Member-only story
Newsletters vs Podcasts
Whenever I, as a podcast professional, hear a client start talking about newsletters, I feel like rushing out and lighting the beacons of Gondor; calling to other podcasters, far and wide, to rally together to refute the evil shadow of newsletters.
Newsletters have been around since the days when cuneiform tablets would announce which ancient Mesopotamian celebrity had been spied bathing from a rooftop. These days we don’t mean village gazettes or even the free handouts you’re foisted when travelling on the London underground. We mean, as a rule, email newsletters. “Ah, email,” you might say. “That radical new technology…” And while email has been around since the 1960s/1970s/1980s (delete as applicable to your definition of ‘electronic mail’) the vogue for email newsletters as a form of media dissemination has grown wildly in the past few years. And just as the dawn of podcasts (those heady days) caused a lot of difficult conversations for people who’d bet their careers on, say, blogging, email newsletters are catalysing the same tough talk for podcasters. Despite, of course, the fact that email newsletters are about as revolutionary as the rich getting richer.
It took a few years after Substack launched in 2017 for it to become market leading in this area, and while its undoubtedly influential as a self-publishing mechanism for writers like Glenn Greenwald, Alison Roman and Matt Yglesias, it’s only a small part of the world of newsletters. Newspapers, magazines and online publications have invested thousands of dollars, either on acquiring newsletter publishing software, or developing their own. Unlike with Substack (or Mailchimp) these options give them access to that precious digital gold: data. The beneficiaries of Substack’s enormous data mining operation are Substack’s shareholders, not the individual publishers using that platform — which is why, in the raw terms of Big Business, it is the more old school newspapers that are the real revenue drivers. Once you opt into a newsletter, that subscription is handled at the publisher’s end, whereas, with podcasting, the nature of RSS technology means that the subscription is always managed by the user. This is a subtle but powerful difference; it makes newsletters much more useful to publishers who want to sink their claws in and not let go.
