The Substrate and Polkadot Developer Newsletter was initially entirely a Parity initiative to cover updates for existing and new developers in our ecosystem. For the last 5 editions and going forward, it’s been open for builders in our ecosystem to contribute, giving anyone the chance to share relevant material to its readers (as detailed in these guidelines).
In this post, I wanted to give a couple updates about it’s current reach and trends. I hope to also gather insight from readers here for how we can improve it.
Audience
- Today the mailing list sends to 1,558 email addresses who have signed up via this link (this used to be around 2.2k but we’ve removed a number of fake addresses etc.)
- The newsletter sent via mailing list has an average active reader base of 680 readers (Dec-March)
- The Polkaverse publication has 168 followers to date, since its launch 4 months ago
- Although it’s still sent out to a mailing list through Parity, it has been open for community contributions since November 2022. There have been 6 unique contributors (apart from myself) since then.
- Because I strive to make this a resource accessible to everyone, you can actually read an archive of the newsletters here which gets published a few days after the final copy is sent out to the mailing list.
Content
- Top clicked links are typically for:
- New educational resources and learning material (e.g. written tutorials, Twitter threads and Youtube videos)
- Developer ecosystem insights
- Developer blogs (from Polkadot, such as the Staking Update and ink! newsletter, as well as ecosystem teams)
- Job and grant opportunities
- In the Technical Updates section, readers aren’t interested in clicking to check out PRs on Github for additional context (very low click rate for these types of links)
Other relevant info about opening the newsletter to community contributions: Contributing to the Substrate Developer Newsletter 🗞☕️
Questions / feedback
- Are there any readers here who can share what they like, don’t like and would want to see more of in the newsletter?
- I’m considering to create a contribution badge as an NFT, would that be of interest to potential contributors?
- Are there any changes you’d like to see in the current setup of the the newsletter (e.g. curation mechanism, archive, branding etc.) ?
Call to action
Please consider contributing to the newsletter. I’m always looking out for latest learning material, upcoming events, new features and libraries for builders in the ecosystem but it’s nearly impossible to include everything and it’s only going to get harder as the ecosystem grows.
If you’re contributing, make sure to add any upcoming events happening in the next month. For e.g. in the upcoming April edition, you’d add events you’re hosting happening in May. And for any other content, add updates from the previous ~4 weeks. For e.g, in the April edition this would be new learning material or releases that happened in April.
Get your PRs before the last Wednesday of each month so we have time to review and publish the content so it goes out before the beginning of next month’s edition. 
And feel free to use this thread to AMA about the newsletter 