I'm Putting Paid Subscriptions on Hold

(If you're already a paid subscriber, this just means you won't have to pay for a while.)

In recent months, there’s been increased discussion about the sorts of media people who are quitting their jobs at newspapers and magazines and starting up Substack newsletters. And let’s be clear: For the most part, these people are not being fired from their jobs. They’re choosing to leave those jobs and expecting to make about as much if not more money setting up their own paid newsletters. For some of them, that decision appears to be working out.

Some of them, it turns out, are getting a substantial financial assist, in the form of a program called Substack Pro. Recently, Hamish McKenzie explained how it works:

“We pay a writer an upfront sum to cover their first year on the platform. The idea is that the payment can be more attractive to a writer than a salary, so they don’t have to stay in a job (or take one) that’s less interesting to them than being independent. In return for that financial security, a Pro writer agrees to let Substack keep 85% of the subscription revenue in that first year. After that year, the deal flips, so that the writer no longer gets a minimum guarantee but from then on keeps 90% of the subscription revenue – which, if we’ve made our bet well, will be a larger overall dollar amount.”

That’s fairly straightforward, and I wouldn’t even mind it so much, were it not for the possibility that those upfront sums may or may not be going to the likes of Andrew Sullivan, Bari Weiss, Jesse Singal, Glenn Greenwald, and Matt Yglesias. I say “may or may not” because Substack understandably doesn’t disclose who it cuts these deals with, citing the financial privacy of the writers involved.

There are different, though sometimes overlapping, reasons someone might be displeased to see any one of the writers named above benefitting from Substack’s largesse. As Jude Ellison Sady Doyle noted, though, within the overlapping reasons, we see a cluster of “people who actively hate trans people and women, argue ceaselessly against our civil rights, and in many cases, have a public history of directly, viciously abusing trans people and/or cis women in their industry.”

McKenzie is very clear about not seeing this as a problem—or, if we want to be generous, not seeing it as enough of a problem to get into the business of curtailing anyone’s free speech. “When considering a Pro deal,” he says, “the main thing we take into account is the writer’s likelihood of success with the Substack model…. We do not approach this process from the perspective of a publisher, looking to gather a particular type of content under our brand, but with the eye of an investor, looking to stimulate a new generation of profitable media businesses.”

“We believe a diversity of thought is essential to healthy discourse,” he continues. “Inevitably, a small subset of writers we have done deals with are controversial in some quarters, attracting praise and scorn in equal measure.” He isn’t—and Substack isn’t—concerned with whether the praise is right, or the scorn. History, he says, can sort that out later. Right now, there’s an opportunity to make some money.

I have nothing against making money. I don’t even have much objection to other people publishing “controversial” content, as long as I’m not paying for it.

But a (very, very small) portion of the money Substack may or may not be paying to these writers comes from their commission on the subscriptions to my newsletter. So I am paying for it. (Again, probably not much, but enough to matter.)

I’m not happy about that. Fortunately, the way Substack operates, I always had the capability of sending some content to unpaid subscribers and more content to paid subscribers, and of defining some and more any way I like. I also have the option of pausing the billing cycles for my premium subscribers, so they won’t be charged every month, or year, when their subscriptions come up for renewal.

So that’s where we’re at now: Billing is paused. Every issue of the newsletter is free for the foreseeable future. (There are some archival issues that are still only accessible to paid subscribers, but I suppose they should have some small reward for their early investment, and I hope the rest of you won’t begrudge them that.)

Substack is, in many ways, a great tool for writers, and I’ve benefitted a lot from my access to that tool in the last three years, and hope to continue to become a better writer as time goes on. And they, for their part, can continue to provide financial and structural support for hateful, harmful voices to the extent they find it profitable to do so, but they won’t be doing it with my money. This isn’t as far as I could go, of course; I know of some people who are actively planning to move their newsletters to new platforms. But it’s what feels right for now.

If you have any thoughts, please feel free to share them in the comments section.