Turn Your Newsletter Into an Experience — Ari Lewis
What was your favorite magazine growing up? For me, it was Game Informer , a video game magazine. I was a video game nerd who spent my childhood playing Steam and Playstation. My mom would get the mail while I'd wait in anticipation that that month's Game Informer had arrived. It was a monthly ritu
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Personally and imho, I don't think there is saturation of email newsletters. We just need better ones and making them paid is a path towards that.
And besides, newsletter readers can turn a few knobs to tune their content level and prevent saturation, from unsubscribing to not subscribiing to some sources in the first place.
This article is ringing the bell to a really important concept that often follows changes in medium.
When film came out, a lot of the first movies were just straight recording of live plays. At the time, people were unfamiliar with the technology and were still experimenting with how to best leverage it's strengths to create an unique experience.
The numbers that the article pulls for Substack subscribers is interesting because I think it hints to this idea that email newsletters are just trying to capture what paper newsletters and magazines do, but in a digital format. This is just my speculation for why so few people subscribe to email newsletter (drawing from the numbers the article is sharing).
Perhaps we'll see email newsletters explode when more people figure out how to do things that you'd only be able to do using email, thus creating an unique "experience."
A possible reason why few people subscribe to newsletters is few people consume content on channels and platforms (newsletters, blogs, discussion boards, and so on) other than social.