- One of the biggest trends in recent years has been the boom in newsletters — and creators are moving from traditional media outlets to self-publish, usually via Substack.
- The Browser is an 11 year old curation newsletter that mines the internet for the best writing and delivers it straight to your inbox.
- Uri Bram, its publisher, spoke to Insider about how they grew the newsletter to great success.
Along with work-from-home and ecommerce everything, one of the clearest trends has been the boom in newsletters. With traditional media outlets cutting back in the face of the pandemic and a general drop in the price paid for a random eyeball, huge numbers of creators have made the switch to selling their words directly to the public, usually via Substack.
Experts can (and do) argue at length about whether this will be a durable solution for many creators, but for some old guard newsletters it already is.
The Browser, a beloved curation newsletter that mines the internet for the best (and very often oddest) writing and delivers it straight to your inbox has been around for eleven years and now boasts more than 10,000 paying subscribers.
That works out to a healthy living for its creator, former business journalist Robert Cottrell, and publisher Uri Bram, who joined Cottrell in 2015 and handles the business and tech side of The Browser. Insider spoke to Bram about how they’ve done it.
A brief history of The Browser
The Browser began life eleven years ago as a website rather than a newsletter. But after several years it became apparent most readers were accessing the content from their inboxes, so the project was reconceptualized as a newsletter.
This flexibility is a consistent thoughline in The Browser's story. It started out with a free-to-read, ad supported model before switching to a paid model seven years ago (more on pricing below). Similarly, the tech that powers The Browser has shifted over the years. It started out on WordPress, MailChimp, and Stripe before moving over to SubStack for an all-in-one solution (where it once held second place on the leaderboard of publications by revenue) and now on to Ghost, which is cheaper and offers creators more of an independent identity and design flexibility.
Now the Substack boom has caught up to The Browser, a development Bram welcomes. "We're very excited for an independent creator model. There are so many niches and so many interesting people in the world with interesting things to say. There's plenty of space for everyone," he says.
So come on in, the water's fine and if you do, Bram has a few hard won lessons to share.
1. More is not necessarily better
One of the first questions you'll encounter when you begin your newsletter journey is how much content to produce. Unfortunately this isn't at all easy to answer.
"People pay for newsletters in both their time and their money. And so sending more often is not necessarily better. Sending longer is not necessarily better," Bram cautions. "One of the main reasons people unsubscribe when they leave the unsubscription note is, 'I really loved the content, but there was too much of it.'"
You can lose subscribers by not providing adequate value for money, sure, but you can also lose them by flooding their inboxes and provoking guilt at all that unread content. Walking the line between these two dangers is difficult for all publishers, according to Bram who has spoken to many about the issue. There is no single solution to the problem, but being mindful of the dangers on either side can help you find your personal sweet spot.
2. "The only good marketing is writing good pieces"
If you've never seen an ad for The Browser before that's not because you haven't been paying attention. It's because they've made a conscious choice to skip marketing and grow by word of mouth. That decision is partially a reflection of their quirky product, which inspires great loyalty in a small but passionate audience, but it also reflects the difficulties of newsletter marketing in general.
"Lenny Rachitsky, who's been very successful, he has one of the fastest growing newsletters. He says that the only good marketing is writing good pieces," Bram quotes. "No one seems to have figured out newsletter marketing very well, as far as I can tell. If someone has they're not talking about it."
When you are in the early stages of building your newsletter and have limited time and resources, this means your energy is much better spent figuring out how to write great content people will recommend than stressing about clever marketing tricks.
3. Authenticity beats maximizing clicks
If you're at all familiar with the world of traditional, ad-driven media you will be shocked by another aspect of The Browser's operations: they don't track what subscribers click on and what they don't.
"We used to have click tracking," Bram explains. What it revealed is everyone clicks on stories about sex, Trump, and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson (no, I'm not shocked either). "We saw that and we just didn't want it in our faces. We just switched it off."
That sounds like insanity to anyone used to monetizing eyeballs, but Bram insists there are long-term costs to giving in to people's baser curiosities. If you don't believe him just observe your own inner dialogue next time you find yourself idly clicking through social media.
"I feel so powerless in front of the tech that I use. I scroll Twitter, even when I'm not enjoying it. I read these things and I think, why am I here? What am I doing?" Bram confesses . Most of us can relate. "So yeah, there's things people would click on if they were there, but in some sense, we pride ourselves in not giving people what they want. We want to give people interesting, timeless reading they'll still remember five years from now."
That mission may be particular to The Browser, but the idea that sacrificing short-term sensationalism for an authentic long-term vision is a good bet that translates to any newsletter.
"It's crucial to have an authentic voice and so much easier said than done," says Bram. "A lot of people will say that, but you read the newsletter and you can feel that they are saying what they think other people will be interested in. It's obviously a really hard impulse to contain, but I think to the extent that you can be weird and genuine, that's where you find people who are interested in what you're doing. The world is too bland."
4. No one knows anything about pricing
When it comes to pricing, Bram is happy to level with newbie newsletter writers. Much like his conversations around marketing, "we've talked to a lot of people about pricing over the years. Nobody knows how to do it." The Browser started out at $20 a year, before moving up to $34, and now finally settling at $48, with those who began subscribing earlier grandfathered in at their original price.
That seems to be right for them, but all this journey taught Bram is humility and that "you can't keep changing your prices. People respond badly to that." While you can reliably charge more for content that subscribers are able to charge as a business expense, otherwise nobody knows anything, so at least don't feel like you're at sea and alone. Everyone is bobbing along with you figuring it out by trial and error.
5. The most important email you send subscribers
Bram offers one more tactical piece of advice for newbie newsletter writers: try very hard to convert monthly subscribers to annual ones. He cites SaaS sales expert Patrick McKenzie who claims that the email trying to convince subscribers to make the switch is the most important one you'll ever send them.
"Something we've had a lot of success with is, if someone is with us for several months in a row on a monthly subscription, we send them an email saying, 'Hey, do you want to upgrade to yearly? Why not? You'll save 20 percent,'" Bram reports. Customers win because who doesn't like a discount? And you win because you lock in revenue and reduce your stress.
Put all this together and what do you get? Bram's advice may be light on specific prescriptions but that's because it's so heavily focused on being yourself. Creators may be fleeing to newsletters in part to escape the homogenizing effects of traditional media, but readers are equally hungry for unique voices.
So pay attention to tactics and other creators' tips, but if there's one thing to take away from the OGs of the newsletter business it's that you should imitate no one (including them or a click-maximizing algorithm). The surest route to success isn't short but it is simple - lean hard into authenticity.
