Isaac Saul, who told me that his nonpartisan political newsletter brought in Tangle $ 190,000 in the first year, recently wrote that he came to Substack ‘specifically to avoid being associated with anyone else’ after being frustrated by the assumptions of readers about his prejudices when he told HuffPost.
One of the writers who left Substack on transgender issues, Jude Doyle, argued that his system of progress amounted to a kind of editorial policy. But the analogy with a media company is not clear. Grace Lavery said she wanted Substack to broaden the definition of harassment, but said she did not think threats to boycott the email service over writers she disagreed with made political sense. She has had bitter public disputes with other Substack writers, including journalist Jesse Singal, over their writing on gender policy. “Boycotting a stack because of Jesse Singal would be like boycotting a paper business” about a writer having books printed on their paper, she said.
Mr. Singal compared Substack to the unregulated, decentralized Internet of a decade ago. “In the golden age of blogging, writers hated each other, but they went back and forth about each other’s ideas. “People call the driver all the time,” he said.
So the biggest threat to Substack is probably not the Twitter-centric political battles among some of its writers. The real threat is competing platforms with a different model. The most technically powerful of these is probably Ghost, which allows writers to send and charge newsletters, with monthly fees starting at $ 9. While Substack is backed by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Ghost has Wikipedia vibes: it’s open-source software that develops is by a non-profit organization.
One of Substack’s biggest newsletters, The Browser, with 11,000 paid subscribers, left for Ghost last August. Nathan Tankus, an economics writer leaving Substack on trans issues, has also moved to Ghost. David Sirota, who runs the left-leaning investigative site The Daily Poster, said he was considering moving to Outpost, a system built on Ghost, because ‘we want our business and our brand to stand on its own. ‘
And it’s easy to leave. Unlike on Facebook or Twitter, Substack writers can simply take their mailing lists and send links to their readers.
Substack’s model of taking ten per cent of its author subscriptions is ‘too greedy to take a business with very little in return’, says Ghost founder and CEO John O’Nolan, a tattooed, nomadic Irishman which is bizarre. in Hollywood, Fla. He said he believed publication of newsletters “was intended to be commodified.”