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Successful writers stand to increase their revenue by the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars by ditching Substack for any number of easy-to-administer sel
by mbgerring 6y ago
Successful writers stand to increase their revenue by the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars by ditching Substack for any number of easy-to-administer self-hosted solutions. Writers like Yglesias gain absolutely nothing from staying on Substack. The CMS interface can't possibly be worth the pay cut they're taking by staying there.
- sfRattan 6y agoThe CMS interface is only a small part of the value. If you cut loose and try to run a high profile blog/newsletter on your own, suddenly you're paying for IT professionals to do security because you are a high profile target and what you want to do is write, not stay constantly up-to-date on hardening your CMS, database, and sensitive information. Good operational security for a website with the threat model of a high profile, heterodox journalist probably costs tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars annually. If Substack can effectively economize the provision of security for the blogs/newsletters of high profile writers, they might actually reach a scenario that inverts the dynamic of others like YouTube or Patreon: the higher your profile, the more attractive something like Substack becomes; the lower your profile, the easier it is to handle your own website administration and not worry about security.