Hacker News Reader

I think more remarkably though is that readers kept up the 10% reading rate, in contrast to Biden's 20%, so the total emails read ended up being much higher on Trump's part.

View on HN

A possible explanation for the tactic of sending so many emails is that the subject header of Donald Trump's emails contained the message he wished to transmit, acting like an alternative news feed, similar to RSS or Twitter, bypassing the restrictions of the latter. In other words, recipients would not be required to open the email to get the message.

Indeed. I wonder, though, to what extent the daily read rate is a function of the contested nature of the election (as viewed by Trump supporters) vs the volume/ cadence of emails. It’s difficult to hold up the Biden campaign as a control given the different audiences.

> Based on open data, the average Biden campaign subscriber is now actually reading an email every other day; the average Trump campaign subscriber continues to read multiple emails per day.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com