Email blogs and newsletters
December 30, 2014 — March 3, 2024
Assumed audience:
Nascent producers and consumers of online punditry
Blogs, but for email. Email subscriptions are useful for enabling people who do not know how to read feeds.
Also some of the providers (e.g. substack) provide a unified experience of the blogosphere conversation which happen to be on substack; see Richard Hanania’s argument about the virtues of this. Personally I’m not that excited about the unified seamless experience that has Hanania interested. It is essentially a standard feed reader but inside Substack’s pay-to-play walled garden with no API; Avoiding that nonsense is why I left facebook and Instagram. But I get that the nice UX is a battle-tested way of onboarding some idle contributors. Meanwhile, the lack of API achieves vendor lock-in that keeps the writers on board, so it’s commercially savvy to set it up this way.
Anyway, I will continue to read substack blogs inside feedly with all my other blogs (but I will laboriously manually cross-sync my subscriptions between Substack’s walled garden and the wider universe.)
See Alexey Guzey on affordances and effectiveness of several blog-email providers, backed by an open-rate data experiment. Why I switched my newsletters from Substack and Mailchimp to Buttondown, which highlights some points of friction and interest between Substack and some others.
1 Mailerlite
The ultra simple option MailerLite incluse the ability to subscribe to a bloss feed by email. Here is a worked example: Salman Naqvi – Adding Subscriptions to a Quarto Site
2 Ghost
Ghost is a popular email/blog hybrid platform. It is open-source with a fairly cheap hosted option.
Create your own platform on the web. Ghost is a powerful app for new-media creators to publish, share, and grow a business around their content. It comes with modern tools to build a website, publish content, send newsletters & offer paid subscriptions to members.
Don’t settle for another basic profile that looks just like everyone else. Make it yours.
Publish by web & email newsletter. An editor built from the ground-up for professionals. Calm by design, with advanced workflows by default. No more suffering through clumsy toolbars or drag & oops. Immerse yourself in the story with an interface that’s invisible until you need it, and powerful when you do.
Ghost is already open-source, which is the big requirement to get started immediately.…: they plan to stop growing at 50 employees and let other companies take on the growth from there.
(For more about Ghost’s fascinating business model, see here.)
Ghost has interesting integrations, an Open API Documentation and a command-line.
3 Substack
Newsletter-style blogs. Intriguing features such as easy monetization and a legal defence fund for writers. As one of their competitors points out, Substack is _missing _certain features as well; in particular, there is no automatic integration, no API; you need to use Substack as your backend to use substack as your front-end.
My life is busy enough without copy-pasting from my well-adapted, easy blog into the substack author page, but is that menial roadbump worth it to access the semi-gated substack community? How many social networks do I want to be copy-pasting between?
For now, because the community is good, I dabble in substack: Let us see how long that lasts.
5 Mailchimp
TinyLetter is one iteration of the hype cycle ago but still seems to be a serviceable platform by Mailchimp. Also there is the mainline mailchimp.