How Morning Brew Uses Data to Grow From a Dorm Room Newsletter to a $70M B2B Media Empire

Bottom Line Up Front: Everyone knows Axios’ trademarked slogan “Smart Brevity” . Morning Brew’s phrase “Become Smarter in Just 5 Minutes” essentially means the same thing in more words. But do not mistake lesser slogan catchiness for lesser relevance in the B2B newsletter space. What started as a single consumer newsletter for college students has become a diversified consumer and business media empire through strategic AI and data deployment. Morning Brew uses AI primarily for audience segmentation and content creation tools, while avoiding AI-generated editorial content. Their annual B2B revenue is expected to surpass their flagship consumer newsletter for the first time in 2025, generating $25 million through data-driven vertical selection and cross-platform audience optimization.

Morning Brew's transformation story began in 2015 when Alex Lieberman and Austin Rief launched a single daily newsletter from their University of Michigan dorm room, originally called Market Corner. The newsletter aimed to make business news digestible for college students and young professionals who found traditional publications like The Wall Street Journal too dense and boring.

The consumer-focused flagship newsletter Morning Brew grew to 4.4 million subscribers with over 50% open rates and 75% complete-read rates. By 2018, after reaching 1 million subscribers, the founders realized they needed additional revenue streams beyond their single consumer newsletter to build a sustainable media business.

The pivot to B2B made strategic sense: professional audiences offer higher advertising rates, more targeted demographics for advertisers, and opportunities for premium events and services. As Dippell explained to Brian Morrissey’s podcast The Rebooting Show in March 2025, B2B audiences are more valuable because they e.g. "take actions like downloading reports and guides, and attending events.”

Critically, this expansion was enabled by Morning Brew's sophisticated data infrastructure, which allows them to segment their massive consumer audience and identify professional opportunities within their existing subscriber base.

Morning Brew's growth trajectory attracted major media investment. In October 2020, German media giant Axel Springer, through its subsidiary Business Insider, acquired a majority stake in Morning Brew for $75 million. At the time, Morning Brew was generating approximately $20 million in annual revenue.

The acquisition proved prescient. In February 2025, Axel Springer completed a full buyout, assuming complete ownership of Morning Brew, though terms were not disclosed. The company is now on track to surpass $70 million in annual revenue for 2025.

2024 was "a major inflection point for B2B capabilities at the company with an increased emphasis on events, data targeting and content services," Rief told Axios last year.

MB’s new CEO Robert Dippell who replaced Austin Rief in February 2025 brings extensive B2B media experience and sees little reason for dramatic changes. "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," Dippell said in the newsletter A Media Operator (AMO) in 2025.

MB's professional brands drove $25 million in revenue in 2024 and total subscribers have more than doubled since 2022. The company now operates eight professional newsletters covering marketing, HR, tech, IT, CFO, retail and healthcare. The latest addition - Revenue Brew - just started this month.

Most significantly, Morning Brew Inc now expects its B2B division to surpass the revenue from the company's flagship daily newsletter for the first time this year.

Morning Brew's growth strategy centers on what Dippell calls "cross-pollination" between consumer and B2B audiences, enabled by AI-powered data analysis, allowing them to identify and segment professional audiences within their consumer base. This cross-promotion leverages Morning Brew's massive consumer base of more than 4 million subscribers to seed new B2B verticals through automated audience targeting. If someone reads Morning Brew, listens to MB’s podcasts, and has ambitions to become a CFO ambitions “cross-pollination” set them up to discover CFO Brew Dippell explained to AMO.

Morning Brew's multimedia products are on pace to do "well over" $10 million in top-line revenue for 2025, according to Axios, driven primarily by podcasts and creator-led content.

Morning Brew Daily is the most downloaded business podcast on Spotify (according to Talking Biz News in October2024), and its daily podcast delivered "multi-million dollar" year-over-year advertising growth in 2024

The Morning Brew Daily Show with now 92,000 subscribers hit more than 50 million downloads and $5 million in annual revenue in less than two years, rising over 700% year-over-year in 2024, according to AMO. Video content is equally impressive, with Morning Brew's Good Work with Dan Toomey reaching 1.16 million YouTube subscribers and Money With Katie hitting 26,500 subscribers.

Critically, over 60% of Morning Brew's engagement with its audience now happens on platforms other than email, according to Axios. This shows that newsletters are not only a relevant revenue model but can also be a powerful base for successful multimedia diversification.

Morning Brew's approach to identifying new B2B verticals combines data analytics with AI-powered audience analysis.

For their just launched Revenue Brew newsletter, Dippell revealed on The Rebooting Show podcast that "10% of the core 4.2 million are already in jobs that are relevant to this vertical that we're going to go into." The company also evaluates "where we're winning from advertiser standpoint categories, and where we think there is additive potential and more spend if we went more deeper into a specific vertical."

The strategic framework combines AI-powered audience analysis with competitive landscape assessment, seeking areas that are undercovered. A signifact amount of relvant data is a side effect of sheer volume: MB has the capability to check 20,000 or 30,000 users’ interest in a new niche space via survey.

This approach resembles Industry Dive’s strategy - a competing B2B newsletter empire that covers 34 industries in 37 newsletters and other publications, always analyzing user demand and proving advertiser demand via pre-bookings before branching out into a new niche industry. Among Industry Dive’s titles are “unsexy” ones in overlooked but highly lucrative niche industries such as “Multifamily Dive” (multifamily housing), “Packaging Dive” (packing industry) or “Waste Dive” (waste and recycling management).

Consumer publishers often fail at B2B expansion due to fundamental operational differences. "Consumer publishers assume that if you have a really good consumer sales team, they can just magically understand how to penetrate B2B verticals and sell into them," Dippell told The Rebooting Show. "It doesn't work like that."

The sales dynamics are opposite according to Dippell: consumer requires longer RFP-based cycles [request for proposal processes where advertisers solicit competitive bids] with larger deals but lower volumes, while B2B demands high volume of clients with shorter cycles and smaller individual transactions. Product requirements also differ - B2B focuses on lead generation and thought leadership rather than consumer's large brand campaigns.

Morning Brew succeeded because they already had B2B expertise in people like executive editor Josh Sternberg (previously Digiday’s media reporter) and Jacob Donnelly (who left to launch A Media Operator).

Morning Brew leverages artificial intelligence strategically across operations while maintaining clear boundaries around editorial content. The company uses AI primarily for audience targeting and operational efficiency and not for content generation.

The company's AI strategy reflects a cautious approach: using automation to enhance human capabilities rather than replace editorial judgment, while leveraging data science to identify audience opportunities and optimize revenue streams.

While mergers and acquisitions are likely, they're not imminent. Dippell wants to first build Morning Brew into a platform capable of adding complementary businesses to its network.

Dippell envisions Morning Brew evolving beyond newsletters into a platform business. "Morning Brew has an opportunity to be way more of a platform business than people understand," he told AMO. "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."

Morning Brew's success offers key insights for both B2B and B2C publishers:

For B2B Publishers:

For B2C Publishers:

Tools used for this newsletter: