<story><title>Why the Substack hype is much ado about very little</title><url>https://dankennedy.net/2020/12/09/blogging-is-dead-long-live-blogging-or-why-the-substack-hype-is-much-ado-about-very-little/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dash2</author><text>Yeah, this is basically correct. The key issue is that people don&amp;#x27;t want to pay $2&amp;#x2F;month to twenty different writers. They want to pay $20&amp;#x2F;month to a single organization which has a hundred writers, also known as a &amp;quot;newspaper&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;The logic is simple: an individual writer is always relatively niche. Niche means small audience. Small audience means you have to charge more per person to cover your costs.&lt;p&gt;Maybe Substack will go the Medium way and try to aggregate, or encourage its writers to aggregate. If so, then it could succeed, but it&amp;#x27;ll succeed by becoming a newspaper. The problem is that the NYT, Guardian, Mail etc. have a lot of experience at doing aggregation well. (Each day has an appropriate mix of home, foreign, finance, and sports. The day&amp;#x27;s editorial chimes with what the front page journalists wrote about. Long run investigations are funded in the hope of big payoffs. Et cetera.) Medium hasn&amp;#x27;t really broken through, I think Substack would struggle.&lt;p&gt;An alternative is the status quo: Substack is a perfectly viable blogging tool, where aspiring journalists and writers like me [1] give away content for free, in the hope of breaking through to the next level, and where a few people make a good living. But if so Substack will fit into the existing landscape, rather than disrupting it.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;wyclif.substack.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;wyclif.substack.com&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Lazare</author><text>&amp;gt;  The key issue is that people don&amp;#x27;t want to pay $2&amp;#x2F;month to twenty different writers. They want to pay $20&amp;#x2F;month to a single organization which has a hundred writers, also known as a &amp;quot;newspaper&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;...actually, I&amp;#x27;d *VASTLY* rather pay a small monthly fee to a small number of writers I care about, than a larger fee for a collection of writers that I don&amp;#x27;t.&lt;p&gt;More to the point, I &lt;i&gt;am&lt;/i&gt; doing that, and a fair number of other people are too. If baffles me to see someone advancing the argument that &amp;quot;people don&amp;#x27;t want to...&amp;quot; and then listing something which people are very much currently choosing to do. Many people want to do exactly that! (Although I think we agree that the number of people is unlikely to be enough to be truly disruptive.)&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Maybe Substack will go the Medium way and try to aggregate&lt;p&gt;Very possibly, but if so, I expect the people enjoying their current business model will simply migrate to a competitor. $5&amp;#x2F;month for a writer I truly love is a reasonable ask. $5&amp;#x2F;month split across six writers, only one of whom I particular care for is in many ways less attractive; I may be getting more writing but the writer is getting less.&lt;p&gt;Aggregation is not obviously the only business model that makes sense here, and I think Medium - and come to that, the news industry as a whole - shows off its weaknesses very clearly.&lt;p&gt;I think the &lt;i&gt;real&lt;/i&gt; weakness of Substack is not that &amp;quot;nobody wants what they&amp;#x27;re selling&amp;quot;, but that they have very little moat. Substack doesn&amp;#x27;t need to worry that Yglesias will realise that actually he hates making more money than the entire NYT editorial board combined and quits blogging to go back to the traditional media; Substack needs to worry that he&amp;#x27;ll jump to his own platform and avoid their fairly hefty monthly cut.</text></comment>
<story><title>Why the Substack hype is much ado about very little</title><url>https://dankennedy.net/2020/12/09/blogging-is-dead-long-live-blogging-or-why-the-substack-hype-is-much-ado-about-very-little/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dash2</author><text>Yeah, this is basically correct. The key issue is that people don&amp;#x27;t want to pay $2&amp;#x2F;month to twenty different writers. They want to pay $20&amp;#x2F;month to a single organization which has a hundred writers, also known as a &amp;quot;newspaper&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;The logic is simple: an individual writer is always relatively niche. Niche means small audience. Small audience means you have to charge more per person to cover your costs.&lt;p&gt;Maybe Substack will go the Medium way and try to aggregate, or encourage its writers to aggregate. If so, then it could succeed, but it&amp;#x27;ll succeed by becoming a newspaper. The problem is that the NYT, Guardian, Mail etc. have a lot of experience at doing aggregation well. (Each day has an appropriate mix of home, foreign, finance, and sports. The day&amp;#x27;s editorial chimes with what the front page journalists wrote about. Long run investigations are funded in the hope of big payoffs. Et cetera.) Medium hasn&amp;#x27;t really broken through, I think Substack would struggle.&lt;p&gt;An alternative is the status quo: Substack is a perfectly viable blogging tool, where aspiring journalists and writers like me [1] give away content for free, in the hope of breaking through to the next level, and where a few people make a good living. But if so Substack will fit into the existing landscape, rather than disrupting it.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;wyclif.substack.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;wyclif.substack.com&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Gravityloss</author><text>I get it why readers can&amp;#x27;t pay individual writers &lt;i&gt;in the newspaper world&lt;/i&gt;. That&amp;#x27;s because it only makes sense to print and deliver one kind of identical newspaper and deliver that to everyone. The printing is done with plates. You make one plate per page (well a few pages at a time) and you use that plate to print thousands of copies of the page. The page contains an assortment of articles. The newspaper is physically delivered to homes and news stands.&lt;p&gt;Now we&amp;#x27;re in the internet. There are no such constraints. Why not just pay directly per article?&lt;p&gt;Spotify for example collects money but distributes it to artists, per-listen. Spotify has basically almost all the music in the world. And other services have it too. Anybody can upload to Spotify or Apple Music or Tidal or what you have. So Spotify is not really doing curating or having a quality standards or an editor anything, like a newspaper, it&amp;#x27;s just a way to collect and distribute money.&lt;p&gt;There is the still-unloved problem of curation. You could use humans for good curation but discoverability is quite bad.&lt;p&gt;(Edit: yes in the newspaper world there is the syndication, Reuters, AFP etc, too, and staff writers etc, it&amp;#x27;s a bit more complicated.)</text></comment>