The Midweek Scroll

Substack's growth, RedNote reversal, and MrBeast hitting the wall

Substack hits 5 million

Substack announced this week that they’ve hit 5 million paying subscriptions, with an estimated 58 million free subscribers.¹ They've been growing fast - this comes less than four months after they hit 4 million paid subscriptions. And because our monkey brains love round numbers, it’s a good opportunity to take stock of where Substack’s at right now.

I was talking recently with a friend who’s a writer/podcaster/creator type. He currently makes money via Patreon, and I’d previously tried to sell him on the idea that Substack was a better option. I think Substack currently has a better layout, better vibes, better features, etc. For a while, this didn’t move him.

What I really should have been selling him on - and what ended up working - was a much simpler idea. Substack is growing rapidly and increasingly looks like a platform that’s going to be very large in the long run. That’s what matters. If you’re a creator, ultimately the most important factor for a service like Patreon or Substack is the percent of people who might conceivably give you money who:

• Have heard of the platform

• Already have an account on that platform

• Are already pre-conditioned to pay for content on that platform

The first is important because you want your total addressable universe of fans to at least be familiar with and trust a site. The second and third dramatically lower the barrier to entry for getting paid. And that’s ultimately what matters. The number of people who have Substack accounts and consider it a normal, uneventful thing to pay a few bucks a month for some of them is rapidly increasing. That’s what creators want to hear.

Patreon, at this point in time, still has Substack beat for scale. They list themselves as having 10 million paying patrons and 60 million free accounts. But it sure feels like all the juice is on Substack. While Substack is growing explosively, Patreon has seen its valuation slashed. They’ve been copying Substack features - the entire idea of ‘free patrons’ didn’t exist on Patreon until last year. Every month there’s a slew of huge names joining Substack. Paul Krugman joined a few months ago and has more than a quarter million subscribers. Joy Reid started posting in earnest a week ago after she was laid off from MSNBC and is already pushing 100K subscribers. I can’t remember the last notable personality to join Patreon.

Why is this happening? Partly because Substack is a much nicer experience to navigate. Both the app and the various Substack sites have nice layouts that make you want to spend time there. Patreon feels like a stapled-on service that you use because you don’t have another good option. I subscribe to a few folks on Patreon, but I hate spending time on their actual site. It’s an unwieldy, badly designed website that I avoid whenever I can. Meanwhile, it’s a delight to explore and find new Substacks.

Substack is also far more social. You can use one Substack to recommend others. You can use Notes to see what’s out there. Substack feels like a community, it feels discoverable and connected in a way that Patreon creators just aren’t. Nobody discovers things on Patreon, they discover them elsewhere and then trundle over to Patreon to pay. I think this is one of the key reasons Substack is growing faster than Patreon.

Ultimately, I do hope that both succeed. Anybody who helps creators get paid is an Internet Good Guy and we should cheer for them. But there’s a reason I’m on Substack and not Patreon. This seems to be where the momentum is, where the energy is, where the discourse is - and ultimately, where the money is.

Cops, just like us

A Vermont police officer faces felony charges for hitting and killing a cyclist with his vehicle while on patrol. A tragic story, but what makes this an Infinite Scroll special is that the officer was apparently using his giant in-car computer to watch YouTube videos while driving. What video had the officer so enraptured that he killed a biker?

Don’t worry citizens. Rest assured that your police force is just as addicted to social media as you are, and they’re watching the same clickbait culture war slop as everyone else.

A Victory for Censorship

You may remember that during the 12 hours TikTok was banned two months ago, a group of TikTok users migrated over to the the Chinese app RedNote.² This was less because of the virtues of RedNote (which doesn’t even have an official US version of their app) and more a way to give a giant middle finger to the US government.

At the time, I thought the whole thing would fizzle out - there was never going to be any lasting growth of English users on RedNote. It was a single moment in time, you had to be there. But I did think that if there was any cultural transmission that happened, it would be Western lifestyles and values shining through:

If you know anything about cultural transmission or China, you know that this gets it exactly backwards. It’s not Americans who will see China and suddenly convert to Chinese culture, values and lifestyle. It’s the reverse.

I swear I’m saying this in the nicest way possible - generalized Western culture is the most potent memetic virus that has ever existed. Western culture is an eldritch horror, a force of incomprehensible power that devours everything it touches. To even see it is to be swallowed by it. All the more terrifying, it has no need to conquer you with fire and destruction. It’s happy to worm its way inside your children’s heads until they’re ignoring your traditional culture to sing Drake and Taylor Swift songs while wearing Nikes and watching Hollywood blockbusters. I cannot emphasize enough the degree to which Western culture has conquered virtually everything it’s ever touched. It’s so pervasive that the only people who don’t recognize its pervasiveness are falling for the What the Hell is Water? fallacy.

Sadly, it seems I was wrong. There may have been a brief moment where I was right - but the Chinese government quickly realized what was happening. They demanded that RedNote censor posts from American users, and only promote posts that make China look good in comparison to the US.

One of the best sources for information on Chinese social media is the excellent blog Chinese DoomScroll, who recently covered the situation:

Around the time of the Tiktok refugee situation, I think I covered a post myself where someone posted a photo of their house in rural China—a honestly rather nice house, in my opinion. It’s nicer than a lot of houses in my hometown. But nonetheless, his comment section was filled with people telling him to delete the photo. They say it’s to prevent…leaking information to spies? Although nobody is concerned about that when people are posting photos of their luxurious mansions or dash cams from their sports cars. And there are a few comments admitting that they’re telling OP to delete his photo because, “We shouldn’t be showing the bad stuff to Americans.”

But when it comes to Americans, it’s the other way around. A post that says, “Most Americans work two jobs to get by.” will get tens of thousands of likes and get quoted by every single blogger and influencer that’s covering this. Americans saying they work 80, 90, or even 120 hours a week will get to the top of the comment section. And then, when influencers cover this, they’ll casually say, “America doesn’t have 996. They have 496. Americans have to get up at 4AM and work two jobs until 9PM to make ends meet.”

The entire post is worth reading, but it seems like the CCP has successfully managed to snuff out any authentic American content and instead floods the zone with content that makes America look bad. At this point, it’s highly likely that the remaining ‘American’ accounts on RedNote are actually Chinese nationals with the avatars of white people, posting for either attention or propaganda purchases. All in all, the RedNote situation seems to have turned into a massive propaganda win for the Chinese government.

Dan Bongino Delays his FBI Job to Fulfill Podcasting Obligations

Sentient ham hock Dan Bongino, for reasons not even God himself could properly decipher, was picked to be deputy director of the FBI last month. He still hasn’t taken the job, though. That’s because he’s too busy podcasting. He says he’ll start work at the FBI once all his obligations to podcast sponsors are fulfilled. At least he has his priorities in order.

In related news the White House is now a car dealership. America has become grift.

MrBeast Hits The Wall

Beast Industries, the corporate entity behind YouTube star MrBeast, is raising money at a five billion dollar valuation.

That’s despite the company losing money in each of the last three years. Bloomberg reports that the company made $20M in profit from sales of the chocolate brand Feastables, but the company’s content division (containing MrBeast’s YouTube channel and Amazon show) lost more than $80M. Despite Amazon paying the company more than $100M to produce Beast Games, the company apparently spent well in excess of that amount producing the show and lost money.

It feels like we’re now past peak Beast, and the only place left for him to go is down.

I’ve always been fascinated by Jimmy Donaldson, aka MrBeast, and his journey to the top of YouTube. In 2023 I wrote about how Donaldson got where he is by following a few simple rules: Always bet on yourself, and always go bigger:

MrBeast was 19 and a small-time YouTuber, nowhere near a household name. He was offered the biggest sponsorship he’d ever been offered to date - 5,000 dollars - and his immediate reaction was ‘Double that and let me give it away to a random homeless person’. He ended up being right, and the video went insanely viral. He knew that the bigger the number (especially if it could break into five digits and be 10,000 dollars) the better the video would do.

The instinct to go bigger has informed virtually everything MrBeast has done since then. He soon had a new video giving away $20,000 to homeless people, then $100,000, then an actual house. He is always pushing the limits, doing bigger and wilder and more, and not just when it comes to giving away money. He’s driven through the same drive-through 1000 times straight. He spent four million dollars to enact a real life Squid Game and bought a train so he could run it off a cliff. He spent two days buried alive in a coffin and a week stranded on a raft in the middle of the ocean. He’s given away a private island a cured 1000 blind and deaf people.

The biggest and probably most knowledgeable content creator on the planet has one philosophy - if you want people to watch, push things to the extreme.

Donaldson’s entire history on YouTube has been simple. He does the biggest, most expensive video he can possible do given his current level of fame/funding. It goes viral and makes even more money. And he then plows all of that profit back into making an even bigger, even more expensive video with an even more insane premise. He’s done this since that very first viral video giving a homeless man $10K, and it’s made him the biggest content creator on the internet. It’s also why he may be worth a billion dollars on paper but says he has less than a million dollars in his bank account.

Donaldson has doubled down on going bigger over and over, and that gamble has always worked. But there’s a problem with being the most famous guy on the internet - there’s nowhere left to grow. He’s already number one, and he’s reached the point where he can’t scale up any more. There’s no existing level of big beyond what he’s doing now. There’s nothing left for MrBeast to do.

You saw this with his Amazon show. Amazon says it’s their ‘most watched unscripted series’ ever, and seems happy enough to have ordered two more seasons. But the show itself was dull and lifeless. Once you’ve seen someone give away a million dollars multiple times, it’s just not that much more exciting to watch him give away ten million dollars. And the show doesn’t have much going on beyond ‘Here’s a game of chance for money’, ‘Here’s a cooperation dilemma for money’ and ‘Here’s a strategic bet for money’. The juice is gone, it’s throwing money at people in the most obvious/vulgar ways possible. It’s odd to say, but there are only so many wacky ways you can give away a million dollars.

If Donaldson is smart (and I think he is), he’ll be putting most of his effort into scaling his Feastables and other IRL products. Feastables is the actually profitable part of his business, and it’s also the part that clearly has the most room to grow. He did attempt to expand his empire with Lunchly, a Lunchables knockoff, but the roll-out was marred by moldy product. Regardless, that’s where his future is likely to be.

Links

• The NYTimes on trend exhaustion - we’re now cycling through social media-driven tend cycles so quickly that for many, the trend is over by the time they want to join in on it.

• TikTok is suddenly filled with religious messages in the comment sections. And nobody can really explain why it’s happening.

• Is resistance lib podcast MeidasTouch the new Joe Rogan?

• Bill Simmons re-ups his contract with Spotify

• Trump says that four different groups are in talks to purchase TikTok

• The latest unfortunately hilarious Trumpism - “Wow, everything’s computer”

Posts

• Are you converting?

• Squeakos

• Leak under the sink

1. I couldn’t find hard numbers for the current number of total free subscribers on Substack, but I did find a source from Substack that put them on 35 million total subscriptions when they had 3 million paid. Using the same ratio for 5 million paid gets you 58 million total - and I suspect that’s an undercount

2. Also known as Xiaohongshu or ‘Little Red Book’