Ask HN: Why is Substack so popular?

The business model is also distinct in which domain experts are incentivized to create quality content due to their income directly tied to specialized niche subscribers.

As other have mentioned the lack of Paywall is nice tho. Medium had one of the most frustrating iirc.

(1) they say they are "anti-censorship" and won't evict writers from their "private platform"

(2) they let the writer own their audience / mailing list (so they can leave with their audience, if they want to)

(3) they advanced money to popular writers

These things with the addition of a simple writing/reading/subscription platform that isn't overrun with adverts gives writers confidence that substack is aligned with their interests and will make money while being on their side (this is true at least for now).

Additionally, the financial success of many writers on the platform has raised the status of creating a substack. I think this is an important secondary effect -- you can disparage this as "pseudo-intellectual" but there are people that are winning from it and doing well is always cool.

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*Edit*: Put another way, Substack's success is due to realism. They've made a realistic attempt to incentivize excellent writers to writing on their platform. They incentivize even those that are already very popular, by not locking them in and by giving them control of their audience. They have even gone as far as giving very significant upfront financial incentives to get the most famous writers on the internet onto their platform.

Other platforms try to own their writers and treat them like commodities producing SEO content. This was obviously not an attractive offer to talented or independent writers, let alone writers that have already grown huge audiences.

2. They basically solve the business model issue for writers, so you really can focus on the writing. At least, more so than the alternatives.

3. Their design is actually pretty nice, and focused on just two things: list building and content.

4. The defaults make sense, and solve real problems for people who want to make money with their writing.

I’m not going to spend $100/month to follow my ten favorite bloggers.

I don't think that's a question to be asked of Hacker News readers in general, as presumably most of us aren't Substack writers, just readers.

To be honest, I don't like Substack as an application. Their commenting defaults are terrible. I'm not a fan of the push model of newsletters in general and prefer the pull model of going to the site whenever you feel like being updated on your own schedule. But I like the writers, so I go there anyway.

Substack has a different financial incentive structure that attracts writers away from alternatives such as Medium.com or hosted WordPress:

- monetization is easy to go from "free" to "paid newsletters". The pricing is set by the author and the revenue isn't shared with other writers

- for paid subscriptions, the writer has the subscribers' email addresses for a more direct relationship

In contrast, Medium does not reveal email addresses and does a revenue share of a flat $50 subscription price.

Looked at a certain way, Substack replaces MailChimp (an email audience relationship tool) more so than Medium.

The founder of Substack gave an interview and he said that Substack is a SaaS backoffice of Ben Thompson's "Stratechery" paid newsletter. Ben was one of the early pioneers of the paid email newsletters resurgence but since Substack didn't exist, he had to string together the payments and emails logistics himself. The later writers wanting to get paid for newsletters can just use Substack instead of reinventing Ben's tech stack.

  - No ads, popups, random paywalls.
  - Authors looking for paid subs offer quite a bit of free content.
  - Substack feels like it loads faster than Medium. Very snappy.
  - Simple email sub/unsub.
  - Substack doesn't treat me like a child & decide some ideas are too dangerous for me to read about.
  - I don't worry that an article/newsletter I like (or dislike!) will suddenly disappear off the internet.

Take a look at someone like Freddie deBoer. He was a very popular blogger, had written for all the prestigious publications, and was about to accept a $15/hr manual labor job before substack offered him a contract. Now he's making 200k+ a year.

Once enough popular writers were on the platform, and with some help from twitter controversies, the network effect took over.

I love it because it's fast and minimalist. No ads, no nonsense, just the text.

I'm happy to pay $50/year to support these independent voices.

So they are a proven-successful platform, and that attracts other writers.

I used Medium before. Medium treats your data as its a generic post about some topic. If I wrote an article on AI, it would recommend other articles about AI from various authors. That's fine for some purposes, but as a writer trying to build an audience, I'd like to think people come to my post because they like something I have to say and would prefer a recommender system to recommend other posts by me.

Medium's monetization model is to get people to pay for Medium articles, not those of the author.

Another gross example of this is that you cannot easily see a publications from a publication. On a site, you see a tiny link called "archive" to see a writer's historical posts. There you can filter on month but can't see a dump of everything the person has written. They don't even offer "load more posts" or a calendar view. It's very hostile to the writer.

I had around 1k followers on Medium but if I posted something and didn't publish it on social media, I would get maybe a few dozen readers. Whereas Substack I consistently get around 20-25% of people that are subscribed open my publication.

Is there something between Medium and Substack? Probably, but I don't really care to look around. Substack offers you a chance to build a reader base, gives you access to emails and lets you easily monetize directly without being part of the global pool of generic low quality articles like Medium does.

I wrote more about it here.

https://mleverything.substack.com/p/migrating-from-medium-to...

The article also touches upon factors of Substack's success:

> [...] the platform portrayed itself as a haven for independent writers with fewer resources while offering six-figure advances to several prominent white men. The hands-off content moderation policy [...]

The get paid part is important. You like one writer on substack, you give em 5 bucks a month. You like someone else, it's exactly the same process to give 5 bucks.

It's the same as Twitch (for gamers) - where people give 5$/month to people who just stream themselves playing computer games. It's because it's a single click and it's the same click for all other streamers.

The barrier substack has broken, is the shitshow that is payments online - they did it for journalists, twitch did it for gamers, onlyfans did it for chicks showing their body parts, etc.

Of course the problem that'll destroy Substack is when they will inevitably raise their fees, piss off their writers and in 10 years, some other Substack like thing will pop up, that'll do the same thing and so the cycle continues.