Natalie Jarvey for The Ankler:
“Newsletters are cooked,” says Taylor Lorenz, whose own User Mag newsletter boasts 97,000 total subscribers. Two years ago, Lorenz left her high-profile job as a columnist at The Washington Post for what she described then as the “complete autonomy” of reaching her audience directly in their email inboxes. But she says she’s lost a third of her paid subscribers in the past several months, and she predicts an AI-driven extinction event. “I don’t think we’re going to be reading email newsletters in five years,” Lorenz says.
Things aren’t quite so dire with my humble tech advice newsletter, but I’m feeling the trend as my paid subscriber count has been more or less in the same place since the beginning of the year. While I’m not losing people much faster than before, new subscribers are definitely harder to come by, and sale events don’t have the juice that they used to. I think it’s a combination of email fatigue, subscription fatigue, and the economy.
The bigger concern is that free sign-ups seem to be slowing down, particularly on the Cord Cutter Weekly side. That’s where AI is the real problem: Google and ChatGPT steal what I write, and people don’t click links anymore.
Fundamentally, though, I’m optimistic that a lot of people still enjoy attaining knowledge through reading human writing, even if it’s not the majority. The challenge will be to keep finding those people as they are increasingly overwhelmed by noise.