Are you a reader or a consumer?
Musings on the economics of newsletter writing
Mindlessly scrolling through LinkedIn—first night in Tokyo, sleep but a distant ambition—I came across a post that actually made me stop in my tracks. It came from someone whose newsletter I’m subscribed to, who declared that upon having reached an enviable number of subscribers one year into their new venture, they decided to ruthlessly remove the emails that showed very little, to no engagement. The reasoning was solid: they noticed that the high uptake in subscribers brought something other than the promise of higher readership; it had in fact translated to lower open-rates. Lower open-rates, in turn, risked losing the interest of potential advertisers. Better to have fewer and genuinely engaged subscribers, than a larger but more diluted readership. Makes sense.
I couldn’t quite remember the last time I had opened their newsletter. Damn, had I also been removed? It felt odd, like an un-invite to a party you didn’t even necessarily have time to attend. I felt a wee guilty, but also a little slighted: what if, at some point, in some utopian future, I actually had time to read their newsletter? I did, genuinely, like it.
Alas! That’s not the point. I went to sleep, still mulling over it.
***
One hour later, I turned the bed lights back on. Why can’t I stop thinking about this!
Why am I aching over unknown emails, removed, expelled, deleted? As far as the current k0nt3nT burnout goes, one could even argue it’s doing people a service: what a blessing, to relieve someone of one recurring email they never got around to opening anyway. I’d be lying if I claimed I could instantly tell whether I’d been removed from certain newsletter lists. And of course this has nothing to do with the quality of the newsletter itself, but rather with the reality of too much of everything, and too little time in a day.
And then, the argument is solid, from a business point of view. This person treats their newsletter as a business, as a product to be monetized. Ironically, just a few weeks ago, I had opened Taylor Lorenz’s popular tech newsletter for the first time in a while, to find slightly different content than usual. The title should have given it away: Burned out doesn’t begin to describe it, a personal appeal on the pressure of the newsletter hamster wheel, and the fact that she’d noticed many readers unsubscribed or canceled their paid subscriptions if she didn’t deliver frequently enough. Lorenz admitted she was exhausted, her extensive research all-consuming, both emotionally and in terms of the hours invested. The expectation that she were to constantly deliver long, thoroughly researched pieces was what was making her crack. She noted:
I’ve also noticed a phenomenon especially here on Substack, where, I think because people feel like they’re paying for a product (the newsletter) rather than to support my work as a whole, they unsubscribe or cancel their paid subscription if I don’t send the newsletter frequently enough. This is totally understandable! But, it also creates this system where the creator can never take a week off or work on larger projects without losing income. This system is a huge bummer.
I felt a lot of sympathy for her, and for all journalists who have left legacy media to go independent, where the promise of broad reach and full ownership of one’s work tends to come at the cost of relentless output expectation and, eventually, burn out. It’s truly the deep malaise of our times, with a wave of individuals leaving contract jobs (whereby you arguably get paid for your time) and moving towards independent, freelance jobs (where you essentially get paid for your deliverables). By taking this step, the creator (read, the writer, the designer, the ceramics maker) whether they like it or not, also becomes the business owner.
Lorenz treats her Substack like a business, in the sense that it is, from my understanding, one of her main sources of income, yet she’s having an opposite experience from that of the person actively removing subscribers from their newsletter. While one essentially optimizes metrics by deleting subscribers, the other burns herself out trying to serve more, and more, content to them. The type of content is different, but I don’t necessarily think that’s what defines the contrast between the two experiences. Lorenz’ income—her business—comes from her paid subscribers. She is delivering a “product” paid for by her readers. The other case runs by a different business model: that of attracting traditional advertising.
It’s interesting because it seems like the two sit at opposite ends of business rationales: the responsibility towards your user, and the responsibility towards your external financial backers. An author like Lorenz chose the independent path precisely as a reaction to the compromised state of mainstream journalism (having previously been the tech reporter at NYT and The Washington Post), where diminishing funding, advertiser and investor dependence, and overall inertia have gradually narrowed what it’s possible to report, and opinion, on, particularly as an investigative journalist. The other end is that of a more start-up-like approach to kicking off a new business—the metric that matters above all else is consistent engagement: has the product embedded itself deeply enough into someone’s routine to become a habit, making it appealing to potential investors?
At 3AM, twisting and turning in my hotel bed, I realized what it was that triggered me about all of this. I understand that some newsletters are run as businesses, which means that they function as products to be refined and optimized. But a systematic removal of unengaged subscribers, on the grounds that they drag down open and click rates and thus render the list less attractive to advertisers, makes me—the subscriber—feel more like a consumer than a reader. A subscriber’s value, in this logic, only exists insofar as it can contribute to a metric used to sell their attention to advertisers; a subscriber, therefore, becomes a unit of attention.
Now, it would be tempting to read all of this as a new, black and white, scenario: the commercialisation of journalism, the blurring line between broadcasting and content marketing, creators struggling to survive without institutional support. But this is a phenomenon that happens in cycles, over and over again, from Guttenberg onwards. Sure, the format changes every now and then, but the capitalist economics certainly don't. The “maverick days of journalism” somehow resurface every 20 years, going in loops. What is perhaps slightly different this time round is that the business developer, the lawyer, the marketer, the editor, the producer: they are now all the same person—in this specific case, the writer. Going independent also implies embodying all of these conflicting roles at once, and this accumulation makes everything considerably more complicated.
***
Like all of us, I have stacks upon stacks of great-books-I-want-to-read-someday piled all around the apartment. Book ownership is a funny thing: it doesn’t operate by regular use–discard–refill logic, quite the contrary. If anything, judging by the rate at which people buy books they will basically never quite catch up on, one might think the publishing industry must be booming. In packing for the Japan trip, I quickly scoped the book situation in the apartment and grabbed a few according to mood and jetlag-friendliness.
One of the books I grabbed I had forgotten I even owned: a collection of Susan Sontag’s essays, On Women. On this first night in Tokyo, I opened it and was instantly drawn to a piece I hadn’t read before: Fascinating Fascism, on Leni Riefenstahl, the aesthetics of fascism, and sexuality. I read it in one long, unbroken pull, like slurping a noodle. It was a delicious read.
Closing the book, I thought: I am so happy I had this book lying around for years, gathering dust, schlepped from one apartment to another, only to be grabbed at the right moment. It turned out that a trip across the world and a blank jetlag night was what it took for all the stars to align: an essay to be read, and a mind to be blown. Not all newsletters are ever-green Susan Sontag essays, of course, nor should they be. But access to a good newsletter should not have a deadline. It’s in fact one of the things I like about Substack: that all sent newsletters are kept in a format reminiscent of an online publication of sorts.
Moderate Hypocrisy currently has 650 subscribers—more than I ever imagined I’d reach, to be honest. My newsletter’s open rate has been a steady 55-65% for the past years, which, in newsletter-land, seems to be a solid open rate. Yet I cannot stress enough how, even to this day, surprised I am with every open, and how grateful I feel to you, my readers—most of whom I’ve never met—for taking the time, in this economy, to read my lengthy newsletters. I love sharing my thoughts with you, and I don’t take it lightly. You are my readers, not my users, and I hope that whenever you read one of my pieces, something clicks, something shifts, or just lodges itself somewhere.
…Well, that is, until I hit 10,000 subscribers. Then it’s over for you all!
I’ve unsubbed from newsletters because they sent too many, even if I’ve paid for them.