Subscriber Attrition - It's Beginning To Feel A Lot Like Twitter
I’ve had a few people unsubscribe recently because of posts I’ve put out and I subsequently received notifications of disabled emails. That’s fair enough. But I’m also noticing that my subscriber count is mysteriously decreasing, even though I’m not getting notifications of disabled emails. How does that work then? It’s all too reminiscent of the bad old days of Twitter when my followers kept getting mysteriously culled; often when I would gain a follower or two, another couple would be bumped off, resulting in no net increase. I hope this is not the start of a trend on Substack.
These two screenshots are just minutes apart.
I had 375 when I logged on this morning. Two subscribers have disappeared. No disabled email notifications. Notice the 30 day views and 30 day open rates have changed suddenly too. My subscriber numbers are now heading slowly downwards. Perhaps there’s an innocent explanation for this . . . . or was it something I said?
Update:
Weird. It’s just gone back up to 374 immediately after publishing this post! No notification of any new subscribers.
Another subscriber just vanished. Is this how it's going to be now? So much for building a readership on Substack.
I liked the post. Not because I like that you’re loosing subscribers. Maybe it’s just a case of information overload. I’ve been thinking about cutting back on my subscriptions because I don’t have time to read them all but feel guilty somehow that the author will feel insulted particularly the authors of some of the smaller stacks.