…about & very much hoping not to get sucked into the black hole that is ad-supported ens***ified clickbait eyeball-glueing ad-supported media. What are its prospects?….
Can SubStack as a singular business and SubStacks as individuals thrive over the medium run? Perhaps. My view is it does best when it normalizes the tip jar and resists the attention casino. Perhaps some combination of teaserage, patronage, and premiumage form a stable orbit for writers. The durable path may be a blend of open commons, voluntary patronage, and adjacent premium offerings. Plus the continued maintenance by SubStack of exit paths, so that the credible threat of exit keeps platform incentives aligned with user success.
This truly is a three‑body problem: writers (who want sustainable income and control), readers (who want open access and trustworthy curation), and investors (who want growth and an eventual payoff). Successful resolution depends on management staying anchored to the core—email/blog/tip‑jar—while resisting the siren song of ens***tifying discoverability and revenue sources.
I run across Harriet, saying the obvious:
Harriet: The Joy of Old Books <https://substack.com/@thejoyofoldbooks/note/c-165523207>: ‘How I wish Substack worked -You pay a single subscription to Substack each month. -This gains you access to e.g. 5 paid newsletters (different tiers if you wanted more!). -Every billing period you can swap out which newsletters you want to read. -The writers you choose get the appropriate percentage of your payment.
Liz Ryan: Groups of writers could get together under an Editor-in-Chief to provide varied content for a daily, paid-for Substack publication aimed at the mass market. I have a name for this idea. We could call it a ‘newspaper’.
Harriet: Ha! I’m in if you are….
Neena Maiya: Or have different ways of paying: A monthly subscription. Or readers can “buy” a newsletter whenever they see something they want to read. The way we bought magazines from a newsstand. I used to buy a Vanity Fair one month…next month I’d buy Vogue, another month another magazine…it depended on what was there that I wanted to read.
Harriet: Yes I would love the option to buy individual newsletters!
Edith: It just doesn’t work paying £6 a month to one writer, especially in this economy
Harriet: No, and it’s such a shame as there are so many great writers on here I’d like to support, but I just can’t afford to subscribe to everyone…
These are the considerations that drive most internet enterprises into ad-supported business models. Renting out people’s eyeballs to people who have something to sell or who want to hack brains feels much much less painful than paying £6=$10 a month, and you make it up in scale. The problem has turned out to be that this brings all of the malevolent clickbait incentives into the system.
As I see it, if SubStack is to be successful—and if individual SubStacks are to be successful—it will require a lot of hard work and luck:
There are, I think, three poles that making any singular SubStack self-sustaining can be attracted to:
They are:
Teaserage: wall most pieces, but with initial teasers, but let a meaningful minority through as “whole‑post peeks.” This might gain paid conversions while preserving a substantial sample of work as commons. The key would then be consistency and clarity about what remains free and why.
Patronage: keep the main garden open; make a direct appeal that the free commons is valuable and worth sustaining. The normalized tip jar (and annuals) become the fulcrum of viability. This might work best when your work is public‑good‑ish—analysis, teaching, civic discourse—and you foreground that mission.
Premiumage: unwall the core but offer bonus formats that are high‑value to your top decile or so—e.g., AMAs, seminars, curated link roundups, early drafts, book clubs, data packs. “Premium” shouldn’t cannibalize the intellectual core; it should be adjacent value that nudges the already‑engaged over the pay line.
Oscillation: the audience is not static; writers can rebalance month to month across the three poles as needs and signals change. The system is dynamic; treat prices, paywalls, and perks as policy instruments, not doctrine. Or you can oscillate month-by-month: appealing to a different group for financial value each month, and relying of stickiness to more than offset uncertainty and lack of clarity.
The big question is whether and what balances work for what audiences, and if any form of this is stable for writers and for SubStack given the malign attractiveness of ad-supported model for those willing to accept the pressures toward en****ification that it produces.
The core product remains a weblog, with email delivery, and a normalized tip jar; plus thoughtful features that reduce day‑to‑day friction for writers. And there is the hope of network and discoverability effects as a source and creator of reach.
There are, however, discoverability limits: most readers come via reputation, cross‑links, social networks, and writer shout‑outs — not the platform’s global feed. That points to investing in peer networks, guest posts, and cross‑stack recommendations rather than hoping an algorithm will bless you. And granularity matters to price‑sensitive readers; accommodating it broadens reach.
Is this sustainable? Suppose that we hold to a core belief that ad-supported is Satan himself come to earth to reign in person What then can we say about the prospects for the long-term success of SubStack, and of SubStacks, for those who do not have well-paying day jobs or comfortable retirement or other capital-income based livelihoods already?
In my view, SubStack’s core value remains “normalizing the tip jar”—lowering friction and enabling a semi‑patronage commons where much remains unpaywalled, while a minority of readers voluntarily subsidize the whole. This is what earlier blogging lacked. And this is why Substack has a chance at durable equilibrium beyond ad markets.
Threats? The big threat is probably venture capital. Raising money creates expectations for “a large exit”. That naturally pushes management toward high‑variance bets on the powerful extractive attention economy. The second threat is the flip side of successful discoverability is the “Nazi Bar” problem. Any broad and successful discoverability layer quickly attracts bad‑faith outrage and extremist content; the platform then faces an unpalatable choice between being gamed by engagement hacks, or erecting heavy editorial/ideological filters. Thus “wide‑net” discoverability is inherently brittle.
To summarize: Ads make scaling easy, but they do so by hacking attention and hence ens***tification. Substack’s potential moat is refusing to let its orbit get sucked into that black hole, and using that commitment to attract a group of writers and perforers and readers and watchers who want something very different from brain-hacking clickbait short form.
But how to stabilize? Perhaps: Treat paywalls, prices, and perks as adjustable dials, not doctrine. Use teaserage to sample, patronage to fund the commons, and premiumage to nudge high‑value readers. Accept that wide‑net discovery is brittle; invest instead in writer‑to‑writer recommendations, guest posts, and reader networks. Venture capital should fund refinement, not identity‑changing gambles. If management strays, the best writers must be able to leave. With product discipline and a commitment to public reason, Substack can sustain thoughtful work without the attention‑economy abyss.
On balance, I am cautiously hopeful, but only if Substack hews to its original thesis: Above all, keep the mission: push back against clickbait social‑media “rage‑engagement slop” and cultivate a rational infosphere. Substack prospers only if it enhances public reason and makes it easier for thoughtful work to find and keep its audience. That’s potential the moat—not ads, not viral video, not lock‑in.
And if it avoids becoming the Nazi Bar.
As a substack consumer I'm driven by more than just a single concern.
I want some substacks to succeed (Krugman's comes to mind) in their current mainly free form because I think many could benefit from his perspective.
I'm unsure if this is a wise choice but I'll continue for a few years.
Personally, I'd love to be able to pay per article. "Teaserage" as you put it (in different form) works for me.
I'm curious to see how this new media model works out as the credit cycle nears its end stages.
"I am cautiously hopeful." The triumph of hope over experience, as the saying goes.