Newsletter

“A Data Story and a Request for Your Support” - 15 December 2025

Āe, Whānau – A Call to Grow This Kaupapa Together

Ivor Jones The Māori Green Ltn

15 Dec 2025 — 16 min read

Tēnā koutou, nau mai, haere mai.

When I started The Māori Green Lantern, I didn’t do it for the metrics.

I did it because there are too many truths the mainstream media refuses to speak – truths about how the Crown continues its colonial assault on Te Tiriti, how neoliberalism devours Māori futures, how misinformation spreads unchallenged across our airwaves, and how the powerful protect their own while our whānau struggle.

Today, I want to talk to you about something different.

I want to share the data story behind this kaupapa – what the numbers say about you, about us, and about the work we’re doing together – and then ask for your support, not as an algorithm demands, but as whānau to whānau.

The Numbers Tell a Story

Over the last month, I’ve been publishing like there’s no tomorrow – often three to four essays a day, which adds up to around 90–120 essays a month, as shown on my Substack email stats page. That output is many times higher than the one-post-a-week rhythm that Substack itself holds up as a baseline for consistent publishing in its official guide to analytics and metrics, where writers are encouraged to post on a regular, sustainable cadence rather than constantly flooding inboxes, as explained in Substack’s own metrics guide.

Why do I publish at this pace? Because every day brings another assault on Māori rights, another deregulation, another manufactured moral panic, another media spin cycle. The number of attacks hasn’t slowed down. So the commentary can’t either.

Digital Mana Under Siege

Engagement: When You Read, You Read Deeply

Despite the firehose, you are still opening and reading.

Across a sample of recent emails, the average open rate sits around 41 percent, with standout essays hitting around 80 percent opens – for example, 173 opens from 216 delivered on a single political analysis email, as visible on my Substack “Emails” stats dashboard exported on 15 December 2025.

For context, newsletter experts and email platforms put “average” open rates for media and publishing somewhere between 30 and 40 percent. A marketing breakdown of 2025 newsletter performance notes that many publishers struggle to even reach 15–30 percent, with media and publishing aiming for roughly 34 percent as a solid benchmark, as explained in Admailr’s 2025 newsletter KPI analysis and reinforced by email providers’ benchmark reports collected by Mailchimp. Substack creators themselves describe anything over 50 percent as “good” and under 20 percent as “poor” in discussions about open-rate expectations, as laid out by one analytics-focused guide for writers on Pubstack Success.

So when my best pieces consistently land between 50 and 80 percent opens, that’s not normal – it’s exceptional. It tells me something important:

You are hungry for truth-telling grounded in Māori values, and when an essay lands in your inbox that speaks directly to the Crown’s abuses, to media gaslighting, to neoliberal cruelty, you show up.

The Long Game: Rising Audience, Slightly Falling Rate

On the Stats → Emails page of my dashboard, the 30‑day open rate currently sits at 22.63 percent and has dipped by 2.65 percentage points over the last month. That’s still roughly in line with general newsletter benchmarks, where many sectors report 20–30 percent as typical, as summarised by HubSpot’s email benchmark overview and a 2024 cross‑industry analysis by Mailerlite.

The dip is not a crisis – it’s a natural effect of rapid growth plus heavy volume. Substack writers with growing lists report the same pattern: as subscriber numbers climb, open rates compress, even when the absolute number of readers is rising, as discussed by experienced creators reflecting on two years of data in Rob Henderson’s Substack analysis and in community conversations where creators describe drifting from 65 percent opens at 200 subscribers to the 30–40 percent band after expanding, as outlined in a thread on r/Substack.

In other words:

as more of you board this waka, it’s normal for the percentage metric to soften. What matters more is that the absolute number of engaged readers is climbing – and that’s exactly what my graphs show.

Who You Are: The Shape of This Whānau

Substack’s Network dashboard tells me there are 250 total subscribers to The Māori Green Lantern, and 288 followers across the wider Substack ecosystem. The audience map shows that around 84 percent of you are in Aotearoa, with another cluster in Australia and diaspora communities further afield, as displayed in the “Audience → World” view of my stats export on 15 December 2025.

Most striking for me is where you come from:

46 percent of subscribers (114 people) came from existing Substack accounts – readers already deep in long‑form analysis who actively chose this kaupapa after discovering it through the platform’s recommendation system, as broken down by source in the Network tab of my Substack stats.
28 percent (71 subscribers) came via the Substack app itself, which shows the platform’s built‑in discovery engine is surfacing this work to people scrolling for political and kaupapa Māori commentary.
The rest are a mix of imported accounts, direct sign‑ups, and new accounts, showing that some of you arrived through personal networks or outside the platform entirely.

Substack’s own documentation frames this “network effect” – the way writer recommendations, Notes, app browsing, and cross‑links feed each other – as one of the key growth engines for independent publications, as explained in their official metrics guide on Substack Tools and in their update on growth charts and discovery tools on the official Substack blog.

The fact that nearly three‑quarters of you arrived through this internal ecosystem tells me something powerful: when Māori‑centred, unapologetically anti‑neoliberal analysis is made visible, people find it and stay.

Retention: Almost Nobody Leaves

Another metric matters even more than opens: who stays.

In the Retention and Churn section of my paid stats, the graph shows only one paid cancellation over the last 90 days, which works out to a churn rate of about 0.4 percent over that period, based on the paid‑subscriber report in my Substack analytics export from November–December 2025.

Industry discussions about newsletter retention for paid publications talk about monthly churn rates often sitting between 5 and 10 percent for subscription businesses more broadly, and retention funnels on Substack itself are often modelled on 5 percent free‑to‑paid conversion with 65 percent retention at 30 days dropping to around 35 percent after one year, as outlined in a product‑growth breakdown on Product Release Notes.

So a churn rate closer to 0.4 percent over three months doesn’t just look good – it suggests that, once people commit financially to this kaupapa, they very rarely walk away. That is one of the strongest signals you can send.

The Half-Million Dollar Misinformation Machine

The Amplification Bottleneck: I Can’t Paddle This Waka Alone

Here’s where the numbers get raw.

On the Sharing tab of my Substack stats, I can see which people are driving traffic:

I personally have driven 5,460 views, 61 free subscriptions, and 4 paid subscriptions through links and shares associated with my own profile.
The next most active sharer has around 234 views and a single subscription attached to their efforts.
After that, the numbers fall quickly – 164 views, 40 views, 34 views – and then a long tail of occasional sharers.

This means I’m doing over 90 percent of the promotion work myself. Reviews of Substack analytics tools note that the platform surfaces only a limited set of sharing metrics – engagement, opens, and click‑throughs – compared with more specialised email tools, as pointed out in a comparison of creator platforms on EmailToolTester – but even within those constraints, the imbalance is obvious.

At the same time, Substack’s product team and experienced writers keep emphasising that most growth comes from three channels: consistent publishing, recommendations, and reader‑driven promotion via Notes, socials, and direct sharing, as spelled out in practical growth playbooks like Escapethecubicle’s 47 Substack growth tactics and community “honest tips” threads about subscriber growth on r/Substack.

So the data says this:

The platform is doing its part through recommendations and app discovery.
I am doing my part through relentless publishing and sharing.
Now the kaupapa needs you to do your part – not as content consumers, but as co‑carriers of this work.

Why I Won’t Write to Please the Algorithm

Some people use their analytics primarily to reverse‑engineer their audience – to identify the topics that trigger the highest open rate and then write more of those, even if it means abandoning what first called them to the page. There are entire coaching ecosystems built on “niche validation” and “audience‑first ideation,” teaching writers to follow the numbers rather than their own sense of what matters, as you can see in data‑driven newsletter strategy blogs such as Online Writing Club’s deep dive on open‑rate drops and growth‑tactic round‑ups like Escapethecubicle’s strategy guide.

That is not what The Māori Green Lantern is about.

The subject of each essay is driven by:

What is happening to our people right now – whether it’s the disestablishment of Te Pūkenga and the dismantling of Māori education structures chronicled in my investigation drawing on sources like the Tertiary Education Union’s critique of Te Pūkenga’s disestablishment and the government’s official disestablishment announcements;
Which issues whānau, activists, and insiders are urging me to unpack, such as the Regulatory Standards Bill and its attack on Māori rights backed by detailed legal and political analysis from organisations like Te Hunga Rōia Māori o Aotearoa and Treaty scholars explaining why these “standards” amount to a back‑door constitutional coup, as reported in RNZ’s coverage of Treaty‑principles debates;
My own sense of duty as a kaitiaki of information – someone who reads the Crown documents, the Hansard debates, the offshore legal theory, the obscure reports from watchdogs and think‑tanks, and then translates that material into plain, accessible, politically sharp kōrero.

I use the analytics not to chase what “performs” best, but to see where the resonance is strongest – to understand which deep dives give you the tools you need, which explanatory pieces are being forwarded through workplaces and whānau chats, which takedowns of media narratives help you push back against gaslighting.

If a painstaking Te Tiriti analysis reaches “only” 30 percent of you compared with 70 percent for a media‑scandal breakdown, that doesn’t mean I choose the scandal every time. It simply reminds me to frame the Treaty work in ways that invite more people inside the whare.

Justice Behind Closed Doors

What I Am Asking From You

So with all of this in mind – the high engagement, the extra‑low churn, the heavy publishing load, the strong platform‑driven discovery, and the promotion bottleneck – here is my ask.

When you read an essay that hits you in the puku, share it with three people:

Forward the email to a whānau member who always feels gas‑lit by the news.
Drop the web link into a group chat where people are trying to make sense of a policy shift.
Post a short quote and the link on whatever platform you use – X, Facebook, Threads, Discord, wherever your people are.

Experienced Substack growth writers consistently show that reader‑to‑reader sharing is the most powerful growth engine for independent publications, often outranking paid ads or algorithm gaming, as broken down in creator‑focused guides like “How Substack is Remarkably Changing the Game for Good”. My own stats already prove this: every time one of you shares, new readers show up.

Imagine what happens if ten, twenty, fifty of you decide that each week you’ll share one essay that you found genuinely useful.

2. Consider Becoming a Paid Supporter – If You Have the Capacity

I know these are brutal economic times. Interest rates are climbing; rents and food prices are squeezing whānau; wages are not keeping pace. Reports on the cost‑of‑living crisis in Aotearoa describe how working households are increasingly reliant on debt just to stay afloat, as captured in critical analyses of contemporary capitalism in New Zealand by commentators like Bernard Hickey in his political‑economy newsletter The Kākā.

So I will never tell you to prioritise this newsletter over feeding your tamariki, heating your home, or keeping a roof over your whānau.

But if you do have the capacity – if your budget has room for one more subscription alongside Netflix or Spotify – then I’m asking you to consider turning that capacity into political infrastructure by becoming a paid subscriber to The Māori Green Lantern.

Substack’s own internal modelling of successful creator funnels suggests that, after enough time and consistent publishing, around 5 percent of free readers convert to paid, with roughly 65 percent of those still active after 30 days and around a third remaining after a year, as summarised in the platform‑growth analysis on Product Release Notes. My retention numbers suggest that, once you step across that line, the odds of you leaving are far lower than average.

Your paid subscription would:

Fund deeper research into complex policy areas;
Allow more time to organise documents, build visual explainers, and cross‑reference sources rather than racing from one crisis to the next;
Help keep this space independent of party machines, corporate funders, and state capture.

For those who prefer direct koha rather than platform subscriptions, the account for this mahi is:

HTDM: 03-1546-0415173-000

Only contribute if you genuinely have capacity. I would rather you stay as a free reader than go hungry as a paid one.

3. Become An Ambassador For The Kaupapa

Beyond money and metrics, I need ambassadors.

Ambassadors are the people who:

Bring these essays into workplaces, unions, kura boards, marae committees, activist collectives;
Help identify which articles should form the backbone of a “starter pack” for new readers trying to understand Te Tiriti, neoliberalism, or media capture;
Offer specialist skills – legal expertise, policy analysis, design, data visualisation – to help refine future investigations;
Alert me to documents, leaks, reports, and Crown papers that deserve scrutiny but are buried three clicks deep on a government site.

Analyses of independent media ecosystems show that sustainable projects are networked, not solo – they are webs of writers, editors, researchers, and readers, all contributing different forms of labour, as explored in research on digital public spheres and newsletter‑driven communities by media scholars examining audience participation and power dynamics in online news environments, such as the readership‑log study of feedback loops in digital journalism published in Journalism Studies.

I want this kaupapa to move in that direction:

away from being “just my newsletter” and toward being a shared platform for rigorous, Māori‑centred political analysis.

The Bigger Picture: Urgency Without Reach Is Just a Scream

When the government chose to disestablish Te Pūkenga despite its own data showing a financial turnaround and cost savings, tertiary unions warned that the sector had become a “political football” and that disestablishment would worsen inequality and undermine Te Tiriti commitments in vocational education, as reported by the Tertiary Education Union and RNZ and detailed in Cabinet papers and annual reports released by Te Pūkenga and the Ministry of Education.

When Te Aka Whai Ora was dismantled, health and legal experts warned that the Pae Ora disestablishment legislation represented further Crown breaches of Te Tiriti by stripping away Māori‑designed health structures, as documented in clinical and legal analyses published in the New Zealand Medical Journal.

When the Regulatory Standards Bill and Treaty‑principles “reforms” were pushed, Treaty lawyers, iwi leaders, and constitutional scholars warned that they would re‑open fundamental questions of sovereignty and undermine generations of jurisprudence, as outlined in submissions like Te Hunga Rōia Māori’s detailed critique and political analysis from legal commentators in outlets such as 1News’ Treaty‑principles explainer.

Those are the kinds of issues that drive the volume of my writing. The urgency is real.

But urgency without reach is just a scream into the void.

I can spend my nights cross‑referencing legal scholarship, Crown papers, tribunal reports, and academic work on settler‑colonial neoliberalism, drawing on research that traces how market reforms entrenched inequality in Aotearoa, like the historical political‑economy accounts published in Jacobin’s analysis of New Zealand neoliberalism and local scholarship detailing how “reforms” hollowed out social protections, such as the theses and essays catalogued in New Zealand’s development‑studies archives referenced in the sources behind my longform essays.

I can pull on that material to make arguments in plain English, as my essay‑structure brief for The Māori Green Lantern lays out in its commitment to clear language, Māori values, and rigorous sourcing, which you can read in the kaupapa description document stored as The Māori Green Lantern in my internal files.

But if those essays don’t reach the teachers facing funding cuts, the kaumātua watching Te Tiriti be rewritten in their lifetime, the rangatahi trying to understand why they feel surrounded by racialised policy – then the work is only half done.

That’s why I’m asking for your help.

Closing the Loop: From Audience to Whānau

Let’s summarise what the data says about this kaupapa:

Publishing intensity: Around 90–120 essays a month, far above typical weekly newsletter rhythms noted in email‑marketing benchmarks from tools like Mailerlite.
Engagement: Sample open rates around 41 percent, with best‑performing essays around 80 percent, compared with 30–40 percent considered strong for media newsletters according to analyses by Admailr, Mailchimp, and Substack growth writers like those on Pubstack Success.
30‑day trend: An open‑rate reading of 22.63 percent, slightly down over the month, entirely consistent with patterns observed as lists grow in size and diversity, as described by creators reflecting on their long‑term analytics in posts like Rob Henderson’s two‑year Substack review and community discussions on r/Substack.
Audience shape: 250 subscribers and 288 followers, with roughly 84 percent based in Aotearoa, as shown on my Audience and Network dashboards.
Discovery channels: 46 percent from existing Substack accounts and 28 percent via the Substack app, confirming that the platform’s built‑in discovery features – recommendations, Notes, and app browsing – are actively surfacing this work, in line with how Substack itself describes its growth charts and source breakdowns in its official metrics documentation.
Retention: One paid cancellation in 90 days, far below typical subscription churn, echoing but outperforming the retention funnels described in growth breakdowns like Product Release Notes’ analysis of Substack’s model.
Amplification: 5,460 views, 61 free subs, and 4 paid subs driven by my own sharing, versus 234 views and one sub from the next most active sharer, as visible on my Sharing stats table.

Those numbers are not just vanity metrics. They are the quantitative shadow of a qualitative truth:

This kaupapa matters to people. It is already punching well above its weight in engagement and retention. It is already being recognised and surfaced inside a global platform that is flooded with content.

What it needs now is you – not just as someone who opens emails, but as someone who:

shares a piece that mattered to you with the people who need it most,
supports the work financially if you have the means,
steps forward as an ambassador, researcher, connector, or advocate,
holds the kaupapa alongside me so that this waka is no longer pulled almost solely by one paddler.

He Kupū Whakamutunga

If you wish to koha directly to support this mahi, the account is:

HTDM: 03-1546-0415173-000

Please only contribute what you genuinely have capacity to give. The last thing this kaupapa should do is deepen anyone’s financial stress. Your manaakitanga, your sharing, your conversations, and your solidarity are already a form of koha.

Thank you for reading, for opening, for forwarding, for quietly carrying this work into rooms I will never enter.

Stand firm, strengthen yourself, and walk the path of love.

Ngā manaakitanga nui,

Ivor Jones The Māori Green Lantern Fighting Misinformation And Disinformation From The Far Right

https://www.mailerlite.com/blog/compare-your-email-performance-metrics-industry-benchmarks

https://www.salesforce.com/au/marketing/email/benchmarks/

https://www.klaviyo.com/products/email-marketing/benchmarks

"He Kore Tikanga: The Coalition of Betrayal" - 23 March 2026

"Hypocrisy of the Highest Order: The National Government's EV Charger Con" - 23 March 2026

"How Winston Peters Wraps Corporate Plunder in the Language of Liberation — and Has Been Doing It for Forty Years" - 23 March 2026

"THE SULU AND THE SWORD: How Christopher Luxon Wore Our Pacific Family's Dignity Like a Costume While His Budget Burned Their Villages to the Waterline" - 23 March 2026