Why I Believe In Email Newsletters

I always get this question and a curious look when I explain that I'm building a project for email newsletters. "Those annoying emails?" is what I think most people are thinking.

Newsletters do have a bad reputation due to being classed with shitty marketing so the reactions are understandable. But I do find myself having to explain why I think they're so great.

Distribution Control

Newsletters are a throwback to the early days of the Internet when email inboxes were the only way to reach someone directly. But then social networks emerged, and many content creators shifted to publishing their work directly on these platforms or using them as the main form of distribution.

But this gave these platforms a lot of control. And it put writers' access to their audience in the hands of tech companies that had no interest in anyone leaving their platforms. All it took was a change of the algorithm and your audience would never see your content again.

Email newsletters give writers that control back. You own your audience and your email goes into their inbox in chronological order along with everything else.

Owning your audience

Your audience is just a list of emails that you can take anywhere. It doesn't matter which platform you use to send your email newsletter, you can easily move to another with little hiccups.

There's no other distribution method on the internet that provides this much ownership and reach.

Internet Native

Newsletters are built on top of email. And email is a universal standard that is completely interopable between providers. There are no restrictions between Gmail, Apple, or whoever else you use. Like HTML websites, it's built into the core of the internet and not owned by any single company, it's internet native.

And that means your reach is almost every internet user. With social media, you have to adapt your content to fit every platform. With email, you just have to create it once and send it everywhere. And if one of those email providers were to disappear tomorrow, your audience could continue to receive your work.

Beyond Newsletters

Email newsletters continue to grow in popularity especially as media organisations see the value of owning their audience. But we need more distribution methods that offer these criteria.

Open-source social networks like Bluesky and Mastodon could be that if they can gain enough users. But I'd also love to see modernisations of other Web 1.0 protocols to see if they can thrive today as newsletters do. Imagine a resurgence of RSS now that we see the value of having a website and not depending on search engines for traffic.

As we learn the lessons from the Web 2.0 era of centralisation, I believe newsletters will continue to grow and pave the way for even more control to return to creators.