Earn additional revenue by running ads in your emails 💰

Use our built-in Kit Ads feature to place programmatic and performance ads in your emails and generate ad revenue.

Here are the details on:

Programmatic ads are smart, automated ads that target the right person at the right time on autopilot for you.

This means that after you insert an Ad Slot into your emails, we have the technology to automatically display ads that are most relevant to your subscribers and bring you the most revenue.

You'll be able to choose the specific brands or categories you want (or don't want) to run ads for in your emails beforehand, but not the specific ads themselves.

Performance ads are ads from campaigns that are scheduled to run within a certain campaign window.

For example, a brand may offer creators the opportunity to run up to three performance ads from December 17, 2025, until December 31, 2025, to promote the brand's New Year's sale.

Unlike programmatic ads, where you'll choose the brands or categories to run ads for, we'll secure performance campaigns for you.

Performance ads are also not personalized to match your subscribers' preferences.

People often think that they need a large number of subscribers or need to sell products before they can make money from their email list. This isn't true. By running ads, you can start monetizing much earlier.

If you're a new creator, seeing the ad revenue trickle in—even if it's just a handful of dollars at first—can be a huge motivation booster to keep going with your creator business and send emails consistently.

What's more, once you've set up your Kit account to run ads, doing so is as simple as adding Ad Slots to your emails. We'll also automatically pay out your ad revenue following a predictable schedule.

Making your first dollar from email just got simpler.

If you're an established creator, running ads opens another revenue stream from email. Use it to complement your existing revenue sources as you grow your creator business!

The amount of ad revenue you can potentially make depends on factors like:

It is also important to note that the more consistent you are with your email sends, the more optimized your programmatic ads will be for your subscribers, which will increase overall ad performance.

So, in general, the larger your email list and the more often you send emails, the more you can potentially make!

Please note that we charge a fee of 23.5% of total ad revenue for running and maintaining this advertising service.

Apart from ads, we also have Kit Sponsorships (previously known as the Sponsor Network) where we'll secure newsletter sponsorships from brands for you.

These sponsorships are similar to performance ads, where we’ll handle all the negotiations, logistics, and payments involved in the brand partnership on your behalf in exchange for a commission and processing fee.

You’ll similarly have full control over the brands you work with and can approve every brand we secure for you.

Unlike performance ads, however, you'll have control and more involvement over the sponsored content you'll feature in your newsletter. This is because you can tailor the sponsored content's copy to match your business and personal experience.

Also, while performance ads are paid based on the number of clicks they get, sponsorships are paid at a flat rate.

Kit Sponsorships is available to creators who have at least 10,000 email subscribers and send emails at least once a week. Learn more about Kit Sponsorships here.

If you're already using Kit Sponsorships (previously known as the Sponsor Network), you can use both!

For emails that don’t have a secured performance ad campaign or content sponsorship, you can have them fall back to running programmatic ads, so you never leave money on the table.

If you aren’t yet eligible to use Kit Sponsorships, you can set up ads to start earning money from your emails!

If you're ready to place ads in your emails, check out these articles:

For programmatic ads, we automatically release payouts 45 days from the end of the month since the ad was run.

For example, if you ran your ad in August 2025, we’ll pay you the revenue for it around October 15, 2025.

For performance ads, we release payouts within the 15th business day of the following month.

For example, if you ran your ad in August 2025, we'll pay you the revenue for it by September 19, 2025.

Ad payouts will be made to your Stripe account. (If you haven't already done so, you'll connect Kit with Stripe when setting up Kit Ads.)

There is no minimum threshold to start receiving payouts.

This is not possible. Your email can display only one such type of content at once.

For example, if you add sponsored content from Kit Sponsorships to an email, programmatic ads inserted into that email won’t be displayed, as we’ve found doing so tends to negatively impact the sponsored content's performance.

However, you can have emails that don’t have a secured performance campaign or content sponsorship fall back to running programmatic ads, so you never leave money on the table.

If you don't want any ads (whether they're programmatic or performance ads) to appear in an email, simply do not include Ad Slots in it. Even if ads are enabled, no ads will be displayed if there are no Ad Slots in your emails.

You can also disable programmatic ads and performance ads separately. Doing this will stop the respective ad type from being displayed in your emails' Ad Slots when you send them.

Learn more here:

When setting up your account for Kit Ads, you'll be able to blocklist brands (or entire categories of brands) whose programmatic ads you don't want to feature in your emails.

You can also manage your allowlist of brands in your Ads dashboard anytime after that.

As for performance ads, you are free to decline performance campaign offers we send you if they aren't a good fit.

If you're worried about subscribers unsubscribing from your emails after seeing your ads, you could explain that these ads help keep your content free for them.

You can also offer subscribers ad-free newsletter access via a paid subscription. Learn how to create a paid newsletter here.

You can include up to three Ad Slots per email. Although displaying more ads means more revenue opportunity, it’s best to match the number of ads to your email length.

For example, shorter emails (fewer than 200 words) should contain only one Ad Slot to maintain content balance.

For the first Ad Slot, we recommend placing it near the top of the email within the content.

If you’re adding a second ad, it’s best positioned near the bottom. And if you want to add a third Ad Slot, place it above the header.

Programmatic ads are personalized to match each subscriber's preferences. The first time you run programmatic ads, our algorithm will pick, for each subscriber, a brand whose programmatic ad is relevant to their general interests and demographics.

As you continue to run programmatic ads, the system will take into account any subscriber engagement (or lack of engagement) with them to serve more relevant ones to your subscribers in the future.

How to set up Kit Ads