Newsletter Sponsor Finder — InboxReads Directory Scraper

Claude / Codex skill to describe and setup this actor: SKILL.md

Find newsletters that accept sponsorships, are open to cross-promotion or are up for sale — scraped from the InboxReads public directory (3,365 listings in the 2026-08-17 sitemap snapshot). Per newsletter: topics, send cadence, audience geography, the email/sponsorship tooling it runs on (Paved, BuySellAds, Passionfroot, beehiiv, Mailchimp...), whether a sponsor-contact route exists, and directory popularity ranks. No login, no proxies.

Built for sponsor prospecting (media buyers and brands hunting placement inventory), newsletter competitive research, and acquisition scouting (onlyForSale).

What makes this different

Other InboxReads scrapers return name, description and topics. This one is built around sponsor intelligence — a combination of first-class, filterable fields no other newsletter-directory Actor exposes:

• acceptsSponsorships, allowsCrossPromotion, isForSale — filter the directory straight down to buyable / swappable / acquirable inventory.
• sponsorshipPlatforms — the ad networks a newsletter actually sells through (Paved, BuySellAds, Passionfroot...), detected from its tooling stack rather than self-reported, so you know where to go buy. Filter on it directly.
• hasSponsorContact / hasAdvertiseUrl — whether a contact route / media kit exists.
• audienceCountries — reader geography, for market-matched buys.

On the fields we deliberately leave out: we do not emit subscriber counts or open/click rates. InboxReads gates those behind its Pro plan on every public listing, so a scraper can only ever return them as null (or a fabricated guess). We return what is actually public and skip the always-empty columns — see the FAQ below.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
topics	array of strings	["business", "marketing"]	Only newsletters tagged with at least one of these topics (case-insensitive). Empty list = all topics. Full topic list: inboxreads.co/topics.
onlyAcceptingSponsors	boolean	false	Only newsletters whose listing says they accept paid sponsorships/ads (roughly half the directory).
onlyOpenToCrossPromotion	boolean	false	Only newsletters open to cross-promotion swaps.
onlyForSale	boolean	false	Only newsletters marked as up for sale.
sponsorshipPlatforms	array of strings	(empty)	Only newsletters that sell sponsorships through at least one of these platforms (case-insensitive), e.g. Paved, BuySellAds, Passionfroot. Detected from the tooling stack, not self-reported. Empty = any platform.
language	string	(empty)	Only newsletters written in this language, e.g. english, spanish. Empty = any.
maxItems	integer	100	Stop after this many newsletters have been returned (= billed results). Filters don't shrink your result count — the scraper keeps scanning until it has this many matches or the directory is exhausted. 0 = no cap (whole directory; 3,365 listings in the 2026-08-17 sitemap snapshot).
concurrency (Advanced)	integer	4	Parallel listing fetches. Keep low — this is a small independent directory site.
analyticsEnabled (Privacy)	boolean	false	Opt in to privacy-safe aggregate debug analytics sent to the Actor creator's Netcup receiver. No caller IDs, filters, records, URLs, source text, raw errors or credentials are sent.

What newsletter data does this scraper extract?

One flat JSON record per newsletter listing:

Field	Meaning
id	Stable id, inboxreads:<slug>
listingId	InboxReads' numeric listing ID, useful for source reconciliation
source	Always inboxreads
slug	Listing slug
url	Listing page on InboxReads
name	Newsletter name
tagline	Verbatim one-line pitch from the public directory listing; InboxReads controls its length
description	Verbatim description from the public directory listing; not generated, summarized, or truncated by this Actor. It is listing copy, not a newsletter issue or full editorial archive.
topics	Topic tags, e.g. ["business", "tech"]
language	Language, e.g. english
sendIntervalDays	Send cadence in days (1 = daily, 7 = weekly) — null if not stated
sendFrequency	Human label derived from the above (daily, weekly, biweekly, ...)
acceptsSponsorships	true if the listing says it accepts paid sponsorships/ads
allowsCrossPromotion	true if open to cross-promo swaps
isForSale	true if the newsletter is listed for sale
paidStatus	free / paid-subscription status of the newsletter itself
hasSponsorContact	true if the directory exposes a contact route for this newsletter
hasAdvertiseUrl	true if the newsletter publishes its own advertise/media-kit link
favourites	Directory likes — popularity proxy
ranks	Directory rank overall and per topic, e.g. {"all": 1, "news": 1}
audienceCountries	Top reader countries with relative score, [{"country", "score"}]
audienceCountryTotal	Raw total supplied with InboxReads' country distribution. It is not a number of countries and the public listing does not document its unit, so do not interpret it as subscribers.
audienceCountryCount	Deprecated compatibility alias for audienceCountryTotal; retained for existing integrations and carries the same raw value.
emailTools	Detected stack, [{"name", "category"}] — category sponsorship shows which sales platform (Paved, BuySellAds, Passionfroot...) the newsletter sells through
sponsorshipPlatforms	Flat list of the sponsorship sales platforms from emailTools, e.g. ["Paved", "BuySellAds"] — the actionable "where to go buy" signal, and the sponsorshipPlatforms input filters on it
listingApprovedAt / listingCreatedAt / listingUpdatedAt	Listing timestamps (ISO 8601)
launchedAt	Newsletter launch timestamp, when stated by the listing
hasPublicArchive / hasSampleIssue	Public-directory signals that an archive or sample issue exists; this Actor does not fetch either resource
relatedSlugs	Similar newsletters (slugs) — feed them back in as seeds
parseConfidence	high / medium / low — how cleanly the page parsed
warnings	Parse warnings, empty when clean

Subscriber counts and open/click rates are not included: InboxReads gates them behind its Pro plan on every listing we sampled, and this actor only reads public pages — no always-empty columns, no fabricated numbers.

How to find newsletter sponsorship inventory with this Actor

1. Set topics to your target verticals (marketing, finance, ai, ...) — or leave empty for the whole directory.
2. Turn on Only newsletters accepting sponsors to keep just the sponsorable inventory; add language if you buy in one market.
3. Read sponsorshipPlatforms in the output — the platforms (Paved, BuySellAds, Passionfroot...) where that newsletter actually sells placements, i.e. where to go buy. To target one ad network, put its name in the Sponsorship platforms input (e.g. ["Paved"]) and only newsletters selling through it come back.
4. Schedule the run and compare snapshots downstream to monitor newly listed newsletters (new inventory alert).
5. Export JSON, CSV or Excel — or call it over the API:

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>")
run = client.actor("nomad-agent/newsletter-sponsors-scraper").call(run_input={
    "topics": ["marketing", "business"],
    "onlyAcceptingSponsors": True,
    "maxItems": 200,
})
for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(item["name"], "|", item["sendFrequency"], "|", item["url"])

curl -X POST \
  "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/nomad-agent~newsletter-sponsors-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"topics": ["marketing"], "onlyAcceptingSponsors": true, "maxItems": 100}'

Output example

Real record (fetched 2026-07-02):

{
  "id": "inboxreads:theskimm",
  "source": "inboxreads",
  "slug": "theskimm",
  "url": "https://inboxreads.co/n/theskimm",
  "name": "Daily Skimm",
  "tagline": "The morning newsletter that millions wake up to",
  "description": "Meet, news without all the noise. The Daily Skimm connects the dots on how the day's biggest stories affect your life.",
  "topics": ["news", "business", "sports", "politics", "entertainment"],
  "language": "english",
  "sendIntervalDays": 1,
  "sendFrequency": "daily",
  "acceptsSponsorships": true,
  "allowsCrossPromotion": false,
  "isForSale": false,
  "paidStatus": "free",
  "hasSponsorContact": false,
  "hasAdvertiseUrl": true,
  "favourites": 174,
  "ranks": {"all": 2, "news": 2, "sports": 2, "business": 2, "politics": 2, "entertainment": 1},
  "audienceCountries": [
    {"country": "United States", "score": 191},
    {"country": "India", "score": 22},
    {"country": "Morocco", "score": 14},
    {"country": "Brazil", "score": 12},
    {"country": "Canada", "score": 12}
  ],
  "audienceCountryTotal": 1911,
  "emailTools": [
    {"name": "Paved", "category": "sponsorship"},
    {"name": "BuySellAds", "category": "sponsorship"},
    {"name": "Marigold Engage by Sailthru", "category": "email service provider"}
  ],
  "sponsorshipPlatforms": ["Paved", "BuySellAds"],
  "listingApprovedAt": "2017-09-08T16:45:16.000Z",
  "listingCreatedAt": "2017-09-08T16:45:16.000Z",
  "listingUpdatedAt": "2024-09-24T22:30:18.311Z",
  "launchedAt": null,
  "hasPublicArchive": false,
  "hasSampleIssue": false,
  "relatedSlugs": ["axios-am-pm", "need-2-know", "tip-news", "1440-daily-digest", "daily-dose-1", "boardroom-newsletters"],
  "parseConfidence": "high",
  "warnings": []
}

Pricing

Pay per event: $0.004 per newsletter record pushed (volume discounts down to $0.0026 on higher Apify plans) plus a negligible $0.00005 per Actor start. Filters run before billing — records filtered out are never charged. A typical filtered topic run (maxItems: 100) costs $0.40; a full-directory sweep (maxItems: 0, no filters) is 3,365 records in the 2026-08-17 sitemap snapshot, or about $13.46 at the base result price.

Compare: newsletter-sponsorship prospecting subscriptions run $8–58/month (InboxReads Pro) to $39–199/month (SponsorGap, Passionfroot). One $0.40 run builds a prospect list for a single use case — pay only when you actually pull data, with no subscription.

FAQ

Where does the data come from? The public InboxReads directory (inboxreads.co) — listing pages only. The actor respects the site's robots.txt: InboxReads' own media-kit, ad-rate, sponsor-list and API paths are disallowed there and are never fetched.

Why are there no subscriber counts or CPM prices? InboxReads gates subscriber/open-rate/click-rate metrics behind its Pro plan, and newsletter rate cards live on each newsletter's own media-kit page. This actor reports what is public: sponsorship acceptance flags, contact/advertise-URL signals and which sponsorship platform each newsletter sells through (emailTools) — enough to build a prospect list; pricing conversations happen on the newsletter's own advertise page.

How fresh is the data? Each run fetches live pages. listingUpdatedAt tells you when the newsletter's listing itself last changed.

Some fields are null — why? Newsletters self-report unevenly. Fields the listing doesn't state come back null (never guessed); parseConfidence + warnings flag records where the page shape looked unusual.

What happens if the source or dataset is unavailable? Dataset rows are always newsletter records, never synthetic error rows. A source outage before any records are available, or a run where no valid records can be persisted, correctly fails the run. Individual listing failures and later batch-write failures do not discard rows already persisted; the run log states the exact partial-delivery count. If a result charge cannot be confirmed after a successful dataset write, the row remains delivered and the Actor does not retry the ambiguous charge.

Integrations

Export results as JSON, CSV or Excel, or wire this Actor into Make, Zapier or n8n; call it programmatically with run-sync-get-dataset-items; or use it from AI agents via the Apify MCP server.

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Found sponsorship inventory with this Actor? A quick ⭐ review on the Actor page helps other media buyers find it — and tells us which signals to add next. Missing a field or a filter? Open an issue and we usually ship it within days.