News and Statistics

An eventful week

Some of you may have noticed that I put a subscription on offer during the week, and then shortly after reconsidered and dragged the publication out of the monetization scheme altogether.

What’s the fuzz?!

That move was caused by something that I should have foreseen, as a certified social media manager, but which my excitement about this nice new platform (new for me) had made me not see, but which became clear when I found out how to read the site statistics:

Out of 116 subscribers, in fact, not all were really subscribers when it got to the point. They might be registered as such, but if they are not reading anything, they only act as subscribers without really being it.

Statistical details

During the last 30 days, 41 people have seen at least 1 article on A Rich Life. I cannot know if they have read all of it, but they have somehow seen it so that Substack could register it as seen.

• 15 of these had seen 1–2 articles

• 12 had seen 3–5 articles

• 14 had seen more than 5 articles

That is by itself very nice: having 41 unique readers during a month is more than many amateur writers can hope for after publishing for about three months on a platform where 20 million people publish regularly — there are many possible distractions, many alternatives.

But knowing that

• about 6% of the users of Substack will ever pay for a subscription to anything,

• and then at most for a few publications,

• and considering that most people have a free subscription to dozens or hundreds of publications already,

• and, not the least, seeing that only about 26 are regularly returning readers, the remaining 15 to be seen as rare readers,

leaves a very low chance for any of the active subscribers to A Rich Life to decide to buy a subscription — maybe 1% or lower.

The future could become brighter, but right now there are very small chances to sell any subscriptions at all.

The logical conclusion and decision

In order to spare all of us for the embarrassment of not facing the reality, I decided to cancel the operation and wait for a more optimal situation before trying again.

This was enforced by another thing, I should have foreseen: that some subscribers decided to unsubscribe immediately when I started talking about offerings and subscriptions.

Suddenly, the magic was challenged by reality — free was somehow threatened by a potential need for payment sometime in the future, and the spell was broken.

From the statistics, it is also possible to see that about half of the subscribers never read anything at all, and about the same number (but not exactly the same people) never opened an email with a newsletter.

The latter is to be challenged, as there seemingly are some problems for Substack with detecting if people open the emails or not, so the statistics are not accurate on this point.

One last thing I have noticed, is that lately, when I have published more than before (approx. one article per day), the number of readers of each article has dropped. Maybe I am overdoing it? Maybe it is better to reduce the output?

A few questions to understand your needs

These polls will help me a lot, so please consider answering to them. I will not see what each individual has answered, only the result.

Now, I understand that only a few people will even see this article, let alone read it, and maybe some of the readers will decide not to answer the polls, so any input from the above will at best be indicative, but I still hope for some input :)

I have set a time limit of 7 days to answer (from the date of publication).

Please also share your thoughts in the comments. It is all contributing to improve the publication.