Sorry Ello, the Real Anti–Facebook Is Good Old.jpg
Translation by Klint Finley /ONES Piece
“Newsletter” is a form of email, which can be understood as an electronic magazine with a theme sent in the form of email. It is usually launched at a fixed frequency, similar to the regular push of wechat official account. This is also a form of we media. In countries where E-mail is widely used, such as the U.S., there are even some people who made a fortune by running a subscription newsletter.
It all happened like lightning: Almost a year ago, Ello, a little-known ad-free social platform, went viral and became a viral sensation. Then, in the blink of an eye, it disappeared from the spotlight as suddenly as it had appeared. Now, just over a year later, Ello has been all but forgotten and mothballed, like other Facebook disrupters like Diaspora and the soon-to-be-dead Google+.
All three are still alive. But it’s clear that none of them are succeeding in taking a bite out of Facebook. At the same time, the focus seems to have shifted to getting Facebook to improve privacy and abandon its real-name system, rather than trying to find a better alternative.
But at the same time, TinyLetter, an email service, has crept up. And as an alternative to Facebook and other social networks.
The site is owned by email marketing company Mailchimp. TinyLetter manages to avoid two of the pitfalls faced by other “Facebook alternatives” : technical complexity and the “empty room problem.” For one thing, TinyLetter is incredibly easy, sending a news email is as easy as updating your Facebook status. Second, everyone has an email (even if someone wants to kill it all the time), so you don’t have to convince someone to go through the trouble of installing a new app. As long as they’re willing to click and subscribe to your newsletter, you have a huge audience.
In recent years, TinyLetter has gained a reputation as the most diao online publishing platform, as techies and media professionals have flocked to it. Now, with news mailings about yoga, poetry, music and so on, it’s starting to spread beyond the media and tech world. According to Mailchimp’s head of content Kate Kiefer Lee, more than 161,000 people have used TinyLetter to create newsletters and send them to more than 14 million subscribers.
Of course, Tiny Letter is far from Twitter’s 31.6 million monthly active users, let alone Facebook’s 1.5 billion. But it doesn’t have to replace social networks to succeed — it provides a viable way for users to reach their target audience without relying on closed platforms like Facebook.
Just the news mail
Mailchimp never claimed that TinyLetter could replace Facebook. Actually, no one ever wanted to do it. When Philip “Pud” Kaplan launched the site in 2010, he told TechCrunch at the time that it was a replacement blog. In the early 2000s, Kaplan was working on a website called Fuckedcompany, which tracked all the companies that died during the dot-com bust. Fuckedcompany’s newsletter has thousands of subscribers, so Kaplan wanted to find a way to deliver content to users without the hassle of maintaining a personal blog.
Other email services existed, of course, but Kaplan was frustrated by how complicated they were to use. So TinyLetter stands out for its simplicity. TinyLetter offers only limited data analysis, and it doesn’t have the luxury of sending messages to a small group of selected readers. But that’s why it’s so easy to use.
Alex Madrigal, editor in chief of Fusion, a digital news outlet founded by Univision and Disney, said: “TinyLetter appeals to me because I don’t want to just send mass emails. I want to do news emails.” He is running a newsletter called RealFuture.
While TinyLetter quickly attracted some high-profile users (Digg co-founder and Google Ventures partner Kevin Rose, for example) and was acquired by Mailchimp, it never went viral. Instead, it experienced a slow and steady accumulation of users. Industry luminaries like Madrigal and columnist Ann Friedman have increased exposure to TinyLetter, while grassroots users like programmer Rusty Foster (whose “Today in Tabs” newsletter about the Internet has become an online column, He was later featured in Fast Company magazine. But no one could recall exactly where they first heard the TinyLetter.
“Somehow, I woke up one morning and decided to do a news email, and my fingers typed in the url.” Madrigal joked.
Why email
Answering “What is E-mail?” is harder than answering “What is TinyLetter?” For many users, “traditional” social media has become impersonal. Facebook uses algorithms to generate the content we see. Twitter feeds come in so much that it’s like a fire hydrant. Linkedin… It’s just linkedin. One of the most important aspects of newsmail is that it still has a sense of intimacy, even if you’re sending it to a stranger. “Email is tricky. It’s both mass communication and personal.” Foster says.
While it’s harder to get people to subscribe to newsletters than to get them to follow them on Twitter, mail subscribers tend to have higher quality users. Your status updates on social networking sites may get friends to glance at them (if they happen to see them), but people pay more attention to the content of emails. “Almost 16,000 people have somehow found and subscribed to my newsletter,” Madrigal says, “and the average daily open rate is 51-52%. It’s amazing.”
Part of the reason may be that people don’t have to remember another site after subscribing to mail. “Email is a favorite for slackers like me,” Foster says. “You just click subscribe and there’s nothing left to do. If you find out later that you don’t like it, just click unsubscribe again.”
But email is more than just a better way to get your message across. People have a hard time finding “decentralized” social media. In retrospect, email (the granddaddy of social media) was very decentralized. “I feel more in control using TinyLetter than any other platform,” says Deb Chachra, author of Metafoundry, a newsletter about technology criticism.
While your subscription list and all your archives on their site will disappear if TinyLetter turns upside down, using TinyLetter’s simple service instead of building your own site (like PHP Newsletter or Sendy) means more freedom and control. If you think about it this way: You can’t migrate all your Facebook followers to Twitter, but if you want to leave TinyLetter, all you have to do is export the list of subscribers and import it to another email system. Email addresses are one of the few constants on the Internet, even more permanent than web domain names (which can expire or be stolen).
TinyLetter is completely free. For now, at least, Mailchimp is doing this as a “public service.” While the most obvious business logic is that TinyLetter can be used as a way to promote paid services on Mailchimp (in-depth analytics, user targeting, and more deliveries), Lee says the user base of TinyLetter and Mailchimp doesn’t overlap much.
Mailchimp doesn’t even get data from TinyLetter — it doesn’t factor into Mailchimp’s analytics or use TinyLetter for advertising, Lee says. “They [TinyLetter users] provide content to a certain number of users, they know who is subscribing and they trust us not to do anything with their data. So we are very careful with that.”
To say the least, even if this were to change, it would be much easier for users to migrate to another email platform. That’s why email is the ad-free social media platform we’ve all been waiting for.
This article originally appeared on WIRED and was compiled by ONES Piece. ONES Piece is a non-profit translation initiative launched by ONES Ventures that focuses on technology, venture capital and business.