2022: Twitter/X Chaos Drives Creators to Email Newsletters

On October 27, 2022, Elon Musk walked into Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters carrying a porcelain sink. “Let that sink in,” he posted. The $44 billion acquisition of Twitter was complete, and what followed over the next weeks and months was one of the most chaotic transitions in social media history. Mass layoffs. Verification changes. Content moderation reversals. API shutdowns. Advertiser exits. Name change to X.

But amid the chaos at Twitter, a quieter story was playing out across the internet. Writers, journalists, creators, small business owners, and community builders who had spent years cultivating audiences on Twitter were asking themselves a question they had been avoiding: “What happens to my audience if this platform goes away?”

The answer was already in their inbox.

The Great Migration

The weeks following Musk’s takeover saw a measurable surge in email newsletter adoption. Substack, the newsletter platform that had been growing steadily since its 2017 founding, reported a roughly 20% increase in new newsletter sign-ups in the weeks after the acquisition. Beehiiv, the newsletter platform founded by former Morning Brew employees, saw record new account creation. ConvertKit (later rebranded to Kit), Ghost, Buttondown, and even traditional email marketing platforms like Mailchimp all reported heightened interest.

It wasn’t just individual creators making the move. Media organizations that had built significant Twitter-based distribution strategies began emphasizing newsletter sign-ups more aggressively. The New York Times, The Atlantic, Axios, and dozens of smaller publications pushed email capture harder than ever, recognizing that their Twitter-referred traffic was suddenly unreliable.

Journalists who had built personal brands on Twitter — some with hundreds of thousands of followers — launched personal newsletters as insurance policies. The calculus was straightforward: 100,000 Twitter followers could evaporate overnight if the platform changed its algorithm, shut down, or simply became a place audiences no longer visited. But 10,000 email subscribers? That was a direct line to your audience that no platform change could sever.

Why Email Was the Answer

The Twitter crisis crystallized a concept that email marketers had been preaching for years: owned versus rented audiences.

Social media followers are rented. You build an audience on someone else’s platform, subject to their rules, their algorithms, and their business decisions. When Facebook throttled organic reach for business pages starting in 2014, millions of businesses that had spent years building Facebook followings discovered that they could now reach only 2-5% of their followers without paying for ads. When Vine shut down in 2017, creators with millions of followers lost their entire audience overnight.

Email subscribers are owned. Your email list is a portable asset. If your email service provider goes out of business, you export a CSV file and upload it somewhere else. No algorithm stands between you and your subscribers. When you hit send, your email goes to their inbox. Period. (Deliverability challenges notwithstanding, but those are technical problems with technical solutions, not policy decisions by a platform owner.)

The Twitter crisis made this abstract distinction viscerally real for millions of creators who had never thought much about email marketing. Suddenly, “build your email list” wasn’t advice — it was survival strategy.

The Newsletter Economy Explodes

The flight to email didn’t just boost existing newsletter platforms. It accelerated the entire newsletter economy.

Substack, which had been primarily known for independent writers and journalists, crossed 35 million active subscriptions by 2023. The platform’s model — writers publish free and/or paid newsletters, Substack takes 10% of paid subscription revenue — attracted everyone from celebrity writers to niche experts.

Beehiiv, which had launched in 2021 with a focus on growth tools and monetization features that Substack lacked, positioned itself as the platform for creators who wanted to build media businesses, not just write letters. Its referral program feature, advertising marketplace, and analytics suite attracted creators who thought of their newsletters as businesses.

ConvertKit, which had been serving the creator economy since 2013, leaned into the moment by emphasizing its creator-first features — landing pages, paid subscriptions, and audience segmentation. The company would later rebrand to Kit in 2024, reflecting its evolution from an email tool to a creator commerce platform.

The Deeper Trend

The Twitter-to-email migration of 2022 was dramatic, but it was part of a longer trend. The creator economy had been gradually discovering email throughout the 2010s. The Morning Brew, TheSkimm, and The Hustle had all built newsletter-native media companies valued at hundreds of millions of dollars. Paid newsletters on Substack had created six-figure incomes for dozens of independent writers.

What the Twitter crisis did was accelerate adoption among the mainstream — the creators, journalists, and small businesses who had previously viewed email as old-fashioned or low-priority. In the space of a few weeks, email went from “boring but reliable” to “the only channel I actually control.”

The irony was not lost on longtime email marketers. For years, they had been told that social media was the future and email was dying. Now the biggest social media platform in the world was imploding, and creators were fleeing to the 50-year-old protocol that critics had written off countless times.

The Lasting Impact

The 2022 migration permanently elevated newsletter culture. “What’s your newsletter?” became a standard question in creator and media circles. Email list size became a metric of credibility alongside social follower counts. Conferences and communities dedicated to newsletter growth multiplied.

More importantly, the crisis educated an entire generation of digital creators about the fragility of platform-dependent audiences. The lesson was expensive for those who had put all their eggs in the Twitter basket, but it was valuable: no matter which platforms rise and fall, email endures because it belongs to no one and works for everyone.

If the Twitter/X chaos taught you to take your email list seriously, start building it right. Craft subject lines that earn opens with our Subject Line Grader and use the ROI Calculator to understand what your growing list is worth.

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Frequently Asked Questions

How did the Twitter/X acquisition affect email newsletters?

Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter in October 2022 caused widespread uncertainty among creators, journalists, and businesses who had built audiences on the platform. Substack reported a 20% increase in new newsletter sign-ups in the weeks following the acquisition. Beehiiv, ConvertKit, and other newsletter platforms also reported record growth. The event accelerated a broader trend of creators building 'owned audiences' through email.

Why did creators choose email newsletters over other platforms?

Creators chose email newsletters because email lists are owned assets — no algorithm changes, no platform shutdowns, and no policy changes can take your subscribers away. Unlike social media followers, email subscribers represent a direct, portable relationship. If a newsletter platform shuts down, creators can export their subscriber list and move to another provider.

What newsletter platforms grew during the Twitter migration?

Substack, beehiiv, ConvertKit (now Kit), Ghost, Buttondown, and Mailchimp all reported significant growth during late 2022 and throughout 2023. Substack surpassed 35 million active subscriptions by 2023. Beehiiv grew from a startup to a platform hosting thousands of newsletters. The paid newsletter economy as a whole grew significantly during this period.