Over the weekend we hit a milestone with our subscription model by reaching 20,000 subscribers and we are left feeling warm, fuzzy, and endlessly grateful for the support and embrace of the shift to the subscription model. We know it was forced on you, LOL, but you could have opted out. At least 20,000 of you didn’t and that’s a big deal to us. The last official update we provided was back in November, so this seems like a good time to provide another general update.

1. Number of Subscribers

As mentioned, we are now at 20,000+ subscribers, which is a 7,500 increase from five months ago. To our surprise, subscriptions haven’t slowed down dramatically, which we assumed would be the case by now and there are some days where we’ll get over 100 subscriptions. Of interest, since August, when we started we have lost a little over 1,330 monthly subscribers, which seems like a pretty low ratio — 6.65% if my maths are correct — and we hope to keep it that way, especially come August and September when the initial 7,500 annual subscriptions are up for renewal. Could we hit 30,000 by the end of 2021? That would be mind-blowing.

2. Free, no-questions-asked subscriptions

In November we reported 353 free subscriptions provided. That number is now up to 1,123 and we hope it keeps growing as we want to provide access to anyone that can genuinely not afford the subscription be it for personal financial limitations or prohibitive currency exchange rates or governments that don’t allow the freedom of doing online transactions that we (or at least I) take for granted. So, as always, if you can’t afford it, just ask!

3. Live events

As announced in February, we postponed all of this year’s events to 2022 and, as much as we would like to say that that seems like a sure bet… we are not 100% confident but we remain 100% optimistic… it seems that we, globally, are at a crucial point where we will either come out great come Fall or things will get bad again. Who knows. The reassuring thing for us right now is that the income from the subscription model could now support the worst-case scenario we had shared back in July of a massive amount of ticket refunds and lost deposits to venues. It would suck big time if that were the case — and it sadly remains a possible case — but it would not bankrupt us as the case would have been nine months ago.

4. University and “Corporate” accounts

We are in the process of thinking how to best serve teachers who have used Brand New in the past as part of their curriculum — we sort of knew this happened but since having moved to the subscription model we have gotten more enquiries about how to provide students access. We are aiming to have a model in place by early Summer so that teachers can work with their librarians or other procurement departments to set up subscriptions as needed. We have also gotten enquiries about bulk corporate accounts and now that we have a little more experience with this, it’s something we might introduce after Summer.

5. What’s next?

The next immediate project is doing another bundle of four First Round Case Studies and we hope to have those ready in a month or so. We already have them selected but need to actually make them. At some point, in some update, we mentioned we might be doing more video content and that is still in the works — it won’t be a big production or anything super fancy but our goal is to bring in more voices and more experiences into the fold about subjects related to branding and identity. We will continue producing Revisited posts and The Follow-up podcast episodes in the meantime (and posting, posting, posting, posting…). For now there are no other significant site updates planned. I have an idea for some fun gallery-type pages and might tackle that soon.

6. In closing

Needless to say, we are doing much better — especially emotionally — than nine months ago and we hope to continue improving the content and the experience to make sure you are getting value for every penny on the dollar as we don’t take your investment for granted. The speed at which we can do things is still not at pre-pandemic levels because… life. We appreciate your time, your attention, your willingness to submit your work to us for those of you whose work has graced our pages, and we hope you keep finding value in Brand New.