Workweek Sees Path to Generate Ad Revenue From Walled Communities
Four-year-old Workweek is finally hitting its stride. The company hosts a collective of industry experts who write newsletters that cover industries including HR and healthcare and reach 200,000 subscribers. It has also been building exclusive online communities where professionals can meet their peers, network and exchange ideas.
Building up those communities took a while, at least at first. The first 1,000 members joined over the period of a year and a half—and then in just 10 weeks, Workweek’s communities hit 10,000. The introduction of a free membership tier last year and automation of the application process helped bump numbers higher. Verified users should reach anywhere between 55,000 and 70,000 by the end of the year.
All those verified members mean a very, very valuable audience for marketers.
“We have a mix of advertising and subscription revenue, but most of our revenue, and probably always will be, will be from advertising. We work with all of the largest players in each of our verticals, and they sponsor our podcast, our newsletters, lead generation,” co-founder Adam Ryan told AMO. “Today, we’re monetizing pretty similar to how Industry Dive has in the past.”
Ad rates vary from $150 to $300 CPM, and their fill rates are “fairly high,” Ryan said. “There’s other brands out there that are B2B, and I think that most of them are closer to $80, and we think our reporting and engagement allows us to be pretty close to double that.”
Revenue in 2025 should be double last year, Ryan said, without providing further details. Ryan believes that, between the newsletter and these communities, each vertical could generate over $20 million in revenue per year. The company’s not yet been profitable.
“The reason I do this personally is I think we’re all really disconnected, and people need to talk to people more and have more human interaction,” Becca Sherman, co-founder of Workweek, told AMO. “It’s such an incredible way for people to truly, authentically connect with people and also get better at their jobs, and scale up in their own careers, in their work.”
Growth
Workweek raised a $12.5 million Series A raised last year that helped spur the development of the bespoke platform. They had originally hosted the communities on Slack. Ryan said that their platform protects against AI scraping, adding to a higher level of privacy.
The creation of a bespoke platform was of utmost importance to the founders.
“We control all of the levers there, so we’re not reliant on Circle or these other community platforms, Mighty Networks or Slack, that you have to live by their own piece, and so we’re building our own castle with our very high walls around it, where it’s our data and it’s also our opportunity to improve and adjust things,” Ryan said.
Members have taken so well to the communities that they are spontaneously setting up their own meet-ups in different cities.
“From the very beginning of Workweek, all we said was, the best content wins and in B2B, we think hearing from people that do the job is the way to do that. And that’s the core of what makes it work,” Ryan said. “If you have the most trusted brand in HR, hospital administration, ecommerce, all of a sudden, you have a lot of avenues to grow that can be incredibly lucrative.”
Workweek’s verticals offer both free and paid memberships.
The free tier was introduced in September; previously, the cheapest subscription was $399 and went as high as $1,500. Now the average premium membership costs $300 a year. With that, users get access to private virtual events, private discussions, additional newsletters, research reports and discounts to events.
“If the best content wins, then why would you try to hide it from 95% of your audience?” Ryan said regarding charging for content. “We’ve had to build out our own ad tech to be able to serve ads within our different environments. And today we have, we think some of the best, not just audiences to reach within their respective spaces, but our reporting and data from our first party data is also incredibly unique, and we offer that to our advertisers and different unique packages.”
Ryan’s goal is for Workweek to share similarities to Doximity, which has a community for medical professionals and then monetizes primarily through marketing services. Doximity has a market cap of $9.7 billion. Shares of the company have doubled over the past 12 months.
