How beehiiv’s Top 4 Recommendations Drive Publisher Growth

Situation:

For most newsletter publishers, growth eventually hits a wall.

Paid acquisition becomes expensive. Social algorithms fluctuate. Cross-promotions require manual outreach, coordination, and trust. Even strong publications struggle to consistently acquire high-quality subscribers without adding operational overhead.

beehiiv introduced Top 4 Recommendations to solve a specific problem: help publishers exchange high-intent subscribers inside the beehiiv ecosystem without creating another paid channel or workflow to manage.

What started as a lightweight discovery feature has become a meaningful acquisition channel for many publishers.

This case study examines how five different beehiiv publications use Top 4 to drive sustained, cost-free growth:

• Almost Friday
• Daily Motivation
• 10almonds
• Just Women’s Sports
• Workspaces

Challenge:

Across these publishers, the challenges were consistent:

• Paid growth fatigue: Rising costs and diminishing returns from ads
• Low-intent traffic: Social and broad referral sources brought volume, not retention
• Operational friction: Manual cross-promotions did not scale
• Unclear attribution: Hard to measure which partnerships actually worked

Publishers needed a growth channel that delivered relevance, not just reach, without adding complexity.

Solution:

Each publication enabled Top 4 Recommendations inside their beehiiv dashboard.

Top 4 allows publishers to recommend up to four other newsletters. These recommendations appear immediately after a reader subscribes, at the exact moment of highest intent.

Key attributes of the solution:

• No engineering or setup time
• No payments, bidding, or campaign management
• Recommendations act as editorial endorsements, not ads
• Growth compounds through network effects as publishers recommend each other

Publishers simply selected newsletters they genuinely believed their readers would enjoy and activated the feature.

Results:

Despite different audiences and content verticals, outcomes followed a similar pattern.

Almost Friday

• Added 319 subscribers from Top 4 in one month
• Two recommending publications became top-four acquisition sources overall

Daily Motivation

• Acquired nearly 3,600 subscribers through Top 4
• Generated close to 1,000 subscribers from the channel in a single month

10almonds

• Gained over 1,400 subscribers via Top 4
• Featured in six other publishers’ Top 4 lists, reinforcing a flywheel effect

Just Women’s Sports

• Top 4 became the fourth-largest acquisition channel of the year
• Matched performance of established paid and organic channels at zero cost

Workspaces

• Top 4 became the number one growth driver
• Accounted for 67 percent of new subscribers in one month
• Generated more than 3,500 subscribers since launch
• Featured in 19 other publications’ Top 4 lists

Across all cases, subscriber quality remained high, with Top 4 traffic ranking alongside or outperforming other core acquisition sources.

Why Top 4 Works

Five clear patterns emerged:

1. High-intent placement
   Recommendations appear at subscription, not mid-scroll or post-click.
2. Contextual trust
   Readers treat recommendations as editorial suggestions, not promotions.
3. Zero marginal cost
   Performance rivals paid channels without spend.
4. Network effects
   Visibility increases as more quality publishers participate.
5. Focus on engagement, not vanity metrics
   Success is measured by retained, engaged readers.

Takeaway

Top 4 Recommendations have evolved into a quiet but powerful growth engine inside beehiiv.

For publishers, it offers something rare: a scalable acquisition channel that rewards quality, alignment, and trust rather than budget size.

For the beehiiv ecosystem, it creates shared upside. When strong publications recommend each other, everyone grows.

Start using beehiiv to turn your newsletter into part of a network that grows itself.