Coleman McCormick

Archive of posts with tag 'Publishing'

Substack Notes and Long vs. Short Form

April 11, 2023 • #

Substack has entered the arena of the social network wars, taking it to Twitter head-on with a new product called Notes. It’s a short form feed style of posts that runs in a parallel track to your long form newsletter subscriptions (the Inbox), and looks remarkably similar to Twitter. But Substack’s big innovation here for a social network is capitalizing on their subscription-centric model — every other general-use social network on the internet to-date has been based on advertising. From the announcement, how Substack will differentiate:

By contrast, the lifeblood of a subscription network is the money paid to people who are doing worthy work within it. Here, people get rewarded for respecting the trust and attention of their audiences. The ultimate goal on this platform is to convert casual readers into paying subscribers. In this system, the vast majority of the financial rewards go to the creators of the content.

With this launch, Twitter responded by variously blocking Substack links completely, preventing them from being liked/retweeted, or being embedded on Substack domains. Some of these have since been pulled back after some backlash (on Twitter), but still — clearly Twitter sees this as the direct challenge that it looks like. Ben Thompson has a great write-up on the state of the competition between the two platforms.

I’ve been playing around with Notes this morning. At first glance it looks great; I love the feed from users I subscribe to, and it looks like it algorithmically includes users outside of my following network. Following plus adjacent similar users is good with me for discovery. As a writer of a Substack myself, the network effects on the platform have improved over time (with @mentions, recommendations, likes) and Notes stands to widen the funnel even more, hopefully.

Twitter has struggled to make inroads on something Substack has been gloriously successful with so far: long form writing. Notably, Twitter bought Substack rival Revue (which was a great product!) in 2021, and has already shuttered it. For some reason — probably classic disruption theory crippling incentives, among other product execution failings — Twitter can’t innovate away from its core 240-character timeline product.

I’m excited to see what Substack can do with the idea. Even though Notes is still in their domain of text media, the usage incentives for producers & consumers will change dramatically if this new product takes on a life of its own, standing alone from the deliberate, deep newsletter product they’ve been focused on the past 6 years. If they want to enter the social media game, now’s the time to strike, with Twitter seemingly still in a confused state about the future of the platform and where it wants to devote innovation resources going forward. They still don’t seem to know how to break out of the advertising-driven, engagement-bait trap, even with a Big Bet Maker in Elon in the driver’s seat.

Arnold Kling is skeptical on the potential for Notes to fit cleanly into the Substack’s existing incentive structure. But he makes a point here that I think points to the potential of combining long form and short form into a new recipe:

Daniel Kahneman has taught us that our brain has two systems. System One reacts rapidly and emotionally. System Two reasons slowly and rationally. Short-form writing is adjacent to System One. Long-form writing is adjacent to System Two.

We need both systems to have a functioning consciousness. Maybe the same could be true for text-based media.

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Newsletters, Bundles, and Indie Publishing

August 14, 2020 • #

In his latest issue of The Diff, Byrne Hobart looks the economic models behind the boom in independent publishing and unbundling of analysis and journalism happening on platforms like Substack:

Bundles tend to grow until they reach a highly profitable mature state—at which point any change in the underlying audience, or the availability of competing products, seriously weakens their economics. The bigger a bundle gets, the more likely it is that a subset of users are all paying for basically one piece of the bundle, which could be sold separately at a better price. And as soon as a bundle is partially unbundled, there are two options: stop offering the part of the bundle that now has a competing single-purpose product, at which point the bundle switches from optimally-priced to overpriced, or keep offering it and accept lower margins. Bundles grow gracefully and shrink painfully.

Newsletters

There’s been talk in the tech world about a newsletter bubble, that readers have too many, can’t read them, and won’t be able to afford to pay for them. Some worry that we’re simply moving from the bundled world of old media to a fragmented space with hundreds of indies to have to subscribe to. Not unlike going from a $70/mo subscription to a Comcast cable bundle to a sum of 7 different $10-15/mo streaming services. They’re going over-the-top only to result in me paying the same thing for entertainment as before1. For written content, we once had to subscribe to the entire Washington Post or Wall Street Journal for writers we enjoy, bringing along “the rest” against our will. Now we can follow our preferred writers directly on their own properties.

In the case of journalism and written analysis, looking at it through only the cost lens is too simplistic. I’m a paid subscriber to 4 or 5 different independent writers’ newsletters, paying a sum greater than I did in total previously for all news subscriptions. But I’m getting a product that wasn’t even on offer in the old world model. Not to mention the freedom and range of motion it affords the writer to explore topics on the edges of their interest. Whatever they’re interested in they can explore, no need to stay in a particular lane to conform to the institutional menu.

I think a natural development we’ll see is new institutions forming around these publications, starting out with an independent writer or two and gradually expanding into larger operations. The Dispatch is at the top of the leaderboard on Substack, and they’re in the early days of building a company around it — destined to expand beyond the few core folks writing there today.

I like and generally support the idea of unbundling, with writers branching out to specialize in niches. This is what the internet has always been great for. Even with the novelty of newsletters as they’re discussed in media, the model is strikingly similar to what we had in the 2000-2006 era of blogs, with independent writers building up their own followings and revenue. What we didn’t have back then were healthy (and stable) income streams — it was mostly ad-driven, which is volatile, irritating to readers, and full of temptation to dabble in other less-than-savory means of making money. I don’t think the financial piece was the biggest problem; the tech was also still new and a high barrier to entry for many professional writers. Tools like Substack give consistency in revenue through subscription, no need to muck with advertisers, and simple publishing tools for dealing with subscriber management, authoring, and email delivery.

The more the space expands, though, the more discoverability will be key. Interesting writers getting a byline at the LA Times get sudden exposure if they can break through to getting a piece published. What does that breakthrough process look like in the indie publishing world? Algorithmic feeds of posts based on interests? Suggestions of complementary publications based on your current subscription list? Would it happen at the post level or publication level? Will someone build an aggregator service to bubble up the best stuff? It would be cool if all a writer needed to do was to write something interesting and have it be “picked up” in the right feed2.

I’m curious to see what kinds of bundles could be created from a decentralized network of long-form indie publications. If Byrne Hobart writes his own property on economics and business, as do Ben Thompson and Matt Levine in their own ways, could they form a “co-op”-like offering into which they each cross-post a selection of their work? If I didn’t want to pay $10/mo for each of them, maybe I could pay $15/mo and get a mixture of writings from each writer of their choosing. Medium’s Publication product works in a similar way technically, but I don’t know how it works from a monetization perspective. A sort of reconstitution of the bundle, but packaged in different recipes for different tastes.

Even if it feels like there’s a glut of newsletters out there to pick from and too much to read, I’d categorize it as a fantastic problem to have and improve upon. Diversity and experimentation are overdue since the heyday of blogs waned after Twitter and Facebook took over everyone’s attention. Big institutional media companies have only gotten less varied over the years, and few of them have figured out how to stay in business. It’s great to see so many independent writers and intellectuals able to drive a good living off of their ideas, creating “monopolies of one”:

Bundling reacts to differentiated desires by creating a less differentiated publication that’s fairly valuable to everyone. But as the cost of the reader’s time rises, focus pays off. And the subscription newsletter model makes it easier than it’s ever been to profitably focus on exactly one topic, and build a one-person monopoly.

  1. Granted, the quality and feature set might be better with on-demand and the available content catalog, but there’s still the downside of needing a suite of different apps of variable quality. And also having to realize which show is on what service. â†©

  2. Perhaps social media feeds fill this hole right now. And for newsletters, things like forwards to friends, etc. â†©

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Weekend Reading: Disintermediating Media, Boring Tech, and DIY Lights

July 25, 2020 • #

📨 Disintermediating the media with… Substack?

Jerry Brito writes about the growth of independent writing on Substack, prompted by a Mike Solana tweet:

From a technical perspective, Substack does not belong on Solana’s list next to Bitcoin and Signal. Signal is a company, but they have almost no information about their users—no names, no messages. Bitcoin is not a company, but instead a permissionless decentralized network, and “it” can’t decide who can use it or for what. Substack, on the other hand, is a centralized service that permissions who’s allowed on and what they can do, and it is subject to official and market pressures.

Comparisons to YouTube or Twitter are closer than to BTC or Signal, for sure. But even with Substack being a centralized platform, the risks are lower in the text or email medium; there’s high portability to move to other platforms at will. If you can move your content and your subscriber list, you can bring your audience. The primary advantages Substack has are that are hard to replicate (today) on your own hosted system are the publishing tools and monetization layer (though not impossible). Trying to disintermediate YouTube yourself would be hard, and transporting your Twitter network isn’t possible. SMTP, hypertext, and DNS are still open.

👨🏽‍💻 Choose Boring Technology

I love everything about this perspective:

The problem with “best tool for the job” thinking is that it takes a myopic view of the words “best” and “job.” Your job is keeping the company in business, god damn it. And the “best” tool is the one that occupies the “least worst” position for as many of your problems as possible.

It is basically always the case that the long-term costs of keeping a system working reliably vastly exceed any inconveniences you encounter while building it. Mature and productive developers understand this.

đź’ˇ Building DIY LED strips for fun

Matt Haughey went nuts on a custom lighting setup for his home office. I ran across this searching for some wirelessly controllable LEDs for my office bookshelf. Mine won’t be this crazy, but I wish I had the patience to do something like this.

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Multilayered Content

July 13, 2020 • #

I saw Patrick O’Shaughnessy share this yesterday, a cool addition to his podcast:

A ton of added work, but clearly an interesting way to add value.

This sort of thing would be an excellent addendum to most podcast shows. For any episode that has detailed references to other works, I always find well-done show notes useful (thinking about EconTalk as an example). What he’s put together here for Investor Field Guide makes me think about other ways of layering different formats for anyone producing content.

Content layers

Content has a “native” format, a medium it’s best suited for. If a piece of content is a podcast, or a long-form essay, or a tweet storm, to move it to another medium requires a translation step to embrace the strengths of the converted format. Depending on the subject matter, some things suited to a 3-hour conversational podcast just aren’t the same when converted into a text transcript. What Patrick has done here is a good complement to the audio conversation, a companion document that is of highest utility consumed in tandem rather than standalone. It’s partially a transcript plus sketches, images, diagrams as enrichment.

Ben Thompson went the other direction with Stratechery, creating a podcast version of the Daily Update newsletter. In his case it’s not necessarily intended to be additive, but rather an alternative way to consume the written words.

Another thing that Ben did to diversify Stratechery’s content is to create an archive of “Concepts” — essentially an evergreen, expanding knowledge base of topics he covers, outside the regular stream of analysis posts.

One downside of podcasts, specifically, is how much great stuff is locked up in archives that are hard to resurface or rediscover without effort to dredge up old episodes. If a show has an evergreen nature (isn’t topical or news), it’s worth extra effort to layer in other content formats for different audiences. Text makes the content linkable and discoverable. Images and annotation add depth to the material and create a visual component to share across other channels.

I’d love to see more content producers layering in different intertwined streams. It’s a smart strategy both from a content marketing and attention perspective (getting people’s attention regardless of their preferred medium) but also adds richness and context maximizing the strengths of different media.

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