Short conversational excerpt from a YouTube video by Chris Miquel (uploaded Dec 28, 2025) arguing that focusing solely on growing email subscriber counts is a vanity metric unless deliverability is addressed — e.g., “you can have a million subscribers, but if you can only deliver to 50,000 of them, you just wasted money on 950,000 subscribers.”
Concern is like, okay, well, I don't really want to spend more money on email deliverability. But they don't realize yesterday they lost money because their emails aren't hitting inboxes.
Yes. People, when they are, you know, building their email lists.
Yeah.
They think, let me just scale my email list. Let me grow it as big as it can go. It's a vanity metric. I want to get to a million subscribers. Not realizing that, yeah, you can have a million subscribers, but if you can only deliver to 50,000 of them, you just wasted money on 950,000 subscribers.
Yeah.
Making sure you establish in the beginning to inbox and have good email deliverability. So while you're scaling and you're acquiring all this, spending all this money, acquiring new data, you're able to actually inbox those people and activate those people. So unfortunately, what happens is a lot of people when they get into the newsletter space, they don't realize this. So they're basically sending to their whole list every time. And as it grows, they don't even think about email deliverability. It's not a problem until it is a problem.