At least for me the Substack app on iPad is developing real gravity. It’s almost like an old school rss reader in that it brings together all my various Substack subscriptions in one handy place and has consistently been the second app I open in the morning after reading the Times. Yes, it’s driven by the individual writers I follow, particularly Yglesias as he writes every morning and I find his daily writing useful and informative, but at the same time I now follow enough newsletters that it consistently has interesting writing and is a place I affirmatively go on a daily basis. That said I’m also a weirdo who started using rss to structure my information diet in the early 2000s and never gave it up, so I may be completely unrepresentative.
Oct 20, 2023·edited Oct 20, 2023Liked by Jeremiah Johnson
I think in order for Substack to be sticky, it needs an all-you-can-eat subscription. I'm not going to wander the site just to hit paywall after paywall - that's frustrating. In a world where I automatically have access to hundreds of writers, though, I'd work a lot harder at finding more people I'm interested in.
I wonder what this would look like in practice. I agree it would be useful for me as a consumer of a lot of newsletters, but I wonder what the price point would be. How do you set it high enough it doesn't decrease revenue but low enough it it attracts new users?
I think in the end bundling will be more feasible than all-you-can-eat. "Subscribe to 5 for the price of 3" kind of deal.
It seems like 90% of substack discoverability exists outside of substack. But the email sign-ups are by far the best feature for monetizing readers. Unlike any social media site, getting a full article in a light email form on demand is way better than logging into a bloated app with a million more distractions. It helps atomize substack and makes the (frankly sometimes steep) cost of subscription feel more targeted. You pay money, you get articles and maybe podcasts sent directly to you.
I don't know if appifying substack works well. Notes sucks. It repeats weeks old posts and the dearth of content makes the algorithm so weak that I still can't get rid of Brett Weistenin like folks after one errant click. It could help the discovery problem, but again, it would require substack to start rewarding notes makers and then you return to the Facebook/YouTube problem of creators bowing to the will of the platform holder.
So in terms of gravity, I would guess substack is closer to SA than Buzzfeed. The weakness is basically the uncertain future of a text based web. Image and video based social media has only been rising and it's not clear that there is a floor for how low text based content sharing can go. This has been a conversation since 2006 when YouTube was blowing up and TikTok is really pushing the limits of it.
I do think we're pushing the limits of how far video can go. Seven second TikTok videos are as far down the zero-attention-span-brain-damage-loop as you can go, and most major sites are now prioritizing vertical video in that style because it's the most retentive/addictive style of social media. But no trend lasts forever and there will be a bounce-back at some point.
Substack right now is still pretty bad at discoverability and actually making their site a cohesive entity rather than a collection of unrelated blogs. But they at least seem aware of the problem and are taking steps. Will it work? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
On one hand, if you have a person reading/paying for 1 substack, they are far far far more likely to want to read/pay for 2 than some other rando on some other site. On the other hand, substack probably does attract more of the type of reader who explicitly likes the clean email newsletter and would very much resist any changes to the format to promote discoverability. I guess the question is, does substack eschittify the bread and butter (email articles and podcasts) to promote discoverability, or do they keep the main parts clean and stick to appifying the rest of the site.
I agree with you that tik tok really pushes the limits of a non text web. And even with the app, you see people would rather post walls of text as they dance behind it than actually talk.
I really appreciate the format of Substack and I wish that it had better discoverability because I would 100% engage with more writers; it's just a question of how to find them.
What I’ve found works is just seeing what the folks I subscribe to read by looking at their profile. Or if there are commenters that seem to have ideas that are novel, even if I disagree with them vehemently, that I may read an article or two by some folks on their list as well.
I also get a lot from just clicking lots of links - most newsletters I read are fairly link heavy, and when they link to someone else's substack it's a sign of quality/trust.
At least for me the Substack app on iPad is developing real gravity. It’s almost like an old school rss reader in that it brings together all my various Substack subscriptions in one handy place and has consistently been the second app I open in the morning after reading the Times. Yes, it’s driven by the individual writers I follow, particularly Yglesias as he writes every morning and I find his daily writing useful and informative, but at the same time I now follow enough newsletters that it consistently has interesting writing and is a place I affirmatively go on a daily basis. That said I’m also a weirdo who started using rss to structure my information diet in the early 2000s and never gave it up, so I may be completely unrepresentative.
I will never understand how Yglesias can write so often at the level of quality he does. He's a machine.
I think in order for Substack to be sticky, it needs an all-you-can-eat subscription. I'm not going to wander the site just to hit paywall after paywall - that's frustrating. In a world where I automatically have access to hundreds of writers, though, I'd work a lot harder at finding more people I'm interested in.
I wonder what this would look like in practice. I agree it would be useful for me as a consumer of a lot of newsletters, but I wonder what the price point would be. How do you set it high enough it doesn't decrease revenue but low enough it it attracts new users?
I think in the end bundling will be more feasible than all-you-can-eat. "Subscribe to 5 for the price of 3" kind of deal.
It seems like 90% of substack discoverability exists outside of substack. But the email sign-ups are by far the best feature for monetizing readers. Unlike any social media site, getting a full article in a light email form on demand is way better than logging into a bloated app with a million more distractions. It helps atomize substack and makes the (frankly sometimes steep) cost of subscription feel more targeted. You pay money, you get articles and maybe podcasts sent directly to you.
I don't know if appifying substack works well. Notes sucks. It repeats weeks old posts and the dearth of content makes the algorithm so weak that I still can't get rid of Brett Weistenin like folks after one errant click. It could help the discovery problem, but again, it would require substack to start rewarding notes makers and then you return to the Facebook/YouTube problem of creators bowing to the will of the platform holder.
So in terms of gravity, I would guess substack is closer to SA than Buzzfeed. The weakness is basically the uncertain future of a text based web. Image and video based social media has only been rising and it's not clear that there is a floor for how low text based content sharing can go. This has been a conversation since 2006 when YouTube was blowing up and TikTok is really pushing the limits of it.
I do think we're pushing the limits of how far video can go. Seven second TikTok videos are as far down the zero-attention-span-brain-damage-loop as you can go, and most major sites are now prioritizing vertical video in that style because it's the most retentive/addictive style of social media. But no trend lasts forever and there will be a bounce-back at some point.
Substack right now is still pretty bad at discoverability and actually making their site a cohesive entity rather than a collection of unrelated blogs. But they at least seem aware of the problem and are taking steps. Will it work? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
On one hand, if you have a person reading/paying for 1 substack, they are far far far more likely to want to read/pay for 2 than some other rando on some other site. On the other hand, substack probably does attract more of the type of reader who explicitly likes the clean email newsletter and would very much resist any changes to the format to promote discoverability. I guess the question is, does substack eschittify the bread and butter (email articles and podcasts) to promote discoverability, or do they keep the main parts clean and stick to appifying the rest of the site.
I agree with you that tik tok really pushes the limits of a non text web. And even with the app, you see people would rather post walls of text as they dance behind it than actually talk.
I really appreciate the format of Substack and I wish that it had better discoverability because I would 100% engage with more writers; it's just a question of how to find them.
What I’ve found works is just seeing what the folks I subscribe to read by looking at their profile. Or if there are commenters that seem to have ideas that are novel, even if I disagree with them vehemently, that I may read an article or two by some folks on their list as well.
Great ideas, thanks!
I also get a lot from just clicking lots of links - most newsletters I read are fairly link heavy, and when they link to someone else's substack it's a sign of quality/trust.
I actually keep a Substack inbox tab open at all times in my browser. Of course, I'm a tab fiend who usually has 50-100 tabs open at all times...