Substack is the biggest threat to newsletters ever | Hacker News Reader

Substack is the biggest threat to newsletters ever

notes.ghed.in

38 pointsrpgbr51 comments

> "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.

[1] https://www.exponentialview.co/p/important-migration-from-su...

[2] https://www.exponentialview.co/p/announcement-move-2022

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.

Sure, but as a newsletter author, portability means that if this happens, I'll just move to e.g. Ghost or Beehiiv, or another platform.

The portability is the reason I am on the platform, and not on another platform. Take away this portability and I am gone.

The big difference with every other platform like Spotify, Medium, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn etc etc is how those platforms do not allow for this kind of portability by design. They never have done so, and never will. And their take rate is also much higher than Substack's 10%.

Given full portability exists today, why are we speculating about things that are not happening, and what would likely undermine Substack's business model of both attracting and retaining newsletter authors?

And yes: Substack will need to make more money to justify their valuation. Taking away portability to do so would backfire: at least from my view.

How would you move if they take away portability? Are you assuming sufficient warning before such a change?

Your argument is addressed to another (future) article, probably called "Substack WILL be the biggest threat..." because as of today nothing of what you are hinting at has happened, or is happening. Maybe we shouldn't take decisions based on fortune telling.

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.

Are we ignoring how one of Substack's major competitors, Ghost is doing just fine? Bootstrapped, on a $6M run rate, their growth speeding the past years and openly sharing their revenue details [1].

What would happen if Substack went out of business? Newsletters can (and would) migrate to Ghost or other alternatives that are also thriving.

[1] https://ghost.org/open/

Except Ghost isn't free, and I doubt most of Substack newsletters (I mean those from amateurs writers, not the pros that make a living off them) would be willing to pay. That's where the destructions will happen.

If you try sending emails to that email list of your subscribers yourself, those will most likely land in the spam folder.

I can guarantee you’ll leave with none of those things if you leave

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.

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.

Likewise. I follow several thoughtful creators like Asianometry[0] and haven't seen anything like what GP's describing.

[0] https://asianometry.substack.com/

Well, the non disgruntled are mostly sheep consuming mainstream content. It's not like newsletters are for mass audiences

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 might, others do not.

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.

You’re uncritically equating disgruntled to niche. It seems to me that the disgruntled view is the mainstream view.

Jonathan Haidt is an interesting example. He’s basically the foremost expert on an emergent problem.

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.

https://indieweb.org/POSSE

Upvoted, but note that LinkedIn disadvantages content with links. A workaround is to put the links into comments, but you have little control over their prominence.

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.

This is the issue from the consumer point of view. For most people, it's too expensive to subscribe to more than a few (like less than 5) writers on Substack, and that excludes the newsletters that have the really high-expertised content (which tend to be quite expensive on a standalone basis, as one would expect). This makes sense for the writers, but as a consumer, it's very limited. I personally only read a few Substacks because I don't want to spend the money to subscribe to more than a few of them, given other subscription costs already being incurred elsewhere. No doubt many other potential readers are in a similar position.

> 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.

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

I think through the subscription model has Substack solved the distribution/discovery problem.

While I might follow people/topics on Medium it doesn't help filter out the noise.

yeah, I'm not so sure they have "solved" anything. I think that many of the authors may be creating thought and feedback silos. They certainly aren't reaching as many people who think differently, helping to influence their thinking. This feedback loop with people who like your content only reinforces writing that they want over what needs to be said.

A good editor can make a huge difference, the interview with Foreign Affairs Editor Daniel Kurtz-Phelan was quite good. Really appreciated his thoughts on how a good editor should work with content authors.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYCBg8-w5VU

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.

Time will tell. I believe that evergreen content produces more revenue over time than clickbait.

Most people don't have a very long horizon.

Consider the stock market.

That’s ok as long as the few who do aren’t subject to the whims of the others

Interesting that you mention the stock market. The stock market velocity of content is entirely different than movie reviews, cultural research, or political commentary. The reason is that a movie does not update the storyline each quarter or change characters. A deep-dive analysis written on Seeking Alpha might be invalid within 1 minute if a short-seller has found evidence for fraud.

Sounds like it’s comparable to sports?

Yup. It's like an article comparing 2023 Manchester City with the 2020 Bayern team. While it might work as a thought exercise it wouldn't have an impact on who wins the cup in 2023.

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.

It’s a shame a company like this can’t just remain small and profitable and well run.

What is the difference between a newsletter and a blog? Aren't they both essay services that get traffic from lists of subscribers + suggestions?

> What is the difference between a newsletter and a blog?

Newsletters are the new RSS for blogs.

Too bad Substack doesn't support distributing articles as RSS though

Yes it does. I follow several Substack newsletters via RSS.

https://support.substack.com/hc/en-us/articles/360038239391-...

Weird, not sure how I missed that. Thank you.

My rss reader (inoreader) supports newsletters. It creates a custom email address for me to feed to substack and I get all emails just like any rss feed.

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.)

> maybe that doesn't matter any more. Maybe now startups are just funded by perpetual equity rounds

This is a hot take circa 2017 [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftBank_Vision_Fund

I question whether the overfunding has meaningfully changed or just shifts focus around to the lastest trend.

Recently we saw crypto, remote work, devtools... and are now AI

As I mentioned elsewhere Substack is a double digit million product at best, propped up by the crypto scammy a16z.

Beehiv is already giving them a run for their money.

It's funny right? 'cause it's a website that looks like Substack, but ultimately isn't Substack.

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.

[1] https://manualdousuario.net/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com