The Substack Conundrum
Followers increase, subscribers drop in a sawtooth pattern, and substack fails to send emails to a significant minority of subscribers
Total followers increase smoothly but at a lower rate than before.
While subscription numbers make no sense. Total subscribers are just about what they were 6 months ago, when I hit 50,000. Paid subscribers have dropped by 22% since the peak, or 367 subscriptions.
And althought I have an alleged 50,000 plus subscribers, only 47,000 are getting the emails. Are the rest dead email addresses, or is there another explanation?
Here is something else that is pretty weird. Substack says that 31.4% of readers open each post on average—which is not bad.
But then substack tells you the actual number of emails opened—and in some cases it is over 50% of emails delivered, a great number. Why the discrepancy?
It appears that substack is no longer keeping track of those who go to the post directly, without an email, perhaps referred by friends, from browing substack, or using the info provided to followers.
I don’t think I can fix any of this. But I thought I would share it, as it could be useful for other substack authors and my readers.
First, thank you for your diligent work with your Substack blog, Meryl.
I know I'm not the only one who turns off and on subs because I can't afford much but want to offer something. So I rotate paid subs with just a few authors per month.
I generally get multiple emails from you on a given day, so assume I'm not missing any. Because my interests are so broad, I have free subs to many. I usually breeze what comes into my email, then decide if I want more info, or to take time to 'like' the post (no small task with 50+ posts arriving daily!).
It is disappointing that Substack is not more helpful to its content producers. Seems to be the trajectory of $ucce$$.
This is also true on Rumble, numbers creep up ever so slowly. Rumble notifies subscribers, 24 hour hours after our most recent podcast. Much shadow-banning with likes diminishing as I watch...very frustrating.