How Substack is upending media: ‘It is seriously challenging the old-guard message that people won't pay for writing'

Irish Times

2 days ago

Elon Musk
wanted to buy Substack not long after he bought Twitter in 2022. But the newsletter and podcast platform wasn't for sale. This month Substack raised a further $100 million (€85.44 million) in investment. The deal put a reported $1.1 billion valuation on the business. For now, Substack remains privately owned.
Even though it's been around for eight years, it's only in the last couple of years that Substack has become more visible and popular. Part of the reason is that several big-name writers have started using the platform.
Margaret Atwood
, George Saunders,
Miranda July
,
Salman Rushdie
, Chuck Palahniuk and many others have Substacks.
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Maybe it's the ethos of Substack that draws writers of such renown. As the app states, 'with full editorial content and no gatekeepers, you can do the work you most believe in'. At this starry juncture of the careers of Atwood et al, it's difficult to imagine any book editor savaging new manuscripts they submit, but maybe it's the freedom to play around with random content and ideas that is the attraction.
Other well-known people on the platform are the Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman, former Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown and singer-songwriter
Patti Smith
.
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So how did Substack evolve? Back in the analogue day, we hand-wrote letters to each other when we had something to say. That lasted for centuries. The most exposure those letters received were overwhelmingly to an audience of one. That's unless the recipients and/or senders were famous, and had the foresight to keep their correspondence; a correspondence that some day in the future ended up being published as Collected Letters.
Then came the Internet and mobile phones for all, and the new reality of your thoughts, images and live experiences reaching huge digital audiences. On the writing side of this in the early days were blogs, usually on the platform Word Press. Plenty of ordinary people blogged about their lives, children, travels, social experiments, interests and an inexhaustible range of other subjects.
In the democracy of the online world, some blogs were good, some were terrible. They were free to read, or at least any I came across were, although, as ever, donations were welcome.
Some that became widely read went on to have another life, one example being
Julie Powell
's 2002 blog Julie & Julia, 365 days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment. Powell blogged for a year about cooking her way through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. It later became a bestselling book, then a hit movie starring Meryl Streep as Child.
After the long and enduring life of the blog came newsletters. These differed from blogs in that they were less frequrntusually once a fortnight or once a month. You could sign up to be added to the mailing list. I subscribed for a time to author Dolly Alderton's newsletter, which was, as I recall, short, newsy and funny.
Maybe it's the ethos of Substack that draws writers of such renown. Photograph: Gabby Jones/Bloomberg
Substack is essentially the 3.0 sophisticated incarnation of the blog-stroke-newsletter, its aim to secure a subscription fee for access to at least some of the writer's content.
Substack was founded in San Francisco by Hamish McKenzie, Chris Best and Jairaj Sethi. It was funded by various venture capitalist investors.
The mission statement on the app reads: 'Building a new economic engine for culture. Do your best work, supported by your subscribers. Substack lets independent writers and podcasters publish directly to their audience and get paid through subscriptions.'
There aren't any ads on Substack, and it is free to use the platform. The idea was that writers – in an era when freelance assignments have become ever rarer and ever more poorly paid – could have some autonomy over monetising their own content. Readers pay writers directly, rather than the traditional arrangement of editors commissioning copy, and organisations then waiting to pay contributors after weeks or even months.
Writers posting on Substack have an individualised website for their archive content, in addition to whatever way they wish to personalise the page. New articles on Substack get emailed to subscribers. The author owns their content and their mailing list.
Traditional media outlets frequently retained copyright over content written by writers. Writers can make their content free, or subscriber-only. Substack's business model takes a 10 per cent cut on paid subscriptions. The company doesn't release profit figures, so if it's difficult to know how much it makes. However, Substack said earlier this year that it now has five million paid subscribers. That came just four months after the company claimed four million paid subscribers, so this number appears to be advancing rapidly.
To talk about media or publishing at this moment, you have to talk about Substack or look out of touch
There is usually some free, or 'unlocked', content on a Substack, so potential subscribers can get a flavour of what's being offered. When writers are starting out, they can choose to make all their content free, while also offering a 'pledge' option. This means that if and when content becomes subscriber only, the pledge automatically transforms into a subscription.
Freelance journalist
Laura Kennedy
, a contributor to The Irish Times who is now based in Australia, has had a Substack called Peak Notions since 2022. It has 14,000 subscribers, though she prefers not to reveal how many of those pay for her content.
'For a writer or freelancer, steady income and consistent work – the reliability of it, the editorial control and ownership of your own content and platform – is legitimately life-changing,' she says.
'A small, regular income that can't be pulled from under you at no notice is more than most writers can expect.
'Substack has sort of upended media in the best sense – it is seriously challenging the old-guard message that people won't pay for writing, that it is the platform and not the writer they value, that they only want to read particular kinds of work, or that local news is not something people will fund directly.
Kennedy points out that some writers have secured book deals through their Substacks.
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In May of this year, the New Yorker
published an essay by Peter C Barker titled Is the Next Great American Novel Being Published on Substack?
As Kennedy says: 'To talk about media or publishing at this moment, you have to talk about Substack or look out of touch. That's a profound change and a good one. There is no reason writers and journalists can't be in both worlds – they enrich one another. They're the same world.'