Substack: A profitable refuge for ‘lightning-rod’ writers
The newsletter platform Substack has become an increasingly important voice in media as “well-known opinion journalists have abandoned their longtime employers to start their own subscription-based” shops, said Eric Levitz in New York magazine. “In most cases, this proved to be an astoundingly good business decision,” with writers such as Andrew Sullivan and Matthew Yglesias quickly gaining tens of thousands of subscribers paying $60 a year each. Now, though, Substack is under fire for luring some writers with sizable “advances” in a “Substack Pro” program, said Anthony Ha in TechCrunch.com. Critics say that Substack’s “promises that anyone can make money on a newsletter are tainted.” But some successful Substack authors, such as commentator Glenn Greenwald, believe the complaints come from “petty Substack censors” who just want writers they dislike kicked off.
It’s clear that Substack “is not a neutral platform,” said Alex Shephard in The New Republic. It selects Substack Pro journalists based on Twitter likes, retweets, and replies—effectively “rewarding large followings and nothing else.” The result is a platform that “doesn’t really fix media’s inequities or flaws” and has no interest in developing voices or finding new ones. It is filled with writers known for incendiary “hot takes” and so has “gained a reputation as a home for reactionaries and cranks.”
Those who complain of censorship by the tech giants “are often told that if they wish to effect change, they should ‘build their own’ outlets,” said Charles Cooke in the National Review. Then, when they do, “the same people immediately rush to marginalize them.” These “self-appointed arbiters of acceptable speech” see themselves “as an anointed caste.” The media establishment is “horrified by the mere existence of venues over which they are unable to exert control.” A merciless “cancel culture” already seems “uncomfortably close for journalists and academics,” said Megan McArdle in The Washington Post. A “win for the cancellation artists” on this would confirm that it’s “effectively impossible to hold a professional-class job without enthusiastically embracing progressive orthodoxy.”
It’s not an accident that “lightning-rod writers ended up on Substack,” said Ben Thompson in Stratechery.com—in many cases, there was no place else for them to go. Now that they are there, though, they’re finding it gives them a lot that big media companies could not. Substack “makes it easy for the best writers to discover their actual market value.” It’s attractive precisely because there might be an advance for a year, but in the long run, it’s not media companies or media critics who determine how much Substack writers get paid—it’s the subscribers.