Hi, I run a long-form newsletter. I send it out twice a week. I spend many bleary nights putting content together for it, and its pieces occasionally appear her

Hi, I run a long-form newsletter. I send it out twice a week. I spend many bleary nights putting content together for it, and its pieces occasionally appear here on Hacker News. I do a lot of research for it—and pay lots of money for tools to access that research. I often do interviews. It often brings in contributors. Those contributors are paid. It has an RSS feed as a service to readers. But it was built as a newsletter because I specifically wanted to experiment with that form and felt that I could do interesting things with it. Since I started it six and a half years ago, a couple interesting things have happened in the sector: One, the interest in building a business model around blogs has shifted over to the newsletter space. And two, people who wouldn’t have paid to access a blog now are willing to pay to access a newsletter. I like to keep my content open to a large amount of people, so I rely on newsletter sponsorships as a business model, but my advertising approach is very minimal compared to other publishers. I’m not particularly aggressive with my signup form—I run it at the top of my front page and put a pop-up option at the bottom of the article, and sometimes I implement an occasional interstitial when an article seems like it’s doing very well and I want to catch the user’s eye. But I don’t do as much as I could. It probably could be larger if I did. But this isn’t about me. This is about this comment. Which is to say: This is a really cruel thing to say about newsletters. I know a lot of creators who put hours of work into their newsletters each week on top of full-time gigs, grinding it out with the goal of hoping to do something with that newsletter. It also ignores the business realities of the newsletter space. Trying to build a blog into a business is really tough these days (it was back then too, something I know because I was blogging back then). But newsletters have created a path of opportunity for those who want to build things independently. And while I will never claim that the work they do is perfect, it’s certainly not blog spam. So I request, hey, maybe research the space before you use such a broad brush. Thanks.