I know a lot of people are worried about Substack and video; I never want to seem to gainsay this kind of skepticism, because, after all: this is the Internet; Substack is a startup platform; I am a “tech worker”; and everyone thus has every reason to be mistrustful. (I also consider writers to be in the business of skepticism, and wouldn’t expect our users to just “go along” with anything).

All that said, I thought it might be helpful to share a bit about how we got here internally, just to give a picture of why we didn’t worry e.g. “that this will change Substack” (which we don’t anticipate in the least; I’d consider it statistically improbable on the order of me growing another few inches):

1. For a long time, we’ve seen large and growing numbers of paid and free subscriptions coming from TikTok and Instagram (and other unlikely places too). And as y’all know, Twitter is no longer a great source of growth for Substack users.

2. When we dug into this, we learned what many already know: since large platforms contain multitudes, there’s a lot of writing, literary culture, journalism, music, music criticism, how-to / advice material, and so on on these platforms.

   1. On TikTok, the hashtag #BookTok has been searched 200 billion times and videos tagged with #BookTok have been viewed 60 billion times.

   2. On both TT and IG, we see writers doing readings, Q&A, livestreams, and even sharing “trailers” of posts and articles. All of these things seem to lead to more paid or free subscriptions / convert well.

   3. These numbers and scenes are so large that even getting small %s of them to subscribe to y’all will make the difference for some between “sustainable success” and “didn’t work out.”

3. So: we wanted to make it easy for Substack writers to “compete” on TT and IG. Chris in particular has a vision of making it easy for anyone to “package” their work —writing, music, journalism, art, etc.— in the best possible way for all platforms, so that e.g. even the most text-only publication gets e.g. interesting video clips that they can —if they choose— share elsewhere.

4. As we’ve done this, we’ve seen that many readers and potential subscribers of all kinds find video highly compelling. This isn’t news, exactly, but we hadn’t really focused on the extent to which video can attract audiences of readers (and listeners and so on). This is partly I think because many of us are not “video people”; I don’t watch video often myself, for example. I’ve got the words problem.

Whenever we have something like this —a zone or area that seems promising for publication subscriber growth but which is new to us— our playbook is to “pull threads,” as Chris says. We don’t have a plan; we try to follow the heat, tinker, see what helps publications, and build from there. One method we’ve used dozens of times is to kick start a cohort we can learn from via fellowships or grants; we’ve done this with many categories of writing over the years —local news, comics (RIP), etc.— and we’ll continue to do so.

But we’ll also continue to explore anything that grows subscriptions for writers and others using Substack. At the moment, that’s video; in five years, it could be augmented reality! In between we’ll probably try other weird stuff. These aren’t “pivots,” at least in my view, because they never change the thing we’re optimizing for: paid subscriptions. Because they don’t change that, nothing that we’ve done in the past is invalidated or made less coherent with the platform. Another way to say this: these investments rarely trade-off against one another; they’re not zero-sum in the fullness of time, but just a question of order: when do we do X vs. Y, given that both X and Y will help grow subscriptions for our writers and other users?

So with all the caveats —we’re goofs, you shouldn’t trust companies, no one knows what the future holds, I am a literally insane person— I don’t expect this video work to “change Substack” in any deep way. Some writers will use video, some won’t; some video will lead to subscriptions, some won’t. It will remain the case that “success” on Substack means: “people value your work enough to pay for it with a long-term commitment,” which just leads to totally different “winners” than if success means “got people to click” or “got people to watch.” This is as true of video as of text. TikTok “influencers” who play the engagement game will not thrive here. We don’t serve ads so there’s literally only costs for us to host videos that don’t lead to paid subscriptions. In other words: in purely greedy capitalist terms, getting a bunch of engagement-bait videos would be bad for us, not good for us.

Anyway, I can’t imagine that an essay from an employee of the company will make anyone feel at ease, but that’s how we think of this stuff!