Subscriber Counts
Hello everyone. My name is Aaron Di Blasi and my company, Mind Vault Solutions, Ltd., specializes in funding, growing, sending and maintaining world-class, legally compliant email newsletters.
As of this writing we publish three weekly newsletters, Top Tech Tidbits, founded in 2004, currently serves over 21,000 readers per week, Access Information News, founded in 2022, currently serves over 20,000 readers per week, and AI-Weekly, founded in 2024, currently serves over 23,000 readers per week.
But How Do You Know That?
How do you know that we’re not just plucking these numbers out of thin air purely for the benefit of sponsors and advertisers?
Well, you don’t, unless the Publisher of that newsletter shares those metrics with readers, sponsors and advertisers in a way that they can trust. As we have begun to do.
Because the fact is that other newsletters do not. They simply state their subscriber counts and expect you to believe them. A bazillion. If I were a sponsor or advertiser of those newsletters, I would not be comfortable with that.
So we wanted to do better. Especially since our publications serve so many industry-leading sponsors and advertisers already.
Readers don’t tend to concern themselves with the authenticity of subscriber counts as much as sponsors and advertisers. Which is understandable. Readers just want high quality, current and relevant content. That’s what they subscribe for.
But Sponsors and advertisers also want to make sure that their ads are actually reaching the number of readers that they have been promised.
So we had to find a way to share the subscriber counts for each of our publications on an ongoing basis in a way that readers, sponsors and advertisers could trust.
So, beginning in April of 2024, we began sharing screen shots directly from our Constant Contact account, once a month.
In terms of users, Constant Contact is the #2 email distribution platform in the world today. Just behind Mailchimp.
While Mailchimp is also a fantastic email distribution platform, it is geared more toward consumers, whereas Constant Contact focuses on serving businesses. Something we appreciate.
In this way, readers, sponsors and advertisers alike can now monitor the growth (or decline) of each list in real time, offering a new and truly unprecedented level of advertising transparency.
You can review the screen shots that have been posted so far for each publication using the following links.
If you use a screen reader, simply read the title of each screen shot link, prior to clicking it, for a complete transcription of each screen shot.
👉️ AI-Weekly Subscriber Count Screen Shots 📸️
👉️ Top Tech Tidbits Subscriber Count Screen Shots 📸️
👉️ Access Information News Subscriber Count Screen Shots 📸️
And so, with that, let’s break down the metrics that each screen shot provides:
➜︎ Sent: The number of email addresses that were sent the newsletter. Important, but second to the metric that you came here for.
➜︎ Bounces: The number of email addresses that could not be delivered. This is the 100-150 per week at 20K subscribers discussed below.
➜︎ Successful Deliveries: The number that you came here for. Sent emails minus bounces. This is the actual number of readers that received the newsletter.
➜︎ Open Rate: We only get these statistics for readers who have their privacy settings set to allow us to record an open, which is not a very large percentage of readers anymore, so this number will always be much higher than reported.
➜︎ Click Rate: We only get these statistics for readers who have their privacy settings set to allow us to record a click, which is not a very large percentage of readers anymore, so this number will always be much higher than reported.
And with that, you now know, with confidence, that our subscriber counts are in fact what we say they are.
So Why Don’t All Email Newsletters Do This?
Because frankly, many of them are not being honest about their subscriber counts.
Sending email consistently to tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or even millions of people, all at once, all over the world, is no small task. Especially if you want to remain compliant everywhere in the world that you send email. Which you must do in order to build a sender reputation that will stand the test of time. And the many spam filters that you will encounter along the way.
Another reason that many newsletters do not want to share their subscriber counts is something called subscriber fluctuation, or “turnover.”
These are email addresses that go from being valid to being invalid since the last time we sent that person an email.
Think someone leaves a company for another company. Their email address changes. So their previous email address, which was subscribed to receive our newsletter, now bounces back as invalid.
If you look at any screen shot you will see that we are provided with a number of “Bounces” for each newsletter sent. These are subscribers that did not receive the newsletter.
There Are Seven (7) Different Kinds Of Email Bounces. They Are:
- non-existent (Always delete.)
- suspended (Maybe delete.)
- undeliverable (Maybe delete.)
- blocked (Maybe delete.)
- mailbox full (Never delete.)
- vacation / auto-reply (Never delete.)
- other (Maybe delete.)
At 20,000 readers per week we remove approximately 100-150 bounces per week. So if you’re not onboarding at least that many new readers per week, then you can see why many newsletters might not want to share their subscriber counts with others.
Alright, So How Do You Keep A List Growing If You’re Forced To Remove 100-150 Subscribers Per Week?
Here at Mind Vault we do it by forging partnerships with businesses and organizations that benefit from providing their constituents with free, high quality news and trends each week.
In other words, we always focus on the reader first. If the reader is happy with the content they are receiving each week, and they find it valuable, then they will stay on and continue to read that content each week. This will, in turn, make sponsors and advertisers happy to reach a large, targeted audience of engaged readers that can benefit specifically from the products and services they offer.
👉️ Key Takeaway: Big email audiences are hard. And maintaining them is even harder. Which is why we offer sponsorships. So that sponsors can benefit from the reach of a big, targeted audience, without having to own the infrastructure required to maintain it.
Which brings me to the second portion of this real talk about sponsorships and subscriber counts.
Sponsorships
Poor, poor sponsorships. They get such a bad rap.
Primarily because they are used so often as a catch phrase for a collection of services that provide no measurable value.
This is a common marketing tack on the internet today. Sponsor the Acme League of America today and receive the following benefits. None of which have any measurable value, or provide any measurable benefit. Not to you, or your marketing.
Making them, effectively, donations disguised as sponsorships. Which is dishonest from the outset. The very thing you never want to be when asking someone to support something.
Which is a shame. Because Sponsorships that provide real, measurable benefits, in exchange for financial support, can fund the ongoing distribution of entire publications.
With 23 industry-leading sponsors at the time of this writing, I think it is fair to say that Top Tech Tidbits proves that this model works. And it works because sponsors are delivered real, measurable traffic from their ads each week. And not just any traffic. But audience-specific traffic. Giving each and every generated lead a much higher probability of conversion from the outset.
So as you can see, when sponsorships are set up in this manner, to be truly mutually beneficial to both parties, they need not be scams at all. They can, in fact, be an incredibly useful tool for achieving your marketing objectives and building lasting relationships.
Through transparent and honest collaboration, sponsors gain targeted exposure and measurable results, while readers receive the funding required to continue receiving a valuable resource that they need, at no cost.
This symbiotic relationship fosters trust and authenticity, and ensures that both sponsors and readers benefit equally. A recipe for long term success that can sustain world class publications.
