Changes at The Daily Doom

I really need your input to make the outcome the best for you that I can.

I want to let all readers know there will be some forced change in The Daily Doom coming up. While paid subscriber support has slowly grown, it comes nowhere close to carrying its weight with the household bills, and my time of being able to self-fund out of savings has finally come to an end after a year now of doing this. So, I’ll be going back to a regular job on Wednesday, but I’ve chosen a position that will provide me about four hours in middle of each day to gather headlines and write the weekday editorials. (I’ll probably have to write the “Deeper Dives” on weekends.)

That means the headlines and editorials won’t be coming out until later in the day (more like evening news). If that is a dealbreaker and you are a paid subscriber, please reply back to this email and let me know you would like to work out some sort of refund, prorated based on how much of your subscription time you have used, and I’ll figure out how that can be done on Substack. There is unfortunately nothing I can do other than work out a refund if the change in schedule is a deal-breaker for you. I hope it won’t be, of course, and that you will stay with me, as I’ve done the best I can to create a path forward. (Until the middle of next week, there may be a lot less published of any kind because I’ll be in a one-week orientation period that will not be my regular work schedule.)

I may have to shorten up what I do in The Daily Doom in order to fit it all into the time I have in the middle of the day, but that might not matter much because there might be parts of The Daily Doom that are barely important to people. For example, I originally thought the headline aggregation would be a bigger interest factor than it has proven to be. Only about 35% of ALL subscribers open the emailed Daily Doom, and only about 5% of those click on headlines on any Tuesday through Friday. That would seem to be all of my PAID subscribers since paid subscribers make up about 5% of all subscriptions and are the only ones who can see the headlines on those days. However, they usually only click 2-3 of the headlines so still don’t appear all that interested in the headlines.

Even when I give out the headlines to ALL subscribers on Monday’s, that percentage still only goes up to about 10% of those who receive the Monday edition who click on links. So, it could be the headlines are simply unimportant to most readers who are only there for the editorials and/or “Deeper Dives.” (It is hard to sort this out from Substack’s scant metrics, but one paid subscriber told me that is definitely the case for him.) It is also possible, however, that a lot of people find value in reading the headlines to get a summary of the day’s news but are just not interested in clicking on them to read the articles. So, they might be finding them valuable even if they don’t click … as a summary. I need to figure out if I’m mostly wasting my time on the headlines, so I need an accurate reading on this.

I’m hoping all subscribers (free and paid) will respond to the following poll questions that apply to you to help me figure out what is genuinely most important and least important in The Daily Doom to both kinds of subscribers so I can concentrate my efforts in the best way. Please also feel free to send additional thoughts by a reply to this email. Note that Substack’s poll feature only allows one response per poll question, so I need you to simply pick the closest fit. If none really match how you feel, please just skip that question. Your responses are not identifiable to me by who you are. I just get a total, and you should be able to see the total, too, on the questions that you vote on. You shouldn’t be able to vote on questions that don’t apply to you, as Substack sorts out which respondents are paid and which are free.

—David Haggith

Please let me know by reply if there is anything you would particularly like to see that you don’t see in The Daily Doom or that you particular dislike?

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