What Dan Frommer Has Learned in the First Year of Running a Subscription Newsletter Business

Dan Frommer:

It’s been almost nine months since I started publishing The New Consumer.

Wrapping up my first calendar year, I wanted to share my experience so far of running a one-person, membership-funded publishing startup, and some thoughts about how this sort of thing fits into where the media business is going.

In short: This is working! And I’m excited about the future.

Glad to hear it’s working out, but I’m not surprised. Frommer is a good writer and a keenly insightful observer.

And readers love newsletters. Websites are getting harder and harder to read. Paywalls forget who you are on a seemingly weekly basis. Websites put interstitial popovers directly over the content you’re trying to read. Videos are set to autoplay. How many times are you supposed to tell the same goddamn website whether you’ll accept their fucking cookies? It’s like they’re purposefully making it hard to read. Newsletters have none of that. They’re just easy and fun to read. The web can and should be that way too, but all too often it’s not.

★ Monday, 23 December 2019