Advertising and unsubscribe rate update - mid January 2024

I have been scaling up ads from Facebook and Refind since December and have been seeing decent growth since then. However, I started to notice that my total subscribers weren’t increasing as much as I would expect given how many new subs I was getting from the Substack Network.

In all from Refind and Facebook, along with opt-ins from other sources, I added 2413 subscribers since December 1st.

That’s great, but the total number of net new subscribers currently during that time is 2255, which is 158 fewer than the total new subscribers from those traffic sources.

Troubling for sure…but that doesn’t include people added from the Substack network. In all, I’ve added a whopping 1105 emails from Substack during that time…

…which means that I’ve added 3518 subscribers from all sources since December 1st and have only netted 2255 total emails, meaning I’ve lost 1263 emails during that time, or an average of 27 per day!

The only thing that has kept me growing is that I’ve been able to add 76 per d…