Why newsletter signups should always be your north star

PLUS: How CJ Gustafson built Mostly Metrics, a newsletter for CFOs

Welcome! I'm Simon Owens and this is my media industry newsletter. You can subscribe by clicking on this handy little button:

Let’s jump into it…

I don’t think there’s a media operator working today who isn’t at least somewhat aware that the tech platforms we rely on for distribution have the ability to completely upend our livelihoods, but it’s still pretty jarring when it actually happens. I certainly felt intense unease when reading this report in Podnews about an award-winning podcaster named Kaigan Carrie who suddenly had her show completely wiped from existence by Spotify. As Carrie told Podnews:

I’ve lost every single person that was 'following’ my podcast. I’ve lost all of my paid subscribers — when they deleted my podcast, the system then refunded each of my subscribers — and I had money sitting in my account from the last 4 months that I hadn’t withdrawn. All my stats are gone, too.

Nobody at Spotify denies that the podcast was removed by mistake, but that doesn’t make the incident any less devastating; even though Carrie’s show was reinstated, her entire audience was wiped out, which means she’d have to rebuild it from scratch.

This case is particularly horrific, but it’s becoming less and less rare. Over the last few years, the tech platforms have been subjected to increased pressure to crack down on instances of abuse, hate speech, and even misinformation. While this may or may not have improved the information ecosystem as a whole — that’s a debate I don’t want to delve into here — it’s also impacted the careers of many hard working content creators who have been unfairly punished by these policy changes.

Any moderation policy meant to scale across literally billions of posts will inevitably create plenty of false positives. Not only do the platforms need to install algorithmic shortcuts to flag content within moments after publication, but even the human moderation is often outsourced and overextended. And because these services are free and offer very little customer service recourse, the platforms can be slow to correct a mistaken deplatforming.

I talk to a lot of media entrepreneurs, and most of the ones who cover hard news can recount multiple instances of mistaken account suspensions due to some overly sensitive algorithmic tripwire that fails to understand the distinction between extremist content and journalism that reports on extremism. In most cases, the media outlet is able to reverse the decision, but by that point the piece of content that triggered the suspension has very little hope of reaching a wide audience.

And the effects aren’t merely retroactive. These policies can often have a chilling effect on the types of content media outlets produce. As Vice imploded the other week, several of its employees went rogue and recorded a podcast episode that documented the implosion in real time. Unfortunately, that episode has since been deleted, but the hosts spent a significant portion of it talking about what it was like to report on controversial issues under constant threat of algorithmic deplatforming. It reached a point where they wouldn’t even engage Vice’s social team to package content for, say, TikTok because they knew the video would immediately be sent to moderation purgatory. 

This is why I always advise creators and media entrepreneurs to treat email signups as their north star, even when it doesn’t align with their main content medium. Sometimes I’ll get pushback along the lines of, “Well, I don’t really consider myself a writer. I’m a video creator.” I don’t care. You should still have some sort of newsletter offering and you should be consistently pushing your audience into signing up for it. 

Email is one of the only web distribution mechanisms that are both ubiquitous and decentralized. Sure, decentralized social networks exist, but most of your followers don’t have a Mastodon account, whereas every single one of them has an email address. A newsletter won’t eliminate all the damage done by a mistaken deplatforming, but it will blunt the damage and instill a greater peace of mind.

And this isn’t some anti-platform screed or a rallying cry against content moderation. I think there are a lot of people out there who pine for a full-scale web decentralization, but I recognize the value of centralized platforms and their ability to aid small creators and media outlets in finding audiences. I spend a significant portion of my work week packaging and optimizing content so it’ll do well on these platforms.

But I’ve also never taken my eye off the ball when it comes to funneling the audience back to my newsletter. Listen to any podcast I create or watch any YouTube video I publish, and you’ll find a strong call to action that communicates the value proposition of my newsletter. It really is the biggest security measure media outlets have against the tech behemoths that dominate the web.