This Week in Substack (2/19/21)
Updates to the subscriber dashboard; and too many new newsletters for one post!
“This Week in Substack” is currently available to all readers of Sub Pub. It will eventually be a perk of paid subscription (unless you can talk me out of it ;) ).
Subscriber Dashboard
Substack has updated the subscriber dashboard, giving creators more valuable statistics, a way to sort the subscriber list by these statistics, and perhaps best of all, new email capabilities.
In order to learn about all the new features, I recommend reading the blog post and comments and the guide to the dashboard. The guide includes a helpful video:
I have a few comments on this update.
The ability to email subscribers — all, just one, a few, or a filtered list — should be very useful, for these reasons at least:
Email (beyond emailed posts) will allow more satisfying two-way communication between creators and subscribers.
Email will allow new perks of free or paid subscription.
Finally a newsletter can send a post or message to all or some subscribers without publishing it to the web first.
Email Opens
As noted in one of the comments by the blog post’s author:
[Email] opens are tracked with a pixel in the emails, so if people block images they'll appear as 0 opens. It's worth noting that some people, even paid subscribers just prefer to always read on the web, and will turn off emails.
So this statistic depends in part on factors that Substack can’t control. It could be misleading. If your email opens seem mediocre, you might want to check your other statistics before you get too concerned.1
Incidentally, I assume that “email opens” relate only to posts, and not to other email messages to one or more subscribers.2 In any case, I wonder if Substack might eventually provide tracking statistics for each email message sent. Some creators might want to know whether one message was opened by many subscribers while another was largely ignored.
The Dashboard on Mobile Devices
When viewing the dashboard in portrait mode on my phone's mobile browser (Chrome for Android), I couldn't see the "Filter" or other buttons at the top of the mailing list. When I changed the browser to landscape or desktop mode, I could see these buttons. YMMV, depending on your mobile device and browser.
I suppose this is a relatively minor issue. But I hope it’s one that Substack fixes.
New Newsletters
I listed 23 new newsletters two weeks ago, and 57 last week. This week, so far, I’ve found more than 230 additional newsletters which launched in the past four weeks. I expect that I could find a few hundred more.
That’s too many for one post. Technically, I could include links to hundreds of newsletters here. But who would read such a long list?
I’ll divide the links I’ve found into several posts over the next week. I want to give some publicity and a welcome to as many new Substackers as I can. The best way to do that is with a non-overwhelming list.
There are too many new newsletters to keep up with. And the number likely increases each week.
I’ll have to figure out how to automate the process of finding new newsletters. Or I’ll find someone who will find the newsletters for me (or for everyone). Or I can get paid [subscriptions] to do this work. ;)
The Competition
I’ll leave with words of wisdom from one of Substack’s co-founders. You might say it’s incomplete; but I think you’ll agree that it’s true for some in the Twitterverse.
I’ve posted a question in the blog comments on whether any other statistics are based on pixel tracking that some users might block.
I’ve also posted a question on whether “email opens” relate only to posts.