🔴 "My approach probably leaves a bit of money on the table"

Today’s guest is Ernie Smith, a deeply committed DIY newsletterist with 10 years in the game. Before getting into newsletters, he built an audience of 150,000 for a pioneering news aggregation Tumblr.

We’re featuring him for Tedium: a newsletter about “strange and unusual descriptions of common things, explained in extreme depth.”

In this issue:

• 🥁 What Ernie, Fugazi, and Taylor Swift have in common

• 📰 Syndication as a way to build a newsletter audience

• 🛠️ Taking a staunchly DIY approach to newslettering

— Francis Zierer, Editor

P.S. We have a podcast! Listen to Ernie and I in conversation on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube.

Does anyone make cool stuff anymore?

Tedium is a defensive-camouflage name for an uncommonly curious, generous, and well-written newsletter. Ernie Smith has been running it for just six months shy of 10 years, largely by himself (with occasional guest writers) and with a staunch DIY ethos. He eschews any specific newsletter platform, opting to cobble together a system that gives him maximum control (see his full stack here).

The newsletter, which currently has around 12,000 subscribers, does not follow a consistent schedule. Yes, there are generally three issues per week, but Ernie doesn’t schedule sends; he finishes writing a newsletter and then sends it out.

Two years after Ernie sent his first newsletter, Substack launched, and the platform’s representatives reached out, offering to pay him to move his newsletter to their platform. He declined:

When he declined Substack’s offer, Ernie was employed full-time; he was 5 years into 11 at Manifest, a D.C. area content agency. He’d not created Tedium to generate a full-time income; he’d created it because he wanted to.

Going short-form for too long

Six years before penning the first issue of Tedium, Ernie started ShortFormBlog, a news aggregation Tumblr that would grow to over 150,000 followers before he shut it down in 2014. He started it after getting laid off, but even after landing a new job, he’d sit down every morning to post. Each post contained one linked news item or statistic with anywhere from a few words to a couple paragraphs of commentary.

The ShortFormBlog Tumblr archive goes back as far as February 2010, about a year after Ernie started the project (the first year was on WordPress). From then until the ‘last’ post (he’s continued to post intermittently over the years), there were a total of 21,482 posts. That is, on average, more than 12 posts per day for nearly 5 years.

Burnout came as no real surprise. It was a mix of the being grind of the news cycle and Tumblr’s limitations: “nearly all my audience was tied up with Tumblr, a platform that was difficult to monetize. I felt like I was renting my readership, rather than owning it outright.”¹

Projects come and go; writing is forever

Ernie is a serial project abandoner, if only because he’s a serial project starter. When he stopped ShortFormBlog to start Tedium, he meant to start an entirely different project called DataSlam. That never quite happened.

Six years into starting Tedium, though, Ernie started another side project: MidRange. He’d give himself 30 minutes to write about whatever was on his mind that day, then just send it out. The idea², after years of writing long, meandering articles for Tedium, was to exercise the part of his brain that could produce short-form writing quickly but with depth.

This lasted for exactly two years.

After MidRange Ernie planned to start something called NextGeist — he never got to that, but he did start Lesser Tedium, which was a short version of Tedium he ran on Substack, largely to experiment with the social media features they’d recently launched. He shuttered it after 3 months; turns out his audience wanted the content in long form.

(This May, another one-off side project of Ernie’s went semi-viral: udm14.com, a way to search Google without AI results or other fluff. He explains it in an article on Tedium).

Tedious profits, tedious growth

Does Ernie make a living from Tedium? Not entirely. He’s had a Patreon for about seven years; these days, there are no significant member benefits, but it’s currently bringing in $262.30 per month. He also hosts ads on the site using Carbon and sells sponsor slots in the newsletter. (Recent sponsors include other newsletters and a Chrome extension called Lumin for editing PDFs).

One of Tedium’s best sources of revenue and growth has been syndication. In the early days, he pitched Atlas Obscura, which was then less of a travel site and more of a general oddities site. Between 2015 and 2018, they ran at least 72 of his articles, compensating him by placing CTAs to subscribe to his newsletter at the top and bottom of the page.

After a year of syndication with Atlas Obscura, somebody from VICE reached out to syndicate his work in their Motherboard technology vertical. This time, he was paid for it in what was a great relationship until shortly before Motherboard shuttered in 2024.

These days, Ernie syndicates with IEEE Spectrum — they’re currently compensating him on a one-article-per-month deal.

Tedium generates enough revenue to pay for all infrastructural costs, compensate occasional freelance writers, and justify some of the time Ernie spends on it. But it’s just as much about the halo effect — about it being a calling card for his freelance journalism work.

What do Taylor Swift, Fugazi, and Ernie Smith have in common?

I asked Ernie what he’s optimistic about in the newsletter world these days:

By his own admission, “an easy buck” is not Ernie’s priority: “I’m not trying to turn it into this $10 million business. I’m just trying to make it a successful thing creatively.”

There was — bear with me here — a band called Fugazi that came out of Washington, D.C.’s hardcore scene in the 80s. For years, they famously insisted on keeping ticket prices $5 to ensure people who wanted to come to their shows could come. This is just a small representation of their more broadly anti-corporate, antiauthoritarian political stance.

An on-principle $5 ticket stands in stark contrast to, say, Taylor Swift tickets, which go for thousands of dollars — a combined result of her tours’ high production costs, of Live Nation-Ticketmaster’s grip on the live performance ecosystem, and relentless resale demand.

These are two extreme approaches to the relationship between an artist and their audience, respectively prioritizing accessibility and profit above all else.

There is clearly a place in the world for both approaches: there remains a niche but fervent Fugazi fandom years after the group broke up and Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour surpassed $1 billion in revenue.

Fugazi was staunchly anticapitalist, Taylor Swift is one of our most gifted capitalists, and Ernie falls much more on Fugazi’s end of the spectrum. What’s important is that, in each case, the audience understands, on some level, that these are the underlying principles defining their relationship to the artist.

I asked Ernie what he’s pessimistic about in the newsletter space:

In media, quality products backed by consistent principles build loyal audiences, regardless of the creator’s relationship with capitalism. It is a relationships business, after all.

Connect with Ernie on LinkedIn, Mastadon, or via his personal website.
Read and subscribe to Tedium.

For the full story, listen to our podcast on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube.

🎙️ In Ernie’s episode of The Creator Spotlight Podcast:

• 🧑‍🎨 How Ernie’s work is like this Japanese painter’s 50-year project

• 💻️ Why (and how) Ernie coded his newsletter himself

• 🤔 Is the creator economy good for the internet?

Listen on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube.

Email is a visual medium

Tedium doesn’t look like any other newsletter in my inbox these days. This is the whole point: Ernie has consistently chosen to avoid no-code platforms because he wants complete control of his product; he wants it to look exactly how he wants it to look, not how a platform dictates.

The thing is, Tedium also doesn’t look that different from every newsletter in my inbox. They’re all just columns of text of varying lengths broken up by images, different text formatting, and a few other visual tricks.

If I squint and quickly scroll through an issue of Tedium, two details make it distinct: the overall red-white-grey color scheme and big, red boxes with big, white numbers. Take a look at this (guest-written) post about the history of the Mad Libs and Droodles games (yes, this is the web version, but the design is largely consistent across email and web).

Ernie spent the first seven years working in news design at traditional newspapers; this bit of visual flair seems to come directly from that, like a pull quote or other text-based graphic disrupting a page of newsprint otherwise crammed with text.

For me, the most basic tenet of newsletter design is visual texture.

You don’t necessarily need JPEGs or GIFs to make a newsletter visually compelling. Text is visual, too — tweaking the color of the text or the background, tweaking the size of the text, ensuring inconsistent paragraph lengths — sometimes, that’s all you need.

Three pieces from Ernie we think other newsletter people will find useful:

• “What can modern newsletter authors learn about newslettering from an era when people actually mailed these things? A lot, it turns out, according to this book I bought.”

• “Pondering the way that the creative process is often directed by rules which, in many cases, stifle creativity. Sometimes, you just have to throw the rules out.”

• “Of the many things that social platforms have taken away from us, perhaps the most disappointing is the freedom to customize our spaces. We need it back.”

Thank you for reading. For more, check out Ernie’s episode of our podcast on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube.

Next week’s guest is Glennda Baker, an Atlanta-area real estate agent with three decades of experience who blew up on social media four years ago. We spoke about batching content, how both real estate and content are actually relationship businesses, and the art of storytelling.

And if you missed last week’s issue, where we featured Justin Gordon for his prolific podcasting, long-form newslettering, and community building skills, read it here.

Talk soon,
Francis Zierer, Editor
Twitter / LinkedIn
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