidence to justify a renewal.

So two predictable things happen.
First, marketers underinvest in newsletters because the upper and middle funnel impact never appears on their dashboards.
Second, they hesitate to buy again because they cannot prove anything internally from such a thin sliver of data.

Publishers experience that as slow sales and inconsistent renewals. Underneath it is a measurement gap, not a demand gap.

This distinction matters because it changes the solution. If the problem were demand, publishers would need more leads or better sales tactics. But when the problem is measurement, the fix lies in helping advertisers understand what success looks like before a conversion happens. Publishers who recognize this shift are better positioned to educate buyers, set expectations, and ultimately build longer-lasting sponsorship relationships.

The marketer’s side

Marketers operate under constant pressure to justify spend. Channels that cannot be clearly explained or defended are the first to be cut. Newsletter sponsorships often fall into this category not because they underperform, but because their impact lives outside traditional last-click attribution models. Without tracking intermediate actions like engagement depth or intent signals, marketers are left guessing whether a placement is working until it is too late to act.

Nearly every advertiser onboarding at Wellput reveals the same pattern. We ask for upper- or middle-funnel signals so we can optimize. Many teams are not tracking those events at all. Or they track them but do not know how to share them with partners, even though the benefits are huge for both sides.

You cannot optimize what you cannot see.

Visibility is the prerequisite for optimization. Once teams can see how users behave after clicking a sponsorship, patterns emerge quickly. Some newsletters drive exploration. Others drive signups. A few drive immediate conversions. Without this clarity, all placements look the same on paper, and marketers are forced to treat the channel as binary: success or failure. With it, newsletters become a system that can be tuned and scaled.

You cannot prove what you never measured.

Until now, I treated this as something we needed to fix for Wellput campaigns. But Jeanne’s episode made the broader point impossible to ignore. If we help marketers see the value in tracking and sharing this data with partners, it improves not just Wellput but every newsletter publisher and every channel in their marketing program.

That means our onboarding call needs to evolve. Instead of walking them through our process, we should use that time to give them the clearest view they have ever had of their customer journey and how to use those signals across their entire marketing mix. If the value feels bigger than us, everything downstream gets easier.

This shift reflects a larger opportunity. When marketers understand their funnel deeply, they make better decisions across every channel, not just newsletters. Sharing that clarity with partners creates alignment instead of friction. Performance discussions become collaborative rather than defensive. Over time, this raises the standard for the entire ecosystem.

The operational shift

Manual qualification is expensive in ways teams rarely calculate. It consumes time, introduces bias, and delays response. Meanwhile, patterns repeat themselves. Certain signals reliably indicate readiness. Others predict churn or stagnation. AI systems excel at identifying these patterns early, allowing human teams to focus where they add the most value. This isn’t about replacing judgment. It’s about removing friction so judgment can be applied where it matters.

There was another moment in the episode that landed just as hard. Jeanne discussed how much time GTM teams waste on inbound leads that will never convert. I felt that one in my bones because I have watched us do the same thing with both advertiser and publisher inquiries.

We are past the point where manual qualification makes sense. We know the criteria. We know the patterns. We know who is ready and who is not. An AI agent can handle that first pass far better and far faster than we can.

It is time to stop spending human hours on work that a machine can do. Especially when that time is better spent helping partners understand and improve their funnel.

Taken together, these issues point to a single conclusion: performance problems in newsletter sponsorships are rarely caused by the channel itself. They are caused by a lack of shared understanding between buyers and sellers. Fixing that understanding unlocks growth on both sides.

Our Take

Jeanne’s episode made the connection between two problems I had been thinking about separately.

Publishers struggle to sell more sponsorships because marketers cannot fully measure their impact.
Marketers struggle to demonstrate the effectiveness of sponsorships because they lack a clear view of the marketer’s funnel.

Fix the funnel and you fix both sides of the market.

That is why we are redesigning our onboarding call to provide full-funnel clarity. And it is why we are exploring an AI agent to qualify inbound demand so our team can stay focused on the work that actually moves performance.

If you want the full-funnel template we are building for the new onboarding experience, or would like to be part of the AI qualification pilot, reply to this email.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Why do newsletter publishers struggle to sell more sponsorships?

Because many advertisers cannot clearly measure or explain sponsorship performance internally, leading to cautious budgets and slow renewals.

Why do marketers struggle to prove newsletter sponsorships work?

Most teams rely too heavily on last-click conversion data and lack visibility into upper- and mid-funnel engagement signals.

What funnel data matters most for newsletter sponsorships?

Early intent signals like engagement depth, page views, email signups, and content interaction are critical for understanding performance.

How does better measurement improve publisher revenue?

When marketers can see and explain performance, they renew faster, test more placements, and scale budgets with confidence.

Can AI help improve newsletter sponsorship operations?

Yes. AI can qualify inbound demand, identify readiness patterns, and reduce time spent on low-probability leads, freeing teams to focus on performance optimization.