TL;DR: I've been publishing an independent subscription based newsletter for three years and counting, and I learned a bunch of stuff along the way. Annual subscriptions are 25% off until 10/13 right here, and you should buy one if you like original, unorthodox, independent coverage about about drinking in America!—Dave.
Earlier this month, I celebrated the third birthday of Fingers, my independent newsletter about drinking in America. (Technically, I started publishing semi-weekly free dispatches back in May 2020, but I turned on paid subscriptions for the first time on September 22nd, 2021.)
More than three whole years of independent coverage, commentary, and shitposts about the business, culture, and chaos of the American alcohol landscape, and ye olde boozeletter is still going strong.
In the past year, Fingers’ overall audience has nearly doubled, and paid-subscriber growth has accelerated. Some top-line figures:
- Total readers readers: 4,720 (+76% year-over-year since 9/22/22)
- Total paying subscribers: 462 (+59%)
- Additional projected gross annual revenue: $17,288 (+70%)
By every relevant metric, Fingers grew faster this year than any other in its existence. That’s no mean feat in this dismal media industry. To quote gracious losers at awards shows, I'm just happy to be here!
That said, independent publishing is rewarding work, but it is HARD, man. So to celebrate this momentous occasion, and set up Fingers to survive another year financially, I’m doing a little subscription drive. From now through October 13th, your first year of Fingers will run just $60 (usually $80) right here.
Paying Friends of Fingers get access to every single thing I publish here, plus the entire three-year-long archives. This is the biggest discount I plan to offer this year, so if you’ve been planning to buy a subscription, know that you won’t see a better deal in 2023:
OK, enough plugging! Here's what I've learned 36+ months in:
- Collaborations aren't guaranteed to generate revenue, but they often do. I was a little bit more deliberate about reaching out to fellow independent publishers/broadcasters/etc. this year, driven by the hypothesis that after a couple years, I'd kinda hit a ceiling on the number of paying subscribers I was able to reach through my own network. I appeared on a couple big podcasts, swapped stories with a few of my favorite newsletters in adjacent spaces, and offered/begged for reprints to a few others. These crossovers don't always result in an immediate uptick in paying subscribers, but they often bring in a few, and certainly a lot of free readers, too. I'll be leaning into these more in the year to come, both because they tend to be fun, and because social media is paying diminishing returns on promotion (see Twitter item below.) Big thanks to
Walter Hickey
,
Kristen Hawley
,
Hanna Raskin
,
Jack Mirkinson
,
Lyz Lenz
, Hamilton Nolan, Brace Belden and Liz Franczak of TrueAnon, and the whole Chapo Trap House crew for letting me introduce Fingers to your audiences this past year. (Oof, phrasing.)
- People are being more judicious about their subscriptions. I felt late to the independent-newsletter game when I launched Fingers nearly 3.5 years ago, but the space has only gotten more crowded since, and neither I nor any other publisher can expect folks to pay for everything they want to support. This goes hand in hand with my next point…
- A lot of free readers are never going to be paid subscribers. That’s OK! But it’s precipitated a shift in strategy here at HQ. For the first 18 months of Fingers’ paid era, I was publishing basically everything for free, and semi-regularly sending promotional coupons to highly engaged free readers begging/urging them to become paying Friends of Fingers. It was sort of like Wikipedia’s model—i.e., please support this thing you can access for free, otherwise it will go away—and for a while, it worked for Fingers. But by midway through 2022, conversions from that sort of discounting had begun to tail off, which is why I began paywalling most of my work and offering short free previews to free readers. Overall paid conversions actually got stronger this year, but rather than longtime non-paying power users, they’ve started coming from people who encounter an edition of the newsletter (usually via forwarding, or a link in from a press hit I’ve done), decide they want it, and buy quickly.
- Twitter is a big loss, but not for subscription sales. The platform’s decay over the past year under Elon Musk’s ownership is breathtaking to behold. It’s sad, because I’ve met a lot of good friends and colleagues through Twitter, and it’s troubling, given how important it was as a communication utility. I’m basically read-only on Twitter now, and I don’t expect to return. It’s a loss for being able to track beverage-alcohol story lines and source up quickly, but not for subscription sales: my followers there did not convert to paying Friends of Fingers a high rate (though some did, thanks folks!), and I only had about 9,000 anyway. So from that standpoint, Twitter’s death-spiral into antisemitism and irrelevance shouldn’t have too much of an effect on Fingers’ future. Silver lining!
- The Weekender is working. In February, I introduced the Fingers Weekender, a paid-only digest of the prior week’s best beer, wine, and spirits headlines optimized for hungover Sunday scrolling. The goal was two-fold: create a way to cover more items, more quickly, in Fingers’ trusted voice, and sell more subscriptions. I don’t have hard data on this, but it seems to be working on both fronts. Its open rate is strong and the click-through rate is low, which suggests to me that paid subscribers appreciate my selections and summaries enough not to ignore the email entirely, or seek out the underlying stories I’m linking to for more info. And each Sunday dispatch typically converts one or two free readers from the preview. The editions take a lot of work, but they’re paying dividends.
- Comments sections are showing signs of life. I did some early experiments with comment threads, and they received a lukewarm reception at best. Some of them were so poorly attended it was kinda humiliating! It was clear that readers didn’t want that type of relationship with the boozeletter at that stage, so I stopped. But more recently, I’ve seen some green shoots in the comments section, with a small but seemingly growing group of paid subscribers (the only folks with commenting privileges) chiming in on stuff. I can’t emphasize enough how much I love this and hope it continues. Journalism is a pretty solitary job in general, and independent ‘slettering doubly or triply so, so it’s really awesome when I get a chance to talk directly to other people who think as much about drinking in America as I do.
That’s all that comes to mind for now. I know this is all very inside-baseball, but this seems like the milestone to do reflect. If you’re an independent journalist, or thinking about becoming one, feel free to hit me up with specific questions: [email protected].
Editor's note: A version of this post originally appeared at Fingers (duh.)
