Well! I guess that means my paying-subscriber roll has grown by 33.333%! I feel guilty about how it happened, though: I had mentioned my Substack in an email to a former student as part of Stuff I've Been Doing Over the Past Year, and I insisted that I wasn't trying to sell him on anything... yet he subscribed anyway. I then apologized for the vulgar, immature, un-PC nature of my humor (which I hadn't exposed him to back when I was his teacher), but since he now reads this blog on occasion and hasn't been driven away by its content, then I guess he'll be fine with my Substack content.
Thanks, Nathan, and welcome aboard.
This math has always confused me. Has your paying-subscriber roll grown by 33.33% or has it grown by 50%. If you think if how many paying subcribers you had before (two), it has grown by 50% (one). If you look at how many subscribers you have now, though (three), then your new subscriber makes up 33.33% of your paying-subscriber roll. Which is it?
ReplyDeleteI don't know if there is a "correct" answer (it's probably just a matter of perspective), but 50% growth sounds more impressive than 33.33% growth, so I would probably go with that.
Ah. My current paying-subscriber count went from 3 to 4. So to calculate percentage increase, the formula is [(new - old)/old]•100. [(4 - 3)/3]•100 = 33.333... , so there we are.
DeleteIt could be that whatever stats you saw hadn't had a chance to update before you did the math. The addition of a new subscriber happened only within the past 48 or so hours.
Substack also seems weird about how it handles subscription renewals. I got an automatic note via email that one paying subscriber had requested a release from my Substack, so I thought I was losing a paying subscriber. I shrugged and thought, "These things happen, and you can't please everyone." Then over the next few days, I started watching for the inevitable drop-by-one of my total subscriber count. Except it didn't drop. And in fact, it turned out that that subscriber's subscription had merely hit the auto-renewal phase. So the sub count never dropped. That person remains on my list as a paying subscriber, now having renewed. Why, then, did I ever receive a notification of a request to drop the subscription? (To be clear, Substack handles all subscribes and unsubscribes; I merely get notifications when these occur.)
So believe me: You're not the only one who's confused by wonky math and dodgy stats.
Oh, yeah, I had thought you had gone from two to three. Three to four is even better!
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