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Sovereign writers and Substack

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Re: Sovereign writers and Substack

#51

Post by abhinav22 »

bhupy wrote: post #37
abhinav22 wrote: post #30

Substack’s business model doesn’t make sense. They are just using VC money to try and build social platform, but it’s a flawed one at best: - MOST people will not want to pay for articles. Especially in an ever increasing world of subscription payments across tv, music, SaaS, I really don’t see how email newsletters will be high on people’s lists - for the quality writers that people do want to pay, they will eventua…

I guess my questions are: - Does it have to appeal to "MOST" people for it to be a viable dividends-paying business? - Does it have to be the "landing page / YouTube of articles" in order to be a viable dividends-paying business?

Both these questions are related in the sense it reflects how large the audience needs to be to a viable business.

Question is how much VC money has been burnt on it - perhaps it’s bootstrapped well and it can succeed at a much smaller scale; it’s definitely possible.

However in the long run, it’s somewhat of an easily replicable stack / feature set, particularly as I assume that most highly successful writers would want to control their branding and prefer not to be on substack if they could reach the same audience.

Which they likely can’t. Substack’a SEO abilities will be key to its success as that is in many ways it’s main feature (everything else can be replicated by any one of the millions of web developers out there).

In that sense, becoming the landing page of bookworms would be a significant achievement and to answer your question an important goal for any considerable success.

I base this on the fact that it seems like they have spent a fair bit in building the platform and it’s not as bootstrapped / low in capital as it may need to be to be viable as a smaller entity. But I’m guessing very much here!

Is it really that different to hosting blogs, personal websites or to Medium.com? They just have the mailing list feature, but for most that doesn’t work because it takes a long time to build your own mailing list, so the target audience of writers is small.

My 2c

Re: Sovereign writers and Substack

#53

Post by dragonwriter »

ceilingcorner wrote: post #3

Of course things aren’t so simple; Sullivan, like several of the other names on that leaderboard, are, to put it gently, controversial. That he along with other lightning-rod writers ended up on Substack is more a matter of where else would they go? While Substack is portrayed as being a good move for writers and journalists (and certainly it is, financially), I don't think this is actually good for journalism as a w…

> While Substack is portrayed as being a good move for writers and journalists (and certainly it is, financially), I don't think this is actually good for journalism

Certainly what I've seen from writers on substack is much worse than what I've seen from the same writers in traditional publications. It seems to be a great way of catapulting anyone who has achieved even a bit of name recognition into that “doesn’t have to deal with editors/publishers/etc.” phase of their career that's often the quality downfall as ego takes over for many writers, but which has historically been more available to writers doing long-form work.

Re: Sovereign writers and Substack

#54

Post by carlineng »

ceilingcorner wrote: post #16
zpeti wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My perception of old media is that they are doing exactly this, writing click bait things to get clicks and subs. This is true across the board from CNN to NYT to Fox. At least with substack the incentives are not there for daily churn articles, the journalists have independence to publish when they want to, how they want to, worst case they lost subscribers. I think those incentives make them a lot less likely to ma…

Agreed, old media already does this. The question is: does switching to an individual-focused model actually address the underlying issues?

I would argue that yes, the fundamental incentives are different. Traditional media relied on an advertising-based revenue model, that needed to maximize eyeballs to be attractive to advertisers. Substack relies on subscriptions, which can operate at a much smaller scale. Matthew Yglesias's 10k subscribers is not nearly enough to be attractive for an advertiser, but more than enough to support a single writer's subscription business. Through Substack, writers are incentivized to write things they think that people will pay for, not just things they think people will click on.

Re: Sovereign writers and Substack

#55

Post by dragonwriter »

bhupy wrote: post #21
ceilingcorner wrote: post #3

Of course things aren’t so simple; Sullivan, like several of the other names on that leaderboard, are, to put it gently, controversial. That he along with other lightning-rod writers ended up on Substack is more a matter of where else would they go? While Substack is portrayed as being a good move for writers and journalists (and certainly it is, financially), I don't think this is actually good for journalism as a w…

That's what journalism has always been like, save for a few decades in one specific country (the US). The past few decades of supposed "objectivity" and "neutrality" in American journalism were a historical aberration. https://www.wired.com/story/journalism-isnt-dying-its-return...

> While Substack is portrayed as being a good move for writers and journalists (and certainly it is, financially), I don't think this is actually good for journalism

And were neither objective nor neutral, just a close alignment of elite interests reflected in homogeneity.

Re: Sovereign writers and Substack

#56

Post by ceilingcorner »

x0x0 wrote: post #45
ceilingcorner wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just concerned that journalists will become more like celebrities . Less concerned with the cold facts and more with giving their take. Frankly a similar thing has already happened in the art world. Banksy, Jeff Koons, and Damien Hirst are fantastic marketers, not artists.

Was Ted Koppel really a great journalist?

Not the example I'd use. Kronkite is a better one, IMO. That level of straightforwardness is sorely lacking today.

Re: Sovereign writers and Substack

#57

Post by mc32 »

WJW wrote: post #35
mc32 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that raises a question. What will readers value? Will they value rigorous writers who may provide discomfort or engaging writers who write to choirs?

Presumably different audiences will prefer different writers, as they always have.

Yes but like food diet, is junk food more profitable or are staples more profitable?

What should we aim for?

If junk is more profitable, is that okay? Do we all jump on that wagon while the going is good, or do we think a minute about what is more fulfilling?

Re: Sovereign writers and Substack

#58

Post by abhinav22 »

ghaff wrote: post #50
abhinav22 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think once the novelty wears off and people start seeing how many subscriptions they are on, they will move to consolidated packages covering multiple writers, like Netflix for writing. Which already exists in the sense of Medium.com Everything reverts to the mean and your point is valid - we shouldn’t expect one form of writing to have abnormally high returns to effort ratio for too long, unless there is a general…

I could absolutely see an aggregator model, where the quasi-publisher maybe even provides some degree of editorial support at the copyediting level. The question then becomes though if the $100 or so/year which still seems to me to be the ceiling for something like this is sufficient to support a stable of writers.

I guess how different will that be to the current subscription model for premium newspapers like WSJ, NYT, FT etc?

Perhaps it could result in the rise of “micro magazines” where a few writers combine and create their own joined content vs being forced to being part of a larger bureaucratic organization.

Or readers could pick and choose a selection for their bundle.

Definitely can expect to see some disruption in the market!

Re: Sovereign writers and Substack

#59

Post by tablespoon »

ceilingcorner wrote: post #3

Of course things aren’t so simple; Sullivan, like several of the other names on that leaderboard, are, to put it gently, controversial. That he along with other lightning-rod writers ended up on Substack is more a matter of where else would they go? While Substack is portrayed as being a good move for writers and journalists (and certainly it is, financially), I don't think this is actually good for journalism as a w…

> I don't know about you, but I don't want the tactics of Kim Kardashian to be the model of a future journalist.

I don't think something like Substack could even support journalism. Sure, it could support various kinds of punditry, which is often confused for journalism, but beat journalism is probably too boring and investigative journalism produces on too irregular of a schedule.

Re: Sovereign writers and Substack

#60

Post by ghaff »

abhinav22 wrote: post #58
ghaff wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could absolutely see an aggregator model, where the quasi-publisher maybe even provides some degree of editorial support at the copyediting level. The question then becomes though if the $100 or so/year which still seems to me to be the ceiling for something like this is sufficient to support a stable of writers.

I guess how different will that be to the current subscription model for premium newspapers like WSJ, NYT, FT etc? Perhaps it could result in the rise of “micro magazines” where a few writers combine and create their own joined content vs being forced to being part of a larger bureaucratic organization. Or readers could pick and choose a selection for their bundle. Definitely can expect to see some disruption in the…

It's different in that there's a different level of editorial control--though it's not that different from the op-ed page.

There are other examples, albeit ad-supported ones. One of the tech pubs used to have a blog network of outside writers. (They eventually dropped this as they became less and less comfortable with outside people writing under their brand; this was also a period when orgs were pulling back from their own people having strong personal brands on their sites.) Back to the print days, many tech pubs had a stable of regular columnists. A lot of Forbes blogs are third-parties.

It's not an unreasonable model. The question, as with many things, is what the economics look like.

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