Substack Writers Concerned as Subscriptions 'Plummet' Due to Follow Feature
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Substack has never been something I wanted to help with. Anything with dark patterns to get you to subscribe completely turns me off. I respond to individuals or small groups saying "hey this stuff you like to read takes time to write, and for me to do this for a living and continue to create stuff, it would be really nice if you contributed a small amount of money"
For example: https://kottke.org/members/ https://www.patreon.com/acegikmo/membership
Subscribe prompts may include modals, pop-ups, and other ways to encourage readers to subscribe to your publication.
(There are several other toggles that control similar settings as well).
I do this. I served 500k visitors this month. 20 of them contributed. I don't know what's causing this, but I imagine that the unfortunate reality is that substack's model is more effective.
There are cost to do that work and people don't pay. And the one person chimes in and says "hey I contribute and support x and y and z things and people can and should do it". But "should" doesn't pay the bills.
Either charge people, make money off adds or you nine times out of 9 get next to nothing for the work you've put in.
"maybe if payment were easier", "maybe if paying small amounts scaled", "maybe if this xyz tech were more robust" - and people love to respond with this. But it doesn't work now, and it hasn't worked in 30+ years of the web and there is no reason to think it will start working any time soon.
Can it? Yes. But until then, people who want to be compensated for their hard work have two options and they use them.
1. I never thought about any of this until recently
2. Even without donations, writing has provided some cool experiences
3. And yet, thinking about it, I would love to make more off my writing
4. I don't want to sacrifice the quality of my writing for my income. Placing ads (and hell, even donation links, but especially ads) creates a perverse incentive to create more content than I want to, and to make it ugly to rank high in Google. Above all else, I want to keep my writing human, even if it means I don't make a dollar.
So, with all this in mind (and to provide "advice" for others looking at this)
1. I don't want to force people to subscribe to a newsletter. I might add a newsletter, because I've been told that building trust takes time, but that's low on my priority list.
2. I don't want to add google ads or whatever.
3. I've recently (today) added Ko-fi in addition to liberapay. I thought that people who actually wanted to give me money would be willing to use paypal through a platform they haven't used before, but I'm not sure this is the case. Right now, only 1% of people who have clicked that donate link have actually donated
4. The plea is much more effective than a simple link in getting people to click
5. Corporate sponsorships are a possibility imo, but I haven't yet recieved one that didn't involve me selling out my readers somehow.
Ultimately, I think the harsh reality is that projects must place themselves on a spectrum of "make fuck tons of money" and "make fuck tons of people happy"
I used to not really pay for content, until an author blew me away, so I set up a patreon account, just for him. Three months later, I'm now subscribed to 11 people for roughly 100€ a month (which is the ballpark of what I want to spend for internet entertainment anyway). Once my account was set up and I knew how to use it, the friction disappeared, and I realized I was more lazy than cheap.
This is for a website that provides undeniable value and has a ton of happy, grateful users. People swear by it, call it their bible.
They still won't donate.
If we assume a very generous paid / non paid user ratio of 10%, it means Substack needs 50m total users to have 5m paid users.
You tell me, that with 50m users, Substack would be content to make “only” $100m per year?
This leaves two possibilities
1. They are financial idiots
2. The competing services are also priced/costed at a similar amount to substack, such that the writers can afford to pay the difference for ideological reasons.
That competition exists for substack is telling enough, that there's still money to be made here.
As for whether $100m is enough, substack is an very cheap platform to run. It can be run by a craiglist sized team if must. It is cheaper than any major publication, by virtue of not having either writers nor editors on staff.
All the additional cost and VC requirement for substack came from it paying big dollars to attract famous writers, which it is no longer doing (And fired the teams managing those relations).
There's also nothing stopping substack from adding ads to the free-users, much like how netflix does it. There's plenty of ways to monetize 50m users without infringing on the core experience. Also this wouldn't turn substack into medium, as the core issue with medium was the membership was site-wide, whereas substack is writer-level.
If that's compared to a mediocre social network like Twitter, which supposedly can show ~$45/year/user of ads, if Substack can get a quarter of its non-paid subscribers to view ads that are a quarter as effective (smaller economies of scale, weak ad partner etc.), they would still quadruple their total top line revenue.
And it's all upside from there because they can get better at selling ads at scale and they can grow unpaid followers by diluting their brand once they're confident it'll pay off.
That, unfortunately, explains the VC case to me. I'd much rather them be a smaller company that focuses on taking real money.
The problem with google ads, is google gets all the cut. If substack can produce an ad system, where the writer can take a bigger cut and exercise control (or choose not to), then it returns the ad-revenue to the writer, which'll make the space boom.
Youtube is half-ad revenue, and it clearly sustains a large ecosystem of thriving video creators. Why can't substack do the same.
The ads can take two forms.
1. Generic ads, which substack just providess silently, and takes a large cut.
2. Writer-sponsored ads. Essentially like youtube sponsorship segments. Except substack provides a nice interface to put the ads (That doesn't piss off the users), and a centralized payment/bidding platform to lower the transaction friction, and take a small cut out of it.
I actually believe Substack is sincere when they said this week that the free following product is in service of driving subscriptions, when if/when revenue from free users is introduced, that's going to change no matter how hard they try to protect the original mission.
It's easy to make the argument that the network effects outweigh the risks but I would take a stable, smaller income stream over something like this any day.
Of course, the big question is whether you can keep the Substack email addresses. Otherwise you need to hope your readers see on social media your new home.
I think they're primarily bungling it up and not actively trying to enshittify, although I'm not well-placed to judge.
It proves the platform, that offers a high concentration of high average writing quality blogposts and a reliable trusted platform (For readers), has more value for readers, than some particular writer's writing.
This whole paid-blog space didn't even exist before substack, except for a handful like stratchery. So clearly its substack/marketplace that made things possible, not the writers. So writers should examine their egos before they complain this way.
Its like the indie game devs who whine about steam, forgetting that before steam, the PC game marketplace was a nuclear wasteland dominated by piracy and MMOs.
I checked and "statistics" includes email addresses.
https://www.citationneeded.news/substack-to-self-hosted-ghos...
One explanation would be that Substack provides discoverability of authors who readers would otherwise not notice. But I’m skeptical of this explanation, because my personal experience of discovering posts on Substack has rarely, if ever, been driven by Substack discoverability features. Most Substack sites I’ve found via link aggregators or Twitter.
So if Substack isn’t providing discoverability, then their main value is providing publishing and monetization tools. That might make for a nice product, but it’s not a defensible one. If writers could substitute Substack with a self-hosted product providing the same monetization and publishing tools, without affecting the discoverability of their posts, then they would have no reason to stay on Substack if it introduces features that harm their main value of monetization and publishing tools.
Self-hosting anything with a billing mechanism, even using something like Stripe, is decidedly non-trivial for most people.
Substack is by far the easiest option for that I've seen.
It wouldn’t be hard to offer the monetization and email features as a hosted Wordpress service based on a Wordpress plugin. That would probably be enough to pull some writers off of Substack.
Because such a blog wont be as discoverable by an audience directly interested in writing and newsletters the size of Substack's.
>One explanation would be that Substack provides discoverability of authors who readers would otherwise not notice. But I’m skeptical of this explanation, because my personal experience of discovering posts on Substack has rarely, if ever, been driven by Substack discoverability features. Most Substack sites I’ve found via link aggregators or Twitter.
In my case, most Substack newsletters I've found them from their Substack "notes", Substack suggestions for other similar substacks, and references in oother Substack newsletters.
Do you know many paid readers aren't even using apple devices to read them?
It'll also cost time and effort for Ghost to somehow make Apple pay enabled for an open source platform (Probably a nightmare). Who is going to pay the ghost devs for that.
In the end, substack's biggest advantage is its 10% cut, which is really not much. Any attempt to replicate it will quickly run up into this cost limit.
For example, Stripe [1]:
> Stripe will charge the same rate for processing Apple Pay transactions as we do for all other credit and debit card transactions. There is no additional fee from Apple for Apple Pay transactions.
Speaking as a user, I will always choose Apple Pay when it’s available on a website, even if for no other reason than it means I don’t need to find my wallet and enter my credit card number.
(And Apple Pay was just one example - the same would apply to Google Play, which Stripe also supports.)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Pay#Technology
[1] https://support.stripe.com/questions/pricing-for-apple-pay-w...
... as long as you memorize your 3-digit CVC/CVV number...
>Maybe I do when using it on the web, though. Also correct
>Or I need to do a 3D secure “approve in banking app” flow. This is above my knowledge base pay grade. But I did understand 2/3: WINNING!
I feel like you answered your own question here. Self hosting your own blog + monetization is a high bar and even when you have those things, people generally don't like entering their credit card details into random sites. Patreon predates substack and didn't even provide publishing tools while taking 8%. There are plenty of 00s pornstars who had their own sites that make more on OnlyFans.
I think monetization is the primary draw, then publishing next. But I don't believe the product is just "monetization tools". You are right that isn't defensible; it's the substack brand. Consumers are comfortable paying for substack content and that kind of branding isn't easily built.
Is it harder than the <5 minute Substack signup process?
Because if so, I think you’ve got your answer
That may still be too high a bar for non-technical people, though.
I don't trust random websites I've never used before, but I know Substack is a sure thing in terms of not excessively charging me money.
It's definitely possible! You could self-host WordPress, then use the Jetpack plugin, which can support premium content options (https://jetpack.com/support/newsletter/paid-newsletters/). You could also do this with WordPress.com (https://wordpress.com/blog/2020/06/04/premium-content-and-pa...)
I'm sure there are even more solutions, or you could roll your own -- WordPress is extremely flexible.
Disclaimer: I work for Automattic. I haven't set up a premium blog before, but it's definitely possible to self-host something very similar to substack.
If your core competency is writing and not tech, buying everything as service makes lot of sense. And then comes the friction. Being on same platforms at others lowers it for some payers.
Just think how much it would cost on average case to hire someone to setup paid blog, if you really did not know who to hire.
is the complaint here really just that these people want a vanity metric that makes their "subscriber count" higher so nobody can tell that most of those subscribers aren't paying subscribers?
This is a first step for Substack to control who see your posts, when, and insert ads amid your content. You also can’t export followers like you can with subscribers.
I also suspect that a free subscriber is more likely to become a paid subscriber than a follower.
So they diminish your earn potential, decrease the audience of your longer form writing (usually the reason someone creates a newsletter to begin with) and lock you in, making you lose control on how you communicate with your readers.
Substack has long provided RSS. Do they offer RSS feed analytics to writers?
Following is just free and you aren't getting an email for each post, you just see a notification in the Substack app/website.
Which is irrelevant, Substack was marketed and promoted itself as a newsletter focused service, not as "yet another blogging platform with social media aspirations".
Authors were promised to have control of their audience, to even take elsewhere if they wanted to move, as they'd be just email addresses subscribed to them.
Everything they've done since (in the last 1-2 years) is to move away from that into a tightly centralized social media platform.
>Substack doesn't charge more or less to users who choose to get emailed or not.
It makes subscribing optional if you want to follow someone (whereas before it was the only way), which means less newsletter subscribers, which means authors don't get to have their audience: Substack keeps the control. This also means less paid subscribers, even if nominally they can still go out of their way to subscribe and then get a paid tier.
Because brands on substack belong to the writer, not the site. The money making substack writers don't care, every writer's substack is its own ecosystem.
Substack is also no ads, so no advertisers to please. It has no bandwidth costs like youtube.
It also doesn't care about normies who would be scared by this. Normies do not pay $5-10/month for some random internet writer, normies scroll tiktok.