Ignoring, for the moment, the questionable morals of pervading an ad-free space with adverts for your own profits: the article could dwell more on the extent to which these companies are burning Substack down for fuel.
It's very mild to say that adverts "risk Substack's funding model". I'd be more dramatic - advertising like this risks Substack's brand reputation, and the subscription incomes of every non-advertising publisher on it; in other words, the existence of the business itself. If I'm paying to get ad-free content, and ads slip in anyways - I'm liable to blame Substack.
Fair point, but what can Substack actually do about this? Maybe they can forbid insertions from ad networks technically and in their TOS, but at the other extreme end, there’s almost nothing they can do about submarine articles. What if someone set up a Wirecutter analogue (but being paid for reviews) on Substack?
At the end of the day, it is fundamentally a platform for sharing opinions.
>As I perceive Substack model and positioning , I would guess that people would blame the author.
That depends on the extent to which users see Substack as a publisher vs a marketplace. If you think Substack's role is just infrastructural, you would blame the author. But if you think Substack has to provide value by cultivating good, high-quality newsletters, then you blame Substack.
But in either case, if you're looking for an ad-free experience, an increase in ads will frustrate you. Even if you don't think Substack is responsible for ads, you may be using it specifically to find ad-free content creators. The moment that guarantee vanishes from the Substack marketplace, the service becomes less valuable to you.
>Also, newspapers have a mix of subscription and ads for decades,
Substack's business model is predicated on its dissimilarity to existing publishing forms. By choosing their own subscriptions and receiving them in their inbox, a Substack customer is doing the complete opposite to going out and buying a particular broadsheet printed by someone else. I doubt any Substack customer who is paying for an ad-free experience would appreciate the comparison to a newspaper.
> Substack is entirely focused on subscriptions, so we don't build any additional functionality to support affiliate links or advertising, but you are free to use them.
This is a very real problem. I have been a YouTube Premium subscriber for years, but am now considering cancelling because every popular channel has started embedding their own ads in videos. It's the smaller creators who end up suffering for it.
As one of the protagonists of the article in OP, I want to mention that the vast majority of ad-seeking writers are not also charging paywall-style for their content. This is about providing an alternative to the paywall for writers.
How do I get past the captcha on these links? The POST after I pass the captcha just 500s and I end up back at the same page but with a new captcha. Turned off adblock and made sure cookies weren't blocked.
You will never escape ads. HN is always about "Let me pay to not see ads". But it doesn't work that way. The value of ads is quantified in aggregate, not on a per-customer basis.
This isn't a theoretical economics experiment that can be carried out on a spreadsheet, where you can neatly decouple ad revenue from the calculation of customer lifetime value and spit out a nice round price point for an ad-free experience. This price would need to be revised quarterly at least as to account for ad revenue seasonality and changing subscriber numbers.
> As an isolated event, advertising on Substack is no big deal. But if it becomes ubiquitous, the funding model of the platform could be at risk, forcing Substack to either clamp down on this cottage industry or embrace it. Substack could incorporate advertising into its product, but doing so would contradict the platform's commitment to remaining ad-free.
So, the ads will be tolerated for as long as Substack does not have a native ad platform through which all ads must flow through.
It doesn't have to be this way. It is possible to decline a money-making opportunity. Can you think of any businesses near you that have blank outdoor wall space, even though they could make good money putting a billboard on it?
In the State of Hawaii the Outdoor Circle successfully made billboards illegal. Businesses can still have signs on their storefronts but that's about it. Many mural artists have filled the void and you can see some in the news story below:
That's one way to deal with it, and in my analogy that would be equivalent to Substack banning ads within newsletters. But my point is that even where billboards are legal, most property owners choose not to install one. Why? It's because people are not money robots, and factor many other things into their decisions such as ethics, morals, personal preferences, cultural norms, etc. So, "ads make economic sense and are therefore inevitable" is a bad argument.
Physical ad spaces are not comparable to digital. A billboard can only show one ad at a time with no real targeting. A digital ad can use your browsing history to guess your preferences and show different ads to different users.
Digital ads are also right there in front of you, and you can go from ad impression --> sale right there on the screen. If your billboard is on the side of your building, located in some remote office park, well, the reach isn't as good.
I'm happily paying for youtube premium because it allows me to watch youtube on my iPad without ads, and to download the videos to watch offline. Totally worth it.
I don't know how many youtube users are paying for it, but youtube premium is still a thing, and I hope it continues to be. Seems like they're making it work somehow.
There is something very wrong with the idea that you can afford an Apple computer but refuse to pay for content, instead employing techniques to avoid remuneration going to the service and content provider.
There are plenty more reasons to not pay for YT Premium beyond the monetary aspect. Not trusting Google is a big one (and in fact why I personally don't pay for it despite happily paying for Spotify and donating to the YT creators I watch directly).
Note that those techniques are in the spirit of the initial vision of the internet being open and free, and you, the user, controlling what you see on the web through your 'user agent' and not the other way around.
Also remember those ads are not free, they come at great cost of bandwidth and compute, resulting in net co2 emission. If I as a user want to object to that, using an ad blocker is morally completely valid.
There is something very wrong with the web which has become a cesspool of trackers and surveillance capitalism and every waking moment is pregnant with monetization options from the powerful players in the attention economy.
I mostly prefer to watch DVDs and employ an ad blocker so that every day existence doesn't require my brain to edit ads out of reality because it's been trained by 25 years of abuse from the internet that this is necessary to just be able pretend like I exist independent of my eyeballs' worth to some goddamn shysters halfway across the world. You know, like most of 400,000 years of human existence.
Invidious is a good solution and solves a lot of the other issues with YouTube's UX (the ads can actually be dealt with AdGuard for Safari): https://github.com/iv-org/invidious
They had 30M paying users at end of Q3 (up from 20M 9 months earlier). That includes both Premium and Music subscribers, but given the pricing structure it is hard to imagine who would pay for just Music. In terms of all users, 1.5 years ago they said 2B monthly active users.
On one hand, that sounds miserable. Only 1% of the users are paying! On the other hand, a Premium subscriber is an order of magnitude more profitable. The ads run rate seems to be about $20B/year, and subscriptions behind at just a factor of 5 at about $4B/year.
(The $20B is a hard number from the Q3 earnings, $4B is back of the envelope. It's hard to say just how e.g. regional pricing if affecting it, or how the family plans are counted.)
I pay for this too and justify it as actually an education/learning SaaS subscription. Youtube has become the way I learn everything. I don't want ads interrupting that learning experience.
Technically you could also say "you will never escape crime" because crime always pays more than doing things legitimately (why earn your money when you can just steal it?), and yet as a society we've managed to marginalize crime and reduce instances of it to single-digit percentages in most developed countries.
Why should it be any different for ads? Advertising is a cancer on society, by itself its purpose is to waste some person's time by showing them something they haven't asked for, sometimes in hope to drive a purchase. We've basically normalized intentionally wasting people's time (in aggregate this time can be expressed in human lifetimes) for the benefit of a select few (the advertisers). Advertising also has secondary negative effects where it perverts the incentives between service providers and their users (social networks' objective is to make you look at ads, not facilitate communication with your friends/family), sometimes up to the point where said service providers promote harmful content to drive ad views ("engagement" as they call it) where said content then leads to mental health issues, broken relationships and crime (like the radicalization of the right-leaning Trump supporters that ended up storming the Capitol).
It's a shame that this isn't more widespread view. I can also add that ads together with granular targeting are being used into manipulating people into buying things they wouldn't normally want or need, and that's sort of more sophisticated and legal scam.
Also, bank robbery isn't usually very lucrative, and they've made it harder and less lucrative over time. "According to the FBI a bank robbery averaged a take of $4,000 in 2009, which may not have been sufficient to yield the thieves a positive return on their enterprise. You see, at today's prices, the robbers would need to expend $4,442 for the guns, bullets, and masks used in a typical bank robbery." http://bastiat.mises.org/2014/09/the-basic-economics-of-bank...
Street crime & bank robbery became a terrible business model because as a society we agree that this kind of crime needs to be stopped/deterred and implemented mitigations (such as making it harder to resell stolen goods, requiring extra documentation for large cash-based transactions, etc).
There's no reason the same couldn't apply to advertising. We could implement (and actually enforce - so unlike the GDPR for example) privacy regulations that would make ad tracking more transparent and give consumers a choice, or repealing Section 230 protections for platforms that take on an publisher role by prioritizing certain content to generate "engagement". These would make advertising less lucrative and let other business models take over.
Interestingly, you make this comment on a platform entirely devoid of advertisement, because it itself is one massive advertisement for the YC accelerator program.
So it's very true, you cannot escape the advertisements.
Aren't those weird submissions with no comments that show up on here ads?
Actually, the last one I saw was for "Substack is hiring talented engineers to redefine the way people read and write things on the internet"
Lol those companies literally gave up a part of themselves for (among others) those ads. Not saying it's not a good deal, but it's not a free lunch either.
Nothing weird about those, they’ve always been on HN. They’re also the one of the least obtrusive ads around. In return we get a moderated, fast website for free.
> "Let me pay to not see ads". But it doesn't work that way. The value of ads is quantified in aggregate, not on a per-customer basis.
The bigger issue is the people that would pay to remove ads have more expensive habits and are worth much more in ads than the average user (though maybe that is somewhat counteracted by being more savvy against scams delivered through ads).
The risk I see for Substack is that if a writer has enough ad revenue in parallel to their Substack subscriptions they are more likely to jump ship, or at least, threaten to reduce the 10% commission.
I haven't used Substack's creator software so not certain if they offer more value than a payment process (or even a vertical-bank designed for creators) would. But neither of those would charge 10%.
I really never saw a convincing argument for why substack would go any other way than platforms before them.
They're all liable to the same market pressures. Easy as that. If the paperwork of a company doesn't specifically rule out certain changes to occur upon incorporation, don't rely on those changes not occurring.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 111 ms ] threadIt's very mild to say that adverts "risk Substack's funding model". I'd be more dramatic - advertising like this risks Substack's brand reputation, and the subscription incomes of every non-advertising publisher on it; in other words, the existence of the business itself. If I'm paying to get ad-free content, and ads slip in anyways - I'm liable to blame Substack.
At the end of the day, it is fundamentally a platform for sharing opinions.
Also, newspapers have a mix of subscription and ads for decades, I don’t think it’s that shocking that some Substack authors are doing that as well.
That depends on the extent to which users see Substack as a publisher vs a marketplace. If you think Substack's role is just infrastructural, you would blame the author. But if you think Substack has to provide value by cultivating good, high-quality newsletters, then you blame Substack.
But in either case, if you're looking for an ad-free experience, an increase in ads will frustrate you. Even if you don't think Substack is responsible for ads, you may be using it specifically to find ad-free content creators. The moment that guarantee vanishes from the Substack marketplace, the service becomes less valuable to you.
>Also, newspapers have a mix of subscription and ads for decades,
Substack's business model is predicated on its dissimilarity to existing publishing forms. By choosing their own subscriptions and receiving them in their inbox, a Substack customer is doing the complete opposite to going out and buying a particular broadsheet printed by someone else. I doubt any Substack customer who is paying for an ad-free experience would appreciate the comparison to a newspaper.
Edit: In their FAQ they say:
> Substack is entirely focused on subscriptions, so we don't build any additional functionality to support affiliate links or advertising, but you are free to use them.
> How does Substack make money?
> Substack takes a 10% fee on all paid subscriptions. Substack will never run ads or sell user data.
Do you have any wonky extensions?
A previous discussion can be found here[0] with the statement by archive.is here[1]
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828702
1: https://twitter.com/archiveis/status/1018691421182791680
This isn't a theoretical economics experiment that can be carried out on a spreadsheet, where you can neatly decouple ad revenue from the calculation of customer lifetime value and spit out a nice round price point for an ad-free experience. This price would need to be revised quarterly at least as to account for ad revenue seasonality and changing subscriber numbers.
> As an isolated event, advertising on Substack is no big deal. But if it becomes ubiquitous, the funding model of the platform could be at risk, forcing Substack to either clamp down on this cottage industry or embrace it. Substack could incorporate advertising into its product, but doing so would contradict the platform's commitment to remaining ad-free.
So, the ads will be tolerated for as long as Substack does not have a native ad platform through which all ads must flow through.
Since there are services that have ad-free tiers I think it can work that way.
Hulu*, for example has an ad-free tier and they don't change the price quarterly.
* Yes, I know there are something like 3 shows that still have ads, but it doesn't change my argument.
https://www.civilbeat.org/2017/08/lets-preserve-and-perpetua...
Digital ads are also right there in front of you, and you can go from ad impression --> sale right there on the screen. If your billboard is on the side of your building, located in some remote office park, well, the reach isn't as good.
Also sounds like the differences are in degree, not in kind.
I don't know how many youtube users are paying for it, but youtube premium is still a thing, and I hope it continues to be. Seems like they're making it work somehow.
Also remember those ads are not free, they come at great cost of bandwidth and compute, resulting in net co2 emission. If I as a user want to object to that, using an ad blocker is morally completely valid.
I mostly prefer to watch DVDs and employ an ad blocker so that every day existence doesn't require my brain to edit ads out of reality because it's been trained by 25 years of abuse from the internet that this is necessary to just be able pretend like I exist independent of my eyeballs' worth to some goddamn shysters halfway across the world. You know, like most of 400,000 years of human existence.
Come to think of it, maybe I'll sign off now.
On one hand, that sounds miserable. Only 1% of the users are paying! On the other hand, a Premium subscriber is an order of magnitude more profitable. The ads run rate seems to be about $20B/year, and subscriptions behind at just a factor of 5 at about $4B/year.
(The $20B is a hard number from the Q3 earnings, $4B is back of the envelope. It's hard to say just how e.g. regional pricing if affecting it, or how the family plans are counted.)
Why should it be any different for ads? Advertising is a cancer on society, by itself its purpose is to waste some person's time by showing them something they haven't asked for, sometimes in hope to drive a purchase. We've basically normalized intentionally wasting people's time (in aggregate this time can be expressed in human lifetimes) for the benefit of a select few (the advertisers). Advertising also has secondary negative effects where it perverts the incentives between service providers and their users (social networks' objective is to make you look at ads, not facilitate communication with your friends/family), sometimes up to the point where said service providers promote harmful content to drive ad views ("engagement" as they call it) where said content then leads to mental health issues, broken relationships and crime (like the radicalization of the right-leaning Trump supporters that ended up storming the Capitol).
Also, bank robbery isn't usually very lucrative, and they've made it harder and less lucrative over time. "According to the FBI a bank robbery averaged a take of $4,000 in 2009, which may not have been sufficient to yield the thieves a positive return on their enterprise. You see, at today's prices, the robbers would need to expend $4,442 for the guns, bullets, and masks used in a typical bank robbery." http://bastiat.mises.org/2014/09/the-basic-economics-of-bank...
Some crime has been made pretty unprofitable.
There's no reason the same couldn't apply to advertising. We could implement (and actually enforce - so unlike the GDPR for example) privacy regulations that would make ad tracking more transparent and give consumers a choice, or repealing Section 230 protections for platforms that take on an publisher role by prioritizing certain content to generate "engagement". These would make advertising less lucrative and let other business models take over.
So it's very true, you cannot escape the advertisements.
The bigger issue is the people that would pay to remove ads have more expensive habits and are worth much more in ads than the average user (though maybe that is somewhat counteracted by being more savvy against scams delivered through ads).
The site hosting the article isn't substack nor is the article a condemnation of advertising.
I haven't used Substack's creator software so not certain if they offer more value than a payment process (or even a vertical-bank designed for creators) would. But neither of those would charge 10%.