SubStack's Three-Body Problem: Teaserage, Patronage, & Premiumage Orbiting...
…about & very much hoping not to get sucked into the black hole that is ad-supported ensified clickbait eyeball-glueing ad-supported media. What are its prospects?….
Can SubStack as a singular business and SubStacks as individuals thrive over the medium run? Perhaps. My view is it does best when it normalizes the tip jar and resists the attention casino. Perhaps some combination of teaserage, patronage, and premiumage form a stable orbit for writers. The durable path may be a blend of open commons, voluntary patronage, and adjacent premium offerings. Plus the continued maintenance by SubStack of exit paths, so that the credible threat of exit keeps platform incentives aligned with user success.
This truly is a three‑body problem: writers (who want sustainable income and control), readers (who want open access and trustworthy curation), and investors (who want growth and an eventual payoff). Successful resolution depends on management staying anchored to the core—email/blog/tip‑jar—while resisting the siren song of enstifying discoverability and revenue sources.
I run across Harriet, saying the obvious:
Harriet: The Joy of Old Books <https://substack.com/@thejoyofoldbooks/note/c-165523207>: ‘How I wish Substack worked -You pay a single subscription to Substack each month. -This gains you access to e.g. 5 paid newsletters (different tiers if you wanted more!). -Every billing period you can swap out which newsletters you want to read. -The writers you choose get the appropriate percentage of your payment.
Liz Ryan: Groups of writers could get together under an Editor-in-Chief to provide varied content for a daily, paid-for Substack publication aimed at the mass market. I have a name for this idea. We could call it a ‘newspaper’.
Harriet: Ha! I’m in if you are….
Neena Maiya: Or have different ways of paying: A monthly subscription. Or readers can “buy” a newsletter whenever they see something they want to read. The way we bought magazines from a newsstand. I used to buy a Vanity Fair one month…next month I’d buy Vogue, another month another magazine…it depended on what was there that I wanted to read.
Harriet: Yes I would love the option to buy individual newsletters!
Edith: It just doesn’t work paying £6 a month to one writer, especially in this economy
Harriet: No, and it’s such a shame as there are so many great writers on here I’d like to support, but I just can’t afford to subscribe to everyone…
These are the considerations that drive most internet enterprises into ad-supported business models. Renting out people’s eyeballs to people who have something to sell or who want to hack brains feels much much less painful than paying £6=$10 a month, and you make it up in scale. The problem has turned out to be that this brings all of the malevolent clickbait incentives into the system.
As I see it, if SubStack is to be successful—and if individual SubStacks are to be successful—it will require a lot of hard work and luck:
There are, I think, three poles that making any singular SubStack self-sustaining can be attracted to: