Announcements for 4 July 2022

Happy independence day to those in/from the US. No significant announcements this week. I'm continuing to fiddle around with paid acquisition. First shot at Google Ads did terribly; I've paused it for now but might try again later. So newsletter ads are the main focus for now.

Last week I announced that you can cross-promote with The Sample by adding smpl.substack.com to your Substack recommendations. I finished writing the code to import the emails and recommendation stats from that account into The Sample. Now whenever someone subscribes to smpl.substack.com, they'll get their newsletter forwarded from The Sample within 10 minutes. Also, your referral statistics (i.e. how many referrals you've sent us, as displayed in this email and on the "Cross-promotion" tab of the publisher console) now includes any referrals you've sent us via Substack.

So far, 28 people have added The Sample to their Substack recommendations, and it's resulted in 31 new subscribers. Thanks everyone! Normally we get 70-100 new subscribers per week, so Substack recommendations are already a good chunk of total new subs.

In We need better tools for online speech, I mentioned that I was going to merge that (brand-new) newsletter with these weekly announcements. After thinking about it again, I realize that really doesn't make sense. The audience for tools-for-online-speech just isn't the same as the audience for announcements about The Sample. So, once I actually start writing that newsletter, I'll just send it to people who have signed up for it explicitly; I won't include it in these emails. Though when there are relevant posts, I'll throw in a link here.

As such I'm also changing the button below so it goes to our Discord server, which is dedicated* to The Sample, instead of the Discourse forum, which is for the tools-for-online-speech thing.

*For some definition of "dedicated"—mostly we just tell jokes and stuff