🆕 Digital Media Listings (Sep 7): Are those subscribers even real?

Find the perfect digital asset to acquire. 🌍 Website | 🗞️ Newsletter | 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Community | 🎧 Podcast | 📱 Application

One of the scariest parts of buying a newsletter is simple: what if you pay for 50,000 subscribers and only half of them are actually paying attention?

The good news: you don’t have to guess.

There’s no single metric that will tell you whether a list is healthy. You need to look at the whole picture:

1- Opens
Open rates used to be the obvious place to start. Not as much anymore. Apple Mail Privacy Protection can automatically register opens, which means open rates can be inflated. Use them as a signal, not as hard proof of engagement.

2- Clicks
Clicks are more meaningful, but they’re not perfect either. Bots and security scanners can automatically click links. Look at them, but don’t rely on CTR alone. Check what type of links works best, promotional ones or informative ones; they tell you what the audience is interested in.

3- How many people actually receive the newsletter?

A newsletter may show 50,000 subscribers on the dashboard but only send each issue to 35,000. Bounced, inactive, or suppressed addresses may never receive an email. Make sure you don’t miss that.

4- Look for signs of engagement
This is where things get interesting. Look for the things only an interested reader does:

The more of these signals you can verify, the more confidence you can have that there are actual people behind those subscriber numbers.

5- Where did the subscribers come from?
Not all subscribers are created equal :)

Ask how the list was built: organic growth, referrals, paid acquisition, giveaways, cross-promotions, or imported lists.

If subscribers were uploaded or imported, dig deeper. Where did they come from? Did they explicitly opt in? And do they actually know they’re subscribed to this newsletter?

6- Third-party data

Some operators add outside verification when readers sign up, which confirms a subscriber was real at registration. Helpful, but it's a check at the start, not a long-term engagement metric, so don't rely on it alone.

Useful? Yes. Proof that they’re still engaged six months later? No.

7- Look at the big picture, not the snapshot.
A great month doesn’t mean much on its own.

Ask to see sends, opens, clicks, unsubscribes, and other engagement metrics across several months. A healthy audience should show some consistency over time.

And pay attention to sudden jumps. If a newsletter went from 20,000 to 50,000 subscribers in a month, you should know exactly where those 30,000 people came from.

TIP: During due diligence, ask the seller to walk you through the newsletter platform directly. Look at subscriber growth, recent sends, engagement, acquisition sources, churn rate, and anything else that matters to the deal.

No single metric proves that a list is real and engaged.

But put all of these signals together, and you can answer the question that actually matters before buying:

Are you acquiring an audience or just a number on a dashboard?

You should know by now that I love a good poll/quizz!

Atrivial is a new tool that makes them effortless: paste your content, and it spins up a quiz or poll, hosted and ready to drop into your email.

You get real data on what your readers actually want and a cleaner way to bring in sponsors.

(I will use this tool in the next issues.) Let me know your thoughts on it.

And if you want to try it for your newsletter

→ Try Atrivial —> Get 10% off + 30-day trial with code LT10.

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