Paid subscriptions not only provide compensation for the labor of the writer, they are the ONLY source of revenue for Substack, the company that makes it possible for all of us to write our newsletters.
I wish we could bundle on Substack but just so my support dollar could go further but without outside revenue that is not ever going to happen and we have seen the horrors of that.
You are never beating the conservative mom allegations. I saw your last post on motherhood. I know deep within you is a Republican woman who just doesn’t like Trump. 😂 So while your critic is arguing you are a liberal feminist, I am unsure!
Okay I’m actually kinda jealous that you are a normie lib that ppl accuse you of being a closet conservative. I think it’s just the “atlantic in bio” effect but people are always writing my stuff off as “normie brain dead liberal feminist junk” and then I feel like I have to try and subtly signal my socially conservative bona fides. Like “I got married at 25 and love it” … “I go to Church every Sunday”…..”Yes I work but tbh I don’t make that much money and am still economically dependent on my husband…” “please don’t write me off conservatives…” lol
If the Republican party were like you, the country would be incalculably better. The fantasy that you're a Republican is based on just changing a ton of your beliefs to the opposite of what you believe.
My father once hate-watched a Trump rally on TV and said that Trump really missed his calling as a late night talk show host, because he interacted with the featured guests in basically the same way David Letterman or Jay Lano would and was about as entertaining doing it.
The steelman objection to paywalls is to recurring charges. There are many authors I would like to read but don’t want to subscribe to. I believe in paying for work. I’m happy to pay $1 per thousand words up to about $5. However, very few authors, other than Matt Yglesias, are capable of churning out 10,000 quality words a week.
Your business model is working for you but it is not letting you do your best work, which can be brilliant. Too many of your posts are basically “stupid people said stupid things on the internet.” Duh. Why do I want to wallow in stupid arguments.
Maybe you only have two good articles in you a month. If 2,000 people paid $2 each for those articles, that’s a decent income. If one article a year went viral and got 80,000 reads, you’d have gross revenues of over $200k.
The subscription model rewards volume over quality and is bad for substack.
But this is Substack’s decision (not to allow pay per view), not CHH’s. And just to think out loud here, if Substack did allow pay-per-view, it would incentivize even more click-baity headlines, which is definitely a downside
There's a work around. Allow pay-per-view, but make likes and dislikes public. A click-baity headline would get a large number of dislikes. Substack might even restrict which subscribers get to do public likes and dislikes to established accounts with a certain payment history. This would produce a useful metric of whether people who are willing and able to pay liked an article.
In theory I agree, however there must be a reason in practice why literally no one on the internet uses this business model. I suspect the answer is the friction of setting up an account and card is high enough that you wouldn’t make up in volume what you lost by charging less or allowing per-article purchases.
I suspect too much of the economy has become addicted to recurring charges. I waste a couple grand a year on recurring charges I don't cut off quickly enough because I hate doing tedious shit. However, this makes me slower to subscribe to new stacks then I would otherwise be. I've also had bad experiences trying to cut things off in the past.
Yeah, newspapers tried this before and it didn't work (probably for the reasons you describe). There's plenty of times I would pay for one article from a local newspaper's archive, but maintaining such systems was not financially sustainable for them.
local newspapers are much more expensive to operate than a substack. you really can operate a substack on five fugures a year if you are willing to live like a young journalist at a regional paper
You can functionally do something like this on Substack, by taking out a monthly subscription (usually in the $5-10 range) and canceling immediately, thereby giving you access to what you want to read plus archives for 30 days. It's very easy to cancel a subscription to a Substack. I do this pretty frequently.
but if you get clicked baited you might hate the other articles you are forced to buy.
maybe they could offer one week subscriptions for half the monthly price, and have them auto terminate. auto termination would be huge, because i don’t like worrying about saving $5. substack knows it’s more affluent readers don’t want to increase their cognitive load to save $5, and they are trying to exploit that
I suppose I only do this if I’m reasonably confident I’m going to like more than one article.
But canceling is super easy, it’s just a few clicks. It’s not the same as the kind of microtransaction you’re talking about, but its the closest thing I’ve seen that actually seems to work.
i’ve had recurring charges i had to cancel credit cards to cut off. spending 25 minutes talking to a phone bank is effectively over $100 in opportunity cost
So it gets kinda complicated. If you do pay per view, then there's quickly an avalanche of clickbait titled short articles like on medium. Medium deals by paying authors based on likes by paying subscribers, and so then it becomes a destination for feel-good slop. There's a thousand authors on there targeting overducated overthinking single people and it got too exhausting lol.
People also don't want 10,000 words a week to read. The only reason I feel okay subscribing to CHH is it's an easy read that isn't triggering anything much in me. Paying money to folks who write on serious topics feels good but then you feel guilty about all the unread emails that are too intimidating to even start and it starts to feel like a waste of your money if they are sending you 5 emails a week. If you're writing cultural commentary, people don't mind recurring subscriptions. I feel like "stupid people said stupid things on the internet" is a kind of media that's easy to consume for me, and CHH does it well enough that it's not slop and fits everything in 1500 words or under. This is a winner-take-all type of writing, so there can be a handful of people doing cultural commentary successfully with each unique point of view. CHH is like the fun column in a newspaper which is a relief from all the talk of nuclear war and bond markets. There can only be so many columnists you don't mind paying money to read.
I have two substacks - one is serious history stuff with lots of research with maybe some cultural commentary once every couple of months, and another is me whining about parenting and mental health. Both have mostly free content. I notice people LOVE reading the cultural commentary and whining. They share it more widely. They subscribe at higher rates. The emails have high open rates. They don't care about erratic schedules.
Serious content with sources and stuff has a band of loyal readers. I try really hard to make it easier to read, shorter pieces, topics more appealing to the average reader. It's really hard for it to break out beyond its circles. Regularity doesn't help that much. And more content really doesn't help. Anything over 2-3 pieces a week is too intimidating to people and they get rather annoyed with me filling up their inbox and unsubscribe.
There's two kinds of writing, I figured - stuff you can read on the go, and appointment reading. If something really appeals to your base instincts of who you are and how you feel about the world, people don't mind reading it on the go, taking breaks from a long piece and coming back to it after putting the kids to bed. But something that's well-written but not immediately important to your lizard brain, that's appointment reading. It used to be easy to do that with magazines back in the day, where you'd sit down with the magazine in the 30 minutes between school and piano lessons and read. Now there isn't that anymore, so it's really hard to get eyes on good writing that isn't immediately tickling your "this pertains to me" instinct.
I looked at your subs, and while what i write is not current affairs and american cultural commentary like you seem to mainly read, you might enjoy reading my history substack, https://lila.substack.com/ Only archives are paywalled and I'm wondering how to go paid still, but, it's focused content that I try to make easy to read, mostly based on primary and secondary sources. Give it a shot, I could use some paid subs.
Can I ask how you manage to keep writing when you deal with so much unpleasantness? How do you not let it get to you? I’m having a lot of trouble with this.
Great question! So first of all, I've been online for a while. I've been publishing my comics since 2018, and I've gotten all sorts of hate comments on those, from both the feminists and the incels (usually because of a complete misunderstanding of my work, not that it matters lol.)
First thing's first, is I don't really DM. My DMs are closed on Twitter unless you're a mutual (and even then, I often don't respond unless it's someone I'm having an intentional conversation with, such as for an interview.) This sounds obnoxious but also, when you get to be a big or influential account, your DMs will be absolutely spammed with people trying to get tailored advice from you or asking you to promote their work, so it's just a minefield to engage because if you do it for one person, suddenly everyone expects it. I have given advice before, of course, but now I try to keep that to my advice column which has a dedicated Google form for paid subscribers.
Second, I remain anonymous. This is a big part of why I'm anonymous. I also just really like my privacy. People will make weird comments about my body, but I think if I gave them access to my face also, it would be worse, because I'm not really that pretty lol. I'm a 35-year-old mom of two and I look like it! Not that a stranger's comment on my face should even matter, I'm not married to them, but the less ammunition you give these people the better.
Last, I'm at the point where my writing enables me to do what I've always wanted to do: stay home with my children. There's almost nothing in the world that would make me want to stop. But before it was a full-time income, I DEFINITELY had moments that I thought about completely deactivating and just going silent. The writing itself and the benefit from the writing had to get to the point where it outweighed the hate comments and I think it's at that point now. But you don't get there by giving up :)
I have been planning to become a paid subscriber for a while now, and this article is what finally convinced me. Is it my inborn Protestant guilt? Anyway, just wanted to let you know that I’ve been enjoying the bits above the paywall and am looking forward to reading the rest!
I did the free preview subscription to see the series on becoming more likeable, and was so surprised by the frequency and quality of the content, like literally laughing aloud. When the time came to cancel I realized wait... I might... actually...be getting my money's worth? So far so true!
I think this is an example of the destruction the internet caused by giving us the ability to voice shower thoughts and the burden of reading every single person's take.
Most people I'd wager are just reacting in a surface level way to surface level details - even if you didn't paywall, they'd still only read the title. Or maybe they would've read on, but someone *else* wouldn't've. And on the flip side, I think it's natural for everyone to go "ah, damn, paywall -" it takes maturity to just be ok with having a feeling one knows is unjustified, and not have to act on it. Most people are going to either act on the feeling without thinking, or suppress it out of fear.
Writers were not meant to read every person who goes through these processes going through them! A person being annoyed they couldn't afford the paper used to be an entirely unobserved phenomenon. Writers used to interact *with other writers*, because those were the only other people writing.
I heard a woman & comedian the other day talk about an experience she had pushing back on some dude who left low effort hate comments ("this is why women aren't funny," or whatever), and his reaction was to be friendly and say he didn't mean it. For him, this was just a reflexive post he made on the toilet, he was not thinking at all. To writers and other neurotics, defined by over-analyzing our thoughts, this is unimaginable, but it is the way a lot of people react to being given a phone.
Also want to say I am one of the people who took a free look and then just signed up. Every post gives me something to chew on (and spam comment section about), a batting avg above most blogs
You see this kind of behaviour even with articles that are free (or free trial, or easy to circumvent paywall) - there's just a tribe of people who want to get angry over the headline, filtered through the kind of person they assume would write it (even though for a traditional publication it's not even the piece author who does that but!)
Many such cases, as you might say. I think that kind of provocative headline/leading paragraph is doomed (unless this kind of hostile pseudo-engagement is somehow monetisable).
There is also the subgenre of "urgh, why is the Guardian writing about this?" about what are clearly meant to be throwaway light-hearted bits filling one column on a lifestyle section but get the same formatting online as a weighty leading editorial.
I'm thinking about it and I'm not sure it's a tribe, but like ... a category of reaction a lot of people fall into depending on the subject or author. There are definitely people who live there (you can find tiresome resistance lib or dsa type or maga tweeters who do nothing but respond to article shares this way), but I'd be the majority of the crowd is just passing through. I know I've had knee-jerk responses before, I just try not to document them!
But yes - a bad way to read, and worth trying to stop.
I wonder those who yell and get mad at paywall for hobby seeks for some kind of interaction just like GW warriors as you pointed out…
And in a sense, it is very intriguing that a lot of ppl can’t sustain their mental sanity without making disagreement with someone into full fledged demonization of that person (no wonder they have few friends irl oops)
One thing also worth mentioning: paywalls involve a tradeoff between short term revenue and long run exposure growth.
My mental model here is Matt Yglesias vs Noah Smith. Matt paywalls more aggressively, so Noah (who started behind him) now has significantly more free subscribers than Matt.
Paid subscriptions not only provide compensation for the labor of the writer, they are the ONLY source of revenue for Substack, the company that makes it possible for all of us to write our newsletters.
And im eternally grateful for them!!
Aren't there several other platforms that take much less money from writers?
Bluesky are *almost* as bad as Redditors when it come to paywalls
Meekly commenting "uhhh this is paywalled :///" like it's a dunk
At least the libertarian brainworm victims on X (and to a lesser extent LinkedIn) are American about it and don't mind you trying to make money
For real. They talk like paywalling things is some kind of act of anti-mutual aid 😭
Fat arms alert? I do not understand the internet.
I wish we could bundle on Substack but just so my support dollar could go further but without outside revenue that is not ever going to happen and we have seen the horrors of that.
But I do enjoy what I pay for.
I wish we could have lower subscription amounts than $5 a month lol.
You are never beating the conservative mom allegations. I saw your last post on motherhood. I know deep within you is a Republican woman who just doesn’t like Trump. 😂 So while your critic is arguing you are a liberal feminist, I am unsure!
I’m a liberal woman who likes Trump only in the form of a sassy celeb gossip host!!
Okay I’m actually kinda jealous that you are a normie lib that ppl accuse you of being a closet conservative. I think it’s just the “atlantic in bio” effect but people are always writing my stuff off as “normie brain dead liberal feminist junk” and then I feel like I have to try and subtly signal my socially conservative bona fides. Like “I got married at 25 and love it” … “I go to Church every Sunday”…..”Yes I work but tbh I don’t make that much money and am still economically dependent on my husband…” “please don’t write me off conservatives…” lol
Ok in my area of twitter and blue sky, Atlantic is code for “secret conservative” lmao
I think it might be code for "braindead lib" only among conservatives. Definitely is in my extended fam!
If the Republican party were like you, the country would be incalculably better. The fantasy that you're a Republican is based on just changing a ton of your beliefs to the opposite of what you believe.
My father once hate-watched a Trump rally on TV and said that Trump really missed his calling as a late night talk show host, because he interacted with the featured guests in basically the same way David Letterman or Jay Lano would and was about as entertaining doing it.
Thanks for sharing that fat arms tweet. It will now come to mind, complete with police siren sound effects, every time I wear short sleeves.
The steelman objection to paywalls is to recurring charges. There are many authors I would like to read but don’t want to subscribe to. I believe in paying for work. I’m happy to pay $1 per thousand words up to about $5. However, very few authors, other than Matt Yglesias, are capable of churning out 10,000 quality words a week.
Your business model is working for you but it is not letting you do your best work, which can be brilliant. Too many of your posts are basically “stupid people said stupid things on the internet.” Duh. Why do I want to wallow in stupid arguments.
Maybe you only have two good articles in you a month. If 2,000 people paid $2 each for those articles, that’s a decent income. If one article a year went viral and got 80,000 reads, you’d have gross revenues of over $200k.
The subscription model rewards volume over quality and is bad for substack.
But this is Substack’s decision (not to allow pay per view), not CHH’s. And just to think out loud here, if Substack did allow pay-per-view, it would incentivize even more click-baity headlines, which is definitely a downside
There's a work around. Allow pay-per-view, but make likes and dislikes public. A click-baity headline would get a large number of dislikes. Substack might even restrict which subscribers get to do public likes and dislikes to established accounts with a certain payment history. This would produce a useful metric of whether people who are willing and able to pay liked an article.
In theory I agree, however there must be a reason in practice why literally no one on the internet uses this business model. I suspect the answer is the friction of setting up an account and card is high enough that you wouldn’t make up in volume what you lost by charging less or allowing per-article purchases.
This format is used a lot in China. There are micropaywalls too. Like just one paywalled section in an otherwise free article.
I suspect too much of the economy has become addicted to recurring charges. I waste a couple grand a year on recurring charges I don't cut off quickly enough because I hate doing tedious shit. However, this makes me slower to subscribe to new stacks then I would otherwise be. I've also had bad experiences trying to cut things off in the past.
A couple of GRAND? Am I just a Europoor or are you the guy from the "help my family is dying" meme?
i have a small business and there are also subscriptions for that too, including software. $20/month is $240/year if you don’t cut it off
Yeah, newspapers tried this before and it didn't work (probably for the reasons you describe). There's plenty of times I would pay for one article from a local newspaper's archive, but maintaining such systems was not financially sustainable for them.
local newspapers are much more expensive to operate than a substack. you really can operate a substack on five fugures a year if you are willing to live like a young journalist at a regional paper
You can functionally do something like this on Substack, by taking out a monthly subscription (usually in the $5-10 range) and canceling immediately, thereby giving you access to what you want to read plus archives for 30 days. It's very easy to cancel a subscription to a Substack. I do this pretty frequently.
n article would have to be really good to pay $10
True, but:
-Usually the monthly subscription fee for a Substack is on the lower end of that $5-10 range.
-Most good Substacks have multiple articles worth reading, and a 30-day subscription gets you access to the archives.
Generally, it's more like $7 for 8 or 10 or 12 articles as opposed to $10 for one article.
but if you get clicked baited you might hate the other articles you are forced to buy.
maybe they could offer one week subscriptions for half the monthly price, and have them auto terminate. auto termination would be huge, because i don’t like worrying about saving $5. substack knows it’s more affluent readers don’t want to increase their cognitive load to save $5, and they are trying to exploit that
I suppose I only do this if I’m reasonably confident I’m going to like more than one article.
But canceling is super easy, it’s just a few clicks. It’s not the same as the kind of microtransaction you’re talking about, but its the closest thing I’ve seen that actually seems to work.
i’ve had recurring charges i had to cancel credit cards to cut off. spending 25 minutes talking to a phone bank is effectively over $100 in opportunity cost
So it gets kinda complicated. If you do pay per view, then there's quickly an avalanche of clickbait titled short articles like on medium. Medium deals by paying authors based on likes by paying subscribers, and so then it becomes a destination for feel-good slop. There's a thousand authors on there targeting overducated overthinking single people and it got too exhausting lol.
People also don't want 10,000 words a week to read. The only reason I feel okay subscribing to CHH is it's an easy read that isn't triggering anything much in me. Paying money to folks who write on serious topics feels good but then you feel guilty about all the unread emails that are too intimidating to even start and it starts to feel like a waste of your money if they are sending you 5 emails a week. If you're writing cultural commentary, people don't mind recurring subscriptions. I feel like "stupid people said stupid things on the internet" is a kind of media that's easy to consume for me, and CHH does it well enough that it's not slop and fits everything in 1500 words or under. This is a winner-take-all type of writing, so there can be a handful of people doing cultural commentary successfully with each unique point of view. CHH is like the fun column in a newspaper which is a relief from all the talk of nuclear war and bond markets. There can only be so many columnists you don't mind paying money to read.
I have two substacks - one is serious history stuff with lots of research with maybe some cultural commentary once every couple of months, and another is me whining about parenting and mental health. Both have mostly free content. I notice people LOVE reading the cultural commentary and whining. They share it more widely. They subscribe at higher rates. The emails have high open rates. They don't care about erratic schedules.
Serious content with sources and stuff has a band of loyal readers. I try really hard to make it easier to read, shorter pieces, topics more appealing to the average reader. It's really hard for it to break out beyond its circles. Regularity doesn't help that much. And more content really doesn't help. Anything over 2-3 pieces a week is too intimidating to people and they get rather annoyed with me filling up their inbox and unsubscribe.
There's two kinds of writing, I figured - stuff you can read on the go, and appointment reading. If something really appeals to your base instincts of who you are and how you feel about the world, people don't mind reading it on the go, taking breaks from a long piece and coming back to it after putting the kids to bed. But something that's well-written but not immediately important to your lizard brain, that's appointment reading. It used to be easy to do that with magazines back in the day, where you'd sit down with the magazine in the 30 minutes between school and piano lessons and read. Now there isn't that anymore, so it's really hard to get eyes on good writing that isn't immediately tickling your "this pertains to me" instinct.
And 30k words a week is well under an hour of reading a day. I often end up commenting for want of good things to read
> People also don't want 10,000 words a week to read
I think I personally read a lot more than that, but I also don't have a job. ;)
I want to consume about 30k words a week written and about 15 hours of audiobooks and podcasts. chh is the least serious thing i pay for
I looked at your subs, and while what i write is not current affairs and american cultural commentary like you seem to mainly read, you might enjoy reading my history substack, https://lila.substack.com/ Only archives are paywalled and I'm wondering how to go paid still, but, it's focused content that I try to make easy to read, mostly based on primary and secondary sources. Give it a shot, I could use some paid subs.
Can I ask how you manage to keep writing when you deal with so much unpleasantness? How do you not let it get to you? I’m having a lot of trouble with this.
Great question! So first of all, I've been online for a while. I've been publishing my comics since 2018, and I've gotten all sorts of hate comments on those, from both the feminists and the incels (usually because of a complete misunderstanding of my work, not that it matters lol.)
First thing's first, is I don't really DM. My DMs are closed on Twitter unless you're a mutual (and even then, I often don't respond unless it's someone I'm having an intentional conversation with, such as for an interview.) This sounds obnoxious but also, when you get to be a big or influential account, your DMs will be absolutely spammed with people trying to get tailored advice from you or asking you to promote their work, so it's just a minefield to engage because if you do it for one person, suddenly everyone expects it. I have given advice before, of course, but now I try to keep that to my advice column which has a dedicated Google form for paid subscribers.
Second, I remain anonymous. This is a big part of why I'm anonymous. I also just really like my privacy. People will make weird comments about my body, but I think if I gave them access to my face also, it would be worse, because I'm not really that pretty lol. I'm a 35-year-old mom of two and I look like it! Not that a stranger's comment on my face should even matter, I'm not married to them, but the less ammunition you give these people the better.
Last, I'm at the point where my writing enables me to do what I've always wanted to do: stay home with my children. There's almost nothing in the world that would make me want to stop. But before it was a full-time income, I DEFINITELY had moments that I thought about completely deactivating and just going silent. The writing itself and the benefit from the writing had to get to the point where it outweighed the hate comments and I think it's at that point now. But you don't get there by giving up :)
Hope this helps!
Thank you so much for the helpful and thoughtful response. Hopefully other people wondering the same can learn from it too since it’s a public convo.
Love to spend some of my hard earned dollars on CHH
I have been planning to become a paid subscriber for a while now, and this article is what finally convinced me. Is it my inborn Protestant guilt? Anyway, just wanted to let you know that I’ve been enjoying the bits above the paywall and am looking forward to reading the rest!
Wow! I didn’t think anyone would convert over this one, I’m honored ❤️❤️❤️
I did the free preview subscription to see the series on becoming more likeable, and was so surprised by the frequency and quality of the content, like literally laughing aloud. When the time came to cancel I realized wait... I might... actually...be getting my money's worth? So far so true!
I think this is an example of the destruction the internet caused by giving us the ability to voice shower thoughts and the burden of reading every single person's take.
Most people I'd wager are just reacting in a surface level way to surface level details - even if you didn't paywall, they'd still only read the title. Or maybe they would've read on, but someone *else* wouldn't've. And on the flip side, I think it's natural for everyone to go "ah, damn, paywall -" it takes maturity to just be ok with having a feeling one knows is unjustified, and not have to act on it. Most people are going to either act on the feeling without thinking, or suppress it out of fear.
Writers were not meant to read every person who goes through these processes going through them! A person being annoyed they couldn't afford the paper used to be an entirely unobserved phenomenon. Writers used to interact *with other writers*, because those were the only other people writing.
I heard a woman & comedian the other day talk about an experience she had pushing back on some dude who left low effort hate comments ("this is why women aren't funny," or whatever), and his reaction was to be friendly and say he didn't mean it. For him, this was just a reflexive post he made on the toilet, he was not thinking at all. To writers and other neurotics, defined by over-analyzing our thoughts, this is unimaginable, but it is the way a lot of people react to being given a phone.
Also want to say I am one of the people who took a free look and then just signed up. Every post gives me something to chew on (and spam comment section about), a batting avg above most blogs
You see this kind of behaviour even with articles that are free (or free trial, or easy to circumvent paywall) - there's just a tribe of people who want to get angry over the headline, filtered through the kind of person they assume would write it (even though for a traditional publication it's not even the piece author who does that but!)
Many such cases, as you might say. I think that kind of provocative headline/leading paragraph is doomed (unless this kind of hostile pseudo-engagement is somehow monetisable).
There is also the subgenre of "urgh, why is the Guardian writing about this?" about what are clearly meant to be throwaway light-hearted bits filling one column on a lifestyle section but get the same formatting online as a weighty leading editorial.
I'm thinking about it and I'm not sure it's a tribe, but like ... a category of reaction a lot of people fall into depending on the subject or author. There are definitely people who live there (you can find tiresome resistance lib or dsa type or maga tweeters who do nothing but respond to article shares this way), but I'd be the majority of the crowd is just passing through. I know I've had knee-jerk responses before, I just try not to document them!
But yes - a bad way to read, and worth trying to stop.
In a lot of places, we expect teachers to teach for basically free ;)
I wonder those who yell and get mad at paywall for hobby seeks for some kind of interaction just like GW warriors as you pointed out…
And in a sense, it is very intriguing that a lot of ppl can’t sustain their mental sanity without making disagreement with someone into full fledged demonization of that person (no wonder they have few friends irl oops)
One thing also worth mentioning: paywalls involve a tradeoff between short term revenue and long run exposure growth.
My mental model here is Matt Yglesias vs Noah Smith. Matt paywalls more aggressively, so Noah (who started behind him) now has significantly more free subscribers than Matt.