Having spent a meaningful portion of my career inside marketing environments where email newsletters were treated simultaneously as a core growth channel and an increasingly fragile necessity, I have developed a fairly unsentimental view of what they actually achieve, particularly when one moves beyond surface-level metrics and begins to examine how closely those metrics map to real economic outcomes.
In Web2, newsletters earned their position not because they were especially innovative, but because they solved a distribution problem that most other channels could not reliably address, namely that if a user subscribed, the message would arrive in their inbox, and that degree of deterministic delivery created the foundation upon which lifecycle marketing, retention strategies, and re-engagement campaigns were built, which is precisely why email marketing continues to report returns in the region of $36 to $42 for every dollar spent, according to industry sources such as Litmus and the Data & Marketing Association.
Those returns, however, are less a reflection of creative excellence and more a consequence of infrastructure doing its job properly.
The difficulty begins when that same infrastructure is applied to an environment in which its core assumptions no longer hold, because Web2 email marketing rests on the premise that identity is tied to an email address, and that this address provides a stable and meaningful connection between a user and their activity, whereas in practice even Web2 systems rely on a patchwork of logins, cookies, and probabilistic attribution models to maintain that illusion, and in Web3 the illusion does not merely weaken but collapses entirely.
In Web3, identity is not an email address but a wallet, and a wallet does not simply function as a communication endpoint but as a verifiable record of behaviour, which means that it reflects, with a level of precision that traditional marketing systems could never fully achieve, what a user actually does within an ecosystem, including which assets they hold, which protocols they interact with, and how they allocate capital over time.
From the perspective of someone who has operated across both environments, the implications of this shift are not subtle, because a Web2 newsletter allows you to communicate with a list of contacts whose relationship to your product or ecosystem is often ambiguous and subject to decay, given that users subscribe for a variety of reasons, disengage without notice, and frequently exist across multiple accounts, all of which contributes to a steady erosion of list quality that is reflected in declining open rates, which now commonly sit in the 15 to 20 percent range, and click-through rates that rarely exceed low single digits.
What sits beneath those metrics is a more fundamental limitation, which is that you are attempting to infer value from signals that are only loosely connected to actual participation, and in doing so you are forced to make decisions based on approximations rather than direct observation.
When communication attaches itself to wallets, that entire dynamic changes, because the starting point of the system is no longer a speculative audience defined by form submissions or lead magnets, but a set of participants whose behaviour is visible, whose relevance can be assessed, and whose actions can be measured directly onchain, which in turn transforms marketing from an exercise in inference into a system of interaction grounded in observable reality.
This shift extends beyond identity into the economics of attention itself, because one of the less frequently acknowledged characteristics of traditional email marketing is that it operates as a largely extractive model, in which every message competes for attention within an increasingly saturated inbox environment, while the user absorbs the full cognitive cost of filtering relevance, and marketers respond by investing in optimisation tactics designed to maintain open rates and avoid spam filters, all of which becomes progressively more complex as engagement declines.
EtherMail introduces a different framework, which I initially approached with a degree of scepticism until I observed how it functions in practice, because by incorporating a read-to-earn model in which users receive small EMT rewards for engaging with messages, it effectively recognises attention as something that carries value within the ecosystem, rather than something that must be extracted without compensation, and although the incentives are deliberately modest, they are sufficient to establish a baseline level of engagement that consistently exceeds what is typically observed in Web2 newsletter environments.
In campaigns we have seen, engagement metrics outperform traditional benchmarks not because the messaging itself is radically different, but because the underlying exchange between sender and recipient is more balanced, in the sense that communication is no longer purely a demand on attention but part of a system in which attention is acknowledged and, to a limited extent, rewarded.
From a marketing standpoint, this produces a more reliable feedback loop, because engagement becomes a function not only of messaging quality but of alignment between the content being delivered and the recipient’s demonstrated behaviour within the ecosystem, which means that when a user who actively participates in a given vertical receives a relevant communication, the probability of meaningful interaction increases in a way that segmentation models in Web2 can only approximate.
The broader point, therefore, is not that Web2 newsletters have ceased to function, because within the context for which they were designed they continue to deliver measurable value, but that their suitability becomes increasingly questionable in an environment where identity, behaviour, and economic participation are already natively aligned, and where communication can attach directly to that alignment rather than attempting to reconstruct it indirectly.
From where I sit, having seen how both systems operate under real commercial conditions, the distinction becomes increasingly difficult to ignore, because Web2 newsletters treat communication as a broadcast directed at an assumed audience, whereas EtherMail treats it as an interaction with known participants, and once marketing begins from that point of certainty rather than approximation, the entire structure of the funnel changes in ways that are both measurable and, ultimately, far more difficult to dismiss.