Semiconductor Things™: Future Media

Natural Selection is Eating the Old Web

Michael Spencer — Sun, 18 Feb 2024 13:29:08 GMT

Photo by Julius Drost on Unsplash

Hey Everyone,

In 2024 the internet is proving to be a rather unfortunate natural selection for the majority of Creator incentives.

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Substack in 2024; Controversy can Rejuvenate an Independent Voices Platform

Michael Spencer — Mon, 22 Jan 2024 10:30:15 GMT

Hey Everyone,

Substack’s ability to rejuvenate itself is going to be more significant than a mainstream media in decline due to the declining quality of social media, poorer performance of Google search and a number of other factors in how citizens are seeking alternative Op-eds, news and coverage of the world in which we live.

Substack is a bold experiment in freedom of expression, community and supporting writers from all around the world to build their own publications and experiences for global citizens.

Writers who aren’t invested in Substack’s community of writers also won’t see Substack the same way as those that do try to grow the success of others and actually care about their peers. Substack isn’t just the relationship between a writer and their readers any longer with Notes, where more collaboration is fostered and more of a sense of communal identity separate from the rest of the internet exists. After six years Substack’s brand identity is forming in its core group of writers, and not just among its scattered readers.

The latest attack on Substack by the Atlantic, itself a competitor of Substack with 22 Newsletters, many of which are quite political (very similar to Substack itself), and the mainstream media as a whole supported by actual ‘journalists’ on Substack - endears me to Subsack even more.

Funny how that works! On the spectrum of censorship, content moderation to free speech and people forming groups, and as a platform for the little guys, Substack’s survival is now in an election year, more important than ever.

I tried to ascertain the damage to Substack’s Newsletters leaving and audience, because the mainstream media conveniently leaves out those details out who has left in their pretty poor blanket coverage. I do not think it’s very significant on the Newsletter/publications leaving, however maybe more on the audience churn on the political left in terms of paid support.

Casey Newton was perhaps the most goofy actor in all of this drama. Given that Substack has treated him like a VIP with benefits (extreme favoritism), supposed to be one of the poster-boys of actual journalists making it on Substack, it was pretty brutal to watch his conduct. It also shows how Substack hasn’t been very aligned with who to boost. A platform like Substack should boost for the record, people more likely to be loyal to the platform, the little guys. The home grown peasants with pitchforks, not some privileged NYT expert in hyperlinks with dozens of cozy buddies on the inside of America’s rapidly declining institutions of journalism.

Boosting an ambitious journalist from Silicon Valley who already had gigs with The Verge and the NYT, maybe wasn’t the smartest idea Substack ever had! Someone who clearly couldn’t care less about damaging the reputation of Substack in the process of his own “investigative” crusade (even contacting Stripe) on content moderation after having profiteered immensely from Substack’s recommendation engine (which is now a shadow of its former self btw).

Thank you for your Service

Still with every funded campaign by the mainstream media to damage Substack as they grind losses in their own paid subscriptions media, some good people have left. Email and Newsletters have always been a revolving door. Talent in, churn out. This isn’t particularly unusual. A majority have moved to Ghost, beehiiv or ConvertKit.

RIP:

1. Platformer

190,000

https://www.platformer.news/why-platformer-is-leaving-substack/

2. The Food Section

The Food Section

So long, Substack

Plenty of fundamental choices are just too boring to talk about. For example, I’m sure there’s a certain brand of soap you stock in your shower, but I’d bet you don’t discuss it at dinner. Generally, I feel the same way about email service provider…

2 years ago · 135 likes · 52 comments · Hanna Raskin

3. Citation Needed

by Molly White

https://citationneeded.news/citation-needed-has-a-new-home/

4. The Disconnect

https://parismarx.substack.com/welcome

5. Garbage Day

69,000

Garbage Day

It's time to leave Substack

Yeah, I’m Out I decided I would give Substack the holidays to get their shit together. I also wanted to hear from readers — and I’ve heard from many of you. But, most importantly, I needed some time to research where Garbage Day could move to if this truly was the breaking point for my relationship with Substack…

2 years ago · 279 likes · 136 comments · Ryan Broderick

6. Search Engine

with PJ Vogt

Search Engine with PJ Vogt

When do you know it's time to stop drinking? (Also, our plan to leave Substack)

Happy New Year Searchers, It’s 2024 and we’re back with a new episode for you. In fact, we have five new episodes for you over the next five weeks. Five episodes! We hope you’ve been saving up your laundry, that you haven’t walked your dog in weeks, and that your dishes are p…

2 years ago · 55 likes · 17 comments · PJ Vogt

7. The Handbasket

Marisa Kabas (organizer of the “petition”)

The Handbasket

Substack says it will ban some Nazis

Last night, Substackers Against Nazis received some encouraging news: Company leadership decided it would actually enforce its terms of service and said it planned to remove a handful of accounts in violation. Since the news broke, there’s been no shortage of opinions about it, ranging from “this is huge!” to “you did absolutely nothing.” After more yea…

2 years ago · 156 likes · 1 comment · Marisa Kabas

8. The Racket

Jon M. Katz (instigator)

Now on beehiiv, read: https://theracket.news/p/off-stack

Subscriber Estimate Lost

To be generous I’d say 500,000 subscribers left with the exodus of around two dozen publications. Considering Substack has in the area of 35,000 publications, it’s not a very large exodus. In fact, it’s more bark than bite. It’s impossible to know how many paid subscribers unsubscribed when the mainstream American press did their copy-pasta campaign.

Also considering that many of these subscribers will stay on Substack since they follow other publications here, most of them are not actually lost at all. Consumers have been dialing down on paid subscriptions as discretionary income slows. I think the point is paid subscriptions are in decline everywhere in 2023/2024 for written media. Even TikTok is stuffing its feed with TikTok Store Ads and slowing its own (paid) growth tremendously by doing so.

Still quietly a lot of churn of some of the bigger Substack influencers (like Grit Capital) have been occurring since the pandemic, and this may be a sign that the Newsletter economy has slowed along with the advertising slowdown, a Creator Economy startup winter and other macro factors for the most part outside of our control. Crypto people leaving Substack is nothing new given that crypto media is pretty well lost. Those crypto bros are now AI bros. Media is a tough business, and now you have to compete against AI spam that’s basically breaking the Google SEO model.

Substack’s Coverage of Substack Controversy

Substack definately isn’t an alternative media ecosystem but it is a complementary media of independent voices. This ecosystem of voices across topics is better even than failing news aggregation apps in terms of developing sustainable revenue. With Notes and more community products, it’s also less mob than tribe. Substack has managed to develop a writer identity. All of this is lost in the Creator Economy media coverage it seems as well.

These independent voices do deserve Native sponsorships and whatever other help to monetize they can to survive as independent voices, as extraordinary a job as Substack has done with paid subscriptions. In 2024, we’re reaching paid subscription saturation in media and blogging. Typically media needs to pivot when you hit a wall, but most Media outlets are doubling down on Newsletters (Substack’s own business). The reality is there won’t be room for everyone as Boomers and GenX age (the main readers and main paid subscription supporters). It’s demographics baby!

Our independent voices have also made some interesting reflections on this episode (Substack vs. Nazi sounds so weird) that in itself was a very “entertaining chapter” in Substack’s history.

If the campaign was actually true, you would think it would have had a far bigger impact. When you had idealistic journalists and researchers on Substack actually believing a “hit campaign” by The Atlantic and its funders, you see how permeated with misinformation the internet has come. Even a censored and content moderated internet is failing to even give you the truth.

Substack is its own beast in terms of the amount of misinformation people want to consume as we naturally gravitate towards topics and political orientations that affirm our own thinking, values, beliefs and cravings for belonging no matter how ephemeral. The internet is today full of synthetic media that is not going to be terribly truthful, it’s not as if content moderation has worked particularly well.

Google in 2023 and 2024 seems partially bad at telling the difference between fake sites generated by A.I. and real high quality sources. Social media and Search is breaking down as a whole, which is actually a much bigger story! I warned about synthetic media spamming the entire internet a long time ago. In 2024, we are starting to see some semblance of how this is taking shape.

There has been so much written about this, it might even be a case of bad publicity (“all publicity is good publicity”) is good publicity when it helps people discover Substack.

Substack as a collection of independent voices doesn’t replace a media in a stark decline, but it does complement how we read online and provide outlets for various groups of people, beliefs and specialized interests. There’s a high chance that Twitter, known as X, will go bankrupt and will strain the finances of Elon Musk. It cannot keep up as a broken model indefinitely with so many lawsuits pending. Buying Twitter was clearly Elon Musk’s worst decision ever. Also because it damages how legacy media used to work before the AI synthetic media onslaught.

Substack’s Coverage of its own Controversy

There has been so much written about this, it might even be a case of bad publicity (“all publicity is good publicity”) is good publicity when it helps people discover Substack. In an election year if Substack gets more right than left, is that such a bad thing at all? I mean wasn’t that inevitable after all given where Substack has found momentum.

The reality is, people are craving complementary media of independent voices. Whether in America, Europe or even places like India. Whether to sound politically correct or neutral, writers take all kinds of sides on this issue. Some defend Substack, others vilify it, but they are also doing this for attention and to reduce churn at a confusing juncture. Still I find it makes for some great reading.

And isn’t that the point after all! We aren’t here to be lectured to, we are also here to be entertained.

People like Eric Newcomer or Lenny would never have been able to make $1 Million without Substack for instance. It’s not just political wackos that are thriving on Substack. There are investor types and some Op-ed essayists as well outside the confines of easy definition.

A Great Death of Media is Coming

That is the beauty of Substack, it’s a tapestry of independent voices that no mainstream media publication like The Atlantic or the LA Times could ever replicate. In fact, those publications are unlikely to survive very much longer. Time Magazine is owned by the CEO of Salesforce, the Washington Post is owned by Amazon’s original founder, there’s a disturbing pattern in how media is controlled by Billionaires and Silicon Valley itself. We aren’t actually getting free media coverage in America.

Nobody actually wants to deplatform in 2024, since the internet is pretty broken. Why would you want to go to Ghost given that Google search has been hijacked by AI generated spam, bots and fraudsters stealing SEO traffic from legit sources? It’s not going to turn out well for you! The current decline of Google search means a Wordpress or a Ghost may as well be on the dark web. The rules of SEO no longer make sense on an internet permeated by more and more AI generated content which 99% of us consider SPAM>.

However the demise of Twitter and things like the decline of journalists on X has really hurt free speech, truth and independent voices as well. While advertising revenue has migrated mostly from Twitter to LinkedIn, more LinkedIn posts are also looking suspiciously like ChatGPT spam. I’m not sure Medium can keep on in its current form either. It’s a shadow of what it once was. Ten years ago I could find a rather uplifting brand of techno-optimism on Medium, fast forward today and most of that stuff is AI generated Venture Capital propaganda.

The Decline of Media will Corrupt Democracy

It’s clear the American Media will keep declining as democracy begins to fail. Wealth inequality keeps increasing, trust in Government and institutions keeps declining. The interest on National debt keeps increasing.

Substack in a sea of media failures, might be one of the last men/women standing. If Substack manages to keep it profitable, growing and independently owned. That’s not a sure thing in such a chaotic and political world. Startups are in terrible shape and media one of the hardest industries and Creator Economy startups seem particularly vulnerable.

Publications with a minimum of censorships should continue, because independent voices might be all that we will have left in a few decades. The AI generated media will just be a canvas for the elites. There’s little doubt about that, Davos 2024 showed us how they are using AI to foster their own agendas.

Substack in a sea of media failures, might be one of the last men/women standing. If Substack manages to keep it profitable, growing and independently owned.

Monopoly Capitalism is a system that might replace a lot of our current institutions, sort of like a dystopian nightmare from a novel. The free press is being hijacked and the Casey Newtons of the world won’t exist any longer even a decade from now. That’s why while I don’t read much political content, I’m much more comfortable with peasants with pitchforks writing, because it’s infinitely more human and entertaining.

People should be free to have their own opinions, and their own perspectives on the world in which we are living in, and a Silicon Valley brand of content moderation mostly conducted by AI, isn’t likely the answer. Elites should not be able to dictate the kind of news we are exposed to.

Storytelling is embedded in the roots of our culture and traditions as tribes, ethnic groups and communities, and writers need a place where they can congregate without feeling the all-seeing eye of Surveillance capitalism censorship. Nobody has the time to keep following their favorite writers as they migrate down black holes of traffic (Ghost, wordpress, beehiiv, etc..). beehiiv’s idea of recommendations is literally writers paying for new subscribers. It’s not even remotely building a sense of community among fellow writers. Instead its prioritizing monetization, Ads and scaling at a time when the Newsletter economy isn’t actually thriving (there’s bots). And how am I supposed to keep up with a writer who migrates to Ghost? Am I supposed to bookmark their website? Is this 2009?

I certainly won’t be reading even among my favorites of those who left, in fact, I mostly don’t even realize who is gone. I had to look really hard just to find a few that left in the old guard media contrived exodus. It just goes to show how incredibly gullible we are as writers. This also underscores how desperate the mainstream media has become, and their actual decaying commitment to the truth while they breakup embrace paid subscriptions - and this is important, way too late to save their business models.

Why is Substack Worth Supporting?

How people consume media will change with the decline of Google, mainstream media, and entire generations of readers who will age out of the economy. Zoomers and Millennials growing up on video and screens aren’t necessarily connected to reading in the same way.

The rise of synthetic media and AI generated content is a tidal wave that is very destructive, nor does it lead to media, writing and creative utopia. It’s not entirely clear what will even be left after all of this. There will be a major disconnect as the American model of the internet falters in how consumers and citizens are supposed to access good information, truthful information and human information.

Good information
Truthful information
Human generated information

Our decline in trust of the mainstream media has solid foundations in our own experience. Yet sources on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram are even worse. Substack has a surprising amount of good information, ideas and unique perspectives.

The future of media might be unrecognizable in just a decade, and by supporting a writer on Substack, you are literally voting with your wallet for the survival of a small oasis filled with “little guys”, independent voices and something outside the control of elites, Silicon Valley and a very unfree press of the future that’s gone from a rising risk, to an inevitable certainty.

Why the Substack Against Nazis Movement Sucks

Michael Spencer — Mon, 08 Jan 2024 01:02:07 GMT

Hey Everyone,

I hope you had a good break. I have to say something and it might not be too popular.

I’ve been horrified in recent weeks how Substack Notes has degenerated into a campaign against the platform, against its own administrators and leaders. Content moderation is everywhere on the internet and there are few places where free speech exists (if it exists at all). This is not just about demonizating Neo-Nazi Newsletters. This is about a bigger problem.

I have had people try to “convert” me over to the Campaign point of view. Substack has always been full of American ‘sicko media’ and a whole range of questionable content. What Israel is doing to Palestine killing 23x as many (mostly innocent civilian young people) as October 7th did is pretty sick to me.

Substack is a free speech platform
Content moderation does not have good outcomes (it leads to more moderation)
Substack is a small startup, it cannot realistically even afford content moderation
Substack is an agonistic tool, Newsletters about anything should exist for us to see, like a collective mirror.

That users of a platform would try to demonstrate (do they even know how to protest in America any longer for real?) and create a toxic campaign against one of the last bastions of free speech online (an oasis of sorts) is terrible for me. Because it hurts the ecosystem where I make a meagre living.

So Then Leave!

I would like to see what @Katz or would be without Substack.

There are so many worthwhile things to protest about in this world, this is not one of them.

Now my Substack Notes is clogged with all of this political nonsense, against the very platform these people use.

I appreciate that Substack is an agnostic tool, they should NEVER get involved in content moderation.

One thing would lead to another, and all sorts of content moderation would be taking place. Substack’s ideology spins a good tale (most of which is not factual), but free speech has to remain in the public square and it’s a Newsletter, most people will never see it anyways. YouTube and TikTok are full of questionable content, even with their content moderation A.I. and significant (literally legions) of traumatized contractors.

The anti-vaccine movement in the U.S. was totally pathetic, and it thrived on Substack. There is and will continue to be tons of misinformation here, most Newsletters are all about clickbait, gimmicks and entertainment. I don’t care for political content myself. But it has destroyed Notes of late. This campaign is bar none, the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen on Notes.

I will personally be very happy to see Newsletter leave on principle. Successful elites who have no financial worries in the world can afford to squabble over fucking Neo-Nazis. Considering what Israel is doing also at this very moment, this movement seems very cringe to me. I’m appalled as the state of the world but I don’t be projecting that on a platform, that for the most part allows me to write. Human beings need freedom of expression. It should be a human right.

Let’s be honest here, I’m a futurist at heart, and I think Civil War in the U.S. is a real possibility, too much debt is going to catch up with that entire civilization. Debt, a demographic winter, global conflict and anti-American sentiment is building. You have no idea what is coming.

But let’s face it, foreign affairs have been badly mismanaged. At home, America is a hotpot of racial discrimination, crime, mass murders (mass shootings/white terror), sexism, wealth inequality, disillusioned young people, unaffordable basic healthcare and housing. Neo-Nazi’s aren’t the problem. And content moderation, isn’t even the answer. America’s mental health is really bad right now. I get it.

Substack leadership doesn’t know how to do PR, that’s a fact. In a note on the site published in December, the chief writing officer, Hamish made some odd statements. The interviews and podcasts of the CEO are super cringe. These are’t stellar businses people or startup conaaisors. They are just people. But I think overall they mean well and I agree with their basic positions on content moderation and free speech.

Substack does have a net positive benefit to humanity, sure some political writing inherits some of the most cringe elements of Twitter but that’s how Substack chose to grow and scale their business. Substack directly inherited this karma due to its growth choices as a company and as a brand. Substack ate Twitter click-fucks and it shows. They ate them for fucking breakfast. So this is what you get.

They chose to support clickbait political writers and ideological weaponization including Anti-vaccine rhetoric (very profitable!), Neo-Nazi content and anti-trans rhetoric and whatever else. I’m not a fan of how they chose to scale the platform or that they think they are empowering culture.

Empowering Culture?

Let’s face it, there’s very little real world demand for cultural writing. Meanwhile, the mainstream media has always tried to hurt the reputation of Substack, who are yet another threat to their dismal future. Katz just gave them what they wanted, a rally cry that even now “users” of the platform have embraced. The piece by Katz in the Atlantic built up a campaign and I wonder who is funding this petty campaign? There’s clearly real money behind it and influencers “joining” it is getting a bit suspect.

Do you think I care about what Atwood, Katz or Newton think? These are very successful writers who don’t bat an eyelash over how their actions might hurt other writers.

I hate this campaign because it just causes more division and hurts indie writers because it hurts the platform we use.

Most writers try to build communities and some of those will have fringe elements that could end up being harmful to society. There is a lot of division in the United States and its two-party system. And yet, I’ve seen the failings of ideology on all sides including how Substack markets itself. Substack is a political swamp of ideological reflections of this bimodular Right and Left which demonstrates that 2024 is going to get pretty toxic.

But user campaigns against a platform? This has gone too far. It doesn’t have any cultural value. America is not remotely a place where you can be safe if you are different. There are so many other better countries for women, racial minorities, poor people, Jews, LGTBQ folk or whatever. This campaign makes no fucking difference to reality, but it does hurt writers trying to earn a living here.

How many hundreds of thousands of dollars do you suppose Katz has cost Substack as a platform with this bizarre hit piece and strange movement? These people know Substack is not about moderation. It’s serious financial damage. Where is the list of people and publications that have or will leave the platform?

The User Campaign Hurts Substack’s Brand Reputation

No I won’t sign your fucking petition. Jonathan M. Katz really is at the end of his life and can say what he likes, but in doing so he is hurting the little guys. He didn’t make the world a better place by profiteering that op-ed in the Atlantic. Heck, he probably did it for the money. It’s a hit piece. A lot of the big Newsletters who are threatening to leave, got a lot of people unsubscribing from their paid subscriptions apparently? All of this damages Substack’s brand beyond recognition. Most real journalists won’t touch it for this reason, long before this campaign. I’ve spoken to dozens myself.

I really want people involved in this Campaign to leave Substack.
I won’t use Notes if it is full of such crap.

I was more hurt by the Anti-Trans content than I am alarmed that Neo-Nazis exist in Newsletters. Who fucking cares? But I don’t consider America a real democracy and I certainly don’t enjoy what the public debate on the internet over these things has become. There are likely people actually funding this latest flavor of the anti-Substack campaign. But for humble writers, some of us actually fund our lives here, you are messing with our small garden.

That people want to be social justice crusaders at my expense, a platform that I depend on to feed my family, irks me. If Substack gets hurt, all writers on Substack get hurt. It’s just, not worth it.

Where is the list of Newsletter Creators giving in to the peer pressure of this campaign? I want to personally write them each a goodbye note.

This is the article that started all of this.
I consider the campaign very clickbait and detrimental to the entire ecosystem.

If Substack “gives in” to any step of moderation, it will only escalate into new topics and subjects.

I’ve seen a lot of fake critics, and people who use ideology for their monetary benefit. It’s profitable to be against something, especially on Substack. So why do these elites do it? Why foster disent about Substack?

America treats its minorities really badly. Not having Neo-Nazis on Substack is not going to change literally, anything.

Meanwhile Israel is killing more children, more innocent civilians, at a very alarming rate. Doesn’t that mean anything? What America is doing trying to maintain its unipolar dominance over the rest of the world will definately cause world war 3. Let’s see how you protest World War 3 folks!

At least know what you are signing up for. If Substack had to spend a lot of money to do content moderation, it might have to take more than 10% of our revenue. And another platform would take its place.

I’m super tired of switching platforms. This turning on the hand that feeds you is super toxic. I really hate this campaign.

But I guess it’s profitable to hop on the bandwagon:

Perhaps Substack is not at a crossroads, perhaps you are. And how many Newsletter writers are joining this campaign for ulterior motives? Do they even care about Neo-Nazi content or racial and ethnic divisions in the country? Do they think a digital campaign against a platform is rational? Are they naive enough to think content moderation even works? Serious questions.

The mainstream media is the enemy of Substack not because they are full of liberals, or because they care about Jewish people, but because it’s eating at their profits.

The Substack Against Nazis campaign is the most toxic thing I’ve ever seen on Substack or on Substack Notes.

I get so upset when I read Sustack Notes now full of his propaganda, and it makes me not want to read these Newsletters who support this harmful campaign.

The Creator Economy Grifter Game

Michael Spencer — Mon, 30 Oct 2023 10:58:16 GMT

Photo by KAL VISUALS on Unsplash

Hey Everyone,

The Creator Economy hasn’t lived up to the hype. In fact, many Creators are actually grifters. What is a Grifter? A person who engages in petty or small-scale swindling. For example in my space, I see many of the same folk who were behind Web 3 products, now doing the same with AI products.

I’ve read most if not all of the “State of Creator Economy” 2023 editions.

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Creator economy now worth $250B

The 25-year-old creator economy is now valued at $250 billion globally, boasting tens of millions of employees and influencers, but many still don’t consider it a real industry.

In 2021, Stripe aggregated data from 50 popular creator platforms on Stripe and found they had onboarded 668,000 creators who’d received $10 billion in payouts. Recently in 2023, they refreshed that data and found something surprising: the creator economy is still growing about as fast as it was in 2021. Today, those same 50 creator platforms have on boarded over 1 million creators and have paid out over $25 billion in earnings. Sounds really good right?

People like a16z, one of the main funders of Substack, invested big in things like NFT platforms and Creator platforms and some AI platforms as well. But if let’s consider $80,000 USD as a baseline for a basic living wage on Substack, how many Creators here do you suppose are hitting that mark after deductions from Substack and Stripe?

It’s way lower than 2.8% Stripe is proposing for the percentage of Creators who make a livable wage. What constitutes a living wage with inflation, wage-inflation and higher costs of housing though?

Creators are Losing to Inflation

According to data from stripe comparing again 2021 and 2023, The percentage of US creators earning a US living wage is 2.8%, down from 4% in 2021. As more people enter the Creator Economy, this number is sure to fall, and not improve. More competition will mean more synthetic winners and not real “creatives”.

The Creator Economy was supposed to be boosted by the likes of YouTube and their competitors. Platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Snap, Pinterest, LinkedIn and others have dabbled in Creator funds, without much to show for it. TikTok has been compared to “renting space”.

Everyone from beehiiv to Twitch help us pretend it’s easy to make money as a Creator, well guess what, it’s not. Most of the Creator platforms are boom and bust cycle perpetrators, so Creators are always starting over, starting again and losing it all over such a cycle. Now with ever more Creators and now with AI, Creators will be in an impossibly competitive environment.

If I’m among a category leader on Substack in a given topic (a trending category in 2023), and I’m making less than half of a living wage after two years of top effort, something is very wrong with the system. Subscriptions aren’t enough, among other things. What sacrifices I have had to make, what sacrifices will me and my family have to make?

If a platform pretends its a viable space for Creators, that’s also part of the grifter-economy game and imbalances supply-demand for that kind of content. Competition in the Creator Economy is fierce and who you know might matter more than the quality of your content. Who you know is after all the network effect of the game!

According to ConvertKit there are also more new kinds of Creators each year:

Blogger
Digital creator
Educator
Coach
Writer
Designer
Artist
Marketer
Film maker
Musician

But is any of it sustainable? You’d have to build a flywheel around courses, Newsletters, digital one-offs, consulting and Sponsors among other things, to make it a variable business model. Where is the stack that enables me to do this? I need to run around like a chicken without a head begging, paying all of these subscriptions and building like crazy. But what for? It’s more than likely just a castle in the sand, ready to be washed away by yet another boom and bust cycle of the Creator Economy, and now, the advent of A.I.

The demand for paid subscriptions alone, just doesn’t cut it to pay the rent guys. I quit my job and my revenue is going down (October, 2023). My career earnings and retirement savings, after years of bootstrapping, regrettable. And so, where is this Creator Economy everyone is cheering for?

The Subsack culture writers who seem to think this platform is incredible, are likely making the least out of all of us! Why Substack decided to market to them is beyond me. That’s not a target customer, it’s a grifter tactic to even target those vulnerable writers.

So many would-be platforms that in this latest startup apocalypse, might not actually survive: (If my own experience is any indication).

How do you build a sustainable Creator business when the platforms are grifters themselves, many of which won’t survive and where traffic tends to dry up in just a few years or worse!

You invest in a platform, only to find you are left at square one. So far this has occurred for me on Medium, LinkedIn and I’m worried the same is happening on Substack as well. Had I gone to beehiiv in 2021, I’d be making 4x as much due to the Advertising revenue and the way they grifted on how to super-charge list size faster.

But I’m an old dude, I did not invest in beehiiv or Video, namely because I have no competence in rundowns or video content. It’s not my jam!

LinkedIn’s algo changed credibility rating, whereby if I’m not working in that industry, I’m not seen as a legit source of information talking about it. This means my decade of blogging to LinkedIn’s algo, is totally meaningless.

YouTubers alone support 390,000 full-time jobs, The Washington Post reports, or four times the headcount of General Motors. And those kids have learned having a clickbait Title and video thumbnail (the more outrageous the better), is more important than having great quality content. I’m getting a bit upset just talking about this.

You do the Math

More GenZ want to be self-employed, freelancers and Creators, more than any other generation so far to hit the workforce. This means competition will increase exponentially, many of them using AI

The market for professional Creators is going to be super ageist.
The audience for a niche is likely to be extremely limited.
Monetization for Creators remains extremely tricky and you guessed it, like a gigantic grifter game.

A temporary high doesn’t mean you’ve made it in the Creator Economy. The boom or bust nature of the beast means even success is likely only temporary. Not to mention you are a slave to algorithms and non-existent promises of audiences that don’t actually exist.

YouTube Holds a Huge Carrot

For many in this day and age, of one single Video Monopoly in the world for all its Creators.

YouTube is the big leagues and the end-game for most Creators.

YouTube allows people to make it big, if they can build a niche.
Millions of people make money on YouTube, a leader of sorts, in a highly fragmented Creator Economy.

You have a better chance succeeding on OnlyFans than you do on most Creator platforms. The nature of the internet and consumption means that some of the worst medium and channels, actually do end up winning.

Creator Economy analysts often boost up the Venture Capital efforts, who have invested millions in this hoping it takes off. Here’s what they say:

The analysts expect the industry's “total addressable market,” an estimate of consumer demand, will jump from $250 billion this year to $480 billion by 2027.

I say, show me the money?

If I’m struggling and I’m a top 30-something in my rather large category, show me what success looks like? Making millions on the top 3, but that’s about it. So why do all of these things seem like pyramid schemes?

I’m grateful for having a place to call my own, to make enough money to put food on the table. But after two years of the sweatiest hustle, I’m wondering if I have a future here in this Creator Economy. I’m not getting any younger.

In 2023, of the 50 million and of those, there are roughly 46.7 million think themselves to be amateurs, with two million-plus considering themselves to be professional creators, earning enough from their passion to consider it their full-time income. Should I be celebrating that I’m almost a part of those 2+ million? Where is my mind?

The hype of the Creator Economy vs. the reality is pretty sad to be honest. The game of carrot has and always will be cringe.

In the Washing Post article though the experts say a lack of recognition and regulation means digital creators face challenges including uncertain income, few employee benefits and burnout from constant content creation. This obscures a significant part of the economy and “hurts us as a society,” one professor says, especially as creators continue to upend traditional industries like advertising. The mental health aspect of this is pretty much as bad or worse than any gig-economy worker.

Listen, I’m happy I’m paying somebody’s lunch fees at Substack. Where a lack of Ads integration reduce my total potential revenue by a factor of around 500%. If paid subscriptions worked in my vertical, I’d be the first to sing its praises. And I was working on a working assumption that they do - which I’m still not sure after over 100 weeks if it’s true.

Maybe I’m just not that original or a quality creator in the end. Maybe it’s all my fault. Maybe the Venture Capitalists are going to make millions on the suffering of would-be Creators even if we as individuals and communities are destined for failure. Maybe there’s this entire level of group-think that has been manufactured around the space.

But I’m tired of excuses, and all I see around me are grifters. To be honest, outside of YouTube, Instagram and Twitch, it’s a bit grim. Notably, half the professional creators (one million approximately) earn their money on YouTube, with 25% (500,000) making their money via Instagram (predominantly as influencers). Another sizable platform for professional creators is Twitch, with 300,000 professional streamers. Video is eating the world.

But I’m not alone in my predicament or my poverty.

According to a report from Linktree, only 12% of full-time creators earn more or around $50K a year, whereas 46% of creators earn less than $1K in annual revenue.

A lot of Creators have incentives not to be totally transparent at the state of their actual business.

Everyone Wants to be a Creator Until They Burnout

So as Creators explode with GenZ, and new internet users in places like India, Nigeria, Indonesia and so forth what exactly do we expect to happen to this gig economy?

I’m doing this to build my “personal media empire.” This is at the advice of Substack. If I never achieve a living wage or basic creator income to be able to keep doing this, what happens to me? What happens to these people who fail while taking the biggest risk of their lives? You don’t really hear the stories about those people.

How do those Part Time Creators Fare?

As per the Linktree data, part-time creators, only 3% boast annual revenues past $50K, with a staggering 68% earning less than $1K annually.

Way to go!

Read the Report

Anyone can make Web 3, or the Creator Economy or Generative A.I. as a whole seem good on the macro. But what do people in those fields actually report? How many of those startups, platform and small businesses will actually make it? We’ve been in a small business recession for quite some time already in 2023, does the media ever report on that?

Do you know how badly the crypto winter impacted the Creator Economy for real? Those shiny NFT platforms a16z invested in? Those Metaverse virtual theme parks? Those YouTube wannabes for the most part?

Creators are like the amateur entertainers and bards of the internet age. But how does society treats bards exactly? If you are not a celebrity, influencer or subject expert?

They don’t tell you how to grow income or diversify revenue, they teach you how to fail on a single platform.

But what happens if you don’t want to fail on a single platform, their platform?

Even the media folk around the Creator Economy feel like grifters. They post sad cliches on LinkedIn, for clicks. Cringe triumphs of a downtrodden industry. If only they knew.

Everyone with their grifty Newsletter. Only ready to pitch a PR angle for some lucrative angle. Calling it Web3 one day, and the Creator Economy the next, whatever works! Whatever is acceptable to the fad of the season.

It’s a Race to the Bottom

Creator burnout, sorry dude just another casualty of the “new internet”. Don’t have a compelling voice, tireless ability to create a community or original niche? You are out of luck.

Many amateur creators still make some income thanks to their creativity, just it isn't enough for them to give up their day job. Even a sizeable following on IG and YouTube don’t make enough money to live on.

So what are the chances that you will on a lesser or newer platform? Newsletters? They are everywhere. But where are the readers who are willing to pay?

Selling your Soul on Socials

People still like to hustle, especially Creatives. But what is the internet doing to those Creators?

Twitter no longer exists, TikTok might get banned and Facebook, well it still copies and clones everyone else. YouTube remains the only dominant long-form evergreen video native platform in the world. I have mad respect for people on Twitch, Bilibili or whatever else, but they don’t really count.

Every year, there are more Creators fighting over less real-estate, less eyeballs and the most outrageous niches. You can be a first-mover to a particular niche, until you are not. Try making a living in a niche, only to find people cut you out to those profits. Sounds pretty cutthroat eh?

An algo changes, you get shadowbanned on your best lead channel, your competitors outwork and outsmart you - then all the sum total of your work basically goes down the drain. Even your consistency of showing up and getting better at what you do, basically becomes irrelevant.

Then your competitors begin to use AI more than you do and you find they are able to do more with less.

What links do you click on?

A Creator has to be diversified across channels, not just across revenue sources. That’s a lot of work.

You think you can make it being just a single creative on one platform? Some kind of specialist? Maybe, but for how long?
When does the future arrive and a16z’s NFTs can save me?
What do we expect the Creator Economy to actually become?

Grifting an Algorithm

So to make it on this internet I have to beat some hypothetical ‘algorithm’.

My success is more dependent on me out-smarting algorithms than any other factor. This means collaborating, community building - all to gain momentum to convince an algorithm that I am worthy.

Is your work persuasive enough for an algorithm? Is your YouTube, is your Instagram? Is your Substack SEO?

Are you a Real Builder?

Do you make your dreams a reality?

Stripe says that as platforms add more monetization features and expand availability to all corners of the globe, the creator economy has a lot of room to run. Linktree and ConvertKit have similar shiny narratives. Don’t even get me started on Substack’s ideological marketing.

These brands want to make money off of you.

But you have to listen to your gut, is it worth it?

What are you giving up even to have a shot at making it?

a16z’s Andrew Chen might say that my attempts are an attempt at micro-entrepreneurship. Does having a minimal viable product give me the chance at having a miny salary as well? And how come you only read about the good stories?

And why are so many of the winners you see clearly grifters?

The future does not belong to creators, nor even the Creator platforms. It may belong to synthetic content and AI creators. As entertainment gets manufactured differently, the movies, videogames and people we watch, may not even be real soon. The developers of games may be AI itself. The voice actors, simply clones. The writers, just copies of the best aspects of a bunch of different voices.

AI could mean its game over for the Creator Economy too.

Post News Ushers in Newsletter Creators

Michael Spencer — Sun, 01 Oct 2023 11:57:08 GMT

Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash

Hey Everyone,

In the great exodus from X, some alternatives are doing some pretty innovative things. Post News has not only attracted media players, but has now released its Beta of Newsletter Creators.

Post is doing what Substack did, focusing on political U.S. Newsletter writers at first to build traction.

To date, the Post News has already signed up more than 100 partners to publish on its platform, including The Boston Globe, The Brookings Institution, Fortune, The Independent, Insider, LA Times, NBC News, Politico, ProPublica, Reuters, SF Chronicle, MIT Technology Review, USA Today, Wired, World Politics Review, CNN, Semafor, Mashable, The New Yorker, Yahoo Finance and others.

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A lot more Media and Creator Economy news below:

beehiiv Acquires Ad Platforms Swapstack

Michael Spencer — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 13:29:39 GMT

Hey Everyone,

There is something that’s starting to frustrate me. While Substack doubles down on ecosystem network advantage and paid subscriptions, its competitors are making important acquisitions in the Ads space. ConvertKit acquirting SparkLoop (which I’ve already spoken about here) was huge and now this.

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So the Ads space is a very lucrative segment for Creators who are just getting started. Monetization of Newsletters is only going to get better.

How Google is Disrupting Wordpress Bloggers and Business Models that Played the SEO Game

Michael Spencer — Thu, 21 Sep 2023 16:55:10 GMT

Photo by Firmbee.com on Unsplash

Hey Everyone,

Read this above tweet carefully.

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Google it Tweaking SEO to Downvote Human Content

As you might know, Google has had a draconian monopoly on SEO for quite some time. We sometimes mistake the “internet”, somewhat conveniently, for Google’s moat. But what happens now as Amazon and Google open the floodgates to AI generated content? Amazon recently in a generous gesture to non-AI augments, said authors would have a maximum of 3 books a day that they could self-publish.

Independent publishers who are creative and human, won’t ever compete in independent book publishing again. Market supply-demand mechanics will now reduce the market to spam or worse.

Now the same has started in the SEO realm of websites. This won’t just impact publishers and local news outlets, but hundreds of thousands of independent bloggers. You might not realize this, but a lot of Substacks too rely on SEO for discovery. I’m one of them.

A lot of bloggers, well this is their income. Some of whom rely on that income for sustenance as their full-time gig.

Only in the Era of ChatGPT

While Medium claims to be against A.I. generated content (despite their being no fool proof test to identify it), how about wordpress? This week, Google has dropped “content written by people” and now says it looks for quality content—no matter how it was generated.

What do you suppose happens to the free human internet, in such a scenario?

The immediate impact? Independent bloggers on Wordpress (their own websites) said that in some cases traffic was down 70% from SEO by all these new 500 word AI generated content in their niche.

Google recently tweaked its guidelines to permit AI-generated content and it’s already having dystopian impacts.

Google recently released guidelines (in February, 2023) for SEO and AI-generated content. These guidelines emphasize the importance of transparency and ensuring AI-generated content is unique and valuable for readers.

So what changed in the nine months since Google’s former stance?

Back in April, 2022, Google’s Search Advocate John Mueller said content automatically generated with AI writing tools is considered spam, according to the search engine’s webmaster guidelines. Fast forward a year and a bit later, not anymore!

Morgan Overholt saw half of her website's traffic disappear overnight.
"This is a joke," another person wrote on a forum for website owners. "I've got long-form content, well written, well researched, filled with original image content LOSING to 500 word AI generated crap…Google is apparently forcing publishers to generate AI spam or die." - said a recent Insider article.

I’ve noticed this avalanche of AI generated content also hit new Substack Newsletters, popping up on the topic of A.I. faster than they should have been doing organically. Skillful humans can make it impossible to tell. But the robotic tone and content that seems gamified for selling is a dead giveaway. Often these authors won’t use their real names to avoid potential legal liability.

Generative AI models are changing the economy of the web, making it cheaper to generate lower-quality content. Now with Google’s change to SEO, it permanently will make the web a less human-centric place. Less real owned websites and more control by Google’s own SEO rules, also means Google can have more power in how it changes consumer behavior regarding Search and Gemini, a LLM that it is about to launch.

Recently Amazon said is has “created a new rule” limiting the number of books that authors can self-publish on its site to three a day, after an influx of suspected AI-generated material was listed for sale in recent months.

I think 2023 is just a testing ground, but in 2024 the content of the web shifts more to A.I. driven content and it’s going to feel like an avalanche of spam. SEO rules have made it difficult to build a writing or blogging career online for quite some time, by A.I. generated content really be the straw that broke the camel’s back of independent publishing and blogging.

Refuges like Substack, won’t be immune from the trend.

Google Plays its own Long-Term Game

The new update, which has been rolling out this month, promised several positive tweaks to punish pages that are built only to rank well in search engines, said Insider. But website owners, travel bloggers and wordpress enthusiasts already have found their business model has crumbled under the sudden influx of bot-competitors.

The new rules basically say something about the AI-human internet that is rubbing creatives and writers the wrong way:

It also came with a big red flag that currently has a lot of website owners worried: human authorship is no longer necessary.

If the future of media and website creation is AI-driven, what happens to the actual writers? Someone posting three “books” a day to Amazon as independent creations isn’t an author, they are an orchestrator.

People who figure out how to game SEO with ChatGPT isn’t exactly a creative, they are more like a scammer or a fraudster. Essentially, Google’s guidelines of February 8th, no longer really seem to apply.

This is a brave new world and companies like Google hold the keys to the future. Google and Facebook as an advertising duopoly already destroyed most of media and most journalism jobs, but what happens as YouTubes and micro video also begin to become A.I generated? The internet will feel a lot different pretty soon.

Google Search was already beginning to break under the weight of clickbait and less human based content. Not only does the reality of HustleGPT make young people scammers, Google’s trial has shown it “fixed” its own price to boost revenue by as much as 10%. If that’s not AI Snake oil I don’t know what is. Google rigging its own auctions are well-documented but it makes you wonder why Google has chosen to disrupt writers with AI generated content? Perhaps it’s to have even more control over what the internet becomes.

The Algorithmic Web is Eating Itself

Whether it’s the exodus from Twitter, now X, or Google’s increasingly nefarious behavior to increase its profits, YouTube is even a worse monopoly, with TikTok under threat of being banned, something doesn’t quite feel right on the internet any longer in the 2020s.

I’ve been warning about synthetic media for quite some time, but it’s only in late 2023 that we are finally seeing the weight of it on the lives of bloggers, independent media producers, small websites, more media publications and the integrity of journalism and media as a whole.

It’s not something like a platform like Substack can save or do anything about, it’s about the entire world’s internet. It’s about the world wide web of our civilization.

Content is No Longer Human

As spotted by SEO Roundtable's Barry Schwartz (see the X post), Google recently tweaked the documentation explaining how it defines "helpful content." No longer is it "helpful content written by people, for people," but simply, "Helpful content written for people."

You almost have to assume that most of what you will be reading soon, wasn’t written by a human at all. And it’s a sad and inevitable point we will be arriving at soon.

It all Began on September 14th, 2023

Read the update here.

The update disrupted many wordpress websites and the business model of bloggers. It turned on the floodgates of AI generated websites, as if without warning and the SEO impacts changes the internet forever.

The change was first reported by Stack Diary.

What did Stack Diary and Barry notice:

In its previous iteration, it said the following:
Google Search's helpful content system generates a signal used by our automated ranking systems to better ensure people see original, helpful content written by people, for people, in search results. This page explains more about how the system works, and what you can do to assess and improve your content.
And now since starting the rollout of their latest version, this paragraph has been rephrased to:
Google Search's helpful content system generates a signal used by our automated ranking systems to better ensure people see original, helpful content created for people in search results. This page explains more about how the system works, and what you can do to assess and improve your content.

Google’s conduct in this update, swung the pendulum to the side of those who articulate and mass product their content optimized for SEO with the help of tools like ChatGPT.

The comments on webmasterworld about the update aren’t as bad as the results were and experiences of those even 48 hours later for those who actually are independent websites, bloggers and who depend on SEO traffic heavily.

One travel blogger said she watched 80% of her traffic disappear in the space of 48 hours, with posts "very obviously AI written" now outranking her.

What this means is AI-human hybrid content will break SEO, as if it wasn’t already broken before to favor Google’s own business model, roll-out of Gemini and its other leverages over controlling the internet. Ironically this is all occuring while Google is literally in court. As if Alphabet is telling the world secretly: “you can’t win!”

Alphabet’s own Terms of Use

The new language shows that Google recognizes AI as a tool heavily relied upon in content creation.
But instead of simply focusing on distinguishing AI from human content, the leading search engine wants to highlight valuable content that benefits users, regardless of whether humans or machines produced it.

Google can simply say, we have our end-users best experience in mind. So if ChatGPT writes better “SEO-optimized” content than me or another website writer, they will win and our traffic will decline to next to nothing. Google with its LLMs, from PaLM to Gemini, is saying AI is the future.

There’s no opting in or opting out, this is the entire internet we are talking about.

Google has been trying to sell an AI-generated content creator tool to News outlets rather aggressively. This is a significant danger to the future of all of media, as if the current internet owned by Google weren’t already a false prism of a platform.

Google according to its PR people doesn’t actually care if you are human or a scammer using AI to game SEO:

The Silicon Valley Rot of Bots, Copilots and ChatGPT

"We are not targeting content produced by any particular method – AI or otherwise – we're concerned with the quality of a given webpage and its helpfulness to readers."

Things like blogging, independent publishing, wordpress websites and the like have been dying for a long-time, but with the acceleration of synthetic content they will die in a new way, death by a thousand ChatGPTs. It’s not just algorithmic injustice now, it will be the social injustice of copilots and the “democratization of AI” we will have to blame.

Google is a company of engineers, we cannot except them to understand the soul of writers. But I expect synthetic content to make the internet a worse and worse place very rapidly, just as social media has been corrupted by corporations that put data harvesting, and advertising revenue ahead of their users and their actual customers.

The incentives for people to use AI to scam a profit will put a lot of others out of business. And it’s a shame. It will quickly degrade the quality of Google search even further heading into 2024 and the 2020s at large. By 2030, the web will be almost unrecognizable.

It's currently impossible to spot the difference between machine-generated content and human work. But website owners and independent bloggers are noticing a major SEO change, and AI generated content seems to be the culprit. They are being disrupted by AI-human teams.

People using AI to game SEO can outcompete a human writer relatively easily. This is because ChatGPT and writing Copilots rehash SEO proven tactics with language in a convincing manner at a speed and scale impossible for a human not using AI (an un-augmented person) to do. It’s the destroyer of worlds, and not only is Google okay with it, it even wants to sell its tool to what’s left of the mainstream Media.

Twitter will have a Paywall Soon 💀

Michael Spencer — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 08:45:05 GMT

Hey Everyone,

Even as Advertising remains in a slump, we are reaching paid subscription saturation, but Elon Musk didn’t get the memo. Twitter may soon go full-on Medium, and exist behind a paywall.

While Snap+ has been successful, it’s because it’s a very low subscription with some fun added features.

Musk said X is “moving to having a small, monthly payment for use of the X system” and said the social network now has 550 million monthly users. How many of those supposed monthly active users will pay? Musk mentioned bots as the issue, but actual revenue is likely the greater issue for X.

The exodus of Advertisers from Twitter has forced its hand, and becoming a closed paywalled community like Medium is the only thing that might save it from bankruptcy. Medium went behind a paywall and it’s teetering on the brink of bankruptcy yet again. So much so it had to purge its “successful” writers recently yet again with a monetization pivot.

Musk did not specify how much the plans would cost or what features would be included at the lowest tier. However, he did claim that X now has 550 million monthly users that typically post 100 million to 200 million posts a day, though this is unlikely to be real data.

If Musk’s abrupt and ruthless conduct alienated advertisers, a paywall would certainly be a good way to alienate casual X users and long-time loyal users who stuck around for things like Twitter Audio experiences formerly called Twitter Spaces, not sure what the X version of that is.

Paywalls and paid subscriptions are great when the times are good, but what happens when consumers are pressed in harsher economic times with less discretionary spending? Even Streaming is half-broken at this point, without doing Ads too as Netflix found out recently. Paid Subscriptions provide an injection of cash, but they don’t solve the user experience. Medium is not a great user experience for instance, even though it went behind a paywall for lack-lustre content.

As users churn from your echo-chamber of a paywalled community, they never come back, and discovery is poor. Which made Medium into a echo-chamber of writers reading other writers, a bit like what Substack Notes feels like today. I recently was blocked from following more people on Notes and cannot recommend them there easily any longer, so I guess that’s the end for me on Notes for a while.

Media is in a bad spot right now, with an advertising slump and too many paid subscriptions everywhere! While consumers have been willing to pay for Generative A.I. products like Midjourney or ChatGPT, even that novely will wear off even as more companionship orientated products like Charter.AI and Pi gain momentum. So a Twitter, Snap+ or Substack subscription will be competing with more and more subscriptions. Eventually all of this hits a wall.

X would be wiser to have different Paid Tiers, since it’s paid tier has not gotten great adoption offering too little for too high a price. Even Elon Musk is not that followed as a paid content producer, as you’d expect. Why would someone with 157 million followers only have 25k paid supporters? That’s a lot of bots in Elon Musk’s community of X-men.

Musk's subscriber count shows at 24.7k, or somewhere between 24,700 and 24,799 paying subscribers. Twitter's owner charges $4 for subscriptions to his account. - Mashable

Paid subscriptions are great, until they aren’t. In 2023 we are quickly reaching a point where they aren’t the best method of monetization, especially without tiers. Consumers like choices, even the illusion of choice. With social media in shambles getting “verified” is the new one-time fee social media giants have leveraged for extra ARPU scamming.

During its last public earnings of Q1 2022 Twitter had 229 million mDAUs. What is the point of saying there are over 500 million now? We know there has been an extraordinary exodus of users.

X must be in a very dire financial situation to contemplate such changes. Snap+ is $3.99 a month, which is a bearable paywall for most people. This pay-to-use reality of social media is creeping up to us in a variety of different ways.

X Plus Likely In the Works

According to analysts, Musk didn’t expand on his plan to charge for X or when such a change would come about. But since Musk took over the platform last year, the company has been pushing its users to subscribe to its paid subscription product, X Premium (previously Twitter Blue). This $8 per month or $84 per year subscription service offers a variety of features like the ability to edit posts, half the ad load, prioritized rankings in search and conversations, the ability to write longer posts, and more. I have been testing out the feature, it has not been a great experience and has not led to any more engagement on X.

It’s a lot of X frankly and a lot of Musk’s ramblings as CTO. But is the product or UX getting worse or better? Frankly the quality of the content there has noticeably gone down. The bias throttling competitors or other sites has not been a bonus. The promise of free speech has just led to people feeling less comfortable there, which damages the brand reputation of the product in an irrevocable way so long as Elon Musk has a dystopian hang-out there. Musk has become increasingly unhinged as he leaves his prime years of productivity as an entrepreneur. And his fall from Greatness whatever that looks like, is going to be painful to watch even for his fans.

That’s not to say X won’t survive though. X has a core base that have invested too much of their lives over the past 1.5 decades to leave. Threads might become the free Twitter alternative that keeps getting boosted by Instagram’s popularity. While X becomes a more premium experience that combines with other things like crypto, trading, chat and other “super-app” type features. It’s expensive to become the WeChat of the west after all.

X’s actual size of MAUs and DAUs might be much smaller than it once was before Elon Musk arrived and it wasn’t that great to begin with, at least compared to TikTok, Meta, YouTube or even LinkedIn that has had a little more global penetration in countries outside the U.S. So what exactly will we be going to X for? Presumably these futuristic experiences. TBA.

X Premium has Been a Failure in 2023

X premium has been a disaster. X doesn’t disclose how many paid subscribers it has, but independent research indicates X Premium hasn’t attracted a majority of X users. One analysis determined only 827,615 users currently subscribe to X Premium, for example. That’s not a stellar conversion rate. Medium is a pretty glaring example of what having a bundled paywall can do to your product, Medium has been in clickbait content mill territory for at least the last decade. Though my peers on Subsack claim it’s good for discovery. In my mind, claims of fame on Medium is almost an insult to your personal brand. It says to me you were dumb enough to pay to write for free. As we found out in August, your “earnings” are subject to change. Medium even comes up with ridiculous idealistic brand narratives that are reminiscent of much of Substack’s tactics.

If you are doing behavior modification via idealism on your users, it’s not generally a good side. It’s usually a smoke screen for weakness of your product, funding or both. It’s actually atrocious to watch, because it’s always to the detriment of the users because it’s promoting a false carrot, a false promise and as you know we writers are sort of suckers.

X Premium felt like such a false promise. But X Plus that anybody has to adopt who wants to stick around might be just want funds new features in the app. New features that many of us won’t actually be that interested in like paying for stuff in dogecoin or whatever.

Elon Musk is a special breed of individual. While SpaceX and Tesla have seemingly decent first-mover advantages, Neuralink and his other projects haven’t been so lucky. It’s not as if Tesla or SpaceX won’t be caught up by China in the 5-10 year period. You can push the world forward, but it does catch up to you surprisingly quickly. As an advertiser you don’t want to be in a shrinking ecosystem with more bots. Musk’s claim that there are 140% more users just doesn’t make sense and for Twitter to become a paid social media ecosystem really is like the death of social media.

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Medium Partner Program's August 2023 is Causing an Exodus to Substack

Michael Spencer — Sun, 03 Sep 2023 10:57:10 GMT

The Medium we once knew and loved, is barely recognizable.

Hey Everyone,

Medium every few years demonetises its new batch of starts in a methodical way to keep costs down. I’ve seen this at least three times in the last decade.

The narrative is that it’s making the Medium Partner Program better. Well they are at least opening it up to more countries.

As of August 1st, 2023 Medium will expanded the Partner Program to 12 additional countries, inviting even more aspiring storytellers to join the ranks of its thriving community. Cyprus, Hungary, India, Malaysia, Croatia, the United Arab Emirates, Thailand, Bulgaria, Brazil, Liechtenstein, Gibraltar, and Malta will soon be ushered in.

However the new formula is also causing its old stars to pivot to Substack. This is of course not the first time this has happened. Substack is choked full of former Medium writers and “Top Writers” in all sorts of categories.

Medium has a pretty fair system with reading time, but now it’s going back to a popularity contest, and it’s really, an effective way to demonetize certain kinds of content in favor of more sentimental and subjective rants, what Medium calls stories.

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What is TikTok Text Posts?

Michael Spencer — Tue, 25 Jul 2023 10:58:02 GMT

Hello Everyone,

What is the future of media? Google has recently touted an AI for news, but insists journalists can’t be replaced. Three trends dominate:

Consumers are exiting social media, a significant and on-going exodus
Media jobs are being lost
New A.I. of LLMs will automate much of the current media landscape

Record number of media job cuts so far in 2023 (June, 2023 Axios)

Twitter rebranded as X
Instagram Threads traffic is plummeting
A new exodus from Twitter to Mastodon (lol right?)

TikTok Adds Text Posting

“Express your creativity with text posts on TikTok”

Okay ByteDance, I think I might actually try that! Given my luck on X, Threads and I’m also being told Substack Notes is pretty dead this summer (not my own quote).

For those of us without a personal brand on TikTok and a Newsletter, is this then the time? I have to admit my initial hope in Threads was more out of desperation than genuine optimism. And that’s the problem, social media is a shell of what it once was. Media as a whole, is destined to follow the same course.

Is Gaming, video and chatbots the future of media? I hope not, but what other reasonable conclusion can we make? LLMs change coding and gaming as much as they change our media system, and this means it will become cheaper to make games and videos with A.I.’s help.

Video has been taking time away from text, websites and reading online for many years - but where is it leading us? A world with just YouTube? Or Text posting on TikTok? A world of X?

What’s clear is with the onslaught of A.I., media, social media and the Creator Economy will likely change pretty drastically.

How TikTok Describes Text Posts

A New Way to Create
Creators have been able to make content on TikTok across a variety of formats -- from LIVE videos to photos, Duets to Stitch. Text is the latest addition to options for content creation, allowing creators to share their stories, poems, recipes, and other written content on TikTok - giving creators another way to express themselves and making it even easier to create.
Simplifying Creation
Text posts offer a simple publishing experience that makes it easier than ever to share text content. Here's how it works:
Creating a Text Post
When you access the Camera page, you'll be able to choose from three options: photo, video, and text. By selecting text, you'll be directed to the text creation page, where you can type out the content of your post.
Enhancing Your Text Posts
Upon reaching the Post page, you'll find familiar options to customize your content. These include adding Sound, tagging a location, enabling comments, and allowing Duets, among others. These features make it so your text posts are just as dynamic and interactive as any video or photo post.

Features to Try
Text posts offer a range of features that empower you to make your text-based content stand out. Here are some highlights:
Stickers: Enhance your text by selecting stickers that relate to your content and add some pizazz to your post.
Tags and Hashtags: Just like in video or photo posts, you can tag other accounts, as well as add hashtags that relate to relevant topics or trends.
Background colors: Choose from a variety of background colors to make your text pop.
Adding Sound: Sounds are core to the TikTok experience, which is why we've incorporated them into text posts. You'll be able to add tunes that readers can groove to as they peruse your writing.
Draft and Discard: Similar to video or photo posts, you can save your drafts and store them with other unpublished posts for later editing or discard them entirely.

Threads, LinkedIn posts, X, Notes and TikTok Text Posts = not the world I would have been hoping for. Getting recommendations on ConvertKit, Substack and beehiiv sounds a lot easier to gain more readers for Newsletters. Creators might find ways to bypass the platform and Ad-media hopscotch. Or whatever you want to call it.

If I’m a Newsletter Creator, do I need to be a threadboi just to compete? Many of the young men in my category, actively use A.I. to create exaggerated threads on news in the space. I’m now in my 40s, I don’t have ambitions to be a “threadboi”.

But TikTok text posts, that could be educational.

But how could it be for Creatives?

TikTok says the new content option will allow creators to share their stories, poems, lyrics and other written content on the platform, giving them another way to express themselves.

At least I can somewhat trust TikTok’s recommendation algorithm for the right people to discover my text posts? I guess?!!

Social media and media are in a limbo along with the advertising slowdown. From X to LinkedIn, my feed is mostly a hodge-podge of gimmicks, exaggerations and network authority that ChatGPT could realistically automate. It’s lost a lot of its humanity.

1000 Character Limit

As X is about to launch “articles”, it all makes me wonder.

Text posts appear similar to Instagram Stories visually: users can add a background color, edit how text appears, and add music and stickers to the post. Posts have a 1,000-character limit. Other users can also engage with the post similar to how they interact with video — by stitching, dueting, and commenting.

For Newsletter Creators, that seems like low hanging fruit. I’m not 25, I didn’t grow up on TikTok, Snap Stories and the mobile short-form video craze. But a text post, I think I could manage.

It would be pretty ironic if it wasn’t Meta, but TikTok that got some of those “writers”. Some of those creatives and educators and aspiring niche creators. Newsletter Creators would be pretty high on the list. Consider also that Instagram is rolling out its own Subscriptions to more countries.

Creator are still pretty poorly treated on the legacy web. Creator Funds are pretty limited gimmicks. On most places where Subscriptions exist, it’s a pretty small number of winners, vs. aspiring Creators. That ratio has not gotten better over the years in any dramatic way to say that the Creator Economy is actually working. You could make the argument some places like OnlyFans have busted open that narrative a little bit.

But Creators of text? Sounds kind of retro!

Read TikTok Announcement

Still this is not the canvas I was hoping for:

You can add stickers to your text post, along with tags and hashtags.
There’s also the option to choose from a variety of background colors.
Similar to video or photo posts, you can save your drafts and store them with other unpublished posts for later editing or discard them entirely.

Let’s hope the Articles interface of X is better as a UI.

So do I really have to call Facebook Meta and Twitter X now? Sounds pretty terrible, I would have never foreseen the abyss of media we are dealing with today. If I wasn’t writing Newsletters, I wouldn’t even be around. And it’s a sad realization to what digital has done to us.

The price of Advertising could be the defaults of democracy and the media going sour and south. America is good at pretending, until it isn’t a leader any longer.

TikTokers can now express quick thoughts via text instead of filming a video. It’s very concerning. Threads feels doomed and X feels like a parody, I can’t talk about Notes since my employer is prone to favoritism and imaginary enemies.

So where does this leave us?

Of course, text posts on TikTok look different than they do on Twitter or Threads, so people might not use text posts on TikTok like they do on other platforms. But how will they use them? How would you create in your niche related to your Newsletter with them?

And how long before you stop doing so, and are back at the scratch level we find ourselves in on all of these pointless feeds.

Thanks for reading!

Threads, Media and Creator Crunches

Michael Spencer — Tue, 18 Jul 2023 11:58:04 GMT

Hey Everyone,

I wanted to talk a little about the disruption of media, the slow demise of Twitter, the false rise of Threads and trends I’m noticing in the Creator Economy. This is going to be a rant with some foul language, so sorry about that.

You might not realize this, but this Ads slowdown isn’t just hurting the advertising business, it impacts media, storytelling online and media jobs in a big way. There’s a lot that’s not being said.

Media companies are struggling with two Hollywood strikes, slumping ad revenue and money-losing streaming businesses. Suffice to say that the Creator Economy isn’t exactly booming in this period.

Twitter is in really rough shape, and Threads as a product is so bad people have stopped turning in (already!).

User traffic on Twitter has slowed since the launch of Meta’s text-based platform Threads, which has already surpassed 100 million sign-ups but still doesn’t even have a functional feed or basic things like DMs.

Broadly speaking though even as legacy TV is dying, streaming isn’t profitable yet. The Ads slowdown also shows how consumer apps aren’t exactly doing great. If I was bullish on Threads last week or when it launched, I’m hardly bullish about it any longer, the time on site has tanked.

While a strong start makes Threads a contender among possible Twitter replacements, daily active users dropped from 49 million to 23.6 million in a week - SimiliarWeb

Twitter clones aren’t replacing Twitter, and the user experience on legacy platforms like Facebook or LinkedIn, remain really pretty terrible.

Don’t tell that to Creators deemed credible by LinkedIn. LinkedIn Tech Creators can drive serious traffic now via their posts, like nothing I’ve seen in the last few years. Niche Creators still have to farm Linked or Threads if they can.

Not so Threading

Key takeaways

On its best day, July 7, Threads had more than 49 million daily active users on Android, worldwide, according to Similarweb estimates. That’s about 45% of the usage of Twitter, which had more than 109 million active Android users that day.
By Friday, July 14, Threads was down to 23.6 million active users, or about 22% of Twitter’s audience.
You can only imagine what it will be for the rest of July, 2023. It turns out rushing a bare bones “skin of Instagram” isn’t the brightest idea Mark and Meta have ever had.

The disruption in media, social media and even Advertising demonstrates a wider problem for the future of the internet and the viability of Creators and Creator platforms. You cannot all be Patreon, OnlyFans, Topmate or Gumroad. Every niche is a battlefield and it won’t end well for most Creator platforms and solutions.

Synthetic Media facilitation like I’m seeing on beehiiv is really pretty grim. It’s going to create an A.I. generated blackmarket for fake follower buying and trading, a pay-to-win ecosystem that could destroy the Newsletter economy and market fairly quickly. Regulators might literally have to step in.

What happens to these a16z and buzzy funded startups when they do?

Threads is still trending on Twitter, and Elon is making “Ad payouts” to Creators, but something doesn’t quite feel right.

Twitter Subscriptions and Twitter Ad sharing of revenue, could work out, but it could also backfire.

Source

It pays to be a “threadboi” in Twitter’s Universe since Elon Musk arrived?

I think what we are witnessing with Twitter and Threads and LinkedIn making professionals themselves Creators, is nothing short of the apocalypse of social media. The end times. The bifurcation of platforms really doesn’t seem to have a happy ending for anyone.

And I’m not just ranting even! Traditional TV is dying. Ad revenue is soft. Streaming isn’t profitable. And Hollywood is practically shut down as the actors and writers unions settle in for what is shaping up to be a long and bitter work stoppage.

The Twitter Exodus and Threads formation is not going well.
TV is dying.
Ad revenue is in a prolonged dip.
Streaming isn’t profitable.
Holywood is striking.
Reddit moderators are protesting.
Substack subs are churning.

And the world goes on, but media jobs and heads will roll with this Synthetic media and ChatGPT stuff.

Netflix and Disney have a hard life ahead of themselves, and YouTube is just lucky it has no competition but TikTok, who will likely get banned.

I predict Twitter could go bankrupt before 2025.

iOS 17 will Disrupt Link Tracking

“Link Tracking Protection in Messages, Mail, and Safari Private Browsing

Some websites add extra information to their URLs in order to track users across other websites. Now this information will be removed from the links users share in Messages and Mail, and the links will still work as expected. This information will also be removed from links in Safari Private Browsing.”

Twitter’s ongoing negative cash flow issue due to an approximately 50 percent drop in advertising revenue and heavy debt burden. Twitter was never good at Ads and now it’s not trustworthy. Apple is going to make attribution even harder.

Apple will become its own Advertising machine and block its competitors. Amazon is surging in Advertising in recent years and so are the likes of ByteDance and Microsoft. This isn’t good news for Google or Meta, in the big picture.

How do you figure out something simple like open-rates if iOS 17 or some future version blocks you if you are a Newsletter platform?

We are literally probably witnessing the end of media as we knew it. Algorithms disrupting publishers was just the first phase of the campaign.

If you thought layoffs were bad in tech in 2023, look at media.

By the way, this chart above, it’s only the half mark of 2023.

The media industry has announced at least 17,436 job cuts so far this year, marking the highest year-to-date level of cuts on record, according to a new report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

What will Generative A.I. do to advertising and marketing and content jobs do you suppose over the next five years? Care to take a guess? It’s going to be bad.

The fact that Threads is just a skin of Instagram without personalized or an improved experience from Twitter or its other clones, it’s a symptom of the media and social media apocalypse. Meta has never been a serious innovator, without the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, where would it even be?

And, all of this is connected.

According to Goldman Sachs, the creator economy is worth about $250 billion in 2023. So why is it harder than ever to make a living as a journalist or a creator? You want to cover the Creator Economy in 2023? You are likely doing pointless PR for the most part. The threadbois on Twitter or LinkedIn at this point in 2023, could be bots, they could be run by AutoGPTs now.

Threads is being touted by Meta executives as a more positive “public square” for communities “that never really embraced Twitter.” But Instagram was perhaps the most toxic app ever invented that was turned to the dark side by Facebook. Countless young women lost their lives due to it. It destroyed the female Millennial psyche, until their mental health got so bad, they had to leave Instagram. Sadly the replacement, Snap and TikTok didn’t always deliver a better experience.

Twitter won’t go bankrupt because it’s a terrible experience (which it is now), but by all the debt and lawsuits and the loss of B2B advertiser trust in it. Twitter wasn’t designed to be monetizable. Snap’s not either, none of them can be with the Ads duopoly of Google and Facebook. That element of Monopoly Capitalism could lead to the downfall of independent media (which it has) and the downfall of democracy which many believe is happening in progress. What happens to a state when its media fails and is corrupted by BigTech and bullied over by the one percent of tycoons, do you suppose?

The Creator Economy is a small segment of social media and Advertising traffic. The trickle into Substack is pitiful. Beehiiv Creators literally buy their followers on the black market. Hey guys, 100k followers in 4 months, a new record! If that’s not fraudulent, I don’t know what is. They can sell sponsorships for a while, until they realize that those clicks are not from their best-fit audience at all.

It’s all becoming a bit a broken system. The 100 million “users” of Threads is mostly fake itself, given that they are just Instagram accounts that are being migrated with a click of a few buttons. It’s not “real users”.

So if you aren’t the NYT or a NYT best selling author good luck to you. Elements of media, journalist jobs and the Creator Economy will continue to break down. It doesn’t matter how many “hidden gems” Threads has, if you don’t know how to do app marketing or build a winning product. ByteDance spent dozens of Billions of dollars to get TikTok to where it is today. Meta doesn’t even have a modest budget for Threads, that could rake in only about $8 Billion a year, even in an optimistic case scenario.

Most media watchers and Creator economy analysts don’t really give you a real picture of what is going on. They don’t understand what Generative A.I. will do to journalism or Hollywood for that matter. The strike – a result of the failed negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers – brings the industry to an immediate halt. The Creator Economy? Hard to bet against sex (OnlyFans), magic (NFTs) in comparison to the blood of writers and makers that we will see in the streets.

Elon Musk being corned into buying Twitter for $44 Billion might go down as his worst business decision of his life. Where does it even stand as a going business? How many months does it even have left? According to an estimate research firm Sensor Tower shared with Bloomberg, advertising spending fell by 89 percent to $7.6 million during a two-month period earlier this year. Per Reuters, Twitter has annual interest payments of about $1.5 billion due to the debt the company took on when Musk took it private for $44 billion.

Substack was more or less born as a marketing celebrity parasite of trending Twitter accounts. Until Elon Musk even sharply decreased their traffic, and it’s all coming home to roost. I’ve been telling Creators about LinkedIn for months, but now LinkedIn prefers you have a PhD or a career history in the field which you cover, otherwise it doesn’t easily consider you a legit source and your posts won’t be seen.

Advertising slowdown (multi-year)
Creator Economy recession like environment
Social media bifurcation and user exodus from legacy apps
Generative A.I. disrupting content and media with synthetic content
Journalism continues its decline and layoffs (those jobs never coming back)
Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and ByteDance continue their assault on Duopoly

So if you are’t a YouTube, where do you expect your traffic to come from? Substack Notes feels like Medium when it built its paywall. Notes is a great place to talk to other writers or get their wrath or sympathy. It’s not yet a place to find readers, somewhat ironically.

The small fish and niche platforms of media will be irrelevant. If as an ad-tech, marketer, journalist, or creator, your job can be automated, it will be. It’s already happening.

What would Twitter’s real world valuation even be now? $20 Billion, $12 Billion? Probably around $10 billion now and sinking fast. It won’t be able to go on like this as a going business for much longer. Elon Musk valued it at $20 Billion in March, 2023. A lot has happened in the last three months, and now there’s Threads.

Personal brands like Tucker Carlson have more hope than Twitter or Threads as this rate. Tucker Carlson has struck an ad deal worth more than $1million with an online conservative marketplace as he seeks to build his new media venture. PublicSq much? What the fuck America doing to itself, whatever it is, it’s not good.

I’d never give advice to a young person to get into journalism, independent media, or become a Creator in this climate. Unless you really had a deep expertise in a niche, had a budget, had an actual grant, accelerator or powerful friends. Blood on the streets for Creators remember, in this media and social media landscape.

beehiiv now thinks it’s a good idea to help Creators become operators of synthetic media businesses. The threadbois found a model of how to scale a business, even with absurdly low quality products. The Sponsors don’t seem to care as long as it leads to clicks. It’s a crisis of ethics in the Newsletter economy, not sure the hustle hard bros at this company have any clue as to what fraud, regulations or the danger of synthetic media are. It’s a pity, but I can see where it’s going to lead.

So you basically have a lot of inept leadership in the space. Newsletter platforms cloning each other and pretending like “recommendations” are a market replacement for targeted leads to black-markets for “selling your followers”, it’s shady as fuck. Recommendations or buying leads are never as aligned as you’d want them to be, it’s pumping your your vanity metrics without much sustainable ROI. Unless you make schemes related to sponsors and advertising. Which in turn degrades the actors and quality of the content of people who enter the game. And it all becomes a dire feedback loop.

Writers that want to say “fuck you” to Twitter, Threads, LinkedIn and platforms like behiiv are out of luck. That’s all that exists out there, there’s no competitive choice. Hanging out on Notes feels cozy, until you realize that readers are absent at the party. It fucks with your head. And a16z gets special privileges at the DJ microphone.

Ah that’s what a Free Press looks like.

Media is entirely screwed.

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Meta's Threads (Barcelona) Launches on Thursday July 6th

Michael Spencer — Tue, 04 Jul 2023 08:30:08 GMT

Hey Everyone,

The future of social media doesn’t seem very bright. After “restricted tweets” coming to Twitter, there’s been another mini-exodus moment. That’s great timing for Instagram’s “Threads”.

The new app will be like the Instagram for Text and writers on Substack and Newsletter Creators in general could do very well from it.

With TikTok making a audio editing app, and Snap having an A.I. chatbot, the future of social for Creators is really looking different. So if you are a writer there’s a lot of potential places you might want to highlight your personal brand and be a niche creator.

LinkedIn Posts
Twitter
Threads
Reddit
Bluesky Social
Post News
Mastodon
Substack Notes

The variety of LinkedIn posts and its new credibility changes, means it’s going all-in on experts who educate.

But will Instagram Threads be a good place for a Substack or Newsletter niche Creator? Bluesky, Post News and Mastodon haven’t really been thus far. Substack Notes is a hang-out for writers, as far as I can tell, readers aren’t THAT into Substack’s bare-bones app.

Threads, is expected to launch on July 6th, according to the App Store listing for the app showing a version ready for Apple’s iPhone

Here is the official — and brief — description of the app, from the App Store:

Say more with Threads — Instagram’s text-based conversation app
Threads is where communities come together to discuss everything from the topics you care about today to what’ll be trending tomorrow. Whatever it is you’re interested in, you can follow and connect directly with your favorite creators and others who love the same things — or build a loyal following of your own to share your ideas, opinions and creativity with the world.

Threads Tethered to Instagram

Threads has features of being tethered to IG and has a decentralized aspect, pretty smart from Meta who are usually pretty terrible at launching apps, will this time be different?

With weakness from Twitter, Notes not really stacking up, and the others like Mastodon just being a fad, what’s next? What’s next is TikTok opening up a store later this summer.

WHAT TO UNDERSTAND LINKEDIN BETTER?

Listen to the podcast here “Why LinkedIn Doesn't Want You Going "Viral"“

Going viral does not seem to be the future of social niche.

Big Winner of Twitter Exodus is Actually LinkedIn

LinkedIn posts saw 42% year-over-year increase in content shared from 2021 to 2023, a 27% increase in content viewed, and now has three professionals joining every second.

Knowledge as a Service

I’m bullish on niches that are educational rather than just entertaining.

The Two Big Changes on LinkedIn's Feed

In short, here's what has changed:

1. If you post on LinkedIn, it is more likely that your followers will see your post.

2. Posts that share "knowledge and advice" are now prioritized throughout the platform.

LinkedIn Post Types That are Doing well Now

Carousal posts
PDF uploads
Polls (still do well)

Which post formats are doing well is a ferris wheel of what’s trending on LinkedIn and what their product team boosts given on granular feedback from the community.

LinkedIn’s feed thinks readers want content that’s grounded in education & advice (which sounds a lot like Newsletter audiences).

Meta’s Threads

It’s looking like Project Barcelona is really going to be called Threads.

“Threads is where communities come together to discuss everything from the topics you care about today to what’ll be trending tomorrow,” the App Store description reads.

That’s basically just what a Newsletter does right? In addition I’m bullish on how WhatsApp Channels could work with Threads. It’s still too soon to say right, but it’s worth considering for Creators.

By the way on Substack if you are interested in this stuff, my new favorite newsletter is ICYMI (in case you missed it).

So what about Threads? We know a lot actually. The new standalone app will be based on Instagram and integrate with ActivityPub, the decentralized social media protocol.

If LinkedIn is saying that content that’s “grounded in knowledge”, it really says a lot about how niche high-quality private communities are winning vs. mindless social media feeds. Now I wonder if Threads will have valuable communities for poets, short story writers and all the various niches that have hung-out on Instagram in their little corners.

According to Money Control, an Instagram spokesperson described Threads as “decentralized.” Meta itself has a pretty “leaky” history with trying to build decentralized apps or platforms (think Libra).

LinkedIn has its own courses, as LinkedIn acquired Lynda.com for $1.5 Billion in 2015. Now I can’t say LinkedIn Learning is great. But Microsoft does have an educational slant here.

It’s the end of a social era on the web. That’s probably a good thing. But I already miss the places that felt like everyone was there. - The Verge

Now with Twitter’s changes it does seem like it’s not just Advertisers who have left the platform. Virality and feeds is out, so what’s in? It’s not as if the Newsletter economy is thriving, but it is growing. beehiiv getting more serious funding is a testament to that. But Substack has struggled with funding, and it’s not clear where all the readers and consumers are.

There’s a bit of burnout here for social media apps, that are no longer or haven’t been really social for the better part of a decade.

Twitter is irrevocably changed, and social media just isn’t very attractive any longer. All the platforms feel bland and the same. So where does a niche creator go to promote their work? They need to go where their topic enthusiasts are - but even that can now be tricky.

LinkedIn’s educational targeting is at least good, to getting better with A.I. But what are the chances I can reach my audience on places like Instagram or Threads with the right hashtags? I might actually have better luck on TikTok, at this point.

In 2023, recommendations are passive readers in a way that’s not very well targeted to our niche. They are not qualified leads, so many aquired leads by big Newsletters are just the same. A qualified lead is actually an enthusiast in your topic.

What we need as Creators is to create evergreen content that’s scalable in our niche, so something like a YouTube Channel vs. a TikTok, where the entire app could get banned. What if TikTok got banned, maybe Instagram Threads would become a bit bigger.

While recommendations are a nice bonus for building an Email list, like you can do on Substack, beehiiv or ConvertKit, traffic from social are more “warm leads” since they presumably click on content that’s directly related to your niche. While most of us can agree that Twitter is worse than it used to be for Newsletter Creators, since they are building Subscriptions now in-house, Threads might be worth checking out on Thursday, July 6th, 2023.

Project 92, Barcelona, Threads - whatever you are called.

If you are a Newsletter creator who migrated from Instagram, than Threads will be important to you, and there are a lot more of these than you think active on Substack now.

Thanks for reading!

Why beehiiv's Funding is Big for the Newsletter Economy

Michael Spencer — Sat, 24 Jun 2023 09:31:05 GMT

Hey Everyone,

beehiiv got major funding last week, in their long-awaited Series A, and can now scale into being a legit competitor to Substack, among others, like ghost and ConverKit.

I’m always watching PR, news and things like Twitter. I didn’t really like how Substack was accusing competitors of cloning their features, in fact, in some ways beehiiv is actually way more innovative and has a culture of growth-hacking. beehiiv had more advanced referral features for months before Substack finally launched their own, and as I’m platform agnostic, I believe in a creator-centric philosophy. We should always be giving Creators and writers advice that benefits them, not our own platform.

You shoudln’t have a platform incentive to be giving writers bad advice that’s not truthful, factual or accurate. Being creator-centric has to be basic to helping them monetize their Newsletters, first and foremost, irrespective of platform.

Substack’s insistence that pure play subscriptions are the best (even the only thing that matters), really doesn’t give Creators very good advice.

Thankfully there are companies who give a more balanced perspective on monetization. I’ve been burnt before by this “Ads are toxic” narrative from Medium, and in fact I’d wager Substack’s philosophy around Ads feels like a clone of Medium, so with all this being said, beehiiv’s Series A funding last week really is a big deal.

That beehiiv are Ads friendly means they are really their own beast. Now that SparkLoop has been acquired by ConverKit, it’s a three horse race. So let’s go! The Newsletter platforms are like kids, each growing and asserting itself in their own peculiar way with their wildly different personalities.

But hold on, hold on a for darn minute! It’s way too soon to say pure-play subscription model is the best for Newsletter creators.

Why the Hybrid Business Model Matters

I think for most Creators, a 65/35 or 80/20 split between subscriptions and Sponsorships really is the best balance, since for the majority of creators subscriptions are a slow gaining mechanism in the Newsletter Economy.

As a Creator you never want to be relying too much on just one income stream, you need to be diversified, and sadly this means being diversified by platforms as well. Since nobody gave me good advice when I started Substack, I had to “eat bread” while I figured it out myself in stark poverty. I wonder if any of these people have had to deal with the stark poverty of trying to be a creator?

Now if Creators are smart and if it’s possible in their niche, they are going to do paid video courses, paid seminars and other more lucrative higher tier monetization streams as well. For many of us that won’t be possible. I can charge $400 for a single Native Ad, but there are many days I’m not getting new paid subscriptions, and that’s concerning if I’m trying to build a sustainable profitable business. Even a one-person gig with a minimum viable product that’s on the cusp of somewhere between brand new and with momentum.

To rely solely on either Sponsorships or Subscriptions, I just don’t feel is sustainable to push on our Creators. Especially in 2023 and sure as heck not in 2022 or before.

It’s usually somewhere at the intersection of those two things that Solo entrepreneurs and amateur media startups are going to shine, especially in the first couple of years. It’s at the beginning when a hybrid approach to revenue diversification makes the most sense.

Newsletter saturation like an Ads slowdown is likely upon us in the Summer of 2023. It’s only normal right, if my Subs are slowing down, I need to double down on Sponsorships. This before I even have a living wage. I’m still bootstrapping here, living a bare minimum existence. Do you know what that’s like?

There will soon be more Creators in our topics than there are plentiful new readers and early stage platforms like Substack and beehiiv don’t do a great job of attracting audiences and users without relying on their influencers. Even our in-house media analysts are sugar-coating it. We are still basically doing this on our own.

The fact is, the beehiiv Series A says a lot about what’s really happening in the Newsletter Economy.

Subscribe now

I’m now testing out testimonials.te since we should also own our case studies of our Email list, and Substack’s testimonial capabilities are subpar and if I can’t bring them with me, I don’t own them do I?

I’m an advocate of being analytical about Newsletter platforms, and as a creator-centric advocate of the Creator Middle Class, competition now from beehiiv, ConvertKit and Twitter is ultimately good for Substack becoming a more mature product.

We should be praising Newsletter Platforms, not thinking they are inferior to us. We should be openly debating all of these things, if being creator-centric mattered to us. If people doing what they love was important to all of us.

The Genius of Ben Thompson - 10 years after he founded Stratechery

Michael Spencer — Sat, 03 Jun 2023 12:31:06 GMT

Ben Thompson started doing paid Newsletters around 5 years before Substack got going. It was in 2013, just five years after Kevin Kelly’s ‘1000 True Fans’ viral blog proclamation. Fast forward 10 years, in 2023, and even Wordpress is now doubling down on paid Newsletters.

Before Substack tried to prove to the world that paid subscriptions were scalable (over years), Ben Thompson had already done it. I found this video inspiration in terms of the “audacity of hope” argument with regards to paid subscriptions:

“To be a successful creator you don’t need millions. You don’t need millions of dollars or millions of customers, millions of clients or millions of fans. To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor you need only thousands of true fans.” - Kevin Kelly (2008)

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Watch the video on YouTube

Today there are free and paid peer recommendation systems that enable Newsletter creators to find an audience organically outside of the limiting algorithms that favor sensationalistic short hits. On Substack, beehiiv, SparkLoop, ConvertKit, Refind and in more places.

Pioneers like Ben Thompson, who founded Stratechery, were early solo-entrepreneurs in the Newsletter economy that influenced the founding of Substack among other things. Ben has gone on dozens of Podcasts throughout the years, where you can learn more about the story.

Ben realized that there was a demand for content like he could produce, and grew his Newsletter paid subscriptions to thousands, before platforms even came to make it easier for the masses. It can take years to scale a Newsletter, even now with all of these recommendation channels where you can super-charge your list (which you own).

Read about Ben on Wikipedia. So why am I talking about Ben today? It’s been 10 years since he launched his Newsletter. Congrats to Ben. Before building a Newsletter he was a growth engineer and before that worked in product at Microsoft for a brief stint.

Ben realized also an important point, high frequency content is more immersive, so he was writing four times a week, three paid and one free. (according to the video interview above). Fast forward today and he has various podcast endeavors as well. He does not require a Substack, he does it all and built it all himself, he’s a real solo entrepreneur who had to figure it out before it became easy.

So where did Ben get all of his success or fans from? His LinkedIn appears relatively inactive. Meanwhile on Twitter he has 230,000 followers. Something had given Substack the early idea that Twitter was where “network effect” primarily occurred for writers and their target audience. Years before Substack took Twitter’s “Notes” name for their Twitter clone product and poked the bear that is Elon Musk.

So when Twitter started to punish links from Substack, Ben Thompson was not impacted at all. Why? Because he owns his own platform, revenue, growth - I mean it’s probably just a wordpress. Those early blogger entrepreneurs realized you need to be independent.

Stratechery stands for the intersection of “strategy” and “technology” together. So Ben also understood the Venn approach to writing at the intersection of things where there is an actual demand and relatively large total addressable market. You will find he often writes about big technology, companies like Microsoft, Google and so forth.

Let’s continue listening to how he explains it, listen on YouTube.

He often writes about how media has been impacted by Technology. Wikipedia even calls him a media analyst. So he’s really talking about technology at the intersection of business and media. So there’s a lot of potential audiences who might be interested in his work, his niche is surprisingly broad if you extend to all the people who work in technology at big companies like Microsoft, Google, Apple and so forth, which appears to this entire segment of engineers, managers and executives - who can easily afford a $12 a month subscription!

A lot of success in the Newsletter economy can be attributed for how long a Newsletter has been active. So on Substack Creators who have been around let’s say two years longer, will be making a lot more revenue than somebody who is relatively new. This is because it takes a lot of work, persistence, marketing and time to scale paid subscriptions. (there is no disclaimer about this, you sort of have to realize it for yourself).

HINT:

Did you know? You can embed graphs and infographics now directly in your Substack? Data visualization: Writers can now insert interactive charts, maps, and tables into posts with Datawrapper.

I think Ben Thompson is important in many ways for the ownership economy and his media analysis is somewhat interesting in the evolution of the internet. People like Ben understand unbundling, aggregation, network effect, curation and bundling of hybrid models for revenue generation.

Ben Thompson was making millions of dollars before Substack came into being. His early dialogues with Bill Bishop. Ben telling Bill that he was leaving money on the table offering too much free content is a reminder to us all.

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Wordpress is Going to be more Newsletter Centric

Michael Spencer — Fri, 02 Jun 2023 09:01:12 GMT

Hey Everyone,

A fantastic thing is happening in 2023, the Newsletter ownership economy is maturing. If I had to rank Newsletter platforms this would be my initial short-list:

Substack
beehiiv
ConvertKit
LinkedIn
Ghost
Locals
Wordpress
Medium
Drip
Brevo
HubSpot
Twitter Subscriptions / Gumroad (not Newsletter specific)

You might wonder why I’d include Wordpress here? The reason is simple, they have decided to hit Newsletters better recently.

As ConverKit’s Creator Network matures and beehiiv’s incredible product features continues to differentiate it from Substack, we’re all winners here, since any smart Creator is going to be using more than one platform. The ownership model is about growing Email lists, not just revenue or leaning to one platform over another.

If you are loyal to just one of the above, you are literally not optimizing your job as a Creator or growing your list optimally! As long as you realize that.

For instance, my A.I. peers have created A.I. rundowns on beehiiv that afford them to make 10-20x what I make via paid subscriptions on Substack, and the network effect of LinkedIn is a huge global network compared to say Substack or ConvertKit. Now if Wordpress decides to create its own recommendation engine big things could happen.

Sarah Perez > Casey Newton when it comes to app announcements and platforms, so I listen to what Sarah Perez is saying.

Earn with Paid Subs (Wordpress)

Wordpress is the backbone of most internet websites and it wouldn’t be difficult to create a peer recommendation for paid Newsletters with each category instantly have huge networks to drive traffic and sign-ups. In this regard, Wordpress as a Paid Newsletter platform could truly rival Substack.

Given WordPress.com’s sizable footprint — WordPress powers 43% of the web, including its open source version — its shift into the newsletters market is significant. - Sarah Perez

What is Meta's Barcelona Going to be like?

Michael Spencer — Mon, 22 May 2023 16:15:16 GMT

Hey Everyone,

After being disappointed by Twitter clones like Post News, Bluesky Social and well disappointed by Mastodon years ago, the heir apparent is Instagram’s Barcelona project.

By the way, I’m also disappointed with Substack Notes and the actual Twitter. I’m also sad to see how LinkedIn posts has evolved, into micro content that doesn’t even reward Creators.

of Platformer, broke the story about Barcelona back on March 9th, 2023. But then again Casey Newton also called Artifact the “TikTok of Text”, so what is Barcelona again?

Platformer

Meta is building a decentralized, text-based social network

Today’s edition is a bit late as I wrangled some late-breaking news. Sorry about that! Twitter’s decline is paving the way for other platforms to build next-generation replacements. And now the biggest player in the game is getting involved: Meta is in the early stages of building a dedicated app for people to post tex…

3 years ago · 107 likes · 4 comments · Casey Newton

For the record, Artifact is the real deal and among my favorite news reading apps that will actually value the personal brand of journalists and writers. But Artifact is from the creators of Instagram for real, so I guess there’s a story behind everything.

Try to find the beauty of yet another Facebook cloned app is a difficult story.

Meta has been through dozens by now in its history, and nothing quite stuck like the companies it itself decided to acquire Instagram and WhatsApp.

That was in 2012 and 2014 respectively, fast forward a decade and Lemon8 and Temu are showing Chinese companies know more about how to launch an app that Silicon Valley does.

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Let’s unpack the state of social media before we welcome Barcelona in a few weeks time.

Random Glimpses of the Future Media

Michael Spencer — Sat, 29 Apr 2023 08:30:10 GMT

Photo by Bank Phrom on Unsplash

Hey Everyone,

In this Newsletters I ask difficult questions and may seem obsessively critical. That’s just the default of how my minds works, so please bear that in mind.

Media Cuts

So the end of Buzzfeed News meant a 15% cut in staff, along with Insider doing its own 10% cut of media workers. Some of those even came to Substack.

Insider’s Matt Lynley is such an example. His about page is very professional.

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Censorship

Regulation is coming to the internet and A.I. Some of the rules are a hodgepodge of country by country and region by region. Canada and the EU are such examples.

Via LinkedIn News: A controversial federal bill regulating online content has become law after clearing the Senate on Thursday, ending nearly 18 months of debate. The Online Streaming Act, or Bill C-11, was introduced last year to modernize broadcasting laws, requiring streaming services such as Netflix, Disney Plus and Spotify to contribute to the “creation, production and presentation” of Canadian TV and film content, just like traditional television and radio broadcasters in Canada. YouTube and Spotify will also be required to promote Canadian content. Critics said the bill gave the CRTC too much control over the content Canadians watch, or in some cases post, online.

I’ve enjoyed reading some Substack authors who have been critical of this Bill. It appears to have some elements of state media censorship. And BigTech are threatening all kinds of retaliation.

TilTok A.I. Avatars

TikTok’s looking to integrate its own set of generative AI tools, with a new profile image generator currently in testing at the app.

E.U. AI Act

Via Venturebeat: After months of negotiations and two years after draft rules were proposed, EU lawmakers have reached an agreement and passed a draft of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act, which would be the first set of comprehensive laws related to AI regulation. The next stage is called the trilogue, when EU lawmakers and member states will negotiate the final details of the bill.

According to a report, the members of the European Parliament (MEPs) confirmed previous proposals to put stricter obligations on foundation models, a subcategory of “General Purpose AI” that includes tools such as ChatGPT.

There is literally a “substack for that”.

beehiiv launches “Boosts”

This is a weird marketplace where you can buy and sell Email subscribers. Even the description about the product didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.

The headline was “Your Newsletter on Drugs”. I cannot help but feel beehiiv vs. Subtack has become a race to the bottom on audience hijacking. Pop-ups and Notes filling our inboxes with spam is a good reading experience?

Behiiv getting into a wallet and marketplace is innovative, if potentially very sketchy. I’ve seen Newsletters growth their at rates that make me feel a lot of black-hat things going on. This happens when you have an Ad-Network you need to scale.

Paid recommendations eh? Golly sounds expensive a.f. How much of a cut does the house get again? Boosts are only available to users on the Scale plan. Scale is $84 a month, sounds like pay to win.

Still its worth taking some time to understand how this enables Newsletters with huge followings to monetize more easily with a new passive income stream.

Meta, A.I. and the WhatsApp Super App Creator Experience

Meta is now also hyping A.I. and how transformative it has been for engagement and Ads on its Earnings call. Meta’s stock is up 17% because of it. This means I expect big things from WhatsApp in the form of more innovation with Generative A.I. and a potential SMS based “Newsletter” competitor.

I’ve been mentioned this in the past but it now seems far more likely. Meta’s first-quarter sales rose 3% from $27.91 billion a year earlier, after three straight periods in which revenue declined. While the advertising slowdown is still pretty slow, they have a window now to leverage A.I. in new ways.

Restructuring at Meta has been expensive with aggressive layoffs. But hyping A.I. instead of the Metaverse seem to be the formula to take. WhatsApp as an SMS channel for Creators in the near future is highly likely, with open-rates far higher than Email.

Advertising has not rebounded as some claim, it’s pretty flat. Meanwhile TikTok is so well diversified in apps, it’s impossible for Facebook to really catch them. There is an argument now that with Lemon8 it’s “pointless” to ban TikTok. Nothing is ever pointless when it comes to National security. Snap continues to fail at advertising and its new A.I. product seems to be controversial. It’s normalizing chatbots in GenZ society.

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I have been a fierce supporter of Substack Notes since it’s launch on April 11th. But the data is not sending home great messages for me. And I’ll tell you exactly why I feel this way.

Substack

Substack is testing a number of new features. Notes has led to more recommendations and more inboxes full of spam. Creators referrals aren’t a great way for a company to do app marketing, as we are seeing.

Substack is including among other things CTAs in the footer to drive app signups. It’s not working. Notes is the not party I’m going to have on Blusky Social. But what to do? Substack has a limited budget for all things sales and marketing, while Substack Pro means they seem to think investing in “well-known” writers it optimal for network growth.

The strategy gave them some growth in the past so they rinse and repeat. But their relationship to Twitter already signals a different internet. Some of the moves they are doing now appear to be reactionary. Substack’s ability to pivot to real-world circumstances is making me wonder about the flexibility of leadership and out-of-the-box innovation here.

For example on my flagship Newsletter I improved recommendation efficiency due to Notes in April, 2023, but at what cost to diluting my potential audience? More free readers from this Network is not optimal to my niche targeting. In the case of conversions, it has likely been more negative than positive. Any platform can pad our Email list size, I’ve experienced that with LinkedIn before.

After their pilot (LinkedIn Pulse) I immediately had over 200,000 subscribers. But as always, it depends on the quality of those readers. Social media has been faking KPIs and vanity metrics for a long time, but does it actually improve the health of the Subscription Network? Is Notes improving monetization for your Newsletter? If the product keeps veering in weird directions on Notes, I may have to temporarily opt out.

To combat this peer-to-peer madness (“Sugar-daddy inboxing”), I’ve been recommending more Newsletters in my niche of A.I. and the software engineer audience. But smaller niches on Substack will not be so lucky to have enough peers in that domain to make their recommendations more targeted. Conversions via sign-up recommendations remains relatively poor to paid subscribers. This leads to an overreliance on Substack’s Network that might actually inhibit long-term growth of some Newsletters.

The one thing that matters for Email list size is getting into flat-fee short Sponsored Ads. After testing out dozens of them the one I have ended up using is called Paved. The problem? They take 30% of the fee. Substack turning a blind eye to these sorts of Ads is frustrating because I definately do not want to enter the realm of cost per click and affiliate ads were I find very lame.

My Take

But if the paid subscriptions don’t scale better to enable me to have a living wage, I’ll need to focus more on external Ads and brand partnerships. The peer-to-peer recommendations are only an ice-breaker for the growth of my Newsletter.

If Substack focuses any more on app conversions in the Newsletter and the direct consumer relationship I am assured I own, it might break the relationship with many creators. Those CTAs have too low a click through rate to justify this CTA spam, that takes agency from the Creator to the platform.

Notes Launched on April 11th, 2023

Notes has been a fun experiment. But if I look at it from a business perspective of ROI, it’s been more of a distraction than an avenue for paid subs for me. These are good people but they are not MY people, this Substack network simply does not have many of the sorts of readers who would find my work interested (across all of my Newsletters).

If I could press a button and deselect all the readers of my Newsletters who are writers on Substack, I would. (not counting this Newsletter of course which is more for Substack writers than anyone else).
Substack is reminding me that to rely too much on a platform is a bad idea, and not in a good way. Platforms have biases, their own incentives which might hurt me, editorial bias and lots of other levers and echo chamber dynamics that could work against me. That some of the product features contradict Substack’s ideological narrative really annoys me. Many of the product-features take ownership away from me the Creator. This harms trust.
So I need to hunt externally again for traffic from better networks for my audience (Technology category is too immature still on Substack).
I feel like there are Creator nuances the employees at Substack don’t fully comprehend. (they think they do but they don’t).

They are getting a bit cocky when it comes to product releases and not taking the time to understand the Creator viewpoints. When an app or platform thinks they “know best” it’s a rad flag for me. I’ve seen this too many times as a Creator.

But you always have to be customer centric, whether that’s Creators or the actual readers themselves.

Notes in this sense could have some pretty severe negative side effects. Instead of forcing Creators and readers to follow your product timeline, you need an actual match the product with the market at large.

While I have done all I can personally to support Notes with my time and effort, the data I’m getting for my own Newsletter does not match this investment. The honeymoon phase for me is fading. So I’m going to use Notes tentatively moving forwards for niche discovery.

My Free Readers since Notes

Unfortunately this bump in traffic did not substantial correlate with many more paid subscriptions than normal. It leads me to reconsider the value of having a P2P audience at all.

Thanks for reading!

Thank you for reading Creator Economy Tips . This post is public so feel free to share it.

Substack vs. LinkedIn Network Effect

Michael Spencer — Mon, 24 Apr 2023 07:30:18 GMT

Photo by Ben Sweet on Unsplash

Hey Everyone,

This is just a brief note, LinkedIn is no longer just for suits and aging male professionals. LinkedIn posts can be an incredible way for a Substack Newsletter creator to augment their personal brand and gain a following that’s global and highly diversified.

No “Twitter Clone” have invested as much as LinkedIn in getting actual journalists to start to share their work there. As Mastodon traffic dries up, Post News fizzles, BlueSky and Substack Notes are in vogue, but they don’t have a very large network effect.

But as prone to vanity metrics as LinkedIn is, what about their network effect?

While I can respect the 17k paid Creators in the Subscription Network of Substack, we need to think of multiple ways to optimize the top of the funnel of your Newsletter traffic including peer-to-peer recommendation inbound flows from more than one channel.

Substack Writers Just Don’t Get LinkedIn

But it’s not like algorithmic feeds have died either. Linda who covers Finance and Investing and a quasi sales-marketing person in my mind for Substack, recently asked the community about LinkedIn in a note: (I was not thrilled with the responses, considering how the top Technology Newsletters are driving revenue for Substack).

Let’s talk about how network effect actually works.

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WTF is Lemon8?

Michael Spencer — Sat, 15 Apr 2023 22:14:04 GMT

Hey Everyone,

Once again ByteDance is showing it understands app marketing at levels Meta or Google will never reach. Lemon8 is a visual lifestyle platform that is targeted to a female demographic and brings back Instagram’s flavor before it tried to copy stories and emulate TikTok, that is, it’s best days.

Lemon8 takes demographic allsure from the likes of Pinterest, Instagram and other lifestyle apps where pictures, carousel pictures, are the dominant content format. Visual marketing is already the dominant content format in 2023, and text based apps will have a hard time competing. If this was true five years ago, it’s even more true now.

Lemon8 is a photo and video sharing app, that looks a lot like a combination of Instagram, TikTok and Pinterest on subjects such as fashion, beauty, cooking or home. Chinese app makers understand that the critical demographic to quickly make an app go viral is young women. In many countries they are the trendsetters.

During times of a TikTok ban, China has already stood how to diversify their presence and ByteDance is the most innovative app maker in the world, and has been since at least 2017.

The total addressable market of Twitter or LinkedIn, or even Substack Notes will never be that large since young people have become used to apps like Snap, TikTok and now Lemon8. These apps provide less information and more connection and entertainment with their own generation. China prioritizes these apps because these are part of China’s long-term effort to influence world culture.

Meta is so incompetent, it’s not very difficult to do. There was a time where Facebook could have designed WhatsApp to be an everything-app, but that ship has sailed. ByteDance had the ability to lure popular social media creators (including those on TikTok) to Lemon8 before it is officially introduced this year. In 2023, it has been climbing up the app download charts.

By the end of March, 2023 it has entered the top 10 on some charts. Lemon8, which was first launched globally in March 2020 to compete with the likes of Meta-owned Instagram, jumped into the US App Store’s overall top charts at number 10 while yesterday, it was at number 9 in the ‘top apps’ section, excluding games. I actually think it disrupts Pinterest most of all, since Pinterest is the most vibrant “lifestyle” app per se.

Lemon8 is Designed for Social Commerce

What Lemon8 is actually a trojan horse app for social commerce, a trend long popular in China but a bit absent in the west. This involved live-streaming around Products, to help E-commerce thrive around Creators. As TikTok and Douyin can attest to, it’s really important for ByteDance’s revenue diversification.

For these companies Advertising isn’t the only revenue source, E-commerce becomes very important. ByteDance is basically what Snap would have become hadn’t Facebook existed. They design very solid products with the budget to make them go global (we are talking $Billions in marketing).

So while in the West, they barely know how to do app marketing, in China they can manufacture apps that scale that can go viral relatively quickly. This is because of their deep pockets and established playbook. By 2023, it’s a really noticeable difference. It comes from Silicon Valley stagnation, walled gardens and a lack of a dynamic mobile ecosystem. In China, not so much. Apps like Lemon8, Temu and others are example of how Chinese social commerce is arriving, not to mention discount shopping.

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ByteDance’s decision to create Lemon8 really shows a sophistication of why they will disrupt Meta. I’m going to walk you though some of it:

Twitter Launches its version of Notes and Subscriptions

Michael Spencer — Fri, 14 Apr 2023 13:14:12 GMT

Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash

Hey Everyone,

Something is very wrong in the world if we are comparing a News aggregator like artifact with Twitter or hoping Substack Notes will go mainstream. As far the as the Creator Economy is concerned, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter never really prioritized them (Creator monetization) giving YouTube, TikTok and even niche places like Pinterest and Snap the upper hand.

One of the reasons Elon Musk is pissed off is that Substack stole the names “Notes”. The original Twitter Notes were just long-form Tweets and now that has launched. Substack Notes has a higher percentage of writers than readers, never a good sign and reminds me of the toxic Medium echo chamber.

So Twitter at a loss for words, as dropped the Notes reference and has changed Super-followers to “Subscriptions”. I cannot embed the Elon Musk Tweets, but they are worth reading. Nothing quite as wonderful as a TikTok Series though.

Mastodon is as much a Twitter descendent as Artifact is the “TikTok of Text”. The TikTok of text is literally “Jinri Toutiao”, sadly it seems platformer is more of a Silicon Valley sort of guy. All of this begs the question, social media keeps splintering and fragmenting.

Substack Notes for its part has a mostly chronological feed with subscription recommendations that seem entirely un-targeted, basically the opposite of the incredible personalization that Artifact has going for it now with reader comments. Substack is low-budget and seems to think reincarnating the ideology of Medium under the guise and exclusive stubborn emphasis of paid subscriptions is the answer for Creators. Well it is if you are the top 100 of Substack’s biggest earners. For the other 16,900 paid writers, not so much.

The Twitter clones isn’t doing so well because well, Twitter isn’t doing so well and we no longer consume social media like we did ten or fifteen years ago.

Twitter Announces Long-form Text and Video

CEO Elon Musk on Thursday invited users to “apply to offer your followers subscriptions of any material, from longform text to hours long video!”

Musk said that, for the next year, Twitter will “keep none of the money” from the program and promised users “will receive whatever money we receive,” which is a varying percentage of the subscription cost, depending on whether it is mobile or web. Considering App stores take 30% it’s not looking like a very good deal.

You need a Twitter blue account to “make money” off of your following on Twitter.
With Subscriptions, you can charge users so they can get access to things like exclusive tweets, subscriber-only Spaces, and special subscriber badges.
Now where did I put my Best Sellers badge on Substack, I know it’s here somewhere.

The fact that new traffic from Notes is entirely random really puzzles me. But it does mirror comments on Newsletter into notes and give some helpful reader advocating impact of your readers actually restack your work to Notes.

I didn’t realize this, but they got a push-notification with your first post on Notes. Something that wasn’t made clear in advance, if you weren’t a tester.

The boost I got from Notes in the first three days of very high activity wasn’t really very much, compared to what I was seeing from others, perhaps my Notes were just not very self-promotional.

Twitter’s Rebrand Going after Subscriptions

Twitter is rebranding its “Super Follows” feature, which lets you subscribe to individual users to get access to some exclusive content, to just “Subscriptions.” Here is an article about what Twiter Notes was supposed to be. So why did Substack steal their name?

It’s all rather puzzling considering Substack Notes is either mainly for self-promotion to gain a trickle more subscribers (that are even lower quality than readers obtained from recommendations). It’s yet another feature by Substack that seems to stack the benefits in the favor of big publications.

While Elon Musk tries to lie to tell us Twitter is near break-even, which cannot be possible considering he isn’t even paying most of his bills; if Twitter goes bankrupt the big beneficiary is actually LinkedIn where many serious journalists go and have been going (not Mastodon).

The decline of Silicon Valley is not going well on social media and from trolls on Reddit to fake hype on Twitter it’s all a bit disturbing. On Substack Notes, at least in theory you are communicating with either other writers (mostly) or potentially reaching some of your readers (the few of whom have downloaded or use the app).

Super Follows were first announced way back in February 2021, and it’s not apparent if Subscriptions are going to clone them or actually improve the product.

Read Twitter on Subscriptions

At launch, Subscription is only for Creators in the U.S., with potential audiences in a handful of western countries like: US, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.

Kind of disappointing. Substack probably has a bias of audience to the U.S. as well at around 60% of the readers, my best guess estimate.

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Semiconductor Things™: Future Media

Natural Selection is Eating the Old Web

Substack in 2024; Controversy can Rejuvenate an Independent Voices Platform

Thank you for your Service

RIP:

1. Platformer

2. The Food Section

3. Citation Needed

4. The Disconnect

5. Garbage Day

6. Search Engine

7. The Handbasket

8. The Racket

Subscriber Estimate Lost

Substack’s Coverage of Substack Controversy

There has been so much written about this, it might even be a case of bad publicity (“all publicity is good publicity”) is good publicity when it helps people discover Substack.

Substack’s Coverage of its own Controversy

On the great Orange Fence…

Factual Issues…

Censorship and Media…

Hatchets for Pitchforks?

How to…

Is Misleading…

Some thoughts…

A Great Death of Media is Coming

The Decline of Media will Corrupt Democracy

Substack in a sea of media failures, might be one of the last men/women standing. If Substack manages to keep it profitable, growing and independently owned.

Why is Substack Worth Supporting?

Why the Substack Against Nazis Movement Sucks

So Then Leave!

Empowering Culture?

The User Campaign Hurts Substack’s Brand Reputation

That people want to be social justice crusaders at my expense, a platform that I depend on to feed my family, irks me. If Substack gets hurt, all writers on Substack get hurt. It’s just, not worth it.

The Creator Economy Grifter Game

Creator economy now worth $250B

Creators are Losing to Inflation

You do the Math

YouTube Holds a Huge Carrot

The analysts expect the industry's “total addressable market,” an estimate of consumer demand, will jump from $250 billion this year to $480 billion by 2027.

According to a report from Linktree, only 12% of full-time creators earn more or around $50K a year, whereas 46% of creators earn less than $1K in annual revenue.

Everyone Wants to be a Creator Until They Burnout

How do those Part Time Creators Fare?

It’s a Race to the Bottom

Selling your Soul on Socials

What links do you click on?

Grifting an Algorithm

Are you a Real Builder?

Post News Ushers in Newsletter Creators

beehiiv Acquires Ad Platforms Swapstack

How Google is Disrupting Wordpress Bloggers and Business Models that Played the SEO Game

Google it Tweaking SEO to Downvote Human Content

Only in the Era of ChatGPT

Google Plays its own Long-Term Game

It also came with a big red flag that currently has a lot of website owners worried: human authorship is no longer necessary.

The Algorithmic Web is Eating Itself

Content is No Longer Human

It all Began on September 14th, 2023

What did Stack Diary and Barry notice:

Alphabet’s own Terms of Use

The Silicon Valley Rot of Bots, Copilots and ChatGPT

Twitter will have a Paywall Soon 💀

X Plus Likely In the Works

X Premium has Been a Failure in 2023

Medium Partner Program's August 2023 is Causing an Exodus to Substack

The Medium we once knew and loved, is barely recognizable.

What is TikTok Text Posts?

Record number of media job cuts so far in 2023 (June, 2023 Axios)

TikTok Adds Text Posting

“Express your creativity with text posts on TikTok”

How TikTok Describes Text Posts

1000 Character Limit

Threads, Media and Creator Crunches

While a strong start makes Threads a contender among possible Twitter replacements, daily active users dropped from 49 million to 23.6 million in a week - SimiliarWeb

Not so Threading

Key takeaways

iOS 17 will Disrupt Link Tracking

Big Trends

Meta's Threads (Barcelona) Launches on Thursday July 6th

Threads Tethered to Instagram

WHAT TO UNDERSTAND LINKEDIN BETTER?