Defector’s growth committee is hard at work preparing for all-company meetings in August, where we’ll set strategy for Year 6 and beyond. Our biennial reader survey is probably the most important single input to that process. You should take the survey! It’ll take you about five minutes, and you’ll gain entry into a drawing for one of ten $100 gift cards for your trouble. (The lawyers among you can read the drawing’s terms and conditions here.)
Feedback from our readers makes a direct, tangible impact on the site. According to our last survey, our readers:
- Wanted more culture and politics writing, so we hired Rachelle Hampton, hired Brandy Jensen, and spun up Tom Scocca’s twice-monthly column.
- Wanted gift links, dark mode browsing, and a weekly crossword, so those became the top priorities of our developers over at Alley.
- Wanted more podcasts, so we’ll launch several this summer! More on this soon.
This time around, we’re especially interested in learning more about how you find new stuff to read online. We wrote about this dynamic in last year’s annual report, and it remains the central challenge of our business: Subscriber churn is low, which suggests that we’re serving the needs of our existing audience. However, the ongoing degradation of search and splintering of social media makes it hard to get our good blogs in front of new people who might eventually subscribe.
We will inevitably try and fail at a bunch of stuff in the course of figuring this out, but we hope that you, our wise, blog-reading audience, might help us make better investments. If you have thoughts, please respond to the survey—the “Distribution” section with these questions is the first real one, and it’ll help us to have everything in one place. Our Ops team will also be monitoring the comment section down here. You can also send good ideas directly to Sean Kuhn (sean@defector.com). Bad ideas can be sent to Ray Ratto at your own peril.
