Why the newsletter came back

For a stretch of about eight years, roughly 2010 to 2018, the confident position on email was that it was over. Social media had won. Nobody read newsletters anymore. Marketing dollars belonged on Facebook, on Twitter, on Instagram, on whatever channel had the most attention. The email newsletter, when it was mentioned at all, was mentioned in the way we mention fax machines — a relic that some industries still used out of inertia.

And then, quietly, that changed. By 2020 the sentence "I have a newsletter" was cool again. By 2022 it was a small industry. By 2024, running a newsletter — not a blog, not a podcast, not a Substack, a newsletter — was one of the most credible things a writer, a founder, or an operator could do with their audience. What happened?

It was not really Substack

The lazy answer is that Substack happened, and Substack made newsletters cool again. This is not quite wrong, but it puts the effect before the cause. Substack was founded in 2017 into a world that was already, quietly, hungry for newsletter tools that treated writing as the point. If the underlying appetite had not been there, Substack would have been a footnote.

The underlying appetite is what is actually interesting. Somewhere around the middle of the 2010s, a growing number of readers started to feel that the algorithmic feed was eating their attention rather than serving it. Facebook stopped showing them the accounts they had explicitly followed. Twitter reshuffled every timeline into a personalised assortment nobody had asked for. Instagram put ads between every friend post. The channels that were supposed to connect readers to writers had turned into machines that decided, on your behalf, what you would see and when.

Email was the only channel that had not done this. If you subscribed to a newsletter, that newsletter arrived in your inbox on the day the writer sent it, in the order they sent it, without a machine second-guessing whether you actually wanted it. This sounds trivial. In 2016 it was starting to feel radical.

The channel where you own the relationship

The real reason the newsletter came back is that it is the last mass channel where the writer owns the relationship with the reader. Not the platform. Not the algorithm. The writer. If a newsletter writer wants to leave Substack tomorrow and take their subscribers to Ghost or to Beehiiv or to their own hand-coded thing, they can. The subscribers are real email addresses. They belong to the writer.

This is not true anywhere else on the internet at scale. If Instagram deprioritises your posts tomorrow, you have no recourse. If TikTok bans your account, you have no way to reach your followers. If Twitter is acquired and turns into something you no longer want to be part of, the people who followed you are trapped there unless you can get them to move. On email, you can move any time. That structural difference is why every writer who thinks about it for more than five minutes ends up with a newsletter.

What this means for what you send

If you understand this history, you understand why the successful newsletters of the last five years mostly do not look like marketing emails. They look like letters. They have a personal voice. They are not designed within an inch of their life. They land in the inbox and read as though someone wrote them, because someone did.

The failure mode I see most often now is a small business that decided to "start a newsletter" and then, on the first send, produced a template with three columns, a large hero image, a promotional block, a testimonials block, and a footer with fourteen social media icons. This is a marketing email dressed as a newsletter. Subscribers who signed up because they liked the personality behind the brand open it, read half a sentence, and unsubscribe.

The newsletter came back not because email was better than the feed. It came back because the feed had gotten worse than email.

Write like the medium won

The newsletter won because it is a personal channel with structural ownership. Both parts matter. Write personally. Own the relationship. Everything else is technique.

The corollary is that the shortest path to a newsletter that succeeds is to make yours read like what your best subscribers already want more of. Not a marketing email that borrows newsletter styling. Not a blog post copied into a template. A letter. Something a specific person wrote to specific people. If you do that reasonably consistently for eighteen months, you will end up with a newsletter that matters. This has been true for the last five years, and it is likely to be true for the next five.