Happy Wood from Eden day

Two years ago today Wood from Eden started. Time to celebrate. Or not.

On this very day last year I published a post celebrating the fact that Wood from Eden had survived its first year in existence. A quite successful survival to booth. Tradition now dictates that I write another post delimiting progress made and in general contemplating time going by.

This had been somewhat easier to write had it not been for the fact that I have all but stopped contributing to this blog. My last published post was three and half months ago. Primarily this is due to time constraints. Child rearing, house building and the general logistics of life are taking their toll. But I am also having some serious problems with inspiration. It just might be that social media is a tad too social for me.

At the heart of the matter is the tiny detail that my contributions are not really contributions at all. It seems to be an iron law of Substacking that you lose subscribers every time you publish something. It is quite natural when you think about it. When people get a strange email from a newsletter they do not remember ever subscribing to, their first reaction is to unsubscribe.

This is probably inevitable, but there are degrees in hell. Every time Tove publishes something, Wood from Eden loses 2-3 subscribers. Every time I publish something, we lose 4-6 subscribers. What is more, every other Tove post is shared somewhere, which usually brings in 5-10 new subscribers. Occasionally, her posts are shared widely, meaning numerous new subscribers. In contrast, my posts are never shared anywhere (except this single exception). Every time I publish something is a net loss for this publication (this post will no doubt go the same way). 

But enough of condescension and self-pity. You are surely not here to read such lamentations. On to business.

State of affairs

How is Wood from Eden doing on its second anniversary? Well, that depends on the perspective.

Currently there are 1213 of you, subscribers of this newsletter. That is significantly more than the 878 of you that were a year ago, although the growth trajectory has undoubtedly been lower during the second year compared to the first.

A difference since last year is that there are also 36 paying subscribers. That is a paltry number but it is not insignificant since your payment actually contributes an appreciable share of our income. I have read other Substackers in passing mentioning a paid subscription as buying them a coffee. Knowing a bit or two about the world at large (and having watched the Lego Movie multiple times) I do not doubt that there actually is coffee that costs 8 dollars. That, however, is not the faith of Wood from Eden subscription payments. We do not drink coffee, especially not 8 dollar coffee. 8 dollars for us buys oatmeal porridge for the entire family for a week. Take heed, all you effective altruists out there who want the most bang for your buck.

Another novelty in connection with the paid subscriptions is the paid content. Over the last year Tove has published no less than 27 posts solely for paying subscribers. That is not very far from the 41 ordinary posts she has published. Personally, I have published a puny 13 articles in the past 12 months (all of them public). Which gives a grand total of 81 posts since the last Wood from Eden day.

The paid content on this blog is restricted to content with a personal touch: Things we would not have published on the open internet anyway. This way we can provide exclusive content for paid subscribers while still keeping everything we consider to be of public interest on the free side of the paywall.  

This is about as much as there is to say about the current status of Wood from Eden. In order to make this into a full-length article I need something to fill it up with. And I think I know what you all very much want to read about: Yourselves. 

Who are you, anyway?

Substack has a few nifty functions for readership analysis. I assume I am not the only Substack writer who likes to browse this part of the settings pages for clues as to who on Earth decides to subscribe to a pitiful little blog like this one.

For a start a hefty 57% of you subscribers are American. Overall there is a heavy dominance of English-speakers among the readership, which might not be that surprising since this is an English-language blog. The top 4 subscriber countries are all English-speaking:

United States: 691 subscribers
United Kingdom: 105 subscribers
Canada: 64 subscribers
Australia: 43 subscribers
Germany: 33 subscribers

The four top subscribing countries together account for 75% of subscribers. In addition, the sixth most subscribing country is India with 31 subscribers, increasing the English-speaking dominance even more. 

Of the many Americans the five most subscribing states are:

California: 141 subscribers
New York: 72 subscribers
Texas: 37 subscribers
Washington: 32 subscribers
Massachusetts: 29 subscribers

The first three states are all at the top of the most populous states list. Missing from our list is the third most populous state: Florida (20 subscribers, eighth place among the states). Another outlier is Pennsylvania, the fifth most populous state, which is only represented by 15 subscribers, maybe (but probably not) due to a lack of internet access among our core constituency: the Amish. 

The fourth and fifth entries on the state list might hint at some sort of liberal bias in the readership. This is probably an exaggeration, more probably it hints at an academic bias, both Washington and Massachusetts being states with lots of academics. 

The one other reader statistic that Substack offers is "audience overlap", where we bloggers can see what other Substacks our subscribers are subscribing to. The numbers on that board are the following:

Astral Codex Ten: 32%
Rob Henderson's Newsletter: 21%
Noahpinion: 21%
The Free Press: 19%
Slow Boring: 18%
Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning: 18%

I generally do not read blogs. I know who Scott Alexander is, but the rest of the list is more or less unknown to me. According to Tove this overlap table places us vaguely in the rationalist/intellectual/scientific policy camp. Which I guess is OK. One can have worse bedfellows than that. 

A note from the editor

I sent this gloomy post to Tove fully expecting her to reject it completely. Surprisingly, she had no complaints except a few minor linguistic issues. However, she would only let me publish it on the condition that she could add her own note at the end. Since my negotiating position is rather weak, I had to accept. 

Here it is, the note from Tove: 

And now a few words from the one who is still writing. I sometimes can't decide whether I should see this project as a success or a failure. On the one hand, we have been writing regularly for two years. We still reach a very limited audience compared to many, many others. We can't make a living from it (not even on the very modest level we are striving for). 

On the other hand, we attract just the kind of people I would like to attract. Thoughtful, wild-minded, intelligent, erudite, humorous - the kind of people I always wanted to talk to. Wood from Eden gives me the opportunity to connect with exactly the kind of people I have always wanted to connect with. This is, if anything, a wild level of success.