An Announcement About the Future of This Newsletter

Hello,

About four and a half years ago, I started the Today in Digital Marketing podcast. (It was a complete ripoff from a great podcast called the Techmeme Ride Home.) The idea was to report on that day’s events in the world of digital marketing. Then I started publishing the scripts as a newsletter. The newsletter itself grew to more than 10,000 subscribers.

The news today is that we are closing both, after today’s issue is released.

(Don’t worry, we are not being sued out of existence. 🤣 This is my decision. See below.)

If you are a Premium member, your subscription has been stopped and the prorated balance remaining on your subscription has been refunded to your method of payment.

Watch the video announcement

Why?

So why the closure?

1. I need more time back at our agency.

This project, the podcast and newsletter, had always sort of consumed a side of my desk, but it was taking time away from our core business here, which is a social media engagement and moderation agency. We handle the responses and replies on behalf of medium to large size brands. The company is engageQ.com. That's our core business. The podcast and newsletter, as fun as it was, was taking time away from that. We've got a couple of new clients that we're onboarding and have just been getting busier and winning some awards as well.

2. My health.

I turned 55 a little while ago and I'm at that age where things are falling off and falling apart and not working as well. I have a couple of big major health things coming up that I need to rest up for.

3. The business realities.

On the revenue side, it's been kind of getting shittier lately. Two things really happened that changed the numbers for us.

1. CHANGE TO APPLE PODCASTS: We used to be quite profitable. And then on the podcast side, Apple changed the way it counted downloads. Basically, it meant that the reported number of listeners that we actually had all of a sudden overnight got cut by like 75 percent. We were getting a quarter of the listeners that we had. Now, to be fair, it was actually a more accurate representation of the numbers we actually had. The previous version that Apple was reporting was grossly inflated, and they fixed it, which is good for everyone, including advertisers, especially for advertisers. But that meant 75 percent of the revenue from the podcast was gone.

2. AI NEWSLETTERS ARE DILUTING THE WHOLE BUSINESS: On the newsletter side, AI just ruined everything. In the last six months especially, there are now hundreds and hundreds of AI newsletters where someone has somewhere in the world has written a prompt that basically says, "Find the top 15 stories about marketing today and write a six-sentence summary and send it via Zapier to this newsletter provider and send it out." It happens all automatically. And I've subscribed to a lot of them, and they're all terrible. But there are so many of these things now that they have diluted the ad market to a point where it's not tenable.

Steph 🙂 

Steph has been the guiding light of this whole operation for the last few years. You know her as the associate producer of the podcast. She has been the guest host for me when I've been busy or sick. She's also been the writer of the newsletter, by the way. I know it has my byline on it — that was a lie. She's been writing it most of the time.

Steph is a fantastic writer, and it has been an absolute joy watching her grow as a writer in terms of just the quality of the work that she's been doing. It has been an absolute pleasure working with Steph, and that is one of the things I'm going to miss the most about this.

What’s next for Tod?

A few things. One is I'm going to take some time off to rest, obviously. Not a ton of time, because I still have the agency stuff to do, but a little bit of time. My wife and I are visiting Australia this summer to visit family. And then I have two websites for you.

1. VIDEO GAMING: The first is just for fun. It's me playing video games while live streaming. It's on Twitch. You can find it at lowefforddad.com. That is my username on Twitch is Lowefforddad. Don't worry, I'm not taking it seriously. I'm not going to become a Twitch streamer full time or anything like that. It's just there for fun if you're a gamer.

2. CANADIAN IDENTITY: Somehow in this whole last few months, I've become a low-key creator on Canadian culture and identity. I don't know how, but it happened. So I have a little side project. Probably, knowing me, in four or five years, it will consume more of my desk than I want it to, and I'll close it down too. 🤣 But for the time being, you can check it out at farandwide.news. It is a little podcast. It's a YouTube channel. It's a newsletter.

3. Finally, you can get my social media links at https://b.link/todsocials 

Thank you so much for being a part of this. Thank you for listening and reading. If you are a premium member, thank you so much for your support of the work. It really did help. In addition to financially, just it helped us realize that people did rely on it, did use it, and that's a great feeling.

So if I don't see you on Far and Wide, if I don't see you in the Twitch stream, then I hope to see you again at some other time.