What are the Downsides of Substack?
Everyone’s talking about making money on Substack, but let's discuss the elephant(s) in the room
Hi,
You guys already know I’m a huge fan of Substack, the newsletter publishing platform that helps creators earn money from their writing. But there are some not-insignificant downsides to the Substack platform.
Let’s discuss the elephant(s) in the room: the negative aspects of Substack.
Substack was launched in 2017 and now has millions of readers and writers.
Writers are making serious money on the platform, with people like Lenny Rachitsky of Lenny’s Newsletter hitting half a million subscribers last year. He charges his paying subscribers $150 per year, so he’s likely generating more than $1 million per year from subscription fees (based on a very conservative paid-to-free subscriber rate of 1.5%).
Individual creators are making more than $1 million per year from weekly newsletters.
My paid newsletter now generates more than $15K per year. That’s not a huge amount, but it provides me with an income stream that is scaleable and work that is flexible. I love it!
In April 2023, Substack’s management team said “There are more than 35 million active subscriptions to writers on Substack, including more than 2 million paid subscriptions. Readers have paid hundreds of millions of dollars to writers on the platform. There has been a Cambrian explosion of great writing, and writers have been saying (unprompted, we promise) that Substack has changed their lives.”
Yep, hundreds of millions of dollars are going to creators on Substack.
It’s no wonder everyone’s excited about Substack right now. But what are the downsides of Substack for writers and artists?
Marketing’s a bitch
Substack is not like Medium, Quora or Newsbreak. It does not automatically show your work to new readers, no matter how good it is. On Medium, for example, if you write an exceptionally good post, the platform may choose to show it to new readers, people who have never seen your work before.
Substack does not do that. Even if you write the best post of all time, no one will ever see it unless you actively promote it, and purposefully put it in front of new people.
On Substack, you don’t get to just write. You have to write and promote.
Promotion got easier for Substack writers in 2022 and 2023, with the launch of two new features; recommendations and Notes. These features are powerful tools for reaching new readers who are already reading other newsletters on Substack, helping writers get new subscribers with less effort.
But — and it’s a big but — if you want subscribers who aren’t already reading on Substack, you have to actively promote your newsletter elsewhere. That means promoting it with social media, word-of-mouth, in-person promotion or guest appearances in other publications and podcasts.
Substack sucks for email marketing campaigns
Email marketing is the process of selling products and services to people by sending emails to a list of potential customers. Email marketing service providers like MailChimp, and ConvertKit are great for doing this. Substack is not.
Email marketing works best when you can send new subscribers a series of emails that slowly nurtures them from the day they sign up until they are ready to purchase from you. Substack does not do that.
While it is possible to sell products and services to subscribers on Substack, the platform is not optimized for that. Automatic sequences and automatic segmenting based on subscriber actions are not supported.
Customization is limited
Substack’s website customizations have come a long way since I started using the platform in 2021. But they are still quite limited.
The webpages hosted by Substack, where people can see your posts online, can’t be manipulated beyond a few layout choices. It’s not just difficult to add features which are common on most websites, such as pop-ups, site backgrounds, parallax scrolling or image carousels, it’s downright impossible.
This lack of customization frustrates many Substck creators. Me, I find it freeing. If you can’t spend hours making your website look perfect, you have more time for writing, and I reckon that’s a good thing!
No API
Tech-savvy users tear their hair out over the lack of API for Substack. The software is not open source and there is no way for other developers to easily create automations and apps that can interact with it.
For me, that means I can’t use an app to automatically import new subscribers from my website and there’s no external app for handling comments or auto-replying to private communications, making life just a little more difficult.
High fees (sort of)
The very best thing about Substack for new writers is that it is 100% free to get started.
This makes it incredibly low-risk to launch a newsletter on Substack. All you need is a couple of posts and an email account to get started.
How to Go From 0 to 2000 Subscribers
Hi, I’ve been talking to Kristina God in the past few days. And I thought you would find her journey on Substack inspiring. Kristina started with ZERO subscribers in November 2022 and now has more than 2600 subscribers. How did she get there? And what can we learn from her journey?
How long is Substack free?
Substack is free forever. If you never launch paid subscriptions, you don’t have to pay anything to use Substack. You only start paying fees when (if) you get a paying subscriber.
This publication is free for readers, and always will be. I created it to grow an audience for my book. It has more than 1,000 subscribers and makes me money from readers who pay for my Substack Help services. It costs me nothing.
Yup, this publication makes money, but I don’t pay any Substack fees because it has no paying subscribers. No fees. Zero. Zilch.
My other publication, for food safety professionals, has hundreds of paying subscribers. For that, I pay Substack’s standard fee of 10% of gross subscriber revenue. When you have a few hundred subscribers, those fees can seem quite high.
Other email providers are much cheaper. In fact, the yearly fees for my paid publication are three times more than what I would pay to host it on Substack’s main competitor, Beehiv. Crazy.
I’m staying on Substack for now because I like its user interface, but some creators choose to leave when their publications get big, to save on fees.
Closing thoughts
Substack is a powerful, easy way to create and monetize a newsletter and blog. Writers are earning serious money using Substack’s platform.
The downsides of Substack are that it does not distribute your work for you; it isn’t good for sophisticated email marketing campaigns; it has limited website customizations and no api. In addition, the fees can be high for high-earning publications.
Having said all that, I’m still a fan of Substack, and use it to make money with my expertise every week. Because it’s 100% free to use until you get a paying subscriber, it’s completely no-risk to start a newsletter on Substack, so I say GO FOR IT!
Still here? You’d better sign up, if you haven’t already!
Cheers,
Karen
I want to start off by saying right from the get-go, that I LOVE it here on Substack. I'm retired, so I've got a lot of time to play around, screw up, and figure things out. I worked in a blue-collar job all of my life. I had one job. I started it when I was 19, and recently retired. I didn't always have access to a computer, and when I finally got one, I didn't have the finances to take classes to help me figure out how to use the damn thing. I started on WORD 2, and worked my way up. Then I got a Mac, and had to start all over again.
So I'm not very tech savvy, which has actually worked out for me. All I knew how to do was write the stories I write. I didn't Blog, because I worked swing shift and couldn't commit to it. Besides, it didn't interest me. I write fiction. Period. I'm not an essayist. I leave that to everyone else.
So when I came to Substack a year and a half ago, it was still pretty new itself. I've grown with it, you could say. I learned how to use NOTES; ditched the idea of CHAT; embraced Recommendations and Cross-posting. I sit back and listen to people complain that Substack doesn't do this and doesn't have that, and shrug my shoulders. I don't know what half that shit is they're complaining about. All I know is that I can put my stories up, and not have to worry about how long they are. That's always been a problem, bringing a story in under the recommended word length. I like long "Alice Munro" type stories. Who doesn't? And if you don't, you don't have to sign up with me.
But I love SUBSTACK. For all the faults it may have, it has just as many opportunities. I never made a dime in all the time that I've been writing. Anything I've published, was on one of those "Free" sites. I thought it was just a stepping stone on my way up to getting paid. Now, I have people actually paying me so they can read my stuff. It's not a lot; but it could be. I don't worry about it. I don't market myself. I just write my stories and put them on my 'Stack, and if you want to read them, fine. If you don't, that's fine too.
I believe, and have always believed, that if the quality of writing is there, people will come. It might take time, but hey, I've got some of that. At 65, I probably have about 20 years to make something of myself; 25 if I take care of myself. I might have approached things differently if I was 30, or 40, but I'm not. So I just write my stories, support those I can, and hope people will read me, and after reading, support me because they feel I've earned it. I've dropped my yearly SUBSCRIPTION rate down to $30 (Can), and plan to leave it there.
I don't have a lot of subscribers. I'm sitting at 420...why does that number sound so familiar? I've got 16 PAID. So I'm making money! Me! I'm now a professional writer. And all I have to do is write, which is something I've always done. I get to reinvent myself into the person I've always dreamed I would be...a writer. SUBSTACK gave that to. They want to take 10%? I was making nothing before I got here. They can, because as a labourer all my life, the fact they pay their staff about $56/hour is awesome!
So while it may have it's problems, I just look at them as growing pains...hiccups.
I came here to write...
As Kristi says below, the thing that sets Substack apart is that it offers a unique space for writers, and particularly writers with a fairly refined sensibility (at least in my circles). And yet one of the core mythologies of the platform is that anyone can earn a primary income eventually. So the success stories that get trotted out make a lot of folks who came here originally just wanting to stop writing into the void at lit mags or other trade publications, and have some genuine interactions with readers, feel like they're failing somehow.
I spent part of last year flailing with this a bit, trying to find the lever that would nudge more free subscribers to upgrade, trying one ridiculously unsuccessful live workshop with a replay (I feel stupid just thinking about it) that led to ZERO upgrades and not a single purchase through the Stripe checkout link I created. I've promoted this thing on LinkedIn, too, where I have a decent following 3K+, and it's a quality course, but conversion has been bupkus.
So I'm learning that what draws people to me on Substack, and what drives upgrades, is quality content, typically offered for free, that makes people want to support me, personally. That is actually a welcome revelation, because it means that I can follow my original instincts of just WRITING, without trying to contort myself into a branding hustle that goes nowhere.
The windy upshot of all of this is that Substack does have a kind of messaging problem if it continues to frustrate writers that it explicitly drew to the platform for a different purpose than the one that continually gets flogged as the measure of success on the platform. For instance, I've been told that interviews don't do well in converting paid subscribers. But you know what they do well at? Building community, giving people meaningful life stories to connect to their own. I'm curious about people's lives, and so I harvest their stories, sometimes with practical goals for job seeking, etc, but sometimes not. And I'd like to continue doing that without trying to find the lever that makes me more money. Because the energy required to find that lever and the tedium of working it effectively week in and week out...that's not why I came to this platform.