As someone who's been hanging around on the Internet since before the worldwide web, I had to laugh at "The email newsletter has long felt like a hack, a reaction..."
The email newsletter preceded "the undeniable shittiness of the website-centric, pageview-driven web" by decades and there are newsletters started last century that are still around. (e.g. I still subscribe to a paid newsletter https://thisistrue.com/ that was a ground breaker in 1994 and which is still the author's primary source of income.)
Personally, I've been keeping in touch with my readers via newsletters (plural because I write under several names) since the beginning of this century. After using various different apps for delivery, each eventually abandoned because of increased shittiness, ironically I've returned to Mailman, the GNU Mailing List Manager (https://www.list.org/) which has been around since the early '90s.
It's still free. It still offers excellent list management functionality (but not the fancy design features you find in other apps) and it's still updated regularly to maintain security. It has both send-only and discussion list options, archiving, content filtering, digest options, spam filters, etc. If you're looking to monetize, however, you do need a separate system set up for payment processing.
So, no email newsletters are not hack reactions. They're retro. An old fashioned way to keep in touch with fans/clients/readers, disseminate information/entertainment, and/or deliver paid content.
Great article! As a Substack writer, the introduction of the reader app made me question if my incentives are aligned with Substack's. I've been hoping for some time that Substack would build growth tools for writers but they seem to have little to no interest in doing so. As a result, I switched to another newsletter sending platform last week that focuses more on growth and will continue to publish my articles to Substack as well, but not have Substack send my emails. I would have loved to have stayed with Substack entirely, but they're not helping me with my main goal, which is to expand my audience.
I'm trying out a relatively newer platform called www.beehiiv.com. It was founded by people from Morning Brew who have backgrounds in newsletter growth, so they're building the platform more to help writers grow (analytics, referral programs, etc.). The biggest downside is that it's not free, but with the amount of time I spent writing content on Substack only to gain a couple new followers after a post, I'm happy to spend some money if it actually leads to growth.
I've had success with a combination of things. One has been cross-promoting with other newsletter writers in the same category as me. So putting "advertisements" to each others' writing in our newsletters. Another is finding communities that are interested in the the topics I write about and posting my articles there. For me that's often certain subreddits, discord groups, etc. The best way is probably to post often in Twitter, but I still struggle with that because I don't enjoy posting to social media all the time.
As someone who's been hanging around on the Internet since before the worldwide web, I had to laugh at "The email newsletter has long felt like a hack, a reaction..."
The email newsletter preceded "the undeniable shittiness of the website-centric, pageview-driven web" by decades and there are newsletters started last century that are still around. (e.g. I still subscribe to a paid newsletter https://thisistrue.com/ that was a ground breaker in 1994 and which is still the author's primary source of income.)
Personally, I've been keeping in touch with my readers via newsletters (plural because I write under several names) since the beginning of this century. After using various different apps for delivery, each eventually abandoned because of increased shittiness, ironically I've returned to Mailman, the GNU Mailing List Manager (https://www.list.org/) which has been around since the early '90s.
It's still free. It still offers excellent list management functionality (but not the fancy design features you find in other apps) and it's still updated regularly to maintain security. It has both send-only and discussion list options, archiving, content filtering, digest options, spam filters, etc. If you're looking to monetize, however, you do need a separate system set up for payment processing.
So, no email newsletters are not hack reactions. They're retro. An old fashioned way to keep in touch with fans/clients/readers, disseminate information/entertainment, and/or deliver paid content.
Great article! As a Substack writer, the introduction of the reader app made me question if my incentives are aligned with Substack's. I've been hoping for some time that Substack would build growth tools for writers but they seem to have little to no interest in doing so. As a result, I switched to another newsletter sending platform last week that focuses more on growth and will continue to publish my articles to Substack as well, but not have Substack send my emails. I would have loved to have stayed with Substack entirely, but they're not helping me with my main goal, which is to expand my audience.
I'm trying out a relatively newer platform called www.beehiiv.com. It was founded by people from Morning Brew who have backgrounds in newsletter growth, so they're building the platform more to help writers grow (analytics, referral programs, etc.). The biggest downside is that it's not free, but with the amount of time I spent writing content on Substack only to gain a couple new followers after a post, I'm happy to spend some money if it actually leads to growth.
Sure thing, happy to share my thoughts! I've been writing on Substack for about a year and starting to have a sense of the newsletter landscape
I've had success with a combination of things. One has been cross-promoting with other newsletter writers in the same category as me. So putting "advertisements" to each others' writing in our newsletters. Another is finding communities that are interested in the the topics I write about and posting my articles there. For me that's often certain subreddits, discord groups, etc. The best way is probably to post often in Twitter, but I still struggle with that because I don't enjoy posting to social media all the time.
I managed to find the photo of the mentioned mural - https://twitter.com/theandreyreport/status/1504101792019329025