Reading so many laments of this type on here at the minute. That so many people seem to have genuinely thought Substack was ‘different’ rather than what it is - a VC- backed platform that was always going to make whatever moves necessary to bring in revenue - just confirms to me how devilishly good Substack are at marketing.

I had that confirmed to me when I participated in that Substack Grow thing they do a while back. While the tone of it was ‘Hey we love what you’re doing, and we’ll help you monetise!’, the motive was pretty transparent - the more paid subscribers you have, the more money we make.

Their model has pretty clearly been ‘let’s bring in people with big audiences and get them to add paid subscribers’ from the start. That seems to be Farah Storr’s job in the UK, for example. Without ads that’s their only route to the revenue they need to make this an ongoing concern.

It’s what the Bestseller badges, leaderboards (based upon paid subscribers, tellingly) and everything is about - driving revenue. (And why I was amazed everybody seemed to take those leaderboards seriously).

It’s also why, periodically, the big hitters all publish essentially the same post shilling whatever new feature Substack have launched that week. Hell, it’s what that online music fest was about the other week. And so on.

For what it’s worth, being on Substack has been good for me personally. I make a modest income, it’s a nice home for the people who follow what I do, it’s got me writing more, and I’ve/followed interesting inspiring people like Seth Werkheiser, Alex Roddie and Lucy Werner on here. I also don’t really have much of a problem with the marketing tbh.

But this idea that a platform backed to the hilt by VCs like Andreessen Horowitz is some anachronistic, altruistic haven for writers is pretty baffling to me.