Today marks the 15th anniversary of Vitiligo News.

That feels big enough to justify a little reflection — and definitely a slice of cake.

The title started as self-deprecating humor. Back in 2012, not much seemed to be happening in the vitiligo world, and I genuinely thought I would write only occasionally. That first year proved me right. The posts were sporadic, the audience was small, and there was no grand strategy behind any of it.

Fifteen years later, I still cannot decide whether this is a blog or a newsletter.

The distinction seems increasingly irrelevant. Most longer articles now live on the News section of VRF website, while the newsletter serves as a guidepost — a short introduction, a few observations, and an invitation to read further if the topic happens to interest you.  

The Strange Little Audience That Grew

What surprises me most is that so many people decided to come along for the ride.

Today, roughly 25,000 readers receive these updates. That is far more than the Vitiligo Research Foundation ever imagined when we started. We periodically remove inactive subscribers to keep costs manageable, but the growth has nonetheless been remarkable: roughly one thousand readers during the first year, steady growth for more than a decade, and only recently signs that we may be approaching a plateau.

The readership itself is an unusual mix.

Roughly one-third of subscribers identify themselves as researchers and physicians, with a fairly blurry line between those two groups. Another third comes from the patient community — people living with vitiligo, parents, family members, advocates, and support group leaders.

The remaining third is something of a mystery.

They open emails, click links, occasionally write back, and otherwise leave very little trace. I think of them as the newsletter’s dark matter. We know they are there because they keep showing up in the analytics. Beyond that, they are largely invisible.

A Slightly Suspicious Academic Existence

That unusual mix has created a slightly unusual academic existence for me.

Some colleagues subscribe and assume I am remarkably productive. Others have no idea this publication exists and probably assume I stopped publishing years ago.

To be fair, both groups have a point.

My Google Scholar profile is not exactly the sort of thing that strikes fear into the hearts of tenure committees. Most professors build careers by publishing papers. I seem to have spent a good portion of mine building conferences, patient programs, maps, books, AI tools, and the occasional paper when nobody was looking.

Yet I somehow collected visiting and honorary professorships along the way while publishing at a pace that could generously be described as 'relaxed' for anyone pretending to be a serious academician. The whole arrangement still feels slightly suspicious — even to me.

Part of the explanation is timing. Most of my academic publishing happened before the recent explosion of artificial intelligence tools that I have been writing about extensively over the past year.

Over time, I found myself increasingly drawn to a different style of communication — faster, more immediate, and accessible to the people I actually wanted to reach.

I still believe in peer review. I still publish occasionally. But I no longer believe that every worthwhile idea needs to spend a year winding its way through the publication process before seeing daylight.

Ironically, AI has only strengthened that conviction. If a publishable-looking paper can now be assembled in hours rather than months, then the real value of scholarship increasingly lies not in producing another document, but in generating ideas worth discussing in the first place.

That is one reason this newsletter has become more important to me over time, not less.

A Running Record of a Changing Field

It has also been fascinating to watch the vitiligo field evolve.

When this newsletter started, there were no approved treatments for vitiligo. Public awareness was limited. Social media communities were still emerging. World Vitiligo Day was in its infancy. Artificial intelligence was still mostly science fiction, or at least something that lived safely inside conference panels and bad movie scripts.

Today, we have approved therapies, dozens of active clinical trials, global patient communities, AI-powered support tools, and a level of public visibility that would have seemed almost unimaginable fifteen years ago.

In many ways, this publication became a running record of that transformation.

What Comes Next

Looking ahead, I plan to continue doing what I have always done: documenting the vitiligo world, highlighting new voices, exploring the growing role of AI in healthcare, and occasionally using these pages to think out loud about where all of this might be heading next.

I have no particular business model. No grand media ambitions. No secret plan.

I write because I enjoy it.

I enjoy following the science. I enjoy watching the field evolve. I enjoy connecting ideas that do not normally get connected. And, every once in a while, I enjoy writing something that makes people stop and think.

Thank you, as always, for reading.

If nothing else, I can say with certainty that writing this publication over the past fifteen years has been good for me.

Here’s to another fifteen years.

Have some cake. 🎂

— Yan Valle
CEO, Vitiligo Research Foundation