What I learned from a year on Substack
niemanlab.org
niemanlab.org
For tech it's twitter, for lifestyle it's instagram, for search it's google, for conspiracies it's facebook, for gen z it's tiktok, for gen x it's media. Whatever way you slice it, Other People's Audience is the fastest way to grow.
This no longer exists. You need Twitter in perpetuity. If for some reason you’re banned from Twitter (often there’s no reason at all) there goes an entire career and audience you’ve built for years.
If Facebook bans you because you think vaccines have microchips you don’t lose your income. If Twitter bans you because you said something mean you’re dead.
Tell it to Josh Rogan.
"- Tell it to Evel Knievel"
As if Josh (Joe?) Rogan is representative.
He's a geopolitics writer that was, ironically, interviewed by Rogan about the lab leak hypothesis, but he's not banned from Twitter: https://twitter.com/joshrogin
Neither is Rogan, btw, but he's not posting any of his controversial takes there.
The good news is that there's this robust, free, and open protocol you may have heard of: email. I can hear Gen Z laughing at me already. "LOL, Gen X grandpa, why are you yelling at clouds? And what's 'email'?"
Yes, email. Build your subscriber list via email. Nobody can cancel you or take that away from you.
Not coincidentally, they're the two only media that are delivered by open protocols.
For a newsletter at least, this definitely isn't true.
For context, I'm the cofounder of SparkLoop — a referral platform specifically for newsletters.
We see thousands of newsletters growing 5-50% monthly with referrals (and more if they do other marketing stuff).
Except this doesn't work for Substack users, because Substack doesn't support tools like ours.
The problem isn't that "you can't grow a newsletter without Twitter" — it's that "you can't grow a Substack without Twitter".
Just choose a better email platform and the problem disappears.
Because thinking of Facebook as a boogeymen that turns people into monsters requires thinking of their users not only as monstrous, but as helpless dupes, unable to resist being influenced by the medium they're using.
The media's overrepresentation on Twitter means that applying the same logic would require a level of introspection and self-awareness that would be difficult for most people, let alone journalists.
It's the same reason everyone overestimated early-2010s Twitter's userbase, when for a long period it had less active users than the Google+ stream alone (ie, not the auto-posting from Google products).
Or perhaps it's that the company has engaged in systematic malfeasance, unethical business practices, and has profoundly amoral leadership, resulting in profoundly amoral behavior, culminating in knee jerk dishonesty, denial, and misdirection, and the systematic betrayal abuse and injury of their users, host societies, and culture at large.
The answer is right here:
> Twitter is the Facebook for the chattering classes [a group which includes those working in media].
This rings true for me as a consumer of tech and tech-adjacent news. Most writers that I've started to follow via their newsletters, I've come across on twitter via their tweets that have gone viral or have been liked/retweeted by people in my network.
Another journalist that I subscribe to via their Substack in Eric Newcomer who also recently published a "Looking Back ..." post [0]. Interesting just to diff it from this post. From my understanding, Eric started writing his newsletter last year without importing a pre-existing list (at least that's the impression I got). His numbers (11,867 free subscribers and 1374 paid subscribers) definitely seems to suggest that Substack's guidance that about 10% of subscribers convert to paid is in the ballpark.
[0] https://www.newcomer.co/p/looking-back-on-newcomers-first-ye... 11867 1374
the interesting thing to me is the discussion around "feeding the discourse", and how the best thing you can do to increase your subscriber count is to jump into fights on twitter. it seems like the idea that you grow your substack through tweets is a nice way of saying you grow your substack through arguments.
The unsolved problem across all genres of content is still discovery though which is why the single most important activity after you have good content is marketing it. That can be both very time consuming and expensive relative to income to shift the needle on and leads to chasing algorithms around and the strong power law distribution in the results because of all of this gets much easier the bigger your audience is thanks to network effects. The growth of the creator side of the gig economy is largely about that on a personal level.
This is the toughest part of the content treadmill. I’ve been blogging for 10+ years, newslettering for ~7, and infoproducting for ~6. It’s a tougher gig than many realize.
For the past year or so I’ve been trying to figure out how to get off the treadmill but keep newslettering. Experiments with evergreen sequences are proving very fruitful. People love reading old stuff if it’s good.
The part I haven’t figured out yet is how to monetize. That seems easier when you’re running the treadmill because you can always sell new stuff to old fans.
Newletters are essentially curated content for specific audience. Even if there is a content profitable for a while then it will be made into a commodity soon because it will attract so many folks.
Also, the issue with content from individuals compared to content from companies: Scale. The dynamic of working alone vs making money is hard to pull off if not impossible.
There's already an abundance of general tech publications that are mediocre, with a small number of stellar ones popping out. What tech nerds really need is something that embraces the niche tech that they use every day. Right now, the example I'm thinking of was a few years ago when Ansible became a thing and a few people started writing about it. It could really be anything from specific languages, frameworks, or methodologies.
They appear to charge $10/mo which is $40-80 more than their direct competitor, National Review. I assume that the delta is the price of not including ads.
Now it's a Gumroad membership product with a workflow that sends out the same series of wallpapers whenever someone subscribes: https://www.foxdelight.com/membership
I still have to add to the queue, but I could take some months off making new ones and people would still get something.
So, in effect, starting a media company?
I feel like these technologies while old, are still nascent in terms of what they’re capable of doing.
Like everyone is learning how to become literate with these new tools.
If any newsroom brass is reading this (or reporters thinking of going independent, especially local) -- I'd love to talk. We're building a platform to help monetize journalism outside of the usual predatory social media/aggregator set up, and with more support than Substack.
jared (at) nillium (dot) com
I just listened to Chuck Palahniuk on Joe Rogan. He still writes on pads of paper, but he said Substack hand-held him and he loved it, and called Substack a "concierge service" and he said he enjoys Substack because it let's him concentrate on writing and not worrying about the tedious parts like formatting, etc.
I've had some ideas around this for a while now, but have been busy with another project. It recently resurfaced when listening to an Ezra Klein podcast wherein he talked about how journalists are now boxed in by their social media audiences, among other laments. If I was less exhausted this early morning, I'd try to dig up the episode.
Anyway, good luck with it. Something that disrupts the current model is sorely needed.