Why My hi, tech. Newsletter Stays Free
I received some self-congratulatory emails from Substack recently about the milestones they have hit.
Apparently, more than 500,000 people pay for at least one Substack subscription each month. Paying subscribers now make up 5-10% of total Substack readers.
As a writer on Substack, I know very well that they are always keen to convince us to “go paid”. There are buttons everywhere to turn on paid subscriptions and they routinely send messages that make it sound so simple:
“If you can convince a thousand people to subscribe for $5 a month, you’ll make more than $50,000 a year.”
(1000 * 5) * 12 = 60000, so why didn’t he say “you’ll make $60,000 a year”?
That’s more convincing than “more than $50,000”, no?
But hey, that’s why they make the big bucks. More than $50,000 a year more than me, I’m sure.
Personally, this back-of-a-cigarette-packet argument has not been too persuasive.
If we leave aside my huge doubt that anyone would pay for this anyway, it all seems much more stressful than the sales pitch would have you believe.
Vanity Fair had a great article recently about the difficulties some paid Substack writers face.
For example:
What if you only have a few hundred paying subscribers and one day, you decide to give it up? How do you refund everyone?
How do you balance newsletter-ing with your other work commitments? At what stage do you go “all-in” on writing?
What if your paid subscribers are overly demanding and they want you to go in a direction you’d rather avoid?
How do you deal with the rejection of paying subscribers who cancel?
There are bigger problems out there, I know, and I am certainly lucky I can make time to write this and still have the option not to charge.
Yet these are still some of the points I have considered too.
When I have asked for feedback on this newsletter (and this is why I stopped asking for feedback), I would routinely hear that it should have:
More bullet points (Happy?!)
Five key takeaways for marketers 😭
Lots more about [niche topic or industry that only I care about]
Lots less about [any topic that is not my specific niche]
Along with all the genuinely useful, constructive feedback I have had too. 🤓
Jokes aside, there has been a lot more of the constructive feedback and that is a rarity. From what other writers say, the negative usually outweighs the positive and it can be challenging to continue.
In the Vanity Fair article, they speak to numerous successful Substack writers and they all say that at some stage they have considered giving up. Or “burning it all to the ground” as one writer, who has sold his newsletter to The Verge, dramatically puts it.
The challenge with Substack’s hyper-individualistic model is that to make it work, you need to do whatever the market wants. It’s fine saying that anyone can write about anything on here and make “more than $50,000”, but reality suggests that’s not what happens.
The top 10 writers on Substack generate $20 million in annual revenue.
I took a look at the top 10s for different categories and it was heartening. First, because they’re not particularly high-quality (hey, it’s the competition), but also because they are pleasantly varied.
People do seem able to write about culture, philosophy, and technology in the same newsletter, for example, rather than sticking to one topic. Substack frees us from the shackles of SEO and its keyword-driven, monolithic posts.
However, many of the top Substack writers brought an existing audience with them from other publications. Substack offers generous salaries and benefits to high-profile writers.
It is much more difficult to start from scratch on Substack and there are few tools for marketing within the platform. I’d be surprised if I had attracted even one new reader from Substack and yes, I should probably look a little closer to home to figure out why.
This imbalance between the top 1% and The Rest is similar to what is happening on Twitch.
As reported in The Guardian this week:
“according to recently leaked Twitch data, the top 1% of streamers on its platform received more than half of the $889m (£660m) it paid out to creators last year; three quarters of the rest made $120 (£89) or less. Millions made nothing at all.”
Substack has also become a home for some “deplatformed” writers that were kicked off Twitter or Facebook. It claims it is going beyond the ad-supported attention economy on those social networks, but Substack replaces that model with something still precarious - even pernicious.
This is some of what Substack said in their recent announcement:
“Over the last four years, we have been building tools that make it easier than at any time in history for writers to connect with readers directly and make meaningful money.”
If we can leave aside the beautifully oxymoronic “meaningful money”, let’s take a look at a historical example of Substack-style “liberation” for writers.
⏰ I’d like to take you back to the late 17th century in England.
The Civil War was over, the smell of imported spices was in the air, and something we now know as “science” was taking shape.
In 1695, luminaries like Locke argued that the Licensing Act (enacted in 1662) should be repealed. Under this act, the Stationers’ Company had a monopoly over all publishing and the King could punish any unlicensed publishers with imprisonment.
In effect, it functioned as a ban on “heretical, seditious, schismatical, or offensive books”. Just about everything, then.
As a result, the only real newspaper in town was the London Gazette. But still, think about those readership figures!
The Licensing Act was allowed to lapse in 1695 when parliament refused to renew it. It was only officially repealed in the 19th century but its powers dissolved in the late 17th century.
What happened next?
Well, quite a lot.
In the early 18th century there was a proliferation of new publications. Chief among them was The Spectator (founded 1711), which covered politics, society, and culture, with the noble aim of “universal truth and betterment”.
The modern-day Spectator, about which this publication has little of praise to say, takes its name from the original 1711 Spectator (if not its exalted aims).
There are some intriguing details about this newspaper:
It had very few named authors. Now partly that was down to the lingering threat of litigation, but it’s also rather telling. The aim was to be an objective observer, a spectator, of modern life. A far cry from today’s YouTube and TikTok generation, eh? The gaze focused outwards, not inwards.
And yet, that definite article The is tantalising, isn’t it? The paper is not A spectator, just any old bloke with an opinion; but rather The spectator, singular. An arbiter of taste to whom the readers should pay attention. A far cry from today’s Twitter experts, eh?
It spawned hundreds of imitators across Europe, as many other countries followed England’s lead and reduced their press restrictions. (To some extent - many were still very strict, including France and Austria. Modern-day Germany and Italy, which had much looser governance across their city and state boundaries, found it harder to police publishers. What was illegal in one city could be legal in another city down the road.)
L’Espectateur Français was founded in Paris by the superb playwright Marivaux.
The Spectator in England offered paid lessons in politeness. People could go along for week-long courses and leave with the Spectator seal of approval on their manners.
The Spectator was only one of thousands of new pamphlets and newspapers in England alone. Everyone was having a go at this newfangled obsession.
This even led to the first Copyright Act (1710) to help authors take some ownership over their intellectual property.
There was also a broader understanding that this shared knowledge should be channelled towards the social and moral good.
Such talk gets short shrift these days and many would wonder what material good lies in talk of “morals”. In a western world that has elected both Donald Trump and “Boris” Johnson, it is hard to say we have made any progress on the moral front. Defenders of these characters will often say the “other side” is just as bad and therein lies the problem. Standards are so low that we no longer dare expect better.
The idea back then was really to use moral insight to make practical improvements to human life.
It was also seen as a human right to exercise one’s reason, with the expectation that if one did so it would be to the benefit of all.
Of course, we know now that society fell short of these lofty ambitions. Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries was some distance from Utopia.
Books were the preserve of the upper classes and for all of this humanistic esprit de corps, life remained rather brutal for most. The ensuing centuries of technological progress have lifted many more out of these conditions. But what if we married that advancement with a belief in the betterment of man’s moral condition?
In fact, the phrase “the social fabric” was born in the late 17th century, albeit only to highlight that the fabric was coming apart.
After a period of rapid expansion, most of the Spectator-style journals closed. The Spectator itself did carry on gamely - and impressively - until the 19th century.
As it happened, the newfound press freedoms led to consolidation around just a few newspapers.
Today we are overloaded with opinion, yet we celebrate ignorance.
Social networks are a vehicle for vitriol, but the roots of anti-intellectualism started growing long before. In a world of overabundance (for us lucky few), apathy has created a nihilistic relativism. Everyone’s opinion is equal, but the ones we agree with are more equal than the others. And we can construct a cocooned reality from our position in this flattened hierarchy.
Substack does not set out with virtuous intentions. The phrase “meaningful money” is as close as our system will get to a moralising mission these days. Substack does also send out round-ups of new publications that readers may have missed, in an attempt to broaden their perspective.
Yet its vision of “millions of creators and billions of readers”, no doubt targeted at securing more VC investment, belies the truth and history of this industry.
Unless Substack takes action, starting from its business model and working outwards from there towards the platform’s features, it will follow the same path as so many others.
The freedom to use our reason and to write is fundamental, but we have no right to a living from it. Without support, we are all just writing pamphlets and hoping for the best.
By oversimplifying this message, Substack can lead writers into a trap. History shows, wealth will consolidate with the few who can attract most attention.
And I guess, that’s why hi, tech. stays free.