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Comment by jdoliner | Hacker News Reader

This reads to me like an admission that Substack is succeeding at Medium's original goal much better than Medium ever did and that they need to make changes to try to keep up.

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100% agree. It's buried so far down the story too. I didn't keep pace with all of the editorial activity Medium had undertaken, but the sentence "We tried to replicate the traditional model" really spells out everything you need to know.

Big validation for Substack and the author investment model.

Until a few months from now when Substack is also filled with lowest common denominator content. Then it’s a race to the bottom.

The incentives are different. Medium has it so that everybody pulls from the same pot of money; blogspam pays. Substack, everybody is running their own newsletter. If you want to make money, you need repeat customers. Blogspam doesn't pay.

One person’s treasure is another person’s blog-spam. Substack will fall victim to this too regardless of how writers are paid. Eventually LCD blog-spammers will want a piece of the pie and will “scramble”, as they say in blog-speak, popular posts/information to generate a post of their own. This will devalue anything published solely on Substack and create a similar Medium/Google search effect when a user is seeking info. At some point the game isn’t about generating an image that you pay writers but proving your platform can support ANY writer.

That's the thing about Substack. The stuff that's monetized isn't even on Google. There is no incentive to do SEO for monetizing Substack.

So? I subscribe to individual authors who happen to be on Substack, not to Substack or all newsletters on its platform in general.

So it goes.

I don't know anyone who goes to the substack.com homepage to surf for new content. I subscribe to authors I already follow via Twitter, or through other writers the people I sub to recommend.

So I'm not sure how substack being full of low-quality SEO content hurts me.

Data point: I've never browsed Substack for content. I have no idea what may or may not be on the platform, and I don't really care. The quality of the median post - or author - could decline any amount, and I wouldn't even realise.

I've subscribed to multiple Substack newsletters because content creators I already liked moved or launched new projects on Substack.

Obviously everyone is different, but my impression is that Medium was trying to sell the "Medium brand", and struggled because a lot of people didn't find the "Medium brand" worth $5/month. Conversely, Substack is a platform for people to sell their own brands, and a lot of people find those brands to be worth $5 (or $8, or even $10 in some cases) per month.

Will people now subscribed to slowboring.com suddenly stop in significant numbers because there's another blog/newsletter built on the same platform somewhere which is really low quality? How would they learn this, and having done so, why would they care? In another comment, you say:

> [LCD blogspam] will devalue anything published solely on Substack

I don't value anything now because it's published on Substack. How can you devalue zero? :)

I don’t use Substack, but what you say matches my understanding of the service. Substack isn’t a brand consumers look for or trust, it’s a brand authors look for and trust. If you are an author, it is a platform which you can build your brand atop. Substack is the platform where you can monetize that readership.

How are you defining success? Is Substack actually profitable, or do its VC-financed authors just receive more clicks than Medium’s?

Reading between the lines, Medium tried a model where they hired authors, paid them to create content, and sold subscriptions to this content, and it was very unprofitable. Worse, it was unprofitable in a difficult to fix way, because it's unclear which authors you can let go with a minimal impact on subscriptions. (And firing people from a paid team of writers is always going to have significant costs in terms of moral, productivity, etc.)

Substack seems to be trying a model where they will, in some cases, guarantee an author will receive a minimum amount of subscriptions for the first year, in exchange for a hefty cut of subscription revenue. I don't think we have information on how the program is doing on net, but in at least some high profile cases they've turned a profit on it. Also, even if the program is significantly loss making, it should be easy enough to shift to profitability; just scale down offering new contracts to people without large existing readerships.

The model is not enormously different at the twenty thousand feet level, but I think it has the potential to play out quite differently in practice nonetheless.

> Also, even if the program is significantly loss making, it should be easy enough to shift to profitability; just scale down offering new contracts to people without large existing readerships.

Yeah Substack's server costs are probably fairly low, so they could also probably lay off some engineers and coast for a while before a competitor gobbled up the market.

I never understood why Medium tried to be the Netflix for words. To me it always made more sense for them to follow Vimeo's model (disclaimer – I work for Vimeo): create tools that paying customers use to help them showcase their work, tools that let them customise how it appears, and tools that let them monetise that content.

I can’t even remember what Medium’s original goal was, but from what I remember it was pretty much a blogging platform. In some ways it sounds like they’re going back to that.

Completely agree. Substack..at least what it is so far is what Medium failed to do. And Substack isn't even that big yet.

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