Newsletters vary in length, alot! How long do you read a newsletter for?

Can't see your side project but would love to know @mister_bruce

I'm in the middle of testing and adjusting the length of my newsletter, keen to hear your opinion tho!

I think it depends on the type of content.

Personally, it seems to be inversely proportional to the frequency.

If the newsletter is sent every month, I can tolerate pretty long content.
If it's every week, medium length
If it's every day, it better be straight to the point and as short as possible.

Good question, my newsletters tend to be on the longer side and I've been wanting to poll the subscribers to see what format they prefer.

Here's an example: https://ckarchive.com/b/r8u8hohn4z85 (kinda long) https://ckarchive.com/b/v8u3hrh88nd3 (very long)

My thing is when someone writes a long newsletter that is also a WALL OF TEXT because they used real paragraphs instead of just 1-2 sentence bites, I never read it.

So even though my newsletter is long (with original content, not tons of links) I think/hope it's digestible because I don't use paragraphs.

This is also true of the newsletters I personally subscribe to.

I really like long newsletters when the writing is good, tells a story that draws me in, and teaches me something useful. Or, a short intro with a single link to click through to the full article so I can easily save it to read later. 100% of the newsletters I have stayed subscribed to and open more than 50% of the time follow this pattern.

I very strongly dislike roundups longer than 3 links. That's just an email giving me more work to do, and I have plenty of work to do. I burn out on roundups emails much, much faster. I can't think of one I've stayed subscribed to.

A better version of a roundups gives me some valuable synthesis for each of the links so I can learn without NEEDING to read the whole thing on the other side of the link, but gives me the choice to click through to learn more.

It depends what it is. Long newsletters are great if the content is quality and relevant. I also prefer it when a newsletter is easy to scan. So I can pick and choose what I want to read more on or click on links.

I’m also a big fan of short newsletters. Something that can get a point across in a paragraph or less.

I prefer short to medium newsletters with external links. To control my reading time I subscribe only to newsletters sent weekly or less often. The only exception is Indie Hackers' daily Growth Bites, which is really short.