Be Less Trashy, Substack.
This is some bullshit, Substack.
Spencer Ackerman recently moved his (excellent) newsletter, Forever Wars, from Substack.com to Ghost.io. He explained the decision to do so last month. It’s very reasonable. He had a contract with Substack. It ended. He moved to a competitor that offered the same services at lower costs.
Substack didn’t like him leaving, and particularly didn’t appreciate him explaining why he left. They couldn’t retaliate against him. So they retaliated against his editor, Sam Thielman. And that’s some serious bullshit.
It’s also a dumb business decision. Let’s discuss.
A year or two ago, Substack was being hailed as the “Future of Journalism.” It hit all the right notes — the Ben Smith NYT media column, the New Yorker think-piece by Anna Wiener, the Kara Swisher interview, the constant drumbeat of big-name journalists and media personalities leaving newsrooms to start their own newsletter. It felt like the return of the blogosphere.
But the thing is, Substack isn’t really the Future of Journalism. (spoiler alert: journalism as a public good and in the public interest has a spotty future unless it has a source of robust public funding. There is no tech silver bullet.) That’s already becoming clear. Some of the most popular writers have been moving back to legacy media, launching newsletters at The Atlantic and the New York Times. A few months ago, the company canceled its latest fundraising round.
Substack is just journalism infrastructure.
Substack is basically just a blogging platform stapled together with an email distribution list and an optional funding mechanism. It works really well. It is quite good at what it does. But there are two fundamental problems for the company:
(1) it is not unique infrastructure. There isn’t some breakthrough that no other platform could compete with. The more Substack succeeds, the more the company should expect to attract competitors that offer basically the same service with a few slight differentiators.
(2) there are no big returns from network effects. If Substack corners the market on newsletter-writers, that doesn’t make Substack exponentially more valuable. Cornering the market on newsletter-writers does not create a serious barrier to entry for potential competitors that want to break into the blog+email distribution list+subscription business.
Substack probably has to talk a big game to convince investors to keep funneling money into the company. (And hey, I’m fine with that. I’d rather them throw money at Substack than at Adam Neumann’s latest vibes-based real estate scheme.)
But, if the founders are smart, they should realize that its actual future is as a service provider, not a media empire. The company’s stretch goal is to become the next Wordpress, not the next YouTube.
And the thing is, if the company is providing a solid-but-not-unique service to writers, then the very worst thing the company can do is be shitty to its writers and editors!
Purely from a business standpoint, the company’s future hinges on being reliable and not-a-pain-in-the-ass. Lots of writers use Substack. They don’t like everything the company does. But they’re not going to abandon it in droves unless (a) it doesn’t work well or (b) the management are a bunch of assholes. These are the tiny returns of first-mover advantage. Writers will mostly stick around unless you give them a reason to leave.
I’m not planning to leave Substack anytime soon.
My blog/newsletter is free. I don’t make money from Substack, and they don’t make money from me. The software platform works well. I’ve figured out how to use it for all the things I want to use it for. I mostly write these posts late at night, after my kids have gone to bed, on the rare evenings when I have anything left in the tank. Porting to a different platform would be a headache, more trouble than it is worth at the moment.
But, if I’m gonna stick around with this service provider, I’m also gonna speak up when they act shitty toward their actual writers and editors.
Substack isn’t the magical tech company ushering in the Future of Journalism. It’s just infrastructure for digital writing. The infrastructure is good, and the company can succeed if it maintains good infrastructure while not being complete fucking assholes to the people using it to make a living.
Over the weekend, Substack’s leadership decided to be complete fucking assholes to people who use it to make a living.
It’s unclassy, and it’s bad business.
They should knock it off.
Great observation. Just the latest Movable Type, Gray Matter....