I subscribed to 47 newsletters during the pandemic. I know because I counted them last month while rage-unsubscribing from most of them. I wasn't reading them. They weren't bad — some were genuinely good — but they'd become background noise. Another bolded subject line in an inbox that already had 90 unread messages by 9 a.m.
I don't think I'm unusual. The newsletter gold rush that started around 2020 has quietly hit a wall, and the data backs up what our inboxes already tell us.
The Numbers Behind the Fatigue
The average professional receives over 120 emails per day, according to the Radicati Group. Mailchimp's own benchmarks show average open rates across industries hovering around 21% — and that number is inflated by Apple's Mail Privacy Protection, which pre-loads emails and counts them as "opened" even when they're not. Real human open rates are almost certainly lower.
Meanwhile, Substack has grown to over 35 million active subscriptions and 4 million paid subscribers. That sounds impressive until you realize what it means for individual writers: you're competing for attention in the most crowded channel in digital communication. Every newsletter you send lands next to work emails, bank alerts, shipping notifications, and thirty other newsletters from people just as thoughtful as you.
The result is predictable. Open rates for independent newsletters have been trending down. Unsubscribe rates are creeping up. And a growing number of newsletter creators are quietly burning out, because writing on a fixed schedule for a platform you don't control turns out to feel a lot like a job — except the job doesn't pay most people.
The Platform Risk Nobody Mentions
Here's the thing about newsletters that doesn't get discussed enough: you don't own the distribution. Yes, you technically "own" the email list. But your deliverability, your open rates, your ability to reach people — all of that depends on email providers' spam filters, which change constantly and without notice.
Gmail's tabbed inbox alone probably killed more newsletter engagement than any competitor ever could. Your carefully written essay gets filed under "Promotions" alongside Bed Bath & Beyond coupons. You wrote it like a letter. Gmail treats it like an ad.
A blog doesn't have this problem. A blog post lives at a URL you control. It gets indexed by search engines. It's discoverable by people who've never heard of you. Nobody's spam filter decides whether it reaches your audience.
The Writers Who Survived Did Both
The newsletter writers I follow who are still going strong after five years share a common trait: they all have a blog too. The newsletter drives the relationship. The blog drives the discovery. When someone Googles a question and finds your blog post, they might subscribe to your newsletter. But that doesn't work in reverse — nobody Googles their way into your inbox.
The smartest play I've seen is people who write in one place and publish to both. A friend of mine writes her posts in Google Docs, uses Cloudpad to turn the doc into her blog, and then emails the same content to her list. One piece of writing, two distribution channels, one of which she actually owns.
Own the Soil, Not Just the Crop
I'm not saying kill your newsletter. Newsletters are great for building direct relationships with readers. But if your newsletter is your only publishing channel, you're farming on rented land. Your content's discoverability is zero. Your archive is trapped in a platform. Your readers can only find you if they already know you exist.
Start a blog. Make it dead simple — something you can publish to in five minutes. Put your best newsletter essays there too. Let Google do what Google does. In a year, your blog will be bringing in readers your newsletter never could have reached. And when the next inbox apocalypse hits — and it will — your writing will still be out there, sitting at a URL with your name on it.
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