How is Multiplier a year old already?

It’s been one year since I pushed the first issue of Multiplier live so I thought I’d take a week off (and buy myself a little bit of time to put together the next proper issue) to take stock of how things are going.

Over the past few years, pivoting to newsletters has been very much the style of the times when it comes to modern media. However, I think it’s important to be honest about what this is and what it isn’t. Multiplier is not a full time gig for. It’s a side project that I want to keep around because it lets me dig into topics, talk to people and do things that are getting harder and harder to justify through the many other outlets for my writing that exist. But enough about that, let’s talk stats. Generally,

• Most issues of Multiplier get at least a couple hundred views. That number could be bigger, but it’s nothing to scoff at for a platform that started with a subscriber-base of zero people, SEO strategy and minimal marketing outside my own social media channels.
• The open rate for issues is about 60% on average, which is a pretty tremendous stat to behold and a testament to the overall engagement of the audience that is signed up to read the newsletter.
• The overall Multiplier audience grows around 3% per month, which isn’t a ton but it does add up pretty quickly.
• About 50% of that audience is reading Multiplier via their email client of choice. The second biggest driver for reads is direct traffic, which accounts for around 30%. Roughly half that amount of readers are reading via the Substack App and the final 5% are finding my work via search.
• In practice, it’s proven to be quite difficult to anticipate which issues will or won’t be more popular. Over the past twelve months, the two most popular issues have been this one about Hellgate London and this one about Esoteric Ebb. Trendier topics or more-timely guests have sometimes found traction via social media but more than just as often they’ve performed roughly in-line with most other posts. If there’s a successful formula to be found here, I haven’t managed to crack it yet.
• Relative to the other writing that I do for the web, my overall takeaway is the work that I put into this newsletter is less inclined towards go viral via social media, news aggregators or other platforms. However, at the same time, the audience here is slow-growing but consistent - which is really encouraging.

What have I learned?

1. The Recommendations system and social networks aspects of Substack have proven surprisingly valuable in terms of exposing new readers to my work. However, that is likely largely down to folks like Alex Antra who are actively championing gaming content across the platform. The fact that Substack itself has failed to rise above the very low bar of adding a video game category to the platform is just another reason that it has become much more difficult to see it as a long term home for this particular project.
2. Back in March, I revved up to a weekly publishing schedule. It did not have much of an impact on growth, even though overall reads went up. I will probably be sticking with fortnightly going forward or potentially even scaling back to publishing once a month for reasons I’ll discuss below.
3. Generally speaking, everyone I’ve dealt with for Multiplier has been very generous about donating their time and words to the project. That said, there has sometimes been additional back-and-forth when it comes to looping in various PR representatives or explaining how it all comes together. This can blow out the usual turnaround time it takes to put an issue together.
4. For the first few months this was not as much of an issue, as I had a massive backlog of issues ready to go to help offset any delays or gaps. However, with each month that wiggle room has grown tighter and I have grown much busier with other a bunch of other life stuff.

What’s next?

1. Moving to Ghost has been on my to-do list for a long time and I remained committed to making it happen. Now that some other unexpected expenses in my life have been dealt with, I’m hoping to make this happen before the end of the year. I’m hopeful that self-hosting might be a more viable option in terms of keeping the overall cost down but we’ll see how it all shakes out.
2. As teased above, I may look to change things up when it comes to publishing cadence in 2026. I started this project with a big list of people I wanted to talk to and topics I wanted to talk about and I’ve mostly worked my way entirely through that stockpile over the past year. Coming up with new topics and finding new guests isn’t the hardest or most time consuming thing in the world. However, having to do so every few weeks as opposed to every few months has definitely moved this project in a less sustainable direction for me on a personal level. Part of this is self-inflicted in that I opted to double the cadence for a while. Part of it is also seasonal in that a ton of issues ended up coming out of chats I had at GCAP and SXSW Sydney last year and that those particular events have yet to recur.
3. In any case, the final piece of the puzzle here is one that I’ve yet to entirely figure out. The core concept of Multiplier is that it's a collaboration between me and a guest. As time goes on, I do wonder if it might make sense to carve out a corner of this project that I could keep to myself. I’m not entirely sure what that’ll look like but keep an eye out for “Solo Queue” after I move Multiplier over to Ghost.

Anyway, thanks for reading this. I hope you’re still as excited to see where this goes as I am.

~ Fergus Halliday