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Newsletters are bad, actually


About a month ago, I had 351 unread newsletters in my inbox.

Well, not in my inbox. In a special folder Iā€™d created to correspond to the special email alias Iā€™d set up just for subscribing to newsletters. (I even had a text expansion shortcut to save me the trouble of typing out that email when signing up.)

Today, I have zero subscriptions and Iā€™m about to kill my own newsletter, which Iā€™ve been sending for over a year.

How did I get here?

Inbox bankruptcy

When I looked at those 351 unread emails, which I had no real interest in reading, I realized that Past Me had created a mess for Present Me, and I wanted to stop doing that.

![Twitter: ā€œI do so many things that seem to be optimizing for a hypothetical future state where Iā€™m like ā€œOh gee whiz I am bored and canā€™t find anything to readā€

Which literally never happensā€](/images/image.png)

I didnā€™t want to invest the time it would take to read them all, or the energy it would take to evaluate them all and determine which ones bring me joy. So I unsubscribed to everything.

After a couple weeks of blissful inbox serenity, it was time to send out my biweekly newsletter. Which led to some internal conflict.

Why do you need a newsletter?

I started my newsletter in May 2019, as a feed of the daily blog posts I was writing on this site. (You can check out the archive here.)

Iā€™m forever grateful - now more than ever - to the kind and curious souls who signed up. Some even replied, and shared. Itā€™s been truly magical!

But things have changed since May 2019. Substack, which I hadnā€™t even heard of when I started newslettering, now has thousands of writers, and hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers. You may have noticed that over the past year or so, everybody and their mom launched a newsletter.

As the landscape gets more crowded, dynamics shift.

Conventional wisdom about having a newsletter is that it allows you to ā€œown your audience.ā€ Slightly creepy, but I can see why it seems appealing.

Except ā€¦ you donā€™t really own somebody just because they gave you their email.

Especially when everybody and their mom has a Substack, so subscribing becomes as common (and as frictionless) as a social media follow.

Especially when tools like Hey.com (or my DIY email alias hack) make it possible to sign up for a newsletter and literally never see it.

What Iā€™m doing instead

All this isnā€™t to say that list building and email marketing donā€™t work. They do! Depending on the offering, and the audience, and your goals.

My goals are:

I can make both of these happen without a newsletter, so thatā€™s what Iā€™m going to do.

If youā€™d like to have an interesting conversation, just grab time here.

To support the content I create, you can subscribe on Gumroad.

And if you have a response to this post, you can email me - hello (at) briandavidhall.com. My inbox is free from clutter, so youā€™ll definitely reach me.


© 2024 Brian David Hall