Tangle - Some big Tangle announcements.

Episode Date: September 30, 2022

Today, Isaac apologizes for not answering your email, announces some changes at Tangle, and launches our charity drive.Links:Our advertising policy: https://www.readtangle.com/tangle-advertising-policy/Advertise with Tangle: https://forms.gle/onzGakixs9k5o6pi6Share link for charity: https://readtangle.com/giveSubscribe to avoid ads: https://www.readtangle.com/membership/--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight.

Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle Podcast, the place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking without all that hysterical nonsense you find everywhere else. I'm your host, Isaac Saul, and it's Friday. You're hearing from us.

You know that must mean something's going on. We've got some news today, some announcements, some updates, some stuff that I wanted to make sure our podcast listeners were aware of. Yeah, so let's just jump right in. So for the last several months, I have been attempting to conquer one of the greatest challenges of my writing career, reader email. As of last night, I had just over 1,000 unread emails in my inbox, some dating back to the last week in August. That is after I marked all the extraneous emails as read, leaving nothing but

reader feedback and important business inquiries. This is a tough spot to be in. When I started Tangle, one of my pledges was that I would read every email response that came in, which I've actually basically managed to do, and try to reply to all of them, even if it was just to say, hey, I got your note. Thank you. I appreciate your reading. This was fun and relatively easy when I had 500 subscribers and 20 people replied a day. Three years later, though, I've mostly kept this promise and have managed to also fall about a month behind on the timeline of replying to people. So with the midterm season about to hit full swing, our mailing list now nearing 50,000 addresses, and more emails coming in than ever before, all good things, this mountain of reader feedback became a major stress point

and distraction for me. So in extraordinary times, I took some extraordinary measures. I decided to just read all 1,000 emails, bite my tongue, which was honestly the hardest part of this exercise, and not respond to any of them. And now I have cleaned up my inbox. I have the stress release of a normal-looking inbox, but the guilt of knowing that I failed to reply to hundreds of your thoughtful and thought-provoking notes over the last month. So today, I wanted to hop on here, and I'm sending out a newsletter along with this podcast to just say,

if you wrote in recently, I'm sorry I didn't reply. I got your email and I read it. Please keep writing in. I'm sort of clearing the deck to get to a point where I hope I can start replying in a more sustainable way. Part of that sustainability is that my head is above water now and we have some people coming to help tangle, maybe some part-time people taking on more full-time roles. I'm hoping to keep all this more manageable and be able to readily apply to everybody. So that's first things first. I just did this this week, just cleared this inbox, and it felt like a good time to just say, hey, we did this. I'm sorry if you didn't get a response from me. But at the risk of bearing the lead,

I'm also here to tell you maybe the big announcement, which is that we are going to start introducing advertisements into the free version of the Tangle newsletter. Now, those of you listening to this, you're podcast listeners. So you have been hearing ads on the Tangle podcast for a few months now. That was something we started to do a little while back. So if you are a regular podcast listener and this is the only way you get Tangle, honestly, it's probably not going to change much for you except that maybe some newsletter advertisers are going to start showing up in the podcast. But if you have been around Tangle for a while, you know that this was a really big decision. Much like my promise to always interact with readers, ad-free was one of our founding ingredients.

It is or was literally in our tagline. And for a long time, I viewed it as a virtuous way to stay independent. But as time has gone on and the Tangle business has grown and more and more competitors have entered the space, I've realized that the primary result of being ad-free has been, more than anything else, a self-imposed handicap. By not running ads in our newsletter, I'm losing out on what could be hundreds of thousands of revenue dollars a year. Revenue that I could put back into improving our product, improving this podcast, growing our team, and more importantly, growing the reach of Tangle. It's revenue our competitors already have and are using to beat us. By running ads in Tangle, I can close that gap and let advertisers subsidize the cost of accessing

the content for readers who can't or don't want to pay. In that way, it's a win-win. Still, in my mind, running ads has always been bad because of the potential appearance of a conflict of interest, the possibility I'd lose readers' trust, and the potential for an ad sales team to screw with our editorial product. It represented many of the things that I hated about my past journalism jobs. So in order to avoid all of this, keep the ethos of Tangle intact, we've taken a few steps on this journey. First, we asked some of you for your thoughts and, in a not-so-subtle way, your permission. When I started Tangle, I promised to treat paying subscribers like mini-investors who could help shape the future of the newsletter and the podcast and all of our products. We published a survey for Tangle subscribers, who are generally

our most loyal and regular readers, and we asked them what they thought about running ads in the free or paid version of the newsletter. Nearly 2,000 subscribers took the survey. The overwhelming majority gave us basically a shrug. 10.1% said it would change how they felt about Tangle if we were to run ads in the free version. Just 1.3% said it would change how they felt and they may consider unsubscribing. Just 9.7% of survey respondents, after reading all the pros and cons of advertisements we could think of, said they thought we shouldn't introduce ads into the paid or free versions. 68.2% said they thought we should and 22.1% said they were unsure. 83% of people who responded to the survey said introducing ads to Tangle wouldn't impact whether they recommended Tangle to others.

Given these numbers, we decided we had a mandate, basically, to move forward. After all, it amounted to 9 in 10 subscribers telling us to go for it or that they didn't really care, and just 1% saying they would even consider unsubscribing. And that was before we came up with what we think is a transparent ad policy and promise readers to make our ads as unobtrusive as possible. Along with the survey reader questions, we also got about 1,100 comments. The lion's share came from readers telling us to make the smart business decision and to use the money to spread the word about Tangle. A vocal and compelling minority pleaded with us not to run ads. I wanted to share with you some of the samples of these comments because I think they're pretty important.

One reader said, Ultimately, you have to make a business model that is sustainable and allows you to compete. Better off doing it now when it's an option rather than doing it when it becomes a necessity. There are uncontroversial ways of implementing ads. Just don't overdo it and I don't think people will respond badly. Another reader said, I think it is wise to be considering the competitive landscape and how to make this sustainable and durable for more than a couple of years. Your work is genuinely important and you're skilled, compassionate, and intentional. I don't mean to sound grandiose, but I truly believe that it would be a loss to the news landscape, to the country, and to the world if you had to stop your work because it was

drowned by competitors and a business model that ran you into the ground. Take on the ads, work with the investors, network with the competitors, do what you need to do to make this feel stable and sustainable. Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming

November 19th, only on Disney+. Another reader said, I recognize how adding ad content feels like a stain against the heart of Tangle, but I think there is a way to manage the businesses you choose to partner with and the way in which the ads are presented that can maintain the spirit of Tangle. The upside of increased revenue and growth is worth it to maintain marketplace competitiveness as well as reach new people with your unique and much-needed presentation of the news. And a reader who kind of objected clearly to this said, In the long run, it will compromise your business model. You cannot serve two masters.

You are either independent or you are driven by ad volume and money. There are no two ways around it, no matter how hard you will try to justify it. I sent a message on LinkedIn by Robin Williams. All politicians should wear their sponsors on their clothes so we know who is paying for them. Thus is the point. You drive revenue with ads, but they own you. There were over 1,000 thoughtful comments like this, and I read them all. Then I used them to help develop a transparent policy that I hope will change the minds of many of you who are skeptical about this step. So, what is that policy? Well, it is now published on our website. You can read it with a link in today's episode description.

But the rough outline is this. We won't ever run political ads. We won't ever promote shady or unproven products. We won't ever have pop-ups, video ads, or intrusive advertisements on our website or in our newsletter. One of our models for advertising is 1440, a newsletter many of you read because we advertise in their newsletter, and they have simple and unobtrusive ads. Like 1440, our ads will only appear in the free version of Tangle. On the off chance that an advertising partner becomes a subject of our coverage, we will cut ties with them immediately and alert readers. Finally, I am creating a firewall between

editorial and advertisers in the best way Tangle can. Magdalena Bukova, our longtime social media manager and my right hand in everything Tangle, will be leading the charge on handling advertisers in the newsletter. Trevor Eichhorn, who edits our podcast, is going to be handling advertisers in the podcast. I'll maintain final editorial say on the language we can use in each, but we are not going to hire an ad sales team. We'll do this in-house with the Tangle team and the Tangle ethos and do our best to create relationships with companies who are pushing products we actually believe in. So in the coming weeks, if you are on our free mailing list for our newsletter, you might start seeing advertisements show up in the newsletter. And of course, you'll continue to hear them in the podcast. For me, this is a bittersweet moment.

I'm excited about the prospect of new revenue that will help us expand our reach and our team. I'm blown away that three years into this project, I'm making consequential business decisions, something I was unsure would ever happen in the first place. But frankly, I'm also a little bit sad. I feel as though I'm watching my child graduate and go to college. It seems like a concession to the forces of the world we live in, like that original small pure thing I started three years ago with an email, is changing into something bigger and more sophisticated and different. So while I'm thrilled about a more sustainable future and glad to be celebrating this milestone, I also feel nostalgic for the overworked and underpaid days of the scrappy little newsletter that got us here. And with that in mind, I'm pledging to do our best to keep that ethos alive

for the months, the years, and the decades ahead. Going forward, if you are a newsletter reader and you don't want to see ads, you have three options. You can subscribe and get the ad-free version. You can write into Vent and try to change my mind. Or if you're part of that 1%, you can unsubscribe, but please don't do that. I truly hope you all stick around. Also, if you are a Tangle listener or reader who wants to advertise with us, please reach out or fill out the form that is in today's episode description. I'd love to get this off the ground with people who are already in our community. I know we have lots of business owners and people who work for big companies. So please, please, please, if this is something that interests you, write in and we can talk

about it. Now, finally, is our last announcement and maybe even the most important one. I wanted to let you guys know that we are going to launch a massive charity drive. Since before we even considered introducing advertisements in Tangle, I have for a long time been spending a portion of our revenue on advertising in other newsletters. But I'd rather give money to a good cause than a competitor or another company. Some of you have been around for a while probably remember we've done subscription drives in the past where in one week I give a portion of all our new subscriptions to charity. So when I saw a campaign Roka News was doing with their readers, I was inspired.

They told their readers that for every new subscriber who signed up under a specific link, they'd donate $1 to charity. This created an incentive for their readers to spread the word and allowed them to lean on their community rather than advertisers for growth. I was so inspired that I decided to steal their idea and see what we can do with it. So starting today, every time a new Tangle reader signs up for a free or paid subscription by going to readtangle.com slash give, we'll give a dollar to a charity fighting hunger. That means you can share that unique link far and wide. And every time someone signs up there, we'll donate $1 to Meals on Wheels America, which helps feed the elderly, or No Kid Hungry, which helps feed the kids. We are going to split

our donations evenly between the two charities. So to recap, if you email me in the last month, I may not respond, but I want you to know I read it and I will try to going forward. Free readers are going to start seeing unobtrusive non-political text-based ads in October in the free newsletter. If you want an ad-free Tangle newsletter, you can subscribe by going to readtangle.com membership. If you want to advertise with us, you can subscribe by going to readtangle.com slash membership. If you want to advertise with us, you can fill out the form that is in today's episode description or write in to me. Finally, we would rather give our money to a good cause than advertisers, so we are starting a charity drive. Anytime someone signs up for Tangle with the URL readtangle.com slash give,

we are going to donate $1 to charity. Please share that URL far and wide. Thank you so much for supporting our work. And as I said, feel free to write in with any questions or thoughts. We're excited for our next chapter. You can always reach me, Isaac, I-S-A-A-C at readtangle.com. All right, everybody, we'll be right back here Monday, same time. Have a great weekend. Peace. Have a great weekend. Peace. who designed our logo. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. For more from Tangle, subscribe to our newsletter or check out our website at www.readtangle.com. We'll see you next time. who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history,

and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+.