Dear reader,
I recently moved Duffel Blog from a website to an email newsletter hosted on a platform called Substack. The primary and perhaps unsurprising reason? 2020.
Duffel Blog has never made a ton of money. It's been kept alive mostly by the amazing writing of its military veteran contributors who do it more for the love of it than the small amount of money I manage to pay them. And with relatively low overhead (no offices, just me, a wonderful part-time editor and freelance writers, web hosting, software), it didn't cost that much to keep up.
But this year has been awful. Everyone has had a rough time. So many media properties have been wiped out. Usually, because they weren't making enough money. Because sometimes (or often) Facebook throttled their content and only served it to a small audience even though those properties worked hard to grow those audiences of loyal readers. And then they didn't get enough page views. Which meant fewer eyeballs looking at those annoying advertisements on the right side of the page.
