“Also, I started getting more paid assignments elsewhere, and it didn’t make a lot of sense to keep putting stuff on Substack,” she said.īut Substack’s biggest conflict has been over content moderation. Most users have struggled to support themselves by writing exclusively on the platform and instead use their earnings to supplement other paychecks.Įlizabeth Spiers, a Democratic digital strategist and journalist, said she gave up her Substack last year because she did not have enough time or paying readers to justify her long weekly essays. Oster’s primary sources of income remain her teaching and her books much of her newsletter revenue goes toward editing and support services. “Substack has become certainly a bigger part of the media landscape than I had ever thought it would be,” she said.īut Dr. The company also offers hefty advances to a small group of writers, whose identities it refuses to divulge. Publishing on Substack is free, but writers who charge for subscriptions pay 10 percent of their revenue to Substack and 3 percent to its payment processor, Stripe. “This is a way for Substack to draft off of their popularity to build an alternative revenue model that entails readers paying for Substack first, and publishers second, instead of the other way around,” Mr. “Right from the start, we’ve been intending for the company to do more than just provide subscription publishing tools,” Hamish McKenzie, a co-founder and the chief operating officer, wrote about the app.īut as Substack evolves beyond newsletters, it risks looking like another social network or news publisher - which could make it less appealing for writers.īen Thompson, whose tech-focused Stratechery newsletter inspired Substack, wrote last month that Substack has gone from being a “Faceless Publisher” behind the scenes to trying to put “the Substack brand front-and-center,” building up its app as a destination on the backs of writers. In an interview at Substack’s office in downtown San Francisco, its co-founders spoke in sweeping statements about the “grand Substack theory” and “master plan.” Chris Best, the chief executive, described a desire to “shift how we experience culture on the internet” and to bring “art into the world.” Executives hope to eventually take the company - which has raised more than $82 million and is said to be valued at $650 million - public.īut to maintain that growth, Substack executives say, the company must offer more than newsletters. (The company won’t disclose the number of free subscribers.) A hiring spree hopes to net more than a dozen engineers, product managers and other specialists. Paid subscriptions to its hundreds of thousands of newsletters exploded to more than one million late last year from 50,000 in mid-2019. The good news for the company, five years old this summer, is that it is still growing. “Substack is at a pivot point where it needs to think about what it’s going to be when it grows up,” said Nikki Usher, an associate journalism professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. And many popular writers left, such as the associate English professor Grace Lavery and the climate journalists Mary Annaïse Heglar and Amy Westervelt, often complaining about the company’s moderation policy or the pressure to constantly deliver. Consumers who loaded up on newsletters during the pandemic began to scale back. Tech giants, news outlets and other companies have released competing newsletter platforms in the past year. Depending on whom you talk to, those challenges are either standard start-up growing pains or threats to the company’s future. Flush with venture money, the start-up was said to be “ the media future.”īut now, Substack finds itself no longer a wunderkind but a company facing a host of challenges. Not long ago, Substack haunted mainstream media executives, poaching their star writers, luring their readers and, they feared, threatening their viability. “I looked at a few options that people were talking about.” She now pays $780 a year to publish through Ghost, but said she still made roughly the same in subscriptions. Han moved her newsletter, We, The Citizens, to a competing service. She also didn’t like earning $20,000 in subscription revenue, and then giving up $2,600 in fees to Substack and its payment processor. The hands-off content moderation policy, which allowed transphobic and anti-vaccine language, did not sit well with her. She disliked how the platform portrayed itself as a haven for independent writers with fewer resources while offering six-figure advances to several prominent white men. They just aren’t enough to outweigh the downsides. There are things that the newsletter writer Kirsten Han misses about Substack.
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