The last couple of posts described why online archival of sites and blogs is something I’m interested in. Specifically, the web is getting old, domains expire, blog hosting services change. That reminded me of this article from 2013 by the blogger Jason Kottke:
Instead of blogging, people are posting to Tumblr, tweeting, pinning things to their board, posting to Reddit, Snapchatting, updating Facebook statuses, Instagramming, and publishing on Medium. In 1997, wired teens created online diaries, and in 2004 the blog was king. Today, teens are about as likely to start a blog (over Instagramming or Snapchatting) as they are to buy a music CD. Blogs are for 40-somethings with kids.
Kottke himself is one of the Internet’s most well-known, longest-published bloggers, having written for twenty-two years running, with well over ten of those full-time. But his essay highlighted a trend that has continued unabated. There are more people writing online than ever before, but that has increasingly been on closed platforms like Medium.
The trend around newsletters is encouraging. We have talked before of how major journalists moving to their own newsletters could even spawn a wave of independent, reader-supported journalism. There are many hundreds of high-quality newsletters now, to the point where discovering them is going to be an issue. There is no good search/browse/recommend for newsletters yet.
Newsletters are email, a technology much older than the web itself. But they’re easier to keep track of someone’s writing than a blog. RSS and RSS Readers never really caught one because it was one more piece of software readers had to use, but everyone has an email inbox. For the writer, publishing an email is as simple as, probably simpler than publishing a blog post.
The downside is discovery – where do you find interesting things people are writing?
Discovery is going to particularly important if newsletters are to thrive as an easy means of causal writing and distribution for the average person – because while newsletters have been around from very early on in the form of people just mailing a group of friends and growing organically from there, the latest wave of newsletter services typefied by the venture-funded Substack for who monetization is an important goal. That changes what the service optimizes discovery and promotion for: newsletters about topics that are ‘current’, that have the highest chance of conversion to paid, and not the long tail. It starts looking like other Silicon Valley businesses:
Arguably, it’s another example of money and prestige coming for an internet-age creative format that was better when it was a hush-hush community activity—non-remunerative, an anti-discovery algorithm, full of in-speak, artistically strange (see: podcasts, blogs, fan fiction, memes).
Without discovery, newsletters aren’t going to replace social media as the place most people share what’s interesting to them. Nevertheless, they remain an extremely hopeful medium for independent, direct-to-reader journalism.
One reply on “For newsletters to become the new blogs, discovery is the missing piece”
Hi Rahul. I think only those blogs from the past decade that got some traction, continue to provide a steady stream of content. New content creators almost always create content on a platform like Medium, Quora or reddit where the search and discovery of content is optimized.
Besides, most byte-sized content has to be wrapped in the form of questions and their answers. It cannot be all topical, which, like paywalls, does reduce discovery. Google’s search is also very optimized for answering questions, as many people type in questions on the search bar. However, Google can answer very short, mostly objective questions and re-direct the user to sites with more detailed answers.
This format reduces the barrier to entry. Most people have nothing much to say about anything, but do know the answer to a very specific thing like say, getting their ear-wax cleaned on Delhi’s streets, or a very detailed flight simulator from the 1990s that ran on hardware with very limited power. Someone having the urge to answer this can immediately do so, without having to erect a tent of a blog, and hoping that people will spot it and the esoteric thing he/she has to so badly express. With Quora/rediit/Twitter, reach is guaranteed. That too, to the right people.
Google CAN index blogs according to content very well. However, it cannot feed content in a constant stream as done once again on platforms like Quora and reddit. That’s why Blogspot will never be where it once was.
RSS is a feeder, but one has to feed it first before it feeds one back. That too, the feed is merely a checklist of blogs and newsletters that one has chosen to follow. It’s not intelligent like the one on Quora, Medium, Facbook, Twitter or reddit. It’s clearly on it’s last legs.
A platform to answer questions or talk on topics, an indexer, and an intelligent feeder are the 3 essentials that a good content discovery platform needs to succeed. Google has the second only, but lags on the first and is absent on the third. That’s why stand-alone blogs and newsletters are, I think, will never grow here onward.