Two speakers debate whether writers should chase broad audiences or niche subscribers. One cites newsletter open rates around 53% and argues engaged subscribers beat chasing impressions.
Yeah, I think that's— I think you are running into like the conundrum that a lot of people run into when they start writing stuff online, which is, do I care about branching to a wide audience? Do I care about catering really well to a niche audience? And I don't think there's a right answer to this, but it's also 2 very different business models, right? If you are, you know, trying to optimize for your ad load, for example, you're trying to increase the number of— Impression. Yeah, number of things you write. Number of impressions, number of eyeballs, all that kind of stuff. If you're trying to do other stuff, then actually you might care about the quality of audience. So like for me, for example, I have very explicitly focused on trying to have a high quality, whatever, like subscriber base, et cetera. And you know, the metric I'm probably most proud of is that the average open rate across all the newsletters is about 53%.
And it's been going for a long time, which means that you have like subscribers that have been following you for like a long time and still opening.
Paige of Behind Genius driving an AI electric train in St. Louis (Intramotev Visit)
