The Sample publisher report (28 Feb)

Several more people enabled paid forwards last week. Thank you! We made just over $1,000 in revenue last week for the first time ever. Of course, we also spent... $907 on Facebook ads last week, but still! It’s a good milestone.

We tried out a different format for the emails last week for some new users. Instead of including the content of a single newsletter issue within the email, we linked to five different newsletter issues which could then be read on the web. However the new format did terribly in the test—it reduced the number of 1-click subscribes by about 3x, so we turned off the A/B test after two days.

I thought the list-of-links format might perform better because it would increase the chance that at least one of the recommendations will be something that interests you. In reality, I guess any benefits from that are offset by the extra friction of (1) having to click something before you can start reading, and (2) having to pick something to click on first.

So it looks like we’re sticking with the 1-newsletter-per-email format. These results made me think we should go further in that direction actually. Currently, after you rate or subscribe to a newsletter, you get redirected to a web page that has a list of your previously recommended newsletters. That seems to be driving some additional 1-click subscribes (can’t say how many for sure since we didn’t put it in a test). I’m wondering if it would drive even more subscribes if instead we picked one of your previous newsletter recommendations at random and then redirected you to that instead of the list.

So a test for that (just on new users) will start in a day or two. If that works, I think we may also benefit from trying to get people to come to us instead of always going to them. In other words—in addition to the daily emails, we may try to get readers to bookmark The Sample (especially one of those fancy bookmarks where it puts an app icon on your phone’s home screen!) and hopefully develop a habit of “when I’ve got some free time, instead of scrolling through social media I’ll push this handy button and get an interesting newsletter to read with zero effort.”

—Jacob