Substack's Entry into Creator Economy Will Soon Include Video
Substack is testing a native video player
Image Credits: Substack
As TikTik pilots subscriptions and tipping at scale for creators, companies like Substack are rapidly moving into podcasting and even video.
As a writer on Substack, you can publish three types of posts: standard text-based posts, discussion threads, and podcast/audio posts. I didn’t even know that and I’m a writer on Substack but now they are going to pilot Video as well.
Vlogging and YouTube really has taken over the pandemic attention economy. They are right to rapidly try more formats to scale their Creator Economy platform embrace before the Metaverse really takes off.
It's the company's latest expansion into a new format. Substack has been trying everything from cartoons to cooking to attract established creators to improve their audience and creator numbers.
The new native video embed will allow Substack creators to upload or record a video onto a Substack post directly. (In the past, creators had to embed videos from other sites like YouTube in their newsletters or blog posts.)
Like existing newsletter posts, creators can decide whether they want to keep videos behind a paywall or not. Though this feature is only available to select users at the moment, the company said that it will “be rolling out video to everyone in the coming weeks.
I imagine that maybe by April, 2022 the common creator on Substack will be able to leverage this in new ways to augment their work.
The story was first shared on Axios and TechCrunch on January, 25th, 2022.
Substack is Innovation in Product and Features in 2022
Writers can chose to make videos available to everyone or only paid subscribers only. This might help creators boost conversation of free subscribers to paid ones. (because greater personalization of creator impressions boosts monetization).
The videos will be playable within Substack posts online. If a creator wants to include a video in an email, they can embed it as a clickable image that links out to the video.
The company will add video stats to account dashboards that will provide the number of video plays, unique viewers, and viewer watch time per video.
You can read my How to Succeed Listicle for Substack Growth here.
Audience Retention is Key for Substack and Creator Economy Scalability
This feature would add another creative way for newsletter publishers to keep their subscribers engaged.
You can envision how this might be used from Spoken word poetry, to fiction writers reading their work to all sorts of more interactive features such as you often have of interviews. Apparently, creators have participated in the private beta test by uploading cooking videos and recordings of roundtable conversations.
Interviews
Cooking videos
Roundtable conversations
Spoken Word
Fiction writers reading their work
Substack launched as a newsletter platform in 2017 and has since expanded to make it easier for creators in various formats to use the platform. Substack exploded in popularity during the pandemic, as its creative freedom appealed to online writers and is now attracting serious Creator Economy participants and micro celebrities.
Video Product at Scale that’s Accessible
The specs of accessibility here impresses me:
With this feature, Substack writers can record or upload videos directly on the platform, whether they’re publishing from mobile or the web. Videos can be up to 20GB, supporting 3GP, AAC, AVI, FLV, MP4, MOV and MPEG-2 file types.
In email versions, the video will appear as a clickable image. Like free previews of text posts, writers can select a preview snippet of subscriber-only videos to show as a teaser.
This native video tool can help creators make sure that their subscriber-only content is more securely paywalled.
Substack and Patreon seem further ahead in native video products than one of the older writing platforms, Medium.
Furthermore when you compare Substack to Medium, the scalability of the monetization of Creators is just so much more superior and sustainable on Substack. Medium’s bizarre pivot into a micro paywall of writers didn’t pan out so well in recent years.
Substack’s growth is snowballing as more people here about it and as more exiting Creators try it out.
Many people don’t realize that’s it’s still extremely early days for them. To see them innovating this much in their product is a good sign.
Before the wider rollout, Substack is still taking requests for more creators to join the private beta test.
As the Creator Economy turns GenZ into indie influencers and niche creators, there’s dozens of platforms and apps that are scaling the Creator Economy to be a major pillar of how the Metaverse will work in the years ahead such as TikTok, YouTube, Bilbili and Snap. The one thing you will notice about them, is that they are all video centric.
Even YouTube tried to create YouTubeShorts and Instagram has been heavily copying elements of Snap and TikTok. For Substack, I think Video is seen as a valuable add-on that creators can use to harness better relationships with their audience and more direct-to-market intimacy of their content.
Creative Freedom on Substack
Substack has carefully crafted independence for creators, even where they must negotiate their content discoverability by themselves. This is both good and bad but mostly refreshing for creators to create the content they are most passionate about.
“As with everything on Substack, you own all of the content and it’s connected to a mailing list that you fully own and control,” the company wrote.
In a best case scenario video options upgrade how Substack Creators can grow their audiences and powerfully convert subscriptions perhaps even leading to new kinds of niche creators active on the platform such as younger demographics who have been successful on video elsewhere.
There are thousands of writers who post newsletters on Substack. The majority of newsletters are free to read on the platform. Many have a paid tier that includes access to additional content. Video, audio and podcasting features are definately a step in the right direction for this leader in the Creative Economy.