This is a first rate piece. I think the holy grail for a media business is a combination of home page traffic and newsletter subscribers. That’s real traffic to build a business around. The rest is nice to have but so fleeting and probably not worth it if you’re trying to build a business that will last for decades.
I would only add one thing: The business model that may be of interest in each case, and not only affiliates. For example, traffic to post can be very good for business models such as online bookstores, or provision of professional services, in my opinion.
I agree with dark social being the best performing channel. My substack is b2b marketing, so fairly niche, and as you said a lot of traffic gets classified as 'direct'. I ran some experiments on where I was promoting and found Facebook groups bring a lot of traffic but not subscribers, slack brings not a lot of traffic (lots of fragmented groups) but much higher chance of them becoming subscribers.
LinkedIn could be a good source of traffic/subscribers but they truly shit me with how much they punish links being posted.
I will start publishing substack content on LinkedIn newsletters with a delay (I run my newsletter in seasons, so I'll post the current season to LinkedIn once it's finished), and prompting people to subscribe to substack for the latest topics so I can keep control of my subscriber list, but haven't yet started testing that.
This is a first rate piece. I think the holy grail for a media business is a combination of home page traffic and newsletter subscribers. That’s real traffic to build a business around. The rest is nice to have but so fleeting and probably not worth it if you’re trying to build a business that will last for decades.
Outstanding analysis. Simon has been on a roll lately.
Very informative, thank you!
Maybe your best piece.
I would only add one thing: The business model that may be of interest in each case, and not only affiliates. For example, traffic to post can be very good for business models such as online bookstores, or provision of professional services, in my opinion.
I agree with dark social being the best performing channel. My substack is b2b marketing, so fairly niche, and as you said a lot of traffic gets classified as 'direct'. I ran some experiments on where I was promoting and found Facebook groups bring a lot of traffic but not subscribers, slack brings not a lot of traffic (lots of fragmented groups) but much higher chance of them becoming subscribers.
LinkedIn could be a good source of traffic/subscribers but they truly shit me with how much they punish links being posted.
I will start publishing substack content on LinkedIn newsletters with a delay (I run my newsletter in seasons, so I'll post the current season to LinkedIn once it's finished), and prompting people to subscribe to substack for the latest topics so I can keep control of my subscriber list, but haven't yet started testing that.