Substack is what happens when the mainstream media elites overplay their hand and force heterodox writers out of the "mainstream". As it turns out there are still plenty of people who want to read this kind of writing, and we don't appreciate the gatekeeping from formerly reputable sources.
The world already has enough clickbait and hot takes. Substack will probably make a lot of money, but it won’t increase the quality of journalism in the US. We need less opinion in our news diet not more.
There still are such news sources -- The Economist, Reuters, AP, etc., rarely editorialize their articles. Most other mainstream news sources like NYT, WSJ, etc., are just as clickbaity and cater to a specific demographic of the society just like Substack writers do. So I don't see it as a loss for journalism if people stopped subscribing to, say The Guardian, and instead supported a Substack writer.
Rarely editorialize? The entire magazine is opinion.
The Economist doesn't interview anybody, doesn't cultivate any sources, or ever break any stories. It mostly reads like recent university graduates cosplaying William F Buckley.
Perhaps it just 'feels' like it doesn't editorialize because their writers are all nameless and faceless and share the same ideology, so there is never a difference of opinion. Problem with the economy/society/military? Just deregulate and privatize!
> The Economist ... rarely editorialize their articles.
What? The Economist is almost entirely editorials. The only difference between it and other editorial-only publications like Foreign Affairs is that the authors' names are deliberately removed to give the paper a sense of speaking with "one collective voice". Every article subheading is an opinion, and ends with a paragraph firmly staking out a position. The writing may be eloquent, and the graphs pretty, but the result is a publication that heavily editorializes, while lacking any debate or diversity of thought.
Sadly, what you say about Reuters and AP are simply not true.
And I agree, less opinion is good, especially in the once-reputable legacy mainstream media like the paper of the record, the NYT, which pushed the trump-hater Michael Steele 'pee tape' rumor (and the idea that Trump did not explicitly condemn white supremacy ) amongst others.
The NYT take on Trump not condemning white supremacy only improves my view of the paper. Trump talks out of both sides of his mouth in that scenario (and so many others) as a way to lay an evergreen trap for critics. I want my paper to take a broader view and then make a decision on best possible info; Trump never convincingly condemned white supremacy.
> As I said on -- remember this -- Saturday, we condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence.
> And you had people, and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally. But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists.
If NYT claimed that he didn't, it's anything but "best possible info". You're not immune to propaganda or misinformation just because you happen to be against Trump.
The focus on less opinion in the US media is misguided. This focus on purity is not leading to better reporting but has lead to honest writers hide their point of view and manipulative writers twisting facts under the presumed cover of neutrality. And it has led to ‚pure’ opinion which can be disconnected from facts and that is tolerated as acceptable.
Imho. US media needs an injection of more common sense through properly contextualized facts - and the human experience of the writer is a big part of this.
Yeah, Substack is just the next iteration of Medium.
What's new is that rockstar opinion writers with enough name recognition are able to generate clickbait targeted for their specific followers and make a living in doing so, rather than relying on the opinion sections of major publications. So now i guess the established troll farms like the NYT or WSJ editorial pages are the clickbait minor leagues while Substack is the majors.
80-20 rule applies. Only a few will become truly well known, and the others will scratch and scrape for crumbs.
Back in the 2000s, 'blogs' were all the rage. It was where 'real journalism' happened, away from the red tape and PC-ness of newsrooms. Sound familiar? 15 years later, somebody like Andrew Sullivan or Breibart are the only 'bloggers' people even remember.
right because a media that just lies about basic facts to push establishment political agendas including promoting unnecessary wars is good for the country & the world
I hate this "elite" framing. The substack writers are media stars with megaphones powerful enough to influence politics and thus our lives. They are rich and powerful, in other words they are elites.
On the other hand, the employees engaged in PC warfare on corporate slack channels, or the social media mobs annoying advertisers, are mostly not the elites. In another framing you would call them populists.
> The substack writers are media stars [...] They are rich and powerful
The vanishingly small minority of Substack writers who are media stars, and who are rich and powerful, yes. That's not true of the overwhelming majority of Substack writers. Also, even the handful of media stars has traditionally been utterly powerless in comparison to our corporate media.
What power, eg, Greenwald may have pales utterly in comparison to the power of a media conglomerate.
> On the other hand, the employees engaged in PC warfare on corporate slack channels [...] In another framing you would call them populists.
Culturally, they would probably be the first to view themselves as part of the elite. And as for being populists, that would seem to require them to be pursuing policies which are popular.
The "elite" framing may bother you, but I don't think it can be easily refuted either.
> That's not true of the overwhelming majority of Substack writers
The majority, then, are writers who can't get a job in paid media - either because they're not good enough, or there aren't enough paid slots available to accommodate them.
IOW, Substack is the 2020s version of Blogger, except that it has a payment/compensation system built in.
As with "content producers" on YouTube, "influencers" on InstaGram, etc, there is vastly more supply than there is demand or available compensation.
I'm not saying that there aren't good, original voices on Substack. I'm saying that the vast majority of writers on the platform are categorically similar to, and subject to the same system constraints as, other media/attention platforms.
"...it’s not that Substack will compete with existing publications for their best writers, but rather that Substack makes it easy for the best writers to discover their actual market value."
Of course, market is natural phenomenon. Every process with pressure, suction and or differences of potential is trying to achieve equilibrium. Electricity, hydraulics, they all manifest the same principles. Except that in nature, it's driven by pure physics. With people, you need to understand value and it's more generic. One step more generic from physics, is cybernetics. And market is a cybernetic system with difference of energies trying to achieve equilibrium.
And that raises a question. What will readers value? Will they value rigorous writers who may provide discomfort or engaging writers who write to choirs?
Media outlets other than substack are also hiring terrible people, and optimizing for trash.
To me the largest difference between large corporate outlets and substack (and other reader-financed journalists) is that large corporate outlets will keep people employed for years that nobody wants to read and could never support themselves independently - journalists who are only important and interesting because of their access to the outlet. The outlets themselves keep those journalists around as pure vehicles for the opinions of their owners.
At least with these outlets, the owners are the readers. If the readers like trash, they'll pay for trash. If the owners like quality, they'll demand it. I don't have to worry about how the subject of the article will affect Bezos's net worth, or wonder how David Brooks, Maureen Dowd, or Thomas Friedman are still employed.
But still, we’re not sure that the content will be free of external influence taking advantage of the writer’s reputation.
Obviously if they peddle too many interested articles they'll likely get caught, but if they do it once in a while or take payment from opposing interests, etc., who’ll know the difference?
There is no "we" here, certainly not in the sense that "do we think a minute". People can choose for themselves just fine, and they'll do so whether I wring my hands about it or not. If you want to be worried about other people, go ahead but leave me out of it. :)
Obviously trash sells and it always has ("The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience"), but some people care more about things like truth and style than they do about money.
Regardless of whether Doritos are more profitable we still have millions of acres of staple crops grown each year. There is no shortage of good writing but it may not come in microwaveable packets. If the majority of the people don't care then that's the downside to living in a free society where each has their choice.
I'd like my journalists to be constrained by the truth, and paid editors in the context of a "traditional" newspaper are one possible way to achieve that. However, if you believe the stats on this, trust for traditional news sources is at record lows.
I personally don't trust traditional news sources very much. Therefore, I'm open to trying something different. I've been a happy subscriber to a handful of Substack journalists for a few months now. It's too soon to say whether this will be a lasting improvement, but it's hard to do worse than the mainstream media.
Rather than annoy the HN mods by derailing this conversation into politics, I can answer in detail to you directly. If you want that, could you update your bio on HN to include your email address?
Glenn Greenwald gets into this a lot. As one recent example, WaPo misquoted Trump's comments on his infamous phone call with the Georgia secretary of state and this was not corrected until two months later when the Wall Street Journal obtained a recording of the call: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/how-do-big-media-outlets-so...
Do we know how many writers on Substack/Medium/independent blogs employ an editor or researcher in some capacity? I've only seen occasional mention, e.g., Kevin Kelly has said that he employs a librarian as a full time researcher. But the absence of mention isn't necessarily a strong indicator to the negative.
"...it’s not that Substack will compete with existing publications for their *popular* writers, but rather that Substack makes it easy for the *popular* writers to discover their actual market value."
I've yet to read what I would consider high quality journalism on Substack. It's a lot of quick take opinion pieces.
On top of that, some may consider journalistic good writing a collective effort, in which an editor is usually necessary.
>I've yet to read what I would consider high quality journalism on Substack. It's a lot of quick take opinion pieces.
Most of what passes for "high quality journalism" in "high quality outlets" are fluff pieces and government/corporate PR masquerading as facts.
And as Alan Kay said: "a point of view is worth 80 IQ points". I'd rather read the opinion of people with well honed points of view than what passes as news in mainstream media.
Glenn Greenwald has written a number of very good pieces on his Substack that I would in no way describe as quick take opinion pieces and Matt Taibbi has the best reporting on the journalism industry itself going around. These guys are "well honed" because they're well read on the activities of the media and they think and communicate clearly
Maybe you're not reading the right posts or you just agree with the prevailing narrative in the traditional outlets?
Usually I find the people who don't see value in Substack also want the news to be reported with "moral clarity" and to eschew objectivity as a valuable aim entirely.
And besides, the mainstream outlets are barely reporting on anything anyway (where's the national news coverage of the George Floyd Autonomous Zone in Minneapolis? For the second time an American city has lost sovereignty over several blocks and the mainstream media is ignoring it) and if you do real investigative journalism into the wrong group, like Andy Ngo has (thank God for Quillette) you are branded a fascist
>Glenn Greenwald has written a number of very good pieces on his Substack that I would in no way describe as quick take opinion piece.
He wrote a piece about Parler and the storming of the Capital[0], within a week of the event that was certainly a quick take. There is absolutely no way to definitively make any sort of claim about how involved it was, especially from his position, thousands of miles away on a patio in Rio.
I find most of his pieces, to be very much 'hot take' in nature, responding to something that is currently going on.
>He wrote a piece about Parler and the storming of the Capital[0], within a week of the event that was certainly a quick take. There is absolutely no way to definitively make any sort of claim about how involved it was, especially from his position, thousands of miles away on a patio in Rio.
The position "on a patio in Rio" doesn't matter, as he was not doing reporting, he was doing a take. It wasn't some obscure event that needed on-the-field investigation for someone to make a take a week later (which is a lot of time in news).
It's enough that others did the reporting, or the events were plain and clearly recorded on video, or one has sources, or experience to see what's the deal behind what's reported.
Thank you for the Autonomous Zone reference. Googling for this and finding local news, Fox and NY Post is really eye-opening. Apparently it's not even worth mentioning... optics would be bad for the -useful idi- compassionate supporters more towards the center.
I find the current criticism of Substack quite interesting. It seems to be on the assumption that they are a publisher, or at least a visible brand in the publishing process, and they do indeed appear to be in the middle unlike most companies.
It's obvious that the NYT are responsible for what's published on their site, after all it says NYT across the top, NYT on the subscription fee, and they (theoretically) have editorial control.
On the other hand it's obvious that Stripe (for example) are not responsible for what's published on Stratechery, they are invisible to the customer, and I think most reasonable people would not suggest that Stripe exercise moral judgement on Stratechery and decline the business unless Ben Thompson crossed a line that is very far from acceptable (likely bordering on illegality).
But Substack is both. Their name is in the URL, writers are found via Substack, articles say "published on Substack" on them. They are trying to claim that they are just a backend and that it's up to writers what they publish, but they are in fact a frontend at least in part for the customer, and therefore any decision or lack thereof is taking a moral standpoint.
I think Substack are going to have to decide whether they want to own that responsibility, and become known for a certain "type" of content, or whether they want to fade into the background and let the writers' brands take over.
What do you think about Wordpress as a counterexample? There was a time a decade ago when lots of blogs under the wordpress.com domain; I don't remember anyone being confused or arguing that Wordpress the company was responsible for their content.
I wonder if it has something to do with the discovery flow and perhaps even the theming?
Did Wordpress provide an index of all the websites? They don't appear to now? Also the fact that every site could be themed meant that many sites looked really quite different and so the website brand was stronger than the Wordpress brand.
Just hypothesising. I feel like it is quite different but I'm not entirely sure why as, you're right, Wordpress worked in a similar way.
That's because WP arrived at a time when corporations weren't selling people pipe dreams about how to get famous and rich on the web through their platform. The motivation to wrote blogs on Xanga, Angelfire, Geocities etc was for recreation, not monetization.
Wordpress offered a self-hosted, open-source blogging platform from day 1, in addition to WYSIWIG Wordpress.org. The idea that WP would attempt to use its audience as some sort of competitive moat is something I could imagine had they arrived 10 years later. Which it did, in the form of Medium.com
The publisher model gets thrown around a lot in regards to social media companies like substack. The basic line of reasoning is that, as a publisher, substack would be "responsible" for its content.
But what ways are traditional publishers "responsible" for their content? There's some internal self-imposed responsibility (e.g. someone will be fired due to insensitive tweet), but that's more politics than anything else. Large publishers regularly print patently incorrect data and narratives with no consequences. So maybe this publisher/platform distinction isn't all that meaningful
They are just using the same playbook as the rest of Silicon Valley. Twitter and Facebook manage to never be considered a platform or a publisher, and they won't be until legislation requires it.
People view things like Substack as closer to traditional news publishing/writing and quite differently to social media so I think they're starting from a position of far higher expectations.
But regardless, Twitter and Facebook are becoming more well known for their positions on these issues. Twitter is known for having a "lefty bubble" and taking a long time to "ban nazis". Facebook is known for having everyone's conspiracy theory loving Uncle.
Of course things aren’t so simple; Sullivan, like several of the other names on that leaderboard, are, to put it gently, controversial. That he along with other lightning-rod writers ended up on Substack is more a matter of where else would they go?
While Substack is portrayed as being a good move for writers and journalists (and certainly it is, financially), I don't think this is actually good for journalism as a whole. It often will just mean that successful writers are the most celebrity-like ones: writing controversial things because it gets more traffic and therefore more income.
I don't know about you, but I don't want the tactics of Kim Kardashian to be the model of a future journalist.
> writing controversial things because it gets more traffic and therefore more income.
This is a danger but I'd rather have "controversial" than "if you deviate from the politics of the publication that pays your salary, you get fired".
Personally, I like Sullivan, Greenwald, Yglesias, Taibbi, etc.
I think Sullivan and Yglesias are not drama queens and that Geenwald and Tiabbi are. But I like all 4, I just think the latter two need a responsible editor to rein them in a bit.
I don't dislike them, I just dislike the idea that becoming a successful journalist will now mean you must also be charismatic, good at attracting attention to yourself, etc.
The word "now" is doing a lot of work there :) So also successful.
Do you think there was really a time that being a really successful journalist didn't require some charisma and a talent for publicity? Maybe the publication handled some of those things, but it doesn't change that they were required.
Of course. Investigative journalism has little to do with building an audience of paying subscribers. When the newspaper handled the business end, the journalists could focus on the journalism.
Newspapers were historically a bundle of only somewhat tangentially related things that you had to take, if not actually read, all together. The foreign bureaus and investigative journalism provided the prestige, sports a lot of readership, and classified ads the money. Of course, the Internet broke that bundle apart to a large degree.
My perception of old media is that they are doing exactly this, writing click bait things to get clicks and subs. This is true across the board from CNN to NYT to Fox.
At least with substack the incentives are not there for daily churn articles, the journalists have independence to publish when they want to, how they want to, worst case they lost subscribers. I think those incentives make them a lot less likely to make everything about clicks and controversy actually.
I would argue that yes, the fundamental incentives are different. Traditional media relied on an advertising-based revenue model, that needed to maximize eyeballs to be attractive to advertisers. Substack relies on subscriptions, which can operate at a much smaller scale. Matthew Yglesias's 10k subscribers is not nearly enough to be attractive for an advertiser, but more than enough to support a single writer's subscription business. Through Substack, writers are incentivized to write things they think that people will pay for, not just things they think people will click on.
> the journalists have independence to publish when they want to,
This is the same thing that was said about Youtube creators vs network/cable TV shows that follow a regular schedule. Before too long, it became clear that channels needed to post at least one video per week to keep up with their competition and boost subscriber numbers.
That's what journalism has always been like, save for a few decades in one specific country (the US). The past few decades of supposed "objectivity" and "neutrality" in American journalism were a historical aberration.
I watched a classic movie from the 50s recently, Sweet Smell of Success. In the movie columnists are portrayed as almost exclusively venal and engaged in corrupt influence-peddling (except for one guy who refuses to compromise in the face of blackmail).
It was an interesting counterpoint to the "journalists used to be objective" stuff.
Were people getting accurate facts about the world previously?
Wen it came out in 1988, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s Manufacturing Consent rattled the accepted view in post-Vietnam, post-Watergate America that journalists’ relationship to power was essentially adversarial. Instead, they argued, the institutional structure of American media — its dependence on corporate advertising and sources in the upper ranks of government and business — created a role for the press as creators of propaganda. Without any direct press censorship, with full freedom of speech, the media narrowed the political debate to exclude anything that offended the interests of the market or the state.
> Anti-discrimination laws, human rights, and democracy are also historical aberrations. But I think they're kind of worth keeping around.
Nazism was also a historical aberration, but that's certainly not worth keeping around. Just because some "good" things were historical aberrations, doesn't mean that all historical aberrations are "good".
> Perhaps getting accurate facts about the world is also important?
I don't think anybody disagrees with this. The central question is: is journalism the institution that should be responsible for getting accurate facts about the world? That's almost never been the case, and even today, isn't the case in most countries (including Western Europe). We typically use other institutions to suss out facts, including academia and peer-reviewed research. News articles published by mainstream outlets aren't peer-reviewed, and bias has existed in journalism since time immemorial. That was the point of my original response. Substack isn't "good" or "bad" for the future of journalism, it's "neutral", since it doesn't change the status quo all that much.
> While Substack is portrayed as being a good move for writers and journalists (and certainly it is, financially), I don't think this is actually good for journalism
And were neither objective nor neutral, just a close alignment of elite interests reflected in homogeneity.
You've described NY Times and Fox News in how they write controversial things to get more traffic. They share the same world, yet have quite dissimilar front pages, because they're tailoring controversy for the value systems of their audiences. The authors on Substack don't need to seek controversy: they just need to point out the rules of the orthodoxy, and then the controversy follows them.
> I don't know about you, but I don't want the tactics of Kim Kardashian to be the model of a future journalist.
I don't think something like Substack could even support journalism. Sure, it could support various kinds of punditry, which is often confused for journalism, but beat journalism is probably too boring and investigative journalism produces on too irregular of a schedule.
You absolutely will when people on the cusp of making a living use them to push themselves over that edge. As is pretty common on other content platforms.
> While Substack is portrayed as being a good move for writers and journalists (and certainly it is, financially), I don't think this is actually good for journalism
Certainly what I've seen from writers on substack is much worse than what I've seen from the same writers in traditional publications. It seems to be a great way of catapulting anyone who has achieved even a bit of name recognition into that “doesn’t have to deal with editors/publishers/etc.” phase of their career that's often the quality downfall as ego takes over for many writers, but which has historically been more available to writers doing long-form work.
World-improving journalism follows a Pareto distribution where 90% of non-submarine hard-hitting journalism is done by 10% of the journalists and the rest just exist to peddle influence. The industry has been under pressure for a long time due to the death of print media, and substack just represents the 10% cutting the fat.
> First, Substack is going to have a serious problem retaining its most profitable writers unless it substantially reduces its 10% take.
This is the part I'm having trouble understanding. 10% doesn't seem like a high percentage for a distributor, even if they're just hosting text and images. Of course Substack also provides comments, notifications, admin/moderation, and some degree of marketing and aggregation effects (not Aggregation in the strict Ben Thompson sense, just people going to a well-known website because they know there are things to read there).
None of that is super hard to set up, but If I was Matthew Yglesias, and I was making $775k next year on Substack, how much incentive would I have to leave and pay someone to create and/or manage a new site for me? Even assuming there's no lock-in whatsoever from Substack, or that Substack does not increase its value proposition for content creators by then, it seems like I'd probably just stay where I was and collect my $700k, and be pretty thrilled about it.
It's possible I'm wrong about that in some cases, but would it happen in so many cases that it poses an existential risk to Substack? Seems like a stretch!
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.
The 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.
Everyone likes easy cash. Adding 50k/yr at the click of a button seems pretty compelling, and consider that the mere existence of alternatives may force Substack to renegotiate contracts woth high profile writers. But even if you ignore this, it's still a nascent space, Substack has not captured all the writers out there, and I think the fee will definitely be part of the package that writers care about.
Substack should try to provide more value, but if it can't, this seems like it will be a problem for them since there is little competitive moat here.
The writers aren't completely "sovereign" as long as they are using Stripe (and Visa and Mastercard) to process payments. It is basically inevitable that some entity in the payment system will eventually interfere with Substack even if Substack themselves hold the line.
Substack themselves have a ToS. In theory Substack could always switch payment processors or allow crypto currency payment, but you can never get out from under their ToS.
For example, you couldn't publish something like 2600 there because they discuss illegal activities like blue boxing.
Numerous people have been removed from popular social media platforms, and I've yet to see any of them make a comeback, let alone go up against Twitter/YT/FB etc.
It is unlikely we will ever even hear about Stripe openly leveraging their influence. They will talk to Substack, who will bring the issue to their investors, who will tell Substack that Stripe is higher up in the food chain than the writers.
That is extremely unlikely to happen, but there are plenty of other payment processors out there that I can't imagine any practical way of putting enough pressure on to stop them from processing payments. If facialabuse.com hasn't been de-platformed from their payment processor yet, then there is always somewhere to go.
It's the planned/future use-case for Bitcoin, yes. As of now, you cannot pay a lot of your daily expenses with Bitcoin so you still need a way of going from Bitcoin to USD/EUR/$LOCAL_CURRENCY so instead of Visa and Mastercard being the gatekeepers, the centralized exchange facilitating the fiat-trade is now the gatekeeper instead.
I guess we're waiting to find out if Trump or someone will start writing there. The current big boys are all non-woke center left/right so they're not actually at all outrageous to the general public.
They are however outrageous to the far-left journos at mainstream publications, which is why there's so much attention focused on Substack right now. Trump won't go anywhere that he doesn't get to own a significant portion of the business, so he'll have to build his own site (which it is already reported that he is doing.)
A very elegant non-political article getting to the core of the issue - that yet again old business models are being disrupted and this pisses people off.
Shame these pissed off people have to get political though.
Vaguely off topic, but why do so many programmers use substack and medium to write about programming? Why not use their own programming skills to create their own website, rather than consume a service?
I used to love visiting programmers' websites, where programmer's would use their skills to not only write, but create. Now it's largely a drab stream of medium posts.
Well there's two reasons. Firstly, you're not producing a competitive advantage by writing your own site. Unless you have some specific purpose, why would you waste your time. Let's assume it takes you a couple of weeks, that's probably thousands of dollars of lost wages when you can use substack, medium or even wordpress for basically free.
Secondly, whilst these companies are trying to claim the responsibility of a peice of infrastructure, they're actually trying to be publishers, they control discoverability. You go to substack because you want to scoop of some of that substack readership, you want to be part of their "webring" and hope that you get more readership whilst they monetize your activity by telling VCs they have their boot on your neck.
I host my content on other services because I have a full time job, a family, and interests outside of tech. Even though I can do it all myself, what's the point? I get paid well into 6 figures for my tech job. What are the odds my blog will start generating that kind of revenue? Basically zero. And I can talk about things I actually do create on my blog, even if my blog is hosted on substack or medium. I just can't point to my actual blog hosting itself as something I created. But that's fine, because it isn't even a particularly interesting problem to solve. I'd be fairly unimpressed if someone was doing general purpose programming for a couple of years and couldn't throw together a barebones blog.
Came here to say exactly this. This feels like asking why my dad, who has all of the skills to build a house from scratch if he wanted to, bothered to buy one that already existed instead. Because it's easier and he's busy. I can write my own blogging platform if I wanted to, but I can't conjure one from thin air in the two minutes it takes to sign up for one that someone else already built.
There is at least some of a reverse effect by now. Because medium.com in a link already tells you to expect to get hassled about paying them just to read some marketing fluff piece.
Only so many hours in a day. Perhaps setting up and operating a blogging platform isn't how they'd prefer to use their time.
When I ran my own business, I had the skills to do everything myself: accounting, order fulfillment, everything. I created a kick-ass system that saved me hours of work for things like calculating and disbursing royalty checks (it was a publishing business). Sure, it was better than off-the-shelf software, but I would have been able to dedicate a lot more time to the core of my business—the part where I was creating truly unique value—if I had hired an accountant, or at least used off-the-shelf software.
LOL I built my own blogging platform for my personal site, but I get constant nagging for not handling permalinks in the expected way and for never implementing RSS. (lisperati.com)
> [...] writers who can command a paying audience have heretofore been significantly underpaid.
I don't know for sure, but I suspect the writer-paid-monthly model is straight up more effective at pulling money from readers' pockets than the magazine subscription model.
I mean, I can pay £34 a year for a fortnightly magazine with quite a few writers doing quite a lot of investigative journalism, and even mailing a paper copy to me. I can pay £10 for a novel by a bestselling author who takes several years to write each novel.
But with the market positioning of "$10 per month" it turns out you can sell one person's writing for £86 ($120) per year.
Strange that the output of one full time human writer could be priced so differently, even when every example is award-winning and well known. Perhaps the future of writing is a return to Dickens-era serialisation, and the next J. K. Rowling will be posting two chapters a week on Patreon.
I think once the novelty wears off and people start seeing how many subscriptions they are on, they will move to consolidated packages covering multiple writers, like Netflix for writing. Which already exists in the sense of Medium.com
Everything reverts to the mean and your point is valid - we shouldn’t expect one form of writing to have abnormally high returns to effort ratio for too long, unless there is a general shift in the value of writing by the population at large. Which given current trends towards video and higher stimulation, I would assume is less likely?
Unless one could argue there’s a huge untapped latent market of bookworms. I think there is some market to a degree as people get burned out on other forms of media, but I’m not sure if it’s large enough for substacks model to work for a significant period in the future
I could absolutely see an aggregator model, where the quasi-publisher maybe even provides some degree of editorial support at the copyediting level. The question then becomes though if the $100 or so/year which still seems to me to be the ceiling for something like this is sufficient to support a stable of writers.
I guess how different will that be to the current subscription model for premium newspapers like WSJ, NYT, FT etc?
Perhaps it could result in the rise of “micro magazines” where a few writers combine and create their own joined content vs being forced to being part of a larger bureaucratic organization.
Or readers could pick and choose a selection for their bundle.
Definitely can expect to see some disruption in the market!
It's different in that there's a different level of editorial control--though it's not that different from the op-ed page.
There are other examples, albeit ad-supported ones. One of the tech pubs used to have a blog network of outside writers. (They eventually dropped this as they became less and less comfortable with outside people writing under their brand; this was also a period when orgs were pulling back from their own people having strong personal brands on their sites.) Back to the print days, many tech pubs had a stable of regular columnists. A lot of Forbes blogs are third-parties.
It's not an unreasonable model. The question, as with many things, is what the economics look like.
How many people will actually pay $120/year though. I pay in that ballpark for the NYT and The Economist. But it seems borderline nuts to pay that for a single author's newsletter unless they're delivering unique insights that I can turn into a lot more money than that. Or maybe is they do a really good job of covering a niche hobby although that's still almost certainly more than a niche hobby magazine would charge.
This is why I feel subscription-based commerce does not take consumer psychology into account. They've seen it work for Netflix, so why shouldn't it be exactly the same for words on a screen?
Like you, I'm happy to pay for a physical product that creates a sense of wholeness. A book is time-bound and content-bound. It has a start and an end. A magazine subscription is similar. A physical product, plus you know what you'll be getting over a one-year timeframe. That kind of bounded-ness helps me mentally assign value to a product.
A Substack subscription on the other hand feels like a monthly retainer for a service I don't attach the same kind of value to.
Substack’s business model doesn’t make sense. They are just using VC money to try and build social platform, but it’s a flawed one at best:
- MOST people will not want to pay for articles. Especially in an ever increasing world of subscription payments across tv, music, SaaS, I really don’t see how email newsletters will be high on people’s lists
- for the quality writers that people do want to pay, they will eventually move off the platform if it makes sense to do so (ie they get their brand recognition and followers and then jump ship to their own website). For the smaller ones, patreon onlyfans or some other direct contribution model would make more sense IMO
So I really don’t get Substack’s model and how it can be successful long term unless it truly becomes the landing page / YouTube of articles. Which I can’t imagine it will with all the competition
More generally I’m looking forward to the day where the SaaS bubble bursts a bit or at least pricing consolidates - every Tom, Dick and Harry is taking a crud app and adding a few features and trying to create a b2c or b2b business
It works to some degree, but I’m looking forward to the day that there are enough programming specialists that many solutions are done in house
As to substack, it’s a very simple technology stack; really the play with it and all other vc funded startups is to spend big, grab marketplace / users and exit. Then the buyer needs to monetize or is left holding the bag
I’m much more of a fan of the Medium model, and even there it’s very hard for writers and for the platform to make reasonable money.
It’s interesting how substack is asking everyone to bring their own mailing list with them, it’s a very smart way to build out their users / network, I give them that.
> More generally I’m looking forward to the day where the SaaS bubble bursts a bit or at least pricing consolidates - every Tom, Dick and Harry is taking a crud app and adding a few features and trying to create a b2c or b2b business
I see these "I could build this in a weekend" type responses regularly on HN, and in my opinion it could not be more wrong. Substack isn't a CRUD app with a few features, it is man-years of work on the technical side. More importantly, they've had amazing execution on the business and product side. Building a business is really hard, and because you could replicate substack-the-app does not mean you would can build substack-the-business.
> It works to some degree, but I’m looking forward to the day that there are enough programming specialists that many solutions are done in house
What a waste this would be! Starting a business today is tractable because we build on the shoulders of giants. Tools like JIRA, Github, Sentry, Salesforce, Hubspot, Zoom, Slack, Notion, Stripe, GSuite, ... and many more are so much better and cheaper than anything you'd build in house.
The business side of things - very difficult to pull off, I agree. The pure technical side of things? I honestly could replicate within 3 months of full time work and I’m sure a fair few others could.
Thing is in theory, SaaS / Cloud should be win-win due to specialization. However the pricing I have seen is anything but - they need to charge that to support the sky high valuations and funding rounds. Which is why most scramble to do vendor lock in because without a barrier to entry they will need to keep reducing their prices down the equilibrium level that others can charge and have normal (but not abnormally high) economic profits.
To give you an example, I was quoted 12,000$ per year for an enterprise b2b database solution to record questionnaire answers. Great software, meeting a need we have. But I’m building a basic postgresql database and a very basic web front end for free in its place. 80% of the functionality, 0% of the cost.
I admit the remaining last 20% is the most complex and hardest part; also marketing and all the business aspect is a whole another game. So I have no intentions trying to compete with them, I respect them but at the same time I can’t justify to my company to spend 12,000$ per year for something that an in-house solution can cover most of. Even my CEO said - isn’t that just a database?
This case doesn’t apply generally, but there should be enough examples of SaaS that can be replicated and we don’t need to pay an inordinate fee to use. I would place substack firmly in this list - it is a mailing list software with a text editor (I wouldn’t be surprised if they just reused TinyMCE for this).
Most of the examples you have are very advanced software and I agree with you that having them readily available for all companies is a net positive. Perhaps sales force could be replicated, the rest require serious programming chops and investment.
I basically agree with you but want to share a few more data points on uncommon cases to show the angle I’m coming from. My belief is substack is in this set of uncommon cases.
> To give you an example, I was quoted 12,000$ per year for an enterprise b2b database solution to record questionnaire answers. Great software, meeting a need we have. But I’m building a basic postgresql database and a very basic web front end for free in its place. 80% of the functionality, 0% of the cost.
Your ROI calculation is wrong. Your homegrown solution costs you [your hourly wage] x [hours spent working on it] + [infrastructure costs]. If you have an engineer who spends 3 or more weeks a year on this (incl. initial development cost amortized over # of years), then you lost money.
Worst, you spent time building a commoditized solution which you could have spent improving your own product!
> - MOST people will not want to pay for articles. Especially in an ever increasing world of subscription payments across tv, music, SaaS, I really don’t see how email newsletters will be high on people’s lists
I've subscribed to three Substack newsletters. A lot of other people have too. A 90% cut of the fee is netting some writers - including some not super-popular writers - a living wage, and for very popular writers, a *LOT* of money. Writing is not generally well paid; at a 90% cut, it doesn't take a lot of $5/month subscriptions to exceed what traditional media can pay.
> - for the quality writers that people do want to pay, they will eventually move off the platform if it makes sense to do so (ie they get their brand recognition and followers and then jump ship to their own website). For the smaller ones, patreon onlyfans or some other direct contribution model would make more sense IMO
Onlyfans has a stigma of being for porn, Patreon has a host of problems, takes a pretty high cut as well, and has a poor UI for this. Substack is objectively much better. You're right that it would probably make sense for the super-stars to jump to a cheaper platform, but there's also wide scope for them to negotiate better deals.
> So I really don’t get Substack’s model and how it can be successful long term unless it truly becomes the landing page
Taking 10% of a bunch of money for a pretty lightweight tool seems like a good business model to me. Can they keep those margins going? It's not implausible. The 10% Substack takes for, essentially, hosting is really high if you compare it to the $X/month you'd need for a hosted blog or VPS + Cloudflare, but it's very, very low when you compare it to the cut a traditional publisher takes.
As so often, a lot depends on framing and how people compare the deal being offered.
> I’m much more of a fan of the Medium model
I've never paid Medium money, I will never pay Medium money, I don't understand why people pay Medium money, and I don't know anyone who has, is, or likely will pay Medium money. The Medium model, to me, seems to be an attempt to copy the traditional non-working model, without even an attempt to fix it. I can see why people might be fans of the concept, but it seems crystal clear to me that it represents the dead past, currently kept alive as a shambling zombie by VC money.
Substack, maybe, is the future. And contrary to your assertions, does NOT seem to be burning VC money to bring it about. They seem to be coming out ahead on the Substack Pro advances, after all.
Both these questions are related in the sense it reflects how large the audience needs to be to a viable business.
Question is how much VC money has been burnt on it - perhaps it’s bootstrapped well and it can succeed at a much smaller scale; it’s definitely possible.
However in the long run, it’s somewhat of an easily replicable stack / feature set, particularly as I assume that most highly successful writers would want to control their branding and prefer not to be on substack if they could reach the same audience.
Which they likely can’t. Substack’a SEO abilities will be key to its success as that is in many ways it’s main feature (everything else can be replicated by any one of the millions of web developers out there).
In that sense, becoming the landing page of bookworms would be a significant achievement and to answer your question an important goal for any considerable success.
I base this on the fact that it seems like they have spent a fair bit in building the platform and it’s not as bootstrapped / low in capital as it may need to be to be viable as a smaller entity. But I’m guessing very much here!
Is it really that different to hosting blogs, personal websites or to Medium.com? They just have the mailing list feature, but for most that doesn’t work because it takes a long time to build your own mailing list, so the target audience of writers is small.
> Both these questions are related in the sense it reflects how large the audience needs to be to a viable business.
But as long as the unit economics are positive, why does the audience size matter? AFAIK, Substack's OPEX looks a lot more like traditional software/SaaS businesses and a lot less like Uber's or Amazon's.
You're right that Substack's functionality can be commoditized, but loads of successful dividends-paying businesses operate in commoditized spaces.
It might be worthless to you. Depends on what you can take out of it, or do with it.
Well formed opinions, ideas, curation, and coverage, and priceless to others. To some because they operate in fields where they can put to use such information, to others because they want to understand the world they live in better (even if they don't get something out of it).
Even more so "in a world where information is virtually worthless", in other words, in a world where good stuff is lost in the noise / signal ratio.
In any case, I'd rather pay for a few great newsletters than for wasting my time with the nth BS Netflix show.
A lot of these writers are operating on a freemium model, where you can consume nearly all of what they write for free, and subscribe if you want to for a few extra subscribers only articles. Only a tiny number are purely for subscribers.
How does anyone even take journalists seriously? I could understand that you follow a specific person you believe to be fair and intelligent, but most news orgs are just a bunch of liers and propagandists, just look at the wave of "fact-checkers", from any side of the political spectrum.
When in doubt, a journalist is to be assumed to be a subversive lier until proven innocent.
These are the people who have as greatest award for excellency in their profession, the Pulitzer award, named after a notorious lier (Spanish–American War) and one of the creators of "yellow journalism".
I perceive a greatly increased volume of criticism of Glen Greenwald on my Twitter feed since he moved to Substack. Makes we wonder if all of the criticism is organic (i.e. readers didn't like how he covered Hunter Biden laptop controversy) or to what extent this criticism is being led by trad media journalists who feel threatened by him leaving the trad media business model.
To put another way: are people on twitter criticizing him because they don't like his articles, or because other people on twitter have said that you shouldn't like his articles?
There seems to be a backlash in progress against Substack's publishing policies.
Last week I finally subscribed on Substack to an art-related list where I had been enjoying the free edition for a while. ($55 / year felt like a pretty good deal for access to more of this interesting content.)
A few days later, the writer announced that they're moving off Substack. I'll just quote their message verbatim:
"I’m planning to switch to my newsletter provider from Substack to Ghost in the near future — if I understand it right, the paid subscriptions can all be migrated, so I don’t think it’ll be a big hiccup on the subscriber end. I’ll let you know when I actually make the switch.
"It’s because I’m concerned with Substack’s marketing plan of subsidizing controversial authors (discourse here: Annaleen Newitz, Emily VanDerWerff, Jude Ellison S. Doyle, Metafilter thread), particularly a weirdly large number that can be reasonably construed as anti-trans. Plus, Graham Linehan still uses the service, despite being kicked off plenty of other platforms for documented anti-trans abuse.
"The media profiting off of platforming anti-trans views was a major impetus behind the rise of anti-trans sentiment in the UK in 2016, and the same seems to be happening in the US (broadly, not just on Substack). Yet Substack’s response seems to pretty bluntly reject the idea that they need to reconsider anything. Even if they ban Linehan in the future, I’ve lost faith in the leadership."
Personally I feel this author is doing the right thing by getting off a platform whose policies they can't support. And it makes me wonder about Substack's stickiness, because as a consumer I certainly don't care one bit which company processes my annual payment and delivers the emails.
I definitely agree that authors and readers should seek out platforms that reflect their values. But to me, what you described is more fairly called a "reshuffling" rather than a "backlash." Some writers that have been canceled elsewhere are finding a home and an audience on Substack, and others are leaving because they can't, in good conscience, share a home with the first group. Both groups end up better off than they were before.
I think Substack's lack of stickiness is part of its appeal. Writers are starting to see the downside of writing for someone else's platform, and Substack is a reaction to that. The writers on Substack own their content database, subscriber list, and even use their own Stripe account to process payments. This makes it easy for a writer to migrate, and makes it hard to deplatform people-- what's the point of getting someone banned from Substack if they'll just be back online in a day on Substack2 without having missed a beat?
