Why Would Substack Give Away 25% Of Potential Income?
Their business model doesn't make sense.
Write, little Substack writer, write !!!!
Three months ago, I wrote a very therapeutic rant
In which I made the case that the Substack business model is using and abusing thousands of small, diverse, risk-taking, interesting writers to offer a fascinating smorgasbord of food for thought, but funnels most of the money to a select group of well-known celebrity writers and influencers.
Some of them produce not much substance or quality at all, but use Substack as a kind tribe-building device, fundraising or advertising platform. Sam Harris and Dr. Mike Yeadon come to mind, but there are others.
142 of the last 200 posts of Sam Harris, for example, weren’t any writing at all but advertising and links for his podcast. That’s 70%. But that man is ranked #8 in culture on Substack.
Dr. Yeadon has published 24 mostly very short statements over the past year to his 30,000 subscribers. Most are between one and three minutes long. Yeadon is earning approximately $50.000 to $60.000 a year to give his fans the illusion he is changing the world. Like millions of others, he started to warn and talk against the mRNA vaccines. Five years ago. Did that stop them or halt the frenetic research and investment in them?
There are only two things that will stop them. The political powers that be, or people simply not taking them. Raising awareness is good, no doubt, but it is grassroots movements that change things, not self-appointed new leaders and influencers with a desire and skill to sell themselves and who capitalize on their scientific “expert” credentials. No “expertism” is required to realise that these jabs are useless and dangerous.
Malone used the same “expertism” to capitalize personally on it by selling the illusion that he would get rid of them. Now he works on “making them saver” instead and denies being an anti-vaxxer.
Imagine guys like them is all Substack had to offer. What a boring platform it would be.
And yet, many of the big-earning celebrities use Substack like that.
Not to write engaging and interesting articles, but to promote themselves.
Worse, stupid fanboys pay them to promote themselves, believing these guys change the world for them.
Meanwhile, those thousands of real, creative, and hard-working writers that make Substack such an interesting platform, who think outside of the box, earn fuck all, and it is due to the subscription system and Substack's business model.
Substack does not encourage and reward great, diverse writing at all.
If they wanted to do that, they would have introduced a donation button so readers could donate to individual articles rather than authors.
A button that allows readers to quickly donate anything from 10 cents to $10 or more for an article they like. This would reward great articles, no matter who writes them.
But they don’t do that, and we must ask ourselves why.
Because they are giving away serious money to services like “Buy me a Coffee”.
“Buy me a Coffee” is not ideal because
Readers have to leave Substack to donate
They have a $5 minimum fee, which is a big barrier for a single article
People don’t like to use credit cards on other Website.
And yet, despite all these downsides, I made more than 25% of my total on “Buy Me A Coffee” since I started it a bit over two months ago.
This begs the question: Why does Substack give away that income?
This doesn’t make any sense.
It would be easy to install a much more fluent system within Substack if desired. Money could be simply transferred between Substack accounts and not require an actual Stripe transaction for each donation.
Here is an example of what a huge difference this would make for small writers from the above article:
My best article got almost 20.000 views and 800 likes, and I got TWO paid subscriptions out of it, worth $60/year, $5 a month, $1.25 a week, 18 cents a day. It took me about six hours to write it.
People don’t subscribe because of one good article they like. But they would donate with the click of a button, especially when low amounts from 10c upwards are offered. I am convinced, with 19.000 views and 800 Likes, I would have made several hundred dollars with that article alone.
Substack would also earn on this button, of course. It would very likely prompt people to spend more money overall on Substack.
But it would funnel away money from the big influencers, of course.
After my rant in April, I decided to try “Buy Me A Coffee”.
In the past two months, I earned $125 with it.
In the same period, I earned $450 with standard subscriptions on Substack.
So, in this case, Substack gave away 27.7% of its income to a third party.
What a stupid business model.
Why would they do that?
Maybe because making money is not their priority?
So what else could be their priority?
Food for thought.
I am fucking tired of wasting my time to make a living on Substack.
I am deliberately biting the hand that feeds me scraps in the hope they kick me out.
They keep me and thousands of others just alive enough with those scraps to get interesting, diverse, and amazing content. But they don’t offer readers a way to pay for it.
This is financial abuse.
They are dangling an unreachable carrot of a paid writer’s career in front of us to keep us going. Fuck you.
If I were paid better, I would invest the time to research how many unknown writers actually made it on Substack through writing and how many came in with big names prior.
We help Substack to offer an exciting, diverse platform, and they funnel most readers’ funds into the easy-to-control hands of a few dozen big influencers.
I hope they kick me out and I get my life back, honestly.
This is not a business model.
So what is it?
Thank you for reading.
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I expect it is being used as a funnel more than anything. For example after someone finds my substack, they will then receive a recommendation for another substack. One that is preferable to corrupt people. They might subscribe to my substack. But after subscribing they never see anything I post ever again. As an example: My emails are not delivered to most of my subscribers. This is for 2 reasons:
1. many substack users do not want the emails so they have chosen notification of new posts through email or app
2. my emails from Far Side of Fringe are being blocked and do not even land in spam box for many subscribers, many of whom were opening them. This block became far more pronounced , cutting off 200 email addresses (email addresses where the emails were being opened) after publishing Freedom Incorporated with biologyphenom
I wish Substack would allow me to publish through “app only,” but they do not. They offer that I can publish through “app or email.” I don’t want to do this because my email has already gotten a bad reputation, and if I continue to send through email, I may at some point be completely banned from all email boxes. Substack said they would be more interested in helping if I was making money. Guess what, Substack, I might be able to make some money if you gave me the option to publish through the app only. Or well. https://www.farsideoffringe.ca/p/freedom-incorporated?r=paf6o&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
There should be a way to make a donation per article. Even as low as a dollar. Unfortunately, any method that is used is going to be digital and tied to a bank card or bank account. If I could make a one time deposit into my "article payout account" say like $100, I could disperse as I want per article.
I am not crazy about this marketing scheme you see everywhere of set-it-and-forget-it for monthly payments. Before long, you lose track of all the money you are sending out when you seldom use the service or get much value from it.
Like cable where I am never going to spend $120/month for a few hours of worthy shows.