2023 Year in Review
Looking back at my first full year on Substack
Dear Readers,
Welcome to the last edition of All Science Great & Small of 2023! I hope you all have been enjoying some rest and relaxation with friends and family this holiday season 🥳 As the year draws to a close, I wanted to share some data about this publication’s journey, discuss insights from my reader survey, and highlight some of the most popular articles of the year.
FYI, I am still accepting survey responses! So I’d greatly appreciate anyone who can take the time to fill it out 👇
State of the Substack
First, I want to share how All Science Great & Small has grown this year. After being dormant through most of 2022, I began writing regularly in April 2023. At that time, I had only 22 subscribers, pretty much all friends and family. Since then, there has been steady growth ever since, and I am closing in on 500 total subscribers! I learned early on to turn off notifications when someone unsubscribes, but it’s still a bummer when I see the line dips down, especially right after publishing a piece I’m proud of. Periods of flat or slow growth are also a little nerve-wracking. However, when I zoom out, the trajectory is clear: more people are reading the work and staying around.
As you’d expect from the subscriber metrics above, the number of views has steadily increased upwards. Monthly article traffic is now between 4,000-8,000 views across sources. Interestingly, the number of views divided by articles and subscribers suggests that each reader views a story multiple times. Since that does not seem plausible, I suspect this implies there are a number of readers who view posts on social media or the web but do not subscribe to the email.
The readership of All Science is quite diverse! Subscribers hail from 80% of states in the US and 46 other countries!
I am fortunate to have a number of other writers on here providing Recommendations that have driven about a quarter of my subscribers. Some of the top referrers, including several who wrote great blurbs, include:
by by by by by byI have tried to pay the generosity forward by recommending all of these, plus many others, for a total of 22 Recommendations that have generated many new readers and fans for those folks!!!
When I started this Substack, I wasn’t sure if anyone would even read my work, let alone pay me for it. I tested the waters and turned on paid subscriptions in late July. To my great surprise, there have been a trickle of paying subscribers since then, and many of those who upgraded are not people I previously knew offline. In fact, last week I got this notification from Substack:
I’m truly honored that people want to support me and fund good science journalism. Most people writing on the internet—perhaps the vast majority—never make a dime from the words they publish, so this is an amazing vote of confidence in this project!
Where did this money go?
Donated >$200 to Humane Society of Tampa Bay
Substack takes a 10% cut of gross
Stripe payment processing takes ~3% of gross
Money set aside for taxes
Software to research and generate content
Marketing costs (ads, business cards, etc)
Travel expenses during reporting on location
As you can see, the final take home money is not something I could live on, but monetization has never been my primary goal for this publication. I do hope that as this grows in 2024, the revenue will allow me to increase my humane society support, reinvest in the publication, and perhaps allow me to rebalance my various work activities so I can travel less and focus more on writing and consulting.
Reader Survey: Preliminary Results
As I mentioned at the top, I am still keeping the survey open, and additional responses will provide insightful data. That said, I wanted to present some of the interesting findings so far.
Audience Composition
50% are in healthcare
~28% are in veterinary medicine
~22% are in human medicine
~14% identified as entrepreneurs or in a start-up
A smattering of other readers, with lots of write-in responses, including:
Animal lovers
Teacher/professor (non-STEM)
Musician
Content Frequency
The response to this question surprised me! In my About page and welcome emails I tell subscribers they can expect 2-3 emails a week. So I was surprised to see that of people who picked a specific frequency, the preference was overwhelmingly for once a week over twice weekly, and nobody picked 3x a week. Furthermore, the majority of respondents indicated they did not care as much about how many times they got content as long as it was well-written and interesting. I will definitely take this into consideration in 2024 and move towards one post a week plus occasional bonus posts when they are warranted.
Topic Preference
I asked survey respondents to pick whether I should write more, less, or about the same for each of the following topics. Using +1 for each vote of MORE and -1 for each vote of LESS (same = 0), I calculated a net score of interest:
Based on this, the three topics people most want to hear about are:
Current events in veterinary medicine
Short-summaries of scientific research (I.e. “5-Minute Paper” series)
One Health
I will make sure to focus on these in 2024!
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
An NPS question is a way to calculate how likely a customer or user is to recommend your product/service on a scale from 0-10, and then you subtract the “detractors” from the “promoters” (and ignore the “passives” in the middle). I included a standard version of this in my survey as a way to take a quick temperature of how my readers are enjoying their subscription.
Overall, the scores were solid, with lots of 8s, 9s, and 10s, and a few lower scores. When I calculated the NPS, it came in around 30. Not bad at all (on par for travel websites, for example), but certainly room for improvement. I hope that by the end of next year I have leapfrogged the insurance industries in satisfaction rate!
Topic and Post Recap
This was a very productive year for my writing: I published 65 articles, along with additional Chat Threads, cross-posts, and countless Notes. I’m a perfectionist who can always see ways to improve things after they are published, but I’ve learned to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and I’m proud of this cohort. I wanted to specifically spotlight a few of the most notable posts from 2023:
Most Viewed
The most viewed story of the year—by a wide margin—is this one covering the rise in respiratory infections across the country. It was read at least 2,960 times! The news media scared a lot of people about this topic over the fall, so I tried to take the temperature down and provide measured reporting about what we know (and don’t know) and how to take common sense precautions.
Highest Engagement
Well, this one escalated quickly! This post on how to spot medical misinformation online fast became my highest engagement post and has not been de-throned. It has my highest click-through rate for links in the piece, more than 11% of readers engaged with it, and it currently has 21 likes and 34 comments (with a lively back-and-forth debate between different readers!)
Most Influential
This post was viewed on Substack 1,900 times and on LinkedIn this post has 5,900 impressions. It generated solid engagement and is tied with my top respiratory post for number of new subscribers (including some high-profile veterinary policy makers and academics 👀). This article has been mentioned in other posts and podcasts and is consistently the one people bring up in conversation when my Substack comes up. Clearly, the huge proposed expansion of new vet schools is a hot topic for the profession, and I think people were hungry for a nuanced take that doesn’t make the issue black-and-white and overly divisive.
Most Personal
Here’s the essay that kicked it all off this year. It is a meditation on the passing of my two beloved cats in 2022, and I use it to examine how doctors process the transition from medical expert to scared bystander when they or a loved one become the patient. I reflect on uncertainty in medicine, the impact that a decline in consent for autopsies has on medical practice, and why I declined a post-mortem on both Phoenix and Ezra.
Other Topics
There were so many other posts this year! Some of the top themes included:
Digital Pathology & AI: As you can tell from the world cloud above, one of the most common topics I wrote about this year was artificial intelligence's potential role in medicine and society. I also explored how veterinary pathology is going digital and what impact that will have for vets and pets.
Hot Topics in Veterinary Medicine: From taking on vet school rankings to critiquing diagnostic test pricing, we didn't shy away from controversial issues.
Scientific Explainers: We discussed papers like one on the mutant FIP outbreak in Cyprus, another about how AI introduces bias to doctors, and another on sequencing bile in cats. We also zoomed out and discussed broader topics like trust and communication in science, the cognitive impact of the internet, and a busy year for climate change news.
Continuing Medical Education: While I want to serve a broad audience that includes many people outside the veterinary field, there is no doubt that continuing medical education is something my readers want. All Science published articles on evaluating bone marrow, cancer cytology rules of thumb, FIP diagnostics, and more.
Exclusive Interviews: I was lucky to interview a number of great thought leaders in veterinary medicine, including Michael Lairmore, Curt Bird, Natalie Hoepp, and Bikul Koirala.
Travel: I traveled quite extensively this year for both work and fun, and brought you on-location reporting from the annual ACVP conference and four different countries! I will be providing 8 hours of CE in Europe this spring and will continue to report on local issues while there.
Towards the Future
I want to thank all of my readers for their continuous support and engagement 🙏 It has been amazing getting to know hundreds of people who are equally passionate about science, technology, and veterinary medicine. I especially love seeing people from human medicine, the humanities, and the tech sector joining the conversation. As we move into 2024, All Science Great & Small remains committed to being your go-to source for independent news, analysis, and commentary in veterinary medicine, science, technology, and public health.
Here's to another year of scientific discovery and enlightened discussion!
Great summary, Eric! Congratulations on a fantastic publication--and one I always open right away to see what you are writing and thinking about. Here’s to an equally fantastic 2024!
Hi Eric, congratulations! It’s been a pleasure getting to “know” you through your writing while broadening my knowledge along the way. Your site has great bones. I sent you a “patient” today who is going back to vet school, and I think she will enjoy your writing, too! Doing this is kind of like jazz, not a huge audience, but you have to have a love for the medium, and the rewards are often intangible, but better when they occasionally pay for some champagne ... cheers for 2024!