Anyone have experience with curated newsletters? (Revue? Curated? more?)

May 14, 2019 11:28 AM

I'm going to do a curated newsletter...Trying to make it as smooth and easy. Idea is a low effort curation with zero marketing. Meanwhile: Revue, Curated.co, Goodbits, substack. Yeah, I'm doing the research - haven't subscribed and tested... But if someone else has done this already, I'd love to know what you know.
posted by filmgeek to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

I do a curated newsletter via TinyLetter. There's some argument that they're going to be shutting down that option at some point, so I don't know if I'd suggest them (otherwise their ease of use is great, mailing list management is terrible). I subscribe to a number of curated newsletters and what I appreciate

- Clear understanding of costs (for me, for subscribers) if there are some
- Ads, likewise (what will people see, who chooses)
- NO CLOYING JOKEY PATTER (seriously, this is why I don't use Medium)
- Accessibility, if I can't add alt text for my images you are dead to me
- Easy subscribe with no shady other stuff pushed at people

One thing I do like about TinyLetter is it's super easy for me to give people a simple URL where they can sign up and they have to confirm and email and that is it. So no marketing but I can hand people the URL and I use it in my twitter bio. Nice, simple. If you're doing something that's going to require visuals (film/YT embeds, animated GIFs) I'd check with that special because not all the platforms handle those gracefully.
posted by jessamyn at 12:03 PM on May 14, 2019 [1 favorite]

I've run a few TinyLetters and found the interface super-straightforward. I subscribe to a small range and people use them fairly simply.

I also have dabbled in using AWeber and MailChimp. In some respects, what you want depends on if you want this to be a personal/community-based newsletter, something professional, or something in between.
posted by knile at 4:42 PM on May 14, 2019

I use Substack and really like it. My newsletter is not monetized but I like the idea that in the future it could be.
posted by Brittanie at 8:29 AM on May 15, 2019 [1 favorite]

I just gave Substack about an hour of my time and, after it refused to send emails of a couple of test posts to my (single) subscriber, I walked away. I found the screen text with respect to email lists, subscribers, etc. confusing, especially since I'm publishing at the free level.

Moving over to TinyLetter for now and I'm getting better results after 20 minutes.

YMMV.
posted by Sheydem-tants at 1:23 PM on June 2, 2019