The resurgence of newsletters as a digital publishing phenomenon

Originally published in Bound Vol. 3

Newsletters were found to be a valuable format for providing readers with content that is both easily digestible and accessible

One of the biggest trends in digital publishing in recent years could hardly be considered innovative. It’s not novel, or a new technology. It’s a medium that many people already use on a daily basis. It’s email newsletters. While some have described this publishing format as low-tech, unfashionable and unsophisticated (Newman 2020; Jack 2016), in recent years the email newsletter has become a digital publishing phenomenon that has changed the ways writers can monetise their work and engage with their readers. This report seeks to provide context for the recent re-emergence of this publishing format, while providing a definition for newsletters that is more reflective of how they currently function in the publishing industry. Further, this report will situate contemporary digital newsletter publishing within the wider self-publishing process and will examine Substack, arguably the largest contemporary newsletter publishing platform, to analyse the benefits and challenges that are inherent in this format. As it is evident that newsletters will continue to constitute an interesting and important role in the publication landscape, at least in the short term, this report concludes with some recommendations for how the publishing industry could better utilise the popularity of this publishing format in the future.

Newsletters: a format in flux

The newsletter is a publishing format that has changed considerably through history. Though today it may be difficult to divorce the newsletter from the digital technology that it runs on, originally newsletters existed as a printed format meant for sharing semi-publicly among people who belonged to a common interest group, like a church or workplace. (Arnold 2014). As access to computing software became more affordable and email use became increasingly ubiquitous in the 1990s and 2000s, the production and distribution of newsletters migrated online where it overwhelmingly remains (Isaac 2019). From the mid-2000s, newsletters have become a popular marketing tool used to draw customers back to a business’ website (Bertin 2017), and although marketing and ecommerce remain the primary purpose of some newsletters, in the last decade newsletters have become a far more interesting publishing phenomenon in their own right.

Prompted by the popularity of blog-style written content and the widespread adoption of email as a daily modern routine, newsletters have reverted to their semi-private correspondence origins, albeit entirely within the recipient’s inbox. Today, newsletters are a popular way for writers to easily create and distribute their writing directly to their readers. These newsletters are often composed in plain text, though they can also contain images, videos or GIFs. The substantive content of newsletters can vary; journalism, opinion-editorial pieces, criticism or more personal blog-style content are all popular; and the thematic focus of a newsletter can be very specific. Successful newsletters are characterised by their ability to establish a consistent structure through themes or formatting, and this supports the ability of newsletters to function as written content that caters to audiences belonging to specific niches (Kalim 2020).

Contemporary newsletters are also characterised by a genre convention that emphasises the writer’s personality and seeks to establish a level of intimacy between writer and reader (Tiffany 2019; Isaac 2019). This characteristic is highlighted by the primary publication space being an email inbox: an almost liminal space that exists somewhere between the offline world and the public internet’s newsfeeds or newspaper homepages. But despite the scope to view newsletters as a private format, like the physical format newsletters that came before them, contemporary newsletters function as material that feels simultaneously public and private. Though many readers of newsletters comment that reading a newsletter feels like receiving a letter from a friend (Raab 2020; Tiffany 2019), it is ultimately content that is accessible for anybody to read.

It is also important to situate the process of contemporary newsletter writing as an iteration of digital self-publishing. In a sense, it's helpful to consider newsletters as a successor to blogs and the personal-commentary style digital writing of the mid-2000s and 2010s—formats that are also examples of self-publishing. Self-publishing is a process that is often defined in its opposition to the traditional publishing model; its proponents celebrate it as a model that allows for a greater diversity of published work as it defies the gatekeeping of the traditional system (Payne 2017; Laquintano 2016). There are several resources that explore the nuances of the self-publishing process, though a key limitation of these resources for the purposes of this report is that they generally only consider the self-publishing industry in relation to products like physical books or ebooks (Thompson 2010), or only consider newsletters and other digital formats to constitute self-publishing in a very superficial way (Tian & Martin 2010). To date, there has been minimal substantive consideration into the ways that digitally published writing on blogs, and now newsletters, function within this same self-publishing framework. This is despite the fact that it is a logical progression to consider this sort of digital writing to be self-published content, particularly if one were to view them in contrast to content published online by traditional media outlets or legacy mastheads and journals.

Contextualising the re-emergence of the newsletter

The primary explanation for the recent rise in popularity of the newsletter has been the high rates of job losses within the international media industries in recent years. Due to continuously dwindling advertising revenue, and the continued financial pressure that tech giants like Facebook and Google have been applying to the domestic and global creative and media industries for many years (MEAA 2020), the media industry has long been contending with reduced viability. This has only been accelerated by the pandemic. These factors have fostered an environment where journalists and writers have found it increasingly difficult to earn a subsistent income from their work (Flux 2019; Tiffany 2019; Throsby et al. 2015). In the United States alone approximately 30,000 media jobs were cut in 2020 due to the pandemic (Challenger, Grey & Christmas 2020). As writers have sought out alternative modes of monetising their work in response to these circumstances, digital platforms like Substack have developed and have become increasingly popular, primarily because income can be easily integrated into the reader experience through subscriber-based models.

Data from Reuters Institute of Journalism supports the general observation that the publication of newsletters has increased in recent years. A 2016 paper that charted the re-emergence of newsletters as a publishing phenomenon indicated that despite email newsletters being perceived as a primitive digital technology, both legacy and digital media companies had made conscious efforts to prioritise the format as an ongoing feature of their digital content strategies (Jack 2016). Newsletters were found to be a valuable format for providing readers with content that is both easily digestible and accessible, and that encourages readers to click-through or subscribe in higher rates than via social media (Jack 2016). A follow-up Reuters Institute report from 2020 further deduced that the rise in popularity of newsletters can be explained by evidence that newsletters are particularly advantageous for media outlets as they generally attract readers that are easy to monetise (Newman 2020). This is because they generally reach a readership of people that belong to lucrative markets for advertisers (i.e. older adults with higher disposable incomes) who are also more likely to commence a paid subscription (Newman 2020).

Australia is yet to experience the same scale of newsletter uptake that has been hyper-prevalent in other international markets since the start of the pandemic

Domestically, newsletter writing in the Australian media landscape trails behind that in the US and, to a lesser extent, the UK. Although there are some developing exceptions; in May 2021, Netflix announced a newsletter publication called Netflix Pause which will be produced in partnership with pop culture news site Junkee and available via Substack. In general though, Australia is yet to experience the same scale of newsletter uptake that has been hyper-prevalent in other international markets since the start of the pandemic. Interestingly, despite this ambivalence with the format, Australians remain consistent with the global average of people who access content in a given week via email newsletters (16% of those surveyed by Reuters), a rate that is unsurprisingly beneath the US who sit at 21%, and yet is almost double the rate of the UK (9%) (Newman 2020).

As a caveat, despite the noticeable resurgence in the popularity of newsletters as a publishing format in recent years, it is important to stress that contemporary subscription newsletters are not a new phenomenon. The re-emergence of this trend has been covered extensively by Western media as many journalists and writers are leaving their positions at American legacy newspapers, online journals and magazines (Isaac 2019; Tracey 2020; Tiffany 2019; Fatemi 2021; Wiener 2020; Shephard 2021; Stenberg 2021). The popularity of the newsletter as a publishing format in recent years is such that some journalists are declaring this the age of ‘peak newsletter’ (Landsbaum 2019), however, consensus on this is far from universal. In truth, whether newsletters should or could be considered a publishing format that has re-emerged in recent years depends on one’s presumption that they ever lost relevance in the first place.

To suggest that this is a new digital publishing phenomenon would be to take a very limited view of the format’s history. Since at least the 1990s, email newsletters have been a publishing format of some popularity (Kotlas 1999; Krass 2003) and claims of oversaturation of newsletters as a publishing format have been made for almost a decade (Friedman 2013). Further, the compulsion for writers to turn away from traditional media and towards a more direct-to-reader publishing model has precedence that far predates the development of the internet (Waters 2020). What could be considered a new phenomenon are the newly emerged platforms that have largely fostered this most recent popularisation of the newsletter as a publishing format.

Substack: the newsletter publisher

Another explanation for the recent re-emergence of the newsletter is the development in recent years of new software platforms that streamline the newsletter publication process. Of the many newsletter hosting and distribution platforms that have emerged in the last decade, Substack is the overwhelming market leader. Founded in 2017, Substack is a newsletter publishing platform that allows writers to easily monetise their writing via a subscription model. The platform was developed to be an alternative to a traditional media industry that was seen to be increasingly over-reliant on the algorithms of social media networks. A key motivation for developing the company was a desire to establish an alternative model that would see writers be able to monetise their writing and create small media empires based on mailing lists (Kalim 2020).

As a platform, Substack covers all aspects of the publication process, from providing editing software to assisting with text design and sharing features so that writers can reach new readers and grow their audiences (McKenzie & Best 2017). Arguably the company's most valuable asset for writers is the streamlined payment process it provides, which allows writers to set and manage subscription fees with relative ease. Most newsletters on Substack are available to read for free, though writers may set subscription fees from a minimum of $5 USD per month or $50 USD per year. Many writers on Substack will adopt both approaches in allowing readers to access weekly content for free, while providing paying subscribers with additional content like podcasts or bonus newsletters. Substack generates revenue by taking a ten per cent commission from the subscription revenue writers earn. To give some context for the popularity of the platform, as of February 2021, Substack had over 500,000 paying subscribers and the top ten writers on the service collectively made more than $15 million in the last year (McKenzie 2021). The company maintains that the subscription model of monetising content on their platform allows for a closer, more direct relationship between writers and their readers, and in turn, a more sustainable media ecosystem going forward. As a company, Substack view their platform as part of a larger movement in fighting against the cultural expectation that creative work online be freely available (McKenzie & Best, 2017). While some may consider this stance somewhat honourable, there are still issues inherent in the increasing popularity of newsletters as a digital publishing format.

A major concern is that the only writers who stand to benefit from the lucrative financial benefits that Substack promotes—six-figure salaries from weekly newsletter dispatches are framed as difficult but ultimately ‘doable’ (McKenzie 2020)—are writers who have already established a large enough audience that is willing to support the writer’s work financially. For all the valid criticisms of traditional media companies, they do play a significant role in publishing the work of emerging writers to their sizeable audiences (Wiener 2020). Currently, many of the newsletters that Substack advertises as success stories are written by people who left staff writing positions at some of the biggest English-language legacy mastheads, or they were already incredibly well-known writers before starting their newsletter venture. Without their previously established platforms, arguably the financial success of their newsletters would have been far harder to achieve.

Further, as newsletters exist in a semi-private space external to social media or web pages on the internet, searchability can be difficult. Substack maintains that they offer searchability optimisation services, but subscribing to a newsletter in practice requires the reader to consciously seek out the newsletter to subscribe. Subscribing is not a passive activity in the way that finding articles online via social media is. Subsequently, it’s far harder for writers without established followings to reach the number of subscribers and, consequently, paying readers, which Substack insists is possible to amass on its platform. In this context it is entirely unsurprising that Roxane Gay’s newsletter, The Audacity, is one of the highest-paid newsletters on Substack's platform. As the author of multiple best-selling books, Gay has already gathered a large following of readers who are interested in reading her writing and who are happy to pay for her newsletter precisely because they already know the quality and tenor of her writing. Substack’s only public-facing metric for subscriber counts is an unhelpful ‘thousands of subscribers’, but Gay has over 800,000 Twitter followers and is said to have already earned back her advance within two months of starting the newsletter in January 2021 (Smith 2021). This is not a realistic trajectory for an emerging writer seeking to create a space for themselves to write what they want, without the impositions of an external publication. Add to this the fact that the annual base rates for a single Substack newsletter approach the cost of subscribing to a physical literary magazine like The New Yorker (Friedman in Tiffany 2020), and it becomes increasingly evident that the subscription newsletter boom is only likely to serve a very specific sort of writer—and the newsletter platform, of course.

Publishing futures and the newsletter

Publishing is an industry that has had to be adaptable and receptive to change, especially in the face of emerging technologies and trends (Throsby et al. 2015; Payne 2015). For this reason, it is surprising that the traditional publishing industry hasn't, as yet, better harnessed the writers who have managed to organically amass sizeable audiences through their newsletters. The rate of a newsletter’s subscriber base, both paying and free, could be a helpful factor at publishing houses when making decisions about which writers should be approached for book deals. Even high subscription rates of free readers signify that a writer has managed to build an engaged and enthusiastic readership. This information could make for a persuasive argument in favour of a particular project, especially one that could target niche audiences, as many newsletters do. It would be safe to expect that in the short term, traditional publishers may turn their focus to publishing works by writers of newsletters. This would certainly constitute a very exciting hybridisation between the traditional and self-publishing models.

Writers are already employing this hybrid approach to the models of publishing they utilise, as much out of necessity as anything else. In relation to this, Substack has recently restructured their platform in a way that reflects this hybrid model. In 2020, Substack began offering some of their writers in the US health insurance and access to legal defence funds. These decisions caught the attention of the media industry who have roundly observed that Substack was increasingly acting as a more traditional publishing company, albeit of a non-traditional digital product (Wiener 2020; Shephard 2021). This observation was further strengthened by the announcement in March 2021 that Substack would be formally developing one arm of the venture into a more traditional publishing model. Substack Pro will pay writers upfront advances for newsletters, in a model reflective of the ways traditional publishers structure payment for book deals. The existence of Substack Pro means that on a level, the platform is regressing from the original concept of the platform: where once Substack proclaimed a level of editorial impartiality, Substack Pro strains the limits of this intent (Stenberg 2021). Interestingly, as a consequence, Substack is already experiencing issues not dissimilar from those that traditional publishers face when announcing book deals with controversial public figures. The announcement of Substack Pro and news of the first recipients of the platform’s advances had been embroiled in a controversy wherein some of the platform’s writers pushed back against Substack’s decision to offer advances to writers with anti-transgender views (Smith 2021). As Substack continues to operate in a space between the traditional and self-publishing models, issues like this are likely to continue and become more pronounced.

Conclusion

Exactly what will happen in the future of newsletter publishing and the role that Substack will play within this ecosystem is something that remains to be seen. This is a publishing format that has changed many times during its history, and every indication suggests that it will continue to adapt and persist. As social media giants Facebook and Twitter are scoping out the potential to enter this publishing environment in the near future (Porter 2021), it is evident that, at least in the short term, newsletters will likely continue to play a role in the contemporary digital publishing space. Accordingly, traditional publishers—of both digital and analog publications—would stand to benefit from including newsletters and their writers into their future practices. Though they are hardly a groundbreaking technology, newsletters have allowed for writers to monetise their work in a publishing environment that is currently increasingly difficult to rely on for financial subsistence. While it’s unclear exactly how the trend will develop in the future, their long term relevance means it’s almost certain that the newsletter will continue to exist as a publishing format of interest.

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Harrison Colwell17 November 2021