How TLDR juiced signups from ChatGPT ads by 30%

About this episode

Letterland Live SPAM or STAR is powered by beehiiv. Want to send from the ESP where newsletter legends are made? Get 30% off beehiiv with code FALL30 @ beehiiv.link/fall30 This week on Letterland LIVE we're joined by Jimmy Pawelski, Head of Growth at TLDR (8M+ readers), and Kate Samuelson, co-founder of Cheapskate London and Senior Newsletter Editor at BBC Studios. Jimmy's ChatGPT ads were getting cheap clicks, but those visitors weren't signing up. So he used Claude Code to match each landing page headline to the ad someone clicked, and saw a ~30% lift in subscriptions. Plus, we ask the question every operator wants answered: could you still build a TLDR in 2026, and where is growth coming from now? Kate shares what she's brought from the BBC to Cheapskate London, her weekly guide to the city's best events, read by 60,000+ Londoners. We'll also get into: - Are newsletters cooked? Taylor Lorenz says she lost a third of her paid subscribers, and Kendall Baker fires back - Gmail inbox placement fell from 91% to 82% this year, per Validity - The UK's competition watchdog investigates Meta's new scraping terms - Substack's update blitz: metered paywalls, freewalls, lists and... cu