Most firms in this industry do. We have chosen not to, and this page sets out exactly what we measure instead, and what we deliberately do not.
Almost every newsletter you receive contains an invisible image, one pixel across, that reports back the moment you open the message: when, how often, and roughly where you were. It is called a tracking pixel, and it is close to universal.
NexSky does not use one. Not in the daily briefing, not in The NexSky Letter, not anywhere.
Partly this is because the data is bad. Apple Mail pre-loads images before you have read anything, so it manufactures opens that never happened, while corporate mail systems block images entirely, so genuine, careful reading registers as nothing at all. The number is wrong in both directions at once.
But mostly it is because we do not think it is ours to have. Whether you read something we sent you, in your own inbox, at your own desk, is not information we need in order to do our work.
We need to know whether what we publish is worth reading. So we count things that happen on our own website, in aggregate.
| What | Why |
|---|---|
| Clicks on links we send | To know whether a piece was worth clicking. The link is identical for every recipient, so a click cannot be traced back to an individual — not even by us. |
| Downloads of documents | To know which subjects hold attention. Counted per document, not per person. |
| Page views on nexsky.io | To know which pieces are read. We record the page, the country, and a random number that lasts as long as the browser tab and is then gone. |
That random number lets us tell one visit reading five pages from five visitors reading one page each. It is generated fresh every session, is not stored on your device beyond that session, and is meaningless the moment you close the tab.
Retention. Individual event records are deleted after thirteen months. What survives is the monthly total: how many people read a piece, not who they were.
We hold your email address, and your name if you gave one, for as long as you wish to receive The NexSky Letter. We use it to send you the Letter. We do not use it for anything else.
Every edition carries a working unsubscribe link. One click removes you immediately, and nothing further is sent. You may also write to us at any time and ask what we hold, or ask us to delete it.
Our public pages also use Google Analytics, which is subject to the cookie choice you are offered when you first visit. The members area does not: it carries no Google tracking of any kind.
A family office asks its clients to trust it with a great deal. It seems reasonable that the same firm should be able to say, plainly and in public, what it does with the small things — including whether it watches you read.
If you would like to know anything else about what we hold, write to contact@nexsky.io.