I write a column delivered by email. I don’t read email columns. Outside of supporting two friends who write email columns, I don’t subscribe to any email media. And, today, I forgot to press send. Karma, right?
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Even when I want the content, I don’t want it my inbox. Email is where I work. Newsletters distract me. Wrong place. Wrong time. Oh, and ugly. Email isn’t the Internet. Nothing is interactive and content lives in the unshiniest light of a format only marginally more advanced than troff. Don’t hold your breath waiting for a but, there isn’t one. To me, email is awful media.
I expect that unvarnished rant will cost me friends and fail to influence people. Assuming you’re still here, this is a story about email. The partisan guerilla fighting against the tyranny of behemoth media platforms.
Pfft, media platforms. Platforms wall off their sovereign gardens. Creators and publishers trade their content wares for followers or connections. Vanity metrics that buy happiness but have no real-world currency.
I find it funny to see publishers talk about how many views their videos got on a platform. They say things like, “We got ___ million views across YouTube and Instagram,” thinking that’s a reason to advertise with them. It’s not. It’s a reason to advertise on YouTube or Instagram. Ask them who watched their video and their best answer is @somebody.
On a platform, publishers and creators are a fraction of a step above advertisers. Their only win is that they don’t pay real dollars to be seen there. They pay with their time. And even that’s changing.
As a media business, you don’t own your audience until you know how to contact each person in your audience. The only way to do that is email. That’s why Samsung wants my email address before I start my TV. Yes. I know I mention this a lot. It bugs me that much. Media can reach you by email. Oh, and Samsung is a media business.
As recently as a decade ago, email was an afterthought for publishers. With good reason.
Outlets like Vice and BuzzFeed could drop content into Insta who’d let traffic leave to take a quiz. Walled gardens left a really big door really wide open. They don’t any more. These days, social media companies are as antisocial as Canada is social.
For reference, a Canadian grocery store forgot to lock up on Easter and found money left for the groceries people took. Really.
Jeff Bezos knows something about shopping. When he bought the Washington Post in 2013, he made it a big deal to get people to sign up for newsletters. Know your audience.
By October 2015, the Harvard Business Review was writing about the “resurgence” of the email newsletter. Google’s Gmail helped the comeback. In 2014, they “Stamped out a lot of spam and segmented the inbox into personal, social and promotional streams that make email much less a mess than it used to be.” Google was a different kind of beast back then.
They’ve 180-ed since then. They can probably ollie too. Google is rolling out Gmail features that highlight which companies send you “too many” emails. And automate an unsubscribe button to “reduce excessive emails.” Sure, it would be nice if that meant they’re addressing the rampant spam issue — I get A TON of that — but don’t kid yourself. Google doesn’t want to stamp out spam. They did that already. This is about stamping out newsletter subscriptions. Hoovering up the last dykes in the dam. Damn, email.
Like I said 450 words ago, email is fighting against the tyranny of behemoth media platforms. And, enewsletters is a hill it might have to die on.
Personally, email for me is reaching the point of my thoroughly useless home phone line that my nearly-as useless cable TV subscription gives me for free like the football-shaped alarm clocks Sports Illustrated gave away. Email is mostly a place where pfishers and automated marketers send me stuff I don’t want. I spend more time deleting and blocking email garbage than getting value from it.
Those who do need email to survive, they’re going to need help. Gmail (Google), Outlook (Microsoft), and Apple are the three biggest email services. Google and Apple don’t want publishers to have direct access to audiences. Apple is a data hoarder. So, you get access but no data.
Substack (
) should be all over this. Right now, they’re just over this. They need to create the best damn email service out there. Make it great. Make it free. Make it ideal for newsletters. A year ago, they claimed, “Substack has over 20 million monthly active subscribers.” Love the weaseliness of that phrase. Sounds like someone who subscribes to my stuff and also subscribes to someone else’s ‘stack would be double-counted. So, the real number is likely 1/10th of that. Still, their business and the businesses of their ‘stackers would be woefully impaired as Google unsubscribes subscribers.If Substack gets this right, they save what’s left of publishing. The NYT says they have 100 million email addresses and that 16 million people subscribe to their flagship daily newsletter. A Substack enewsreader could be the place to read newsletters. Maybe, there, content won’t distract me. It will be the right place. At my right time. Oh, and maybe, it won’t be ugly.
But, nothing.