📈Context Collapse's 2022: A Substack in review
Inside how the newsletter works: Context Collapse #178.
Friends, writing an industry newsletter is weird when you help other people make newsletters for a living. You trade in your detached analyzing-your-client’s-needs perspective for all the ego and self-centeredness of judging your own creative work you put out under your own name.
Especially when it’s Context Collapse.
I started Context Collapse’s predecessor, the Neal Ungerleider Newsletter, back in 2015 when I still worked at Fast Company. That’s a couple of internet lifetimes ago. It was a personal newsletter on Mailchimp! It was a whole different era, kids. A whole different era.
Here’s how Context Collapse’s 2022 went.
Subscription Growth
Substack subscription growth happens through several different channels. If you really want to juice up your subscriptions, you go all-in on culture war. The other ways are through building niche communities or obsessively covering a niche topic in a way that gives readers value.
Context Collapse goes the third route. We cover strategic communications (aka public relations, marketing, advertising and journalism) from an expert perspective.
We were entirely free throughout 2022. Free is good for audience growth, but terrible for churn1. Ironically, readers are much more likely in my experience to cancel free subscriptions than paid subscriptions--when readers pay for a publication, they feel more of an attachment to it and consider it an investment rather than a freebie.
2022 was pretty damned decent for subscription growth.
We had 373 subscribers on January 1, 2022 and 446 on December 31, 2022. This is an almost 20% increase in subscribers over the course of the calendar year. We also have a handful of RSS subscribers (hello!) and Twitter, LinkedIn and Google were our top three external traffic sources.Â
Google hits led to two subscription signups and LinkedIn and Twitter hits led to one signup apiece.
Several posts led to significant subscriber growth. Off the Record, On Background and Other Journalist Secret Codes and How To Prepare For A Journalist Interviewing You led to six signups apiece, Joel Johnson: The Interview led to four signups, and there was a long tail of posts that led to three-to-one signups apiece.
Although Substack does not yet offer detailed acquisition metrics on a yearly basis, we had 43 new subscribers from September-December. Of these, 20 discovered Context Collapse through recommendations by other publications or by browsing Substack’s directory, 21 were readers who had already-existing Substack accounts and two were new to Substack-based publications.
Fifteen of these subscribers were recommended by other publications; of these, 13 were through The Rebooting. (Thanks!)
Most-Read Posts
2022’s most read posts on Context Collapse were:
Off the Record, On Background and Other Journalist Secret Codes (982 opens, 38% open rate)
When a Parent Suddenly Dies (405 opens, 39% open rate)
How to Prepare For A Journalist Suddenly Interviewing You (394 opens, 41% open rate)
Our least read post of 2022 was No, You Don’t Need To Follow The News 24/7 with a 33% open rate.
Sponsor Break!
This post is sponsored by Ungerleider Works.
This is Neal Ungerleider’s newsletter. Neal runs Ungerleider Works. Ungerleider Works helps clients with podcasts, email newsletters, ebooks, video scripts and more.
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Thoughts & Next Steps
All in all, 2022’s growth was very positive. We did have some churn in terms of unsubscribes, but it was more than offset by new subscribers. By far our most popular posts (with a handful of exception) were service-oriented How To Do X/How To Learn Y posts rather than link roundups, industry analysis or news coverage.
Context Collapse has worked great for me in terms of finding new clients for Ungerleider Works or for other projects, which has more than justified the time expense I put into the newsletter. In a typical week, I spend 6-8 hours working on the newsletter including writing, research, editing and promotion.Â
In 2022, my back-of-napkin calculation is that Context Collapse generated approximately $22,000 for Ungerleider Works. That revenue comes primarily from new clients who discovered my consulting services through the newsletter.
With that said, one thing I am considering for 2023 is adding paid subscriptions to Context Collapse. If I pursue this path, Context Collapse’s free tier - weekly feature posts and weekly news roundups - would remain exactly the same. However, paid subscribers would have access to more service-y and how-to content. This would also (ideally!) allow me to bring on paid guest writers and produce longer-form content.
Here are my top priorities for 2023:
Produce more media/PR/marketing-specific content. This corner of Substack has some great publications including us, The Rebooting and Simon Owens’ Media Newsletter, but I definitely see a need for educational content, especially for early-to-mid-career folks, that larger publications like AdWeek and AdAge don’t really offer these days.
Publishing at a 2x week/greater frequency. One thing I admittedly dropped the ball on this year was working on the newsletter while I’ve been swamped with client work or IRL stuff. This is a major area of focus for the coming year.
Feature guest writers who are writing about things that interest our readership and work on partnerships with other newsletters, media outlets and creators.
With that said, I’m pretty happy with how Context Collapse’s 2022 has gone. Let me know what you think in the comments and feel free to share this year-in-review with anyone who you think may find it useful.
And, as always, thank you for reading Context Collapse.
Special thanks to Resident Contrarian for inspiring this post.
Churn = industry term for when a newsletter subscriber unsubscribes, or when someone cancels a paid subscription, etc. It sounds poetic but IRL is just impulsive people moving on to the next thing, with whoever’s selling/offering the service either trying to get them to sign back up or moving on to the next potential subscriber/reader.