How the Tangle newsletter reached 77,000 readers and $624,000 in annual revenue
Isaac Saul wanted to create an antidote to the hyper partisan media ecosystem that dominates the web.
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If you ask Isaac Saul about the origin story of Tangle, the politics newsletter he publishes five days a week, he almost always cites his childhood in Bucks County, a suburb north of Philadelphia. “It’s a bellwether county in Pennsylvania,” he told me. “It's a place that everybody watches in national politics because it usually dictates where Pennsylvania goes, which is where the presidential election typically goes.”
Growing up in such a politically diverse area meant that Saul had friends and family across the entire political spectrum, and he believes this experience guides the ethos of a newsletter that goes to great lengths to consider all partisan angles before rendering a verdict.
Saul launched Tangle in 2019 when he was still a politics editor at A Plus — the viral news outlet founded by Ashton Kutcher — and the dual role meant he had to wake up at 5 a.m. every day so he could get the latest edition out. What started as an email list of 13 friends quickly grew to thousands of readers, and after about eight months or so he debuted a paid subscription. “I was making probably like $70,000 a year or something at the time,” he said, “and overnight I almost matched my yearly salary on this newsletter I'd been working on for eight months. And so I quit my job a few weeks later, since this was a real pathway for me.”
From there, Tangle’s audience grew rapidly, and today it boasts over 77,000 readers, $624,000 in annual revenue, and a small staff. Saul has also begun to branch out into other mediums like podcasts and video.
In a recent interview, Saul discussed how he came up with the newsletter’s signature format, how he converted his free readership into paid, and why he made the recent decision to accept advertising.
Let’s jump into my findings…
Rejecting viral partisanship
In many ways, Tangle is a rejection of the social media-fueled news environment that shaped Saul’s early career.
In 2013, he was hired by Huffington Post to serve as an associate editor. “I was working on what was essentially HuffPost’s viral team,” he said. “I was doing quick 200-word write ups and trying to drive traffic to the website, and it felt like I was in this factory with a bunch of other young writers doing that.” This caught the attention of the team at A Plus, which had coded a program that scraped the internet for the most popular content. “And when they did that, I was one of the top 15 bylines that popped up in terms of page views based on publicly available data, and so that was pretty much why they reached out to me. They wanted to get somebody who could drive traffic to this website and knew how to construct click bait headlines and viral images.”
This was during the time when Facebook was still unleashing billions of pageviews on the news outlets that learned how to game its algorithm. A Plus was designed to capitalize on this traffic, and while Saul was adept at packaging stories for social virality, he also pushed the company to produce more traditional reporting. “I told them I was happy to help drive traffic to the website, but I want some kind of commitment that we're going to do real original journalism,” he said. “And they did. They followed through on that. To their credit, we got a lot of chances to write original stories.”
Unfortunately, A Plus’s archives have been scrubbed from the internet, but Saul’s website bio cites dozens of pieces he reported on for the site, including articles that got cited in congressional inquiries and landed him interviews on cable news. In 2016, Yahoo News named him as “one of the 16 people who shaped the 2016 election.” A Plus even allowed him to travel overseas to report in places like Indonesia and India.
But while Saul was proud of these pieces, he doesn’t shy away from admitting that most of his job involved the production of viral clickbait. As time wore on, he grew increasingly weary of this approach to news, especially once Facebook tweaked its algorithm to de-emphasize news content within the feed. He also began to bristle at how this media ecosystem rewarded partisanship over nuance. “I saw the way my stories would be changed, the headlines they'd use, the quotes they'd choose, those kinds of things,” he said. “In my experience, a lot of media organizations have this left-of-center perspective that gets baked in by editors and reporters. The initial genesis of Tangle as a product was that I was covering politics as a very politically incongruent person myself.”
I asked Saul what he meant by this, and he gave a hypothetical situation in which he was writing about the latest Trump indictment. “Is this indictment legit or is this a political witch hunt? If I want a real answer to that question, I can't just go read the New York Times or Fox News or the Wall Street Journal to figure it out. What I was doing back then was I'd go read the New York Times editorial board, I'd go read the Wall Street Journal editorial board, I'd read Fox News, I'd read Huffington Post, I’d read Breitbart, and then I’d go read Reuters and AP and a bunch of quote unquote ‘straight news.’ And then like four hours later after listening to some podcasts and consuming 30 different news outlets, I'd be like, ‘okay, now I have a pretty holistic understanding of all the arguments that are out there.’ I so badly wanted that to all be in one place, and I didn't really find anywhere that was doing that.”
While working at A Plus, Saul began to sketch out some ideas in a paper notebook for a media outlet that packaged news in a way that he would want to read it. The format included a straightforward presentation of the basic facts at the top, followed then by breakdowns of how both the Left and the Right were spinning the news. “I wanted a news outlet that could be trusted by diehard Trump supporters, establishment Republicans, mainstream Democrats, and the progressive Left altogether. Like what could I send to my best friend growing up who's a cop in rural Pennsylvania and super conservative and my friends in Brooklyn who are like super lefty progressive hipsters, and both of them would read it and trust it?
Saul decided to test out his theories by writing a few sample versions of a newsletter and forwarding it to friends and family. “A lot of people responded and said, ‘this is really great. I'd love to read it, but like, what do you think? I'm interested in your perspective. Of these two arguments, which do you think is right?’” This led to the creation of a final segment titled “my take.” “I actually think that's maybe the most important part of the newsletter now because it's kind of like this act of transparency where I'm just telling readers what I think. So now the readers know what the person who's explaining this story to them actually believes on this specific issue.”
With the addition of this final segment, Saul figured the newsletter was ready to debut to the public. In August 2019, he launched Tangle on Substack — which he chose mostly because it was free — and committed himself to sending out a new edition every weekday.
Paywall incoming…
The rest of this case study is behind a paywall, but if you aren’t ready to subscribe, you can also download it as an ebook over here.