Happy Nice Mall

There are things that newsletter writer Kirsten Han missed about Substack. They just aren’t enough to get over the negativity.

He disliked how the platform portrayed itself as a haven for less-resourced independent writers while offering six-figure advances to several prominent white men. The hands-on content moderation policy that allowed transphobic and anti-vaccine language didn’t quite suit him. He also disliked making $20,000 in subscription revenue and then giving up $2,600 in fees to Substack and its payment processor.

Last year, Ms. Han ported her newsletter, Us, Citizens, to a competing service. He now pays $780 a year to stream through Ghost, but he said he still does more or less the same with subscriptions.

“It wasn’t very difficult,” he said. “I looked at a few options people were talking about.”

Not long ago, Substack haunted mainstream media executivesThey hunted down their star writers, lured their readers, and feared they threatened their viability. Your venture, which is overflowing with venture money,media future”

Now, however, Substack no longer sees itself as a marvel, but as a company facing a series of challenges. Depending on who you talk to, these challenges are either standard initial growth pains or threats to the company’s future.

Tech giants, news organizations and other companies launched competing newsletter platforms last year. Consumers who uploaded to newsletters during the pandemic began to scale down. And many popular writers left, such as associate professor of English Grace Lavery and climate journalists Mary Annaise Heglar and Amy Westerveltoften complain about the company’s moderation policy or the constant pressure to deliver.

“Substack is at a crossroads where she has to think about what will happen when she grows up,” said Nikki Usher, assistant professor of journalism at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

The good news for the company, which is five years old this summer, is that the company is still growing. Paid subscriptions to hundreds of thousands of newsletters exceeded one million late last year, from 50,000 in mid-2019. (The company won’t reveal the number of free subscribers.) A recruiting spree hopes to clear more than a dozen engineers, product managers, and other professionals. Executives hope to eventually take the company, which has raised more than $82 million and is said to be worth $650 million.

But Substack executives say the company needs to deliver more than just newsletters to sustain that growth.

In an interview at Substack’s downtown San Francisco office, its co-founders gave extensive explanations about the “big Substack theory” and “master plan.” CEO Chris Best described his desire to “change the way we experience culture on the internet” and “bring art to the world”.

“Substack is like this alternate universe on the internet with all its passion,” he said.

In practice, this means that Substack will be more of a multimedia community, not just a distribution channel for print newsletters. Managers want users to create “personal media empires” using text, video and audio and communicate with subscribers via expanded networks. comments May contain GIF images and profiles for readers. This week Substack announced new tools for writers to suggest other newsletters.

Co-founder and chief technology officer Jairaj Sethi talked about his vision of subscribers gathering around the writers like fans at a concert.

“There are some pretty cool types of bonds if you just give them a place where they can come together and interact with each other,” he said.

In March, Substack introduced an app that consolidates subscriptions into one place, rather than distributing them separately via email. The company this month podcast expansion.

“From the very beginning, we planned for the company to do more than just provide subscription publishing tools,” said Hamish McKenzie, co-founder and director of operations. about the app.

But as Substack moves beyond newsletters, it risks appearing like just another social network or news publisher – which could make it less attractive to writers.

Ben Thompson, who inspired the tech-focused Stratechery newsletter Substack, wrote last month that Substack was trying to stop being a “Faceless Publisher” behind the scenes and put the “Substack brand front and center” on its app. the goal on the writer’s back.

“This is a way for Substack to leverage their popularity to create an alternative revenue model that requires readers to pay for Substack first and publishers to pay publishers instead,” Mr Thompson wrote.

Publishing on Substack is free, but authors who charge for subscriptions pay 10 percent of their revenue to Substack and 3 percent to payment processor Stripe. The company also offers major advances to a small group of writers whose identities it refuses to disclose.

The bottom line has one major difference from most other media companies: It refuses to chase advertising dollars. “You gotta chew my corpse“Mr. McKenzie once wrote. ‘The antithesis of what Substack wanted to be,’ said Mr. Best.

“If we got into this game through greed or mistake, we would be effectively competing with TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook of the world, which is just not the kind of competition we want to be in,” Best added. .

This means that Substack continues to rely on its subscription revenue. Subscribers pay more than $20 million a year to read Substack’s top 10 authors. The most successful is a professor of history. Heather Cox Richardson’s photo., with more than one million subscribers. Knight novelist among other notable writers Salman Rushdie, punk poet laureate Patti Smith and Eisner Award-winning comics writer James Tynion IV.

Emily Osteran author and professor of economics at Brown University, and managing the pandemic with childrenHe joined Substack in 2020 after Mr. McKenzie hired him. his newsletter Parent DataIt has over 100,000 subscribers, including over 1,000 paid readers.

“Substack has definitely become a bigger part of the media world than I thought,” he said.

However, Dr. Oster’s primary sources of income continue to be his teaching and books; Most of the newsletter revenue goes to editing and support services. Many users struggled to make a living just by typing on the platform and instead used their earnings to supplement other paychecks.

Elizabeth Spiers, a Democratic digital strategist and journalist, said she gave up on the Bottom Stack last year because she didn’t have enough time or didn’t pay readers to justify her long weekly articles.

“Also, I’ve started getting more paid assignments elsewhere, and it didn’t make much sense to keep putting stuff in Substack,” he said.

However, Substack’s biggest conflict has been over content moderation.

McKenzie, a former journalist, describes Substack as an antidote to the attention economy, a “better place” where writers are “rewarded for different things rather than throwing tomatoes at their competitors.”

Critics say the platform recruits (and thus supports) culture war provocateurs and is a hotbed for hate speech and misinformation. Last year, many writers left Substack for its inaction on transphobic content. This year, Digital Anti-Hate Center I said Anti-vaccine newsletters on Substack Earning at least $2.5 million in annual revenue. Tech writer Charlie Warzel quit his job at The New York Times to write a Substack newsletter. told the platform as a place for “internecine internet cattle”.

Substack has resisted pressure to be more selective about what it allows on its platform. Twitter employees and the platform, worried that content moderation policies will be relaxed by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk largest shareholderhas been told don’t hesitate to apply for a job on Substack.

“We don’t want to have a say in saying ‘eat your vegetable’,” said Mr. Best. “If we accept or like everything on Substack, that falls short of what a healthy intellectual climate looks like.”

The bottom pile makes it easy for writers to leave, and defectors have a rapidly growing collection of competitors waiting to greet them.

Last year, newsletter offers excitement, LinkedIn, Facebook, axioms, forbes and one former Condé Nast editor. The Times rolled out multiple newsletters to subscribers-only last year. Mr. Warzel moved the Brain of the Galaxy as part of it from Substack to The Atlantic. pushing newsletters in November.

Billed as a “standalone Substack alternative,” media platform Ghost has a concierge service to help Substack users change their jobs. Middle reduced its editorial releases to follow a more Substack-like model of “supporting independent voices”. ZestworldA new subscription-based comics platform, “Bottom stack without transphobia”

Mr Best said he welcomes the competition.

“The only thing worse than being copied is not being copied,” he said.