In Defense of Substack
Why I Use the Platform
On November 15th, Substack announced an exciting milestone: over “1 million paid subscriptions to publications on” the platform. Founded in 2017, by Jairaj Sethi, Chris Best, and Hamish McKenzie, Substack has quickly grown into a place where writers can thrive. “The top 10 publications collectively bring in more than $20 million a year,” and millions of readers read newsletters on Substack every week. Part newsletter deliverer, part blog, part something-new-entirely, Substack is now an intriguing institution in its own right.
It was founded on a simple, yet revolutionary idea. That people were willing to pay for the writing they consumed online, especially if there weren’t any distracting ads or under-the-table sales of personal data. And that the subscription model would be better than the ad model for all parties involved (except advertisers). At least for some writers, it’s worked.
The very first paid newsletter launched on Substack was Bill Bishop’s Sinocism. In a recent conversation with McKenzie celebrating the 4-year anniversary of Sinocism (and Substack), Bishop revealed that Sinocism “brought in six figures of revenue” shortly after he enabled paid subscriptions. He never looked back and neither did Substack.
A New Vision for the Internet:
On November 8th, Best and McKenzie published a short article laying out their vision for improving the Internet, one Substack directly attempts to implement. Their “new rules” for the Internet undergird Substack’s entire business model.
This model seems simple, yet it represents a radical shift from how Internet has operated for two decades. Here, people pay for what they consume. In exchange, their data won’t be monetized. Nor will they be served up any ads.
Substack deserves partial credit for the growing shift away from an ad-based, attention-economy model of the Internet towards a subscription-based model. Streaming services, paywalled blogs and newspapers, and platforms like Patreon have also contributed. This is one of the most positive trends in digital technology in my lifetime. It empowers creators by facilitating direct relationships with their readers – relationships in which readers happily pay for content they value.
It also promotes healthier online discourse. On most (but not all) Substack publications, the comments sections are characterized by substantive discussion and mutual respect (or at least not outright hostility). Elsewhere (mainstream news sources, YouTube, blogs, etc.) comments sections are often cesspools of the worst that humanity has to offer.
The ad-based model incentivizes clickbait. It’s a contest for eyeballs and quantity of attention, not quality of attention. The quest for clicks drives non-paywalled sites to put out endless streams of crappy content (incendiary headlines, nauseating listicles, etc.). The subscription model empowers writers to focus on producing high-quality work that readers will actually want to pay for and engage with. Both cycles reinforce themselves.
No discussion of Substack would be complete without a word about free speech. The platform’s founders have demonstrated a commitment to free speech, which is borne out by the diversity of viewpoints available on it, as well as by their refusal to bow to outside pressure to deplatform anyone. As I’ll argue today, I believe this is a good thing. However, this commitment to freedom of expression has caused controversy and is one of the primary lines of attack taken by Substack critics, many of whom don’t want the founders to tolerate certain speech.
Why is Substack Controversial?
If Substack is good for writers and for online discourse, why has it come under attack in the last couple years? Surely paid newsletters can’t be that controversial.
There are some who do still like the ad-based model, or who dislike the subscription-based model, or who dislike disruption. But many attacks on Substack have different grounds. Some voices sound threatened, either by Substack’s model, or (more often) by particular writers. These latter sometimes mistake individuals for the institution that hosts them. Or they want that institution to ban particular individuals. A few would simply like to destroy any institution that allows individuals they dislike to operate.
One line of attack is based on equity. Substack doesn’t have enough diverse voices. Or it doesn’t do enough to promote those voices. Or it doesn’t foster a community in which those voices have prominence. These critics point to the fact that most of the top performing publications on Substack are run by white people, most of whom are men.
Other critics complain that Substack is empowering conspiracy theorists. Or rather, that Substack hasn’t removed certain persons (some of whom have been banned from Twitter), who actively lie – or at least throw shade in the direction of misinformation – in their newsletters.
This is true. I won’t link to such individuals to avoid promoting their work, but Substack does have its share of cranks. It also has individuals who may not be fringe themselves, but who give credibility to fringier ideas by hosting conspiracists on podcasts or by “raising questions” about vaccine safety or election fraud.
There’s another line of attack coming primarily from people who either tried Substack for five minutes, or who already have their own preferred method for online moneymaking. This argument boils down to, “It Doesn’t Work.” Meaning, “Substack is not the solution it promises to be for thousands of writers and it will only work for a select few who get in early.”
When someone says that something “doesn’t work,” they usually mean, “it didn’t work for me,” and many of them didn’t really try, or didn’t put in the work necessary to make the thing they disparage work. Versions of this argument may include the line, “Substack is dead,” or “newsletters are dead,” or even “blogging is dead.”
There is another version of which is a little more serious. This version of the argument points to the fact that the vision has not yet panned out completely for every writer on the platform. Generally speaking, those who are successful on Substack already had a large following outside of Substack. To some, this means all that idealistic rhetoric turned out to be a myth. This critique explicitly buys into the premises of Substack’s founders, but argues that the platform has not lived up to those premises in practice.
Related to the above, there are those who describe Substack as a scam because the founders offer advances to certain writers (which are then paid back out of subscription dollars). These critics are either upset that the playing field isn’t level (i.e., that it’s not equitable), or they’re convinced that these advances prove that Substack is another Theranos-style house of cards ready to collapse.
To the latter: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Along similar lines to the “Substack is empowering conspiracy theorists” argument, some critics contend that one of the fundamental premises of Substack – the democratization of media and the flourishing of individual writers – is a bad thing. Critics who take this line tend to either be in traditional media themselves, or to have a strong preference for it. Their argument is that disruption is a problem. The mainstream media, traditional publishing houses, and the other old gatekeepers of information were doing fine. In fact, things were better when information was controlled. Some claim that this disruption – begun by the Internet itself, but accelerated by platforms like Substack – is a threat to democracy (or to truth, or good taste, or institutions worth preserving, etc.).
Finally, some critics don’t like paywalls. Or the policing of intellectual property. “The Internet was supposed to be free!” Right?
All of these arguments have their merits. Some more than others. I’ll respond to each in turn.
It’s Not Equitable:
An article in the Columbia Journalism Review (linked previously) points out that, of the top 25 writers on Substack, “most are white and male.”
(Hilariously, the full line is “most are white and male; several are conservative.” As if this were a red flag. I’d hazard that Substack’s policy of not practicing viewpoint discrimination means that there will be conservatives on the platform. In fact, if there is a real or perceived bias against conservatives in other institutions and on other corners of the Internet, many will flock to a platform that is at least neutral towards them. If there are “several” conservatives in the top 25 writers on Substack, that also means that “several” of the top writers aren’t conservative. So, I’ll confess, I don’t see the problem.)
It’s true that most of the top performers on Substack are white and male. However, this is not some kind of intrinsic feature of the platform. Rather it’s due to the fact that the top publications on Substack tend to be written and produced by people who had existing audiences and strong Twitter engagement. Many of them also happened to be white and male, but not all.
The second most-subscribed publication, Letters from an American, is written by a woman, Heather Cox Richardson. Given that Letters from an American is her solo project, she’s the top performing individual writer on Substack.
The top 10 podcasters on Substack include Glenn Loury, the first Black professor of economics at Harvard, and Katie Herzog (cohost of “Blocked and Reported”) who is a lesbian journalist based in Seattle. Just to continue with the LGBTQ+ community, Glenn Greeenwald, who writes one of the top 10 most-subscribed publications on Substack (and perhaps one of the more controversial), is also openly gay. Andrew Sullivan’s The Weekly Dish cracks the top 10 in the Politics category, and I could list others.
Also, with the exception of Loury, none of these individuals is conservative (although Greenwald has made some common cause with the populist Right since he left the Intercept).
Additionally, there are many Black writers, Asian writers, Muslim writers, and writers from other minority groups on Substack.
However, Clio Chang, author of the CJR piece, raises another concern. She points out that while Substack purports to be neutral, they do put a thumb on the scale by offering some writers cash grants. Chang opens with an anecdote about the struggles of one particular writer, Patrice Peck, who writes Coronavirus News for Black Folks. Chang notes that Peck did not receive a cash grant from Substack.
Chang implies that if Substack puts a thumb on the scale for anyone, the platform should do it to advance equity. She also implies that if too many white men are represented among the top publications (as well as – gasp – conservatives), Substack isn’t doing enough to promote diverse voices.
I’ll stop here to point out that Substack is promoting diverse voices. In fact, in Chang’s article, she mentions that one of the recipients of a grant from Substack (along with a stipend) is Darian Harvin, who writes Beauty IRL. Substack also routinely sends out “What to Read” newsletters, in which they feature and promote particular writers. This fall, they interviewed Isabella Silvers, who writes Mixed Messages, Maya Cade, who writes Black Film Archive, and Joey Akan, who writes Afrobeats Intelligence, among others.
Chang acknowledges that one of the reasons that “the most successful people on Substack have been well-served by existing media power structures” is that Twitter engagement level directly correlates with success on Substack and “it’s hard to earn four-fire-emoji status without having already built up a reputation within established institutions.” (Here I will stop and note that while she is largely correct, several prominent Substack writers – among them Greenwald and Matt Taibbi – actually got their start as independent journalists before moving to – or founding, in the case of Greenwald – media institutions.)
Chang tells us that 2020’s “anti-racist activism has made all the more visible [that] those institutions are built from prejudiced systems, which form working environments that are often unsustainable for people who are nonwhite or non-elite.” She quotes Harvin as saying, “I think one of the reasons why we often see that the top-twenty-five board at Substack is mostly white authors is because that’s an extension of the type of audience and recognition they get for their work on other platforms.”
This brings me to my next point. If you subscribe to the argument, as does Chang, that much of the institutional fabric of society is not equitable (or is, in fact, structurally racist), how can you expect this new platform to solve the problems that go unsolved everywhere else? The top Substackers are typically people who already had their own platforms. Some, but not all, of them are white and male. I’d argue that Substack does create the potential for a more equitable future by giving people from all backgrounds the ability to create and grow their own newsletters on their own.
But according to Chang, that’s not good enough. She – and others critics of Substack on equity grounds – want the platform to do more. To go farther in putting a thumb on the scale for minorities and women.
However, Chang also correctly notes that “like many media companies, Substack is dependent on large amounts of venture capital.” In other words, it has a responsibility to its shareholders – the people who gave it money in exchange for a potential return on their investment – to generate profits. Thus, decisions about whom to offer stipends and cash grants are driven by business goals. The platform’s founders have a metric to determine (based on Twitter engagement) who will perform well on Substack, and therefore who can best help the platform grow.
I’ll be frank here. Substack’s founders are free to do what they want. It neither surprises me, nor causes me any alarm when they make purely business decisions about whom to invite to Substack with a cash offer. Especially since, like any business, if Substack doesn’t make money it won’t survive.
I’ll go further. I don’t think equity is a legitimate business goal. A privately-held company, like Substack, (or a publicly-traded company) has a fiduciary duty to its investors, the people who let the company borrow their money, to generate returns.
If business leaders and shareholders agree that equity is a goal worth pursuing, then they are perfectly free to use the company’s money to pursue that goal. Many businesses have and do. Unless I have money invested in a company, that’s none of my business. I don’t think Substack should pursue equity, but if its investors and founders decide to, that’s their business, not mine.
At the moment, Substack is neither hostile to, nor a catalyst for, social justice. To some, neutrality is complicity (in an inequitable society). But it makes sense as a business strategy, and it’s a strategy I applaud.
To sum up: Substack isn’t just dominated by cisgender, heterosexual, white men. Its founders have promoted diverse voices. If you believe that American society is irredeemably racist, it’s unrealistic to expect a startup to create a perfectly equitable platform in four years. And finally, Substack is a business and makes decisions driven by business considerations. That’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
Now, to move from controversial topic to controversial topic, we’ll turn to conspiracies.
There are Conspiracy Theorists on Substack:
Yes. There are.
There are also conspiracy theorists on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, LinkedIn, and in the military, the legal profession, the medical profession, the flower-arranging profession, American society writ large, the nation of France, the Internet, the real world, and honestly just about everywhere.
Actually, Substack is healthier on this front than many other platforms. For one thing, most Substack comments sections that I have seen (quite a few) blow the prototypical Internet comments section out of the water. Instead of spam, flame wars, trolling, doxing, dragging, vitriol, racism, sexism, homophobia, and generally the worst of humanity, Substack comments sections tend to be cordial, respectful, and even substantive. Not in all cases. But disagreement rarely leads to death threats or slurs. The best comments thoughtfully contribute to the conversation and build upon the article commented on. When discussions grow heated, at the very least there is a sense among commenters that real people are on the other side of the screens.
Perhaps more relevant here, comments sections are also less likely to devolve into conspiracy theory rabbit holes. (I won’t claim it never happens.)
One reason for this is that comments are typically restricted to paying subscribers. (Not every writer restricts the comments section, but I do. I want commenters to have skin in the game.) Random trolls cannot happen upon an article and fill it with spam or Holocaust memes – unless they are willing to pay to do that. In most cases, people only pay for what they actually want to read, and if people actually want to be a part of a community, they are more likely to contribute in a positive (or, at the very least, neutral) way.
Another reason is Substack’s model, which is a reaction to the toxicity of the current digital environment. The ad-based, “attention economy” model prioritizes eyeballs and quantity of shallow engagement. This incentivizes fishing for clicks, which degrades the quality of writing and journalism.
The subscription model relies on quality of engagement. It’s premised on the notion that fewer readers who are more invested in your work are better than more readers who click, scan, and move on. The only way you make money with a subscription-only model is by convincing readers to pay you for access to your writing. You don’t make any money from the readers who click on your headline but don’t read the article (because you aren’t running any ads). You need fewer readers to make money, but you need them to care more deeply about what you are saying.
The move away from the ad-based model is a move away from clickbait. And away from conspiracy. Conspiracies get traction on social media. Headlines about Satanic pedophiles in pizza parlors or about the reincarnation of JFK shock people into clicking. But only a select group of people actually want to pay for that kind of dreck.
At this point, one might reasonably raise the objection that – for that select group of people – Substack allows provocateurs to easily disseminate their crackpot pamphlets. In other words, Q’Anoners could subscribe directly to Q!
But committed conspiracists have always had means to transmit their lies: newsletters, online message boards, email chains, secret listservs, chain mail, magazines, or even pamphlets passed hand-to-hand. On social media (part of the attention economy), conspiracies can go viral and reach people far more easily than on a platform premised on the idea that people should pay for what they read.
Perhaps surprisingly, belief in conspiracies is not rising among the American public. More people identify as members of Q’Anon, but fewer believe the CIA killed JFK or that the aliens abducted Elvis. Joseph Uscinski, coauthor of American Conspiracy Theories and professor at the University of Miami, has stated that the data do not show any increase in overall belief in conspiracies among the general public. His research demonstrates that while certain conspiracies displace others, conspiracy-thinking more broadly is flat.
The takeaway here is that new platforms, including Substack, are not fueling misinformation any more than print media or talk radio did. No matter how tightly gatekeepers control information, Kool-Aid drinkers always find ways to access misinformation. Even social media has not proven more fertile for crackpots than pre-Internet technology. So, while Substack may include its share of wackos, every platform and technology does. The Internet is not “uniquely dangerous” for truth. We are not living in a “post-truth society.”
Furthermore, there are many healthy voices on Substack. A majority, in fact. Because of the Internet, human beings have better access to true information that can debunk conspiracies than ever before in human history. Including on Substack. Most of the top writers on Substack are thorough, serious, and an antidote to conspiracies. The true wackos don’t have that many subscribers.
Now at this point, some readers will raise objections to that previous sentence. A few, no doubt, will say, “there are post-truth writers in the top 10 on Substack!” Probably, they will be referring to Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald. It’s amazing that a statistically significant portion of the criticism of Substack is actually a feud with these two independent journalists in disguise.
I do not subscribe to either TK News (Taibbi) or Greenwald’s newsletter. However, I’ve read enough from both of them to know that the negative hype is overblown. Greenwald has given airtime to narratives I consider conspiracies. But while he exaggerates and often draws conclusions that I find a stretch (to say the least), he is also a talented investigative journalist who has uncovered real facts at odds with mainstream media narratives. He made a great deal more of the fact that Brian Sicknick was not killed with a fire extinguisher than I thought that fact warranted, but he was correct that the New York Times’ initial reporting was false. While I ascribe to error and confusion what he ascribes to a coverup, he’s not wrong about the fact. Has he gone in some strange directions recently? Yes, I think he has. But that doesn’t make him Alex Jones.
Both he and Taibbi mainly earn ire over their attacks on the “mainstream media.” And perhaps because they are on the political left but refuse to pull their punches when punching left. (Everyone hates an out-of-line political ally more than an opponent.) Both are prominent independent journalists who have made covering the failures of journalistic institutions (including the ones they used to belong to) part of their beat. Taibbi actually has a book called Hate, Inc. about the media.
Greenwald and Taibbi can defend themselves, and I have no need to wade into a fight between a handful of journalists. I will say that it isn’t fair to thousands of other writers to denigrate, boycott, or openly wish for the failure of an entire platform based on the work of two individuals.
(If Greenwald goes too much deeper into theories about 1/6, I definitely won’t waste my time defending him. But, even if he claims it was perpetrated by fire-breathing, purple-eyed, lizard people, I don’t think he should be deplatformed for that.)
Taibbi has actually written his own defense of Substack (include a defense of himself and Greenwald), also titled, “In Defense of Substack.” I won’t go into the particulars, other than to say that it’s primarily a response to a Twitter thread. As far as I can tell, the facts are on his side when it comes to himself and Greenwald. Substack didn’t invent independent journalism, and both he and Greenwald were independent journalists before they joined (or founded) mainstream publications. Which undercuts the narrative that mainstream institutions give individuals credibility, who then turn around and trade on their new (and supposedly undeserved) reputations on Substack.
I’ll go more into the dynamics between individuals and institutions later. This extended discussion of Greenwald and Taibbi was mainly to draw out the fact that some of the hubbub over Substack is really a feud between two individuals on one hand and a collection of other individuals at mainstream journalistic outlets on the other.
But this discussion of conspiracies – and of deplatforming particular writers who enflame the sensibilities their peers in the name of fighting misinformation – leads me into a broader topic: freedom of expression.
Free Speech and Substack:
Many who dislike Substack dislike the role it plays in the democratization of information. I’ll get to that democratization, but for the moment I want to focus on one proposed solution to its negative effects: controlling speech.
Some people seem to cling to the misguided belief that conspiracies can be stopped by regulating the flow of information (infringing on the freedom of speech). In mentioning Uscinski’s research earlier, I hoped to dispel any belief in the success of such regulation. When information was far more tightly controlled than it is today, conspiracies were no less prevalent. In fact, as I pointed out, it’s easier than ever to find information debunking conspiracy theories.
Yet some people still want to crack down on free speech in order to prevent misinformation from, say, throwing a presidential election (to pick a random example). The First Amendment isn’t very popular these days. Substack’s founders have written about their support for free speech, and the platform continues to be permissive (although it does ban outright harassment – this isn’t 4chan). Which might be why (as I mentioned) many conservatives have taken up on Substack.
The same people who want Twitter, or Facebook, or even the U.S. Government to regulate speech on the Internet want Substack to do the same. In response, the platform’s founders have come out strongly in favor of freedom of expression.
Once again, I’ll lay my cards out. (In return, I’d like proponents of speech restriction to do the same.) I’m close to an absolutist when it comes to free expression. I take a laissez faire approach to free speech (the only exception would be child pornography). But I’ll also argue that, as a private enterprise, Substack can do whatever it wants when it comes to speech on the platform. You may have the right to say whatever you want, but you don’t have the right to be on Substack. Just as you do not have the right to say whatever you want on my property, or in a bar.
I’d like Substack’s critics to be equally honest about their priors. The way I see it, there are three camps who want to restrict speech.
First, what I would call the moderate camp. These people want modest restrictions on hate speech and conspiracies. I dislike hate speech and I don’t want conspiracies to proliferate, but I don’t believe either justifies a restriction on a person’s ability to put thoughts into words. Controlling information seems to have no effect on actual belief in conspiracies, anyway. Substack does prohibit hate speech. (Just not what activists consider hate speech, e.g., saying, “men can’t get pregnant.”)
Most critics of Substack (and the First Amendment) want to go much further. They fall into the other two camps, which I define by ideological lines. Progressives who want to ban not only the speech of right-wing extremists, but all conservative speech. And right-wingers of the nationalist-populist variety who want to do to the left what they claim the left has been doing to them for years.
At the moment, there are progressive writers, conservative writers, Never-Trump writers, Trumpist writers, Marxist writers, libertarian writers, reactionary writers, and woke writers on Substack. Thus, there’s someone to offend everyone. (I’d hazard that the vast majority of publications don’t actually have anything to do with politics.) I like the platform’s diversity of thought. I like the fact that people of all ideological stripes can set up shop. I’d like to keep it that way.
Those who want to crack down on what is permissible on Substack typically want to ban their ideological opponents. The progressives want to ban the nationalists and vice versa. Many who don’t want an outright ban still enjoy the idea of “owning” political “enemies,” and would happily celebrate their banning as a victory.
But proponents of speech restrictions and deplatforming often cloak their motives in language about “problematic” speech and “dangerous” information. They use phrases like, “it’s an interesting time for such a hands-off, free-market approach” to content moderation. But what they really mean is that they want the power to shut down debate and silence the voices of those with whom they disagree.
I don’t think any bans on ideological grounds are justified, whether I agree with the individuals being considered for ban or not. I like Substack’s loose content moderation policies. But I’m honest about that.
Once all parties about what the real goal of restricting speech is, when can begin to have a discussion about whether or not it’s justified. I can’t settle the debate. All I can do is call for an open one – one in which all parties admit their premises.
Let’s change gears for a moment and address a different criticism. At first glance, a seemingly unrelated one. However, some critics of Substack’s content moderation policies and supposed inequity bring it up, so it’s worth addressing. But there is a more fundamental reason. Just as critics who worry about disruptive speech feel threatened by Substack, those who make this new argument are also threatened by the platform – just in a different way.
“Substack is Dead:”
Rumors of Substack’s eventual demise have been greatly exaggerated. It’s only four years old. Brief in the lifespan of a human being but an eternity in the lifespan of a Silicon Valley startup.
This argument is essentially similar to the argument that it’s a scam, so you can read my response with that in mind. (There are those who make patently false scam claims as well. I won’t deal with fringe claims.)
As I intimated earlier, oftentimes people who say, “X is dead,” do so without evidence. Whether X stands for content marketing, direct mail, blogging, Rock and Roll, the American Dream, political conservatism, Marxism, email, Facebook, or even Kim Jong Un.
Earlier this year, Substack raised another $65 million in venture capital, putting its market value around $650 million. As previously mentioned, Substack recently passed 1 million paying subscribers, up from 500,000 earlier this year. The top writers bring in six or seven figures a year. In other words, it’s a thriving platform – at least for some people.
It’s natural to point out that most writers on Substack are not earning anything close to a multi-six-figure income. Just as with other forms of online entrepreneurship, some few earn millions, more earn a full-time living, a number earn part-time income, and some earn close to nothing. As an article in the New Yorker put it, “In most cases, subscription fees will generate not a salary but something closer to tips.”
My response is, “give it time.” Substack has only been around a few years and already some writers are earning more than they did in journalism or publishing. The truth is, the model is working for some people. Substack’s founders never promised anyone overnight success. In his interview with McKenzie, Bill Bishop readily acknowledges that, while he loves the work, he puts long hours into research and writing and promotion to make Sinocism highly-profitable.
There’s a sense among some that every Internet business is a fad, and that the only way to succeed is to be first in to the bubble. If you missed blogging’s heyday, or the early days of online copywriting, or the ground floor for affiliate marketing, or the peak of Instagram and TikTok influencing, or the zenith of YouTubing, there’s no point in trying at all. The truth is, that while some few can ride bubbles to instant success without putting in much effort, most entrepreneurs have to put in work to succeed – online or in the real world.
The “I missed the gold rush and it’s all gone now,” mentality is premised on the idea that every trend is over five minutes after it starts. It either translates to “I tried it and it didn’t work in the first thirty seconds,” or “some people are failing and therefore success is impossible.” Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence. Evidence of failure in specific cases cannot be generalized to evidence of failure in all cases.
The truth is, newsletters are panning out for some writers. Everyone knows that most businesses don’t last a year. Why should newsletters be wildly different?
Some have said unpersuasively for years that advertising was dead. Ever since the Kindle Gold Rush, we’ve heard that e-books are dead, or that self-publishing is dead. Yet in 2019 over one thousand authors earned more than six figures on Amazon’s KDP. And the KDP Select Global Fund (the amount of royalties Amazon pays out to authors enrolled in KDP Select) grew from over $370 million in 2020 to around $450 million in 2021.
The e-book is example is useful, because in each case (e-books and Substack), critics claimed it was a bubble. And in each case, the industry is healthy.
Just as more self-published authors are earning a living each year on Amazon alone, more writers on Substack are succeeding every year. In both cases, concerns that the boom is over are misplaced.
Maybe It’s Too Successful:
Self-publishing is successfully disrupting the traditional publishing industry, with independent authors taking a much larger share of Amazon book sales than traditional publishing houses. Likewise, independent journalism on Substack is disrupting traditional media.
Hence the attacks on Substack from outlets like the New Yorker, which asks, “Is Substack the Media Future We Want?” (Interestingly, this article also takes a swipe at self-publishing on Amazon, which – like Substack with its “loose content moderation polices” – “has become a haven for extremist content,” contributing to an Internet environment characterized by “disinformation and conspiracies,” which we have already covered.)
The author of that piece, Anna Wiener, is troubled by the “hands-off, free-market approach” to content moderation. In other words, the idea that readers self-police by unsubscribing to newsletters they don’t want to read.
But as I’ve already explained, conspiracy theories have not actually grown, even in this new, democratized information environment. Rather, the Internet appears to be more dangerous, because information is no longer controlled by a handful of gatekeepers (even if those gatekeepers weren’t doing a good job at preventing Americans from believing theories about the moon landing or the JFK assassination back when they had power).
Which means there is another reason for the attacks. Substack is disruptive. Creative destruction – while an important part of a thriving economy - feels uncomfortable. It threatens traditional industry players. This leads some of them to attack the institutions facilitating that disruption – in this case, on grounds that they promote disinformation.
But there is a more fundamental question at play here, and with the conspiracy-theory argument out of the way, we can engage with Substack’s critics on their true grounds (which have greater merit). Is disruption of media and publishing a good thing?
We didn’t need the record quit rates this year (the Great Resignation) to know that we’re in a period of upheaval, in which traditional institutions are losing power and influence and freelancing is rising. The Internet has proved democratizing. And while in recent years large corporations like Facebook and Google have reversed that (to some extent), we are living in a more fractured landscape (physically and digitally) than we did in 1999.
Trust in institutions has dropped to all-time lows. Outside and “alternative” voices have proliferated, now challenging authorities on everything from medicine to epistemology to pop culture. Individuals are lonelier, and more atomized, than ever. Americans are bowling alone more than they were in 2000 when Robert Putnam wrote the book with that title. (If large numbers of people still bowled, that is.)
Substack has facilitated this trend by allowing journalists and authors to make a living by themselves – no need for a newsroom or a publishing house. And while some freelancing is a good thing, there are real downsides to a lonelier, more disparate populace. Democratization is not a bad thing, but atomization is.
However, Substack is not just a place for atomized, deracinated solo-writers. It has also facilitated the creation of new and healthy institutions.
The number one publication on all of Substack is The Dispatch. The Dispatch is a digital media company founded by Jonah Goldberg, Steve Hayes, and Toby Stock. In just two years, The Dispatch has grown into a thriving enterprise with three podcasts, a variety of newsletters, original reporting, a daily news roundup, a fact-checking arm (which is part of Facebook’s fact-checking program), a culture section, and regular outside contributors. (Full disclosure: I subscribe to The Dispatch. For the record, the subscriber community is not dominated by conservatives. There are progressives, Trumpers, Never-Trumpers, moderates, libertarians, independents, etc.)
The Dispatch is already doing higher quality fact-checking and journalism than many mainstream media publications. (I won’t provide examples here, but if pressed, I can show receipts.) For one thing, unlike certain journalistic outfits that will remain unnamed, The Dispatch issues corrections when it makes mistakes. It does not “stealth edit” published pieces to hide errors.
One of the premises of its founders was journalistic accountability: a willingness to apologize for errors. They saw a need for a new publication because too many mainstream outlets do not approach journalism with the humility necessary to say, “I was wrong,” when screwups occur. I’ve heard writers at The Dispatch admit wrong on podcasts – something I’ve rarely heard from national newspapers. And I’ve seen them admit mistakes in print.
The company also willing to admit its biases. Goldberg, Hayes, and the rest of the team do not hide their conservatism. In an age when journalistic objectivity is increasingly devalued, I’d rather have an outlet that admits its assumptions than one that pretends it’s being unbiased.
The Dispatch isn’t the only example of a burgeoning institution on Substack. The Bulwark+, Persuasion, Arc Digital are others buck the trend of lone individuals (like me) publishing a Substack newsletter. (I do not subscribe to those three publications, so I will not comment on their content.)
Some will argue that there isn’t a need for outsiders, whether they work alone or found a new institution. Yet there have been well-documented failures in what is generally called “the mainstream media,” as well as in the host of other blogs and magazines rivalled by writers on Substack. (One can use the term “mainstream media” descriptively and not pejoratively, and that is what I will continue to do here.)
These institutional failures go beyond the stealth edits, the botched stories, and even the clickbait (fearmongering headlines, substance-free articles, listicles, etc.). In some cases, there have been coverups, either blatant or unintentional. In others, stories were written, or not written, or written in such a way as to further a false narrative. The suppression of the lab-leak theory (whether or not it’s true), the narrative that Kyle Rittenhouse was a white supremacist, the “mostly peaceful” protests of 2020 (or on the other side, the idea that “COVID isn’t worse than the flu”), all come to mind.
While actual instances of fraudulent stories or made-up facts are rare (except in the fever swamps dominated by fringier elements on both political extremes), misplaced attention and improper focus are not. These gave us a week of front-page stories about “covfefe,” with much less attention directed towards actual events in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, or Asia. Not that there wasn’t reporting about those places during that time. But “covfefe” should have been a one-day, two-paragraph story relegated to the last page, after all the real news.
More blatantly, there is the echo-chamber problem in which right-wing and left-wing media focus entirely on either opposite stories or on opposite details of stories, in order to further a narrative, while neglecting entirely to report on the bits that don’t contribute to their preferred narrative.
The Portland Courthouse story illustrates this divergence. Right-wingers read exclusively about destruction of property and blinded and maimed police officers. Left-wingers either read nothing about the courthouse, or they read about groups of moms linking arms in peaceful solidarity, or about former president Trump sending plainclothes federal officers to Portland. All true. Both sides reported facts. But both sides excluded facts that did not fit their narrative. And this same picture holds for the Hunter Biden laptop story, the Trump-Russia/Mueller Investigation story, and others.
(I’m not saying that Substack solves these problems, just that people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. Newsletters can be fact-free echo-chambers just as easily as blogs. But Substack can provide disruption, and disruption may, in fact, be necessary and healthy.)
Still, some will argue that there’s nothing to see here. Serious, highly-respected scholars argue (including using the lab-leak example) that the mainstream media is healthy. This argument has merits. But I believe it to be flawed.
In the linked article, Jonathan Rauch argues that the institutions of the mainstream media are healthy not because they get everything right, but because they are self-policing and self-correcting. If that is true, then there is no need for outside, independent voices, and certainly no need for disruption. (I highly doubt Rauch would argue that Substack is unhealthy, given that the article in question appeared on Substack, in the aforementioned Persuasion).
The mainstream media does self-police. When Rolling Stone published the infamous “A Rape on Campus” story about the University of Virginia (my alma mater), the Washington Post uncovered the truth that “Jackie” had fabricated the entire story. (I believe the Post was first, but could be wrong.) Rauch correctly points out that in the case of the lab-leak theory, journalists in prominent mainstream media institutions (including the Post, and the Wall Street Journal), played an instrumental role in keeping the story alive by reporting new developments.
However, criticisms of mainstream journalistic institutions cannot be dismissed so lightly. According to the most recent data from Gallup, only 36% of Americans trust “the media.” That means close to two-thirds of Americans do not trust the media. This is on par with most of the major institutions in American life, from governments to businesses to religious organizations. Surely, not all of the fault lies with these institutions. But neither can none of it lie with them.
If two-thirds of Americans no longer trust the fourth estate, it can’t all be right-wing, anti-media propaganda. Or the rise of a new information environment no longer guarded by the proper authorities. While some of the distrust surely is due to those factors, not all of it can be. The media – mainstream or not – bears some institutional responsibility for grappling with the failures that have led to this moment. Whether or not you think it is fair to blame news organizations writ large for prominent failures by specific outlets, taking responsibility is the responsibility of the people in positions of institutional leadership.
When trust in institutions is close to all-time lows, and when major institutional failures are a matter of public record, it can’t all be the fault of the masses. Media companies must take at least some share of the blame for the problem. Or better yet, responsibility regardless of where the blame lies.
Which brings me back to Substack and the rise of independent journalism. It turns out that we do need outside voices to hold mainstream ones to account. Partly, due to the lack of extreme ownership on the part of major mainstream publications (and, in some cases, lack of self-awareness about the existence of the problem). But another reason we need outsiders is that the relationship between individuals and institutions is complicated, particularly with regard to accountability, and trust in the authenticity and veracity of information.
Just as institutions can give credibility to individuals, individuals can lend their credibility to institutions. Even before Substack, many media consumers followed specific writers, not their publications. Readers subscribed to a publication because particular writers were there, and they often stopped subscribing when those writers left. Prominent journalists and opinion writers brought readers along when they left one publication for another.
Some of the hit pieces aimed at Substack are perhaps driven by fear that journalists who “go rogue,” or light out for Substack, take revenue away from their former employers. Taibbi and Greenwald are not the only examples. Bari Weiss, Matthew Yglesias, Andrew Sullivan, and others have all headed for Substack and the freedom of self-employment. Some left on better terms than others, but even writers who liked their old bosses drew some readers away. (Notably, this flow goes both ways. John McWhorter departed his Substack for a position at the New York Times.)
But if many people – myself included – already followed individuals rather than publications, traditional media outlets were going to have a hard time regardless of Substack’s existence. We no longer live in an information environment dominated by old-school gatekeepers and we haven’t for a long time. We don’t live in a world in which those gatekeepers can regain control of information.
Which means that outsiders are going to exist, and that people are going to read them. I’d rather live in a world with healthy outsiders, rather than one dominated by flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, and secessionists. The extremists will still exist and still have followers, regardless of whether or not traditional media regains its former credibility. They’ll have a place whether or not Substack exists. But Substack also provides a tool for healthy voices that work to counter them.
And Substack also provides a tool for voices who’ll provide outside accountability for traditional media organizations that lack internal accountability. If national newspapers and broadcast journalists won’t take responsibility themselves, we need outside voices to do it for them. Otherwise, we end up living in a place where the Walter Duranty’s of this world can coverup famines that kill millions.
We no longer live in the golden age of newspapers, and perhaps that’s a good thing.
Substack isn’t just for Journalists:
I’ve gone on at length about independent journalism because that’s what most of the attacks on Substack focus on. Some critics point out that their criticism is not directed at the pantheon of writers on Substack who write about sports, beauty, animals, gardening, music, or anything other than politics. Many people (including me) primarily use Substack to publish fiction. Substack’s haters rarely have a problem with that. But one cannot so easily divorce a subset of the platform from the rest of the writers on it.
And while some preface their critiques with an “I’m not talking about the people who just write about sports” caveat, others would willingly see the end of a platform that has proved beneficial for thousands of non-political writers, just to destroy a handful of “transphobic” or “anti-democracy” or “problematic” individuals.
The latter group is few in number, but because Substack is – to some extent – dominated by political writing, and because politics is the sea we swim in these days, it is impossible to truly separate attacks on the platform over the political journalism that it facilitates from attacks on the model which allows writers who write about sports and finance to make a living. If a tool allows someone to make a living publishing fiction, it will allow someone else to make a living writing about politics.
Which brings us in a circuitous route back to Amazon and self-publishing. It is instructive to look at the implications of Amazon’s (and to a lesser extent Kobo’s and Apple Books’ and Ingram Spark’s) disruption of traditional publishing, to understand what Substack is doing. In both cases, Amazon and Substack allow more writers to make a better living independently than ever before. (A lot more writers.) And in both cases, the same worrywarts worry about empowering “problematic” voices.
Just as legacy journalistic institutions are running hit pieces to strike blows against Substack, traditional publishing houses attempted to kill the e-book by pricing their e-books artificially high (higher than the same paperbacks). Which meant the e-book market went more quickly to the indie authors.
Independent authors (self-published) now sell far more e-books (they take up a larger percentage of both sales and dollars) on Amazon than traditional publishing firms. (37% in 2019). That number does not include the small imprints like Michael Anderle’s LMBPN or Mark Dawson and James Blatch’s Fuse Books. Including small imprints, a majority of e-book sales goes to people who publish outside the traditional world.
Does that include a few flat-earthers or racists? Yes.
But the vast majority are just writers trying to make a living. If you believe that people profiting off of their own work – supporting a family, putting food on the table, earning full-time incomes from their writing – is a good thing, then Substack and Amazon are incredibly beneficial. More writers than ever before – journalists, fiction authors, sports writers, etc. – can make a living because of these platforms and others like them. (In the case of self-publishing, the numbers are high enough that I don’t need to qualify that statement. A simple Google search can verify it.)
This is a good thing. Unless you believe that people should not profit from the value they create. Of course, there are people who believe that, which brings me to my last point.
(But, first, a quick word: do not romanticize poverty. There’s nothing good about a situation in which most writers live in penury. The fact that Herman Melville died in poverty doesn’t add anything to Moby Dick. Not earning money doesn’t make writing better or more literary. Great literature may not always earn much money, but not earning money doesn’t make it great literature.)
The Internet was Supposed to be Free:
Some people are turned off by the gall of writers asking for payment for mere words. The Internet was supposed to be free! Paywalls may allow writers to earn a living, but they keep out the nonpaying masses.
Substack newsletters may consist “merely” of words, but all intellectual property requires work to create. Taking something that rightfully belongs to a person who did not offer it as a gift, against that person’s will, is stealing. It directly impacts their ability to pay their rent or mortgage or provide for a family. It devalues their labor.
At this point, someone will point out that not all newsletters are created equal and some of them may not be worth paying for. To which I say: if it isn’t worth your money, it isn’t worth your attention either (and it isn’t worth stealing).
In the ad-based Internet, you could read almost anything for free. The rise of paywalls, including those on Substack, has some people pining for the Internet of 2012.
To which I say, you get what you pay for. If you expect to get something of value without paying for it (in order words, without offering your own value in return), you shouldn’t be surprised when you become the product. Unless it’s a gift, it isn’t really free. It takes time and money and effort to create value, and that time and money and effort must be compensated or it stops coming. Why should we think that the Internet would be free if nothing in the real world worked that way? In the real world, you have to trade value for value to get what you want. If you expect that the Internet should work differently, you shouldn’t be surprised when the quality of the product goes out the window.
Most non-paywalled sites have seen dramatic drop-offs in the quality of both the content and the user experience (“UX,” for those who “inhabit this space” and are fluent in its language). One of the first things I noticed as a reader of various newsletters and blogs was how much better Substack’s experience was than most other sites’.
Without ads, pages on Substack are clean. They read like pages in a book. There is no distraction. The simple, stripped-down layout does not eat up power or data or bandwidth on a mobile device. The lack of ads makes Substack newsletters both more pleasant to read, and less expensive (power and data and bandwidth).
Crappy “UX” goes hand-in-hand with clickbait. And as both mainstream media publications and individual bloggers put up paywalls, the average quality of what is available for free deteriorates. This is the shift we are seeing now. (Podcasts remain an exception. The majority are still free, and the lone ads come with greater transparency and more direct benefits.)
Of course, some will object at this point that not everyone can afford to pay for everything they read on the Internet. If paywalls go up on the best writing and journalism, they will keep out people who cannot pay.
Many Substack writers will happily gift a subscription to anyone who truly cannot afford one. I have seen it happen. It’s very easy to do. I can do it with one click. (If a reader can demonstrate financial hardship and would like to read the rest of my work, please email me directly and we can talk.)
Barring financial hardship, if you believe that something – in this case, a newsletter – is valuable, paying for it should not upset you. If you enjoy reading the work of a particular journalist, or beauty writer, or sports writer, or culture writer, or humorist, you should also be willing to support their ability to continue producing that work. Substack makes that easy.
And even if you think that a particular writer has more money than she could ever use, if you want to read her work (assuming she doesn’t offer it for free), you should willingly trade her something of value (in this case, money), in exchange. Substack makes that possible.
In Summary – A Healthy Vision for the Internet
Nobody paid me or asked me to write this defense. I wrote it because I thought it needed to be written.
This is my apologetic. (Not my apology.) It is my case, my explanation, for why I chose Substack and why I continue to use the platform.
I believe that Substack is a positive good. The vision of its founders is idealistic – in a good way – while the platform is practical. It offers a home for writers who want to share their writing with readers who will support them. It creates a small digital space (ha!), where that idealistic vision of what the Internet could be is a reality.
Is it imperfect? Yes. Have companies in the past launched with grand and lofty visions that turned sour in reality? Yes, especially in Silicon Valley.
But Substack is a stab at solving the problems plaguing the current Internet (everyone admits there are problems, but everyone disagrees on what those problems are and what the solutions should be). We live with (or perhaps in) the Internet of 2021, with the problems of the Internet of 2021. We can neither create a new Internet of whole cloth, nor return to the good old days of the Internet circa 2001. Which means that if we want to live in (or perhaps with) a better Internet, we must take it as it currently exists, and attempt to build constructive solutions to solve those problems.
Substack is such an attempt. It’s a stab. And a good start. It’s not perfect, but no human institution ever is.
Already, Substack has done some good. The platform – and many (but not all) of the publications I have encountered on it – have given me new hope (not optimism) for the digital world. In fact, there’s little else that I can name that has contributed to that hope, and much that has done the opposite.
On balance, I’d say the platform has done more good than harm, including on the grounds by which its critics seek to judge it. Substack has promise. Perhaps it will do even more good in the future, and perhaps it will spark other moves – a trend even, but maybe that’s too much hope – in the direction of a healthier Internet. I believe that healthier Internet would look, well, like Substack: more paywalls, fewer ads, less clickbait, more actual discussion, better quality of discussion, slower news cycles, and writers who actually get paid for their work (or who actually get paid what they’re worth).
By no means do I think I’ll have the last word. Nor do I think I’ll convince every person who reads this defense. Not everyone believes a paywalled Internet with fewer ads is a better Internet. But I do.