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.
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.
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.
The newsletter publisher’s side
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.
The marketer’s side
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.
And 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.
The operational shift
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.
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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