Do you read Substack? I don’t usually, but today I went down a bit of a rabbit hole reading a bunch of different stuff, and was genuinely shocked by how good some of it was. Some was trash, but overall, much better than expected.
A common theme that floats around is that technology has vaporised our attention spans. TikTok, X (formerly known as Twitter), and Snapchat all thrive off providing entertainment or information in just a few moments. We notice people checking their phone every minute, and think that this just the way things are. But at the same time we have seen an explosion in length, sophistication, popularity, and complexity of other sources. As we have discussed in previous posts, podcasts are regularly reaching over three hours, YouTube as well. And now, we have the revolution in text. Move over Twitter X, the age of the Long Read has arrived.
Long reads, or essays over 2000 words, have taken a long time to get to where they are today. First off, it was assumed that they weren’t wildly popular, so the few avenues that allowed them had to be laser focussed on their audience. National Review, a conservative American magazine founded by William F. Buckley would be able to commission a few pieces a month for it’s particular audience, The New Yorker, which I happen to subscribe to, would do the same, albeit with a very different flavour. But whether you were reading an article on Mitt Romney or Jordan Neely, it was a dangerous game. The cost of publishing, promoting, and the inability to go viral made long articles a rarity for traditional publishes.
The web changed that, sort of, at least at first. Since the early days of geocities, people have kept blogs, run website, and shared ideas online. The issue is that they weren’t easy to find, and the motivation to build them was entirely internal. Like this blog, my rewards are the occasional comment, the knowledge that my writing skills are improving, and a sense of satisfaction that I can keep turning up day after day. For the longest time, long form articles were stuck in a cycle of low returns, thus writers putting in low effort, or were purely motivated by fringe or other goals.
Substack came around and brought something that I never in a million years think could work, a subscription model to writing. With so much to read online, why would anyone PAY to read something. Especially when I could subscribe to the NYT, The Economist, or the Guardian for just a little bit more, and get coverage on everything from Tamil uprisings to Test Cricket. Plus any one with a brain could see that the paywalling style that many formerly successful newspapers had switched to was failing.
But somehow, it did. It turns out that there is a huge interest out there for fresh views and interesting ideas that aren’t howled across the digital public square, but considered, debated, and speculated upon. And when people find someone they like, they’re happy to support them, not just with comments or likes, but with cold hard cash.
The highest earner on Substack is not a Kardashian or a celebrity. Heather Cox Richardson is a historian who earned her PhD from Harvard, and writes an easy to read newsletter on American politics. From that, she earns over a million dollars a year, despite giving away most (all?) of her content for free.
Anyway, it was a fun thing to read this afternoon. I recommend checking it out.
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