How publishers are leveraging Substack for new audiences
The foundation of Substack in 2017 was “basically to make it simple for writers to start an email newsletter that makes money from subscriptions, from direct mailings,” Renée Kaplan, Head of Partnerships France at Substack, told participants at our World News Media Congress in Marseille.
Today, nearly 10 years later, there are more than 5 million paid subscriptions on Substack worldwide.
“One in three of those paid creators are based outside of the United States, even though most of the subscribers are in the US,” Kaplan noted.
Furthermore, the total amount of money involved is substantial.
WAN-IFRA Members can access Renée Kaplan’s presentation on our Knowledge Hub.
“European creators today are making 75 million euros. That’s just organically, there’s been no development here until now,” Kaplan added.
However, there are also a lot of freely available subscriptions on Substack, which has more than 100,000 creators with publications on the platform as well as tens of millions of subscribers globally, “so it is a very big community,” Kaplan said.
While many celebrities, authors, politicians and individual journalists use Substack, there are also a lot of news and media on it, too. These range from alternative weeklies and TV channels to traditional newspaper publishers as well as news magazines, such as Germany’s Der Spiegel, The Economist and The New Yorker.
What Substack has to offer publishers
Some reasons behind the platform’s popularity and success, Kaplan said, are that it offers an “all-in-one ecosystem. What launched in 2017 as a space for writers of newsletters is now also for podcasts, for recording videos, for live-streaming videos, for even webinars, and for commenting, for chat.”
“It’s actually become very multi-media and it allows a publication or a creator and their publications to be whatever they want. And to interact with their audience and subscribers any way they want,” she added.
In addition, she said, Substack is very easy to use: “You don’t need to know any technology.” But perhaps most importantly, creators own their audience.
“The relationship you have is direct to your audience,” Kaplan said. “It’s a direct, owned relationship.”
Should a creator / publisher wish to leave the platform, “and we don’t wish that for anyone, you can take your audience with you. You take your email list with you. You take all of your intellectual property with you. We don’t have access to any of that because you own it,” she said.
‘If you don’t monetise, we don’t monetise’
As for subscriptions, not every news media or journalist on Substack wants to monetise, and they don’t have to.
“If you don’t monetise, we don’t monetise, and that’s the deal,” Kaplan said.
“If you do monetise, Substack takes 10 percent. The business model is very clear and transparent,” she added.
Kaplan then offered some examples of how a number of well known publishers are using Substack to grow their audiences as well as experiment.
“These are all examples of established news media that have launched something on Substack that they don’t have necessarily on their main platform,” she said.
The New Yorker, for instance, launched on Substack a year or so ago with the idea of creating something of a book club for their magazine articles. They post one freely available article from their magazine each week, and people who subscribe by just providing their email address, receive access to that article and are invited to comment and discuss it with other subscribers.
“It’s actually proving very successful for them because they are finding an audience that they wouldn’t have normally on their own main platform, Kaplan said. “And mostly they’re creating community. They’re creating an experience and a New Yorker product, which is chat, that they don’t have on their main platform.”
The Economist offers both paid and free options
Another example Kaplan noted was The Economist, which has both free and paid-for options for their Substack subscribers.
“It’s data journalism, and it’s a vertical that they found on their own main website wasn’t doing particularly well, so they thought, ‘Let’s find an audience for it.’ … So they launched a newsletter dedicated just to data journalism. They know it won’t cannibalise their main subscription because it’s not a topic that works well on their own platform and they’ve been going for just over a year, and it’s now a viable and growing revenue stream for them,” Kaplan said.
Germany’s Der Spiegel grows its English-language audience
In another example, Der Spiegel, a well known German weekly news magazine was trying to increase their audience for their English-language content.
Kaplan said they found Substack to be a low risk way to experiment with posting three or four pieces of translated content each week. They also made a weekly recap, which was free, but they decide to charge a subscription to get the other translated articles, Kaplan said.
“They tested it for about four months. They had a lot of success in terms of growing their existing audience of readers, and are actually making money,” she said.
