Who turned out the lights?
Apple did. Again: Last week, Apple’s iCloud Private Relay dropped for a few days.
As a result, Substack writers saw a significant drop in open rates. Thankfully click-through rates seemed normal.
Apple Mail users were the most affected. And as Ryan Christoffel points out in the article we’ve linked, the outage raises an interesting question:
If the privacy feature that usually suppresses open rates crashed for a few days, wouldn’t you expect opens to go up instead of down?
You would think. But the open rate drops suggest Mail Privacy Protection might be inflating rates after all.
So let this be a reminder: Don’t rely too heavily on open rates. Focus on click-throughs instead, as Substack suggests.
