You Don't Need Another Newsletter: The Economy Built on Unread Emails and Unearned Authority

In 2020, everyone started a newsletter. It happened so fast that there is probably a Substack essay about why it happened, written by someone who started their newsletter in 2020, sent it to a Substack essay about newsletters, which you subscribed to and then forgot about, like the other forty-six newsletters you have subscribed to and forgotten about.

The newsletter economy is a miracle of marketing. It convinced millions of people that the thing they were missing was more email. Not better email. More. That an additional voice in their already overflowing inbox would be the one that finally made things click. That the problem with their information diet was insufficient volume.

And it worked. It really, genuinely worked. There are now more newsletters than anyone can count. Every writer, every pseudo-writer, every person who once wrote a LinkedIn post that got seventy likes and thought "I should have my own platform" has a newsletter. The barriers to entry are zero. The barriers to success are the same as they have always been: writing something worth reading. The newsletter format has not changed that equation. It has just made it easier to pretend you are solving it.

The numbers are brutal. The average newsletter open rate across all industries is now below 25%, and it has been declining steadily for years. For most individual writers, it is lower. Much lower. A person who writes a weekly newsletter to 3,000 subscribers is typically reaching about 500 people. The other 2,500 are either ignoring it, have forgotten they subscribed, or are using Gmail's automatic filtering which routes newsletters to the Promotions tab where they die alone.

This is the unspoken contract of the newsletter economy: most of your subscribers are not reading. They subscribed because they wanted to support you, or because they felt guilty not subscribing after reading something you wrote, or because there was a popup offering a "free PDF" that they wanted and then never downloaded. They are not subscribers. They are well-wishers. They are people who hit the button because it cost nothing and it made them feel generous. They are not your audience. They are a mailing list.

The newsletter boom happened because traditional publishing collapsed. Magazines laid off everyone. Newspapers shrank. The gatekeepers disappeared. On one hand, this is democratization. Anyone can publish. On the other hand, the gatekeepers served a function: they said no. They told people their writing was not ready, their ideas were not developed, their platform was not earned. That was painful, but it was also valuable. It filtered.

Now there is no filter. Everyone has a newsletter. Everyone has a "voice." Everyone has hot takes delivered weekly to your inbox, which you are not reading, which makes you feel vaguely guilty, which is exactly how the writer wants you to feel because guilt is a more reliable driver of engagement than interest.

The newsletters that survive are not the ones with the best writing. They are the ones with the best marketing. The best conversion funnels. The best lead magnets. The best understanding of how to turn attention into revenue. The craft of writing has been replaced by the craft of acquisition. The writer has become a content marketer. The newsletter has become a sales funnel. And you have become a lead, not a reader.

I am not going to tell you to unsubscribe from everything. Read what you actually read. The three or four newsletters you open every time they arrive. The ones you would miss if they stopped. Those are real. Those matter. The rest are just noise with a subscribe button. You do not owe them your attention. You do not owe them an open. You do not owe them a justification. Your inbox is not a charity. It is your attention, and attention is the only thing you cannot make more of.

Unsubscribe from everything you do not read. The writer will not notice. The world will not end. And you will have one fewer source of guilt in a life that already has enough.