Substack's Inglorious Infatuation with Twitter

A POV piece on Substack's Weird infatuation with high-Tweet Bread winners.

This is a random Op-Ed POV piece.

Substack is a young indie media platform, its honeypot has two distinct varieties: luring Political journalists with massive followings and allowing investing and crypto writers to charge 6x what a culture writer would charge for the scoop on money making and Bitcoin’s various Web3 tokens.

Substack’s employees seem to ignore LinkedIn, where they could be driving real revenue, and instead spend their time retweeting things on Twitter, an ecosystem that’s for the most part, hostile towards them.

Substack Piggybacked on Twitter and it’s Catching up with Them

It just so happens that for Substack’s early successes, both of these groups of writers are well aligned with Twitter. Political writers spinning their charms (left or right) and Finance (including investing and crypto) Newsletters thrive on Twitter, that place with so many bots, and so much toxic controversy, Substack’s brand image has not come out of it unscathed.

Escape from Hell World

If you are curious how many followers are bots or inactive, I suggest you try out this audit too: ~ https://sparktoro.com/tools/fake-followers-audit .

Twitter has a long history of brands and influencers “buying fake followers” to pad their social proof following lists. As a marketing consultant, I can tell you, hanging out on Twitter, is not the equivalent of PR or marketing or good brand management for product-marketing.

How Substack Scaled

Things are getting a bit disjointed and biting back for Substack on Twitter. Here I am quoting excerpts from Hamish’s piece.

• Substack first experimented with paying advances (Substack Pro) to writers such as Judd Legum, Emily Atkin, and Lindsay Gibbs so that they could afford to pay the bills while they got their Substacks up and running, and the results were encouraging.

• Substack Pro would go on to cause some controversy for Substack. Chris and Jairaj struck upon a formula: offer a substantial minimum guarantee, and in return we’d keep 85 percent of the writer’s subscription revenue for the first year. At the end of that time, they’d revert to the standard agreement, keeping 90 percent of the revenue. 

• Some of the earliest deals were huge successes – including for Matt Taibbi, Matt Yglesias, Roxane Gay, and Anne Helen Petersen – giving us the confidence to invest more into the experimental program, which we would come to call Substack Pro.  Huge successes at what price for Substack’s brand?

• The lack of transparency was problematic.

Inevitably, word got out about these Pro deals. We had been holding off from saying anything publicly about Pro while we were still figuring things out. Early on, we decided not to disclose who got deals. We wanted that decision to be the writer’s – it was their business, not ours, to share if they wanted. - Hamish McKenzie.

• By that point, Substack had done more than 30 deals with writers who covered a range of issues. Then the anti-Trans conspiracy blew up for Substack. This was also gamed as a potential smear campaign from traditional digital media who at the time, might have seen Substack as a threat to their business models. For reference, the NYT has done incredibly well in the past two years.

• Fast forward a few years, and Substack treats new creators very differently then it did back when Luke O’Neil started (now he has left for Ghost).

• Substack twice took advantage of historically favorable conditions for startup funding, raising $15 million in a Series A in June 2019 and then $65 million in a Series B in March 2020. How it is spending this money is also sometimes not always revenue-generating focused (e.g. benefits for a VIP club).

• Before the pandemic boom of Substack readers and writers and in the first two years of Substack’s life, the most prominent writers on the platform were lefties, including Judd Legum, Nicole Cliffe, Daniel Lavery, Jamelle Bouie, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Emily Atkin, and Luke O’Neil (Hell World). What they lacked were voices from the right, according to Hamish.

Chris Best’s interview with CNBC in July, 2021.

• The Politicization of everything in America has since not been good for Substack, suffice to say and the monetized dichotomy between the left and right.

We didn’t start Substack because we were looking to build a giant company that could one day go public and make us rich. - Hamish McKenzie

Twitter Co-Founders Experienced Toxic side of Twitter

In the ensuing days, Substack and its co-founders faced intense criticism online, particularly on Twitter. In another widely shared piece, a different writer called the Pro deals a scam and said the recipients were effectively secret staff writers for Substack, further fueling the drama, says Hamish in his recent post on Disjointed.

Substack’s early decision to tether itself to Twitter, was a bit hasty and immature in retrospect.

If Twitter Notes (long-form blogging on Twitter) takes off, it will also have been a critical mistake as Substack is losing some of its biggest early writers and media channels.

Twitter Write @TwitterWrite

✨ Introducing: Notes ✨ We’re testing a way to write longer on Twitter.

The Substack - Twitter wars might become more literal and less symbolic in 2023. Since Substack has piggybacked off Twitter influencers, and their community is most active on the platform, it’s a bit shady. Substack’s lack of platform diversification is not what I expect from a startup that’s 5 years old. Live and earn guys.

• Substack’s first, Creator, power user and customer, Bill Bishop, was a smash hit. Bill had been writing his China newsletter, Sinocism, for five years but, save for a couple donation drives, had never made much money from it.

• To this day, Substack’s China watching community is really impressive.

• I’d wager this small handful of China writers makes 5x more revenue for Substack that does the entire literature and fiction writer category.

• Substack leaders don’t always realize how their early decisions impact the future business model, biases and reputation.

If we raised money from investors, we could hire great people and build a support structure to help independent writers do their best work. - Hamish McKenzie.

Substack’s Beaten Up Reputation

As a new Creator on Substack, Substack’s history is very political and how it tethered itself to Twitter’s ecosystem is super interesting, if albeit not very well diversified and on a product-marketing bottleneck perspective.

Substack needs to reinvent how it attracts Writers and Creators, even as we an indie writers need to learn how to diversify our leads from a variety of social media platforms. It’s even hiring business development (sales) folk to fix the situation.

Substack needs to de-leverage from Twitter in the second half of 2022.

Adam Singer @AdamSinger

Sad @SubstackInc didn't exist when we all started blogging in early/mid 2000s. My old blog had 50K RSS subs. On Substack that's in theory (assuming 10% conversion rate) $25K/mo (@ $5/sub). V respectable. At best my blog was doing 7K/mo ad rev. It's just an insanely better model

Substack’s challenges are very clear, but does it have the talent and funding to remedy the situation?

People and writers often don’t realize how early-stage Substack really is in its mission. Writers are not flooding to the platform and there are some really easy to spot reasons why this is.