dria.org

Promotion and growth

Recently, Alix Franquet arranged for the about:mozilla newsletter to be featured as one of the Firefox Start Page snippets. Prior to this, the newsletter had plateaued at around 2800 email subscribers (plus an unknown number of readers via the web and feeds), increasing by maybe 10-20 subs per week. Since being added to the start page, however, the number of email subscribers has exploded to 6800, and the number continues to grow by 300-500 subscribers every week. A million, million thanks to Alix for helping promote the newsletter like this.

Content and length

The newsletter has also been getting longer as the Mozilla Project continues to grow both in the sheer number of contributors and the number of projects being undertaken. I’m going to experiment with slightly increasing the number of stories mentioned while paring down a little on the number of words I write per piece, to see how that works.

Experimental source feed

I’ve also started an experimental “Source feed” of sorts. Each week, while I read through the various Mozilla-related news sources, I flag possible items for newsletter inclusion by starring them in Google Reader. A few weeks ago I also started “sharing” those items, so you can now see a raw feed of Mozilla news stories, mentions, and blog posts that I’m thinking about including in the newsletter. I’m not sure whether it will be useful or not, but someone asked if I could put it together, so here it is.

That’s about it for now. If you have any questions or suggestions about the newsletter, please feel free to leave a comment here or email me at deb-at-mozilla-dot-com.