This week, NILnomics crossed 1,000 subscribers. I wanted to take a moment to reflect on that milestone and share some thoughts on where this newsletter has been and where it's headed.
When I launched NILnomics in early 2025, the premise was simple but untested: that there was a meaningful audience for independent, data-driven analysis of college sports finances. Not hot takes on NIL deals. Not speculation about conference realignment. The actual financial data — revenue and expense reports, multimedia rights agreements, cost-of-attendance figures, coaching compensation structures — sourced directly from the institutions themselves through public records requests.
It turns out that audience exists, and it's larger than I expected.
A few observations about NILnomics by the numbers, because examining the data is what we do here.
The newsletter currently maintains a 63% open rate, which is meaningfully above the industry average of roughly 40%. To me, that metric matters more than the subscriber count itself. It suggests that the people reading NILnomics are actively engaged with the content — not passively subscribed and ignoring it. That's the kind of audience I set out to build.
Growth has been entirely organic. I have not spent a dollar on paid advertising or subscriber acquisition. Every reader found NILnomics through one of a handful of channels: LinkedIn, where I share analysis and visualizations regularly; X, where the college sports finance community continues to grow; search engines, where people looking for actual financial data increasingly land on NILnomics content; and importantly, through the recommendation networks of other newsletters.
On that last point — I want to specifically acknowledge the newsletters that have recommended NILnomics to their own audiences. Publications like Daily Playbook, Awful Announcing, Sickos Committee, Quick Slants, and several others have driven a substantial share of subscriber growth by featuring NILnomics in their recommendation feeds. That kind of support from established voices in the college sports media space is not something I take for granted, and it speaks to a broader truth: the people covering college sports recognize that financial literacy in this space is overdue.
I also want to thank the readers who found NILnomics the old-fashioned way — someone forwarded you a post, or you saw a chart on LinkedIn and wanted to know where it came from. That kind of organic, word-of-mouth growth is the most meaningful validation a newsletter can receive.
The foundation of NILnomics remains the same as it was on day one: a library of over 7,000 FOIA documents from athletic departments across the country, publicly available datasets on Kaggle and GitHub, and a commitment to making college sports financial data accessible and understandable. I believe transparency in this space matters — for administrators, for athletes, for the media covering it, and for the fans funding it through ticket purchases and tax dollars.
As for what comes next — I'll let the work speak for itself. Here's a preview of what I've been building:
This week, NILnomics crossed 1,000 subscribers. I wanted to take a moment to reflect on that milestone and share some thoughts on where this newsletter has been and where it's headed.
As for what comes next — I'll let the work speak for itself. Here's a preview of what I've been building:
This is an early look at a comprehensive college sports finance dashboard that will give subscribers the ability to explore institutional revenue, expenses, and financial trends across Division I athletics in a way that simply hasn't existed in a public-facing format before. The goal is to take the same data I've been analyzing in the newsletter and put it directly in your hands — searchable, sortable, and updated as new filings become available. I'll have much more to share on this soon.
(If you are interested in being a beta tester for the dashboard and haven’t signed up yet, just respond to this email and tell me you’re interested. Join a group of 50+ people ready to pour over the dashboard and build a product that meets the needs of the entire college athletics community)
Finally — 1,000 subscribers feels like too significant a milestone to let pass without a conversation. Earlier in the life of this newsletter, I hosted a live Q&A on the NILnomics YouTube channel for every 100 subscribers. That cadence wasn't sustainable, but this one deserves it.
I'll be going live on YouTube this Tuesday, May 12th at 8:30 PM Eastern for a Q&A to celebrate the milestone, talk about what's ahead for NILnomics, and answer whatever questions you have about college sports finances, the data, or the newsletter itself. If you have a question you'd like me to address, reply directly to this email and I'll add it to the list. You can also join the live stream on Tuesday and drop your questions in the chat.
Thank you for subscribing. Thank you for reading. And thank you for proving that there's a real appetite for substance over speculation in college sports coverage.
— Greg