> "Substack is to newsletters what Spotify is to podcasts, Medium was to blogs, and what Google Reader was to RSS: an aggressive player that dominates an entire segment with artificial and unsustainable advantages in a risky bet."
As someone who is writing a reasonably popular Substack newsletter - and have used several newsletter platforms in the past - I have to disagree.
The biggest difference between Substack and Spotify/Medium/Google Reader is how, with Substack - and with Ghost, Beehiv and other newsletter platforms - the author owns the relationship with readers.
When you sign up for Substack, assuming you use a custom domain (which is a one-off $50 fee), you own:
- Your domain
- The email list of your subscribers
- Your content that you can easily export and migrate
- Your subscriptions: as you are not paid by Substack, but subscribers pay you via Stripe, and then you pay Substack
This makes your Substack content, "audience" and paid subscriptions fully portable, should you ever want to move to or from this platform. These days, migrating to and from platforms like Ghost is fairly trivial without losing anything (content, subscribers or SEO ratings).
This portability and owning of my content, and the connection with subscribers is why I am on Substack. It means that I have the freedom to leave to another platform.
It's also why there have been many publications that have left Substack - and then some came back. For example, the newsletter Expontential View that has about 80,000 subscribers and thousands of paid subscribers left Substack for Ghost in June 2021 [1] and then migrated back to Substack from Ghost on August 2022 [2]. In both cases, they moved all their subscribers and content. And any publication can leave (or move to) without issues, any time!
Sure: this portability is not the best business to Substack. But it's the opposite of threat to newsletters: it's the opportunity to choose your platform, and move when you want to.
Show me another platform outside of newsletters that has this option.
As Substack pivots from VC driven growth at all costs to needing to actually be profitable, they will slowly chip away at every one of those facets: domain will get more expensive (likely monthly), email list will be locked down or paid, content export, and even payment portal likely changes to be through them.
They have to justify a valuation at some point and it will happen. This happens with every VC company, they grow because they do unsustainable things, then pivot to ruining the platform.
I appreciate the context you provided about what makes Substack appealing and how it may mitigate some of the threat. However, I believe the main point of the article is that Substack represents yet another example of money being poured into disrupting existing channels. When the funding dries up and the music stops, we may lose more than just Substack. We may witness a diversity of providers going out of business because they couldn’t compete with deep-pocketed investors throwing money around. In the end, we could be left with a spam-riddled Substack struggling to make any money at all, while the old services are gone because they couldn’t survive the onslaught of VC wealth. It’s a bad bet that could leave us with nothing but craters and scorched earth where a thriving newsletter community used to be.
I bought into Bari Weiss' theory and the narrative she is making a lot of money from the substack and alternate journalism. I started consuming a lot of substack content; after a few months, I realized most of the substack content I got recommended were people ranting about social change happening in America. It is interesting to read for a few weeks. After a while, you will get tired of that narrative.
Today I saw a substack article on HN's top list from Jonathan Haidt, another guy in the same political spectrum complaining about social media and societal change.
My impression of substack is that, it is the platform of the disgruntled. Substack is a niche player, and never will be mainstream.
Agreed, the disgruntled are the only people willing to pay specific journalists with specific missions to effect change. Everyone else would just either pay a flat fee for general information about X, or would pay nothing.
I think that is more telling of the substack content you were reading, This is like people that complain YT feeds them more of the same content they watched??
If read a bunch of stacks that are complaining about social change why would you expect substack to recommend you sports content....
>>After a while, you will get tired of that narrative.
You may be suffering from a recommendation system flaw. I subscribe to several Substack newsletters and have no content similar to what you've described. Instead, I read mostly about economics and parenting.
Strongly disagree. I read finance news and stock writeups on Substack and the platform has a vibrant community in this category. Newsletters like Grit, Doomberg, The Science of Hitting, and others are doing great, valuable work and have pretty big followings.
Author here. One thing I think Substack helps a lot, and that I didn't mention in the article, is on its network effects.
I started this blog last year, got it featured on HN home page a few times, but my own newsletter[1] (not hosted at Substack :) growth is non-existent — so far, it got only 25 subscribers.
Meanwhile, people can cross-recommend newsletters on Substack, and leverage things like Notes (and replies to popular writers) to increase their subscription list. That's another aspecto of this whole Substack eating the (newsletter) world that I fear: that at some point, people could get so used to subscribe only to Substack newsletters that any form on the open web will look weird and/or suspicious.
[1] If you're feeling it, you can subscribe for free here from there (blue letter icon on top menu); I only send occasional messages: https://notes.ghed.in/
As always, POSSE (Publish Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) to the rescue! Get the best of both worlds; own your content, get the network effect of other services.
Basically, have a canonical location of everything, where you first post things. Then, link it from elsewhere with either the full copy, or best parts of it.
I want to thank Rodrigo for sharing my mindset on Substack, but I want to make clear that my approach is going to ultimately be extractive.
I think long-term I want to follow the indie-web approach of POSSE, in which I publish a more minimal product to these platforms with the goal of getting people to subscribe to the long-form thing: https://indieweb.org/POSSE
I will say thus far that my experiment is off to a good start, but I think the fact that Substack has such strong network effects in the first place reflects the fact that we still haven’t figured out how to encourage these network effects on the open web as a whole. It’s an opportunity, and one I’d like to work on long-term.
All I really want from Substack is an all-you-can-eat model where I pay a base fee and they sort out who gets what based on what I read. It can’t be that hard, lynda.com did it ages ago and was always profitable.
This is the reason I never paid for any substack subscription.
There are about 15 authors I'm willing to support in some way, but not $5/month for any of them individually. I don't even mind if they kept some articles restricted. It could be that I can "unlock" 10 premium articles per month for $10/mon, the main thing is I want to control what I contribute. $75/mon is too much.
> want from Substack is an all-you-can-eat model where I pay a base fee and they sort out who gets what based on what I read
This doesn’t work for high-cost content. Ultimately, if a writer can’t find readers who find their work worth the friction of paying for it, I’m not sure they’re adding value going solo.
Dependence on ad-revenue has led to a decrease in quality researched content and to an increase is engagement articles. From what I've heard is that Journalists have left their traditional media outlets and publish now on substack because it allows them to publish quality content without an editorial oversight that emphasizes clickbait.
Quo Vadis Medium? Medium used to be a site that worked well in the same niche and now hardly drives views.
In both cases you're still subject to editorial oversight (your own) and (financially) encouraged to publish clickbait. It's just that the clickbait can be more narrowly targeted to the slice of the ideological/subject-interest spectrum your newsletter most appeals to. And if you stray outside of that line, you'll see revolt from subscribers just like any other publication.
I suspect the platform of choice will move around as the current one reaches saturation and more people are primarily on there to make money where the crowd is. The noise becomes greater than the signal.
That HN has been able to keep the signal to noise ratio high seems like a feat of the gods this day in age
My bias, I make money on Medium using my medium blog as a newsletter(recent traffic analysis puts $100 per 1000views per month current month is 30k views and 300 income thus far for April).
To make any paid newsletter work you have to have other sites where they get short-form snapshots of free content that act as advertising for the paid content, not mine view...garyVee's own content stack philosophy. This is why Taibbi was jumping up and down about his stuff being blocked on Twitter as he was posting free short-form content to advertise his substack newsletter.
It's not a simple as the author theorizes.
For example for me to reach the magical 500k per month views I have to make 500 short-form or more posts to places like LinkedIn and Instagram.
Not saying that Substack will not reach some form of reach in the social media economy just that the author has not a clue how creating content in the social media space actually economically works.
Other things I do not know yet:
-Several GDE's have sponsors for their own dev/design flutter app content, I have no idea if their sponsorship income is more or less than my currently monthly earnings. My own best guess is that it might be a little higher but not much.
My content stack progress path looks like this
coding apps->medium long form articles-paid->short form snippets in reel-shorts as slides->mini-guidebooks-paid->paid ui kits->paid books->paid-video courseware
Just thinking out loud, maybe someone else gets some use of seeing the path and work involved.
Except that it can't make enough money to keep itself afloat. But maybe that doesn't matter any more. Maybe now startups are just funded by perpetual equity rounds. Though... I have to admit... I like the idea (of substack): make it easy for people to monetize content. (Also, nice link, thx for sharing.)
Not sure if I'm flattered or offended by this comparison :)
This humble blog is an effort to bring my work to a broader, English-speaking audience. My main business is another blog, founded ten years ago, but written in Portuguese for Brazilian market[1].
I made a pledge to not rely on big tech and avoid as much as possible VC funded providers — including to send a newsletter, which isn't hosted nor sent via Substack.
In other words, it was a bet that it's possible to run a digital business without relying on Substack, Meta etc. Turns out it's possible.
[+] [-] gregdoesit|2 years ago|reply
As someone who is writing a reasonably popular Substack newsletter - and have used several newsletter platforms in the past - I have to disagree.
The biggest difference between Substack and Spotify/Medium/Google Reader is how, with Substack - and with Ghost, Beehiv and other newsletter platforms - the author owns the relationship with readers.
When you sign up for Substack, assuming you use a custom domain (which is a one-off $50 fee), you own:
- Your domain
- The email list of your subscribers
- Your content that you can easily export and migrate
- Your subscriptions: as you are not paid by Substack, but subscribers pay you via Stripe, and then you pay Substack
This makes your Substack content, "audience" and paid subscriptions fully portable, should you ever want to move to or from this platform. These days, migrating to and from platforms like Ghost is fairly trivial without losing anything (content, subscribers or SEO ratings).
This portability and owning of my content, and the connection with subscribers is why I am on Substack. It means that I have the freedom to leave to another platform.
It's also why there have been many publications that have left Substack - and then some came back. For example, the newsletter Expontential View that has about 80,000 subscribers and thousands of paid subscribers left Substack for Ghost in June 2021 [1] and then migrated back to Substack from Ghost on August 2022 [2]. In both cases, they moved all their subscribers and content. And any publication can leave (or move to) without issues, any time!
Sure: this portability is not the best business to Substack. But it's the opposite of threat to newsletters: it's the opportunity to choose your platform, and move when you want to.
Show me another platform outside of newsletters that has this option.
[1] https://www.exponentialview.co/p/important-migration-from-su...
[2] https://www.exponentialview.co/p/announcement-move-2022
[+] [-] nwienert|2 years ago|reply
They have to justify a valuation at some point and it will happen. This happens with every VC company, they grow because they do unsustainable things, then pivot to ruining the platform.
[+] [-] rosywoozlechan|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amadeuspagel|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] v0idzer0|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ginger2016|2 years ago|reply
Today I saw a substack article on HN's top list from Jonathan Haidt, another guy in the same political spectrum complaining about social media and societal change.
My impression of substack is that, it is the platform of the disgruntled. Substack is a niche player, and never will be mainstream.
[+] [-] fullshark|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phpisthebest|2 years ago|reply
If read a bunch of stacks that are complaining about social change why would you expect substack to recommend you sports content....
>>After a while, you will get tired of that narrative.
You might, others do not.
[+] [-] xapata|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Invictus0|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nonethewiser|2 years ago|reply
Jonathan Haidt is an interesting example. He’s basically the foremost expert on an emergent problem.
[+] [-] coldtea|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rpgbr|2 years ago|reply
I started this blog last year, got it featured on HN home page a few times, but my own newsletter[1] (not hosted at Substack :) growth is non-existent — so far, it got only 25 subscribers.
Meanwhile, people can cross-recommend newsletters on Substack, and leverage things like Notes (and replies to popular writers) to increase their subscription list. That's another aspecto of this whole Substack eating the (newsletter) world that I fear: that at some point, people could get so used to subscribe only to Substack newsletters that any form on the open web will look weird and/or suspicious.
[1] If you're feeling it, you can subscribe for free here from there (blue letter icon on top menu); I only send occasional messages: https://notes.ghed.in/
[+] [-] capableweb|2 years ago|reply
Basically, have a canonical location of everything, where you first post things. Then, link it from elsewhere with either the full copy, or best parts of it.
https://indieweb.org/POSSE
[+] [-] shortformblog|2 years ago|reply
I think long-term I want to follow the indie-web approach of POSSE, in which I publish a more minimal product to these platforms with the goal of getting people to subscribe to the long-form thing: https://indieweb.org/POSSE
I will say thus far that my experiment is off to a good start, but I think the fact that Substack has such strong network effects in the first place reflects the fact that we still haven’t figured out how to encourage these network effects on the open web as a whole. It’s an opportunity, and one I’d like to work on long-term.
[+] [-] joemaller1|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] halfjoking|2 years ago|reply
There are about 15 authors I'm willing to support in some way, but not $5/month for any of them individually. I don't even mind if they kept some articles restricted. It could be that I can "unlock" 10 premium articles per month for $10/mon, the main thing is I want to control what I contribute. $75/mon is too much.
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|2 years ago|reply
This doesn’t work for high-cost content. Ultimately, if a writer can’t find readers who find their work worth the friction of paying for it, I’m not sure they’re adding value going solo.
[+] [-] jsemrau|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] femiagbabiaka|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] verdverm|2 years ago|reply
That HN has been able to keep the signal to noise ratio high seems like a feat of the gods this day in age
[+] [-] fredgrott|2 years ago|reply
To make any paid newsletter work you have to have other sites where they get short-form snapshots of free content that act as advertising for the paid content, not mine view...garyVee's own content stack philosophy. This is why Taibbi was jumping up and down about his stuff being blocked on Twitter as he was posting free short-form content to advertise his substack newsletter.
It's not a simple as the author theorizes.
For example for me to reach the magical 500k per month views I have to make 500 short-form or more posts to places like LinkedIn and Instagram.
Not saying that Substack will not reach some form of reach in the social media economy just that the author has not a clue how creating content in the social media space actually economically works.
Other things I do not know yet: -Several GDE's have sponsors for their own dev/design flutter app content, I have no idea if their sponsorship income is more or less than my currently monthly earnings. My own best guess is that it might be a little higher but not much.
My content stack progress path looks like this
coding apps->medium long form articles-paid->short form snippets in reel-shorts as slides->mini-guidebooks-paid->paid ui kits->paid books->paid-video courseware
Just thinking out loud, maybe someone else gets some use of seeing the path and work involved.
[+] [-] medion|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lordnacho|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hk__2|2 years ago|reply
Newsletters are the new RSS for blogs.
[+] [-] retrocryptid|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|2 years ago|reply
This is a hot take circa 2017 [1].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftBank_Vision_Fund
[+] [-] ilrwbwrkhv|2 years ago|reply
Beehiv is already giving them a run for their money.
[+] [-] justinator|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rpgbr|2 years ago|reply
This humble blog is an effort to bring my work to a broader, English-speaking audience. My main business is another blog, founded ten years ago, but written in Portuguese for Brazilian market[1].
I made a pledge to not rely on big tech and avoid as much as possible VC funded providers — including to send a newsletter, which isn't hosted nor sent via Substack.
In other words, it was a bet that it's possible to run a digital business without relying on Substack, Meta etc. Turns out it's possible.
[1] https://manualdousuario.net/