Why I'm Thinking of Quitting Publishing on Substack

A victim of its own success?

I never thought I'd quit publishing on Substack before quitting Facebook. But after one year—and posting more than 220 articles here—that's exactly what I'm thinking of doing.

Above is a graph of my free subscriber total for the past six months. It took me a full year to go from zero to around 2,200 subscribers.

All of my subscribers are free. I don't charge for my work, even though I'm a trained investigative journalist with 24 years’ experience writing and editing for one of the nation’s top media outlets: Consumer Reports (both print and online).

When I started here in April, 2024, I was mostly writing satires. There was plenty of material, much of it not political. Occasionally, I’d publish an investigative report. On average, I was publishing one piece per day for the first few months.

But, as the world got crazier and crazier, current events took over as subject matter. By Fall, I had around 100 subscribers. During the election campaign, the number of readers and subscribers started to rise.

After the election, those numbers rose more quickly. By then, I was publishing a lot of serious pieces offering advice and insights on how to deal with the coming Trumpian onslaught.

The graph above shows what happened from election day through now. Until February, it resembles what is known as an “exponential curve.” After that there was still a steep increase until mid-March. Then it flattened out.

What happened?

Protests 🪧

Starting in February, I began organizing and participating in numerous local protests where I live, which reduced the time and energy I had for writing. So I wrote fewer pieces.

I’ve seen postings recently by other writers, including one “famous” one—Dean Obeidallah—complaining about a significant flattening in their readership. Which tells me that it wasn’t just me.

Substack’s Algorithm?

One writer here questioned whether Substack had changed it algorithm, which governs how visible a writer’s work is to others. Facebook and Twitter have both been known to alter their software algorithms to maximize their profit and, quite possibly, carry out political agendas.

Recently, the great Heather Cox Richardson complained that Facebook was making some of her postings invisible to her and some readers. Andy Borowitz has also accused Facebook’s management of suppressing his postings there.

Many More Publications. 📰📰📰 📰

More and more people are publishing on Substack, making it harder to get readers’ attention. Numerous readers have complained on Substack that they can’t afford to subscribe to as many publications here as they’d like. That would not apply to me, because all my content is free.

But even if you read only free content, there is now so much stuff here—much of it excellent—that you can’t possibly read everything to which you subscribe. You must pick and choose. That alone could cause readership and growth of individual publications to level off.

Celebrities 📺🗞️🎬

As many famous writers and journalists on legacy media were fired or quit, more and more have migrated to Substack. Not only do they immediately attract hundreds of thousands of followers, but by name recognition alone (not to detract from their work), they attract more attention than not-so-famous people.

I thought it was great when Paul Krugman and Jim Acosta found new homes on Substack. And it is. But so many luminaries have come here now—and keep coming every day—that, IMHO, they are making it much more difficult for many of the rest of us to grow.

Yes, you can still grow if you jump and shout online and take extraordinary measures to get people’s attention. But I generally refused to go totally clickbait.

I will admit to occasionally having slipped up and written a few “grab you” headlines. And I do use profanities liberally. But I don’t think I ram my personality down people’s throats.

There are also self-made celebrities here who came here early and brought huge audiences with them built over many years on Twitter. God bless them. I don’t begrudge them their reward.

They helped make Substack a success—but one of which I feel it is now becoming a victim.

Profit 💰

Substack is privately owned, but has received millions in investments from venture capitalists, including big names from Silicon Valley.

Venture firms invest with the goal of making a huge profit when a company goes public. So Substack must be under pressure to grow revenue and market share.

That being the case, writers who generate paid subscription revenue are far more important to Substack than those who don't.

Substack has paid advances to big name writers to induce them to move their work to Substack. Undoubtedly, those folks get a lot more visibility on the platform than the rest.

All of which supports the notion that, however much pleasure many of us get from writing on Substack, most of us are insignificant to the company—except perhaps for the slight revenue we each give them by paying ourselves to subscribe to other publications.

That may not matter to you if you don't care how many people read your material. It does matter to me, even though I don't make a penny from my work.

I want to reach more and more people with the content I produce. If Substack is going to make that more difficult because of profit concerns and too much noise, I will move my content to a platform that values me. Even if I have to pay a nominal fee to publish there.

Some great authors, such as Rebecca Solnit and Dan Gillmor, have shunned Substack in favor of other platforms. The policies of Substack’s ownership and its venture-based business model are major reasons.

What do you think? Would you read content like mine if it were available for free on a different platform?

If you publish on Substack, are you satisfied that you can grow your readership even if Substack management virtually ignores you?