An Update On My Prejudice Against Newsletters
This blog appeared first on my newsletter, Future Proof, last week. Please be a cool dude and subscribe: there are free and paid options, and both support my work!
I have this vision of myself, many years from now, wearing a straightjacket in a padded cell. “Newsletters,” I mutter under my breath as a forensic psychiatrist hired by the FBI is escorted in by armed guards. “Newsletters, newsletters, newsletters,” I screech, at an ever-increasing pitch, before finally yelling, with blood-curdling intensity: “NEWSLETTERSSSSS!”
If this sounds like an odd thing to write in a newsletter (though you’re now reading it on my Medium blog, so this line makes less sense), then you are experiencing a small fraction of the cognitive dissonance that I have to endure every time I fire up the ol’ Substack. My natural instinct is to call out newsletters, to push the agenda of podcasts instead, and to do them down. So why did I start publishing a newsletter? The truth is that it’s very easy for me to do: right now I’m sat in my living room in South London, hammering this post out in Microsoft Word (I’m old school like that) and will shortly copy it all over into the Substack CMS and hit send. It’s easy. It’s also a very simple system for monetisation, far cleaner than any of the paid subscription options for podcasting.
There was also the question of timing. If you can keep your pod when all about you are losing theirs and starting newsletters — well, you’re a stronger person than me, my son. The world has moved towards newsletters dramatically over the last few years. I’m sure I’ve told this anecdote on here before, but when I was working at a British current affairs magazine they had an evening newsletter that they were very proud of. They were considering launching more. Having to be brought in to run the podcasts, I was loathe to big up newsletters — but I also fundamentally believed that this was antiquated technology that would be stupid to invest in. But the editor was determined that newsletters should be part of the publication’s future, and they now have 14 different titles (including a midday version of the evening email). On a purely industrial commitment level, I was wrong.
In last week’s edition of Future News, Ian Silvera’s excellent newsletter about the news, he spelled out the fact that the BBC is planning to enter the newsletter race. The BBC has the financial firepower, as well as in-house expertise and talent, to compete with the private market in any sector it chooses. Frankly, I’m just pleased that they’re taking a break from podcasting — no company or organization has done more harm to the UK’s podcast market than the BBC (in my opinion; other opinions may exist). The BBC’s newsletter head honcho “will utilise the expertise of thousands of journalists across the world, as well as examine the impact of the big stories from North America on other regions,” a spokesperson told Future News.
For the Beeb, it’s another no-brainer. They already have everything they need to make a newsletter work — talented (and salaried) correspondents and, er, massive marketing infrastructure — so not doing it would be, to some extent, a dereliction of professional duty. That’s unless you believe, like me, that part of the responsibility of a publicly funded broadcaster is to nurture, and not stifle, a competitive private market (but that’s a subject for a different blog and another time).
But at the same time as I was thinking about the BBC news, I saw this tweet, from my old colleague Stephen Bush, pop up on my timeline.
Stephen is what you’d call a newsletter pioneer, at least in the UK. He cut his teeth working on Benedict Brogan’s email at the Telegraph and now writes a morning email for the FT. We worked together at the New Statesman where he launched Morning Call, an email that has gone on to be one of the NS’s most valuable pieces of property. And even though we worked together on the podcast (which is very popular and which he was co-host of for several years) I don’t think it’s unfair to say that his first, and deepest, love was his newsletter.
Stephen’s tweet highlights a Press Gazette article which, to summarise, looks at a new nature newsletter based in the UK, called Inkcap journal. It launched in May 2020 as a free newsletter and later added a paid option. It now has, according to Press Gazette, 6000+ subscribers including 800 paying ones. Membership costs £40, £50 or £100 a year, depending on your level of generosity so, for argument’s sake, let’s assume that, on average, those subs are paying £45 a year. That’s £36,000 or $43,500. It’s a salary, for sure, though not a huge one, especially if you’ve got commissions as part of your outlay.
Anyway, more striking (and what Stephen was calling BS on) was the 70% open rate. The article doesn’t specify whether that open rate is for all subscribers or just for paid subs (people who pay for a newsletter are, unsurprisingly, much more likely to open the email) but it’s a high figure. As a compare and contrast, this newsletter (which, I should say, has far, far fewer than 6k subscribers) usually has an open-rate of about 50%. If you’re reading this, you’re part of that figure (and thank you). If you’re not reading this, well, eat dirt.
A 70% open rate means that you have excellent engagement with and from your audience, as well as the possibility to expand monetisation either through increased subscriber growth (and retention) or via advertisers. So it’s an exciting figure. All the same, 70% of 6,000 doesn’t represent a *huge* number of people, and open rates tend to decrease with scale. A mailing list of 100,000 is going to have a higher attrition rate of subscribers to non-readers (or readers to non-readers) than at 6,000, where the audience is still relatively niche and personal. If I started a newsletter that I only sent to my family and a dozen friends, I could probably get my open rate to 100% (or 95% cos I’m not sure my niece and nephew have access to email). But the reality is that I want people in all sorts of different sectors, companies and locations to read this email — and that will necessarily negatively impact my open rate.
There is a danger to articles like the one in Press Gazette, in that they set unrealistic expectations and/or targets at a time when rapid expansion is going to cause a squeeze. We have seen this exact thing happen in podcasting: after Serial, everyone wanted to start a podcast. And, at the same time, there were many news stories championing shows that were getting a million listeners (or celebrating shows that were signed to major distributors on multimillion dollar deals). I have spent much of the past 5 years having to feverishly manage expectations. No, I tell potential clients, your show isn’t going to get a million listeners. It’s probably not even going to get a thousand listeners. Can’t you be happy with a hundred?
No, your newsletter probably isn’t going to get a 70% open rate. In the past year or two, I’ve gone from about a half dozen (weekly) newsletter subscriptions to more than twenty, and I expect that number to increase. I signed up to more newsletters because it’s easy and, usually, free — what’s less easy (and definitely not free) is creating more time. I have the same amount of time to spend sat with my emails, I just have more content in my inbox. This is a challenge that faces podcasters too: each year, overall listening times increase, slightly, but at nothing like the rate of content being produced increases. And while there are some mechanisms for changing time and space (lots of freaks listen to podcasts on 1.5x or 2x speed) the reality is that more content to fill the same amount of space means that more content is going to end up on the scrapheap.
If the BBC get Amol Rajan to start a media futurology newsletter, are you going to keep reading Future Proof? When he has access to all the biggest interviewees and can exquisitely rewrite their press releases, will you need me to tell you about how much money you can make from a podcast? Newsletters are mainstreaming themselves at a great pace, aided by reporting that makes them sound like a quick route to success or a cash cow.
In reality, if I were to put together a panel of newsletter publishers and ask them about the positives and negatives of the industry, you would get a much more nuanced look at where the format is headed. Because — and I don’t just say this as a Man of Pod — there are real problems in the world of newsletters. Big glaring structural and mechanical problems, and smaller, more personal ones. For instance, I’ve written, according to this Word document where I bash out my blogs, almost 43,000 words for Future Proof, since I launched at the start of the year (and that often doesn’t include bits and bobs I add once the text is pasted into Substack). I have hundreds but not thousands of free subscribers, and tens but not hundreds of paid subscribers. Treated as a purely economic exercise, and reduced to cost per word, this is the cheapest writing I’ll ever do.
In point of fact, the seeming impossibility of making any sort of living, as an independent publisher, from newsletters reminds me of another format. If only I could remember which one…
Follow me on Twitter. And yes — do subscribe to my newsletter.
