Top 27 highest-earning substacks generate over $22M a year | Hacker News Reader

Top 27 highest-earning substacks generate over $22M a year

pressgazette.co.uk

70 pointspaulpauper59 comments

As a reader of several Substack writers, I find the individualist approach frustrating, and - I feel - ultimately counter-democratic in a way.

By the latter I mean that with legacy media - despite the political slant (either way) of the publication as a whole, you generally have access to a multitude of voices.

With the Substack model that isn't the case - unless you limit yourself to the free options, or are wealthy enough to subscribe to as many writers as you like.

I suppose there are Substack amalgamations out there, grouping writers on a common outlet, but those who have managed to gather enough of a living striking out on their own are probably not going to worry too much about whether they are also available as part of a more economically accessible and diverse collection of voices using a different subscription model that collates multiple writers for a single cost.

Ultimately that means that access to a truly wide range of authoritative voices is potentially limited to the wealthy.

Access to authentic diverse viewpoints is a luxury good you must pay for. Everyone who would be accurately informed must fund their own private intelligence service. The legacy media of a "multitude of voices" under one imprint is pretty rare and will still be editorialized within a local Overton window for any given publication. The plebs can only afford one or two subscriptions to their politically-approved list of "news" sources and must be satisfied with being told what to think from a limited menu. If you can't afford it, you're not meant to have it.

You need to budget at least $200 USD per month for substack subscriptions. After that, you will need to budget about 10-20h per month to parsing their output and deciding which of the approved media outlets they would be allowed to write for if they weren't making more money with their own audiences. This will help you think critically about what they're trying to have you believe. For those who would not be welcome at even the most heterodox mainstream publications, you will need to spend a bit of time deciding how it is they can afford to be writing for a living. You will need to track down their incomes until you are satisfied that their shadowy patrons are either dark money influence campaigns and/or CIA-NGO grants. Use this information to triangulate the various positions you are presented with. The truth is somewhere in the nexus of lies.

There's no need to play the edgelord here. Your average person does not have $200USD/month lying around for news. Even cable packages aren't that expensive.

But they don't need that much either, just budgeting $15 a month is more than sufficient to have a favorite paid substack, and several other free substacks. Most people don't have the time to analyze that much information.

Its sufficient to know that viewpoints other than MSM-peddled-narratives exist, that gives people a healthy skepticism, without needing to spend days each month just analyzing the news.

The fact your "average" person can't afford premium information is the point. Truth is free to those who can afford it, very expensive to those who can't.

ok, shoot. $5/mo per sub. Pick three for your $15 budget and a few freebies. I submit it is not sufficient merely to know that non-MSM narratives exist to have the skills sufficient to detect military-grade influence campaigns.

Great copypasta, you almost got me.

copypasta from where?

I think this is a worthwhile point. My belief about Substack is that many of its initial appeals to writers were to people who were not happy at traditional publications. People who had brand names, and wanted better money, prestige, or editorial control than they were getting. So, it's definitely designed to provide isolated perspectives: isolated not only in the sense of being a magazine with a single voice, but also in the sense that it will tend to attract people a little further to the margins of the cultural discourse, who attract attention and bump up against editors.

However, I don't believe this is a big problem, since there are many other places to get opinion and analysis other than Substack.

In fact — and I have no basis for it other than intuition — it doesn't feel like Substack's model could ever make it that big. By nature, a magazine with one writer isn't going to provide enough content to be anybody's only source, and, as you say, there aren't that many people who are going to subscribe to dozens of Substack writers. Having tens of thousands of subscribers really doesn't make too much of a dent in the media landscape over all, it's just that it's very well monetized, so it's great for this handful of writers (and Substack Incorporated of course).

I don't see that as a fundamental product limitation of Substack. Having the concept of a "publication" is probably something they will get to at some point. Medium followed the same path, and they now have multi-author publications as well. I'm guessing it's more a matter of engineering and product prioritization than some explicit decision towards maintaining individuality.

After 30+ years of web publishing we still have no viable system for content micropayments. There's just no way I will sign up for any more monthly subscriptions; those build up and eat you alive. But I would be happy to pay a small amount to read an individual article if it was a frictionless one-click process. There have been many attempts to crack that problem but so far all have failed.

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/the-case-for-micropayments/

And there's an argument (almost certainly correct) from 25 years ago that the problem with microtransactions was that there's a mental transaction cost associated with every 5 cent payment. https://archive.is/fzL0I

Small $$ subscriptions are a different variant of the same problem.

To be fair, many of us used to have a bunch of magazine subscriptions--some of which were only $1-2 per month but I'm not sure the same mindset still applies.

We do see things like Apple News+ that aggregate non-free content and perhaps that's something of a solution. We'll see. I do pay for the New York Times and The Economist but I mostly won't subscribe to individual sites online.

Maybe this is true but it would be nice to have a technical solution in place that would facilitate a 5 cent payment so people could experiment with it. The US treasury of FED should do it at this point as it seems no one else will.

Many startup failures in the dot-com era. Not sure why this should be a US Treasury service given there's a well-developed financial system in the US that facilitates lots of other payment options. (And have you ever looked at the hilariously barely late 90s website of TreasuryDirect?)

I'm also not sure I want the US government deciding which publications are proper participants in an official micropayments scheme.

Blendle is 20-50 cents per article. I doubt that lowering their prices to 5 cents would make a material difference.

In China, the online literature industry represented by qidian.com is a typical model of charging by word count: a few cents RMB per 1000 words. If you subscribe to a novel with several million words in full, you will find that the final cost far exceeds buying a physical book. I subscribe to three or five online entertainment novels for fun and relaxation all year round, because reading them only takes a few minutes of fragmented time every day, so this price is acceptable. But I think this word count payment model is difficult to replicate in serious news or more formal opinion articles, because users do not have much motivation to subscribe daily, and this fee is too low, and also need to pay attention to piracy issues. Novels are not very meaningful if they are not copied in full. But for a single article, it is very easy to be copied away for 5 cents and made public on the Internet. <This comment is translated by new bing.>

Because they aren't and never will be "micro". Every single media I saw trying this eventually comes to the multiple dollars, or tens of dollars per single purchase of a single digital item (post, video, recording etc). That's not sustainable for majority of people, and of course fails. Unless a specific type of people become interested in it, commonly known as "whales", who can sustain a lot of expensive single purchases. And it's a reinforcing loop - since more money comes from a few "money is no issue" crowd, creators are increasing prices to extract more money from this crowd, more people are filtered out and more whales are left, the prices increase again and so on.

"access to a multitude of voices" You mean a multitude of groupthinked, editor supervised voices?

More people != better opinions unless there is a constant debate. And the modern subscription driven model for large newspapers means appealing to the base, and neutrality is bad for revenue.

Substackers also have to appeal to their base. But individual idiosyncrasies and strong opinions are much better preserved when its just one person, instead of a n editor enforcing a hivemind.

You must have a huge "democratic" beef with books. Those being the dominant largely solitary-voiced format that people pay for. Before now, I've read anything that correlated them to being counter to democracy.

There's libraries, at least in the USA, in a lot of places.

> With the Substack model that isn't the case - unless you limit yourself to the free options, or are wealthy enough to subscribe to as many writers as you like.

Don't most authors have at least some free content? The only substack where I've regularly encountered locked content on is Emily Oster (who writes about parenting issues). I read on substack a dozen or two times weekly, and I've never found the paywalls to be an issue. Would it be nice to have subscriptions to five or 10 newsletters? Sure. But it would hardly change my life, since most news is available from many outlets, even if you're looking for a particular perspective.

They talked about this article on the Blocked and Reported podcast (13th on the list). They said the numbers in this article are inflated.

Wowzers, “The Fifth Column”!

Good for them! I love their podcast.

I started Substacking recently. I’m not bothering with a paywall - I’m doing it to get better at writing and because writing helps me think and reflect. If people find what I’m writing interesting or helpful, that’s a bonus.

I thought the only people who’d read my posts were people I have on LinkedIn so I’ve been really pleasantly surprised how many people I’ve never heard of have been subscribing. I’m not sure what Substack are doing but they seem to do something right to spread your writing beyond your direct network. I appreciate that, and I’m not surprised they’ve enabled some very large subscriber bases as a result.

ps. If you want to make my day: https://ghiculescu.substack.com

You are literally demonstrating how substack "does something right to spread your writing beyond your direct network"

On substacks, writers own their brands. Their own brand is plastered everywhere on their website. Compare that to medium, where the medium brand takes precedence. Since writers own their brands, they are highly incentivised to market it themselves, and keep a distinct personal voice, both easily drawing in paying customers.

Misleading title -- it isn't claiming that there are any newsletters generating $22M a year individually. It's just saying that the top 27 (why 27?) newsletters in aggregate make at least that much.

Our software screwed that one up. Sorry - fixed - thanks!

My belief has been if you are decently talented at writing and can set aside a few hours to write at least 2 articles/week, you should be writing on Substack. The upside is huge--thousands of dollars or even a six-figure income--with almost no downside besides time spent writing and maybe some promotion, but with any talent the content should go viral (on both the Substack app/network but also Twitter) without too much work. Unlike Medium, Substack seems to care much more about its writers and less inclined to censor. Writers have much more control.

Many journalists are making way more with Substack than with their prior publications/employers, but with full autonomy and control of the platform, so they have both more income and also the platform, which is also worth a lot and can be monetized in other ways, like affiliate links. It shows how much money they were leaving on the table.

"If I have 100,000 subscribers and only 1% sign up for the paid plan at $5/month, I'll be pulling in $60,000 per year. A million subs, and I'll be rich!"

Problem is, almost no one wants to pay, and even if they do, you have to deal with massive churn and a constant demand for high-quality content that is truly unique, high quality, and impossible to find elsewhere.

There are only a few top level people making this work, and all have deep knowledge of profitable niches or business customers who can foot the bill for their employees. Almost everyone else is constantly begging for people to convert to the paid plan, or burning out.

Oh, if you have good enough content that's also important to people. People will pay. I've started paying for an AI substack because the news is so important to me, and I couldn't find high quality & deep coverage in mainstream media.

Now, this does mean the 'average' journalist stands no chance. But 'average' news is already overproduced to worthlessness. No one needs the same boring take rewritten slightly. GPT-4 can already do that.

They would have been unemployed anyways, because all the average newspapers (read local newspapers) died out. The only remainders are national newspapers that only hire the best of the best.

At least now they get to experiment with their passionate topic, and potentially discover new markets, instead of being forced to report on mainstream topics.

Oh, if you have good enough content that's also important to people. People will pay.

The question is how many will pay (not just say they'll pay) and for how long.

I used to pay for Molly White's excellent Web3 reality check newsletter. She changed the platform and I didn't follow her. It was interesting while she was reporting all of the BS and fraud, but after the bubble has popped it's less compelling.

For someone getting into a hot field like AI, will the paid subscriber interest still be there in 1 year, 2 years, 5 years? If the writer expands to an adjacent area, will that make some of his existing subs bail?

Ben Thompson keeps Stratechery going not only because he's a strong, insightful writer, but he didn't go too narrow (for instance, only Apple strategy) and there's always something to write about for people who follow this stuff. Benedict Evans works in a similar way in terms of not going too narrow.

Two factors here:

1. Journalists don't necessarily want to write about 1 topic for their entire lives either. They can pivot, and its no harder than finding a different job for a journalist.

2. Journalist writers have a responsibility and freedom to choose more durable topics. If you built your brand on a fad (web3), even if to criticize it, you make yourself vulnerable. Whereas if you built on on say cloud computing/ancient history/how to find jobs in tech, you'd be on way safer grounds. I would say AI is the rare topic that is both insanely hyped and permanently durable. The industrial revolution lasted centuries, so will AI.

So, say, "cloud computing." I've had a conversation with a successful consultant and having a "cloud computing" business for him is mostly about specializing in AWS (and costs specifically). Which is a very different business from what writing about cloud was 10 years ago. The money probably is in being a specialist but the caveat is that specialties often go out of fashion.

What Substack is this? I’m interested in a good AI Substack that keeps me up to date. I follow a few free newsletters but something more in-depth would be very helpful.

That's more or less the classic "If I can only get 1% market share in China I'll be rich." Which turns out to be really hard.

I did some research as a consultant once for a company trying to sell a product for 32-bit to 64-bit transition. They were obsessed with the total addressable market and assigned some percentage of that market they thought they could capture. Weren't interested in hearing about any more substantive advice and went out of business of course.

Sounds like every other entrepreneurial endeavor. What % of startups go to zero, what % of restaurants close? Begging for people to convert is also called salesmanship

> but with any talent the content should go viral (on both the Substack app/network but also Twitter)

A lack of ethics also helps. Fringe views are more likely to gather attention. If you optimize for attention (revenue) then you basically end up getting paid to spread lies. Way more clicks for well written conspiracy bait than debunking conspiracies.

This is a pretty strange way to think about viewpoints. Fringe as opposed to what? The "common" view of things in the modern media environment is highly manufactured. To have a knee-jerk filter that privileges the mainstream consensus in this information environment is a surefire way to guarantee you have "approved" viewpoints that offend no one and rock no boats. After all the revelations of intelligence service infiltration of content moderation boards at the major media companies, one might expect this attitude to be largely discredited by now.

Can you demonstrate that the substack accounts on the list largely profit on false-conspiracy promotion?

I assume that you don't apply your logic to the MSM. Otherwise, your statement's inherent neutrality would make it pointless in a relative sense.

Because the statement can't be neutral lest it be time wasting, it de facto correlates profitable writing, only outside of the MSM, to lies.

This is one of the more implausible political statements I've read. You're essentially accusing consumers of supposed non-fiction writing to be tabloid readers. Only outside of MSM consumption, of course.

What accounts for the stark difference in motivation of people paying for true MSM writing and false substack writing? I must be hallucinating the contradiction, because otherwise it would frame your model as nonsense that some might correlate with false-conspiracy thinking.

This is also true of mainstream media publications.

I have often thought about how easy it must be to be one of these crazy conservative talking heads. All you have to do is be loud, angry, and say the obvious bigoted talking points they have, and people will flock to you because you are doing it with no shame. Then once you have a bit of a base you are a player in that game for life with a career of conservative podcasting to always fall back on. Maybe you even have a shot for higher office. Of course, this all requires selling your soul, so there is some cost.

And it came out in the Dominion trial that the Fox talking heads didn’t even believe the “election was stolen” narrative.

It came out in Alex Jones's divorce trail that his entire persona is an act for commercial use. He's always selling weird testosterone supplements and such, he's a total snake oil salesman. Of course you know his fans would say that was fake news even if you showed them that evidence.

"“He’s playing a character” and is nothing like his online persona, attorney Randall Wilhite reportedly insisted in a Texas courtroom at a pre-trial hearing ahead of the right wing radio jock’s custody battle with ex-wife Kelly Jones."

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/not-fake-news-infowars-...

See all these messages for just how few qualms people have for selling out their country’s future.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/20/technology/fox-news-domin...

Lack of journalistic ethics is a problem. But let's not forget how many mainstream media outlets beyond Substack made huge profits during the COVID-19 pandemic by spreading lies that weren't even considered "fringe". This was misinformation that came straight from government officials, corporate executives, and credentialed scientists.

https://nypost.com/2023/02/27/10-myths-told-by-covid-experts...

Or to look a little further back, how much money did the New York Times make by publishing lies and conspiracy theories about WMDs in Iraq? Do we think they wouldn't do something similar again?

That’s like saying if you are a decent singer you can make money. Once you have so many people producing content, you’ll get the same power law like every other form of media.

I’m not sure. There are a lot of talented writers out there and an ocean of mediocre ones. “Build it and they will come” has never been harder.

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