A Full Year of Scrolling

Recapping one year on Substack for Infinite Scroll - with graphs!

One year ago today I posted Welcome to Infinite Scroll and kicked off the greatest blog about Internet Discourse in human history.¹

Welcome to Infinite Scroll

It’s been a good year. I’ve had a lot of fun writing and learned a ton. On the site’s anniversary, I thought it would be a good time to take stock and report on how the newsletter has done over the past year. I also thought I’d show behind the scenes of how the typical post here performs, what monetization looks like for a mid-level substack, and how many of you are reading this. Peek behind the curtain! Radical openness! And nerd that I am, it means that I get to share a bunch of charts! Let’s jump in.

Subscribers

First, a graph of free subscribers over time:

Line go up = blog more good.

Free subscribers are potentially the most important statistic for any newsletter, and Infinite Scroll has seen pretty steady growth for the first year. Three visible inflection points here are marked. Two of those are the biggest posts I wrote in 2023, Ugh, Capitalism and Worst Tweets of 2023 - Dishonorable Mentions. The other is when Noah Smith added Infinite Scroll to the recommendations section of Noahpinion.

I’ll have more to say about recommendations later, but the posts are interesting. Having a hit post can definitely drive a temporary surge in new sign ups, especially if it makes the rounds on social media or it’s linked on other prominent sites. If you look in July and early September, you can see small jumps that coincide with The Rise of Girlies and There Are No Ethical Momfluencers. But these posts don’t tend to alter the long-term trend of subscriber growth. As a side note - it’s funny and frustrating that the two biggest posts in the site’s young history are one of the more deeply researched and thoughtful posts I’ve ever done, and some garbage I put zero thought into as the scraps of a Twitter Bracket about bad tweets. There’s no telling what will hit.

One thing that Substack did earlier this year was start heavily promoting the ‘follower’ feature in their app. This allows you to ‘follow’ a blog through Substack’s network without actually getting the emails directly in your inbox. Here’s what free subs look like with followers included.

Bigger line! Up more! This is encouraging and nice to see, but I’m cautious about followers. They don’t get direct emails, and there’s not really any way to know how many articles they’re clicking through to read. I’d rather have them than not have them, of course. But subscribers are better. If you’re only a follower, consider subscribing directly! You’ll get every post and more importantly, it’ll make me happy (button at the bottom of the post).

Monetization

Free subscribers are important! But another thing that’s very important, just to me personally, is money.

Infinite Scroll recently passed the mark of having more than a hundred paid subscribers. If you’re one of them, you’re the best. I appreciate you, seriously, so much.

But there’s a reason that I said at the start that free subscribers are probably the most important statistic - even moreso than paid subscribers. And that reason is that at least for now, the number of paid subscribers is pretty much directly a function of free subscribers.

It took a few months to settle in, but for about 9 months now the percentage of subscribers who pay has hovered around 5% of overall subscribers. Based on conversations with others on Substack, I think this conversion ratio is pretty typical. My expectation is that if I can continue to add free subscribers, I’ll continue to convert about 5% to paid subscribers.

What does that mean, income wise? Theoretically you can just multiply (Price * Number of Paid Subs * 12) and get a yearly income. In practice, it’s not that simple of a calculation. First, there’s the cut that Substack and Stripe take:

On a typical $8 payment, the Substack author will see $6.67 of that. I don’t begrudge that - 10% is a reasonable fee for Substack creating the entire site and network I’m using. Stripe is likewise fine. But it does mean less coming my way.

There’s also the issue of discounts (if you’re interested in a discount, keep reading). Many users get a discount by paying annually rather than yearly, or take advantage of some other discounted offer I ran. Users can also drop in or out of being subscribed², and some of those in the ‘paid’ tier are either comped or gifted. So in practice this stuff is complicated.

My best estimate is that for 2024, accounting for continued growth the blog will likely make around $10K total. For the moment, that puts me solidly in the middle range of Substack authors. It’s hard to know for sure because Substack doesn’t release comprehensive stats, but it’s almost certain that the large majority of Substack newsletters are either non-revenue or near-zero revenue. Infinite Scroll has clearly gotten over that hurdle, and I’m grateful for it. But $10K also isn’t yet close to the range where one quits working at other jobs and goes full-time on Substack. So we’re in the ‘middle class’ of authors here, so to speak.

Posts

If we go back to the early days, a typical post would get 500-1000 views:

But as the blog has grown, that number continues to tick up. Now the floor, even for non-viral posts, seems to be around 2,000 views:

Open rates tend to be around 45%, which from my understanding is pretty typical on Substack.

Of course, not every post is a typical post. The paid posts naturally have lower view counts, and the Weekly Scroll posts are dependable but usually don’t go viral. But some posts do go big. The Worst Tweets Honorable Mentions post has 58K views, while Ugh, Capitalism has more than 30K. After that are a number of semi-hit posts with 5-10K views. The midweek thinkpiece-y posts have far more variance than the Weekly Scroll posts in terms of how far they reach.

Other Insights

One of the most surprising things to me about running the Substack is how influential the network itself is.

I’m pretty happy after the first year. 4,000 total followers, 2,500 free subscribers and 100+ paid is nothing to sneeze at. But if I had to give the four factors that caused those numbers, I would say:

• Posting twice every week, rain or shine, no excuses

• Having two viral-ish posts that clearly escaped containment

• Nate Silver recommending the blog

• Noah Smith recommending the blog

An absolutely absurd number of my free subscribers and followers in the last few months have come from either Noah or Nate recommending Infinite Scroll. It’s been a huge surprise how effectively the Substack network actually functions - this has been a big fucking deal. You can literally see on the graph of free subscribers the exact date Noah added me to his recommended list.³

I’ll also repeat the insight I hear from the majority of writers I talk to - if you’re running a newsletter, you absolutely must post regularly. Unless you are doing something incredibly specialized, people don’t connect with newsletters that post twice a month. Twice a week is a minimum for success - ideally I’d like to post three times a week, but my other jobs (The New Liberal Podcast and other writing/consulting gigs) make that difficult. If you want people to care, you need to post multiple times a week, no excuses, no justifications, get it done. Basically every successful newsletter writer I know operates on this schedule. I haven’t been perfect, but over the last year I’ve published 119 posts - slightly more than two per week.

What’s Next

More internet! Obviously.

The purpose of this blog has come into focus over the past year. My goal is to do two things:

• Recap all the most interesting things happening on the social internet - whether they be important, trivial, funny or horrifying.

• Help people understand the social internet better - why do users behave they way they do? Why is one site flourishing while another dies? Etc.

The Weekly Scroll series mostly focuses on the first - tales from around the internet, identifying the trends, patterns and news from the week that explain what’s going on online. There are a lot of people out there who enjoy a good dose of online storytelling or nonsense, but don’t have the time to obsessively follow it because they’re healthy human beings and not stunted internet goblins. That’s a great reason to follow along here. I’ve been the internet goblin this whole time.

The midweek pieces tend more towards the second point. In all humility, I do think I understand the nature of social internet communities and how people behave in those social communities better than almost anyone else writing about this stuff. People are endlessly fascinating. When you stuff them into artificial virtual environments, drown them in engagement bait and culture war posts and let them loose, they’re even more fascinating. And I think it’s important to understand how these social media systems influence us and how people are navigating them as groups and as individuals.

If you’re interested in these things as well, you’re in the right place. And here’s where I make the sales pitch - becoming a paid subscriber gets you access to the 1 in 3 posts that are paywalled. If you’ve been on the fence, now is a great time to jump in.

For the next week, this link will offer a 20% discount on a paid subscription. You can also use the button below.

I’d love to hear more from you about what you’d like to see in year two. I have some projects planned, but what else should the blog explore? Are there websites I haven’t covered that I should? Would the blog benefit from more podcasts? Should we create an Infinite Scroll discord? Merch? Let me know!

Thanks so much to every single reader. But special thanks to those of you who’ve been around since the beginning and active in the comment sections - I’ve had a ton of fun chatting with you guys the past year.

1. Citation not needed, just trust me bro

2. Retention is about 80% after six months and 70% on the year.

3. I highly recommend both Nate and Noah’s blogs as well! (not that they need my help)