The click isn’t the point

Email newsletters used to be teasers. A few sentences, then “read more” — a link back to the website where the actual content lived.

That made some sense for publishers that ran ads: a click meant an ad impression on the website, and an ad impression meant revenue.

But this became the norm even for senders that didn’t depend on ads, like nonprofits. They built the same teaser-and-click model.

One big reason why? Measurement.

When the content lives in an email, there’s far less to count. No page views, no time on site, no funnel. Even open rates have gotten unreliable as email providers block marketers from seeing who opens. A click on a link is one of the only numbers left that can still be measured with any confidence.

So click-through became the metric — and then, like every proxy that stands in for a goal long enough, the metric became the target. Chasing clicks skewed the actual job of a newsletter, which is to give subscribers something worth reading.

Some writers went a different direction. Ben Thompson was sending full-text emails as early as 2013. Substack made that approach feel normal. A better reader experience, but less data.

That’s a trade worth making. A newsletter’s job is to create value for the people who signed up for it, not to generate a number for the people who sent it.