My theory is that a large percentage of Substack readers came of age during the Buzzfeed/blogger years when there were much fewer paywalls and much more insane advertising covering every inch of the article you were reading. When paywalls started popping up more frequently a decade or so ago, I remember being initially annoyed. But I also remembered my wife telling me when she worked at Mashable the writers all made like $35K per year and the top ad sales people made like $500K per year. Hmmm…
Today I’m happy to make a decision on whether or not to clear a paywall. I wish more Podcasts had “no-ad” member subscriptions like “The Rest is History Club.” I think people forget how awful reading articles chocked with ads really is.
And I think in many many people’s head, “everything on internet should be free” is such a deeply engraved idea - in this regard, I kinda wondered how much ppl are aware of the fact that a lot of “free” contents are just ads
Society is more fun and interesting in a low interest rate environment, but people who don't pay attention to things like monetary policy just think they are suddenly being ripped off.
The Internet has trained people to expect things to be free and available all the time without considering the second order effects of that. "All music should be available to me all the time for only 10$ but also the artists should be paid well". "Why ain't every movie ever made available on Netflix for 12$/month with no ads?" while forgetting that the physical media market was a massive boon to the industry that cannot and has not been replaced by subscription. My husband uses PlayStation Plus and that gets derided by gamers as a scam despite only costing 60$ a year for two games a month.
it's really annoying to see and my hot take is that a lot of what people see as things declining in quality a result of this consumer preference. People prefer free crap over paying a little more for better quality. And that goes for writing too. Yes, if you want good content, people have to make money off of it as incentive to do it. And if they are so good they can afford vacations, that's a good thing! Gonna call it the Taylor Swift effect that it's suddenly bad for folk to be successful at their creative industry job.
Don’t even get me started on clothing! Everyone is always asking why they can’t find high-quality natural fiber clothing for dirt cheap and then never once stops to wonder how much people should be paid to make or design clothing.
There are three types of people 1) people who understood the magical time when Netflix had everything was never going to last, 2) people who didn't understand why that period of time was temporary and was inevitably going to end, and 3) people who work at Netflix who were surprised that viewers caught onto their "make second seasons look cheaper and cancel everything by the third season" gambit.
I am an old-timey FDR-style liberal (or, more accurately, I am a Minnesotan born-and-bred Democrat-Farm-Labor Democrat). My strongest political belief is that we should support workers. Workers should earn a fair wage for their work. Period.
This discourse about how we shouldn’t have to pay for our Substack subscriptions drives me up the wall. Is the writer writing posts that you read, enjoy, chuckle over, and learn from? Then pay up! Sheesh!
And for the record, I put my money where my mouth is. I have paid subscriptions to many Substacks, including CHH, because I value their work.
1. I love your son's savagery. Hilarious. Brutal. Real.
2. I know you wrote this for us, your audience, but I like to imagine you reading this aloud to your son cos you're mad. And he listens patiently the whole way through and then says a hilarious one-liner which tears the whole thing apart.
1) in general people do not like having to pay for something they are used to getting for free. We were all spoiled by the era of free blogs, so of course paywalls are grating
2) your premise that no one objects to athletes’ salaries is incorrect. I know multiple people who whine -at length- about how overpaid they are
I think that a portion of this attitude stems from a lot of people underestimating the difficulty of good writing. In other words, they overestimate their own writing ability, and they look at someone’s Substack and think, “I could do that.” These people see a CHH or a writer of similar acclaim and believe that they could do this too…they just have chosen not to.
This idea of “I can do that” is easier to justify for writing than it is for basketball, even if it’s just as wrong. Most adults had to write a lot in school, and so they believe the playing field is more level—they are far closer in ability to a very good writer than they are to Steph Curry. This is not true, but it’s much harder to measure the writing skill gap, and so most people never think to try.
As a result, I think a lot of people consider writing to be a skill that everyone has but that most don’t pursue professionally. Alongside this, they see writing something other than a book as hobby writing (as CHH alluded to). So people charging on Substack are just monetizing their hobby, hoping that rubes out there will pay for something they shouldn’t have to just because you put a price tag on it.
Something that makes this complicated is that when a basketball player makes it to the pros, we know that they must be good at basketball. We can whine and gripe all day about whether Bronny James is good, but the fact of the matter is that he is in the 99.999th percentile of basketball players on Earth—he looks bad when we compare him to the others in that percentile group, not when we compare him to me (I estimate I’m around the 2nd percentile). Even the worst players in the league make money from their basketball skills, which gives us an easy heuristic: someone who can charge money for basketball playing must be one of the best in the world (which is to say that the average man could never hope to compete with them, and therefore cannot charge money for playing basketball).
On the other hand, anyone can put a paywall on their writing, which means that a buyer cannot just assume that the writing must be good just because the author is charging money. Doubtless, there are thousands of writers on the platform who are pretty bad and are just hoping that they can get a few bucks. What that means for a casual reader is that there are far fewer markers separating those types from serious writers whose product is truly worth the cost. You have to develop better heuristics for telling good writers from bad than you need to do the same for basketball players. Get a bad algorithm and it’s not hard to imagine how some such people would become cynical about this rather quickly.
"I think that a portion of this attitude stems from a lot of people underestimating the difficulty of good writing. In other words, they overestimate their own writing ability, and they look at someone’s Substack and think, “I could do that.” These people see a CHH or a writer of similar acclaim and believe that they could do this too…they just have chosen not to."
Yep. Plus, they think the time it takes to write a long blog post is however long it would take to physically type. Research, edits, and even just sitting there thinking about it get passed over.
(Side note: if someone finds a way to "monetize their hobby", good for them!)
It's correct people overestimate their abilities in writing and it's also like... if you think you're as good as these top Substackers go on then? Nothing is stopping you from publishing on Substack if it's so easy.
Honestly, I don’t think writing needs to be a full-time job for it to be legitimate for the writer to charge to read it! They could be annoying billionaire heirs, writing from their third yachts, and it would still be completely fine for them to say they charge $x for access to their blog about yacht life. Of course if their writing is not worth $x to anyone, they’ll have no readers—and if they yearn for readers, they need to look at their pricing—but that’s just the morally neutral force of supply and demand doing its thing.
On a different note, the use of “unhoused body” in the sentence about Matt Yglesias is frankly worth the cost of the subscription to me. A+ comedy phrasing, as ever.
I'm a paid subscriber because I enjoy reading what you write enough to pay for more, and that's the way it should be imo. I think having both the current subscription model AND adding a way to unlock individual articles for $1-2 each might be better though. People hate subscriptions, but if they just want to unlock one article here and there, they might decide it's more cost-effective to pay for a subscription anyway. Or maybe they can only comfortably afford $1-2 a month, or they just want to sample, and that's okay too.
The problem is, if the pay-per-article option existed, everyone would choose it and nobody would take a risk on a subscription, so people write on Substack full-time would simply go away and do something else. I wrote about that here: https://www.cartoonshateher.com/p/substacks-pricing-model-is-fine-actually
My main issue is that something in me feels bad or deceitful when I subscribe in order to access a single article and l know I'm intending to unsubscribe asap. I can't help but picture the author feeling saddened by an instant unsub! But is this just a baseless worry?
I wouldn’t worry about that. A lot of people did that when they subscribe to me, and then they ultimately changed their mind and remained subscribed, but also I expect that some people will subscribe just for one article.
It seems pretty inefficient for you to pay Matt Yglesias $80 per year and for him to then pay you $80 per year. Not only does Substack take 10-20% (I don’t have a paid blog, so I don’t know the number) off the top, but then Uncle Sam takes whatever your marginal tax rate is.
Wouldn’t it make more sense for the two of you to trade lifetime free subscriptions?
I suspect there is a Jevons Paradox angle here. At say $50 per newsletter per year, I’m probably going to pay for my favorite four authors. But there are so many interesting by writers that I’m still going to hit paywalls all the time, which is very frustrating. But at $20 each, I’d be tempted to just sign up en masse for 30 newsletters and essentially never hit a paywall. That’s $600. But if I spend $600 today, I’m getting 5-6 newsletters at most, and still hitting lots of paywalls.
I think this is one reason that Substack favors prolific writers. I agree there’s not much of a point in subscribing to a writer who doesn’t write often enough for it to be worth it. Almost all the most successful writers here are publishing multiple times a week often more than three times a week. To me, that’s the business model! It’s not ideal, but it facilitates the type of writing I do, so I like it.
Yeah. Substack writers do have to deliver good value for money in order to be worth the cost. I canceled paid subscriptions to three excellent writers because they would maybe post once a month. I enjoyed their posts, but they were definitely not worth $5-10 each. If these writers ever aggregate their posts into a book, I will buy it, at a fraction of the cost of an annual subscription.
All that being said, I am in awe of the work ethic of the Substack writers I do pay for, particularly CHH and Jeff Maurer, who post high-quality pieces almost every day. Amazing!
And this mentality of “I am miserable so I demand everyone is miserable instead of I wanna be as happy as successful ones” is such a prevalent mindset esp as a Japanese, I’ve seen this a lot lol
And the other random thing i wondered is, “is this similar to what French trad artist felt towards impressionist” lol
The idea that writers (or literally anyone else) *shouldn’t* charge for their work is, indeed, ridiculous. The reason most artists “starve” (figuratively, generally speaking :) is that an insufficient number of people are willing to pay for their art. But that doesn’t mean the artist *shouldn’t* ask for payment.
I subscribe to maybe three substacks, to include yours. You're prolific and funny!
But I do wish the first click onto a new writer's substack would be a free read; how can I tell if want to subscribe otherwise, if it's not a topic that I'm into in the first place?
As far as rich writers go, I admit a strong bias against fashion writers on this platform who are obviously loaded. I'm not able to buy $1200 shoes or $900 pants*, and I certainly don't care to give those people who can a kickback for flogging them.
*You know the ones. They look like the pants my mom wore in the 70s.
I have no objections to paying writers (obviously since I'm paying for several), but I do think Substack's model is limiting. I'm probably paying for more than I should, but I'm not paying for as many as I would like. Would micro transactions lead to more slop? Maybe, maybe not. It depends on how it's implemented. Maybe Substack could offer some kind of bundling. Authors who choose to participate get less money per subscription but get more subscribers. I'd like to see them experiment with more options.
People keep talking about bundling and it drives me mad. Bundling exists. It’s called Medium and it’s essentially burned to the ground. Big writers cannot subsidise small writers because the numbers don’t make sense.
Also The Argument, The Free Press - are all essentially the bundling model. You get access to multiple writers on their platform. But not everyone is obligated to do that. Substack does allow it though and anyone could do it if they wanted.
I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing exactly, but that's my fault. Bundling isn't exactly the right word. You're right about The Free Press doing a form of bundling that works. What I'm thinking of might be better described as a volume discount. You can subscribe to these individual writers for $5/month each, but if you subscribe to six writers it's only $25/month. Writers could opt in or out of allowing the discount. Something like that. It's not insisting that anything be given away for free. It's just rewarding the people already spending the most.
But many writers do give discounts, CHH had a big discount a while back and so did Lirpa strike who casually made it a lifetime discounted annual price. There’s also founding memberships. Again bundling writers together for this exists in the Argument /Free press model and they give discounts too, but Substack giving discounts to customers based on the number of ppl they subscribe to simply doesn’t work because their deregulation gives that power to writers and groups of writers and secondly those writers rarely take it up to form such groups (again creating an argument style newsletter is an option!) because the volume of purchasers is incredibly sucky. There is simply no volume for this to be justified which is why it’s still a “winner takes it all” model. If you want to change that model, customer spending habits need to change. Compare the number of readers on Substack to the number of NBA/World Cup etc followers. It’s not even remotely the same.
My theory is that a large percentage of Substack readers came of age during the Buzzfeed/blogger years when there were much fewer paywalls and much more insane advertising covering every inch of the article you were reading. When paywalls started popping up more frequently a decade or so ago, I remember being initially annoyed. But I also remembered my wife telling me when she worked at Mashable the writers all made like $35K per year and the top ad sales people made like $500K per year. Hmmm…
Today I’m happy to make a decision on whether or not to clear a paywall. I wish more Podcasts had “no-ad” member subscriptions like “The Rest is History Club.” I think people forget how awful reading articles chocked with ads really is.
This makes a perfect sense to me!
And I think in many many people’s head, “everything on internet should be free” is such a deeply engraved idea - in this regard, I kinda wondered how much ppl are aware of the fact that a lot of “free” contents are just ads
Society is more fun and interesting in a low interest rate environment, but people who don't pay attention to things like monetary policy just think they are suddenly being ripped off.
The Internet has trained people to expect things to be free and available all the time without considering the second order effects of that. "All music should be available to me all the time for only 10$ but also the artists should be paid well". "Why ain't every movie ever made available on Netflix for 12$/month with no ads?" while forgetting that the physical media market was a massive boon to the industry that cannot and has not been replaced by subscription. My husband uses PlayStation Plus and that gets derided by gamers as a scam despite only costing 60$ a year for two games a month.
it's really annoying to see and my hot take is that a lot of what people see as things declining in quality a result of this consumer preference. People prefer free crap over paying a little more for better quality. And that goes for writing too. Yes, if you want good content, people have to make money off of it as incentive to do it. And if they are so good they can afford vacations, that's a good thing! Gonna call it the Taylor Swift effect that it's suddenly bad for folk to be successful at their creative industry job.
Don’t even get me started on clothing! Everyone is always asking why they can’t find high-quality natural fiber clothing for dirt cheap and then never once stops to wonder how much people should be paid to make or design clothing.
There are three types of people 1) people who understood the magical time when Netflix had everything was never going to last, 2) people who didn't understand why that period of time was temporary and was inevitably going to end, and 3) people who work at Netflix who were surprised that viewers caught onto their "make second seasons look cheaper and cancel everything by the third season" gambit.
"Why Must Artists Starve": thinkpiece about paywalled writing, or about Ariana Grande? Only paid subscribers will ever know!
I am an old-timey FDR-style liberal (or, more accurately, I am a Minnesotan born-and-bred Democrat-Farm-Labor Democrat). My strongest political belief is that we should support workers. Workers should earn a fair wage for their work. Period.
This discourse about how we shouldn’t have to pay for our Substack subscriptions drives me up the wall. Is the writer writing posts that you read, enjoy, chuckle over, and learn from? Then pay up! Sheesh!
And for the record, I put my money where my mouth is. I have paid subscriptions to many Substacks, including CHH, because I value their work.
Glad to have you here! ❤️
Two thoughts:
1. I love your son's savagery. Hilarious. Brutal. Real.
2. I know you wrote this for us, your audience, but I like to imagine you reading this aloud to your son cos you're mad. And he listens patiently the whole way through and then says a hilarious one-liner which tears the whole thing apart.
He was in the room while I was writing it, but mostly he was making fart noises with his mouth (okay, the "room" was a 5 hour train ride.)
The greatest critic gives his perspective.
1) in general people do not like having to pay for something they are used to getting for free. We were all spoiled by the era of free blogs, so of course paywalls are grating
2) your premise that no one objects to athletes’ salaries is incorrect. I know multiple people who whine -at length- about how overpaid they are
I think that a portion of this attitude stems from a lot of people underestimating the difficulty of good writing. In other words, they overestimate their own writing ability, and they look at someone’s Substack and think, “I could do that.” These people see a CHH or a writer of similar acclaim and believe that they could do this too…they just have chosen not to.
This idea of “I can do that” is easier to justify for writing than it is for basketball, even if it’s just as wrong. Most adults had to write a lot in school, and so they believe the playing field is more level—they are far closer in ability to a very good writer than they are to Steph Curry. This is not true, but it’s much harder to measure the writing skill gap, and so most people never think to try.
As a result, I think a lot of people consider writing to be a skill that everyone has but that most don’t pursue professionally. Alongside this, they see writing something other than a book as hobby writing (as CHH alluded to). So people charging on Substack are just monetizing their hobby, hoping that rubes out there will pay for something they shouldn’t have to just because you put a price tag on it.
Something that makes this complicated is that when a basketball player makes it to the pros, we know that they must be good at basketball. We can whine and gripe all day about whether Bronny James is good, but the fact of the matter is that he is in the 99.999th percentile of basketball players on Earth—he looks bad when we compare him to the others in that percentile group, not when we compare him to me (I estimate I’m around the 2nd percentile). Even the worst players in the league make money from their basketball skills, which gives us an easy heuristic: someone who can charge money for basketball playing must be one of the best in the world (which is to say that the average man could never hope to compete with them, and therefore cannot charge money for playing basketball).
On the other hand, anyone can put a paywall on their writing, which means that a buyer cannot just assume that the writing must be good just because the author is charging money. Doubtless, there are thousands of writers on the platform who are pretty bad and are just hoping that they can get a few bucks. What that means for a casual reader is that there are far fewer markers separating those types from serious writers whose product is truly worth the cost. You have to develop better heuristics for telling good writers from bad than you need to do the same for basketball players. Get a bad algorithm and it’s not hard to imagine how some such people would become cynical about this rather quickly.
"I think that a portion of this attitude stems from a lot of people underestimating the difficulty of good writing. In other words, they overestimate their own writing ability, and they look at someone’s Substack and think, “I could do that.” These people see a CHH or a writer of similar acclaim and believe that they could do this too…they just have chosen not to."
Yep. Plus, they think the time it takes to write a long blog post is however long it would take to physically type. Research, edits, and even just sitting there thinking about it get passed over.
(Side note: if someone finds a way to "monetize their hobby", good for them!)
It's correct people overestimate their abilities in writing and it's also like... if you think you're as good as these top Substackers go on then? Nothing is stopping you from publishing on Substack if it's so easy.
As someone who has written a little bit to very moderate success, even if you *can* do it well like you think you can, it's really, really hard!
Honestly, I don’t think writing needs to be a full-time job for it to be legitimate for the writer to charge to read it! They could be annoying billionaire heirs, writing from their third yachts, and it would still be completely fine for them to say they charge $x for access to their blog about yacht life. Of course if their writing is not worth $x to anyone, they’ll have no readers—and if they yearn for readers, they need to look at their pricing—but that’s just the morally neutral force of supply and demand doing its thing.
On a different note, the use of “unhoused body” in the sentence about Matt Yglesias is frankly worth the cost of the subscription to me. A+ comedy phrasing, as ever.
New article idea: should Matt Yglesias be allowed to sleep on the metro
I'm a paid subscriber because I enjoy reading what you write enough to pay for more, and that's the way it should be imo. I think having both the current subscription model AND adding a way to unlock individual articles for $1-2 each might be better though. People hate subscriptions, but if they just want to unlock one article here and there, they might decide it's more cost-effective to pay for a subscription anyway. Or maybe they can only comfortably afford $1-2 a month, or they just want to sample, and that's okay too.
The problem is, if the pay-per-article option existed, everyone would choose it and nobody would take a risk on a subscription, so people write on Substack full-time would simply go away and do something else. I wrote about that here: https://www.cartoonshateher.com/p/substacks-pricing-model-is-fine-actually
My main issue is that something in me feels bad or deceitful when I subscribe in order to access a single article and l know I'm intending to unsubscribe asap. I can't help but picture the author feeling saddened by an instant unsub! But is this just a baseless worry?
I wouldn’t worry about that. A lot of people did that when they subscribe to me, and then they ultimately changed their mind and remained subscribed, but also I expect that some people will subscribe just for one article.
Bigger problem is that while everyone says they'd pay a dollar, most actually wouldn't even do that
CHH: would they? I would pay for all articles except for the few where you show off the clothes you wear lol. Not my jam.....
It seems pretty inefficient for you to pay Matt Yglesias $80 per year and for him to then pay you $80 per year. Not only does Substack take 10-20% (I don’t have a paid blog, so I don’t know the number) off the top, but then Uncle Sam takes whatever your marginal tax rate is.
Wouldn’t it make more sense for the two of you to trade lifetime free subscriptions?
Actually, yeah, we should have done that a while ago lol. Oh well. (My annual sub is less than $80 though so it’s not equivalent)
I suspect there is a Jevons Paradox angle here. At say $50 per newsletter per year, I’m probably going to pay for my favorite four authors. But there are so many interesting by writers that I’m still going to hit paywalls all the time, which is very frustrating. But at $20 each, I’d be tempted to just sign up en masse for 30 newsletters and essentially never hit a paywall. That’s $600. But if I spend $600 today, I’m getting 5-6 newsletters at most, and still hitting lots of paywalls.
I think this is one reason that Substack favors prolific writers. I agree there’s not much of a point in subscribing to a writer who doesn’t write often enough for it to be worth it. Almost all the most successful writers here are publishing multiple times a week often more than three times a week. To me, that’s the business model! It’s not ideal, but it facilitates the type of writing I do, so I like it.
Yeah. Substack writers do have to deliver good value for money in order to be worth the cost. I canceled paid subscriptions to three excellent writers because they would maybe post once a month. I enjoyed their posts, but they were definitely not worth $5-10 each. If these writers ever aggregate their posts into a book, I will buy it, at a fraction of the cost of an annual subscription.
All that being said, I am in awe of the work ethic of the Substack writers I do pay for, particularly CHH and Jeff Maurer, who post high-quality pieces almost every day. Amazing!
I think this is accurate, whe I have canceled a sub it's usually because they hardly ever post.
Great article!!!
And this mentality of “I am miserable so I demand everyone is miserable instead of I wanna be as happy as successful ones” is such a prevalent mindset esp as a Japanese, I’ve seen this a lot lol
And the other random thing i wondered is, “is this similar to what French trad artist felt towards impressionist” lol
The idea that writers (or literally anyone else) *shouldn’t* charge for their work is, indeed, ridiculous. The reason most artists “starve” (figuratively, generally speaking :) is that an insufficient number of people are willing to pay for their art. But that doesn’t mean the artist *shouldn’t* ask for payment.
I subscribe to maybe three substacks, to include yours. You're prolific and funny!
But I do wish the first click onto a new writer's substack would be a free read; how can I tell if want to subscribe otherwise, if it's not a topic that I'm into in the first place?
As far as rich writers go, I admit a strong bias against fashion writers on this platform who are obviously loaded. I'm not able to buy $1200 shoes or $900 pants*, and I certainly don't care to give those people who can a kickback for flogging them.
*You know the ones. They look like the pants my mom wore in the 70s.
I agree it’s good to get a free sample for sure! That’s why I place my paywalls pretty low and I always enable the 7 day free trial
I have no objections to paying writers (obviously since I'm paying for several), but I do think Substack's model is limiting. I'm probably paying for more than I should, but I'm not paying for as many as I would like. Would micro transactions lead to more slop? Maybe, maybe not. It depends on how it's implemented. Maybe Substack could offer some kind of bundling. Authors who choose to participate get less money per subscription but get more subscribers. I'd like to see them experiment with more options.
People keep talking about bundling and it drives me mad. Bundling exists. It’s called Medium and it’s essentially burned to the ground. Big writers cannot subsidise small writers because the numbers don’t make sense.
Also The Argument, The Free Press - are all essentially the bundling model. You get access to multiple writers on their platform. But not everyone is obligated to do that. Substack does allow it though and anyone could do it if they wanted.
I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing exactly, but that's my fault. Bundling isn't exactly the right word. You're right about The Free Press doing a form of bundling that works. What I'm thinking of might be better described as a volume discount. You can subscribe to these individual writers for $5/month each, but if you subscribe to six writers it's only $25/month. Writers could opt in or out of allowing the discount. Something like that. It's not insisting that anything be given away for free. It's just rewarding the people already spending the most.
But many writers do give discounts, CHH had a big discount a while back and so did Lirpa strike who casually made it a lifetime discounted annual price. There’s also founding memberships. Again bundling writers together for this exists in the Argument /Free press model and they give discounts too, but Substack giving discounts to customers based on the number of ppl they subscribe to simply doesn’t work because their deregulation gives that power to writers and groups of writers and secondly those writers rarely take it up to form such groups (again creating an argument style newsletter is an option!) because the volume of purchasers is incredibly sucky. There is simply no volume for this to be justified which is why it’s still a “winner takes it all” model. If you want to change that model, customer spending habits need to change. Compare the number of readers on Substack to the number of NBA/World Cup etc followers. It’s not even remotely the same.
Very much agree.