Why the Substack hype is much ado about very little

You need dozens or hundreds of substitutable writers under a single roof if you're reporting factual updates about a concrete situation as quickly as possible. Natural disasters, elections, sports, law changes, etc. Substack is for analysis and commentary. Traditional newspapers also bundle a handful of "superstar" writers along with their news, but many of those writers aren't very good and especially in the past 8 years many of the better ones have been purged because the best analysis requires free thinking, but free thinking is incompatible with a hard left takeover of an institution. It's no coincidence that Substack's top earning writers like Greenwald, Taibbi, Scott Alexander have all been purged from other media outlets for their un-woke writing: there is demand for such analysis but newspapers are trying to extinguish it. In Taibbi's case he was pushed out of the media outlet he himself founded! Substack is now monetizing this demand, apparently, very successfully (the deals they cut with those writers have supposedly all been very profitable for Substack).

I am reminded of the financial commentator on the radio in the early 2000’s predicting that Amazon would fail because it had stopped offering free shipping.

Time will tell. I don’t have a crystal ball, but I’m rooting for substack.

I guess the question is does that model work? Rather than catering to a generalist audience focus on a niche and charge more to people who can't get that content anywhere else.

Free content then plays to the more generalist audience and helps attract people who are more seriously interested in your niche.

I started doing this with my substack, which is aimed at the relatively narrow niche of sequencing technologies (biotech). The information I provide, isn't really available elsewhere and requires an industry background, and significant research. This information can play into investment decisions, so I've priced it to reflect that (~$50/m).

I don't have enough paid subscribers to justify the effort yet. But every paid subscriber provides some meaningful amount of money...

I could see this working in other areas too. I'm not sure the niche even needs to be super small. For example, English language reporting on Japan is generally pretty bad. Could you find at least 200 people worldwide willing to pay $50/m for detailed well sourced reporting on Japan? It seems likely to me...

It doesn't even matter if those 200 people republish your work in some form. They're paying privilege of getting that information first.

Now we're in the internet. There are no such constraints. Why not just pay directly per article?

Spotify for example collects money but distributes it to artists, per-listen. Spotify has basically almost all the music in the world. And other services have it too. Anybody can upload to Spotify or Apple Music or Tidal or what you have. So Spotify is not really doing curating or having a quality standards or an editor anything, like a newspaper, it's just a way to collect and distribute money.

There is the still-unloved problem of curation. You could use humans for good curation but discoverability is quite bad.

(Edit: yes in the newspaper world there is the syndication, Reuters, AFP etc, too, and staff writers etc, it's a bit more complicated.)

...actually, I'd *VASTLY* rather pay a small monthly fee to a small number of writers I care about, than a larger fee for a collection of writers that I don't.

More to the point, I am doing that, and a fair number of other people are too. If baffles me to see someone advancing the argument that "people don't want to..." and then listing something which people are very much currently choosing to do. Many people want to do exactly that! (Although I think we agree that the number of people is unlikely to be enough to be truly disruptive.)

> Maybe Substack will go the Medium way and try to aggregate

Very possibly, but if so, I expect the people enjoying their current business model will simply migrate to a competitor. $5/month for a writer I truly love is a reasonable ask. $5/month split across six writers, only one of whom I particular care for is in many ways less attractive; I may be getting more writing but the writer is getting less.

Aggregation is not obviously the only business model that makes sense here, and I think Medium - and come to that, the news industry as a whole - shows off its weaknesses very clearly.

I think the real weakness of Substack is not that "nobody wants what they're selling", but that they have very little moat. Substack doesn't need to worry that Yglesias will realise that actually he hates making more money than the entire NYT editorial board combined and quits blogging to go back to the traditional media; Substack needs to worry that he'll jump to his own platform and avoid their fairly hefty monthly cut.

Except, with the Internet you don’t have physical/geographical constraints for distribution and suddenly a niche audience, at a global level, is not so niche. And it makes it a viable model, a thousand people paying $5/mo and all of a sudden you are making more than most journalists AND with much greater freedom of expression

And the financial returns are real. I vaguely recall someone, Glenn maybe, who shared they had 6,000 subscribers at $60 per year or $360,000 in income. Clearly more than enough to sustain a writer.

I think the demise of the publishing industry proves this point comically incorrect!

That is not my experience at all. Buying a newspaper where you are only interested in 15 % of the content is like buying an entire CD with perhaps two really good songs. This model used to be the norm, but consumers hated it and it is becoming obsolete.

Insert a purchase decision into that flowful sesh (even for as little as a penny) and most will find it more relaxing to just instead go and click on one of the many free articles at their disposal being served up by free aggregators (like this one).

These debates always pop up here with little awareness that the newspaper industry tried micropayments 20 years ago and it didn't work. Paywalls were discovered in 2011 or so, they worked, and that's pretty much been that.

Source: I founded a micropayments company in 2002 and worked at a newspaper 2009-2013.

Paying more for a smaller collection of writers may provide me more value.

It turns out that many (not all) people are willing, able, and actively want to make the choices to curate their experience and see what happens. Yes, it's more work but it's probably closer to what they want.. OR if they miss, it's on them with few others to blame.

We've reached the point where there is SO much noise and the algorithms are optimized to feed you more noise that people suffer. In some cases, it manifests as the constant anxiety and stress of "omg this thing happened!" while in others, it's just the constant interruptions.

Regardless, I suspect we're going to see the pendulum swing back and we'll see strategic disconnection to filter out the noise, chaos, and BS. If that's correct, Substack nailed the timing and should do well for quite a while to come.

My experience is the opposite. I get the Boston Globe delivered every Sunday. It's fine. I flip through it. Occasionally there's a story I care a lot about. Some weeks there's nothing. I read it mostly because I feel loosely obligated to try to keep up with current events.

On the other hand, I subscribe to Matthew Yglesias's Substack and the hit rate is like 85%. Nearly every article perfectly aligns with one or more of my interests. His policy focus almost exactly overlaps my policy interests. It's kind of uncanny.

If I had to cancel one or the other it's really not even close.

Depending on what you mean by "well". I haven't "read" the newspaper in any traditional sense - i.e. reading it as a whole product, not picking a single article - in decades. I haven't subscribed to a traditional newspaper (I exclude special interest magazines) for even longer. I know for a fact that the work of real journalists (investigative, etc.) is being routinely suppressed or restricted by their major newspaper employees because of reasons having nothing to do with reporting. I am getting much more high-quality content from independent journalists (including Substack ones, but not only) and writers than I could ever have found in any newspaper. I struggle to find anything that traditional newspapers like NYT do "well" for me. They have a variety of topics? Who cares. If I'm interested in what a certain author has to say or in a certain topic - which rarely happens with NYT nowdays, but nevertheless - I don't care who pays the salary to the writer. I know that there's no chance a single subscription - or even several of them - would cover even part of my interests, I'd be needing my hundreds-strong RSS feed anyway. So what's the point? What exactly is being done well there?

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.

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.

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.

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.

The opinion makers working at Substack.

Interestingly, one of the top performing Substacks is a local publication, the Charlotte Ledger: https://www.businessofbusiness.com/articles/local-news-subst...

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.

That being said, it seems every writer I’m familiar with that launched one has been successful

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

Mmmm, those sweet, sweet clicks. Come children, we shall eat well tonight.

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.

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.