List Rental & Dedicated Sends Medium

What it is

List rental is sending an email that is entirely a partner's message to your subscribers, for a fee. A dedicated send is the polite version: it goes from your name, with a note that it is sponsored, and the sponsor supplied the content. A solo ad in affiliate circles is the same thing sold per click. Co-registration adds a partner's opt-in to your sign-up form and sells each new subscriber. Under GDPR and most privacy law you never give the list away; you send on the partner's behalf.

How the money flows

Sponsors book a date, supply copy and links, and pay a flat fee or a CPM based on your subscriber count, usually up front or NET-30 through a marketplace (Paved, Swapstack, Sponsy) or directly. Co-registration pays $1-5 per new subscriber delivered, tracked by the partner. You keep your normal cadence and add the sponsored send on top, or replace one issue with it.

What it pays

Dedicated sends run $50-150 CPM for a general list and $200-400 for a tight professional one; a 20,000-subscriber B2B newsletter can charge $2,000-6,000 for a single send. Kept to one or two a month, that is $60-250 per 1,000 subscribers per month, more than regular sponsorships. Pushed to weekly, the list stops opening and the rate collapses with it.

Requirements and who pays

A list large enough to price (5,000+), a clean sender reputation, and sponsors whose offer fits the audience: B2B software, courses, events, finance and tools buy most of it. Your email platform must allow sponsored sends (most do) and your privacy policy must say you send partner messages.

Pitfalls

Measure the unsubscribes and complaints each send causes and price that loss into the fee. Never more than one dedicated send per fortnight for most lists. Keep editorial control: reject copy you would not read, and refuse anything misleading. Never export addresses to a partner; besides the law, a leaked list is a dead list.