A Substack On Substack About Substack
Why Substack (there's that word again) Should Update Its Subscription Model
As per my last post, my brain has been a tub of potato salad (Kirkland, not even a quality made variety) and as a result my primary projects are being delayed. In the interim, I figured I could get out of the way a quick post about the issues with the current Substack subscription model and how Substack may improve its prospects.
Substack does seem to be on the rise. It keeps bringing in more high profile writers and is certainly getting much more buzz than its closest rival, Medium. Substack has recently surpassed Medium in the amount of paid-subscribers it brings in.
Prior to Substack, if you were an independent writer, you had limited options in getting your writing out there. Even if you weren't looking to acquire any influx of cash, you could set up your own site for a blog, use the user-friendly WordPress, or latch onto some other blogging site. Then if you wanted to try and at least get some compensation for your writing, you could essentially set up what Substack does now on your own but in a slightly more cumbersome fashion by attaching a PayPal link or connecting your blog to Patreon—and possibly some other arrangement of that nature (as all my friends know, I'm not exactly the most tech savvy person). The problem after that is trying to find people to come to your site. Social media has helped many in that regard but it also has its limitations as most people on social media stick around to keep wandering the mindlessness and rapid paced stimulation that is, well, what social media is as a whole.
One could jump into Medium and have being paid arranged for you. You only need to write and Medium does the rest. The problem with that is Medium isn't very reader friendly with its arrangement and it is convoluted in how it pays its writers. Medium allows an allotment—or at least it did, I honestly don't travel to Medium-land very often these days—of free articles to readers or you subscribe for a wholesale price to get unlimited access. Writers are be payed by how many “claps” they get. From there, it isn't simply defined what the valuation of each clap is. A writer could then get a decent amount of readers but their readership may not have the proclivity to be very clappy, if you will, compared to readers of other types of material.
Medium is very easy to write and publish on (only slightly less so than on Substack) and simple enough to jump in without having to set up your own website. Your writing is then available for you to try and share yourself but also available to pop up on the site, as much as the moderators see fit. Medium was better than the direct alternatives, that being nothing, but I suspect it may very soon become the Myspace of self-publication.
Substack is formatted to be a newsletter service but that is nominal at this point. Some do use it for their newsletters but it is now essentially a general blogging site. How it surpasses Medium in being favourable to the writer is that it allows you to better curate your own page, which is extremely intuitive and simple to set up, and manage how you're paid, or not. For the reader, if there is open access material, they can venture to it all they want without Substack getting in the way.
Where Substack has its shortcoming is that it has a bottom limit for what writers can charge, that being $5 a month or $30 for a year. My assumption as to why they did this is that in starting out they could accrue enough revenue per subscription to stay afloat and have capital to expand. Substack takes in 10% (and the Stripe payment system another 3%) so seeing a more stable influx of revenue would be key if they were to keep going after getting off the ground.
For most writers, the minimum fees are too much to start generating a paying readership (no, this isn't some self-serving diatribe, as I don't expect myself to be included in whatever sort of quality category possibly ascribed) and the fees are too high for the average reader, and more importantly the prospective reader, to subscribe to many accounts at all, if any. In modifying this, Substack can possibly grant itself a new opportunity.
Print media is failing and I'll circumvent—for now—as to what degree actual journalism is falling apart, or how much quality it ever had, but another issue is their outdated business model. It's hard to make the claim to support the papers as to bolster investigative journalism when one is burdened with getting a load of crap they don't need when buying a paper: they get the sports, opinion, and culture sections, all of which are objectively low-grade—for the most part—not to mention the smug, class-based connotations that usually go along with simply urging whoever to subscribe to print journalism because it is the right thing to do. Most people get their sports news (if they subject themselves to it) online anyway, and opinion columns and culture sections have the potential to be of quality but aren’t in their present form, with the former being overly confident impulses, and the latter being gossip and overly compressed strings of adjectives that they call reviews. Some newspapers are the exception to being cluttered with bad writing and extra junk, such as the Economist, but they're outliers. Some magazines are of quality like Foreign Affairs and the New York Review of Books, and others have some quality writers as in the New Yorker and the Atlantic but with those too you're riddled with much that is low-tier or tedious. Long form essays, analysis, and reviews are rarely good when confined to such rigid marketing and needing to appease certain business endeavours. If Substack improved it's set up, it can allow readers—beyond a minority with plenty of cash on hand—to select a wide array of writers of their choosing and support quality writing without being subjected to heavy handed editors and archaic business models.
At present most Substack subscriptions cost $5 (US) to $10 per month or $50 to $100 per year for one Substack, although some utilize the annual minimum of $30 and some writers well exceed the top of the range given. An annual digital subscription to the New Statesman is $140, $40 for Foreign Affairs, $80 for the Spectator, $25 for Vogue, $19 for Time, $96 for Commentary, and $60 for Rolling Stone. It takes around one to three Substacks to get to the cost of a magazine. $6 or $7 dollars alone doesn't seem like much but it adds up quick. Paying $70 a year will seem like too much for most to have access to someone's blog for a year. Many will consider as to why they may subscribe to that when a magazine has a whole host of staff and guest writers? I've alluded to reasons why Substack may be a better option but there is also the factor of getting much less writing with an individual Substack. Also, Substack is competing with all else on the internet. Someone can subscribe to a streaming service for the same cost of two Substack pages. For many the values here will seem askew, even if you may think streaming services are wholly unnecessary and that reading someone's insightful posts offer more in the long run. You could catch up on someone's whole monthly entries on Substack in an afternoon but a streaming service can offer a near limitless amount of films atop an array of series. This may be another reason why Substack revenues are so low amidst their high costs, considering the scale of the internet. You can continue on from here, as with comparing the cost of Substack with an entire book and the contrast of how much material you're getting and whatever other such example to contrast cost and quantity and/or quality.
One may not consider the costs high for everyone at present, but as mentioned with print publications, you may then need some self-reflection. As well, there is always the adage, which I can anticipate, of writers need to be paid—even though I'm saying they should be paid and could perhaps be paid more under a better arrangement.
The first part of how Substack should modify the platform is to drop the minimum charge a writer may issue. Make it a free market, as is stylish to say. A writer can charge $20 a month or 25 cents, and pay-wall whatever they wish. Next is to modify the payment system. Instead of using Stripe as is done at present, where the customer directly pays each writer individually and has to go through the motions of the payment system for each Substack page they wish to pay for, and then Substack takes their cut off the top, create a new system where each customer has an account and Substack manages their total costs month by month through the account. Then Substack receives the funds, takes their cut, then distribute the funds accordingly to each writer. This way the customer can simply click on who they want to subscribe to and it links to their payment arrangement already set up through a general Substack account. They can go in and add or subtract who they're subscribed to accordingly much easier and for less. This will streamline access for paying customers. The writers also won't be a quasi-vendor anymore either. They can simply get a monthly invoice of how much they received every month.
Both those two changes in tandem will make essentially a large change to Substack on the payment logistics end but will not change at all how each writer may format their page. Where it can vastly change Substack for the better is that it allows more options for the writers trying to reach more readers, and more options and incentives for readers to become paying customers. The reader can then essentially build their own magazine. A reader may allot themselves $6 a month or $50, and with that can add on however many pages they wish. Most, if not all, writers will get paid less per reader but the scale in their readership may easily greatly expand. Substack can use the new cheaper and simpler set-up in an advertising campaign to begin further growth. If the apocalypse of older publications does occur, the best writers will have a more free and robust home to take their writing to and won't have to have their writing confined in a publication that may be littered with junk, deterring present possible readers.
As Substack is at present, since the costs are so unnecessarily high, a relatively small number of writers are accruing Substack's small number of paying customers. Such a change will expand who is paying for Substacks and who gets paid. If Substack stays as it is, more Substacks will likely become like Matthew Yglesias's Slow Boring Substack, where there is essentially a staff and they are their own publication, and little change will be made from previous models. They'll become a magazine, merely using Substack as a web page to publish on. It disallows the possible freedom that could be granted to the reader, and will turn off most prospective readers as they would wonder why they shouldn't give their money to National Geographic or Harper's instead of this hot and new but overpriced publishing medium. There are writers like Margaret Atwood who are publishing all entries on Substack but for free (and her page is delightful and I recommend you do give it a gander) but from what I've found so far, pages like that are few and far between, and Margaret probably isn't all that strapped for cash.
If Substack makes itself actually accessible to the broader public, it could also fill the void opened by broadening dissatisfaction with social media. Instagram has always been a useless frivolity, Facebook is on the decline and has completely become a cesspool, and Twitter is falling out of favour with Elon Musk's arrogance, naivety, and impulsivity at the helm. Substack has the chance to orientate social media toward real writing and more sober interaction if it makes itself open to the wider public rather than being a tiny niche.
This may all be for not anyway, as perhaps the gatekeeper free (or more free) landscape of writing on the internet may morph as much of the rest of alternative media has, as with social media and video, where they're ushered in as alternatives to all the old ways but offer a new set of problems where the benefits are overshadowed by the loss. At the very least, Substack should take advantage of the opportunity it has presented to it with it's growing attention and construct a business model that makes some sense and isn't so lazy and ham-fisted. It may end up declining in quality anyway, like podcasts, YouTube, and social media, but it can't be any worse. It is worth a shot to try a make it a larger and more accessible venue with greater durability.
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Update:
Two things to add on to this. One applies to something I have recently become aware of and the other is something that I forgot.
Substack has made numerous deals with higher profile writers to give them a guarantee of a certain amount of funds if they stay on Substack for a certain duration. This has aided the platform in becoming more popular but it has also directly generated them revenue. In the case of Matthew Yglesias, his subscriber revenue exceeds his payout. So now that the Substack readership has expanded, it is in the best interest of these writers to embrace the expiration of their contracts. This adds weight to why the fees are structured as they are, even though they should still change in the not too distant future. Substack is directly cashing in at 100% of some of their most high profile writers with all their input costs with those writers now paid for. They wouldn’t want to lower that fee and they certainly do not want a fair subscription market working against those cash cows. They still need to address that as soon as possible as it is working against Substack’s best interest in the long term by appealing to a wider array of readers, which they will very much need once their reliable revenue streams come to a halt.
Second is that I forgot to add that since one can offer their Substack for free, it does—apart from what I now mentioned above—make the cost minimum peculiar. There are many accounts that have all or most of their writing free that may otherwise charge a couple dollars or so, and Substack is missing out on their cut from that. Some of those writers are prolific and are simply using this as a casual blog, others are doing so because they’re starting out and cannot reasonably have their writing paywalled at such high costs to restrict accruing any readers. So Substack is hindering not only broader growth but their new writers from expanding themselves and aiding Substack in expanding.
All for now.
Tootles.