You don’t often think of email as something you pay to get. If anything, most people would pay to get less of it. Of course, there are always emails you like to get and opt into on purpose. We have a newsletter right here on CSS-Tricks that we really try to make worth reading. It’s free, like the vast majority of email newsletters. We hope it helps a bit with engagement and we make it worth doing financially by showing the occasional advertisement. It’s certainly not a full-time job.
I spoke with Adam Roberts who is trying to make it a full-time job by running SitePoint’s Versioning newsletter as a paid subscription. I don’t know much about this world, so I find it all pretty fascinating. I know Ann Friedman has a paid newsletter with a free variant. I know theSkimm is a free newsletter but has a paid membership that powers their app. I was told Bill Bishop made six figures on his first day going paid, which is wild. In the tech space, Ben Thompson’s Stratechery is a paid newsletter.
Let’s hear from Adam on how it’s doing it. I’ll ask questions as headers and the paragraph text is Adam.
So you’re doing it! Making the transition from a free, advertising-supported newsletter to a paid, subscriber-based newsletter. There is a lot to dig into here. Is the motivation a more direct and honest relationship with your readers?
Yep, it’s crazy! Versioning provides devs, designers and web people curated links aimed at making them more productive and up-to-date with the bleeding edge of their industry. I’ve done the newsletter for nearly four years and, up until now, it’s been a thing I squeeze in for an hour or two during my day, as a break from my actual job (most recently, head of content for the site). Now, it’s no longer being squeezed, and is my actual job! I can now focus entirely on making it something people find valuable. They’ll know that everything I include is there because I think it’ll make their lives, skills or knowledge better. I’ve always set a high standard for myself when it comes to what I include—never something I’m 50/50 on (unless it’s an emerging tech) and I never include something because we have a deal or something. Now, this is an actual formal thing. Ads were always a means to an end, now we have a better means, and hopefully a better end!
Is it a straight cut? Anyone who doesn’t subscribe for a fee will stop getting it and have no way to read it?
If you sign up as a paid member, you’ll get the daily newsletter. You’ll also get periodic members-only updates, like deep dives on an emerging subject, always-updated posts on important subjects, and media guides. If you sign up to receive free updates, you’ll get a weekly update plus other periodic free updates.
I’m sure there are financial concerns. Anyone in this position would be nervous that paid subscribers won’t match what was coming in from advertisers before. Is that a concern here? How in-depth did you get trying to figure out the economics of it? Is there potential that it’s even better business?
Given this is a SitePoint venture and not my own thing, we had to make sure it was worthwhile for subscribers and that the numbers were friendly! There’s definitely potential this will work better in a financial sense, while also be being better for subscribers—we wouldn’t be doing it otherwise!
Do you have a good sense of what your readers want from you? It seems to me Versioning is largely a link-dump, but with your hand-curation and light commentary. Did you come to that over time?
I have always had a fairly active reader base, with people dropping me a line via email or Twitter to thank me for something they liked. We also have the requisite creepy email analytics (e.g. opens and clicks), which help to spot trends and subjects to focus on or avoid. It’s a challenge to cover a few different subject areas well (like front-end and back-end development, design, etc.) but I think most readers working in a particular niche in our industry find it helpful to know what everyone else is up to. The world also evolves quickly—the first edition covered a jQuery library, for example. That’s not an area that’s stayed in the forefront of the news since! Mind you, the first edition also had a Star Wars link, so maybe some things do stay the same.
I struggle with even knowing what I want from a newsletter. Most days, give me some personality. I want news but I want to know why I should care and I want an expert to tell me. Then other days, I hate to say it, but I want less talk and more links. Cool story about a goat, but I’m here for the performance links (or whatever). Are you a newsletter connoisseur yourself? Are you writing a newsletter you wanna read?
I think if I ran into Versioning in the wild, I’d want to subscribe to it. I’m working to try to get the content balance right—providing the right stuff for people, plus commentary that’s enjoyable. The other day I had links to an article on understanding state in React (I think it was on some site called CCS-Tricks, am I spelling that right? 😉), an article on fake science gurus on Facebook, one on an Australian cyborg who tried to pay for a train with a chip in his hand, and the video for Warren G’s Regulate (an allusion to the likely response to the various Facebook crises).
I subscribe to so many newsletters, and they’re all different. I think consistency in each newsletter helps. If I was to drop the format and post a long, detailed screed about one subject, that would not go over well. My aim is to include one link that every reader wants to click. Often, that’s all you can handle as a reader, especially on mobile where the interface doesn’t make collecting tabs easy. That’s also why I include the destination domain in brackets next to every link—I don’t want people to end up somewhere they’re not expecting. Also, some sites (like the The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Wired) have limits on the number of free articles people can view. I don’t want people to accidentally run out of freebies because of me—I want them to realize how much they value a site and support it.
Do paid newsletters replace the traditional blog or do you see them complementing one another? We’ve obviously been using our newsletter to support the blog and vice versa, but I’m curious if adding a paid layer changes that relationship.
The formats have different, complementary strengths, and so I don’t think the paid layer necessarily changes this. Newsletters are good at highlighting particularly important things, putting them in context, and maybe taking a long view of a certain issue. Sites (or blogs) are good at adding interactive elements and keeping content up-to-date and accurate as things change.
In our case, one of the things our email platform, Substack, allows us to do is send a particular edition out as both a newsletter and a post. This means a member can access it wherever is best for them. It also means I can do things like send out an initial newsletter outlining a particular topic, then update the online version with new content. I will use this to produce updated, canonical posts for a particular subject or technology. And these formats can be either free to all, or only available to paid members. There’s a lot you can do with this level of flexibility, I’m sure I’m only scratching the surface. The key is to produce something worthwhile for an audience and the format is secondary.
What is it about newsletters that seems to be clicking with people lately? If someone asked you, hey, I have a ton to say about this general topic, and so I’m thinking of either starting a blog or a newsletter, would you say newsletter? Any SEO concerns there?
There is a backlash against the algorithmic tide. Instead of opening a feed and hoping for good content, why not find someone you trust, and whose opinion and taste you find interesting and useful, and sign up to consistently receive content from them. You’ll still get the “something new and cool” dopamine hit you would in a feed, but it’ll be more consistent and reliable. And they’re all separate entities; there’s no “if you followed this publication, maybe you should follow this other one” thing. And if you stop enjoying them, you can just unsubscribe.
Newsletters are intimate. Your inbox is your personal space, where you step back from the tumult and take stock of the stuff that you’ve decided matters most to you. That’s why spam and relentless, poorly-conceived marketing emails always feel like such a violation.
I think newsletters and podcasts are both growing in prominence for the same reasons. Both mediums reward consistency and reliability in format and topic, are built on personality, and have an intimate feel. Someone’s either talking into your ears for hours every week, or writing to you in your private space.
Speaking of concerns, SEO is a tricky one. Algorithms are part of the discussion here again. SitePoint has a pretty decent search footprint, but new and niche publications aren’t so lucky. I suspect there will be a mini-industry of newsletter curation services start to develop. I would actually love to be in that space.
Filter bubbles are another concern. Newsletters are another opportunity for people to only read the stuff they agree with. But it turns out algorithms and social networks aren’t so good at stopping that either!
I was very, very, very sad to see the end of the Awl (and the Hairpin). That was a site that was chock-full of amazing content that was not targeted to appeal to Facebook and such, and as a result, it ultimately wasn’t sustainable. It kind of feels like such cases—plus the re-tooling of Facebook’s feed away from publications and towards people, and the rise of newsletters—are all related. It’s reductive to say “newsletters are the new blogs,” but it’s probably not far off. I would 100% be telling someone to start a newsletter. Actually, I’d tell them to use Substack, but I would have to declare my bias!
Tech-wise, what tooling are you using to curate, create, and send here?
I love talking about this stuff! Uses This is one of my favorite sites. Honestly, it’s pretty low-tech at the moment, just busy. I have a Pocket account with a #versioning tag, so that often gives me a dozen or so links at the start of the day, sourced from my internet meanderings through the evening. I subscribe to a million newsletters, both in my work and personal accounts, on a hopefully both diverse and relevant range of topics.
I subscribe to quite a few RSS feeds using Feedly, too. Nuzzel, which sends you a daily/weekly digest of the most-shared links among people you’re following in Twitter and Facebook, is very useful here too. I have a personal Twitter/Nuzzel feed, plus one I’ve specifically set up for this purpose. Refind is another service trying to solve this problem. Its breadth and depth kind of give me a headache though. They’ve got a Nuzzel-like daily/weekly digest, a service for creating your own newsletters, a cryptocurrency—there’s a lot.
I also have the requisite very big Tweetdeck set-up to grab other links that catch my eye. Oh, and Initab is a new Chrome tab extension you can populate with feeds from certain subreddits and other place. I’ve been playing around with psuedo-Tweetdeck-for-Reddit services too. And Spectrum is a new community service thing I found last week, looks like it could be a winner too. And I need to be more active in Facebook groups. Also, Slack!
So yeah, there’s a lot. A bit of a combo of algorithms and people, hopefully I have the balance right. I also change newsletters, feeds, and other sources regularly, trying to find a better balance.
As for collecting and writing, it’s actually fairly simple—I find something I like, copy the URL into a Markdown doc, then write a description. I deliberately use a web-based Markdown editor (currently Stackedit, though I have used Dillinger and Classeur in the past). Something web-based is good because I can easily tab to it without having to switch to a new app. Stackedit is good because you can paste the generated preview directly into Campaign Monitor and (now) Substack and have formatting and links sorted. I then have a Google Doc to collect links I’ve already shared, and to gauge the reception in the audience—I want to spot trends like a rising interest in micro-services.
Building emails is something we all sort of love and loathe as front-end developers. How did you approach your email design and did you learn anything from building it?
Yes, email design is hard! Fortunately for me, the content and approach I’ve adopted lends itself to a stripped-back design with very little going on. Versioning is just text and a few images, so it required practically zero design. Our use of Campaign Monitor and now Substack meant we could sidestep some of the template work. In general terms though, my advice would be:
- Focus on the purpose and content of the newsletter, produce a template based on that. It’s more important to produce something compelling, promote it in the right places, gain an audience, and then keep it (and grow it) by making sure you’re consistent in your production.
- If you can (via a survey or through whatever data your email platform offers) work out what devices and platforms your audience uses to access email. People read email in all sorts of obscure ways, but you can likely cover the main ones for your audience with relatively little effort.
- Don’t forget the plaintext user! Make sure your URLs are short, your images have alt tags, you’re generally nice to those in your audience who are in this boat. Versioning, given the niche, has a high proportion of these.
- If all else fails, work with an expert or use one of a plethora of tools and services to do the work for you. Substack has a stripped-back CMS, Campaign Monitor and MailChimp have built-in template builders, and there are plenty of other services you could use. The compatibility issues with email are legendary. You could instead spend your time on things like a distinctive logo and branding or a landing page that communicates your newsletter’s value.
Ultimately people will enjoy a simple newsletter full of content they love presented in a way they can absorb. The design shouldn’t tie you in knots!
Great topic, and very timely with the recent newsletter boom. Love Adam and Versioning (of course, I’ve worked with him so I’m biased! But it’s still true!). Everyone should subscribe, it’s a great newsletter. Which reminds me… I still haven’t sub’d for the pay model!
Deciding on pay vs. free (with ads) is definitely a major decision that shouldn’t be rushed into.
I have a newsletter (I won’t name or link to it, so I don’t look spammy) geared mainly towards front-end devs that has about 12,000 subscribers. That’s an ok number, but it’s not very high. I’m growing slowly every week though. I haven’t done any aggressive marketing with it, so I’ve kept the subscriber base growing slowly and with good quality subscribers, which I think is more valuable than some big push with a contest or something that gets a lot of superficial subs.
If I were to move to a pay-to-receive model and strip out all the ads, how many subscribers would I keep? If I charge $5 per month and got just 500 people out of the 12,000 to stay on, that would be $2500 per month. That’s really tempting because I can assure you that’s considerably more than what I’m making now off the newsletter now. And if the number is greater than that, well that would be tremendous. In fact, as I write this, I’m almost convincing myself to try it! (That being said, my newsletter promotes my e-books and I’ve gotten paid projects as a result of it, so there are other financial benefits outside of ad money.)
I guess the fear is that if there is very little interest in the pay model, I’d have to resort back to the free model and keep the old subscriber base as a “backup”. But are there ethical or legal problems with that? Do I have to ask them to opt in again? So in that case, it might be tough to build it up again to what it currently is. And what effect would it have on my reputation from my readers’ perspectives? Would I lose their respect because I don’t seem to want to stick with a plan?
I think with the recent Kickstarter and Patreon booms, it does seem like people are more and more willing to support things they love in a direct way. So the potential seems to be there.
As Adam alluded to, I think two things are most important to consider: Will a pay model help improve quality? And will a pay model provide a better financial return? SitePoint decided both were true for Versioning, and so each newsletter would have to make the same choice.
I’m in the same boat as Louis and have a newsletter I send out each week.
I first started around six years ago and my opinion on newsletters has certainly changed over the years. To start with I was doing a bunch of research anyway so I wanted to share my findings with others that might not have the time to do their own research.
Over time the newsletter grew and became more than just a time cost (which goes unpaid), but also a cost for the Mailchimp list. That’s when I started using sponsorship to help cover those costs and buy coffee to keep me up at night while I research and curate the newsletter ;)
At the beginning it was all about sharing information with people, and I really love that about our industry. We share things on blogs (and newsletters) and give things away for free.
Having said that, as my life has grown more complicated over those six years there have been more responsibilities that demand my time (work, partners, children etc). This has caused me to re-look at where I’m spending my ‘free’ time and the newsletter is certainly something I’ve thought about incorporating a cost, but it’s likely to remain free in the foreseeable future.
What I have found is over the years I appreciate the work that people put in to things a lot more. If a newsletter offers patronage (like CSS Weekly) or a site offers membership options (Smashing Mag) or people offer insight into a redesign (CSS-Tricks) I will pay those ongoing costs to help people continue to create (that is also tied to better financial security I suppose).
I suppose the question is whether it’s better to send a newsletter to 500 paid subscribers and make £2,500 a month in subscriptions or send it to 50,000 subscribers and make £1,500 a month in advertising. I certainly love the approach of a paid newsletter but the content is available on the site for free…. kinda the best of both worlds.
Great article, good to ponder.
I find the scratch-pad-math stuff kinda irresistible too.
Seems like 1% conversion is how this stuff plays out. So if you took a list of 20,000 that was pretty organically built and whom you’ve done a good job with, you might actually get that 1%. So 200 of them paying $5 a month gets you $1,000 a month, which is good money and seems like on par for what you might expect to earn with ads in a list of that size on average.
What remains to be seen is how growth/churn play out. Can you keep them? How does it effect growth? Say you gained 100 subscribers a month, will you continue to get 1 a month by just keeping on keeping on?
Lots to think about! I know a big factor for me would be how much it would mentally weigh on me to have paying customers that are literally paying for unique content. When nobody pays directly, I find content flows easily. When I’m on a neverending direct user-to-me contract, it feels weighty.
Hey y’all – thanks for dropping by! I do love talking about this stuff, so….
@Chris Coyier
Yep – I understand the anxiety around a direct model, that was definitely something in the back of my mind. I try to think of it as me working primarily for the members – it’s my job to make the product worth the fee. In some ways this is simpler – you would no longer have to worry about, say, making fun of an advertiser or promoting a competing product. Neither have happened to me, but it’s possible given the nature of the product.
As for growth/churn – I’ll let you know! Marketing and promotion definitely plays a part, which is something I’m currently grappling with – but the main thing at the end is to make sure the thing you’re producing is worthwhile!
@Justin
That’s a very familiar quandary you have there. I think ultimately the decision on whether to go paid will be one for each publisher – it definitely felt right for us though. I’d encourage you to take a look at your engagement numbers, and also ask your subscriber base what they’re keen on. You may find more people would be willing to go with a subscriber-supported option than you’d expect. I’d definitely recommend looking at Substack, even if you’re not yet decided. Good luck navigating through this stage man!
Also, what’s your newsletter called? Would love to see what you’re working on.
@Louis
Hey mate! Always nice to hear from a SP alum!
Re: your question on ethics – the key is to be open and honest ahead of time. I’d go so far as to say to your subscriber base, look, I’m thinking of doing this, what do you think? Then, if you feel good about going live with a paid option, let the subscribers know ahead of time that on a certain date, things change, so they have a chance to decide whether they’ll stay.
If you wanted, you could offer a paid/free option like I have – then it’s a pretty simple message for the subscribers: “either sign up, or if you’re not keen yet, you’ll move to the free tier and get [whatever]”. And whatever you decide to do, you shouldn’t lose respect for trying to find a way to make the newsletter sustainable – it shows you’re taking it seriously and working to improve it.
ANYWAY, I could talk about this for hours, but I already did that, so thanks!
@adam – thanks for coming back on that. I ran a poll on the newsletter last week (rwd weekly is the name) and the results are in:
Paid for only subscription option (2.9%)
Pay weekly for a free newsletter (no sponsors if you pay) ( 3.8%)
Free newsletter, but with labeled sponsors (currently what is done (82.7%)
Nothing, I want free content with no ads (10.6%)
I’d say this is skewed towards what our subscribers are used to. If you ignore what the people want using the percentage for paid only subscribers the newsletter would make far more than it does with ads, but then I’m not sure I’d like to exclude 95% of the readers.
Interesting though!
Before e newsletters really blew up, I was typically using RSS feeds and a handful of known development sites to keep current with.
This did just fine for me and was free.
When e newsletters blew up, I never found ads that distracting to begin with.
In my mind, it was more appropriate to use ads in the newsletters as they were handled well and didn’t detract from the content which is typically the case with a full site that includes a whole lot more content where focus is more important. Personally I can handle ads in a one column format far easier than a 2 or 3 column layout with a good deal more content, possibly sliders, subscription boxes etc…
While I get everyone wants compensation for their time, I would imagine the knock off benefits of being professionally public with their skills brings the real revenues in with freelance work, attention from larger companies, etc…
I’ve always questioned the wisdom though of giving something away for free that you intend to charge for later despite it maybe being easier to grow a following and figure out monetizing it after.
An aside, I always thought a content creation tax added onto ISP bills might be a way to get around ads but provide a distribution of some sort to the content creators.