Don't call it a Substack

Maybe this is off-topic, or marketing and promotion - anyway, here’s the core argument for why Substack is less than ideal when content is your business, and a very strong argument for Independent publishing.

Consider this scenario: transferring your writing from a Substack-hosted subdomain (mywriting.substack.com) to a custom domain (www.mywriting.com) will cost you a $50 connection fee.

This is a fully automated one-click operation on hosted services where you can use your own domain. Substack does not want you to do this.


We constrain our imaginations when we subordinate our creations to names owned by fascist tycoons. Imagine the author of a book telling people to “read my Amazon”. A great director trying to promote their film by saying “click on my Max”. That’s how much they’ve pickled your brain when you refer to your own work and your own voice within the context of their walled garden. There is no such thing as “my Substack”, there is only your writing, and a forever fight against the world of pure enshittification.

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100%. I never play that game, and if I have to I always refer to so and so’s “Substack newsletter”.

I’ll avoid saying more before I rhyme off another 50k words about Substack, and so will instead say that I couldn’t help but hear your title in the voice of LL Cool J (just replace “comeback” with “Substack”). Now that’s going waaay back.

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Well researched post on same theme, “Death by a Thousand Substacks”


Following the money

It’s important to understand Substack’s revenue model to fully grasp the incentives at play: the platform takes a 10% cut on all paid subscriptions, indefinitely.
Substack isn’t very transparent with its numbers, but let’s assume they’re trending towards a power law where the top 1% of publishers on the platform might account for the majority of revenues.

So, let’s break publishers into two categories:

  • The breadwinners: The top 1% who generate most of the revenue for the company.
  • Everyone else: The long tail of users who feed the breadwinners and make the system go.

Said differently: if you’re not a breadwinner on Substack, you’re the yeast. The yeast is responsible for driving app downloads, granting access to their social graph, and funneling their readers towards the platform’s top earners.

These publishers attract their own followers (with their own dollars) and leverage their own social networks to introduce new readers to the platform. Substack then uses algorithmic recommendations and “community” features to direct these audiences to their most lucrative writers, ensuring that the long tail of creators supports and enriches the top earners.

If that sounds akin to a caste system for writers, trust your independent instincts.

But the view isn’t so rosy from the top either. Some of Substack’s largest publishers earn well over $1M annually; stuck paying Substack hundreds of thousands of dollars for what amounts to a simple API call to Stripe (something any junior developer could build in just a few hours).

Building within a walled garden has its limitations. Besides the lack of ownership, brand identity, audience data, and control of distribution… you’re locked into a closed ecosystem.

Substack doesn’t offer an API, webhooks, or integrations with any third party platform. That’s right — all of the incredible tools and platforms that make up the modern creator ecosystem are entirely shut off to those on Substack.