The Sample publisher report

I've updated the publisher report, as you can see (unless you joined just last week, in which case, welcome!). Hope you like it. Part of the change is the design; the other part was fixing the back-end code so it wasn't so much of a pain to send each week. I also made the publisher console load faster.

A bigger change is that we've started ramping up our Facebook ad spend. We set up a report so we can monitor our ROI, and in short, so far it's looking pretty good. If you have paid forwards enabled, you may have noticed an uptick in the number of subscribers we've been sending you this week—that's why.

To help make sure we get positive ROI, we decided to turn the ad ratio for our Facebook referrals up to 100%, instead of the usual 15%. i.e. all emails they receive are paid forwards; organic and cross-promotion forwards are only given to our other subscribers. Currently, about 1,000 out of our 5,000 subscribers are from Facebook. We haven't seen any decrease in the 1-click subscribe conversion rate since cranking up the ad ratio, so the experience for Facebook people evidently hasn't degraded. After we're growing enough and it's clear we've got enough margin, we might turn the ad ratio down.

So going forward, our growth efforts will likely be focused on paid acquisition, and the organic part of our subscriber base will grow... organically. We're going to focus on just Facebook ads for right now since they seem to be working alright. Later on we'll possibly branch out to advertising elsewhere, like in newsletters.

As we continue handing over all our revenue to Mark, I'll be focusing more on recruiting advertisers. Maybe we can try some gimmicks. e.g. if you refer someone who submits a newsletter and they spend at least $30 on paid forwards, we could give both of you $30 in paid forwards credit; that kind of thing. But mostly I'll probably just be cold emailing people directly.

Kind of an interesting way to think about the product going forward is that we're basically reselling Facebook ad space in a format that's better for newsletter writers: instead of figuring out ad creative and spending $$$ to get an ad to optimize sufficiently well, you just write your newsletter like normal and let us forward it to people. We handle filtering through people on Facebook to find the ones interested in newsletters. I think this is particularly helpful for writers with relatively small audiences, but I also wonder if it could be worthwhile for large publishers who already do Facebook ads. 🤷‍♂️

Jacob