The case for bundling substacks

No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money

There is a reason why Substack is a very successful business and a number of writers earn a living from it, while a lucky few make a good deal of money - the bastards. The platform has many advantages over conventional media, allowing for more eccentric and quirky articles that might not get commissioned elsewhere, and at greater length.

The ability to write and the ability to pitch, network and self-promote don’t always align. The success of a particular Substack post is not driven by the individual’s ‘fit’ for an article, and very often the most interesting analysis comes from someone who has no particular lived experience nor a background in politics or journalism; they’ve just thought about the issue and come up with an interesting theory. Unlike with blogging in the 2000s, financial incentives attract more highly-skilled writers and the paid subscriptions model allows them to devote more hours to the pursuit.

The downside of the model is that it is expensive to subscribe to a range of writers, and the typical reader will follow at least half a dozen and may have a variety of non-core interests. Every writer is limited in their specialisation, and as I’ve got older I’ve become far more reluctant to touch on areas in which I don’t feel I have enough expertise, and can offer nothing more than a bar room opinion. How will the new war in the Middle East work out? No idea.

So while a brilliant model, some Substack readers with a broad range of favourite writers feel that they can’t afford the current system. I think that this might explain why a number of writers have struggled to expand their paid subscriptions in the past year or so; alternatively, maybe a number of us have just reached a natural plateau. The most common explanation I get from former paid subscribers is that they already spend money on a number of substacks and they simply cannot afford it; of course, maybe they’re being polite, and don’t want to say ‘it’s because you’re rubbish now’ and are well into Season 10 of your career.

Half of my paid subscribers come from Britain, which is currently enjoying successive quarters of zero economic growth and a mood of overwhelming pessimism (which I’m probably not helping with, to be fair). In hard times we naturally make cuts to non-essential spending, and I’m having constant tussles at home with my desire to cancel one of the streaming services we pay for, and which my children seem to think are vital. Do I really need to spend that £5 a month to read about how Britain is in terminal decline, one might ask? (To which I would reply, YES.)

It’s complicated because, if you’re a Substack writer, your paid subscribers are both consumers and patrons; some are happy in the latter role, supporting writers who raise issues that need to be raised, but most are not wealthy enough to see it in those terms.

The platform has also got more competitive, and this is observable from following Substack Notes, which I’ve started using more as an alternative to Twitter, not out of any principled stance but because Elon blocked links to Substack. Notes seems to be full of writers complaining about poverty, a sign of the intense competition within the platform (which makes me want to reply ‘what did you expect from a writing career?’).

From the consumers’ point of view, the ideal system would allow them to pay a monthly subscription fee and read anything they want, as with Spotify. Yet even if Substack were far more generous than the music streaming service, this would be disastrous for the ‘creators’, as I suppose we’re supposed to call ourselves. Substack has attracted a lot of very good writers because it offers a great deal of money to those who succeed, and the top earners would refuse to take part in such a system. Some customers would like to pay per article, but that would also translate into a significant pay cut, unless they were perhaps allowed only one such purchase per writer; after that, you need to subscribe. A pay-per-article system would also change the incentives which currently make Substack interesting, encouraging far more clickbait.

Perhaps the alternative is bundling, whereby consumers buy paid subscriptions to 3 or 5 or 10 substacks at much reduced rates, with the income shared between the writers. Maybe it could be distributed based on how much time the consumer spends on each, although that sounds complicated, or just shared evenly.

There would need to be restrictions on how often people were able to change their line-up, either every three, six or 12 months, whatever is required to stop them endlessly switching in order to read everything. Perhaps the system could allow you to read one free article from a writer outside of your bundle, if the author agrees, to test them out for the next period.

Writers would have to opt into the bundling system, and the very high earners might not feel the need to join, but that probably wouldn’t matter; there might be issues about contrasting prices between substacks, but this doesn’t sounds like an insurmountable problem.

The typical Substack writer talking to their accountant

When I recently posted this suggestion on Notes, many people replied that I’m just reinventing the magazine. There are certainly examples of successful substack ‘magazines’, the Free Press being the obvious example, such a triumph that it has come to outgrow the New York Times by certain measures. This shows the extent to which digital media can lead to rapid scaling. There are also smaller examples like the excellent Pimlico Journal, which offers a perspective not readily available in any mainstream media, and so adds a richness to the commentary world. But this is not the ideal format for all writers.

Magazines are a wonderful invention, but they are complex organisms. They involve infrastructure. If I got together with four or five other writers, eventually we’d need to co-ordinate what subjects we were covering, ensure that no one was slacking, or getting too extreme (or maybe not extreme enough). Magazines have their own brand that needs to be protected. We’d need to have, God forbid, ‘meetings’. Just as many people within this trade are not naturally gifted salesmen or networkers, writers aren’t necessarily organisational geniuses.

The biggest difference between a magazine and a bundle is that the latter allows consumers to build their own ‘publications’, the whole purpose of Substack. Most magazine or newspaper readers will have their favourite writers, and they will have writers they have no interest in; there are also the writers they actively hate, and newspaper comments sections are full of them. Bundling would abide by the spirit of Substack, of matching readers to writers organically while also offering financial rewards for consuming more.

The main argument against bundling, from what I’ve read, is that Substack fears it would undermine writers’ earnings, and the people in San Francisco will know more about the market than I do. Having said that, I wonder if it would work out better for some medium-income writers.

I currently charge £5 a month, or £50 a year, which is near the lower end of the range, and would like to reduce this to the very minimum - roughly £4 a month or £25 a year - if I didn’t fear that demand is quite quite inelastic. I also wonder if this will give the subliminal impression that my writing is cheap, when in all honesty I do labour over every piece, which is why my hot takes are often three weeks late. (I’m still working on an article I started in 2023 about the Claudine Gay drama at Harvard, and it will be a work of history by the time I get around to posting my opinion piece.) With bundling, I would have to bet that I can double or triple the number of paid subscribers on reduced rates, and my knowledge of the economics just isn’t strong enough.

I’m sorry to end inconclusively, but this is one of those areas where I have to admit that I just don’t know. I can’t even think of a tenuous historical analogy as a hook.