The Unlikely Rise of the Newsletter Platform That’s Taking Over the Internet
45 years after the first-ever email newsletter
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.