Beehiiv launches webinars, rejects Substack’s case against email

Beehiiv is rolling out a new webinar tool and subscription features, while its founder has rejected claims that email is losing its power as a distribution channel for creators.

Co-founder and chief executive Tyler Denk said the update comes after growing demand from creators looking to monetise their work in formats beyond the newsletter.

"We want to provide as diverse methods of monetisation as possible," he told The Daily Influence.

The webinar feature allows creators to host live events for up to 10,000 attendees, sell tickets in multiple currencies and automatically sell recordings after the event.

"With webinars, you can charge for a live session and scale that one-to-many," Denk said. "Creators can get 100 people to show up and make thousands of dollars pretty easily."

The product is built on infrastructure from Cal.com but hosted within Beehiiv. The platform does not take a cut of webinar revenue.

The update is the latest in a run of Beehiiv product launches, following its expansion into podcast hosting earlier this month.

Also launched today are metered paywalls, allowing creators to offer a set number of free posts before locking content, and paid trials, which require readers to enter card details before accessing trial content. The update also introduces AI-powered analytics for podcasts.

Denk said these features are designed to improve conversion from free to paid audiences. “The whole game is converting free readers into paid readers,” he said.

"A very convenient stance to have"

Meanwhile, the rollout comes as platforms diverge on whether email remains a reliable foundation for creator businesses.

Denk pushed back on claims from Substack that creators should move away from email and toward app-based distribution.

Mills Baker, Substack's head of design, said this week that email was becoming "less deterministically reliable", citing changes from email providers and filtering systems as a key reason Substack had built its own app.

"I think that's a very convenient stance to have when it's 'sign up for our app where we get all of your data and now you depend on us instead of Gmail'," Denk said, adding that he did not agree that email has fundamentally deteriorated.

"Email has always changed – from Yahoo to Gmail to spam filtering – that's been evolving for decades," he said. "I don't think there's anything drastically happening today that would cause alarm."

Instead, he said one of email's core advantages remains data portability, allowing creators to own and move their audience between platforms.

"What tech platforms and aggregators do is try to become the protocol – they take something that was open and make it closed," he said, pointing to platforms such as Facebook, where users cannot export their audience data.

Even so, Denk acknowledged that Beehiiv benefits from creators consolidating tools on its platform, but drew a distinction between convenience and lock-in.

"You can export your list and your data and your content and take it wherever you want," he said. "We actually encourage people who feel like they're not being served well to leave."

*The Daily Influence's newsletter is hosted on Beehiiv.