Making Substack affordable for average folks
An online petition
Dear subscribers,
This is not a typical post about the main subject of this newsletter, but an open petition directed at the
team.I have seen more and more complaints about Substack subscriptions becoming too unaffordable for many people.
And I agree with these complaints.
I am of the view that the traditional news media is doomed. In the traditional age, an average person subscribes to a maximum of one to two newspapers and one to two magazines. But in fact, nobody wants to subscribe to an all-encompassing newspaper anymore, because there are only specific topics anyone cares about. The future is customizable reading so that people only subscribe to what interests them and bundle together into a personalized “newspaper” experience.
For instance, I only care about emerging technologies, equities, geography, and politics of some specific countries. My habit now is to find the best Substacks within these topics and subscribe to them.
I used to subscribe to traditional media such as the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, but I stopped recently. The reason is simple: most of their content is irrelevant to me. Why should I pay for a subscription that includes irrelevant content when I clearly have better alternatives?
The single most important thing I love about Substack is this personalized reading experience.
However, I don’t think Substack has lived up to this potential, nor can I feel they are even trying. One big hurdle is cost.
Just read this top comment on one of Substack’s official postings
I love the content model but the subscription model is unsustainable. If all the blogs I want to read want to charge me even as little (seemingly, at first) as $5 a month, that’s $60 a year. That amount is almost equivalent to that charged by a major publication. If there even only 10 blogs I want to follow, that’s $600 a year. I’m retired and with inflation, cannot afford $600 in addition to the 2-3 major publications I need. So what I end up doing is “unfollowing” all those I can’t afford, because the frustration of seeing only the tip of the iceberg on those pages is more costly in time and energy than I have. You need a better subscription model.
I myself am a content creator here at Substack. When I price my newsletters, I always price them at what I believe my content and all my efforts should be worth.
I am also an avid reader and like to give back to the community. I am currently paying for 15 Substacks that I love.
But I can totally appreciate the frustration shown by the comment above.
If I were not a content creator, not working in the information service industry, and not a freak hungry for high-value information, I would probably not dish out $1,500 a year for other people’s writing out of my own pocket, either. It simply doesn’t make sense for the vast majority of people.
Eventually, this cost barrier will hurt readers, creators, and, ultimately, Substack.
Let’s be honest: few people have the budget to subscribe to 10 publications simultaneously. For ordinary people, I can only imagine an average annual spend on newsletters at a maximum of $200-300, and I am already generous with my estimates. Given the inflexible pricing structure of Substack, with such a budget, one can, at best, subscribe to ~2 newsletters. But people are often interested in many people’s work. What happens is that they will be forever stuck at deciding for whose publication they should pay for. Usually, they will end up paying for NO ONE, and will be constantly frustrated by the paywalled content that they can only read the tip of. So, eventually, they will leave Substack.
Clearly, reforms can unlock so much value for every stakeholder. But, without these necessary reforms, everyone will get to lose something.
With this in mind, let me propose some sensible steps that Substack can adopt to solve this “affordability crisis.” There are actually only 3 simple steps.
#1 Allow voluntary bundling negotiation between Substackers
For starters, I am against bundled pricing for all content on the platform. It will destroy the creator ecosystem and go against the vision of a “personalized newspaper.”
What I am proposing is Substack should allow and support different creators to freely and voluntarily negotiate a bundled pricing arrangement among ourselves.
This is theoretically easy to execute. On Substack’s publisher dashboard, each of us knows which other newsletters we have the largest user overlap with. It would make a lot of sense if we could offer a $120 bundle price to our common subscribers instead of forcing them to choose to spend a grand total of $200 to subscribe individually. Just think of the incremental economic value for the creator economy this can generate!
In fact, I have already successfully tested this model. Currently, for a subscriber who subscribes to Baiguan, which is my company’s newsletter, I offer free access to this one. As of now, about half of the paying users of Baiguan have exercised that privilege. But because Substack doesn’t allow bundling, I have to manually do this. I can only dream of the day when Baiguan paying members can automatically gain this access.
My experiment shows that bundling works, for readers as well as for willing creators.
#2 Introduce 2-tier pricing
Currently, Substack has a “founding member” tier, but it’s substantially different from a 2-tier system simply because there is only one type of paywall.
If a 2-tier pricing system is allowed, I can theoretically charge a token value (maybe one cup of Cappucino a year) for most of the content, so the great majority of my readers can access most of my content with some monetary contribution, and while I keep the most intense stuff for the hardcore followers.
#3 Give creators an option to take down monthly pricing
A common gripe from content creators is the monthly subscription option. A major reason is that once you are a paying subscriber, monthly or yearly, you can access and download all the archives. But for many creators, the archive is actually quite valuable. This inherently creates an unfair situation, advantaging monthly subscribers over yearly ones.
On the other hand, having no monthly option is not good for readers, so I believe this policy has to be in conjunction with the proposal above about 2-tier pricing. For instance, one thing a creator can theoretically do is to allow a “one-Cappucino-level” reader to read most of the new content while only a full member can access the archives.
All of the above proposals should be very easy from a technical perspective, but they can have a huge return on investment for the creator economy. If Substack can divert only 10% of its resources away from its perceived ambition to build the next Twitter (notes), Discord (chats), or even YouTube (videos), we should be able to have these functions in a few weeks.
If you are a content creator with at least 100 subscribers and wish to add your name to my petition, please comment below or DM me. We need to gather, at the bare minimum, 100 signatures to make our voices heard.
If you agree with me in general, please like and restack this post. Make sure to also write to your favorite authors to urge them to join this petition!
(If you have different opinions about some of my proposals, please also let me know, and I will make it clear on the petition list)
Let’s all strive to make the community we love a better place!
Signed by
@ & Baiguan (bestseller) @ (bestseller) @ (bestseller) @ (bestseller)Hrvoje M. @
(besteller) @ (besteller) @ (besteller) @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @and more to come…
I agree. Substack charges too much for its "toll road". Yearly/monthly charges are too high when compared to yesteryear's newspaper subscriptions. Lower the prices: more paying subscribers will pay
Upon reading this piece, I immediately went to review my subscriptions. I count 19 paying subscriptions in total.
i also came to the realization that for at least 4 of them, i havent seen any content in a while. digging deeper, two of the creators have paused billing. good men. but another one has not paused yet been quiet for over 1yr. i paid $70 an year for nothing. another one has lowered annual fee to $100 for new subscribers however somehow i was renewed at the old rate of $150.
i can'ed the last two immediately. ofc.
and that i think represents a problem with the substacks model. as much as i love the platform, there's no one to police or gwtee subscribers get a minimum of what they pay for. we need to be on the constant lookout and managing our subscriptions. and that tiresome.
I still subscribe to WSJ, NYT, FT and other traditional newpapers; and as much as i think they are useless sometime, i know for sure when i wake up there will always be a today's edition.
by no means am I implying Substack creators should create daily. some should, like Bill Biship's flagship Sinocism, and i read it top to bottom everyday. Some publish once a week or biweekly and they are golden too. but i would appreciate if Substack can send me an alert if any of my paid subscriptions havent posted anything for 2 or 3 months. better to know it then, then 1yr later.