Why Newsletters Are Called Outdated, and What Remains

Introduction: What Is Actually Being Compared

How to raise open rates, and how to compare sending tools, are already well documented. What this article takes up is the verdict people reach before any of that — isn’t email a bit dated? On what basis is that verdict passed?

New versus old is debated freely, and the question of what exactly is being compared is generally left vague.

Here is the conclusion first. “Dated” is a comparison made on the basis of currency. But the foundation of publishing is not decided by currency — it is decided by who determines whether the words arrive. Judged on that axis, the comparison reverses.

Addition Does Not Reach the Exit

What someone stuck in publishing thinks of first is more or less fixed: I need more reach. More followers, higher frequency, another platform, simultaneous presence across several. This is addition.

Addition looks intuitively right — more people reached must be better. But however much you enlarge the base, while it happens on borrowed ground you do not leave that ground’s design by a single step.

If anything, the reverse. The more places you operate in, the more separate criteria you must fit, and the more directions your origin is pulled apart in. Addition simply enlarges the wear on borrowed ground.

The problem was never an insufficient base. It was that the centre of gravity sits in a place you do not own. So the solution is not to enlarge the base but to move where the centre of gravity sits — a replacement.

Addition increases quantity on the same structure. Replacement changes the structure itself.

Followers and a List Are Different Things

Here is the distinction people most often collapse.

Followers are a loose crowd connected through a platform. Between you and them stands a gatekeeper. Whether what you publish actually arrives is decided by that gatekeeper. However large the count, you hold no right of direct access.

A list is data you manage directly. A reader has explicitly given permission — I would like to receive what you send — and entrusted you with their contact details. That list bypasses the gatekeeper: you can deliver a message directly, whenever you choose. No one’s judgement sits in between. Decide to send, and it arrives.

So newsletters are dated mistakes the axis of comparison. On the axis of currency it is indeed not new. On the axis of who decides arrival, it remains one of the few options available.

And in the language of economics, this path is a means of production. Someone without a path of delivery grows crops on another’s land and has the terms of harvest set by the landholder. To hold a list is to hold a path of delivery in your own name that cannot be taken from you.

This Is Not an Instruction to Abandon Borrowed Ground

Clear one misreading in advance. From borrowed attention to an owned path is often heard as: so stop using social platforms and use only email. It is not that.

On reflection it could hardly be. Where do the readers who join your list come from? In most cases they met your work on borrowed ground — a social platform, a blog. As the entrance where readers first encounter you, borrowed ground remains indispensable.

So what changes? Where the relationship is stored. Leave a relationship formed on borrowed ground in that place and it stays borrowed, its distribution still held by someone else. Move it into an owned path and it becomes an owned asset.

Use borrowed ground as the entrance; make the owned path the place where the asset accumulates. Separating these two as layers is what replacement actually means. It is not either/or — both are used, in their own roles. What is decisive is which of them the centre of gravity sits on.

One line worth drawing. Using borrowed ground as an entrance, the temptation to maximise numbers operates there too. But the purpose of an entrance is not maximum reach. It is to find readers who resonate with the worldview and guide them to the owned path. Use the entrance; do not surrender the origin at the entrance.

The Origin Returning Inward Is Not an Act of Resolve

Hold an owned path and what you think of first when you begin writing changes. Not will this perform but I want to convey this. External response has not vanished, but it has moved position: no longer the objective of publishing, now a by-product that follows it.

This is the most easily misread point in the whole argument, so distinguish it carefully.

Make external evaluation a by-product rather than an objective — taken alone, that sounds like a matter of attitude, a resolution to stop caring about numbers. It is saying something entirely different.

The origin returns inward not because anyone resolved to stop caring. It returns because the authority to decide arrival has come back into your hands. While you stand on borrowed ground, resolutions are useless: there, the design itself pulls the origin outwards without passing through intention. Resolve does not beat design.

On an owned path that wind is not blowing. Since a gatekeeper does not decide arrival, the reason to optimise for what performs simply disappears. Where no force pulls outwards, the origin stays inward on its own.

Not resolve against an outward wind, but a move to where the wind does not blow. The former leaves the outcome to each person’s strength of will. The latter happens to anyone who moves.

The Side Effects: Numbers Shrink, and Starting Takes Time

A sound account of a solution does not hide its costs. This move has two, stated plainly.

First, in the short term the visible numbers shrink. Stop chasing spread across several places and concentrate on one owned path, and the surface total of reach falls for a while. To an eye accustomed to large figures on borrowed ground, this looks like retreat. While everyone around you competes on impressive follower counts, you are quietly growing something small. There is no denying that impatience accompanies that period.

Second, an owned path is slow to start. Borrowed ground sits on top of the large user base a platform has already assembled, so it starts fast. Your own path grows one reader at a time, as each gives permission. It begins from a startlingly small number.

Both costs are real. There is no point concealing them. But this difficulty happens once, and its effect persists.

State that precisely. Once does not mean that publishing at the entrance stops one day. What ends is not the activity but a particular kind of difficulty.

While the centre of gravity sits on borrowed ground, you carry indefinitely the difficulty of surrendering the origin and redoing your optimisation each time the criteria change. That kind of difficulty — the kind that erodes the origin — has no end. The difficulty of growing an owned path — of establishing the authority over arrival in your own hands — has a finishing point. Choosing a one-time difficulty over an endless one is the essential structure of this move.

Conclusion: Judge by Authority, Not by Novelty

Newsletters are called dated because they are being compared on the axis of currency. On that axis they are dated. That is a fact.

But the foundation of publishing is not decided by currency. It is decided by who determines whether the words arrive. On that axis, this path remains on the side where you decide.

That the numbers shrink once is not a loss. It is the process of moving the centre of gravity from a large borrowed figure to a small owned one. A small path you own is structurally stronger than a large attention you borrow.

The whole picture is gathered in why blogging longer leaves less of your own voice. On the measurement that precedes the move, see before branding, there is something to re-test; on why the move resolves the problem, the real advantage of owned media is not on the comparison table.

References

Academic papers and theory

• Deci, E. L. “Effects of externally mediated rewards on intrinsic motivation” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 18(1) (1971)

Books

• Marx, K. Das Kapital (1867)
• Uno, K. Principles of Political Economy (1964) Iwanami Shoten