Will the newsletter ever die?

I run a small one which has been growing slowly but surely (check out the latest edition!, the next edition will be out in ~8 hours).

OK now that I have the shameless plug out of the way, I've recently been starting to wonder if the newsletter trend is actually still in the early innings.

The easy/consensus view seems to be that newsletter fatigue is growing amongst consumers. How many newsletters does the average person sign up for? 2? 3? 10? 20? The number might be higher than we think.

Here's the thing -- I'm confident that what I send out is valuable. Not because I'm an arrogant person, but because people unsubscribe quite quickly when you put out bad content. There's nearly no "lock-in" to the newsletter game.

Of course, the question of how much value is always up for debate, but "absolutely valueless" is clearly off the table, once you have more than 100 people subscribed to a newsletter.

The mechanism of a newsletter is quite crazy -- direct access to a person's inbox is one of the most direct kinds of contact, yet there are so many opportunities left in the space. I know at least 5 newsletters that should exist right now but don't.

It's kind of amazing if you think about it.

Maybe this isn't the time to be cautious about newsletters -- it's the time to start advancing what a newsletter is. Here's an idea (again, ideas are kind of my thing): Why isn't there a newsletter delivery service that does email and whatsapp/facebook/signal/instagram/tiktok/etc? Aren't we missing out on a massive delivery mechanism for "internet natives"?

[EDIT] - If someone from Substack wants to pop in here and show me the hockeystick graphs on the pitch decks I'd love to see them -- I'd be surprised if it's not a hockey stick.