Are newsletter subscriptions over?

Maybe we don’t want this many emails. Maybe we want to reclaim our attention.

This is The Ledger, a monthly newsletter exclusively for my subscribers at the Collector tier and investors in my book project We Should Own The Economy. Here, I share my process of building a media ecosystem and writing a book in public. It includes open access to my goals and financials and how I’m performing relative to those goals and financials. Members can provide feedback on my strategy and influence where we go from here.

This month, I want to talk about an interesting trend: My free subscriptions and paid subscriptions on Substack are hovering flat, if not slightly dipping, but digital and print pamphlet sales on Metalabel are growing, and now making up a significant part of our revenue. Is everyone tired of their inboxes filling up with newsletters? Would we prefer to keep our inboxes clean, purchase a collection of essays on a topic we enjoy, and read them over a pot of tea on Sunday without getting on the internet at all?

Our community might be too small of a sample size to know for sure, but let’s at least look at the stats: