The big five oh oh for Fair Warning

Back in June I’d been running my newsletter Fair Warning for around 16 weeks when I hit 200 subscribers. I wrote about my experience writing it and what I learned.

Thrilled to say that I’ve now hit 500 subscribers and I thought I’d look at the stats again. This will be the last meta-post I write on here, since I don’t think it’s especially interesting for people. But I instinctively value transparency in people and try to be as transparent as possible, so here goes.

Fair Warning meta-data

This time I’m throwing all the stats in one chart before examining each one…

Subscribers

Subscriber numbers have been quite steady, but there have obviously been big leaps where people have featured them in newsletters etc. As time has gone on, more people have subscribed week by week. For instance, there were on average, 11 new subscribers in the first 16 weeks, and afterwards, the average is around 19.

Unique opens

Last time I looked at rates for clicks and opens, but this is somewhat misleading — of course open rates will be higher at the beginning because there were only 23 people subscribed at the beginning, and they were keen to check it out. Unique opens vs subscribers gives a better sense of improvement over time; it averages out at around 57% over the lifetime of the newsletter, with the lowest being 48% and the highest being 91%.

As mentioned in the previous piece, this outperforms standard benchmarks for newsletters which surprised me. I had anticipated a dramatic fall in open rates the more subscribers there were, but that hasn’t really happened (yet).

Unique clicks

Unique clicks is a really weird metric to get my head around. I said before that it’s a hard metric to gauge. I don’t have any data on exactly what people click on, so I have no idea what people find particularly interesting in any given newsletter. That would be valuable data for improving the newsletter.

The average clickthrough rate is around 21% with a low of around 10% and a high of around 30%. The standard benchmark is 1–5% but again, you’d expect newsletters with masses (hundreds/thousands) of subscribers to have large numbers of uninterested people who just don’t bother opening emails. I expected clickthrough rate to decrease substantially but it hasn’t (yet) — the first 16 weeks had 21% on average and the newsletters since then have got around 20%.

Medium stats

I took Fair Warning off Medium for a couple of weeks before deciding that I would publish on Medium but the day after I send it out via TinyLetter. I wanted to find a way of encouraging people to subscribe (which is my preference) but also allow people who don’t like newsletters to read it somehow. This way, it works as an incentive to subscribe and feels like a happy medium. I was therefore expecting a reduction in stats here, and I have.

In June I reported a reading time of 1,754 minutes over the last 90 days — that’s now just 786 minutes. Additionally, there were 1,711 views over the last 90 days in June — that’s gone down to 733.

I can’t say I am that annoyed about that reduction, I think most people have ended up subscribing rather than reading on here, especially now since I’ve mildly incentivised subscribing over checking the publication on Medium.

What next?

I don’t have any concrete plans for progressing Fair Warning, just some vague thoughts. I really enjoy doing it as it forces me to seek out good projects and things that I might want to do in future. I feel like it keeps me in the loop with the industry and what other people are doing. It’s also fun?!

As noted last time, I rarely get feedback that I can act on, because it’s so subjective. People email and tell me they really liked a particular newsletter but then others say, ‘this wasn’t my favourite one’, so it’s quite hit and miss and it’s really difficult to tell what will go down well. I think once I get to 1,000 subscribers I’ll probably move it to MailChimp and make use of their more in-depth stats.

I’ve contemplated monetising it somehow but that feels deeply cynical and weird; currently I have a ko-fi account and several people have ‘bought’ me a coffee over the last few months. This was hugely surprising since the link is always buried at the end and I genuinely didn’t expect anything. I thought of using Patreon but that felt a bit pointless. I would probably be open to sponsorship or mini-ads for relevant jobs etc, but it isn’t something I’m proactively seeking out.

To be honest, I kind of like that right now I do it for me and I’m not beholden to anyone else. The fact that other people like it is really a bonus!

• If you’re intrigued about FW, subscribe here, or read the publication.

What are your thoughts? What do you like seeing in Fair Warning? What do you not like? Comment below!