The New Social Network That Isn’t New at All

Christopher Best, Substack’s chief executive, said the company’s creation was driven by feelings like the ones I was having. “We felt this growing sense of despair in traditional social media,” he said. “Twitter, Facebook, etc. — they’ve all incentivized certain negative patterns.”

What firms like Substack and Revue make possible is more personal than the wave of newsletters that emerged in the early 2000s from companies like Daily Candy, Flavorpill, Nonsense NYC and Oh My Rockness. Those brands mostly blasted lifestyle content out to the masses, targeting city residents with disposable income and attracting millions of dollars in venture capital, said Naveen Selvadurai, an entrepreneur and partner at the start-up incubator Expa.

More recently, media start-ups like The Skimm, a daily newsletter started by two former NBC producers, have grown from dozens of readers to millions. (The New York Times is a minority investor in The Skimm.) Axios has tapped into the newsletter market with a focus on politics and business. Other big media companies — Vox, BuzzFeed, CNN — have latched on to the trend as they seek a deeper bond with readers.

Newsletters could be a more reliable means of increasing readership for major publishers whose relationships with social networks have soured. Remember when Facebook moved away from promoting videos on the platform? Or when it decided to show more posts from friends and family, and de-emphasize content from publishers and brands? With every shift, big media companies had to adjust.

“Publishers have learned the hard way that traffic from social media is too volatile,” said Martijn de Kuijper, Revue’s chief executive.

For me, a guy writing dispatches from home in his pajamas, email offers a more personal connection between writer and audience. Since beginning The Dump, I’ve traded emails with people who might have followed me on Twitter but felt more comfortable talking with me one on one.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/19/technology/new-social-network-email-newsletter.html?partner=rss&emc=rss