Substack, Ghost, beehiiv, Buttondown, Kit, deliverability, DMARC, and what Apple Mail Privacy Protection did to open rates in 2021.
Section 3 of 6 · 5 pieces
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An examination of Substack's revenue model — the 10% cut on paid subscriptions, the hosting and deliverability infrastructure it funds, and the implicit trade between distribution reach and platform dependency.
The Newsletter Pipe
Ghost's architecture as an open-source CMS that treats RSS and newsletter delivery as equal outputs — the design decision behind dual publication, and what it represents in the wider argument about owning the distribution channel.
The Newsletter Pipe
What Apple's MPP actually does — pre-fetching pixels, masking IP addresses, inflating open rates — and the measured effect on the metric that newsletters had used as their primary performance signal since the format began.
The Newsletter Pipe
An explainer on the three email authentication standards and what happens to newsletters sent without them — inbox placement, spam filtering, and Gmail and Yahoo's 2024 enforcement changes for bulk senders.
The Newsletter Pipe
An argument about the hidden costs of the newsletter pivot — the loss of linkability, the absence of search indexing, the opacity of the subscriber list as an audience — set against the gains in open rates and direct revenue.