38 ms·

Why the Substack hype is much ado about very little

133 points by indigodaddy 5y ago

dgb23 5y ago
It doesn’t have to be original or be lucrative for the small. Like so many other successful services it is packaged well and just works, while building on established ideas.
telotortium 5y ago
Substack looks like blogging/newsletter plus Patreon (and probably some ancillary services - I read once that they would offer some kind of legal representation). I think this post errs in not bringing up the Patreon comparison. I'm unaware of any major media empires funded via Patreon, but it seems to provide enough of an income to support many YouTubers, podcasters, etc. I think only extreme news junkies would subscribe to more than one newspaper and maybe a few magazines, just as the post argues. But I think Patreon proves that there is a larger market for people directly subscribing to people's writing to support an individual creator's distinctive voice.
- jesselawson 5y ago
  Maybe not empires per se, but many fiction publications are using Patreon as a revenue-generating tool.
spindle 5y ago
Substack expects me to agree to a long EULA before they will permit me to give them money. Seems crazy to me.
- monsieurbanana 5y ago
  What paid services do you use that don't require you to accept an EULA??
  - KirillPanov 5y ago
    The newspapers and books I buy with cash, for starters...
    - simonsarris 5y ago
      Those aren't services, those are objects. You don't post comments in the book that everyone can then instantly read, like you do on Substack.
  - rchaud 5y ago
    I remember getting a $50.00 cheque in 2007 from the now-defunct Epinions.com website when my review of an MP3 player hit 10,000 views. Different kind of business, but I never signed any EULA with them. Just signed up for an account to post.
napoleoncomplex 5y ago
There's two premises I disagree with in this article, one subjective, one objective. The subjective disagreement is that the trend/bubble towards more and more subscriptions is going to burst all of a sudden. From what I've seen in the mobile app world, it's now at least a 5-year trend towards more and more paid subscription apps being successful, more and more consumers willing to pay x$/month for things they wouldn't ever consider paying for before, etc. And yes, it's not billions of people, but you don't need billions of subscribers to run a successful business with subscriptions. And the same thing is happening with Patreon, Substack, even OnlyFans. And same as with mobile apps, so it is with creators, not all apps are worth the monthly fee, and not all creators are worth the monthly fee. The business model is not a revenue guarantee, it's a revenue possibility. And yes, as with any other solo business, it's extremely hard to stand out in blogging. You have to be a great writer, you have to know how to build an audience, and you have to consistently deliver that great writing to this audience. And there's about a few million other bloggers out there, with the same goal. There's no business model that's going to pay all of them well. But having the possibility of paying writers directly, simply and easily, is a very worthy evolution for the writer space. It's not going to save millions of bloggers/writers who believe the business model is the issue though. The objective disagreement is that Substack is only successful due to having VC cash to throw at writers to come to their platform. Yes, they have VC cash, and they have offered great upfront deals to writers. But Scott Alexander wrote a good post on this subject, revealing the details of his deal (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/adding-my-data-point-to-the-discussion https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/adding-my-data-point-t...). Long story short, in basically all cases that he is aware of, his own and others, the deal that Substack offered was great, great enough to jump ship quickly, but in nearly all cases, the writer would have been better off not taking the deal, and just taking the usual Substack cut of the revenue offered to all writers, as the eventual subscriber revenue was bigger than the already big upfront deal. That makes me think that even once the VC cash dries out, subscriber revenue is going to be a pretty good driver of the business going forward.
- hsod 5y ago
  Substack doesn’t publish a list of all funded writers so we really don’t know if this is broadly true. Unsuccessful substacks don’t get much pub so it makes sense we wouldn’t have heard from them. That being said, it seems every writer I’m familiar with that launched one has been successful
inglor_cz 5y ago
Substack cuts out the middlemen in opinion journalism and tolerates a wide spectrum of politics. Both is disruptive for entrenched businesses, and both induces anger from less paid and more dogmatic journalists. Potential failures of Substack are elsewhere - no local coverage, little investigative journalism, a tendency to build bubbles - but as a vehicle to reduce the grip of the anointed "opinion makers" (how I hate this candid expression!) it is very useful.
- fragmede 5y ago
  If you don't look too closely, yes. Thing is, as a promotional thing, Substack will give some writers an advance to live off of, and who picks who gets an advance? The opinion makers working at Substack.
  - native_samples 5y ago
    Substack don't seem interested in opinion making. Perhaps one day they will be, but for now their advances appear to be driven by some very smart BD guys and are given to whoever will be profitable. The story is always the same: they approach some writer who was just attacked by some woke institution and is now out on their own. They tell them, hey, did you know you could make some six figure sum by charging for newsletters? And they say, no you're wrong, I can't earn that much. So they say, OK, we'll give you a much smaller six figure sum guaranteed and take the rest. If we're right, we win. If you're right, you win. Sounds fair? It does, so they say yes. And Substack always wins.
    - KirillPanov 5y ago
      > Perhaps one day they will be Unfortunately if they survive they will become quite fixated on opinionmaking. It's structurally inevitable, manufacturing consent.
      - ghaff 5y ago
        One aspect of unbundling (ads/opinion/news) is that there nothing to subsidize your foreign bureaus or multi-month investigative journalism that may not even pan out, to say nothing of hyper-local news.
throwawaysea 5y ago
> “If Substack is successful, it will remind news consumers that paying for good journalism is worth it,” wrote the University of Maine’s Michael Socolow for The Conversation. “But if Substack’s pricing precludes widespread distribution of its news and commentary, its value as a public service won’t be fully realized.” Is this basically saying that authors need to keep their content freely accessible so that Substack provides a wider public good? If so then I would say that this is already the case. Most authors keep nearly all their content publicly visible. Those who subscribe do so to support good work, not to gain exclusivity. In that sense, the community/content model is more like Patreon than Only Fans. In my opinion what makes Substack great is its lack of censorship (encouraging a diversity of thought), the fact that readers pay individual authors (unlike medium where you pay for access to the whole site), and the fact that making/collecting payments is easy for users/authors. Sure you can host your own Wordpress and hook up a payment mechanism and all that - but there’s a certain degree of trust and convenience that Substack offers eager subscribers. I feel its payments appeal is a lot like tipping via rewards in the Brave browser (https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360021123971-How-do-I-tip-websites-and-Content-Creators-in-Brave-Rewards- https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360021123971-How...) but more accessible and understandable to the layperson.
- pjc50 5y ago
  It's not true that Substack is "uncensored". It wouldn't last long if it was. https://substack.com/content https://substack.com/content
dash2 5y ago
Yeah, this is basically correct. The key issue is that people don't want to pay $2/month to twenty different writers. They want to pay $20/month to a single organization which has a hundred writers, also known as a "newspaper". The logic is simple: an individual writer is always relatively niche. Niche means small audience. Small audience means you have to charge more per person to cover your costs. Maybe Substack will go the Medium way and try to aggregate, or encourage its writers to aggregate. If so, then it could succeed, but it'll succeed by becoming a newspaper. The problem is that the NYT, Guardian, Mail etc. have a lot of experience at doing aggregation well. (Each day has an appropriate mix of home, foreign, finance, and sports. The day's editorial chimes with what the front page journalists wrote about. Long run investigations are funded in the hope of big payoffs. Et cetera.) Medium hasn't really broken through, I think Substack would struggle. An alternative is the status quo: Substack is a perfectly viable blogging tool, where aspiring journalists and writers like me [1] give away content for free, in the hope of breaking through to the next level, and where a few people make a good living. But if so Substack will fit into the existing landscape, rather than disrupting it. [1] https://wyclif.substack.com https://wyclif.substack.com
- raffraffraff 5y ago
  A bundle deal would be cool. But I'd prefer to pay the $20/month to read x articles regardless of who writes them.
  - monkeydust 5y ago
    Agree. That way you can discover new writers that you will come to like.
  - skinkestek 5y ago
    Or even better $10 for n tokens, $20 for n * 2,5 tokens, $30 for n*3 tokens or something to that effect. Charge me monthly to to up but not if I have more than m unspent tokens.
- ALittleLight 5y ago
  I would like a "Build your own magazine" type deal. Let me configure a list of the writers I want to read and give me a sizable discount on the subscription or a bundled deal. I don't want to pay 10 dollars a month to each of 20 writers, but I would pay 20 dollars a month to read and support 20 writers.
lmm 5y ago
The argument here is pretty weak. Yes, all that Substack really is is blogging but with better monetization. Yes, if Substack is to make money then it probably won't be accessible to the widest possible audience. But that's not enough to conclude that it can't be gamechanging. Kickstarter was "just" a way to monetize, but it's had a dramatic impact; likewise Patreon (and OnlyFans).
- draw_down 5y ago
  Right, I think there’s a lot of value in helping people capitalize on an audience they already have. Build your audience on Twitter or twitch or whatever and then you can go from there. This is good actually. By the way it’s a bit cute to describe some of these authors as simply having “gotten an audience elsewhere”- the other part is how these people get chased out and barred from typical media careers. Glenn Greenwald and Angela Nagle for instance. It’s important that these people have some kind of lifeline. Also Substack doesn’t have to be for writers exclusively. You can post podcasts on it and video is either already possible or could be.
- adventured 5y ago
  > Yes, all that Substack really is is blogging but with better monetization. That's not even true. Some people enjoy receiving newsletters. Substack gives me a free newsletter platform. I can send out to 100 or 10,000 daily recipients all the same, at no cost. That's actually quite nice and you simply don't get that with vanilla blogging. Newsletters at scale are expensive if you want reliability + frequency. If I just want to operate a free blog and newsletter with eg 10,000 subscribers, with no desire to monetize it at all, I'd otherwise have to eat that cost from my own pocket. Mailchimp wants $1,200 per year for 120,000 sends per month (10k subscribers * 3 newsletters per week) via their transactional offering. Most people can't justify that if you're not going to monetize.
  - wnissen 5y ago
    I think a big part of that price is that it's almost impossible to send a newsletter to a significant amount of people with a personal email account. Craig could never have started his list today without paying for Mailchimp.
isaacremuant 5y ago
Glenn Greenwald and others move there because they got censored elsewhere. Glenn in his own founded news site, the intercept, because he dared talk about something that could affect Biden's chance of winning. https://greenwald.substack.com/p/my-resignation-from-the-intercept https://greenwald.substack.com/p/my-resignation-from-the-int... If you don't address that then you're missing the mark. Btw, we are already seeing attacks and attempts to control substack. Can't have a medium becoming popular with wrongthink now, can we?
- Synaesthesia 5y ago
  That's correct but doesn't really change his analysis of substack. I do think it's a place where a number of important journalists have gone, like Glenn, Ed Snowden and others.
- smitty1e 5y ago
  Substack is funded by VCs, as noted in The Famous Article. To own someone's debt is to control them. One wonders how long the vibrant opinion will take to shift to propaganda when that debt is bought up by entities with an agenda.
- pron 5y ago
  Because Greenwald helpfully published his correspondence with his editors (https://greenwald.substack.com/p/emails-with-intercept-editors-showing https://greenwald.substack.com/p/emails-with-intercept-edito...), as a former journalist I can tell you that the term-of-art for that is "editing," and that this is precisely what editors do every day for every journalist (especially in the better quality organisations). And yes, in many cases editing might reflect the biases of the publication. Editing in the WSJ has a different ideological bias from editing in the NYT. You can think it's bad, and you can even call it censorship if you like, but just so you know, when journalists say "editing," this is the thing they're referring to. This is why many professional journalist were peeved with Greenwald when he presented the exact same experience all journalists face every day as a normal part of their job as censorship. I guess editing is a censorship of sorts, as is code review and manager approval, but just as programmers say "code review" when they mean that particular kind of censorship, journalists say "editing" when they mean the very ordinary kind of censorship in that correspondence between Greenwald and his editors. When you get a job as a writer, you accept that the editors will "censor" you, because "censoring" is their job, and "being censored" is a part of yours. Like countless journalists before him, Greenwald wasn't happy with the editing his piece received, so he left for a venue with editing that's more to his liking, which in this particular case means virtually none.
bloke_zero 5y ago
What I don't get in these conversations is why no one mentions the role of the editorial team? Expecting even a great journalist to write consistently interesting and clear pieces on their own is like letting a musician record without a producer. It might be good for a while but the chances are a great producer is going to even out the output and make a tremendous difference in depth, quality and accessibility. To say nothing of checking the wilder excesses. These discussions which focus on the stars ignore the team so necessary for consistent and readable articles. I suppose the lone genius idea has an inexorable fascination.
- gebruikersnaam 5y ago
  In addition to this: traditional media organizations provide a training space for new writers, journalists etc. You can argue that that strengthens the status quo, but Substack provides nothing to promote new talent.
- dcolkitt 5y ago
  Isn’t escaping editorial teams exactly the reason that many migrated to Substack? A big reason people are on the platform is because they want to read Glenn Greenwald or Andrew Sullivan or Matt Yglesias in a way that’s not filtered by their previous editorial teams.
  - bloke_zero 5y ago
    I take the point for sure, and escaping constraints can be valuable - but we must all be familiar with the 'great wo/man' syndrome where everything they say is right and doesn't need editing or even questioning...
- blackshaw 5y ago
  Many of the top-paid Substack writers do use part of their revenue to pay an editor.
  - iworshipfaangs2 5y ago
    Surely Scott Alexander is not because lord of mercy is he verbose.
nsonha 5y ago
why do we call blogging journalism as if they have the same standard? Do you expect a blog post to be fact-checked? Do you sue bloggers when they write something damaging to your brand?
- moron4hire 5y ago
  Even the major papers have had some pretty serious gaffes in the fact-checking department in recent years. That's kind of the major complaint with modern media houses: they don't do their purported jobs anymore. Book publishers don't really edit and promote books anymore, they leverage established e-authors. Game companies don't make new games anymore, they rebundle old games with a slot-machine monetization system. And news media doesn't edit or fact check anymore, they fight for clicks. Mmmm, those sweet, sweet clicks. Come children, we shall eat well tonight.
  - nsonha 5y ago
    yeah in that case just call journalism dead, instead of calling something else journalism
- pjc50 5y ago
  Bloggers have been sued, yes.
dexen 5y ago
>There is one important difference: Substack has better, more flexible tools for payment than blogging ever had. There are two more key differences: Substack has serious marketing effort behind it. Big scale, well thought ought, multi-channel and multi-platform. It's the proverbial tide that rises all boats - the ones that docked at the Substack harbor, that is. The other substantive advantage is uniform and clear user (reader) interface. The value of which cannot be over-stated for ease and please of focusing on the content, for comfortable familiarity, and for fast, smooth performance. It stands in stark contrast with ad-laden, noisy and ad-hoc interface of most online publications, be it newspapers or blogs. Its structure is very clear "flat trees", giving an almost linear navigating experience - as opposed to the multiply linked graphs of typical publications. The constrained options of Substack allow it to be, and remain, great. It even passes the "works just as well without adblock" test. At the risk of doing it disservice by the way of risky comparison, Substack is everything that Google Amp ever wanted to be - and without the warts.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  > It even passes the "works just as well without adblock" test. From a visual perspective yes. However i must note without a JS blocker snowden's article from yesterday will weigh 2.41MB, including 1.22MB JS file, which is insane! Disabling JS brings it down to 1.16MB where images are the heaviest files, with about 40-210KB per image, which is reasonable. So, despite all the bad things i think about that kind of industry, i must recognize that their website works well without JavaScript, does not block Tor users, and is not excessively heavy to load once you have disabled JS. I'm ashamed to say it because it should be the minimum quality requirement for EVERY website, but congratulations on making an actually usable website in 2021. That's apparently become such a technological challenge that most VC-funded startups are incapable to do it. It almost makes me want to pay a subscription! But of course i won't do it, since Substack is not a non-profit. There's no reason i should subsidize evil capitalist shareholders with the little money i have to live, i'd much rather use it to support artists and developers directly via liberapay, opencollective and other more ethical venues that do not encourage centralized hosting of content.
  - 5y ago
dalbasal 5y ago
"Been done before" is a pointless criticism. Yes, "blogging" reduced to a bare bones definition, has been invented and reinvented since before it was a term. That means very little though. It's subtleties, norms and culture that make these mediums what they are. If Patreon, twitch, only fans and now youtube can support a direct-to-creator subscription culture, why not journalism? In any case, the economic woes of journalism transcend medium and specific formulations of a business model. Whether the incentive is eyeballs for advertising, an enthusiastic core for patronage or whatnot... it seems to always be at odds with journalism's financially independent mission. 100 articles commenting on the commentary or covering the coverage are the same amount of work as one, important, investigative piece. If that work is genuinely important, the information will be republished hundreds of times, and that's how most people will consume it. That's where money will go, whether through subscriptions, patronage or advertising. I don't think there is a way of having good incentives in the news business. Hard journalism is always subsidized some way, whether that's government subsidies or cross subsidies. Substack is, I think, a decent place for "independent voices." Individuals respected within a clique, commenting and highlighting issues of the day. It's probably not going to fund investigative journalism, and neither is any straightforward model. Public information is a public good. It's hard to get around that.
- xtracto 5y ago
  The problem with Blogging is that it got eaten by marketing drone teams. Most blog entries nowadays are just SEO optimised articles written by a marketing intern who has no clue of what he is writing about.
  - rchaud 5y ago
    There is no one single reason for everything. Web traffic started centralizing around social media sites over a decade ago, and bloggers themselves pushed their readers to 'interact' on Facebook and Twitter. They are writers, not tech ecosystem experts, so it didn't occur to them that Facebook and Twitter would take steps to keep people on their platform, and discourage them from linking out.
marban 5y ago
If you're just getting started in the realm of business content, you're welcome to post at https://biztoc.com https://biztoc.com * until you build out your own homebase. *(A Mark Cuban Venture I launched)
_Marak_ 5y ago
We think it's deplorable that a concerted effort was made to dilute the Markov chain ranking of James Halliday ( aka the actual Substack ) for not wanting to play games with you. James has the quantum entanglement crystal and there is nothing you can do about it.
- KirillPanov 5y ago
  Beam me up, Alf!
ape4 5y ago
Duh, (before reading the article) I thought "substack" was a software thing. Maybe a stack below the main stack?
k__ 5y ago
Is there a hype? I'm a person who makes most of their money with blogging and I only heard bad things about Substack.
- Anon84 5y ago
  Any tips for someone trying to get to the same point? I have a couple of substacks (https://graphs4sci.substack.com/ https://graphs4sci.substack.com/ and https://viz4sci.substack.com/ https://viz4sci.substack.com/) and medium (https://medium.data4sci.com/ https://medium.data4sci.com/). I'm stuck roughly at the "vacation money" threshold (a few thousand a year, enough for a nice vacation or three but not enough to live off of) which certainly isn't bad for something I do essentially on weekends but the medium term goal is to be able to mostly live off of it
  - k__ 5y ago
    Look for a content agency to write for. It's not presige work, but I always can get a bunch of payed articles if nothing else comes in.
amadeuspagel 5y ago
> “Since I closed down the Dish, my bloggy website, five years ago, after 15 years of daily blogging,” he wrote, “I have not missed the insane work hours that all but broke my health.” > Somehow Sullivan has convinced himself that things will be different at Substack. Maybe he should have checked in with Patrice Peck, a journalist who publishes a Substack newsletter in relative obscurity called Coronavirus News for Black Folks. According to an article by Clio Chang in the Columbia Journalism Review, Peck has discovered that overwork and burnout are just as real for newsletter writers as they are for bloggers. (And why would we think otherwise?) We might think otherwise, because if you have a newsletter you don't have to publish something all the time, because you don't rely on people checking your site. (Which they might stop doing if there isn't something new every time they check.)
- ghaff 5y ago
  Back in the day, many people used RSS so they didn't have to check a site all the time. Even if it's push, if I'm paying for something and I seem to rarely get an email, I'll probably stop paying.
candyman 5y ago
I think Substack is onto something and enjoy it both as a subscriber and a contributor. For one thing newspapers and their ilk want to drive my attention. I don't want that. With Substack I can pick the topics and writers I'm interested in and then easily see and read new articles. And while there are all kinds of writers on Substack I am on the business/technology/investment side so my "DIY magazine" is really a collection of analysis and commentary. You might call this a niche but some might be pretty large and a collection of them might be very big indeed. Also consider Bloomberg author Matt Levine. Fortunately we can read him for free (in exchange for a couple of non-intrusive embedded ads) but if Bloomberg put his material behind their paywall I would not pay $300-400 per year to them in order to read it. I'd certainly be willing to pay $5/month for him though. The other super annoying thing about these aggregators is that they push advertising to you even after you are a paying subscriber! Paying for content that also sends me advertising is a non-starter for me.
rchaud 5y ago
"If Substack is successful, it will remind news consumers that paying for good journalism is worth it,” wrote the University of Maine’s Michael Socolow " Talking about the news doesn't make one a 'journalist'. What was Andrew Sullivan's last scoop? Reporting, fact-checking, corroborating source statements...this is slow, invisible work. It is the polar opposite of 'content production', which requires a regular posting schedule. With investigative reporting, it's generally not possible to get in your 2 cents out when the topic is still hot in the news cycle. Yet with Substack, and any other content promotion business, you not only have to come up with original content, but spend time creating graphics and promotional copy and maintaining a presence and 'personality' for Twitter. It's absurd to think that you're getting an 'insider's scoop with no editorial filter' for anything related to real news.
- dalbasal 5y ago
  So... I think there are two seperate things here, besides ownership of the prestige word "journalism." One is "reporting," which involves fact-checking, corroborating source statements and such. This is, I agree, something that generally needs an organisation. The other is investigative journalism. This can be done independently & can't be scooped, but it is an incredibly inefficient way of putting ink on paper. Investigations take weeks, months or years and not every investigation finds much worth reporting. This is incredibly important, but god only knows hows its supposed to be funded. Where it is done, its subsidized, cross subsidized, snuck in or done unpaid. This is as much an issue at NYT as it is on substack. There's no known general solution to this problem. All that said, most of what most people read, listen to and watch is neither of these things. It's commentary and rhetoric. Those aren't bad, they're just overabundant, everywhere... not just substack. In fact, if you take a glance at politically fringe publications like Breitbart, Jacobin, Democracy Now, etc.... You will find that most of it is such content. News first published elsewhere, with new commentary. Its like this everywhere: left, right, centre, establishment, dissident, corporate, independant. If there's intelligent life on mars, I reckon their papers will be full of it too.
stereoradonc 5y ago
Substack is a blogging tool (an inadequate one with a poor CMS)+ Payment tool (uses Stripe)+ VC money and hype to create "excitement" and uses some white label service to distribute. It got coverage because star journalists joined it with eye-popping figures. Does it trickle down to others? Your luck will depend on discoverability- a mechanism which Subtack controls.

133 points by indigodaddy 5y ago

It doesn’t have to be original or be lucrative for the small. Like so many other successful services it is packaged well and just works, while building on established ideas.

telotortium 5y ago

Substack looks like blogging/newsletter plus Patreon (and probably some ancillary services - I read once that they would offer some kind of legal representation). I think this post errs in not bringing up the Patreon comparison. I'm unaware of any major media empires funded via Patreon, but it seems to provide enough of an income to support many YouTubers, podcasters, etc. I think only extreme news junkies would subscribe to more than one newspaper and maybe a few magazines, just as the post argues. But I think Patreon proves that there is a larger market for people directly subscribing to people's writing to support an individual creator's distinctive voice.

jesselawson 5y ago
Maybe not empires per se, but many fiction publications are using Patreon as a revenue-generating tool.

spindle 5y ago

Substack expects me to agree to a long EULA before they will permit me to give them money. Seems crazy to me.

monsieurbanana 5y ago
What paid services do you use that don't require you to accept an EULA??
- KirillPanov 5y ago
  The newspapers and books I buy with cash, for starters...
  - simonsarris 5y ago
    Those aren't services, those are objects. You don't post comments in the book that everyone can then instantly read, like you do on Substack.
- rchaud 5y ago
  I remember getting a $50.00 cheque in 2007 from the now-defunct Epinions.com website when my review of an MP3 player hit 10,000 views. Different kind of business, but I never signed any EULA with them. Just signed up for an account to post.

napoleoncomplex 5y ago

There's two premises I disagree with in this article, one subjective, one objective. The subjective disagreement is that the trend/bubble towards more and more subscriptions is going to burst all of a sudden. From what I've seen in the mobile app world, it's now at least a 5-year trend towards more and more paid subscription apps being successful, more and more consumers willing to pay x$/month for things they wouldn't ever consider paying for before, etc. And yes, it's not billions of people, but you don't need billions of subscribers to run a successful business with subscriptions. And the same thing is happening with Patreon, Substack, even OnlyFans. And same as with mobile apps, so it is with creators, not all apps are worth the monthly fee, and not all creators are worth the monthly fee. The business model is not a revenue guarantee, it's a revenue possibility. And yes, as with any other solo business, it's extremely hard to stand out in blogging. You have to be a great writer, you have to know how to build an audience, and you have to consistently deliver that great writing to this audience. And there's about a few million other bloggers out there, with the same goal. There's no business model that's going to pay all of them well. But having the possibility of paying writers directly, simply and easily, is a very worthy evolution for the writer space. It's not going to save millions of bloggers/writers who believe the business model is the issue though. The objective disagreement is that Substack is only successful due to having VC cash to throw at writers to come to their platform. Yes, they have VC cash, and they have offered great upfront deals to writers. But Scott Alexander wrote a good post on this subject, revealing the details of his deal (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/adding-my-data-point-to-the-discussion https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/adding-my-data-point-t...). Long story short, in basically all cases that he is aware of, his own and others, the deal that Substack offered was great, great enough to jump ship quickly, but in nearly all cases, the writer would have been better off not taking the deal, and just taking the usual Substack cut of the revenue offered to all writers, as the eventual subscriber revenue was bigger than the already big upfront deal. That makes me think that even once the VC cash dries out, subscriber revenue is going to be a pretty good driver of the business going forward.

hsod 5y ago
Substack doesn’t publish a list of all funded writers so we really don’t know if this is broadly true. Unsuccessful substacks don’t get much pub so it makes sense we wouldn’t have heard from them. That being said, it seems every writer I’m familiar with that launched one has been successful

inglor_cz 5y ago

Substack cuts out the middlemen in opinion journalism and tolerates a wide spectrum of politics. Both is disruptive for entrenched businesses, and both induces anger from less paid and more dogmatic journalists. Potential failures of Substack are elsewhere - no local coverage, little investigative journalism, a tendency to build bubbles - but as a vehicle to reduce the grip of the anointed "opinion makers" (how I hate this candid expression!) it is very useful.

fragmede 5y ago
If you don't look too closely, yes. Thing is, as a promotional thing, Substack will give some writers an advance to live off of, and who picks who gets an advance? The opinion makers working at Substack.
- native_samples 5y ago
  Substack don't seem interested in opinion making. Perhaps one day they will be, but for now their advances appear to be driven by some very smart BD guys and are given to whoever will be profitable. The story is always the same: they approach some writer who was just attacked by some woke institution and is now out on their own. They tell them, hey, did you know you could make some six figure sum by charging for newsletters? And they say, no you're wrong, I can't earn that much. So they say, OK, we'll give you a much smaller six figure sum guaranteed and take the rest. If we're right, we win. If you're right, you win. Sounds fair? It does, so they say yes. And Substack always wins.
  - KirillPanov 5y ago
    > Perhaps one day they will be Unfortunately if they survive they will become quite fixated on opinionmaking. It's structurally inevitable, manufacturing consent.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      One aspect of unbundling (ads/opinion/news) is that there nothing to subsidize your foreign bureaus or multi-month investigative journalism that may not even pan out, to say nothing of hyper-local news.

throwawaysea 5y ago

> “If Substack is successful, it will remind news consumers that paying for good journalism is worth it,” wrote the University of Maine’s Michael Socolow for The Conversation. “But if Substack’s pricing precludes widespread distribution of its news and commentary, its value as a public service won’t be fully realized.” Is this basically saying that authors need to keep their content freely accessible so that Substack provides a wider public good? If so then I would say that this is already the case. Most authors keep nearly all their content publicly visible. Those who subscribe do so to support good work, not to gain exclusivity. In that sense, the community/content model is more like Patreon than Only Fans. In my opinion what makes Substack great is its lack of censorship (encouraging a diversity of thought), the fact that readers pay individual authors (unlike medium where you pay for access to the whole site), and the fact that making/collecting payments is easy for users/authors. Sure you can host your own Wordpress and hook up a payment mechanism and all that - but there’s a certain degree of trust and convenience that Substack offers eager subscribers. I feel its payments appeal is a lot like tipping via rewards in the Brave browser (https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360021123971-How-do-I-tip-websites-and-Content-Creators-in-Brave-Rewards- https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360021123971-How...) but more accessible and understandable to the layperson.

pjc50 5y ago
It's not true that Substack is "uncensored". It wouldn't last long if it was. https://substack.com/content https://substack.com/content

dash2 5y ago

Yeah, this is basically correct. The key issue is that people don't want to pay $2/month to twenty different writers. They want to pay $20/month to a single organization which has a hundred writers, also known as a "newspaper". The logic is simple: an individual writer is always relatively niche. Niche means small audience. Small audience means you have to charge more per person to cover your costs. Maybe Substack will go the Medium way and try to aggregate, or encourage its writers to aggregate. If so, then it could succeed, but it'll succeed by becoming a newspaper. The problem is that the NYT, Guardian, Mail etc. have a lot of experience at doing aggregation well. (Each day has an appropriate mix of home, foreign, finance, and sports. The day's editorial chimes with what the front page journalists wrote about. Long run investigations are funded in the hope of big payoffs. Et cetera.) Medium hasn't really broken through, I think Substack would struggle. An alternative is the status quo: Substack is a perfectly viable blogging tool, where aspiring journalists and writers like me [1] give away content for free, in the hope of breaking through to the next level, and where a few people make a good living. But if so Substack will fit into the existing landscape, rather than disrupting it. [1] https://wyclif.substack.com https://wyclif.substack.com

raffraffraff 5y ago
A bundle deal would be cool. But I'd prefer to pay the $20/month to read x articles regardless of who writes them.
- monkeydust 5y ago
  Agree. That way you can discover new writers that you will come to like.
- skinkestek 5y ago
  Or even better $10 for n tokens, $20 for n * 2,5 tokens, $30 for n*3 tokens or something to that effect. Charge me monthly to to up but not if I have more than m unspent tokens.
ALittleLight 5y ago
I would like a "Build your own magazine" type deal. Let me configure a list of the writers I want to read and give me a sizable discount on the subscription or a bundled deal. I don't want to pay 10 dollars a month to each of 20 writers, but I would pay 20 dollars a month to read and support 20 writers.

lmm 5y ago

The argument here is pretty weak. Yes, all that Substack really is is blogging but with better monetization. Yes, if Substack is to make money then it probably won't be accessible to the widest possible audience. But that's not enough to conclude that it can't be gamechanging. Kickstarter was "just" a way to monetize, but it's had a dramatic impact; likewise Patreon (and OnlyFans).

draw_down 5y ago
Right, I think there’s a lot of value in helping people capitalize on an audience they already have. Build your audience on Twitter or twitch or whatever and then you can go from there. This is good actually. By the way it’s a bit cute to describe some of these authors as simply having “gotten an audience elsewhere”- the other part is how these people get chased out and barred from typical media careers. Glenn Greenwald and Angela Nagle for instance. It’s important that these people have some kind of lifeline. Also Substack doesn’t have to be for writers exclusively. You can post podcasts on it and video is either already possible or could be.
adventured 5y ago
> Yes, all that Substack really is is blogging but with better monetization. That's not even true. Some people enjoy receiving newsletters. Substack gives me a free newsletter platform. I can send out to 100 or 10,000 daily recipients all the same, at no cost. That's actually quite nice and you simply don't get that with vanilla blogging. Newsletters at scale are expensive if you want reliability + frequency. If I just want to operate a free blog and newsletter with eg 10,000 subscribers, with no desire to monetize it at all, I'd otherwise have to eat that cost from my own pocket. Mailchimp wants $1,200 per year for 120,000 sends per month (10k subscribers * 3 newsletters per week) via their transactional offering. Most people can't justify that if you're not going to monetize.
- wnissen 5y ago
  I think a big part of that price is that it's almost impossible to send a newsletter to a significant amount of people with a personal email account. Craig could never have started his list today without paying for Mailchimp.

isaacremuant 5y ago

Glenn Greenwald and others move there because they got censored elsewhere. Glenn in his own founded news site, the intercept, because he dared talk about something that could affect Biden's chance of winning. https://greenwald.substack.com/p/my-resignation-from-the-intercept https://greenwald.substack.com/p/my-resignation-from-the-int... If you don't address that then you're missing the mark. Btw, we are already seeing attacks and attempts to control substack. Can't have a medium becoming popular with wrongthink now, can we?

Synaesthesia 5y ago
That's correct but doesn't really change his analysis of substack. I do think it's a place where a number of important journalists have gone, like Glenn, Ed Snowden and others.
smitty1e 5y ago
Substack is funded by VCs, as noted in The Famous Article. To own someone's debt is to control them. One wonders how long the vibrant opinion will take to shift to propaganda when that debt is bought up by entities with an agenda.
pron 5y ago
Because Greenwald helpfully published his correspondence with his editors (https://greenwald.substack.com/p/emails-with-intercept-editors-showing https://greenwald.substack.com/p/emails-with-intercept-edito...), as a former journalist I can tell you that the term-of-art for that is "editing," and that this is precisely what editors do every day for every journalist (especially in the better quality organisations). And yes, in many cases editing might reflect the biases of the publication. Editing in the WSJ has a different ideological bias from editing in the NYT. You can think it's bad, and you can even call it censorship if you like, but just so you know, when journalists say "editing," this is the thing they're referring to. This is why many professional journalist were peeved with Greenwald when he presented the exact same experience all journalists face every day as a normal part of their job as censorship. I guess editing is a censorship of sorts, as is code review and manager approval, but just as programmers say "code review" when they mean that particular kind of censorship, journalists say "editing" when they mean the very ordinary kind of censorship in that correspondence between Greenwald and his editors. When you get a job as a writer, you accept that the editors will "censor" you, because "censoring" is their job, and "being censored" is a part of yours. Like countless journalists before him, Greenwald wasn't happy with the editing his piece received, so he left for a venue with editing that's more to his liking, which in this particular case means virtually none.

bloke_zero 5y ago

What I don't get in these conversations is why no one mentions the role of the editorial team? Expecting even a great journalist to write consistently interesting and clear pieces on their own is like letting a musician record without a producer. It might be good for a while but the chances are a great producer is going to even out the output and make a tremendous difference in depth, quality and accessibility. To say nothing of checking the wilder excesses. These discussions which focus on the stars ignore the team so necessary for consistent and readable articles. I suppose the lone genius idea has an inexorable fascination.

gebruikersnaam 5y ago
In addition to this: traditional media organizations provide a training space for new writers, journalists etc. You can argue that that strengthens the status quo, but Substack provides nothing to promote new talent.
dcolkitt 5y ago
Isn’t escaping editorial teams exactly the reason that many migrated to Substack? A big reason people are on the platform is because they want to read Glenn Greenwald or Andrew Sullivan or Matt Yglesias in a way that’s not filtered by their previous editorial teams.
- bloke_zero 5y ago
  I take the point for sure, and escaping constraints can be valuable - but we must all be familiar with the 'great wo/man' syndrome where everything they say is right and doesn't need editing or even questioning...
blackshaw 5y ago
Many of the top-paid Substack writers do use part of their revenue to pay an editor.
- iworshipfaangs2 5y ago
  Surely Scott Alexander is not because lord of mercy is he verbose.

nsonha 5y ago

why do we call blogging journalism as if they have the same standard? Do you expect a blog post to be fact-checked? Do you sue bloggers when they write something damaging to your brand?

moron4hire 5y ago
Even the major papers have had some pretty serious gaffes in the fact-checking department in recent years. That's kind of the major complaint with modern media houses: they don't do their purported jobs anymore. Book publishers don't really edit and promote books anymore, they leverage established e-authors. Game companies don't make new games anymore, they rebundle old games with a slot-machine monetization system. And news media doesn't edit or fact check anymore, they fight for clicks. Mmmm, those sweet, sweet clicks. Come children, we shall eat well tonight.
- nsonha 5y ago
  yeah in that case just call journalism dead, instead of calling something else journalism
pjc50 5y ago
Bloggers have been sued, yes.

dexen 5y ago

>There is one important difference: Substack has better, more flexible tools for payment than blogging ever had. There are two more key differences: Substack has serious marketing effort behind it. Big scale, well thought ought, multi-channel and multi-platform. It's the proverbial tide that rises all boats - the ones that docked at the Substack harbor, that is. The other substantive advantage is uniform and clear user (reader) interface. The value of which cannot be over-stated for ease and please of focusing on the content, for comfortable familiarity, and for fast, smooth performance. It stands in stark contrast with ad-laden, noisy and ad-hoc interface of most online publications, be it newspapers or blogs. Its structure is very clear "flat trees", giving an almost linear navigating experience - as opposed to the multiply linked graphs of typical publications. The constrained options of Substack allow it to be, and remain, great. It even passes the "works just as well without adblock" test. At the risk of doing it disservice by the way of risky comparison, Substack is everything that Google Amp ever wanted to be - and without the warts.

southerntofu 5y ago
> It even passes the "works just as well without adblock" test. From a visual perspective yes. However i must note without a JS blocker snowden's article from yesterday will weigh 2.41MB, including 1.22MB JS file, which is insane! Disabling JS brings it down to 1.16MB where images are the heaviest files, with about 40-210KB per image, which is reasonable. So, despite all the bad things i think about that kind of industry, i must recognize that their website works well without JavaScript, does not block Tor users, and is not excessively heavy to load once you have disabled JS. I'm ashamed to say it because it should be the minimum quality requirement for EVERY website, but congratulations on making an actually usable website in 2021. That's apparently become such a technological challenge that most VC-funded startups are incapable to do it. It almost makes me want to pay a subscription! But of course i won't do it, since Substack is not a non-profit. There's no reason i should subsidize evil capitalist shareholders with the little money i have to live, i'd much rather use it to support artists and developers directly via liberapay, opencollective and other more ethical venues that do not encourage centralized hosting of content.
- 5y ago

dalbasal 5y ago

"Been done before" is a pointless criticism. Yes, "blogging" reduced to a bare bones definition, has been invented and reinvented since before it was a term. That means very little though. It's subtleties, norms and culture that make these mediums what they are. If Patreon, twitch, only fans and now youtube can support a direct-to-creator subscription culture, why not journalism? In any case, the economic woes of journalism transcend medium and specific formulations of a business model. Whether the incentive is eyeballs for advertising, an enthusiastic core for patronage or whatnot... it seems to always be at odds with journalism's financially independent mission. 100 articles commenting on the commentary or covering the coverage are the same amount of work as one, important, investigative piece. If that work is genuinely important, the information will be republished hundreds of times, and that's how most people will consume it. That's where money will go, whether through subscriptions, patronage or advertising. I don't think there is a way of having good incentives in the news business. Hard journalism is always subsidized some way, whether that's government subsidies or cross subsidies. Substack is, I think, a decent place for "independent voices." Individuals respected within a clique, commenting and highlighting issues of the day. It's probably not going to fund investigative journalism, and neither is any straightforward model. Public information is a public good. It's hard to get around that.

xtracto 5y ago
The problem with Blogging is that it got eaten by marketing drone teams. Most blog entries nowadays are just SEO optimised articles written by a marketing intern who has no clue of what he is writing about.
- rchaud 5y ago
  There is no one single reason for everything. Web traffic started centralizing around social media sites over a decade ago, and bloggers themselves pushed their readers to 'interact' on Facebook and Twitter. They are writers, not tech ecosystem experts, so it didn't occur to them that Facebook and Twitter would take steps to keep people on their platform, and discourage them from linking out.

marban 5y ago

If you're just getting started in the realm of business content, you're welcome to post at https://biztoc.com https://biztoc.com * until you build out your own homebase. *(A Mark Cuban Venture I launched)

_Marak_ 5y ago

We think it's deplorable that a concerted effort was made to dilute the Markov chain ranking of James Halliday ( aka the actual Substack ) for not wanting to play games with you. James has the quantum entanglement crystal and there is nothing you can do about it.

KirillPanov 5y ago
Beam me up, Alf!

ape4 5y ago

Duh, (before reading the article) I thought "substack" was a software thing. Maybe a stack below the main stack?

k__ 5y ago

Is there a hype? I'm a person who makes most of their money with blogging and I only heard bad things about Substack.

Anon84 5y ago
Any tips for someone trying to get to the same point? I have a couple of substacks (https://graphs4sci.substack.com/ https://graphs4sci.substack.com/ and https://viz4sci.substack.com/ https://viz4sci.substack.com/) and medium (https://medium.data4sci.com/ https://medium.data4sci.com/). I'm stuck roughly at the "vacation money" threshold (a few thousand a year, enough for a nice vacation or three but not enough to live off of) which certainly isn't bad for something I do essentially on weekends but the medium term goal is to be able to mostly live off of it
- k__ 5y ago
  Look for a content agency to write for. It's not presige work, but I always can get a bunch of payed articles if nothing else comes in.

amadeuspagel 5y ago

> “Since I closed down the Dish, my bloggy website, five years ago, after 15 years of daily blogging,” he wrote, “I have not missed the insane work hours that all but broke my health.” > Somehow Sullivan has convinced himself that things will be different at Substack. Maybe he should have checked in with Patrice Peck, a journalist who publishes a Substack newsletter in relative obscurity called Coronavirus News for Black Folks. According to an article by Clio Chang in the Columbia Journalism Review, Peck has discovered that overwork and burnout are just as real for newsletter writers as they are for bloggers. (And why would we think otherwise?) We might think otherwise, because if you have a newsletter you don't have to publish something all the time, because you don't rely on people checking your site. (Which they might stop doing if there isn't something new every time they check.)

ghaff 5y ago
Back in the day, many people used RSS so they didn't have to check a site all the time. Even if it's push, if I'm paying for something and I seem to rarely get an email, I'll probably stop paying.

candyman 5y ago

I think Substack is onto something and enjoy it both as a subscriber and a contributor. For one thing newspapers and their ilk want to drive my attention. I don't want that. With Substack I can pick the topics and writers I'm interested in and then easily see and read new articles. And while there are all kinds of writers on Substack I am on the business/technology/investment side so my "DIY magazine" is really a collection of analysis and commentary. You might call this a niche but some might be pretty large and a collection of them might be very big indeed. Also consider Bloomberg author Matt Levine. Fortunately we can read him for free (in exchange for a couple of non-intrusive embedded ads) but if Bloomberg put his material behind their paywall I would not pay $300-400 per year to them in order to read it. I'd certainly be willing to pay $5/month for him though. The other super annoying thing about these aggregators is that they push advertising to you even after you are a paying subscriber! Paying for content that also sends me advertising is a non-starter for me.

rchaud 5y ago

"If Substack is successful, it will remind news consumers that paying for good journalism is worth it,” wrote the University of Maine’s Michael Socolow " Talking about the news doesn't make one a 'journalist'. What was Andrew Sullivan's last scoop? Reporting, fact-checking, corroborating source statements...this is slow, invisible work. It is the polar opposite of 'content production', which requires a regular posting schedule. With investigative reporting, it's generally not possible to get in your 2 cents out when the topic is still hot in the news cycle. Yet with Substack, and any other content promotion business, you not only have to come up with original content, but spend time creating graphics and promotional copy and maintaining a presence and 'personality' for Twitter. It's absurd to think that you're getting an 'insider's scoop with no editorial filter' for anything related to real news.

dalbasal 5y ago
So... I think there are two seperate things here, besides ownership of the prestige word "journalism." One is "reporting," which involves fact-checking, corroborating source statements and such. This is, I agree, something that generally needs an organisation. The other is investigative journalism. This can be done independently & can't be scooped, but it is an incredibly inefficient way of putting ink on paper. Investigations take weeks, months or years and not every investigation finds much worth reporting. This is incredibly important, but god only knows hows its supposed to be funded. Where it is done, its subsidized, cross subsidized, snuck in or done unpaid. This is as much an issue at NYT as it is on substack. There's no known general solution to this problem. All that said, most of what most people read, listen to and watch is neither of these things. It's commentary and rhetoric. Those aren't bad, they're just overabundant, everywhere... not just substack. In fact, if you take a glance at politically fringe publications like Breitbart, Jacobin, Democracy Now, etc.... You will find that most of it is such content. News first published elsewhere, with new commentary. Its like this everywhere: left, right, centre, establishment, dissident, corporate, independant. If there's intelligent life on mars, I reckon their papers will be full of it too.

stereoradonc 5y ago

Substack is a blogging tool (an inadequate one with a poor CMS)+ Payment tool (uses Stripe)+ VC money and hype to create "excitement" and uses some white label service to distribute. It got coverage because star journalists joined it with eye-popping figures. Does it trickle down to others? Your luck will depend on discoverability- a mechanism which Subtack controls.