Are all WordPress news newsletters the same?

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Matt Medeiros started a very interesting discussion about WordPress Newsletters. At some point Dumitru Brînzan said “Sub to one = sub to all. The content is 95% the same in most of them“.

So I decided to check this out.

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Testing method

I decided to check all the links that we published in the 51st issue of WP Owls and compare them with other popular newsletters. I understand that every newsletter is released on a different day, so to make it more fair I compared WP Owls with two latest issues of other newsletters.

In result I compared WP Owls with:

  • Post Status – issues 462 and 463
  • MasterWP – issues 229 and 230
  • WP Mail – issues 527 and 528
  • The WP Weekly – issues 61 and 62
  • The Repository – issues 90 and 91

It’s worth to mention that I was only looking at news link, not events nor sponsored links.

The results

We published 16 news in general and there wasn’t any news that were published everywhere at the time.

Only one article was published in 4 other newsletters (WordPress 5.9 Planning Roundup).

Delicious Brains’ Why You Should Use the WordPress HTTP functions to Make API Requests, Helen’s Exploring custom blocks from a PHP-centric developer UX point of view and Konstantin Kovshenin’s Sail: Deploy WordPress to DigitalOcean were published in 2 others.

And there were even 7 articles that weren’t published anywhere else and many articles that were covered somewhere else but not on WP Owls.

Although we have to remember that some news will be probably covered in their next issue. This is very often related to the newsletter publication date.

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Conclusion – WordPress Newsletters are far from being the same

We all differ in many ways.

Some newsletters publish less links but build a story around this (MasterWP and The Repository), some publish enormous number of links and it’s up to the reader to filter it out (Post Status and WP Mail) and there are those that are in between (WP Owls and The WP Weekly).

Also, even if some links are published on multiple newsletters they might have a totally different description.

I think that if you really want to be on top of what is happening in the WP ecosystem you have to follow at least few of them.

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