The Closed Trend: Email Newsletters

Posted by Darren on Jun 30, 2010 • (Comments)

closed-signOne of my friends, Sam Lessin, created a service called letter.ly, which allows anyone to sign up for a email newsletter account and charge users whatever they want to join.  An example of this is Michael Galpert’s newsletter of which he charges $4.00/mo.

Recently, Jason Calcannis and Sam Lessin declared their blogs dead and are moving to email communications because it’s more intimate.  I receive Jason’s email newsletter and find nothing in there that couldn’t/shouldn’t be on his blog.

I find it funny how everything old is new again.  Note, these 2 people are not a statistically significant sample but being that these two men are at the center of the tech scene, it may be a directional indicator of where things are headed.

Nate’s post entitled Going Premium talks about how he’ll write in-detail about things not fit for mass public consumption (his blog).  Sam also talks about how an email newsletter allows him to talk about things more interesting things.

I don’t know if I subscribe to the whole notion of “stop blogging, start a premium newsletter.”

I think each of them have their place as a communications vehicle but I would guess, right now, without much experience writing email newsletters that being open rather than closed would deliver a lot more value which is the antithesis of what Sam talks about in his blog post.

An interesting thing did happen though.  Since I’m paying for this content now, I do hold a higher standard for it.  In an email exchange I had with one of the guys mentioned above, I told him that he better deliver “significant value” since my wallet is open.  Being that I’m now paying for this content, I may be more likely to cancel my subscription than to take his previous [free] content out of my RSS Reader or my alpha version of Tomzy.

I’ve been wrong many more times than being right, so take this all with a grain of salt.

Would love to hear your feedback.

This post was written by Darren Herman (@dherman76) who is the Chief Digital Media Officer ofkbs+p/The Media Kitchen and the founder of Varick Media Management.  This post represents personal opinions and views, not necessarily reflected of his employer.

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , + Categorized as Internet & Web X.0
  • Life is one big circle. Eveything old becomes new in a new form.
  • the idea that if you have a paid newsletter you're cutting yourself off from the rest of the internets is i think misleading. i still have a tumblr that i plan to update, along with all the other services i use on a regular basis.

    i think of this sort of as the freemium-ization of personal content. give away some stuff for free, and charge for the good stuff.
  • After being forwarded here, I have to agree with this comment.

    The thing I really want to know- What is the correct price on the email considering that they can be forwarded. It causes some very weird senses of "What should the price of this be"

    Remember, if this were an auction setup- probably most people wouldn't pay.

    The only value I see being derived is those who pay for emails versus those who don't- an exclusivity game with a low barrier (get someone to forward them to you)
  • Little off topic but... I was meeting w/ a potential client (F500 level); and we got into a discussion about multi-channel marketing and how CRM systems need to be nimble today to make their data relevant and useful. The client was complaining about how one channel dies then another becomes popular and the vicious circle ensues. The bulk of the conversation revolved around direct mail versus email; and how their consumers keep shifting on them and the brand doesn't have speedy enough processes in place to shift as the consumer shifts. It was very frustrating to sit there biting my tongue. It's a little sad that some great American brands may not be recognizable in less than 10 years because they refuse to adapt their processes to the ever-changing consumer.
  • I'm a big believer in the email newsletter business (things like thrillist, geekchicdaily, or Thrillist), but I don't know how I feel about it for personal use. I write long form content on my blog to spread to as many people as possible in order to meet new smart people. Doing it strictly via email greatly restricts that. On the other hand, it allows me to have a more intimate audience. I think having the best of both worlds might make sense: email is by far the best mechanism for retaining a reader (Ups Lifetime value). Also publish a select group of articles/posts on the web in order to get the distribution+retention of blogging (Lowers Customer acquisition cost). Use email for reader retention and blog for reader acquisition.
  • Darren, you're one of my favorites, but if you started charging I'd sooner buy you a beer than pay for an email version of this blog.

    I actually can't think of anyone I'd pay to read. Though with bloggers and others I'm a big fan of, I not only reward them with attention but often with speaking opportunities, client referrals, buying their books where relevant, or other forms of reward that are far more valuable than $1.99. The same currency has helped me too - I don't run ads on my blog for that reason; an unpaid speaking gig that leads to some great relationship down the road is worth far more than any CPM I'd ever earn.
  • You and I share the same sentiments.

    How about some client referrals? :)
  • Alex Mather
    "everything old is new again." right on.

    i can see why we're trending this way. the fact that everyone and their aunt has an opinion and a wordpress account makes for a noisy hot blog mess. additionally, our inboxes have been scrubbed (for the most part) of spam. finally, companies like Gilt and Daily Candy are doing quite well.

    its just painfully obvious that it won't take long for the pendulum to swing the other way. ignoring an RSS feed when a blog gets boring is one thing; deleting boring "interesting personalized newsletter" after "interesting personalized newsletter" from my inbox will get old quite quickly.
  • I'm accountable for the marketing at my company. Aside from interpersonal interaction and handwritten letters, email is the most import channel there is for nurturing connections. Moreover, it is ironic that with all that is new, nearly every social-network and identity management system defers to email. Facebook account and profile? Email. Twitter? Email. Linked in? Email. Comment on someone's blog? Email (or use a service that defaults to email).
  • True, but if you are growing a follower base, how do you get word out about yourself? Not just through email (you can't send an email to people you don't know)
  • That's why I said nurturing. Email is not good for building awareness and first-time connections, unless you have content that is incredibly valuable, that lends itself to word-of-mouth.
  • Right on
  • It seems a little backwards to me that anyone would need payment in order to force themselves to write better and/or more often. In my personal experience the writing I've forced has been my worst writing and the writing that just flowed out is the best. Most every writer I know (including songwriters) would express a similar POV.
  • I might personally like a lot of the people doing this, but I *can't stand* the trend. I have no problem with publishers trying to make money from content, but I don't think that is the motivation here. Without that justification, putting content behind a paywall feels akin to saying, "I don't want to give to the community, I don't want to engage in open discourse, I don't want to be linkable, commented upon or rebutted in the blogosphere." My favorite blogs are generous with their insights, and that generosity is good for everyone. The startup world is much better for the blogosphere.
  • We'll see the next "paywalls" dedicating all payments to charity. It's only a matter of time.
  • I started a newsletter as well (I won't share the URL here -- I'm not trolling for subs) but:

    1) I'm keeping my blog. My blog is the "me" online.
    2) My newsletter isn't about me. I use it to share something new every day -- something I learned in the last week or so. It's about learning something and sharing it, basically.
    3) The newsletter is free.

    I went to the newsletter because the buy-in -- you're agreeing to let me invade your inbox -- is significant, and my goal is to share with those who care. I can get more traffic via blog but I think the relationship is more significant this way. (An earlier post of yours, http://www.darrenherman.com/20..., suggests I'm right.)

    That said, I don't understand why it'd behoove me, beyond small (small) pecuniary gain, to put up a paywall.
  • lessin
    Darren -- good post... interesting points.

    1. your points about requiring more of people you "subscribe" to and pay is a big part of my thesis on this. I want you to be more demanding because I want to be more rigorous in what I write and I want to force myself to write more often. In that way, things like letter.ly are actually an open-ness machine...

    -- so A. I would take you as an engaged paying and demanding reader over 1000 anonymous and unengaged people any day of the week.

    --- and B. leading out of this -- actually, I think that people are generally building a false tension between openness and privacy. Ready for this - I actually think that privacy aids openness! I am going to write more about this in my next letter at http://letter.ly/lessin

    2. but let's have the conversation (on your blog, not mine :)
  • My "payment' to what is now-defunct lessin's official blog was my "time." There was no monetary value but if you equate dollars to time, then there was certainly a monetary value.

    What you are essentially stating is that you need monetary compensation (whether you hold on to it, or donate it is another story) to structure your writings and to incentivize inspiration/creativity to write more. I can buy that, but I don't think that's totally necessary.

    Daniel Pink wrote a book called Drive, which essentially exposes what motivates us all. While money works, it's not the end all and be all.

    For me, my blog has been a conversational, new business, career making, friendship creating & maintaining, personal exploration, and inspirational space. Knowing that people commit their time to read it is what is most important, not the funds that come thru the door
  • However, there is another theory in the industry which I do subscribe to at certain points.

    if you give something away from free, it's a free product.

    if you charge $1.99, it no longer is free and people fundamentally treat it different.

    If they "engage" more at $1.99 and the relationship is mutually beneficial, then maybe that's the way to go?
  • Point A is the one I don't get. Why are you lumping "paying" with "engaged"?
  • lessin
    not lumping -- equating.

    because generally speaking if you are willing to invest your time and money in something you value it at least at the sum of (your time) * (how much you value your time) + (your money), unless you are in the business of loosing money and time.

    I want people engaged that are co-investing in the discourse with time and money, regardless of whether they disagree or agree. I don't ever want to be a stub in your google reader you never open.... and this is how i make sure you aren't.

    If you believe that my stuff is worth reading critically / engaging with / and holding me accountable for -- great, I would love to have you as a subscriber paying with your time and money. If not, I don't want you reading.

    p.s. remember my car-salesman reminiscent "money back guarantee", which is that if you are a subscriber and don't like it, you can charge me back on venmo :)
  • I actually do like your motivation and thinking behind letter.ly ... I just think it's a much harder sell for the 'average blogger' out there to convince me they have content/opinion of real monetary value to share with me (actually I know they have it, but do I trust they will actually consistently deliver it once I start paying them is the *real* question).

    A Seth Godin or a Fred Wilson could easily jump to letter.ly and people would follow and I suspect still feel as they were getting good value for their dollar...but anyone that doesn't already have a knock-it-out-of-the-park-consistently blog is probably going to have a tough time converting people to a paid subscription...

    Of course I'm usually wrong on these trends...so who knows ;-)
  • I'm with you here...in fact, I mentioned on Twitter a few times already how I don't like this trend and I think all it's really doing is filtering these people out of my attention stream (which is fine if that's what they want to do).

    I do actually subscribe to a few daily/weekly email newsletters but they are all free...even at the price of free, I don't like that they have no form of open communication (ie. no comments) and because it's an email you can't even really refer to it to further the discussion on your own (OK you *can* put an excerpt into your own blog post, but you can't be sure any reader is really going to get the context of the discussion because they may never have access to the key parts of the discussion -- the email).

    Don't get me wrong, I'm a HUGE fan of email (it's probably the one tool I use the most online, it's how I keep track of my schedule, where I keep my contacts, and even how I usually transfer files/code)...but I think it really falls behind in the one-to-many and especially many-to-many communications area.

    To me, the number one problem facing most people online right now is information overload...there's more FREE quality content already out there than I could ever consume...so it's all about figuring out who to listen to and what to pay attention to that's already free...until that's mastered, I just don't see myself bothering much with paid personal content via a form that doesn't facilitate aggregate value...
  • It's funny that you cite to comments.

    No one comments on my blog, even when a post does 1,000++ views. On the other hand, I've had a few people email, @reply, or otherwise communicate with me regarding my emails. Admittedly, there's no way for these people to speak *together*, but I don't have any reason to believe they would anyway.
  • I was actually going to mention it to you via email today as well because in today's NIK ( http://dlewis.net/nik for those that want to subscribe btw) you mention some people emailing you with questions and it pointed out the fact that I had no way to actually get involved in the discussion even if I wanted to (I was wondering if the newsletter would work better/more like an email list, where your posts were the driving force, but then the community could continue the conversation if they like)...

    I *think* my biggest point about comments is that even if they don't occur directly on your posts, having your posts out there and available for everyone to see makes them attributable...I can't really tweet a link to an email, reference a discussion that occurred via email on my own blog, or come to the conversation later via a google search as the topic actually becomes interesting/relevant to me...all things that I *think* make the internet as interesting and useful as it really is today...
  • FWIW, MailChimp's archived version is a web page with a "Share This" button -- you can tweet that :)
  • ...and "now I know"! Thanks. You should def. put that information and encourage people to do it in each of the emails ;-)
  • Get ready for the filtering companies popping up around email newsletters... ;)
  • I've already *not* read stuff that I linked to from Social Media because of the paywall.

    As someone that has blogged for 4 years and shared almost everything of value I have learned doing digital media optimization I can tell you the rewards of blogging have been immense and far more valuable than a few extra bucks.

    (sorry for typos or extra words. Disqus needs a mobile version)
  • i will bug daniel on a mobile version. i am an investor
  • I share your sentiments.
  • me too. i cant visualize it.
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