Writing just doesn’t pay much, and it’s getting worse. No amount of digital juju is going to change that. I have free subscriptions to hundreds of Substack channels. I have Paid subscriptions to exactly two. Therein lies the problem with the Substack business model.
You know, fellow authors: I’m often interested in what you have to say. But not interested enough to pay for it. I know that’s exploitive when you’re trying to make a living, but there you are. There is too much free writing out there that’s almost as interesting as anything you have to say, and I spend too much time on the computer as it is. And on Hacker News, for example, all kinds of interesting stuff gets surfaced for my edification, and it’s all free.
Much of it is paywalled, but archive.today somehow or other captures almost all of it, once someone types in the link. The leading journalistic outlets all get captured there.
“But I’m making good money with Paid subscriptions, so there!” you say? Good for you. Maybe I really am all wet on this business argument. I’d love to see the statistics, and they could even be anonymous so that no one feels bad for making too much, or too little. But don’t give us the “top earners” numbers — give us all the earners, including the ones who don’t earn anything.
A testimonial from Matt Taibbi or Ted Gioia is kinda like Taylor Swift explaining the music business’ health. How about if we see the distribution of all writers’ incomes, Substack owners? I would bet it’s a Power Law with a very long tail:
where a few stars make a ton of money, and the Long Tail makes little or nothing. None of us like to imagine ourselves out on the right edge. But that’s how most creative fields operate.
Anecdotes Are Not ‘Data’
When you read about Substack writers and the big bucks, it’s always a story: a real person, like Emily Nunn, Delia Cai, Edwin Dorsey, and. Anne Trubek in this Fortune article. Stories are exciting, while data is boring. Furthermore, the people who own the actual data tend to be stingy with it; they want to give you their best stories only like this:
Some of our writers are making six figures!
The standard formula for non-fiction articles in the media is:
Introduce a person or persons
Write about the general situation they’re in
Conclude with a fun quote from one of those persons
Lifehacker has some realism about Substack earnings.
I worked on Google Ads for several years, dealing with statistics and money every day. When you have as much data as Google generates, it’s fairly easy to find really weird and exciting anecdotes. To actually change the system’s behavior, though, you needed to persuade with data. Here’s a phrase that could make you unpopular, since people tend to love their anecdotes:
The plural of ‘anecdote’ is not ‘data.’
Success Stories
Who better to ask than Substack itself? Here’s an article they wrote. Let’s look at some of their success stories:
Michael Fritzell (Asian Century Stocks claims to have 252 paid subscribers)
BowTied Bull (newsletters on crypto and tech stocks) Claims to have “thousands” of paid subscribers and to produce 200 pages a month.
Technically (tech talk for non-techies) Claims 2000 paid subscribers, and to publish “once every two to two and a half weeks, which I’m aware is relatively infrequent for paid newsletters.”
Noahpinion (economics) Claims 6,200 paid subscribers
Privatdozent (history of mathematics, physics, and economics) Claims 200 paid subscribers.
Financial Newsletters
Believe it or not, people did manage to make money writing newsletters before Substack, and even before the Internet. If we consider Asian Century Stocks, BowTied Bull, and Noahpinion: these are really just financial newsletters, which have always existed. They still exist.
Newsletters of the traditional printed variety survive, as this report makes clear:
Motley Fool Stock Advisor, $200/year, 500,000 subscribers
Alpha Picks, $200/year
The Barbell Investor, $150/year
Ticker Nerd, $200/year
“But I don’t have the resources to run one of those!” you say. I actually don’t have a smart comeback for that. $200/year works out to $16.67/month, which is more than most paid Substack channels. We do have lower barriers to entry. We don’t have to pay a printer, either. Substack does create a new business model.
It can’t shake money out of people who don’t want to pay, though. Most writers are still not going to make more than a middle-class living, if they even manage that.
Income Distribution
Leaderboards, like this one, are misleading. I mentioned “creative fields” so let’s take one obvious one: acting.
Actors
The Substack leaderboards are really like the list of “top actors’ salaries for a single role”:
Highest Paid Actors by Single Role Salary in 2021
1. Daniel Craig – USD$100 Million
2. Dwayne Johnson – USD$50 Million
3. Will Smith – USD$40 Million
4. Denzel Washington – USD$40 Million
5. Leonardo DiCaprio – USD$30 Million
6. Mark Wahlberg – USD$30 Million
7. Jennifer Lawrence – USD$25 Million
8. Julia Roberts – USD$25 Million
9. Sandra Bullock – USD$20 Million
10. Ryan Gosling – USD$20 Million
11. Chris Hemsworth – USD$20 Million
To bring this back down to reality, the recent Screen Actors Guild strike unearthed some discouraging numbers on real actors:
The minimum amount of money a performer must take home in one year to qualify for health insurance is $26,470.
However, while well-known actors are paid millions of dollars to star in movies and TV shows, many members of SAG-AFTRA don’t bring in enough income each year to meet the union’s minimum requirement.
According to Shaan Sharma, an actor and SAG-AFTRA board member, just 12.7% of SAG-AFTRA members qualify for the union’s health plan.
Actor Rod McLachlan, who has appeared in television shows such as “Blue Bloods,” said it’s “a constant struggle” to meet the health insurance threshold.
“If you think about it, $26,000 isn’t a middle-class wage,” he said.
Think about that: even to get a SAG card, you have to have gotten paid work and passed their eligibility test. And of those people, only 12.7% earn over $26,000 a year! So do you think you’ll be like Jennifer Lawrence? Or more like Rod McLachlan or one of those anonymous actors struggling to qualify for SAG health insurance?
Magazines
Of all these writers I subscribe to for free: would I be willing to pay a single price for all of them together? That might be worth $10 a month (I’d like it to also come on paper, so I can read it while eating breakfast, but I can accept that that should cost extra). Note that $10 a month is much more than almost all print magazines charge for a subscription.
Not all the writers would have to appear in every issue. And I would want a smart editor to hire only good writers with something worthwhile to say, and provide a second pair of eyes to nix their dumb ideas.
The word for that product I’m wishing for, you might have guessed, is a magazine. I’d pay for a magazine with most of my Follows, but I’m not going to pay for each one individually.
Yes, it was true that Matt Taibbi was not getting paid nearly his real value by Rolling Stone, and now he’s proved it. However, there’s no reason a magazine shouldn’t pay commensurate with the writer’s value to it. Like a sports team.
Sports Payrolls
Manchester City’s payroll shows annual salaries of:
Kevin De Bruyne £17,680,000
Erling Haaland £17,680,000
Jack Grealish £14,040,000
….
Lewis Fiorini £260,000
Tomas Galvez £239,200
Alfie Harrison £182,000
Do Harrison, Galvez, and Fiorini think it’s bitterly unfair that De Bruyne makes over 67 times what they do? Maybe so, but he brings in the fans and they don’t.
The L.A. Dodgers 2023 payroll shows:
Freddie Freeman $27,000,000
Mookie Betts $20,000,000
…
Emmet Sheehan $720,000
Kolten Wong $720,000
So Freeman made 37 times as much as Sheehan and Wong.
The Value of a Team
Kevin De Bruyne and Freddie Freeman probably can’t earn nearly as much as a solo act (unless they become TV commentators, maybe). They need a team around them to realize their true value. Actors can, sometimes, put on solo shows, especially on Broadway, but usually they need an ensemble around them, too. What about writers?
The Wall Street Journal
I do actually pay for the Wall Street Journal print edition, which makes me a dinosaur, I guess. I don’t care; paper is inherently superior for reading while eating. You get more information before you need to do something. So let’s take that as an example.
The WSJ has quite a few writers, but I have some favorites. Let’s take a few:
Holman Jenkins
Andy Kessler
Mary Anastasia O'Grady
And a few whom I still like to read:
Walter Russell Mead
Gerard Baker
Jason Gay
Suppose all of them went independent, and the only way to read them would be a Paid subscription on Substack. I probably would pay for Jenkins, Kessler, and O’Grady. For the others: sorry, guys. It’s Free or sayonara.
But for Mead, Baker, and Gay (sounds like a law firm, doesn’t it?): I’m very happy to read them IF they come along with the Journal. They add to the team, like Kolten Wong adds to the Dodgers.
The New Yorker
The New Yorker has regularly featured famous or almost-famous writers, like
Malcom Gladwell
Donald Barthelme
J.D. Salinger (who considered himself a failure until he published there)
Renata Adler
John McPhee
These people probably could get a goodly number of Paid subscribers (except Salinger and Barthelme, being dead). They’d make a lot more money than the magazine pays them, too. However, if they never published another article there, New Yorker subscriptions probably wouldn’t drop at all.
Magazines in General
“Ah, but you’re ignoring the dismal state of writing for magazines!” you say?
You’re right. I think anyone who can attract a paid following on Substack should go independent and do so. The question is: can you?
ZipRecruiter says :
As of Jan 12, 2024, the average hourly pay for a Magazine Writer in the United States is $24.29 an hour.
While ZipRecruiter is seeing hourly wages as high as $42.55 and as low as $11.78, the majority of Magazine Writer wages currently range between $18.51 (25th percentile) to $27.88 (75th percentile) across the United States.
Let’s take the top 10 magazines in the U.S. according to Stacker:
AARP The Magazine
AARP Bulletin
Better Homes & Gardens
Game Informer
Good Housekeeping
Family Circle
People
Woman's Day
Cosmopolitan
Southern Living
Can you name even one writer for any of those? And if you can: would the magazine’s circulation fall if that writer left? No, those magazines’ writers probably make a modest living, with health insurance and a 401(K) but with tenuous job security.
Conclusion
If traditional magazines are dying left and right (like Sports Illustrated), and the ones that survive are looking to cut writers and their pay, not raise it: what’s the future? I think I’ve established that most writers aren’t likely to earn much from individual subscriptions a la Substack.
However, contrary to the conventional wisdom, print magazines are not dying:
As the writer Hope Corrigan has noted, there is also something appealing about the aesthetics of print magazines. The care taken with layout, images and copy can’t always be replicated on as screen. Indeed, magazines with a significant focus on photography and visual design – such as fashion and travel magazines – are enduring in print.
Magazine expert Samir Husni has observed that emerging independent print magazines are more focused on targeting a niche readership. Advances in printing technology have made smaller print runs more cost-effective. This allows new magazines to focus on quality over quantity.
First of all: stop envying tech companies. Just as WeWork was not a technology company but a real estate company, the Magazine of the Future will not be valued like FAANG companies, and salaries will not be stratospheric. It will be part of the Media industry, except maybe paid more like a sports team or a movie.
Secondly, writers’ salaries should and will vary dramatically, as with sports teams. If a writer is enough of a draw that readers subscribe just for them, then they should earn 20 times as much as the lowest-paid writers. Or more. They should have agents negotiating for them, like Mookie Betts does.
Third, paper copies still need to be available, like the Wall Street Journal. Print is not obsolete. You should be able to buy them in airport bookstores, and get them in the mail.
Accept that Substack hasn’t repealed the laws of economics. It’s been good to a few superstars, but most authors should be content to be doing something they love, and any money is a hard-won achievement.
You put a lot of work in compiling this. I think you don't have to be a celeb to write here. There's also a growing middle class plus side hustlers who want to earn some extra cash and of course be seen and heard. On Medium we know the pyramid scheme. Would be great to learn more about Substack's Pyramide and what the average Substacker earns etc.
I totally agree, Albert. It's the same for authors in the UK. There is a handful pulling in the big bucks, and the majority of the rest having to take on several jobs other than writing because it pays so little