Boosts to paid recommendations: what changed

Available on paid beehiiv plans for paid recommendations. Free recommendations are available on all plans.

If you've been using Boosts to grow your audience or earn revenue, this article is for you. The core functionality is still here, paid recommendations, the wallet, earnings, subscriber verification, but the experience has been reorganized and renamed. Here's what changed and where to find everything. 

Quick overview

• Boosts are now called paid recommendations.
• Free and paid recommendations now live together under Grow > Recommendations.
• Auto-clean is gone: Subscribers who don't pass verification stay on your list and get tagged so you can decide what to do with them.
• Email Boosts and Direct Links have been retired.
• Everything else still works:  CPA offers, verification, the wallet, auto-accept, auto-pause, geolocation targeting.

What's new in recommendations

One place for all recommendations

Free recommendations and paid recommendations now live together under Grow in Recommendations from the left panel of your dashboard. 

The section is split into two areas:

• Outgoing recommendations: Publications you recommend to your subscribers, for free or for pay.
• Incoming recommendations: Publications that recommend you. This is where you create and manage your paid offer.

Previously, free recommendations and Boosts were in separate parts of the product. Now they're unified, so you can manage your full recommendations picture in one place.

New automation: auto-deposit

You can now set your Wallet to top up automatically when your balance drops below a threshold you set. This prevents active paid agreements from pausing due to low funds without you having to manually monitor your balance. 

Verification outcomes are now visible to you

Previously, subscribers who failed verification were silently removed by the auto-clean setting. Auto-clean has been removed. Subscribers who don't pass verification now stay on your list and are given subscriber tags and custom fields so you can see the outcome and decide how to handle them.

Every paid recommendation subscriber is automatically tagged:

• Rec: Pending Verification: still in progress.
• Rec: Verified: passed.
• Rec: Failed Verification: did not pass.

You can filter by these tags in Segments and use them to trigger Automations.

New slot configuration for outgoing recommendations

When you recommend other publications, you now have more control over how they appear to new subscribers. Slots can be set to shuffle through your active recommendations, pin a specific publication, match automatically, feature one of your own publications, or be left empty. Each slot can also be set to draw from free recommendations, paid recommendations, or both. 

What's retired in recommendations

Email Boosts

You can no longer create new email boosts. Any email boosts already in flight will run until they expire naturally.

Direct Links

You can no longer create new direct links. Links you've already shared will continue resolving for subscribers who use them.

What got renamed in recommendations

The subscriber attribution channel label has also been updated from ‘boost’ to recommendations terminology, meaning you’ll see ‘recommendations’ in place of boosts in your dashboards.