Substack is a great platform. How do we increase its market share?
Some really smart writing from some really thoughtful people makes it standout. Along with no damned Democrat Ministry of Truth style censorship. It should have wider readership.
Paul Finlayson has some smart ideas to improve the reach and therefore influence of Substack. We’ve got a great platform here - it’d be wonderful for more people gagging on mainstream media’s lies and censorship to find this platform. They can get lots of those same lies here, to be sure, but the difference is the logical writers refuting those lies are not silenced. Have a read.
Please comment on this, and if you endorse the following restack, I’m too much of a nobody to have an effect. It has nothing to do with politics. Thanks.
While Substack is a wonderful publishing platform, it could be much more. Here are some suggestions. I realize that I am a nobody, and if people believe the points below and don't re-stack the post, there is no chance the marketing department at Substack will listen to someone like me. I started freedomtoffend.com about nine months ago and have grown to 900 subscribers with 25% paid. But it is still quite small.
However, changes to the platform need to happen.
My (and anyone who supports the following) concern with Substack should be:
The brand is not marketed well; many have not heard of it. Substack should have numbers on this, but I have met many educated people who have never heard of it. When a brand is not well known, and people are being told to sign up through email,
The sign-up method is awful. People are very suspicious of phishing driven by hotlinks. The combination of a largely unknown brand and email link invitations is suspicious and not well thought through. This sign-up method is well out of date.
Categorization in Substack needs to be done better, and search engines could be improved. If the model allows for subscriptions and micropayments that allow people to read single essays, there must be much better categorization. Not everyone wants to subscribe, and people do not value what they are given for free. Some might say this is a freemium model, but How much additional value can you drive beyond the main post? Access to chats? Early release? That’s not enough, and the difference between the paid and typical free subscription is much narrower than apps (like some dating apps that use a freemium model). Furthermore, if Substack wants to go all in, they should give anyone three free essay reads per month and after that, they have to pay to read individual essays and/or subscribe to a single content provider.
People want to consume content, single essays, and only sometimes subscribe to one author. They also should be able to read random essays selectively. Those can be paywall protected with perhaps ⅓ of the content offered up, and the rest below the line needed a paid reading purchase or overall subscription.
Subscription is a level of commitment that is too much for many. That is the problem.
Substack should work with a domain provider to help writers get their domains; they help readers connect to Substacks.
People read Substacks on their phones, not laptops. This data is widely available, and all content provided should be presented as such.
Make co-authorship and cross-posting more intuitive and easy to use.
The sign-up method (just to read an essay) should be like those financial companies that text you a code after you give them your phone number and make you enter it on your phone. Or work through fingerprint / facial recognition. It needs to be insanely easy and quick. There is a reason that one-click on Amazon is popular.
I use Dall-E for AI in pictures. Readers tell me the pictures make a huge difference, but the AI built into Substack could be better.
Substack needs to affiliate itself with the education system, especially post-secondary. As they and most of us know, print media and newspapers are dying. We live in a wild scrub jungle of information, mainly weeds, and finding nutritious plants is hard. Substack has to put some serious effort into its search algorithm. Their AI is very good at responding, but Substack's categorization could be better; right now, it isn’t much use.
The key is price sensitivity. Substack has a mix of very popular niche writers, writers who worked in legacy media and entered the Substack market with a huge brand presence, very good writers who are growing, people who really don’t care and will always just have a handful of subscribers, and those who simply never post.
Substack should declare Substacks where someone doesn’t write (unless they have formally suspended it) for X amount of time unoccupied and delete them. Clutter and empty SS’s don’t help the brand when people search.
Substack needs to consider potential advertising. We don’t want to become just a social media vehicle for writers, but some subtle advertising should be considered. It doesn’t have to be as bad as the major social media platforms.
Most importantly, it’s great that Substack allows free options and automatic discounting. I have discounted mine to $2.50 and grown to $600 monthly, with 900 subscribers and over 200 paying in less than nine months. But I see some pretty poor substacks asking USD 11 or $14, and it’s just not smart. Another thing you have not considered is that everything is 30% more expensive for Canadians.
You needed to sell Stackers (sorry, I couldn’t come up with a better name), which would serve as an internal currency that could be purchased easily on the phone/site with just a few clicks. This would allow people to pay for access to a single article they like or allow them to subscribe to someone they like, and most importantly, if the Stackers were sold, for example, for $20 for 100, it would allow writers to price both single essays and subscriptions at lower rates. It’s better to make $20/week on individual essay sales than zero on mandatory expensive subscriptions.
This free option sucks; I teach and have written textbooks on Social Media Marketing, e-commerce, consumer behaviour and relationship marketing.
I’m not saying that makes me all-knowing, but this is my area. For example, there is a reason that Amazon’s one-click has been so successful and that it has patent protection—it's easy and quick. People online have a lot of freedom to leave you, and they are extremely impatient. This 1990s sign-up system has to be changed. You need to count patience in nanoseconds and realize that people will bounce quickly.
But back to the pricing, people do not value what they don’t pay for, even if they only pay $1. Free subscribers that don’t engage, don’t read, and don’t share are useless. This “Stackers’ method would allow (depending on the numbers) sub-subscribers to read their essays for - for example - $.20 and subscribe for $1.50 per month. I realize small amounts might raise your percentage mandates as processing small transactions might be a pain, but someone should get $150 monthly from 100 subscribers rather than have 200 subscribers and make $10 because they only got their grandma and mother to sign up. You have to allow a proper market mechanism. As writers, we need far better engagement numbers, heat maps, read times, and finish rates, not just open rates.
Substack is great, but if they don’t step up their marketing game, some well-financed company will step in and do everything Substack won’t. We lament readership rates declining. Perhaps Substack can help there.
Substack should team up with Etsy and offer advertising (the writer must get a good chunk of it; some say that you should wait until you get to 2000 subscribers and then try to get one sponsor. Granted, in niche markets, some have likely been successful. But many Substacks, like mine, could be more focused and more geographically focused. But they arent’. Substack would have to match with e-commerce vendors that ship to the UK, Canada, and the US. Again, I don’t have your stats, but you need to determine if non-paying subscribers are engaging. Are those just vanity stats? If so, what use are they?
Substack should use some form of gamification that rates writers on their growth in both readership and subscriptions. It would allow stats if people pay small amounts through credits to read single essays. However, gamification, knowledge, and the ability to compare prevent writers from getting discouraged; I have 900 subscribers and 203 paid in 9 months. Is this good or bad? Is that 60 percentile worse or better? How am I doing? People get discouraged if they have yet to learn where they stand. And if you gave out little awards, allowed readers to vote on the best essay, or something else, you would give a lot more incentives for readers to write. You need to raise engagement, and right now, it’s too basic.
You won’t have a problem getting well-financed companies or big brand names to do well. Kim K could come over and write weekly about how dry her heels were and her toenail fungus issues, and she would get 50000 subscribers in an hour.
If that is your market, could you stay the course? If you want to raise non-professional or side gig niche writers, you must do much more than you are doing.
Nothing is harder than starting a brand from nothing. Hopefully, these suggestions are read by the right people. They will restack or cut and paste what they like and circulate it if they believe it.
Paul Finlayson, freedomtoffend.com
I myself have some ideas which I will be reaching out to Substack’s managers about. Drop your thoughts below. We’ve got a great, vibrant and growing community here - how do we make free speech fashionable again?
I would welcome a change to the payment system. The concept of paying a monthly subscription doesn't work if you want to read articles from a number of writers but you don't necessarily want to read everything that person writes.
As a contributor, I don't charge a monthly fee because I don't want to be pressured into producing articles to a specific schedule.
A pay per read system would work better for me, both as a reader and as a writer.
For us older folks, I'd appreciate being able to change the text size, making it easier to read. I'd also appreciate being able to copy larger amounts of text (which I could then send to my friends to get them to read the full post on substack). Last, the "substack" name is not great; it communicates nothing of the treasure of information and opinion to be found here. It's sounds like something a computer scientist made up. Just my two cents.