That affects your growth.Ĭordon McGee, who runs a small-scale meal prep business in Chapel Hill, N.C., has struggled with the same dynamic. People sign up for a newsletter and they don’t see it. She has tried every solution the internet hive-mind recommends: dragging-and-dropping new issues from Promotions over to the primary inbox replying to the newsletter as if it were a real person consistently opening and reading each issue. Merber’s wife is among his subscribers, and although she receives the Lap Count on the same WiFi he mails it out from, Gmail continues to deposit each issue in her Promotions folder. So that obviously affects the open rate, and therefore your growth.” “People sign up for a newsletter … and they turn around one week later expecting to see it, and they don’t see it. Kyle Merber, who writes a weekly Substack newsletter about track and field called the Lap Count, has struggled with similar problems. Even paying subscribers often see issues sequestered in their Promotions folders. Last year, the Markup raised concerns that this classification system inconsistently hurts politicians’ fundraising efforts. Gmail does let users deactivate this sorting system, but it’s enabled by default - something research suggests may nudge people to keep it turned on. Despite engaging with every issue in the manner of an enthusiastic reader, the writer has never received his own newsletter in his primary inbox. Falling into that gap is his own Gmail account, which he uses for troubleshooting. He estimated that between 5% and 10% of his Gmail-based subscribers never see a single thing he sends them. “There are people who get in their primary inbox every single time, but there’s other people who maybe never ever got a chance to become a reader of the newsletter, because everything from their welcome email to their first 10 all went to the Promos folder,” said the MailChimp writer, who asked to remain anonymous for fear that deliverability issues would scare away his newsletter’s advertisers. For some newsletter writers, that seems to change week to week and reader to reader. If the inbox is for friends, family and colleagues, and the spam folder is for untested virility pills and investment propositions from deposed foreign princes, the “Promos” folder is for … well, whatever Google’s sorting algorithm chooses to put there. Nothing inspires this sense of helpless frustration more than Gmail’s Promotions folder: a sort of liminal purgatory into which the mailbox platform casts emails too bad for the inbox and too good for the spam folder. We just know that it’s always changing, and sometimes it’s good news and sometimes it’s bad news.” how they’re making decisions and how it will affect us from one day to another. Like some ancient, unknowable deity, Gmail “has this influence over our lives, but we don’t know. Newsletter writers talk about Gmail and its whims “the way that Greeks used to talk about Greek gods,” said one writer, who publishes a newsletter through Substack competitor MailChimp. There are still email providers to reckon with - in particular, Google’s free, wildly popular Gmail service. Yet the dream of a middleman-free media ecosystem is not so fully realized as its proponents might like to think. The newsletter platform Substack has secured tens of millions in venture capital, while smaller-scale players such as Ghost and Buttondown have carved out their own niches in the emerging market. It’s a trend that has made email sexy again, boosted earnings for a small cadre of name-brand writers and helped countless others supplement their incomes. Newspaper editors? Social media algorithms? No need to worry about these gatekeepers, the thinking goes, when you can just email your thoughts straight to whoever wants them. The exodus has often been driven by frustrations with the various interlopers who stand between content creators and their audiences. Over the last year, a gathering parade of writers - including some of the biggest names in journalism - have abandoned traditional publications for the greener, less centralized pastures of independent newsletters.
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