0% SEO gobbledegook

Dear Fingers Fam:

As you may have noticed, the boozeletter’s independent coverage and commentary spans a bunch of different topics and perspectives, reporting on whiskey workers’ grievances against corporate distilleries one day, “headless brands” and NFTs in the canned water sector the next.

But you know what you’ll never catch Fingers publishing? Search-engine optimized palaver designed to trick Bing.com1 into sending the boozeletter’s to the top of its search results in hopes of squeezing ad revenue out of a bunch of lifeless #content nobody wants to read and forgets immediately.

Not gonna happen! Every single edition of Fingers is lovingly researched, reported, and written by me for you, the human audience of the Fingers Fam. I’m not trying to game an algorithm: I’m trying to publish smart, funny, thought-provoking stories about the business, culture, and chaos of drinking in these United States.

I need your help to keep doing that. It’s a lot of work to publish Fingers, and because I don’t accept advertising, I depend entirely on readers to support this project. If you’d like to keep reading original, off-beat writing about alcohol, labor, digital media, and more, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription today: 

Annual subscriptions work out to less than $6 a month for the first year with the deal above. What a steal!

A vast majority of the people who read Fingers the most do not pay for it. Which, I get it—there are a lot of newsletters! But this one is mine, and I’m bound by honor/capitalism to promote its merits to you. Plus: most of the alternatives to independent media, especially drinks media, are big ol’ brand-friendly bummers! If you like reading SEO gobbledygook whose only raison d’etre is bamboozling Bing’s algorithm so a millionaire founder can tell his billionaire investors that quarterly traffic goals are being met and exceeded… I mean, do that, I guess? No one’s stopping you. But if you like Fingers, and you want to keep it going so you have interesting stuff to read, please buy a subscription today: 

Every single subscription helps me continue to publish this work. Over 300 Friends of Fingers have already stepped up, I hope you’ll join them. Thanks for reading!—Dave.