I feel like this is the equivalent of the dotcom boom in 2000. Due to the pandemic everyone turned to newsletters and podcasts to fill up their(forced) free time.
A lot of people started newsletters, either independent ones or through services such as Substack.
It's normal that there is a pullback. Only the strongest survive. I feel like if you have a newsletter and you can keep your audience stable and/or grow it during the next 12 to 24 months then you ll have a solid business.
My evidence of growth is anecdotal - I never found more newsletters to sign up to in my life than I have in the last year. It makes me wonder just how wide open the market was before covid. I don't really notice a slowdown mostly because the discovery process is a kind of lagging indicator.
Every newsletter I've ever seen has initial velocity of subscribers based on the initial follower base of the author. Meaning some subset of your existing followers will convert to a subscriber of your newsletter. So the initial velocity is based on your existing community,followers, etc. It's also based on the amount of people you can access via non-followers, i.e.: YC, IH, Product Hunt.
But as the newsletter (pre,or post covid) gets rolling, the amount of net new subscribers each week trails off. Percent increases dwindle.
Yes there could be spikes from reposts, discovery engines, but generally speaking I have never seen any newsletter subscriber base grow exponentially.
In fact within the first year to three years I've seen most newsletters grow, not linearly, but rather logarithmically. Personally I was able to meet a personal goal of 50 new subscribers each week, not from consistent exposure but quarterly or monthly content marketing throughout the year. So my growth each month was spiky, but over the course of 3 years remained consistent linearly.
What the original author picked up on is that perhaps this natural growth, life, and death of a creator's work has been magnified by the pandemic. If say we had 100 new newsletters a week pre-covid, during covid it seemed like 1,000 new. (numbers just an example).
Substack at one point was growing 5k new newsletter a month. Way way way more than pre-pandemic. Search for "substack" was 10% two years prior what it was during the pandemic. a 10x increase in search might correlate to a 10x increase in new newsletters. Because if I am not-mistaken not many people are going to subscribe to your newsletter via searching for "substack" they will find your subscribe link.
Yet, unless, they decided not to announce it, their paid users had not have grown at the same rate. Meaning their paid users didn't 100x, but "merely" 5x'ed. source from 100k early 2020 to 500k early 2021.
And this is natural. A natural logarithmic curve of a newsletter is magnified by the platforms that serve them. Podcasts are similar since they don't have a decent search and explore like youtube/Instagram/TikTok which all feed off of an algorithm and do produce quite consistently good results for users. If the algos didn't work they wouldn't have a billion users.
I disagree with the author. I think the creator economy is still growing, it's just changing.
In which way is it changing? Do you see the pattern?
Agreed
I'm curious to know if anyone is feeling or noticing slowing down?
Well Podcasts have always had a 75% YoY churn for new creators pre pandemic.
So the boom from last year might increase those numbers a bit.
People have less time now but I think we are at the early stages of this creator economy.
The tooling is just being built now.
NC hack
If 7 billion people start launching courses and newsletters, who will be the consumers?
Seems like those are the classic chicken-egg problem.
This comment was deleted 2 years ago.
Yes i agreed, but the demand vs supply is what matters. After the covid time, most of them started podcast, newsletter and online courses.
I feel like this is the equivalent of the dotcom boom in 2000. Due to the pandemic everyone turned to newsletters and podcasts to fill up their(forced) free time.
A lot of people started newsletters, either independent ones or through services such as Substack.
It's normal that there is a pullback. Only the strongest survive. I feel like if you have a newsletter and you can keep your audience stable and/or grow it during the next 12 to 24 months then you ll have a solid business.
My evidence of growth is anecdotal - I never found more newsletters to sign up to in my life than I have in the last year. It makes me wonder just how wide open the market was before covid. I don't really notice a slowdown mostly because the discovery process is a kind of lagging indicator.
Every newsletter I've ever seen has initial velocity of subscribers based on the initial follower base of the author. Meaning some subset of your existing followers will convert to a subscriber of your newsletter. So the initial velocity is based on your existing community,followers, etc. It's also based on the amount of people you can access via non-followers, i.e.: YC, IH, Product Hunt.
But as the newsletter (pre,or post covid) gets rolling, the amount of net new subscribers each week trails off. Percent increases dwindle.
Yes there could be spikes from reposts, discovery engines, but generally speaking I have never seen any newsletter subscriber base grow exponentially.
In fact within the first year to three years I've seen most newsletters grow, not linearly, but rather logarithmically. Personally I was able to meet a personal goal of 50 new subscribers each week, not from consistent exposure but quarterly or monthly content marketing throughout the year. So my growth each month was spiky, but over the course of 3 years remained consistent linearly.
What the original author picked up on is that perhaps this natural growth, life, and death of a creator's work has been magnified by the pandemic. If say we had 100 new newsletters a week pre-covid, during covid it seemed like 1,000 new. (numbers just an example).
Substack at one point was growing 5k new newsletter a month. Way way way more than pre-pandemic. Search for "substack" was 10% two years prior what it was during the pandemic. a 10x increase in search might correlate to a 10x increase in new newsletters. Because if I am not-mistaken not many people are going to subscribe to your newsletter via searching for "substack" they will find your subscribe link.
Yet, unless, they decided not to announce it, their paid users had not have grown at the same rate. Meaning their paid users didn't 100x, but "merely" 5x'ed. source from 100k early 2020 to 500k early 2021.
And this is natural. A natural logarithmic curve of a newsletter is magnified by the platforms that serve them. Podcasts are similar since they don't have a decent search and explore like youtube/Instagram/TikTok which all feed off of an algorithm and do produce quite consistently good results for users. If the algos didn't work they wouldn't have a billion users.
Read the article.Now I feel that creators who were active last year are less active now. The more I recollect more names are coming up.
I have been working on a newsletter at https://thecoincept.com. Having a hard time growing it.
Hope I don't slow down.
Do you have an existing audience? For example on Twitter?
No, don't have an existing audience. Depending on paid acquisition channels.
One tip is to niche down. You're covering way too much.
Say for e.g just focusing on Ethereum
Thanks for the feedback.