Newsletter ad prices held flat for eight quarters while the ad slots were quietly cut
675 words · about 3 min
Cooper Press has not raised a single newsletter sponsorship price since Q1 2025 — eight quarters in a row — while cutting the number of paid ad slots by 25-33%, losing 5.5% of its subscribers, and quietly retiring 5 of its 12 newsletters without saying so.
- How it was measured
- Built from 24 of Cooper Press's quarterly price sheets, Q1 2021 to Q4 2026, which sit at web addresses you can guess, then read out of the documents. Ad-slot counts come from the published back issues, counted one by one rather than asked about. Every Q4 2026 figure below was checked again against the live price sheet and the live list of newsletters on the date given.
- Last checked
Listen to this Playing read from this page, nothing added
Watch it plot 36s · narrated · the same figures as above
"Newsletters are booming" is the received wisdom. It is hard to check, because almost nobody in the business publishes what they charge.
Cooper Press does, every quarter, and has for six years. They have run newsletters for developers for fifteen. If anyone in this business can push prices up, it is them.
The prices have not moved since Q1 2025
What one sponsor pays for the main slot in one issue, in US dollars:
| Newsletter | Q1'21 | Q1'23 | Q1'25 | Q4'26 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| JavaScript Weekly | 2,900 | 3,520 | 3,680 | 3,680 |
| Frontend Focus | 1,700 | 1,800 | 1,790 | 1,790 |
| Node Weekly | 1,120 | 1,340 | 1,460 | 1,460 |
| Postgres Weekly | 580 | 920 | 1,280 | 1,280 |
| React Status | 720 | 1,100 | 1,265 | 1,265 |
| Ruby Weekly | 970 | 1,220 | 1,220 | 1,220 |
| Golang Weekly | 750 | 1,060 | 1,120 | 1,120 |
From 2021 through Q1 2025 they raised prices every year — JavaScript Weekly by 27% across that stretch. Then every one of them stopped, in the same quarter, and none has moved since.
A price that stays the same is a price that is falling. At roughly 3% inflation, eight frozen quarters is about 5-6% eaten away, compounding.
The audience shrank underneath the frozen price
| Q1 2025 | Q4 2026 | Change | |
|---|---|---|---|
| The 7 newsletters together | 461,876 | 436,662 | −5.5% |
| JavaScript Weekly | 176,998 | 163,202 | −7.8% |
Work out the price per thousand readers — the figure the trade calls CPM — and it drifted up over this period — but only because there were fewer readers to divide by. That is not pricing power. It is the same money spread over fewer people.
Ad slots were cut while the price list was held
Counted from the published back issues:
- JavaScript Weekly: 4 paid slots per issue (2022-24) → 3 (2025-26) - Golang Weekly: 3 slots → 2, from 2024 - Q3 2026 removed React Status's "Sponsored" slot. The total value of everything they had to sell fell from $17,595 to $16,945.
Cutting slots by 25-33% while holding the advertised price is what a publisher does when they cannot fill the slots and are protecting the number on the price list.
Five newsletters went, and none of them said so
There were twelve. There are seven.
Serverless Status, DB Weekly, StatusCode/WebOps Weekly, Mobile Dev Weekly, JAMstacked and Deno Weekly are still in the HTML of cooperpress.com/publications/, hidden by comment marks. Hidden rather than deleted, with no explanation published anywhere.
We checked again on 2026-08-30. Seven newsletters appear on the page; six sit hidden in the same file.
The sentence that is not evidence
Cooper Press's price sheets say they keep a waiting list of sponsors. That gets quoted widely as proof of demand.
It is the same unchanged sentence in all 24 price sheets since Q1 2021, on a page stamped "Last updated: October 2021." A sentence nobody has rewritten in six years is not a reading of today's demand. We leaned on it ourselves, in an earlier decision on this project, and had to reopen that decision when we checked.
What this is and is not
This is one publisher, in one subject area, that happens to publish unusually well. It is not the newsletter market.
What makes it worth publishing is that it is the only continuous public price series we could find, and it runs the opposite way to the story told about it. Anyone claiming the category is strong is welcome to point at a longer public series that says so — we looked and could not find one.
Grade this A, not A★: the figures come from the source and have been checked twice, but a single publisher cannot carry a claim about a whole category, and we are not making one.
Tracked as RATE-FROZEN, RATE-SLOTS-CUT, RATE-SUBS-FALL, RATE-WAITLIST-TRAP. If a number here looks wrong, tell us and we will check it against the source.