Email and SMS are not competing channels. They are sequenced surfaces inside a single owned-audience stack — different latencies, different open-rate economics, different roles in the customer relationship. The brands compounding run them as one operation.
Morning Brew, Axios, Puck, The Free Press, Semafor, The Information. The newsletter economy is a multi-billion-dollar business news layer — here's the index of who owns business email and why.
Traditional 'free media' was never free. Creator-economy distribution actually is — if you build the audience asset.
How Rihanna built a direct-to-audience marketing machine — owned channels, self-distributing events, and products engineered to generate their own content across Fenty Beauty and Savage X Fenty.