So, Substack has started asking it's paying users for more money. Yup, you read that right, writers on Substack are being asked to chip in to the platform as an "investment".
The problem is that investors already didn't see the point in Substack's Series C funding, so Substack cancelled that. But Substack still needs money so they're trying to hit up the people that are making money on the service. Yes these people are already giving a portion of their revenue to Substack each month, but clearly that's not enough for the "growth" that Substack needs.
This feels like the first step on the path towards the enshittification of Substack.
Why I Own My Work
All of the crap above is why I own my work. I run this site on WordPress and WooCommerce and LearnDash and MailPoet. I pay for premium plugins to make it all work, and yes I have a leg up in that I've been building WordPress sites for almost 15 years now, but the point is I own my work. No one has a relationship with my members but me. I get to decide every word that goes up on my site.
Writers on Substack don't have the exclusive relationship with their customers, Substack also has a relationship with them. I subscribe to a few Substack newsletters and I get "extra recommendations" from Substack for things I may want to follow. It would be better to phrase that as "People Substack wants you to follow so their writers are more locked into Substack".
I get why some writers would put money into the ask, they want Substack to stay around because it means they don't have to worry about the tech stuff. But Substack doesn't seem to be a profitable company, and investors didn't see a path to Substack bringing in boatloads of revenue1. For Substack, each writer that put money in is now even more locked into the platform.
They'll now kill themselves to keep it going, so this is great for Substack and terrible for writers.
Long-term, expect Substack to squeeze writers more by sticking themselves more and more in between writers and readers. They'll need to contiunue with the enshittification of the service to try and meet initial investor demands for stupid amounts of growth.
It's not too late to start a newsletter, but you should always own your content. Even on open services like Mastodon, you should own your content.
- Investors are only interested in huge multiples. Where I'm happy with a business that is growing an pays the bills, investors want exponential growth. ↩