As a follow-up to my previous post about substack, I found myself thinking about the financial nature of the platform. One of the primary purposes of substack is to serve as a marketplace, connecting buyers and sellers1. What is it that they are buying and selling? This wasn’t something I initially gave much consideration to; I didn’t intend to create a paid substack, and most of my subscriptions are free. But it has a significant impact on how substack will develop and change over time.
I can think of the following reasons why someone would decide to pay for a Substack subscription (not mutually exclusive but hopefully close to a comprehensive list).
Possible motivations for a paid subscription
Price — Substack is generally not the cheapest way option, but in some cases it may be (and, though I’m focused on paid subscriptions, price is obviously a major factor for free subscriptions).
Convenience — The format of reading on e-mail or the Substack app is sufficiently convenient that it adds value.
Patronage — Appreciate for what the writer is creating and want them to be able to create more and share it with the world.
Para-social relationship — Think of the writer as a friend, or friendly-acquaintance and want to help them out.
Guilt — the feeling that one should support a writer.
Specific Content — the writer provides a specific style of writing or information which isn’t otherwise available, and worth paying for.
Completeness — Subscription as a way to be as up to date as possible with the person’s writing, including work in progress.
Exclusivity — Paying specifically for paywalled content which isn’t otherwise available.
Access — Buying a subscription to represent some small claim on the writer’s time. Perhaps hoping to get questions answered, replies to comments, or in some way direct the efforts of the writer.
It is common for multiple motivations to overlap, and one of the strengths of Substack, at the moment, is that there are a lot of different models, and different approaches to paid subscriptions. However, there is some tension between those motivations. I have, generally speaking put them in order based on the degree to which the subscriber would prefer the writer to dedicate attention to paying subscribers compared to other public work.
As a broad generalization the most appealing case for Substack are the examples when the existence of the marketplace creates demand which would have otherwise existed — either convincing subscribers that something is worth paying for which they wouldn’t have otherwise considered or convincing writers that there is a potential market for their work which they wouldn’t have otherwise been able to access. Similarly, the least appealing cases would be if Substack were dominated by people either selling the impression of personal attention/access or selling guilt.
From the other side, writers may have multiple motivations as well (and I do not try to be comprehensive in this case):
Possible motivations for writing on Substack
Internal motivation — writing for practice; to develop skill or sharpen thinking
Community — desire to participate in a community of readers and writers
Friendship — Having a social relationship with readers or writers (similar to community, but a slightly different emphasis)
Guilt — Feeling that they have made a commitment, either to existing subscribers or to themselves to write regularly.
Money — Cultivating paid subscribers
Fame/Influence — Producing work which will make a difference in the lives of the readers and/or the world.
Again, these are not mutually exclusive, people can and will aspire to all of those, but they don’t perfectly coexist. They will each provide a different basis on which writers can feel like they are succeeding or failing.2 To some extent I’ve ranked them based on the degree to which the writer would prefer that readers are “sticky” (being committed to giving time and attention to selected writers) vs browsing across the site. There is also often a question of how much of an audience does a writer need to feel like the time spent is rewarded and satisfying and also finding a balance between shorter and longer work.
The thing that strikes about putting these lists together is that having a direct connection between subscribers and writers is not purely a virtue. It can be quite positive and rewarding on both sides but, as is common on the internet, I’d imagine that a lot of people feel some degree of wanting something other than what their getting and not knowing whether that makes them ungrateful (and/or whether they are presuming too much of a para-social relationship)
But, beyond that, there are also questions about the effect of readers and writers both seeking to “own” the attention as much as possible and the impact of commercializing that relationship. I think there are huge advantages to building a marketplace which isn’t driven by advertising, but I am also slightly concerned and curious what
was thinking of when he wroteChris Best and Hamish McKenzie in particular —as crazy as this sounds, and they’re crazy people— believe that migrating a large % of what you might call “the culture budget” of the world to recurring revenue / subscriptions / creator-aligned models will bring a lot of incredible second-order effects beyond the economic stabilization of the creative classes (which would be enough!), and I share their hopes: that discourses might improve, that communities might get healthier, that politics might in some tiny way get past some of its dynamics, etc.
What I hope to follow up on in a part 2 is connecting some of these questions to the description of Gift Economies in Lewis Hyde’s book The Gift. I read the book many years ago, and my memory of the details have faded, but it permanently changed the way that I think about creative marketplaces, and I want to re-visit it.
Hyde offer this summary:
The main assumption of the book is that certain spheres of life, which we care about, are not well organized by the marketplace. That includes artistic practice, which is what the book is mostly about, but also pure science, spiritual life, healing and teaching.
This book is about the alternative economy of artistic practice. For most artists, the actual working life of art does not fit well into a market economy, and this book explains why and builds out on the alternative, which is to imagine the commerce of art to be well described by gift exchange.
…
I began with a real attachment to the gift-exchange side of this equation, and in a sense the book overemphasizes that, intentionally so because I felt that it was not well described or thought about. But as I said in my afterword, I ended up realizing the real problem was to have a consciousness about the two realms and to think about ways they could communicate usefully with each other.
So I have nothing against the marketplace, when it’s applied to the things it works well doing. And my books are for sale.
Margaret Atwood comments:
I doubt that Lewis Hyde knew while he was writing it that he was composing such an essential work. Perhaps he felt he was merely exploring a subject of interest to him—in its short form, why poets in our society are seldom rich—and enjoying the many tributaries he was uncovering through his exploration without realizing that he had hit on a wellspring. When asked by his original editor who his presumed audience was, he couldn’t really pinpoint it but settled for “poets.” “That’s not what most editors want to hear,” as he says in his preface to the 2007 edition. . . .
That allows me to close with a song.
“Cold Dog Soup” — James McMurtry (written by Guy Clark)
Ain't no money in poetry
That's what keeps the poet free
I've had all the freedom I can stand
Cold dog soup and rainbow pie
Is all it takes to get me by
Edit: This is an interesting thread on notes discussing the question of what prompts people to get a paid subscription:
Substack is obviously more than just a marketplace; it offers tools for creation and social media as well but it is built around a core function of allowing the sale of and managing subscriptions.
Something that struck me; on each of my prior posts about substack I got a comment from a writer who’s doing good work saying that they were feeling burned out or like they were plateauing on substack. It is often good that substack provides various reasons to continue putting more time into the platform, but that can also create frustration.
Really bold and bracing thinking and analysis, without pretending to know all the answers. So I like this a lot. And it’s really serving the Common Good to pushback, and think aloud about: Who’s zoomin’ who?
Particularly enjoyed the song at the end. Complimented the well written article.