Why TIME Moved Their 2M+ Subscribers to beehiiv

Situation:

TIME has been a pioneer in media for over a century — leading transitions from print to digital and reaching millions weekly through its editorial newsletters. With over 2M subscribers across more than a dozen newsletters, email had become a critical channel for engagement and revenue.

Challenge:

Until 2024, TIME was using a legacy ESP built for marketing teams, not newsrooms. This created major pain points:

• Manual, fragmented workflows (copy-paste from WordPress, dev help for layouts)
• Slow ability to test, iterate, and optimize content
• Hard-coded ads with limited flexibility
• Limited performance insights, requiring manual exports and analyst support

As newsletters became a primary revenue driver, this setup was holding the editorial team back.

Solution:

TIME migrated 13 newsletters and 2M+ subscribers to beehiiv with zero downtime.

• White-glove onboarding: Custom domain warm-up, template setup, and full support from beehiiv’s customer success and solutions teams.
• Editorial-first workflow: A clean editor, built-in segmentation, and scheduling tools that let editors publish without dev involvement.
• Integrated insights: Real-time data and survey tools in one dashboard, enabling faster iteration and direct audience feedback.

Results:

The switch transformed TIME’s email operations:

• Open rates surged — e.g. Inside TIME newsletter saw a 63.8% increase, Health Matters rose from 51.0% → 60.4%
• Click-through rates jumped across newsletters
• Publishing speed improved, allowing the team to launch more editions with less friction
• Audience insights deepened, giving TIME the ability to test, segment, and gather first-party data directly

Burhan Hamid, former CTO of TIME, summarized it best:

“Our editors just work in beehiiv... They don’t need to fit a square peg into a round hole.”

TIME didn’t just switch ESPs — they unlocked an entirely new level of editorial efficiency and audience engagement.