Finding balance on the shifting sands of online publishing: BTTR is going email first

I'm not much of an optimist. So when Google announced its massive changes to search at I/O a couple of weeks ago, my immediate response was that the internet was doomed, and being an independent publisher on a doomed platform is a fool's errand.

But over the past few weeks, after lots of soul-searching and contemplative poses, I've realised (or maybe "remembered"?) that there's more to the internet than the greedy bastards in Silicon Valley.

BTTR has been my driving creative force for almost 2.5 years. I enjoy carving out my own pocket of space on the web (well, most of the time). I'm not ready to let that go yet, but with the ever rising tide of AI-slop, and a system that is designed to cheat publishers from their audience, I cannot keep doing the same things.

So, just like last year when Google wiped BTTR from search results, I'm tweaking my strategy.

And the biggest change is that as of this very post, BTTR is officially email first.

While I've been sending a weekly newsletter for almost a year now, it has been just one weekly send among a range of articles published exclusively to the web. I've been writing news and reviews and opinion pieces, much of which only got published to the site. If I'm honest with myself, I still held out hope these articles would rank in search engines, driving traffic the way I'm familiar with, so I wouldn't have to try and do anything too different.

But most of this work doesn't perform. And with AI mode coming to Google Search, I expect what little traffic I have from these types of news pieces to evaporate entirely.

By going email-first, I'll be writing a lot less news. Rather than publishing individual news articles, I'll summarise them in the weekly BTTR Roundup newsletter.

For the past few months I've had separate lists for receiving reviews and opinion pieces by email. It was a bit of an experiment and I learnt a lot, and what I can tell you is that nobody subscribed to one list but not another.

So I'm going to consolidate those lists and begin sending my reviews, features and opinion articles via email to all subscribers as well as part of this new focus.

(I understand that may not have been what you signed up for – I hope you'll stick around, but if you want, here's the link to manage your subscription.)

My goal is to find a regular cadence of delivering 3-5 high-quality articles each week. The Roundup will still get sent on a Friday afternoon, but it will be joined by 1-2 reviews each week, as well as 1-2 in-depth features, opinion pieces or guides, depending on the week, all delivered directly to your inbox.

I'm also planning to add extra value for paid subscribers for every article I write on BTTR. While the weekly roundup already has deeper analysis on three of the week's biggest news stories and a sneak peek into upcoming reviews, I plan to start offering behind the scenes and bonus content for my financial supporters for everything I publish.

I know that for the past 25 years we've lived in a world where you get to experience most of the web for free. But that's also the same web dominated by a handful of tech companies that use all your private information to make themselves richer. They make their experiences worse to keep you using their platform, no longer delivering an enjoyable experience.

My hope is that I can start to offer enough value to you, dear reader, that you feel that $10 a month is a bargain.

Whether or not you decide to become a paid subscriber, I appreciate your support in this journey. If you have any thoughts or feedback on this new approach, or even BTTR in general, please feel free to reply to this email, or leave a comment on the website.

For paid subscribers, let's dive into some of the data points I used to make this decision: