Since the launch of Something Interesting I’ve tried to pause periodically to reflect and share with you the state and trajectory of the newsletter itself. [Past examples: #1, #2, #3] I consider this a useful exercise in accountability for me, but also an important recognition of the fact that I am not (and could not) do this alone. I write Something Interesting but everyone who shares posts, sends me questions/topics or even just lurks in the Discord is helping build whatever it is we are building here. I am tremendously grateful. 🙏
Inside this issue:
How to stay warm in crypto winter
How to time the market perfectly
Top performing content (2022)
How to stay warm in crypto winter
At time of writing Something Interesting goes out to 1535 email addresses which represents roughly ~50% growth over the course of 2022. A typical post is opened by between ~42% and ~56% of subscribers, so the average open rate is about the same but the variability has gone up — which makes sense, given the news cycles this year. Most readers don’t read every post so my sense is that ~800-900 humans consider Something Interesting part of their content diet.
Paid subscriptions grew steadily over the course of 2021 but basically stopped growing during 2022. Part of that was probably the bear market but a lot of it had to do with my conflicting feelings about what I was even selling! It felt wrong to paywall my best content but also wrong to not reward paid subscribers with premium content. I tried a couple of different approaches to producing paid content but none of them felt natural or seemed to resonate. I also was approached about integrating paid crypto job-listings into the newsletter — but I didn’t feel like I could responsibly screen the opportunities.
In the end, it was clear that despite my best efforts that Something Interesting was not going to become a sustainable income stream. Anyway, I have a day job now! It’s still basically "write emails about Bitcoin" but the details are somewhat different. I like to think of Blockstream as the ultimate paid subscriber. 🙂
Everyone reading Something Interesting learned about it from someone.
Maybe there is someone who should learn about it from you?
How to time the market perfectly
Taking on a day job has obviously slowed down my rate of content production. In the first half of 2022 I averaged a post roughly every ~3.5-4 days. Since starting full time at Blockstream I have been averaging a post ~5.5 days. I am trying to be judicious about how I spend that limited coverage considering the onslaught of crypto news during that same time. Generally that has resulted in longer, more focused posts on the most important stories and less coverage of the long tail of crypto weirdness.
I miss the weirdness and will likely try to find a home for it but the response to the longer-form posts has been pretty positive overall. Generally the posts with the most unique readers were about different facets of the FTX contagion and the posts with the most shares were long form explainers like this one about Terra/Luna or this one about how to watch the (at the time) upcoming Merge. NFTs as a topic generally drove a low open rate but a very high view rate — suggesting that only a subset of readers are interested in NFTs, but that they are very interested.
In doing this analysis I happened to notice the lowest open rate in the last 100 posts (only ~39%) was "Bitcoin reaches another all time high" on November 9th, 2021 — so congratulations! Something Interesting readers called the exact top. I hope the reason you didn’t open that one was because you were too busy selling at ~$67.6k/BTC!
Top Performing Content (2022)
Most Readers
Most Views
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I am proud, humbled and grateful by the chance to share my thoughts with you and those you share them with. Thank you for reading.