Reflecting on Year 1 at Cultivated Media

Driving the news: It’s been one year since Cultivated Media launched into a daily newsletter and media company. One year in, we’re proud to say that we just had our most successful month yet in terms of engagement and revenue. 

And we’re just getting started.

Back up: When we launched, we were building off the strong foundation Jeremy had built with his Substack newsletter. We turned the Substack into a daily offering and our readers responded. While our pillar content is our daily newsletter, we have also had great success engaging the cannabis industry on LinkedIn and YouTube. On both channels, we are outperforming much larger, much more established competitors. 

By the numbers: Our newsletter is being sent to over 7,000 email subscribers daily with an average open rate over our first year of daily newsletters at 54% and a click rate of 5.3%. Both metrics are best-in-class. Our readers are opening, reading, and engaging in our newsletter.

Our video content is also performing. Early in the year, we surpassed the largest player in the cannabis sector when it comes to all-time YouTube views, and have continued to build distance. We are also surpassing long-standing competitors when it comes to LinkedIn followers and engagement. 

In short, what we’re doing is working.

And another thing: On a quarterly basis we have been pruning our list. That’s right, we’re making our list smaller at the end of every quarter. Why? Well, if you don’t open an email from Cultivated in three months, we remove you from our list because we believe engagement is far more important than list size. 

Why people are reading: Driven by our Editor-in-Chief Jeremy, our daily newsletter has become an essential must-read for industry professionals and industry followers. We’re diving deep on the most important story of the day, but also providing smaller dives on all the (cannabis) news that matters. Is it easy to put together? Heck no. But, it’s how we at Cultivated stay on top of what’s happening every day, so we think it’s critical to share it. 

If you are reading this note and are not subscribed, no time like the present. Subscribe now. 

At MJBizCon a few weeks back week, we received unbelievable feedback from industry newcomers and long-timers alike. 

An industry that grows together: We also know we’re not the only game in town, so we’ve partnered with industry leaders with whom we’re aligned. 

Specifically, we are providing a daily newsletter to the audience from Grown In, we have a cross-promotion partnership with The Outlaw Report, and we have a content partnership with MJBiz. With MJBiz, we have a weekly live stream featuring reporters and editors from MJBizDaily and MJBizMagazine and we’ll be producing 40+ video podcasts from conversations we had at MJBizCon. 

We’ve also worked with the A+ team at Benzinga, the Minnesota Marijuana Association, NECANN, and many more.

We can’t wait to expand and grow these partnerships in 2025.

About the Benjamins: But without revenue and revenue growth, we can’t keep going. And here’s the really good news. November 2024 was our biggest revenue month since we launched. 

We’ve launched and built new partnerships with Dutchie, UZIO, MJ REIT, and Shield Compliance – and we’ll be announcing more very soon. 

We believe we have a unique offering to place our partners in front of our audience in an authentic, replicable, and thoughtful way. 

If you think your company or brand could benefit from being in front of the most engaged, daily audience in the cannabis industry, let us know.

In the past month alone, we’ve featured conversations with publicly traded company CEOs and leading cannabis journalists. We’ve had on a key voice in the hemp industry, and gone deep with a CEO of a company on the rebound. We’ve talked to current and past regulators and government officials, and there’s so much more coming down the pike in 2025.

With that, we’re signing off for until 2025. 

We’ll be back stronger than ever for Cultivated’s Year 2.

-JB & JR