I’m in the throes of writing a post on the political economy of AI - it’s not going to be ready this week, and it will be a bit of a beast. I’m guessing it will end up somewhere just north or south of 4,000 words. That is an unusually long piece, but then, this is an unusual newsletter. And deliberately so.
On my Cancer substack (billgardner.substack.com) all the posts are free. However, I let people subscribe and I donate the revenue to Médicins Sans Frontières. I've raised quite a bit of money this way.
Like Bill Gardner below, I've kept my posts free, but offer a paid option. I use the revenue from paying subscribers to cover subscriptions to other substacks, magazines etc. I'm trying to keep this break-even, so I can just treat it as a hobby for tax purposes, and make charitable donations out of my ordinary income.
You nicely summed up a position I roughly also have. I don't need to write for the money (I have been hosting host mine on wordpress.com since 2011), I write because I like to (next to a paying regular job), and incidentally: a lot about (Gen)AI the last year.
I have been eying substack, but a reason not to write there is that I don't like the business model from a reader's perspective. I subscribe to some newspapers, and in terms of how many good journalism and opinion I get there, paying for each journalist/opinion writer separately on substack, would mean having to pay the subscriptions many times over. A subscription for a single writer who writes a single piece a week at the rates substack thinks are normal is not a subscription, it is a subsidy. Which is a model too, but I tend to reserve my subsidies for big good causes.
So the reading side simply doesn't scale as far as I'm concerned.
Writing for paid subscribers substack means I would have to commit to writing at least once a week ($7 for one article is really steep) and that is simply too much pressure. I write when I have something to say, and I have written a few pieces where I invested actual months of intermittent research into it.
So, unless substack makes reading individual stories as affordable as a column or reporting piece in a newspaper, I know it won't scale as a pattern for me as a reader. I won't start with such a pattern, either as reader or as writer.
Two more things can be added to that.
One is that substack seems to belong to the 'free speech absolutist' side and I think that is both naive and damaging to society.
And second, I would have to spend a lot of effort on choosing what to read. Do I click, yes or no? (I actually wrote in the 1990's that the idea that the internet would be a treasure of information that would replace all curated/edited channels like newspaper and TV was in many ways naive, for one because what I pay for is not just access to the article, I pay for the selection the editors have done, which is a valuable service). If you choose a newspaper or magazine to subscribe to, you in fact choose the editors, not the actual content (which is unknown at that time). On paid-for substack, I need to choose authors, not editors and that is a much narrower bubble.
But if substack would offer a magazine/newspaper level 'substack' subscription, of which they would hand out 90% to the authors based on what is actually read, I would probably bite.
On my Cancer substack (billgardner.substack.com) all the posts are free. However, I let people subscribe and I donate the revenue to Médicins Sans Frontières. I've raised quite a bit of money this way.
Thank You!!!
Like Bill Gardner below, I've kept my posts free, but offer a paid option. I use the revenue from paying subscribers to cover subscriptions to other substacks, magazines etc. I'm trying to keep this break-even, so I can just treat it as a hobby for tax purposes, and make charitable donations out of my ordinary income.
I am so glad you enjoy this task of writing, I love reading your thoughts. Please keep going.
You nicely summed up a position I roughly also have. I don't need to write for the money (I have been hosting host mine on wordpress.com since 2011), I write because I like to (next to a paying regular job), and incidentally: a lot about (Gen)AI the last year.
I have been eying substack, but a reason not to write there is that I don't like the business model from a reader's perspective. I subscribe to some newspapers, and in terms of how many good journalism and opinion I get there, paying for each journalist/opinion writer separately on substack, would mean having to pay the subscriptions many times over. A subscription for a single writer who writes a single piece a week at the rates substack thinks are normal is not a subscription, it is a subsidy. Which is a model too, but I tend to reserve my subsidies for big good causes.
So the reading side simply doesn't scale as far as I'm concerned.
Writing for paid subscribers substack means I would have to commit to writing at least once a week ($7 for one article is really steep) and that is simply too much pressure. I write when I have something to say, and I have written a few pieces where I invested actual months of intermittent research into it.
So, unless substack makes reading individual stories as affordable as a column or reporting piece in a newspaper, I know it won't scale as a pattern for me as a reader. I won't start with such a pattern, either as reader or as writer.
Two more things can be added to that.
One is that substack seems to belong to the 'free speech absolutist' side and I think that is both naive and damaging to society.
And second, I would have to spend a lot of effort on choosing what to read. Do I click, yes or no? (I actually wrote in the 1990's that the idea that the internet would be a treasure of information that would replace all curated/edited channels like newspaper and TV was in many ways naive, for one because what I pay for is not just access to the article, I pay for the selection the editors have done, which is a valuable service). If you choose a newspaper or magazine to subscribe to, you in fact choose the editors, not the actual content (which is unknown at that time). On paid-for substack, I need to choose authors, not editors and that is a much narrower bubble.
But if substack would offer a magazine/newspaper level 'substack' subscription, of which they would hand out 90% to the authors based on what is actually read, I would probably bite.