The rise of the Newsletter?

I was involved with an experimental newsletter late last year. For various reasons we decided not to market it yet.

I think the bigger trend here is not just newsletters on the rise but people seeking ways to keep up with all the information we are overloaded with daily.

In the past few years it's really become harder to keep up; we keep switching between various platforms and services that increasingly are not interoperable.

Email as old as it is, is standards base so it's a bit easier to manage the information you receive there from different sources. One of the problems we encountered though, a bit surprisingly, is that a lot of people still don't know how to effectively organize their inboxes.

That may be entirely due to the audience we targeted .

However, I will point out that I noticed this among owners and CEOs as well who don't read pass the subject line because "they don't have time for all these emails".

Newsletters definitely seem to be on the rise and with startups like https://www.getrevue.co/ and https://www.substack.com/ it seems like that trend will continue. At the same time, gmail and other email apps are making it easier to ignore newsletters or unsubscribe in mass, which I think is a good thing. While we'll see more newsletters, I suspect it will also be harder for newsletters to win the attention of readers, as competition for the inbox increases. To succeed, it will be increasingly important for newsletter publishers to intimately understand their subscribers' values and consistently deliver content that is right on the mark. This post is particularly interesting to me, as my wife and I are in the process of launching a newsletter (https://eatintonight.co/), so I'm curious to see what others in the IH community think about this.

This article sums up everything that was on my mind on this question. Love it!

https://www.indiehackers.com/@pjrvs/the-how-and-why-of-newsletters-generating-almost-all-of-my-revenue-for-digital-products-and-software-e344d18e0d

Very much think newsletters are becoming more compelling. In the same way there's been a trend towards charging for software, especially for business tools, newsletters are starting to go paid in order to maintain quality and build communities around topics / value.

I've moved my ten year old music hunting newsletter to paid, (https://musicgeeks.co) & am experimenting with a business hunting project that's also a paid newsletter (https://tinyacquire.com).

From another angle, I'm building a list of newsletters I want to advertise with. I've had widely varying results on this, but I do think for the right brand & newsletter fit it's a compelling option that isn't as noisy as other digital ad channels (ie FB, IG etc).

I publish a curated newsletter around data science that has a super engaged audience: https://dataelixir.com

I started 4 years ago with just me and my wife as subscribers and I'm closing in on 29,000 now. It's definitely a long game but I don't think newsletters are going away anytime soon.

I've been monetizing the newsletter through paid sponsorships, which isn't a lot of money but gives me runway to do other things with it.

From my perspective, the real value is having an engaged audience to survey, bounce ideas off of, do problem discovery interviews, lead gen, etc. And eventually, it becomes kindling for some product that directly addresses needs in that community.

The paid newsletter trend is interesting and I'm a big fan of Substack because I would love for readers to become accustomed to paying for newsletters! Right now though, people seem mostly uninterested in paying. I surveyed my readers about a year ago about the idea of a paid "Pro" version and the response was lukewarm at best. And those were engaged readers. So at least in my case, I decided it wasn't worth going down that route because inevitably, the audience would get smaller and the real value to me is having a good-sized - and growing - audience to interact with.

Your mileage may definitely vary! "Success" depends a lot on your goals for a newsletter. Also, your niche, competition, content, and marketing savvy are key to making it work.

I think they are here for the foreseeable future. Obviously email clients can make tools to mass unsubscribe, but for the newsletters I truly find value in (i.e. shortcutting searching the web), I prioritize how I classify them and digest them.

They are a simple, old concept (much like email in general), but still serve a very useful purpose for the right audience.

I could be wrong of course, but I've always felt the 'Email is dead/dying' articles were just click-bait as clearly the reverse is true. Email is especially valuable for building businesses, onboarding customers, creating revenue streams, etc.

Shameless plug for my recently launched newsletter (weekly roundup of the best SaaS articles on the web): https://getsaasweekly.com/

Personally, I hate the noise in my inbox and I suspect Andrew Chen's "law of shitty conversions" will continue it's course. Open rates have been trending down for at least 5 years.

What saves me time is getting my news or other information when I want it, not forced into a critical communication channel.

Definitely, ours is killing it.