A creator who measured the cost of a borrowed audience

A creator who measured the cost of a borrowed audience

Context: a course-seller published two launch results — one to an Instagram following, one to an email list built afterward — selling the same $290 product.

What was measured:
— Launch 1: promoted to ~40,000 Instagram followers
— Launch 2 (next cohort): promoted to ~6,500 email subscribers

Reported outcome:
— Instagram launch: 31 sales, about $9,000 — roughly $0.22 revenue per follower
— Email launch: 88 sales, about $25,500 — roughly $3.92 revenue per subscriber
— Email converted at ~18x per head despite one-sixth the audience

Caveats: single seller, two non-simultaneous launches, so audience warmth and product reputation grew between them — a confound that inflates the second result regardless of channel. Email subscribers were self-selected from the Instagram audience, the most engaged slice. No control.

Implications: consistent with the well-documented gap between owned and rented audiences, though the timing confound means 18x overstates the channel effect.

What we still don't know: how much of the email advantage is the channel itself versus simply selecting the warmest fraction of an existing following.