Brandwatch Bulletin #55: How Newsletters Reach Beyond Inboxes

We're getting meta today.

What’s better than a newsletter analyzing newsletters? Nothing, so you’re in luck as that’s what today’s bulletin is.

Let’s get to it.

A newsletter about newsletters

If you’ve spent even a small amount of time online over the last year, you’ll have heard about the rise of the email newsletter. Platforms like Substack have drawn a lot of attention as big name journalists and commentators have moved their writing and opinions to newsletters.

We’ll avoid contributing to the discourse on what this means for journalism, traditional publishers, and whether this model is sustainable, as there are a ton of articles that have delved deep into these questions. Instead, we’re going to look at the data.

Specifically, we’re going to look at the reach this newsletter content has on Twitter and forums. Why? Because while the main way newsletters are read is via a private inbox, the promotion of said newsletters on public social media is necessary to gain a following and, importantly, paid subscribers.

With this in mind, we used our Consumer Research platform to measure the reach of content from three big email newsletter platforms. We’ve used our Brandwatch reach score, which estimates how many people see those links (you can read more on how this works here).

It’s safe to say it’s been a good year for newsletters.

While the reach of newsletter content saw strong gains in 2019, it wasn’t until 2020 that things really kicked off. Between January 2020 and January 2021, reach increased by an incredible 267%.

We saw peak newsletter reach in March of this year, with April seeing a small fall. What’s clear is that newsletters are seeing sustained and growing interest. How long this can go on for is a different question, and we’ll be keeping an eye on the data.

But what does this data look like compared to the reach of traditional online publishers? Relative to them, are newsletters really doing that well?

We conducted the same analysis on two of the biggest news publishers in the world to find out.

It’s important to remember we’re comparing newsletters to well-established, global publishers with enormous brand recognition. Considering this, we’d argue newsletters are doing very well on social, especially when emails are their actual focus.

Of course, we should note that there are thousands upon thousands of newsletters being published every day. The sheer volume will help push their numbers up but, looking closer at the data, it’s clear a small number of newsletters are doing the heavy lifting.

The newsletters leading the pack

Looking at trending newsletters within the data, we were able to pull out the ten we found to have the most reach.

These ten alone account for 22% of the reach for all newsletter links combined, while the top 20 account for 30%. That is pretty staggering, showing that while newsletters themselves are popular, big names are behind a significant chunk of the interest.

We also shouldn’t be surprised that news and politics are the dominating topics. Not only has the last year included the US presidential elections, but also the Covid-19 pandemic and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement. You will not be shocked to learn that Donald Trump was the biggest topic amongst newsletter link shares.

To find anything non-politics in the list, you have to go pretty far down. One of the most popular is Historic.ly, a newsletter about history and “the stuff they forget to tell you about at school.”

But what’s next for newsletters? With Trump out of the White House and vaccines offering a way out of the pandemic, will we see interest rise in other topics? We can already see hints of technology, fiction, and culture newsletters gaining ground in the last couple of months.

Whatever comes next, newsletters are on the cusp of becoming a true fixture of online content. If the growth goes on for much longer, it’s hard to see how they’ll ever go away.

What should we cover next?

Is there a topic, trend, or industry you’d like us to feature in the Brandwatch Bulletin? We want to hear your ideas to make sure our readers are getting what they want. We may even ask to interview you if you’re involved with the topic.

Send any and all ideas to [email protected] and let’s talk.

Thanks for reading

That’s it for today. We’ll be back on Monday. If you were forwarded this email and want in on the action, get subscribed to the Brandwatch Bulletin now.

Stay safe,

The Brandwatch React team

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