The Sample publisher report

The little Substack fiasco has been taken care of, and the new "you got subscribers, please import them" emails seem to be going over alright. I was going to update this weekly report to include a similar notification—a notice of how many subscribers you got last week if any, a direct link to export them, and (for those on Substack) a link to your CSV import page—but it's late, and I haven't done it, so, next week. Instead, here's a periodic reminder that whether you're on Substack or not, you should every now and then go to the publisher console and export+import your subscribers, in case any of them didn't click a confirmation link.

An unexpected nice thing about last week, whilst scrambling to get all that set up and taking care of refunds etc (which only amounted to about $200 by the way), was that I got to have conversations with several of you, and many/all of you were positive and supportive of the work we've been doing. Thank you!

Completely unrelatedly, several people shared links to The Sample last week, because we got 100 or so more newsletter submissions (usually we get one or two per day). Welcome everyone! I'll take this opportunity to mention that if you're interested in cross-promoting with The Sample, you should also check out Refind which has a similar cross-promotion setup. (We're meta-cross-promoting with each other—we promote each others' cross-promotion programs!)

So, new stuff... a couple weeks ago I added a public performance page. It has several charts and metrics which attempt to give you an idea of how many subscribers we usually send people. That page is updated automatically once per day.

Also, someone asked about paid forwards performance/benchmarks, so I threw together this spreadsheet with anonymous data from people who have received at least one paid 1-click subscribe in the past week. You can use that to eyeball how many subscribers you can expect to get for a given bid price. I'm planning to turn that into another auto-updated page on the website.

One of the things I have planned next week is to do some redesign on the publisher console. So a question, especially for those of you who have joined recently: is there anything in the publisher console which you found confusing at first? Especially with regard to paid forwards, since it is particularly important for the business that people not be confused about that.

Other than that, there is a possibility that I'll soon build a simple tool for booking classified ads in newsletters. It'd be a complementary product; we probably wouldn't even charge for it. It'd just be a way to get more exposure for The Sample, especially among people who might be interested in paid forwards. If you sell ads in your newsletter and aren't 100% happy with your current setup, could you reply to this and tell me what improvements you'd like to have?

In a similar vein, I'm also toying again with the idea of making some kind of public newsletter directory, mainly for buying/selling ads and/or find cross-promotion partners. Of course it wouldn't be the first newsletter directory, by far, but maybe it could still be a useful addition. In particular I'm mulling over ideas for some kind of review system. In my experience the biggest problem with sponsoring newsletters is figuring out which ones will actually drive results (as opposed to e.g. simply sourcing potential newsletters to sponsor). We're spending about $2k/month on Facebook ads right now, and I'd love to direct some of that to newsletter ads, but they're just so hit-and-miss. So that seems like a potentially significant opportunity, if I can figure out how to navigate it... let me know if you have ideas!

Jacob