First off, I’d like to thank everyone who subscribed to Birch Bark in the past week! The response was far larger than I expected, and I got an order of magnitude more subscribers than I expected, so thank you so much! If you already subscribed and had feedback on the first issue, let me know on Twitter or shoot me an email. But let’s get into some housekeeping that I probably should have covered in the announcement post, but like I said at the time, it was coming in hot, so I didn't cover all the details.

1. Privacy

As you have likely already seen, the sign up form for this newsletter simply asks you for an email address. I don’t need your name, address, or anything else about you. I’m not keeping track of who specifically signs up and I am not scouring the subscriber list to see who is reading. I will really only be going in there for troubleshooting purposes. I’m not trying to target anyone with ads or “special offers” or any of that junk. You wanted some fun links every week, so I’m giving you some fun links. That’s the deal, and I don’t see that changing any time soon.

Likewise, I’m not collecting email addresses to use with some other thing I’ve got cooked up. Don’t expect to see an email offering you my new self-help ebook or anything through this mailing list 😛

I had fun links I didn’t know how to share well. You said you’d like to see those links. That’s the relationship and there is no grand plan to make it more or less than that.

2. Advertising

As of right now, there are no plans in place to include advertising in the weekly email. I’m totally open to including some sort of ad down the road if this becomes successful enough, but I will tell you before hand, ensure it’s the sort of ad I feel comfortable with, and will clearly mark any sponsored content in the email itself.

I don’t love ads either, but this email is a bit of work to put together and it would be nice to be compensated for that time and effort. If one of the 15-20 links each week is a clearly marked sponsor, I hope that will be okay with you.

We’ll see if it gets enough traction to even make this a possibility though. 😊

3. Schedule

Like I just mentioned, this is a decent amount of work to put together, but it also turns out that there is more stuff to share than I expected. I held some stuff back from the initial email because it was getting too long, and next week’s is looking to be even longer. I still plan on releasing a newsletter every Friday morning (4AM Central so you have it when you wake up, in the US at least) to make sure I can keep up a schedule. I understand that I’m in the honeymoon period of a new project so it’s all very exciting, and I don’t want to overcommit now.

If there is interest in going daily or even Mon/Wed/Fri, that could be something we change to down the road. Again, let me know if this is of any interest to you.

4. Content

You’re really getting stuff that I like, so tech, science, video games, and “just makes you smile” videos, but I’m trying to get thing that speak to a broad audience. If there is a whole category I’m missing, I’d love to hear it. No politics though, let’s not go down that road…

The only addition I see coming, and this will be in the next issue, are music recommendations. I listen to a silly amount of new music, and will share one or two highlights each week with direct links to Apple Music and Spotify.

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And that’s about it for now. If you have any questions or concerns about how Birch Bark is running, you can always reach out with one of the links above, and I’ll be sure to get back to you. Thank you again, and I hope you enjoy the fun stuff hitting your inbox this upcoming Friday 😁