Hey, fellow grower. Ever obsess over anything so much that you don’t sleep, eat, drink water, or otherwise live your life b/c your brain is entirely focused on one thing with no room for anyone or anything else?

No? Yeah, me either….was just kidding. Ha ha.

Actually, I wasn’t kidding🫣: My pet project over the past few months has been designing and building out a self-serve advertising site for DONUT Press Media, where prospective advertisers could browse our newsletter advertising packages (+ other features we offer) and check out without actually needing to talk to a salesperson. I wanted it to stand out, so it’s reimagined as a retro, 8-bit Oregon Trail-style videogame experience, with our sasquatch mascot, Presston, as the wayfinder.

Well, it finally launched this week (!!). And I’d love for you to check it out (but pls be gentle lol).

-Peter

In this week’s newsletter:

• ⚖️ The performance-scale tradeoff, and how to manage it
• 🤔 Do ppl trust podcast hosts more than their own friends?
• 📊 How to make creative feedback less subjective

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DATA INSIGHT

⚖️ How to manage the performance-scale tradeoff to break through growth plateaus

Many of you may not know that I (Peter) played college baseball at Michigan State - poorly, mind you (if you ever need a laugh, just look up my stats).

• Before each practice, our coach would invite a different speaker to address and motivate the team. Injured combat veterans, successful entrepreneurs, pro athletes, etc.
• One day, he invited legendary basketball coach Tom Izzo to speak to us. We were all stoked; Izzo, a national-championship-winning coach, was - and is - a mythic figure on Michigan State’s campus and in college basketball in general, and we adored and respected him.

…then he started LAYING into us. Cussing, screaming, telling us how much we sucked because our team liked to party more than we liked to win (guilty at the time, unfortunately). The ultimate point of his very-loud-and-raspy message: “Good grades, playing elite baseball, or a social life. You can only pick two."

And while college basketball or baseball isn’t exactly pertinent to marketing, the lesson here is: everything has tradeoffs.

Today’s marketing topic: How to minimize the inherent tradeoff between performance and scale.

To illustrate the concept, let's use an example from the golf portfolio of our newsletter network (what a pretentious sentence lol). Over the past week:

• A 650k-subscriber daily news edition delivered 26k sponsor clicks on average - or 0.04 clicks/subscriber.
• A 625k-subscriber instructional edition (for those w Charles Barkley-looking swings) averaged 19k sponsor clicks, or 0.03 clicks/subscriber.
• A 200k-subscriber product-curation edition averaged 11k sponsor clicks. That’s good for 0.06 clicks/subscriber - or 50% better than any other newsletter in the sample.

In summary, the newsletter with the smallest audience performed better on a per-subscriber basis, while the newsletter with the largest audience performed better on a volume basis.

This, in a nutshell, is the performance-scale tradeoff: Smaller audiences, where the relationship between the creator and consumer is more intimate, tend to perform better on a per-person basis. But these are near-impossible to scale without deploying a significant amount of time and attention (human capital), since you need to maintain many publisher/influencer point-of-contacts at once to generate any sort of volume. Larger audiences, on the other hand, provide this volume with less effort - but with a larger tent comes worse per-person metrics.

The north star = small-list metrics at scale

But how do you achieve this?

The honest answer a guru or marketing agency won’t tell you: there’s really no silver bullet.

• You can gravitate to channels where data and volume is plentiful - ex: third-party ad partners like Meta or Google (or DONUT Press Media😉), which combine data and a vast audience size to target your ICP at scale - but no channel is a true set-it-and-forget-it.
• These growth channels can be tricky and complex, often requiring specialized knowledge to effectively operate and improve. And whether you outsource this day-to-day work to an agency or not, ultimately, you're the one that's responsible for their output, so you or your team will be involved at some point in the process.

NEED TO KNOW

What you may have missed this week

🎧 Under the influence: Podcast fans tend to trust creator hosts more than their own friends, a recent survey of 3k US adults found. That may be why host-read ads are the most-effective and trustworthy format - but only if brands appear in them more than once (a data point gleaned from the survey). Read the full 14-page report.

🤳 On that note: A rug company aptly named Ruggable recently started shifting spend from Meta to a creator-centric affiliate network - and it paid dividends (to the tune of ~$9M/month in revenue currently). High trust = high conversion rates.

🧑‍🎄 It’s almost that time of year: Meta CPMs are about to mimic Drake in the club on a Tuesday and start going up📈. Here’s how media buyers are navigating the 2026 holidays on Meta.

THE HELP DESK

Stuff that makes your output better and your job easier

🎨 How do we make creative feedback less subjective? Discover a few methods in this manager’s guide to giving creative feedback.

🧩 The org chart to take to heart: How to build and scale a high-performance marketing team in 2026.

✍️ An always-useful skill: The complete guide to writing a business case that powers your ideas forward.

That’s all for this week! Happy growing; see you back here next Wednesday✌️.

-Peter & Scott

P.S. The founding thesis of DONUT Press Media, America’s most-exclusive newsletter network, is that we can minimize the performance-scale tradeoff for advertisers by A) heavily vetting each publisher in our network to ensure that ad dollars only reach premium audiences with verified buying power, then B) actively managing each campaign. We now have 20M+ subscribers split across 16+ highly niche B2B and B2C audiences; 43% have a net worth over $2M; 87% are decision-makers. If your ad budget (or experimental budget) includes newsletters, you should definitely check us out.