What even is Substack anymore?

Substack TV, new email marketing features & an increasingly vague identity.

I’ve been on Substack for three years now.

When I started, the idea was simple: write newsletters, build an audience, get paid. And somewhere along the way, things got more complicated.

I mean, Substack has now launched a TV app. You can watch Substack content on your Apple TV or Google TV. I've enjoyed it in a sense because I get to watch more basketball breakdowns by the Game Theory crew, but that's hardly newsletter-focused, is it?

A newsletter platform made a television app. Just take a moment to process that.

Look, I get it. Substack raised $100 million last year at a $1.1 billion valuation(!). When you take that kind of money, you need to show growth to shareholders. You need to prove you’re not just an email service. The idea, clearly, is that you need to become some sort of social media or general media empire.

So now we have livestreaming. Desktop livestreaming arrived recently. The TV app dropped last week. There is a relentless push toward video content that feels less like evolution and more like chasing whatever YouTube’s doing (remember when they had a section on the app to watch video easily that they removed within months?).

But really: who asked for this?

I came to Substack to write. Almost all of you reading this came here to write. We wanted a clean publishing tool that handled payments and delivery without faff. To allow us to focus on words and content, because the world lacked a platform that existed in such a way.

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Competing with YouTube? Why bother?

YouTube has 2.7 billion users monthly. Two. Point. Seven. Billion. They’ve spent nearly two decades building infrastructure, recommendation algorithms, and creator tools. Their parent company might as well be printing money.

So, for reasons I don’t yet understand, Substack has launched a beta TV app and more livestreaming features.

What are we doing here?

The livestreaming push makes a certain kind of sense if you think deeply about it. Video creators have larger audiences in general. Larger audiences mean more subscriptions. More subscriptions mean Substack takes more of that sweet, sweet 10% cut. Everyone wins, right?

Well, maybe not. There is a reason that platforms specialise in different things. Every meeting, every brainstorm, every engineering hour spent on TV apps is an hour not spent on the tools writers actually need.

What features actually matter?

Look, Substack is still trying to compete as a newsletter platform.

Drip campaigns are (sort of) here. Though perhaps not for all of you. The ability to set up automated email sequences has been standard in email marketing for a decade plus. ConvertKit, Mailchimp and others, they’ve all had this forever. Substack is arriving late to that party.

But still, they’re genuinely fantastic. Drip campaigns have been hugely productive for my business using other tools. Having them native to Substack simplifies things considerably. The email marketing capabilities massively lag behind dedicated platforms, but there is at least a small inkling of progress.

A/B testing for headlines landed recently too, though you need 200+ subscribers to access it. Another feature that’s been table stakes elsewhere for ages, but welcome nonetheless. Knowing which subject line performs better before you send to your full list? Revolutionary stuff. If you live in 2015.

But seriously, these are good additions. They suggest someone at Substack occasionally remembers that writers exist and might want functional tools to help them grow.

Wouldn’t that be a novel idea? For a newsletter platform!

The 10% problem

10%. Of every payment. Goes right to Substack.

On top of that, Stripe takes around 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction. If someone pays you $50 for an annual subscription, roughly $6.50 disappears before you see any of it. Once you hit a few hundred paid subscribers, the economics stop making sense.

Compare this to alternatives. Beehiiv’s pro plan charges a flat monthly fee with 0% transaction cuts. Ghost takes 0% and charges based on subscriber count. ConvertKit’s creator plan works similarly.

At a small scale, Substack’s model is great. Free to start, you only pay when you earn. Reasonable enough, and the reason it’s so popular to begin with.

At larger scale, that’s painful. If you’re earning $5,000 monthly, you’re handing Substack $500 every month. That’s $6,000 a year for what amounts to email delivery, a basic website, and payment processing. On one of those similar sites, hosting to a similar number of subscribers is much cheaper.

I’ve always been open about this: I’ll do what’s best for my business. If Substack’s organic growth features keep working, the 10% is worth it. The network effects, the recommendations, the app, these things bring readers I wouldn’t find otherwise.

But if they shift focus entirely to becoming a video platform and kill what makes organic growth work? I’ll be off. Simple as that. And you’ll get to come with me!

So what is Substack, then?

This is the question I keep coming back to.

Is it a newsletter platform? Sort of. The core email functionality works fine, though it lacks the sophistication of dedicated tools.

Is it a social network? Increasingly yes. Notes is essentially Twitter without a character limit. The app is designed for browsing and discovery, not just reading your subscriptions. It’s pushing short-form content more and more, and subscribers report spending more time there than reading actual posts. That’s not good.

Is it a video platform? Seemingly it wants to be. The TV app suggests ambitions far beyond email. If this is in place now, what are they going to do in the future?

Is it a podcasting platform? Also yes. Audio uploads and podcast feeds have been around for a while now.

Substack seems to want to be everything to everyone. A place where writers write, podcasters podcast, streamers stream, and viewers watch it all on their tellies. One platform to rule them all and in the darkness bind them.

This strategy rarely works. Companies that try to do everything usually end up doing nothing particularly well. Jack of all trades, master of none, as the saying goes.

How real is shareholder pressure?

When Substack was bootstrapped, they could focus on writers. Writers were the product, the customers, the whole point.

Now there are shareholders to please. Growth targets to hit. Valuations to justify. The incentives keep shifting.

I don’t say this to be cynical. It’s simply how venture-backed companies work. You take the money, you serve the people who gave it to you. That’s essentially the deal. You get more money to do things with, but your priorities have to change somewhat as a result.

The question for us writers is whether our interests still align with Substack’s interests. For now, mostly that’s a yes. The platform still works. Growth is still possible. The features are improving, though slower than I’d like.

But the TV app worries me. The livestreaming push worries me. They suggest a company looking for growth in places that don’t involve people like me sitting down to write.

I genuinely don’t know what Substack is anymore. Maybe that’s fine. Maybe being hard to define is what they’re looking for, and I’m the one who’s out of place.

Or maybe this is a company in the middle of an identity crisis, pulled between what it was built to do and what its investors want it to become.

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What do you think? Are you here for the writing, the video, the social features, or some combination? Would you stay if they doubled down on video and let the newsletter tools stagnate?

Drop your thoughts in the comments. I’d love to know what you think.

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