Don’t Miss Media Group home pages, and founder Georgina Wilson-Powell (top right).
A local newsletter business covering UK coastal towns is on track to hit £85,000 in annual revenue from its first location in under two years.
Don’t Miss Margate was launched in May 2024 by former magazine editor Georgina Wilson-Powell, who expects the business to support a full market-rate salary within the next year.
The newsletter launched under the Don’t Miss Media brand, later renamed Don’t Miss Media Group (DMMG) as it expanded to Ramsgate in September 2025. A third edition is set to launch in Broadstairs in April, with plans to scale further across the coast.
Wilson-Powell, who has spent 20 years in journalism, previously held editorial roles at Time Out, BBC Good Food and Morrisons magazine. She also founded sustainable living magazine Pebble, which was sold after growth stalled during the pandemic.
The idea for the newsletter came after she spotted a gap in the market, with “people missing events, not knowing what’s on” and relying on Instagram.
“We’ve lost that kind of local media layer in a lot of towns,” she said. “You’re relying on really old Facebook pages or you’re at the mercy of the algorithms on Instagram.”
Being “locally connected and community-minded” makes the business stand out from large-scale culture titles, she added.
Built on Substack , Don’t Miss Margate reached 1,000 organic subscribers within three months of launch. It has since grown to around 3,000 subscribers, including around 150 paid. The Ramsgate edition has reached 1,000 subscribers, with around 50 paying.
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Open rates across both newsletters currently hit 65-70%, with a 5% free-to-paid conversion rate. The core audience is aged 30 to 55, many of whom have moved from cities and are interested in culture.
The newsletter offers recommendations, listings and local reporting, supported by an Instagram profile. The Margate brand also a website and a podcast – currently on pause – exploring deeper local stories. Wilson-Powell added she would like to roll out a podcast and website across each launch.
Revenue is mostly driven by advertising (75%) with subscriptions accounting for the remaining 25%.
Paywalled content costs £4 a month, with paid subscribers – called the “Don’t Miss Out crew” – receiving exclusive monthly content, early access to the newsletter (therefore tickets), and exclusive local discounts.
Ad slot queue is ten weeks long
Advertising is high in demand for DMMG, with Margate’s newsletter sponsor slots currently booked up to ten weeks in advance.
She said: “I’m really careful that we speak to that decent ratio of ads and editorial, we have a really high open rate because people trust us… We don’t want to abuse that.”
Sponsors range from bigger companies like Live Nation promoting local gigs to independent local businesses.
Wilson-Powell added advertisers “want to support us” instead of contributing a “tiny drop in the ocean at Meta and not knowing how that ad’s going to perform”.
“We are seeing people wanting to spend their marketing [funds] in the local economy as well, which is something I don’t think you would have seen a few years ago.”
Coastal towns a growing focus for funding
Wilson-Powell is focusing on coastal towns because they share similar challenges and opportunities.
“Eight million people live in coastal communities around the UK, and a lot of the coastal communities have traditionally come from quite deprived backgrounds,” she said. “They’ve lost their tourism over the last few decades.”
She added these towns are becoming a focus for funding, while growing into “hubs of culture and arts spending” without strong local media infrastructure.
“If people don’t know it’s on, they can’t support it. It’s that information architecture that actually needs to be [brought back] by people who are really embedded in their local communities.”
DMMG operates as a limited company with an associated Community Interest Company (CIC), directing 10% of profits to grants to make free events. Projects funded so far include a women’s football team and a dog show.
Wilson-Powell said: “I expect to be on a full market-rate salary within the next 12 months, but I wanted to invest my time into building and scaling the model, and it’s already paying off”.
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Wilson-Powell is now hoping to expand into other towns: “We aim for each town to be making around £85,000 per town in revenue, and I reckon we should hit that by the end of the year [for Margate]. For that to be year one of me working in the business, I think that’s pretty great.”
DMMG has a six-person team including three part-time editors (one per town), a social media editor and a podcast producer, with Wilson-Powell overseeing the network.
Expansion will target coastal towns “that have arts institutions” and not university towns, “because they’re already fairly well served” by the media, said Wilson-Powell.
She also sees opportunity in the recently announced UK state funding of up £12m for local media .
“There are always going to be challenges, and ultimately, we want to scale and scale fairly quickly… it does feel like there’s a lot more focus on local media and what it’s lost and what needs to be regained. It does feel like the pendulum swinging a bit more back towards it. So, I think now’s a good time to be working in it.”
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