21–30 of 54 posts
Still no custom domains, so you don’t really own your audience or your content on Substack.
Even if you had your own domain, their ToS would prohibit you from collecting email addresses of "your" audience. Because in their lawyer's opinion, it's not yours.
The difference is the offering towards the audience. What are readers willing to pay for? Content published on a blog or in a newsletter isn't inherently different: it's short pieces conveying thought, opinions, observations,... So, why would anyone be more willing pay for newsletter content rather then content posted on the Web?
There's the simple convenience of having content you subscribed to delivered to your inbox, rather then having to invest time and effort scouring/curating it yourself from the Web (bookmarks, closed platforms where you need to register, etc.). Content just lands at regular intervals in your mailbox, end of story.
There could be a perception that your Inbox is your own personal space as opposed to the Web as this foreign place with inherent dangers to which you have to expose yourself just to get to the good bits. Authors to newsletters become your guests, whereas you are their guest when you visit their websites. So, I think a sense of agency and being in control are big drivers here.
The sense of exclusivity of being part of a fledgling tribe of readers to a small publisher who knows how to appeal to that sense. Receiving an e-mail in your Inbox is as different from visiting a website, as is receiving a personally addressed snail mail is from going out and reading newspapers in the library.
I'm also curious as to how the e-mail / newsletter model impacts Substack's operations. Unlike 'traditional' social media, millions of visitors don't flock a central platform 24/7/356 which comes with hard infrastructure problems. I'm well aware that there will be different challenges that need to be met, but pushing content to individual mailboxes is, in essence, a hybrid form of decentralization and distributed publishing combined with a centralized platform for curation and subscription.
Another assumption I'm going to make is that revenue isn't spread evenly across all publishers on the platform. I suppose it's more of a long tail with a typical Pareto kind of distribution. 20% of the writers account for 80% of the revenue and then there's a sharp drop off. Thing is, I suspect inactive publishers don't consume much if any resources: e-mails in an Inbox have a rather short half-life as opposed to the (perceived) need of keeping content available over HTTP which brings additional running costs with little to no added value.
It's interesting to note that Substack isn't the only offering in this space. A direct competitor came to my mind: https://www.getrevue.co/
Personally, given the pre-dominant promotional nature of newsletters, I'm pleasantly surprised how this mode of writing/authoring has been adopted, once again, by budding writers and publishers. After all, journalling via mail has a long historical pedigree. It's great to see how the analogue concept finds traction in the digital age as well.
Can those people actually make a living wage from it, or are they "entrepreneurs" like all those Instagram "influenzas"?
(Ditto e-books or similar information products, by the way.)
Turning to the question of paid newsletters: I'm socially constrained from pointing at examples, both because in some cases I have non-public information and in some cases I would be perceived as having non-public information, and because there are heady professional considerations, but: there are definitely, definitely some people who sell information professionally who break the top end of the pay scale for people who are generally described as writers in more traditional media jobs.
Another way to put it is "I'm pretty sure I could sell 1,000 subscriptions at $20 a month within 6 weeks if I wanted that to be my job", which is not competitive with other things to do with my time but probably clears most reasonable bars for stable professional options. I think I'm very far from having the largest collection of people who'd pay to read my writing, the best writing, the most engaged userbase, the most lucrative decision points that users routinely apply my advice against, etc.
A big open question for the business model is whether one thinks there are hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of people who could hit that bar (and, I suppose, whether one could tempt them from other options). Hundreds feels clearly wrong to me as an upper bound.
Substack has been successful in creating buzz among the media crowd, and there's definitely a business there riding the trend toward subscriptions in the media biz, but unfortunately taking on $17M in VC money has set them up for a disappointing end. Here's how this plays out. The successful writers on Substack will eventually leave the platform for more control over their audience and lower fees (there's a reason Be…
Except the entire model of substack is based on writers not having access even to their audience's mail addresses.
Newsletters are the easiest way to retain readers since it just pops in their inbox -- if the writing is good and/or specialized. Good design also really helps. When I managed the newsletters for a New York urban planning nonprofit, we averaged 23% open rates. Another good hook is when issues don't have a public web archive, or it's paywalled. I saw the bundling mentioned in the Digiday article with the "Everything"…
I'm curious, how do you measure open rates for a newsletter? Many email clients prevent external content from loading as a security measure, thus precluding any tracking. Do you adjust the final figure to account for resulting underreporting? Or do you reckon more clients load external content than I think?
Still no custom domains, so you don’t really own your audience or your content on Substack.
If you want your own custom domain with membership features, then Ghost is probably your best bet. It has built-in member features, open-source and can also be hosted on their Pro platform. They also don't take a cut from your memberships.
Haven't we learned anything from Medium?
Substack has been successful in creating buzz among the media crowd, and there's definitely a business there riding the trend toward subscriptions in the media biz, but unfortunately taking on $17M in VC money has set them up for a disappointing end. Here's how this plays out. The successful writers on Substack will eventually leave the platform for more control over their audience and lower fees (there's a reason Be…
> Here's how this plays out. The successful writers on Substack will eventually leave the platform for more control over their audience and lower fees (there's a reason Ben Thompson isn't on Substack). Except the entire model of substack is based on writers not having access even to their audience's mail addresses.
“References and supplemental video content available on my website at ...”
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Here's how this plays out. The successful writers on Substack will eventually leave the platform for more control over their audience and lower fees (there's a reason Ben Thompson isn't on Substack). Except the entire model of substack is based on writers not having access even to their audience's mail addresses.
well, you may not have their address, but you have their inbox. “References and supplemental video content available on my website at ...”
Getting paying subscribers to change their subscription method is huge friction and risk of churn, the more revenue you already have established on substack the bigger the risk cost of trying to move away, aka the boiled frog business model.
Substack has been successful in creating buzz among the media crowd, and there's definitely a business there riding the trend toward subscriptions in the media biz, but unfortunately taking on $17M in VC money has set them up for a disappointing end. Here's how this plays out. The successful writers on Substack will eventually leave the platform for more control over their audience and lower fees (there's a reason Be…
Interesting that "The Browser" is on Substack (one of the top 5 newsletters) but the affiliated and more recent "The Viewer" is on Ghost.
Of course Ghost still has a relatively small ecosystem compared to Wordpress which I think is why Ben Thompson still expressed a preference for a Wordpress based setup.