Substack won't make you rich | Hacker News Reader

Substack won't make you rich

albertcory50.substack.com

52 pointsAlbertCory50 comments

The "curation is an great addition to value" argument is certainly a powerful one.

I agree with the position that it makes sense to pay for a selection of writing (or other content) that someone, who truly deeply understands their demographic, puts together.

This site ( HN ) is certainly proof of that. It is effectively a magazine curated by its readers (upvotes/downvotes) for 'my deomographic' which is the demographic of everyone on here I guess.

In the novel "Fall", Neal Stephenson developed a theme I found profoundly insightful - the internet becomes a morass of trash so to get anything out of it, you gotta be selective about what you read or consume.

Selectivity, for characters in the book, was effected by subscribing to 'edit streams' - content pushed to them by editors who figured out what they should see for news and what they should see elsewhere from the arts, science, anything.

The super wealthy have personal editors - bespoke curated balanced content that was super expensive since one essentially is paying for person to "pre-read" and "grade" everything.

The 'middle class’ subscribes to one or more cheaper good shared 'edit streams' that had balanced and nuanced selection made possible by amortizing the cost over a ton of subscribers - a magazine.

Everyone else consumes what FAANG equivalents and bottom of the barrel anybodies pushes out for free on the "Your Feed" streams. Since they are free, you are the product.

Anything on those is largely driven by agenda - think "the right vs the left", propaganda, 'just because I have a mic", anarchy, pick your poison.

Two thoughts pop to mind out of all this

- just occurred to me that Facebook's / TikTok's /YouTube's etc "For You" streams are just really bad, (very addictive) very poorly edited magazines. Can't really make money from them because they are the equivalent of a old-timey pulp magazine.

- (this is the biggie) these FAANGs should set up some way for folks to make money through curation of their content (patented, TM, etc). Just send me a cash "Thank You" to cover college bills and the mortgage for this idea.

> these FAANGs should set up some way for folks to make money through curation of their content (patented, TM, etc)

Not sure what you mean by "patented, TM, etc". Other than that, I think this should already be possible from the outside e.g. by setting up a Patreon whose sole point is to provide a curated list of content from other platforms such as YouTube or Facebook, and already has a payment mechanism.

This hinges on the fact that content can be linked from the outside, but any approach will be subject to the mercy of the big platforms that host the actual content.

The "patented, TM, etc" was just a joke claiming credit for the whole thing to support the "pay me" joke in the next line. It is a completely content-free line.

The idea of doing a Patreon is interesting.

The real problem is that from a technology support perspective, this is not a real tech business, it is just a feature on any of the platforms. The moment they implement some type of "Magazines" on YouTube / Facebook / Tiktok, you gotta move from Patreon to their platform because of discovery.

The product is not the tech, it is the skill in curation.

As a curator, i could care less what the platform is as long as someone pays me as much as I can get out of the system. Happy to run it on multiple platforms, on email .. whatever mix pays me the most. But I realize right up front that I will have to be paid on the platform the content is on because that is where it will be easiest to get new sign ups.

On second thoughts, @moring, you are definitely on to something here!

It may be a product if one can find a way to effectively integrate content from across different platforms. Which means it has to be off any of the platforms.

Like, maybe, curated paid for lists of selected content via RSS, for my beloved, now dead but not forgotten, Google Reader

There is definitely something here.

Ah, I thought that novel was called "Reality" and had ten billion authors.

I want search engines to operate similar to this. Instead of using googles monolithic index, you can subscribe to different trusted sources for lists of sites that are curated and maintained. Then your personal search engines queries them all at once.

I think if you could balance the incentives right it would put the onus on the curators to make sure that their indexes were full of high quality sites. And if one starts giving you rubbish, just remove their index from your search engine.

This is an interesting idea. The way I see it, there is a lot of really high quality content that does rise to the top of YouTube. But also the feed has a lot of recency bias. So a great creator who puts out things once every many months, ends up having their stuff at the top of the pile for just a week or two.

So as time passes, high quality quickly gets buried by the mediocre barrage of content.

So an interesting feed would have some dimension of time-indepedence.

Really made me think. Thanks

About user input, where the users can moderate contents by tools (like upvote/downvote).

I think that the user feedback is sometimes very dangerous. Corporation XY releases trailer, users do not like it. Trailer is review bombed. People running corporation are angry, they do not want downvotes.

There are several things that can be done to solve that "problem". For one: you can remove transparency. If things are not transparent it is easier to "fool" users, boost some things that should not be, or limit reach of things that are correct, true, but undesirable by the big tech.

I think that is the main reason why social media feels muddied, user input does not seem to matter that much.

It is hard to push content on mainstream media, if it is transparent that the quality of the thing you are pushing is mediocre.

Substack has some great writers, for sure. But unfortunately something about the marketing and business model seems to induce a large portion of Substack users to treat it as a kind of pyramid scheme. People cannibalize each other's subscribers, subscribe to each other as a favor or for strategic reasons, and of course there's the barrage of self-interested comments on every new celebrity Substack post. Further, Substack themselves pepper everything with sales pitches, and even remove comments that might appear to question their claims. There's a bad smell there, and I ended up leaving.

I'm not sure how many paid substacks I'm signed up for, but it's a few.

Average writers, like most professionals, need to associate themselves with a well known brand. No surprise there.

Substack seems to be lucrative for folks who use it in combination with another complementary publishing platform. If you write a bunch of articles on Substack and then put together a book made up largely of said articles, it can be good because it doesn't really cost you anything extra. Also, if you have a podcast then you can use similar content for both.

Out of the tech authors that I read, seems like Lenny and Gergely are printing money, but everybody else is unlikely to be even breaking even. But like with YouTube, Twitch and OnlyFans, it's imperative that people feel like there's a chance a chance of them joining the ranks of superstars, or growth stops.

disagree. many people do not expect to become rich but do it for fun

Many yes. Most even.

But quite a few do expect to become rich/well compensated.

Which is why there's a huge meta-group of people selling the dream ("How to make money on Substack/YouTube/Instagram/whatever platform"), with books, seminars, tutorials, sponsored content, and so on - each with tens or hundreds of thousands of subscribers...

damn. I meant to include something about "make millions selling Amway" and "make millions selling Mary Kay Cosmetics."

Those are yesterday's hotness.

Is that really any different from aspirational athletes, musicians, or actors? Everyone knows that only the 0.1% have wild success. The N% below that can make a non-glamorous living from it.

>Is that really any different from aspirational athletes, musicians, or actors?

Yes, not for Substack (as teens don't like this "writing" thing much), but e.g. a huge number of teens (and 20-somethings) tries to be vlogger, influencer, etc - more than athletes, musicians, or actors which is more of a 'far away' dream.

Who are Lenny and Gergely?

Gergely Orosz and Lenny Rachitsky

I also did know. Here is my guess from some light Googling:

Lenny Rachitsky & Lenny Rachitsky

Ref: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/blog/summary-leaving-big-tech-...

Right. The difference is, most people realize they won't become wealthy actors or musicians. But let some new Web platform come along where a few people are killing it, and everyone thinks "why not me?" And the platform owners are happy to encourage it.

To me that's just a function of industry maturity. I wouldn't be surprised if in the early days of the movie and recording industries people felt equally as bullish about their chances of making it. A century later things no longer feel as rosy.

I'm not sure who this is directed at. A more interesting question is, does Substack expand the number of people who can support themselves by writing vs a world without it? I personally spend over $1k/yr on Substack; sometimes because I get great value out of the paid posts, and more often because I want to author to keep working in an area I care about.

> I personally spend over $1k/yr on SubstacK

I imagine your photo might be up on a "whales" board back at Substack HQ, and the growth team might refer to you by name in their weekly meetings when they hypothesise on how to attract more like you.

If there's one universal truth about whales, it's that there's always a bigger fish. Every time I've heard about a real-life whale, I've been out by multiple orders of magnitude from my wildest guess.

And yes I know whales are mammals but facts don't get in the way of puns.

I liked the use of "whale."

I'm just not one. Or the addictive type, either. I had rotator cuff surgery last month, and a couple people joked, "Oh, you get these really good drugs for the pain!"

I had Percocet (oxycodone + ibuprofen). It did nothing for me; no high at all. I wonder if there's a connection.

These are really good. I had them after removing my wisdom teeth (less than easy operation as they came out horizontally) I stopped taking them as soon as the pain subsides because I understand why someone can be addicted to them. The pain just vanishes a few moment after ingestion.

I think individuals vary. For me, they just dulled the pain; they didn't eliminate it.

> Of all these writers I subscribe to for free: would I be willing to pay a single price for all of them together? That might be worth $10 a month

Fair enough, but a magazine is largely filled with advertisements, which is where much/most of the revenue comes from. I like that Substack does not have ads like this.

There are magazines with no ads, like Consumer Reports and Cook's Illustrated in its early days.

Sure, but that's not exactly comparable to most Substacks (at least the popular ones).

Consumer Reports is able to do that because it makes $260 million a year from subscribers.

The only magazines in the world with more subscribers ADAC Motowelt in Germany and AARP and Costco's magazines in the US. They have a scale that makes it possible to forgo advertising that isn't really applicable to other magazines.

Here for the Manchester United / Manchester City comments in response to that roster faux pas.

Fixed. Thanks.

(I was aware they were different.)

Another sustainability crisis playing out is in the field of software: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39085704

I never paid for a Medium blog, but I subscribe to three Substacks. It may not "make you rich" but it's the only pay-to-read blog platform that got me to open my wallet!

How many authors on Substack expect to make a living from it?

I get that if you have e.g. an Onlyfans or a full time acting career you expect to earn money, but how many writers have that expectation?

> how many writers have that expectation?

Caroline O'Donoghue talks about exactly that issue on her blog "Sentimental Garbage": https://sentimentalgarbage.substack.com/

In short, most writers take any kind of commercial copy/edit/writer work to pay the bills. During down times, they work on their book.

Like this for anything with low barriers to entry. On the opposite extreme are tech jobs, in which the Iq barrier is higher but so is median pay.

> You know, fellow authors: I’m often interested in what you have to say. But not interested enough to pay for it.

Another thing to know is that engineers are notoriously cheap. For whatever reason we'll pay $100K for a degree, but not $5 for an article that helps us in the next hour or a tool that saves us an hour.

It's more of a cost benefit analysis as the author pointed out. When so much of valuable content is surfacing in hackernews and other streams, it's not cheap, rather a wise decision not to spend money.

I got tired of the these I like to use and the people I like to read disappearing. Now I just pay a few bucks a month for everything, and things just stopped disappearing. I don't have to worry about switching apps or finding new people read, which I would have pay with time instead of money.

That's because the degree helps us get more money in a direct and easily understandable way.

A tool that saves an hour doesn't save us an hour, it saves our employer an hour. We don't get to home home an hour early when we save our employer an hour.

You're looking at an entirely rational chain of logic.

Really? That is rather surprising - time to jump on TikTok. And Twitter X.

Correction - it won't make most authors rich. It's like cooking - most chefs are ruining their health with 14-hour-days for pennies, and like five others are crushing it. You have to be really, REALLY good.

or just lucky. as someone who reads a lot of blogs, the top substack bloggers are not that much better, if at all ,compared to obscure ones

Or hard working, at the right thing - ie marketing.

Most creatives, programmers included, believe "if you write it, they will come." The successful ones though are the ones who got good at selling it.

Hard work and/or luck. Usually both, but not always.

Occasionally you hear of someone (Rodriguez in Searching for Sugar Man) who makes it big despite doing nothing at all to promote himself.

And hard working folks who go nowhere.

I'm watching a documentary right now about Jonathan Ramie, who plays Jesus in The Chosen. He struggled for 20 years, not even having health insurance.

Are the chefs that are crushing it "really, REALLY good", or just good, comparable perhaps to tens of thousands of others (and worse than many of them) that nonetheless aren't crushing it?

With chefs, it seems like they really are crushing it. I've heard of a couple of top chefs who got burned out, went and started "something else" away from their fame, which then proceeded to crush it as well.

Of course, there is a lot of survivorship bias. I never heard of the ones who never crushed it or who started the second thing and it failed.

However, the fact that there are a non-trivial number of chefs who crush it multiple times seems to suggest that there is something that they have.

Even people like Anthony Bourdain acknowledge that there is a VAST gulf in capability between people like himself and the people who went and survived those big name restaurant kitchens.

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