We’ve investigated a trend of dropping email open rates for a subset of publishers since 7/24. We take these concerns seriously and recognize the importance of these metrics as you build your businesses here. 

After investigating, our team has determined that the recent decline in reported open rates is likely due to an outage with Apple’s iCloud Private Relay. However, it does not reflect an actual change in opens, as click-through rates have been stable during this time. If fewer people were opening emails, we would expect fewer people to be engaging with them as well, but we're not seeing that. Secondly, the drop in reported opens is entirely concentrated among Apple Mail users. 

It's important to note that Apple Mail obfuscates opens for many users, making reported opens from Apple Mail generally less reliable than from other email clients. While we understand that open rates are often viewed as key metrics, we recommend focusing on other stable indicators like click-through rates for a more accurate measure of engagement.

Apple’s outage has been resolved, and we’ll continue monitoring to confirm that open rates return to normal to ensure that this is not the result of delivery issues or a decline in the frequency with which subscribers are actually reading posts from the publications that they subscribe to. If you have further questions, please email Support@Substackinc.com.