The newsletter : Old wine in new bottles?
You may wonder why I am reaching out to you using Medium, i.e. a newsletter format. This is in line with everything I want to do together with you in this course: evaluate the evolution of the marcom landscape and actually use the channels that are on the rise.
Very much so with newsletters. First, a look over our shoulder. The essence of the web 2.0 as the term was popularized by Tim O’Reilly in 2004 is participation, i.e. everybody’s participation, not just companies and authorities, not just established media. This participation in public communication was made easy by the introduction of platforms making blogging easy (cfr. Blogger, Wordpress, Skyblog, later Tumblr).
Today sees an acceleration in the use of a well-known format supported by new frictionless technology: the newsletter. One way to gauge the promise of newcomers is to check whether the tech giants seem to take an interest. Precisely. Twitter has recently bought Revue and launched Revue by Twitter. The NYT unveiled information stating that “Facebook is said to be planning newsletter tools to court independent writers.”
This is a phenomenon that is fuelled by several other trends living in today’s society: the passion economy, the pandemic, self-entrepreneurship, a growing resentment against algorithmic communication. Newsletters indeed offer much freedom to writers of all shapes, building their own following organically on the basis of the quality of their content rather than the calculation of algos intended to increase the ad revenue of the big social platforms. The business models, both for the platforms and for their users/writers, vary widely.
Interesting examples are Substack (“Take back your mind. Subscribe directly to writers you trust”), Medium, Ghost (“Build an independent business from your newsletter, where you always own your content & benefit from 0% transaction fees”). Not only do they offer new dynamics compared to blogs in terms of subscription, analytics, monetisation; they also reverse the blogging process, the newsletter becoming the main communication channel feeding its contents natively into a website, instead of using the blog/newsletter to promote the site’s content.
These newsletters should be on your radar, dear LIVErtising students: as a marketer looking for new ways to leverage true content, as a writer trying to monetise your insights, or as a student wanting to detect early signs of emerging creativity. Therefore, new curation platforms are of course also appearing on the horizon, such as Newsletter Stack, to help you “Explore the largest curated collection of newsletters on the web.” As an influencer, you may even find partners, sponsors or adspace on Sponsorgap.
