Do this, but for devs with big social followings. Have them name the price for a tweet, post, like, etc. There is nothing like it right now and its a huge market.
The problem is the devs you'd most likely want to do it are the least likely to want to (at least, indiscriminately and in a marketplace style) because they have the most reputation to lose. Now dev oriented accounts on the other hand..
I've often wondered how you feel when you see other newsletters that use the "$TECH Weekly" name format. I know that in the history of the world it's not unique but, in recent years, it has become likely that a newsletter with that sort of name might be a Cooper Press publication.
Mostly okay. I was on the leading edge of a wave that was going to happen anyway, and the term is relatively generic. As long as someone doesn't start one with the same name as any of ours, I'm good. Many of the people behind other * Weekly dev newsletters have become good acquaintances.
We have a rebrand in the works, however, as due to our reluctance to heavily promote or send arbitrary emails to subscribers, we have a lot of subscribers who don't know about the other publications.. and our stable is not very cohesive branding wise. This will be resolved by the end of the year :-)
There are always trends in naming, especially when it comes to spamming - err, I meant to say growth hacking.
Scroll back over Hacker News over a few months and you can spot the moment when people caught on that putting "Machine Learning" in their titles got clicks, regardless of how valid that was.
"$TECH weekly" is a similar level of branding to all those lists of projects which are "curated". Seriously search past submissions for "A curated list of ..". They're cookie-cutter posts that could probably be generated by machine-learning!
Gee, I now realize I sound like a total dick in the comment above. What I mean is that you can get most people to promote a product as long as they have a match of values and reputation, and the money is right. Given how this is fairly new to devs its going to take a good deal to break the ice. Though I suspect the upside is going to be huge. Maybe a deal similarnto what copywriters get. Base plus a percentage.
Great idea, but I'd rebrand due to the main mailing list software being called Mailman already.
(the "mailman" part is probably the wrong thing for branding, anyway -- I'd pick branding focused on the sponsor/trust/endorsement/patron aspect, so you can extend to other channels like video. You should decide if you're selling single branded links or (limited duration?) sponsorship.
If it's a sponsorship marketplace, the value is a lot higher to both sides -- if there were a great "devops security bulletins" newsletter or alert list, it would easily be worth $10-20k/mo for a remediation vendor, platform vendor, or specialist recruiter to sponsor it, and you'd get a larger amount of money than selling a bunch of $100 links. There are probably thousands of valuable niches out there.)
Really cool but it would be even cooler if it offered sponsored newsletters in other industries like finance, real estate, faith, gaming, etc. Are there other services like this or is this the first of it's kind?
I'm planning on expanding for sure. I couldn't find anything like this, that's really why I built it. So I didn't have to google them every time I was looking for one.
I like the idea (barring name issues) but the cost for getting on the list ($25/month) is a little high considering the idea is untested and, unlike the orgs on the list, I don't know how big your potential audience is.
As a NL owner with 8k subs, I would recommend offering a test plan of some kind.
I would offer a limited trial of some kind—probably a few days, enough to get a taste of the service without giving away the whole thing. That way I can get an early idea if the idea is effective.
(My list, by the way, is also not not dev-related—which might help you branch out your offerings some.)
It's a history/pop culture NL with a lot of pieces on vintage technology (located here if you want an idea: http://tedium.co). I think if the cost were closer to $10 a month, it'd be closer to impulse territory for me.
Cool, but why do I need to open a mail program to send a message? I think it would be better to be able to send a direct message from the site and receive more information about the newsletter. How long they exist, how the company will appear in the message and other things.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 27.9 ms ] threadObviously, needs more than developer-focused mailing lists.
We have a rebrand in the works, however, as due to our reluctance to heavily promote or send arbitrary emails to subscribers, we have a lot of subscribers who don't know about the other publications.. and our stable is not very cohesive branding wise. This will be resolved by the end of the year :-)
Scroll back over Hacker News over a few months and you can spot the moment when people caught on that putting "Machine Learning" in their titles got clicks, regardless of how valid that was.
"$TECH weekly" is a similar level of branding to all those lists of projects which are "curated". Seriously search past submissions for "A curated list of ..". They're cookie-cutter posts that could probably be generated by machine-learning!
(the "mailman" part is probably the wrong thing for branding, anyway -- I'd pick branding focused on the sponsor/trust/endorsement/patron aspect, so you can extend to other channels like video. You should decide if you're selling single branded links or (limited duration?) sponsorship.
If it's a sponsorship marketplace, the value is a lot higher to both sides -- if there were a great "devops security bulletins" newsletter or alert list, it would easily be worth $10-20k/mo for a remediation vendor, platform vendor, or specialist recruiter to sponsor it, and you'd get a larger amount of money than selling a bunch of $100 links. There are probably thousands of valuable niches out there.)
However, I do look forward to seeing where this project goes.
As a NL owner with 8k subs, I would recommend offering a test plan of some kind.
(My list, by the way, is also not not dev-related—which might help you branch out your offerings some.)
Is there a way you can link to the source of your information regarding the List Size, Average Clicks and Sponsor Rate?
It makes sense, but I was expecting you to basically be the broker that takes a cut on the ad buy side from potential sponsors instead.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14086259