For Creativerly and my personal website, I use Fathom Analytics*, which is a privacy-focused, secure, and ethical way to get insights about the traffic happening on my website. I do not check it that often, I do not have any events set up in order to figure out how many people are clicking on a specific button, the sole purpose of this setup is to keep track of what is going on on creativerly.com in a laid-back environment. And thanks to that, I found out that overall the traffic has been up, and I am happy about that. Now, the core Creativerly "product" is still the weekly newsletter, however, I have newsletter fatigue, which means I do not read that many newsletters as I have used to, and based on the newsletter signups to Creativerly which are stagnating, it seems like others are feeling like this too. So, it is great to see that an increasing number of people are reading Creativerly on the web.

In a recent post by Molly White, she pointed out that the surge in newsletters has been overwhelming. Journalists who left corporate media or got laid off, established news rooms, independent writers, well, even your mum or your dad probably have a newsletter now. As Molly White further points out, instead of subscribing to a single newspaper for columns and articles by a dozen journalists, now you have a dozen separate newsletter subscriptions, with articles appearing haphazardly in your email inbox amid bills, business communications, marketing spam, order confirmations, and two-factor authentication codes.

In addition to just being overwhelmed by all emails landing in my inbox every single day, email is increasingly spying on you, like Substack collecting data about your reading and then showing you an algorithmic feed based on that data.

Based on that I am increasingly defaulting to my RSS reader whenever I want to read new stuff from my favorite writers and news sources. Thankfully, most of them offer RSS feeds, so I can easily subscribe to them, and curate my own feeds, or how Molly White calls it curating your own newspaper. As some RSS readers even provide you with the functionality to generate a custom email address which then adds your newsletter subscriptions to your RSS reader directly. I am using that functionality too, although, I have a bit of a different setup, as I use a separate email address to subscribe to the newsletters, and then forward that email address to the custom one provided by the RSS reader. The reason I am doing this is to have the possibility to engage with the writers of the newsletter in case I want to, since the custom generated email address from the RSS reader does not allow me to use it as a "regular" email address. I explained more of my reading setup in another post.

So, while I do love reading within my RSS reader, I find myself opening up the articles every now and then, since as Molly White further points out the RSS feed can make it easier to miss subscription prompts or donation requests that appear on a website outside the content feed, and ultimately, it is all about supporting the writers. And as the RSS reader kind of bypasses the support options, you can become a paid member to your favorite writers, sign up for the newsletter, leave a donation, or at least share the post and spread the word about it. On top of that, while my preferred RSS reader which is Readwise Reader, provides a lovely reading experience, it is always nice and special to read the article or post on a website that has been specifically designed to read that article.

Seeing Creativerly's web traffic rising gives me the hope that more and more people have their own curated newspaper set up in an RSS reader and decide to visit the web page every now and then.

RSS is a lovely way to put together your own feeds, packed with what interests you, free from any ads, promoted posts, or clutter. It is a very personalized, private, calm, and cozy reading experience.

Artwork: Photo by Maxim Ilyahov on Unsplash / edited by myself