It’s 10 years since Oprah Winfrey put theSkimm on the map by tweeting: “I just became a Skimm’er. News that’s smart and fun. Those girls are onto something.” Her shout-out lit a fuse under the pioneering daily newsletter. It had launched in 2012, at a time when most media was still besotted with Facebook. It was the same year as Industry Dive but before The Information (2013), Morning Brew (2015), Axios (2017) and The Hustle (2020).
TheSkimm is a news outlet for young North American women and is best known for its conversational tone, explaining the biggest stories of the day “the way a friend would”. Although it seems to have been successful since the start in building an audience and also a glittering array of investors, advisers and mentors, it was not always that easy. Of course.
As the co-founders and onetime NBC cable TV producers Danielle Weisberg and Carly Zakin discovered when they first went in search of funds for their fledgling newsletter, the email was (imagine this) being rejected as an outdated channel. The future (said the moneyed naysayers) belonged to the clickbait-fuelled audiences chased by BuzzFeed and Vice (ironically both part-funded by NBC). With the launch of the New York Times’ world-beating The Daily podcast still five years away, you might imagine how many aspiring media entrepeneurs were being told audio was also in the past.
Everybody now recognises the value of the email inbox as a channel for direct-to-consumer, low-cost media – scheduled at a specific time of day.
Some legacy news brands might still be under-estimating the potential of daily newsletters by using them simply to promote newspaper-website content rather than building new future-proofed, revenue-generating brands. But – at a time when relatively few products of the podcast explosion have yet made any profit – email newsletters are building audiences more successfully than many other digital media right across consumer and business markets – effectively beyond the reach of platform gatekeepers Meta, Google, YouTube, Instagram et al.
That’s what Weisberg and Zakin realised when they planned their daily newsletter focused on news for busy young 22-34 year-old women who had neither the time nor inclination to seek out smart analysis of events. It was delivered at 6am every morning so they could catch up before starting their day and before they were exposed to any other news outlet. What seems obvious now struck millennial women – and Oprah too – as revolutionary back in 2012.
But it wasn’t a newsletter that the co-founders were thinking about, it was email. They reasoned that the best way to get in front of their friends and young people like them was staring them in the face: “The very first thing you do in the morning is turn off your alarm, it’s on your phone, you grab your phone, and you literally open your email to be like, Did someone die? Am I getting fired? Or Is my boss yelling at me? and What did my friends send me? And we knew we had to be in that moment. One of our friends worked in finance, and she left for the office at 5:50 in the morning every morning. So we were like, we gotta get it out to her on that commute. So we chose 6 a.m.”
But. then, the hard graft began.
The founders have said they were emailed funding rejections from “hundreds” of potential investors saying that “email is dead”. Yes. “And we were told more times than I can count on two hands that women are a niche market And we would just talk through all the reasons why that is offensive and completely wrong – and also really bad business.”
They described their mission as to “make it easier to live smarter. There’s a lot of noise out there. We’re going to clear the weeds, and we’re going to make it easier to understand what’s going on in the world. How we expanded was really thinking about all the necessities of our lives. How do we make money? How do we think about our physical health, mental health and health insurance? How do we think about the purchases that we need to make? And how do we think about our rights? And, then, how can we clear the noise around all of those things and make it easier to live smarter?”
The founders had been room-mates in downtown Manhattan and backed the project with their total of $4k savings – and some credit card debt. They had first met while studying in Rome, before both accepting jobs at NBC. Before their search for funds, they worked out of their apartment and local coffee shops. The first version of their Daily Skimm newsletter was sent to all the email addresses they could collect from family, friends and colleagues.
But support was on the way.
In 2012, they raised $60k of seed funding. Since then, some $40mn of largely equity investment has come from the likes of Homebrew, Graycroft Partners, RRE Ventures, Goldman Sachs, Disney, Google Ventures, Fox and the New York Times. It’s been a glamorous project.
After racing to 100k signups soon after the 2012 launch, theSkimm now claims a regular audience of 8mn and a total reach of some 12mn.
Today, its ecosystem includes: the Daily Skimm, Skimm Money, Skimm Well, and Skimm Your Life newsletters, B2B marketer’s newsletter The SKM Report, the “9 to 5ish with theSkimm” podcast, and theSkimm mobile app. TheSkimm also houses Skimm Studios which creates video and audio, and a creative agency SKM Lab. In 2018, it launched ““Skimm’d From the Couch,” a podcast focused on no-nonsense career advice.
Despite heavy pre and post -pandemic layoffs, the company has continued its wave of innovation. In 2016, it launched the “No Excuses” platform mobilizing Americans to vote and, in 2021, “Show Us Your Leave” campaign for paid family leave policies. In between times, it has had periodic flirtations with JP Morgan reportedly to seek out possible sale, merger or investment opportunities. It had been touted for a possible SPAC/IPO and acquisition by Discovery. But nothing’s happened.
The sizzle of theSkimm has been underpinned by a heavweight board including executives from the Gates Foundation, Google, Magnet and Homebrew. Other investors, mentors and cheerleaders include: Shonda Rhimes, Mariska Hargitay, Tyra Banks, and Sara Blakely.
TheSkimm is believed to employ some 50-75 people (previously up to 130). It may have revenue of some $40-50mn, double that claimed in 2019, generated primarily from advertising, affiliate eCommerce, content marketing and also branded products including books like “How to Skimm Your Life” written by the founders.
But theSkimm’s plain-speaking, chatty reporting has sometimes been controversial, apparently for trivialising the news. In 2017, the Columbia Journalism Review memorably leapt to its defence:
“Every weekday around 6:45 am, I get an email with a subject line that manages to allude to both a major news item and a pop-culture meme. Sometimes the latter goes over my head, but the former is always a pretty good indication of what I’ll find in the email, known as The Skimm. It’s a newsletter created by two 20-something women who left their jobs as NBC News producers in 2012 to create something a little more accessible. They claim to have an open rate of more than 40% and, during the 2016 US presidential elections, they helped register 110,000 young people to vote.”
TheSkimm is different to many of its newsletter peers and not just by being (almost) the first into what is now a busy pool of inbox dailies, especially in the US. For all their initial difficulty in attracting funds, the founders won the financial, emotional and practical support of some distinguished backers.
But its level of investment (and, presumably, also its spending) has seemed high, compared with the bootstrapped efforts of Morning Brew (sold for $75mn in 2020) and Hustle ($27mn in 2016). The eight-year-old Axios (which was sold to Cox Enterprises for $525mn in 2022) had actually raised about the same as the c$40mn invested in theSkimm.
In funding terms, it’s not another BuzzFeed and Vice but, then, Weisberg + Zakin have never been shooting for world domination. But, 12 years after launch (and four years after Morning Brew’s sale to Axel Springer), theSkimm’s monetisation ‘event’ seems overdue.
Meanwhile, at a time when we have seen the fall from grace of the egregiously over-funded clickbait warriors, it’s time to note theSkimm lessons for digital entrepreneurs everywhere. High on the list is the undoubted strength of co-founders: research by Harvard Business School shows that two-person founding teams are much more likely to succeed.
The best lesson, however, is that the email inbox remains the most cost-effective media channel for distinctive, engaging content targeting the “right” audience. There can (still) be many more, right across B2C and B2B markets on both sides of the Atlantic. They probably won’t need theSkimm’s rich backers. What are you waiting for?
