Creators, revenues, and why Facebook suspects I'm an electrician

The shift in algorithmic priorities doesn’t just disrupt the user experience, but also alters how creators connect with their audiences and directly impacts their ability to make money.

We published the first edition of this newsletter almost exactly one year ago, so as we get to our main topic today, let me throw some stats at you.

• We published 44 newsletters, including this one.

• The 3 most popular pieces in 2024 were

  • Major new funding heading to CEE news media

  • We need to change the way journalism is funded in Europe

  • A benevolent extraterrestrial entity with unlimited resources should fund investigative journalism in perpetuity

• Almost 900 media professionals receive the newsletter every week.

• We had ~10,000 unique readers throughout the last year.

In journalism, we often express our successes and failures in terms of numbers like these.

I used to write for and later ran big newsrooms, with massive audiences. A bad day would be only having 200,000-250,000 readers, a good one would be more than half a million. These numbers are not jus…