Morning Brew Already Has What it Needs for Double Digit Growth: New CEO
Morning Brew’s new chief executive officer sees little reason to start off with big changes. After all, the company’s audience is well-known for being fiercely loyal and its newsletter, multimedia products and B2B lines are all firmly established.
Robert Dippell just wants to connect the dots, bring what’s working in B2B to consumer and vice versa, expand events to the West Coast and build out a platform hosting several businesses upon which it can eventually add new businesses.
Dippell replaced founder Austin Rief last week as head of the company that started about a decade ago in a college dorm. What started as a single witty email has blossomed into 12 consumer newsletters, seven B2B newsletters and podcasts and video.
In 2021, Morning Brew generated about $50 million in revenue, followed by $36 million in the first half of 2022. This year, the company expects revenue of more than $70 million with double-digit profit margins. Dippell said the company scaled too quickly in 2022, leading to two rounds of layoffs. Last year was one to rebuild and create healthier operations, and level up with strong senior staff, he said.
“The growth now is substantial versus where the business was, and I believe, is a much healthier base to build upon than the company had before, and compared to pretty much all of our peers,” Dippell told AMO, adding that the company has always been profitable. “We don’t have to completely flip this business on its head, we can just continue to develop what we’re doing, because we have such a great relationship with the audience and so much opportunity to cross-pollinate.”
Consumer, B2B and Back Again
The daily newsletter, Morning Brew’s workhorse, remains hugely important to the business, though readership has slowed. It reported topping 4 million subscribers in April 2022 and today is reportedly read by 4.2 million. has been in the 4 million range for a few years.
“I wouldn’t say it has stalled. I would say that we’ve stabilized that within a very, very crowded market,” Dippell said. “Morning Brew set the tone for the industry, starting years and years ago, and we have also somehow stayed ahead in a lot of ways, even within a much more crowded industry, which I think is a big compliment.”
The main newsletter remains a priority and, anecdotally, is seeing more ad demand now than it has in the two years since Dippell arrived at the company. Open rates remain north of 50%, with 75% of readers finishing the entire email—that gives marketers a strong audience to sell to.
Multimedia, including podcasts and video, and particularly with creator-led content, is the second area of focus for Morning Brew.
The launch of the Morning Brew Daily Show, which in less than two years hit more than 50 million downloads and $5 million in annual revenue, rose over 700% year-over-year in 2024. According to ListenFirst, a social media analytics platform, Morning Brew Inc. ranked within the top 2% of digital publishers on social platforms based on follower growth and ranked in the top 10% based on engagement volume.
“Multimedia and that lane has really expanded to creator-led strategy,” Dippell said. All kinds of media are jumping on the creator bandwagon lately, but he said Morning Brew has been doing it for years. “We were very ahead of the curve on that.. our social video is all very creator forward.”
Morning Brew’s Good Work with Dan Toomey has 971,000 YouTube subscribers, while Money With Katie has hit 25,000 YouTube subscribers.
Coming this year is a new creator-led show with Macy Gilliam. Her specialty is breaking down the economics of different businesses or individuals, like a hot dog vendor in front of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and what delivery drivers really make.
Meanwhile, Morning Brew plans to continue going deeper into its B2B verticals like HR and marketing. When they niche within a niche, say sports marketing in marketing, both marketers and readers are more engaged. That includes both live and virtual events, with the average profit margin for live events at 50%.
The B2B style live experiences is a place Dippell wants to explore on the consumer side, and he wants to see more creator voices in the B2B side of the business. He also expects to add one or two verticals to B2B, as well as bring events to the West Coast later this year. The number of events will grow from six last year plus one summit, to 10 this year and the same marketing summit. Morning Brew holds about 80 virtual events annually.
One thing driving business to B2B are the podcasts; “it spreads out pretty quickly to this whole ecosystem that we didn’t use to have, and a lot of that is cross-pollinating,” Dippell said. “If somebody knows about good work, and they’re also interested in being a CFO one day, or in finance, I want them to know about CFO Brew, so try to connect those dots the best we can, which is a difficult task, is our goal.”
Growth in the form of mergers and acquisitions is likely, but not in the near term. Dippell wants to build Morning Brew into a platform that can add on new businesses to complement the network.
“Morning brew has an opportunity to be way more of a platform business than people understand,” Dippell said. “They saw us as a small business years ago that was being added into Axel Springer’s portfolio, and I think over time, we could end up being a much bigger part of that value than people probably expect.”
Disclosure: AMO founder Jacob Donnelly worked at Morning Brew from 2020 to 2023 and was part of Dippell’s initial hiring.
