Regarding EA Newsletter statistics: I didn’t see this mentioned in the piece, but the heavy growth in late 2016 and early 2017 mostly happened because the team who were working on the Newsletter at the time advertised it heavily on Facebook. After the 2017 campaign ended, there wasn’t any further advertising (as far as I’m aware).
The number of subscribers roughly tripled during this time, which translated to a 1.5-2x increase in the number of people opening the emails and clicking links (since new subscribers from FB ads weren’t as interested in the content). I don’t know whether the campaign stopped because the ads stopped working as well, or for some other reason.
I’m considering trying another advertising campaign at some point, but over the last few months, my focus (with the time I actually have to spend on newsletter work) has been on improving the quality of our content and improving our measurement (both for objective open-rate data and subjective “what’s our impact?” data).
Anyway, the Newsletter’s patterns of growth were heavily “hacked” (albeit not in a bad way) and shouldn’t be taken as a measure of organic interest in effective altruism.
Regarding EA Newsletter statistics: I didn’t see this mentioned in the piece, but the heavy growth in late 2016 and early 2017 mostly happened because the team who were working on the Newsletter at the time advertised it heavily on Facebook. After the 2017 campaign ended, there wasn’t any further advertising (as far as I’m aware).
The number of subscribers roughly tripled during this time, which translated to a 1.5-2x increase in the number of people opening the emails and clicking links (since new subscribers from FB ads weren’t as interested in the content). I don’t know whether the campaign stopped because the ads stopped working as well, or for some other reason.
I’m considering trying another advertising campaign at some point, but over the last few months, my focus (with the time I actually have to spend on newsletter work) has been on improving the quality of our content and improving our measurement (both for objective open-rate data and subjective “what’s our impact?” data).
Anyway, the Newsletter’s patterns of growth were heavily “hacked” (albeit not in a bad way) and shouldn’t be taken as a measure of organic interest in effective altruism.
Thanks. I edited the post a bit more to mentioned that.