The Flyover Turns 2 Profitably, Aims to Double Subscriptions to 4M by Year’s End

The Flyover turns two on March 15 with 2.1 million subscribers to 10 different newsletters, having hit profitability last year.

By the end of 2025, it should reach 4 million subscribers to at least 16 editions—buoyed in part by the addition of new state newsletters—and have at least one podcast. The company also aims to get to an eight-figure annual run rate, up from high seven now.

It’s a flurry of success in a very short amount of time—it helps that Guy Short, the company founder, previously had a successful digital advertising company with large audiences reached via billions of emails and hundreds of millions of text messages a year, ie built-in readership that they could send The Flyover out to.

Like so many others, a couple of years ago, Short became fed up with legacy media and political agendas dominating headlines. He also saw the success of Morning Brew, The Hustle and Industry Dive and figured he could do something similar. He brought his proposal to some business partners and thus The Flyover, covering national news, was brought forth into the world.

“We view it as a 40,000 foot view of the news—we fly over all the bias, we fly over all the agendas, and we just simply report common sense, daily news every morning, 6am in your inbox, and it’s been great,” Short told AMO.

Less than a year after launching The Flyover, Short started a Texas-wide newsletter. It came after he realized there was no all-encompassing media anymore in his home state. That was followed by about one new state newsletter a month from Florida to North Carolina. The Flyover will add another 6 or 7 states by the end of 2025—which will depend upon where they find writers first—and is launching a daily podcast based on the national product in April: a whirlwind, to say the least.

We Do Everything

The mainstay Flyover newsletter has 1.1 million readers, and Texas is the biggest state newsletter with about 300,000, followed by Florida with 200,000.

While the Flyover, which has about 20 employees, started out strong with a readymade base of subscribers, the company hasn’t just leaned on that advantage. It monitors ad spending on a daily basis looking at customer acquisition cost—usually under $1—and retention.

The Flyover is “trying to constantly thread that needle of acquiring valuable readers at a low rate, so we do everything,” Short said. “We do social media, Meta, X, Instagram, Reddit, we do all the newsletter ad networks, we do the Beehiv network, we do the Kit network.”

The company also rents email lists and creates standalone messages advertising the straight news The Flyover writes, and works with Retention.com to identify anonymous users that visit their sites.

Profits are largely reinvested into The Flyover, which was entirely self-financed from day one. Among those investments is the effort to extend the state products to seven days a week, which isn’t always easy since it requires finding someone willing to write late on a Saturday evening, Short said.

The national newsletter has open rates of between 60% and 65% on a regular basis, with states frequently above that, Short said. Readers tend to be 55 and above, skewing slightly more male and “very high income.” About 90% of revenue comes from ads and 10% from reader donations, who have given mid-six figures in voluntary donations over the past two years. And the business is continuing to grow nicely. After AMO attempted to calculate its revenue using the mid-six figures as a 10% variable, Short told AMO, “the business will generate upper 7 figures this year. $2.5 million was so 2024.”

Regarding recent fear over the AI-driven demise of traditional email, Short is nonplussed.

“I come from the direct mail world, and so direct mail has been dead forever, but people continue to have extremely successful businesses in direct mail,” Short said. “I tend not to be that alarmist… Every year it’s becoming more challenging than it has in the past, but the industry will adapt.”

That’s also part of the podcast plan—it’s a new channel to expand audience reach. The Flyover has already hired two professionals and the podcast will follow the same outline as the newsletter itself, with three top headlines, business, sports, science and tech. In terms of other formats to reach readers, texting’s also a possibility.

The Flyover has grown to a size where it has had to implement formal customer service. Previously, Short responded to every single email every morning.

“I still read every single one. Now it’s a habit. I can’t not wake up and see what folks are writing to us,” Short said. It’s part of what the audience appreciates so much about The Flyover, that direct connection and acknowledgement from the source.