The Unlikely Rise of the Newsletter Platform That’s Taking Over the Internet

45 years after the first-ever email newsletter

Photo by Oleg Laptev on Unsplash

The first-ever email blast was sent out in 1978 by a guy named Gary Thuerk, a marketing manager at Digital Equipment Corporation, to about 400 Arpanet advertising machines. This one email blast generated $13 million in sales, according to Brafton.

As you can tell, newsletters were a big deal right from the get-go.

Fast forward 39 years, and a small email-driven, writer-focused project saw the light of day. 

Its name? Substack.

And nobody could have predicted the success this newsletter platform would see back then.

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