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How The Knowledge team is experimenting with newsletters without alienating its audience

The Knowledge is a daily digest newsletter founded in 2021. Since then, its readership has grown to over “140,000 happy readers”, who appreciate its format and content. But it took a while for The Knowledge team to identify what makes its product appealing and, more importantly for other newsletter providers, how to experiment without alienating its core audience.

I’ve spoken to more than a few people over the past few months about their newsletters. Some solo creators are doing great with their projects having found a niche in which they can grow to be the big fish. Others – big names, too – candidly told me that running a newsletter can still be difficult, even with a history of publishing and prominence behind them.

The truth is it’s very tricky to take any lessons from those conversations. I’d love to be able to say that, having spoken to so many people, I’d managed to condense all the insights into hard and fast rules for newsletter growth.

But the reality is that each newsletter, each creator, each niche, each business model… they’re all so different. As I said in the introduction to the latest Publisher Masterclass all about newsletters, it’s still a space that is experimental. That makes it difficult to find firm footholds on the path to success, true. But it also means it’s an exciting and vital ecosystem to play around in.

Jon Connell is founder of The Knowledge, a free-to-read ad-based newsletter. He has a string of successful news product launches behind him, having conceived of The Week and worked as editor of The Daily Telegraph. Even with that proven foresight and experience behind him, he told me for an episode of The Publisher Podcast that The Knowledge had undergone a few ‘false starts’ when it comes to finding audiences and revenue. If that doesn’t speak to how experimental the newsletter ecosystem remains, I don’t know what does.

The catalyst

The Knowledge was first mooted during lockdown. While many of us were shaving our heads or gradually losing our grip on reality, Connell was instead thinking about how news consumption had changed since the launch of The Week.

He told me: “I talked to my daughter and my family, and we came up with the idea that maybe a diary [newsletter] would be more appropriate for what’s going on now. A print weekly seemed to perfectly fit the bill back in 1995, but the world’s moved on. People have become even more impatient. They want things more quickly.”

From that kernel of insight, The Knowledge team settled on its “quirky”, quick-read format. That tracks with how many digest newsletters bill themselves; they recognise the inbox is rarefied space and that people are habituated to finishing emails there. But even then, the temptation is to overdeliver, to the detriment of that appeal. Connell explained that “we probably put too much in at first, and we did long weekend things” that didn’t quite pique audience interest in the way they wanted. Ultimately, however, The Knowledge settled into its current form “which works very well”.

The formula

One lesson that The Knowledge team – and indeed many newsletter teams – have had to learn is that the inbox is the destination. In fact, it’s something that we’ve had to learn at Media Voices, too, as it runs counter to other audience development priorities.

The temptation is always to provide links out of the newsletter to relevant websites and articles. Since many news businesses are based in part on driving traffic to your website, it seems obvious. But, as The Knowledge discovered, that is not how many readers want to consume newsletter content. They want it to be discrete, self-contained, and valuable in its own right.

Connell explained: “We did an experiment about a year ago: we were thinking of launching something called Knowledge Premium, where our readers would go to a website at the weekend. [There] they would get long explainers, they would get pieces about books etc., but they would have to sign up and pay for that.

“But what was interesting was how badly that experiment worked. It was a complete disaster. And not because people didn’t necessarily want the content, but they didn’t want to be pushed off into websites. So the message, which really was implicit, is ‘everything else pushes us off into these websites, and we don’t really want that with you. What we want with you is what we get’”.

The results

Even with a distinct voice, The Knowledge still trades in general news and interest content. That is in no small supply online, and is in demand from almost every demographic. Connell is not especially concerned by that, however; he says The Knowledge’s audience is united by a mindset, rather than arbitrary age, gender or location-based demographics.

That is a message I’ve heard time and again from people talking about their newsletters. Given how personal a connection newsletters form between creator and reader, cynical attempts to reach demographics simply do not work.

Meanwhile, a shared ethos, utility, or interest in a niche is a far better means of developing that connection.

Connell (and our recent Masterclass guest Dan Oshinsky) both argue that readers’ qualitative feedback is so valuable because they share those things, rather than because they fit neatly into a demographic box.

Further experimentation

Despite having found a loyal audience and a format that works, Connell is keenly aware that the challenges of monetisation remain.

Later in the interview he notes that the newsletter ecosystem is only becoming more saturated – especially in places like the US – which means competition for ad revenue and reader revenue grows increasingly fierce.

He explained: “At the moment we’re doing quite well on our ads front, but I do feel that we are heading into territory where we are going to have to start charging. I just hope that I’m right, but [I believe] enough of our readers will feel ‘well, yes, I’m addicted enough to The Knowledge’”.

I asked him about potential events, given the enthusiasm for them from speakers at our latest Podcast & Newsletter Summits. He believes that there is scope for small-scale, intimate events, hearkening back to the lunches he ran at The Week, but worries about doing them “so soon” into The Knowledge’s lifecycle.

By contrast, he believes there could be legs in paid-for, specialist newsletters operated under the aegis of The Knowledge. He explained: “I like the idea of extra paid-for newsletters on very special specialist areas, such as green energy, because there you can, again, mine all the stuff out there for the best, most insightful [pieces].”

The Knowledge, then, is in a strong position to build upon its success. Experimentation is taking place across the newsletter ecosystem – with many instances of unqualified success. But in order to do those experiments, you need a solid foundation upon which to stand.

The Knowledge team began with a coherent idea about the changing nature of news consumption and how to cater to audiences looking for something that suited them. That enables them – and other newsletter creators like them – to chart new paths to prosperity from newsletter provision.

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