The Real Reason that Substack is Collapsing
The Subscription Model Has Maxed Out
A few years ago Substack transformed away from being a niche newsletter-delivery system and into the main refuge for tens of thousands of journalists who were fleeing (or been kicked out) of the mainstream media. The value proposition was simple: writers could come here to build an audience that would actually pay directly for their writing. The platform recommended writers put paywalls on posts that would encourage readers to financially support their favorites. The tradeoff from other social media platforms was that the paywalls would inherently limit the reach of their best work. Nonetheless, with a thousand paid subscribers you could live the middle class dream of earning close to $100,000 a year (well, more like $80,000 after all the fees).
For a while it seemed like a reasonably good trade. No one wanted journalism to die, and the new influx of writers was doing pretty good work on the platform—albeit with lower budgets than traditional newsrooms. But the model raised an obvious question: how many individual newsletters could the platform rationally expect readers to pay $8/month to access?
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The example of Taylor Lorenz losing subscribers left and right has little to do with how substack functions, but more to do with the rampant psychotic outbursts at anyone that doesn't agree with her extreme liberal politics. Her trying to dox and destroy the lives of people like Libs of Tiktok. I think that has a lot more to do with it tbh.