# About

> The history of the inbox, and what we do in it. An essay on email, the algorithmic trade, and the room that stayed.

Canonical: https://wittier.co/about

October 29, 1971, was a massive day. A programmer named Ray Tomlinson sent the first email between two computers… sitting only a few feet apart in a Cambridge office. The message was probably “QWERTYUIOP,” a row of keys he typed to see if a route would hold. And it did. Choosing the @ symbol to separate the user from the host (because that was the only character on the keyboard that didn’t appear in any name), he invented email. Nobody asked him to do it, he was just looking to do something with the government program ARPANET.

That first message gave the world an address format that hasn’t changed in 55 years. Everything since has been built around it. Wittier exists because the inbox is still the one channel online where the reader chooses what arrives and when. And because of this long standing tech, we help publishers monetize email patiently (and we operate a small set of media brands of our own).

## Address

Built once… the address hasn’t moved since.

The first email arrived 18 years before the World Wide Web. Tomlinson worked at Bolt, Beranek and Newman, the firm contracted to build ARPANET for the United States Department of Defense. 23 computers were connected to that network when he sent the message. By the following summer, basic mail was running across all of them. 11 years later, in 1982, a memo called RFC 822 standardized the format. From that moment, an email written on any machine could be read by any other machine, anywhere on the network, without permission from a platform.

The inbox has never been owned by a company. The protocol that delivers it is open. No single firm can change the rules of what a “From” field looks like or what the @ symbol means. A list belongs to whoever holds it. If you build an audience on email, you can take that audience with you when you change tools, when you change companies, when you change continents. Hotmail launched in 1996. Gmail launched in 2004. Both were apartments built inside a city that already existed.

For 30-something years, this is just how the internet worked. Addresses, pages, lists in order. You went where you went because you typed in where you wanted to go. The reader’s choice was the unit of attention. Newsletters were sent by hand from professors to their students, by editors to their subscribers, by friends to friends. Then, slowly, the rest of the internet began to forget the arrangement.

## The trade

Other channels started to choose for the reader. And then the reader paid for it.

In September 2006, Facebook launched the News Feed. At first, it was chronological. You followed your friends, you saw what they wrote in the order they wrote it. By 2011, that arrangement ended. Facebook introduced an algorithm called EdgeRank, which decided what you saw based on what would keep you on the site the longest. Instagram followed in 2016. TikTok built itself around the idea from the start.

And the motive wasn’t very complex. Platforms had collected billions of users on the promise of organic reach, then sold ad space to brands that wanted access to those users. The way to make the ad space more valuable was to throttle organic reach. In 2012, a typical post from a Facebook business page reached roughly 16% of that page’s followers. By 2024, that number had fallen to 1.4%. The average engagement rate on Facebook posts in 2024 was 0.06%. LinkedIn company posts now make up about 2% of what users actually see on the platform. Instagram organic reach dropped roughly 18% in the last year alone.

You can bet your bottom dollar that the motive was deliberate. It was on slide decks years before the reach numbers began to fall. Every major channel online traded the reader’s choice for an editor that ranked content by what the platform decided would hold attention longest. The reader didn’t get to vote. Brands that had spent 10 years building followings on these platforms discovered they were renting access to the audience they thought they owned. Every algorithm change was a rent increase, and when a platform died altogether (Vine, then Clubhouse, with another always on the way), the rent collapsed entirely for whoever had built there.

The inbox sat through all of this without changing. The same protocol that delivered Tomlinson’s QWERTYUIOP in 1971 delivers your newsletter today. No platform stands between the sender and the recipient. No algorithm decides whether to show the message. The reader opens it, or they don’t. The reader replies, or they don’t. The address is the address.

## The room that stayed

Open protocol, portable lists, and the readers as the host.

The inbox has lasted because of three properties that an algorithmic feed can’t match.

The address is portable. A list is a file, and the file belongs to whoever holds it. A reader who follows you from Substack to Beehiiv doesn’t need to resubscribe. If your ESP raises its rates, you can move. If your platform sells to a buyer with different ideas, you can move. Nothing on the algorithmic side of the internet works that way. The follower count on a platform is a borrowed number on a borrowed wall.

When you send an email, the recipient's mail client receives it. There is no editor in between deciding whether to show it. Spam filters exist, and they are real, but their job is to keep junk out of the inbox. Nothing in between is making editorial choices. Once a message lands in the inbox, the open is the reader’s decision.

The inbox is the only channel online where the reader actively asks to be there. To subscribe is a deliberate act. The unsubscribe link is one click away. A reader who is opening your email week after week is voting with the only currency that matters online, and that’s attention given on purpose.

The economic consequence of this architecture is unusually consistent. Across most reporting in 2025, every dollar spent on email marketing returned roughly $36 in revenue. Open rates for well tended lists run above 30%, with strong ones above 50%. A media newsletter sponsorship sells for several times the CPM of a banner ad on the open web, because the reader is reachable in a way the banner viewer is not. These are the numbers of a room that never had to chase an algorithm.

## The practice

On the slow side of the inbox, a few partners at a time.

Wittier began as an agency, and the agency side of the business is still where most of the day to day work happens. We sit at the publisher's table when they want to monetize email without breaking what the reader shows up for.

Most of the work is unglamorous. Pricing is one example. A newsletter with 30k engaged readers in a niche category is usually selling its sponsorships for less than half of what the inventory is worth… because the publisher has never sat down with comparable CPM benchmarks across formats. Fixing that is a single document and a hard conversation with a longstanding sponsor. It is also the difference between a struggling newsletter and a profitable one.

Other examples sit at the same desk. List health… a publisher running a 250,000 list with 5% bounce rate is one bad send away from that domain being flagged into every spam trap known to exist. The fix is a deliverability audit, a re-engagement campaign for the dormant segment, and a sunset policy for those that are unreachable. Then there are the media materials… a pitch deck that opens up with audience size and ends with logo soup will never close a partnership better than a deck that opens with what the reader does after the ad runs. And what about deal management? A sponsor who renews at 80% of their original spend, twice, is more valuable than a new logo at a full rate. All of it is how the revenue actually moves.

We do this work for select partners only. The contracts are years long. We don’t take on more than we can stay close to. We have turned down work from companies whose newsletters were the wrong shape for the strategy they were asking us to build… because the right call was for them to keep the newsletter and skip the strategy. That constraint is why we believe in the inbox in the first place. Slow attention pays better than fast attention. A reader who opens an email every week for two years is worth more than 10 readers who clicked through a sponsored post once. The math works the same on our side of the table as it does on theirs.

## The house

A small house of brands for us to keep.

After enough years of helping other people build media businesses, we started building our own. The first is Suber Health, a publication focused on longevity. A construction publication and a dating publication follow, both due in 2026.

Our thesis behind owning rather than advising is based on the long arc. The publications that compound, the ones whose archives become more valuable than their latest issue, are the ones in categories where the reader’s relationship with the topic does not move much in 10 years. Longevity is one of those categories. The question a 40 year old has about staying healthy at 60 takes 10 years of patient reading to answer. The news cycle can’t reach them. We are interested in being the publication a reader chooses for that 10 years.

Each brand is built the long way, on the assumption that we will still be running it in a decade. Selling them was never the point of building them. The point of building them is to operate them.

The studio behind this work is small. Two cities. We live and write in Phoenix. The company is filed in Delaware. We have stayed at our current headcount on purpose. The work asks for hands, and hands don’t scale. Once a week, we send a letter on what we are seeing across this practice… the pricing shifts, the brands taking shape, the mistakes from last quarter. Most readers just keep reading, and that’s enough. We are still here, still writing… there’s no rush.