How do casual blogs like mine retain their interested readers when every distribution channel is degrading?

Well, if you scroll to the bottom of this post—or any other post here—you should find a simple email address and a subscribe button. Giving me your email signs you up for the newsletter, which is simply an emailed version of this site. It's sent when I post something new, which averages to about once a week.

Subscriptions and memberships are core components of the Ghost publishing engine, and one of my reasons for migrating to this platform from WordPress. Granted, I'm a bit late to the party. Email newsletters have been popular for at least a few years now, and I'm jumping onto this latest—also ironically the oldest—technology after the hype cycle has already worn off.

Of course, I've been using other mechanisms for distribution, both for this blog and for my own reading habits. For a long time, my favorite tool has been Really Simple Syndication (RSS) for its simplicity and user control. But as the protocol waned in popularity, social media surged as a replacement, an all-encompassing promotional tool with the added bonus of hitting the viral lottery.

With RSS, the format is limited by design, so feeds are constrained to text, static images, and audio/video files. As websites are increasingly stuffed with banners, auto-playing videos, interactive pop-ups and overlays, all of these annoying advertisements are unrenderable in RSS. I've found that the cleanest RSS feeds are the ones where the publisher has left the feed alone. But recently, it seems like sites are inserting the static equivalents of those dynamic ad elements into their feeds anyway. So instead of a thumbnail video inserted just below the fold, your RSS-powered article has irrelevant product placements inserted every other paragraph.

In the case of social media, article discovery has to compete with a lot of…other stuff. Algorithmic feeds already prioritize engagement, and any amount of friction risks losing the user. TikTok and its ilk have already shown what near-zero friction looks like: auto-playing short videos, lazy swipes to navigate content. X is a blend of GIFs, images and AI slop, while Bluesky and Facebook interactions feel closer to group chats. A decade ago, Twitter users invented the tweet storm, stringing together a thread of tweets to both get around the character limit and to serialize text while remaining in the app. Against all of this other content, an article headline that links out to a separate site is fighting an uphill battle for attention.

So this leaves newsletters to fill the void. Email clients recognize the format, and most will automatically categorize newsletters separately from everything else in your inbox. It's a simple email, so it can be forwarded and shared, or aggregated through another app like Matter or Meco for a more pleasant reading experience. There's something in it for the publisher as well: they can track open and clickthrough rates, and leverage some of the email marketing analytics that's been built over decades.

Substack was the pioneer in cultivating this channel, and they pitched the principle of letting publishers own their relationships with their readers. Their early focus on paid memberships established a content quality floor, and gained momentum by attracting strong newsletter authors early. That said, their features—building Notes, aggregating subscribers within their app, upcoming plans for ads—renege on their founding premise and have drawn tension with their author base. But since the medium is still email, authors own their subscriber lists and, if forced, can take it elsewhere.

Since each distribution mechanism has its pros and cons, plus the aforementioned degradation of the more mature channels, I've tweaked how I'm using each:

• RSS: Aggregate feeds with the Unread app, and when feeds get polluted with too many ads or irrelevant posts, subscribe to their social media account instead or unsubscribe altogether. RSS works particularly well for infrequently updated sites like personal blogs and webcomics, as I usually want to read every post.
• Newsletters: Forward emails to Matter for later reading, particularly since many of them are lengthier and go into depth. This channel works really well for articles published on a regular cadence (e.g., daily or weekly), but the best stuff tends to be subscription-only.
• Social media: Periodically skim through X/Bluesky/Mastodon/Threads, scanning for noteworthy headlines or keywords of interest. The hit rate here is generally low, but it's the only way to discover new pieces of writing by some of the people I follow where there's no other distribution channel.

Given the option, I should subscribe to this blog's newsletter—hence the experiment. If things go well (or even if they don't), I'll share some stats in a few months on how much impact this untested channel makes.