Planning a More Useful Newsletter

Removal of newsletter ads from ILLUMINATION stories and providing ad- free articles

Dear Subscribers,

Medium created a new newsletter feature for publications.

We used it for a few months.

Having a built-in newsletter feature sounded useful and exciting.

However, implementation of this feature on ILLUMINATION stories did not prove useful and appealing. We don’t use this feature for ILLUMINATION-Curated.

Based on a survey to a selected group of writers and readers, we found out that a majority of the writers did not find the embedded ad in ILLUMINATION stories useful.

Besides, some readers also mentioned that they only want to receive relevant stories rather than the whole distribution list. The main concern was it looked awful at the end of each story published on ILLUMINATION.

We tried to make the ad look pleasant, but there was not much we could do apart from just adding an avatar. Even adding an avatar was not an easy option as the requirements were fussy. So we gave up.

The purpose of this post is to inform our writers and readers that we decided to remove the embedded newsletter advertisement at the end of the stories on ILLUMINATION.

We believe this is a piece of good news for many writers.

By removing this embedded advertisement, the stories look cleaner.

We will continue sending newsletters to our subscribed readers.

The only change is to stop collecting email subscriptions on our stories.

The purpose of this change is to transition to a better-supported mailing service which offers more functionality.

Medium’s Newsletter feature is difficult to use and customize. In fact, there is no customization feature; it sends the newsletter to all subscribers. We aim to share and distribute content based on reader interest.

To this end, we created a pilot project for this initiative.

We subscribed to a reliable service provider that will be hosting our mailing list and newsletter distribution.

The landing page is ready for subscription.

The information we require is a first name, email address, and the topic of interest. We respect your privacy.

We recommend you to subscribe to our mailing list by pointing out the topics of your interest. We plan to create distribution groups based on topics of interest. If the option is not selected, we assume you want to receive distribution lists for all topics.

You can subscribe to our newsletters and distribution list from this link.

And you can unsubscribe at any time.

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