Substack Journalism doesn't (currently) pay
True for all on here I'd suggest, even those with 1,000s of subscribers
I mean I completely understand as I too have limited my paid subscriptions to around 6 out of 50 or so at this stage. On a non-limited blog like this paid subscriptions are even lower than that for example it’s about 3% on this blog at the moment. You’d need about 40,000 subscriptions on that ratio to make a teacher’s salary. I don’t see too many of those blogs around and the ones that are in that region, well those writing them probably want a little more than 5k a month in salary I’d suggest. Some of them look like they’re putting in more than 24 hour days with the content that’s on them (i.e. they’re getting paid help). Maybe by limiting content to paid subscribers you can increase that ratio mentioned above but I still have problems with that, you’d need already to have 10s of thousands of subscribers to be able to do that without turning your blog into a dead zone.
Why am I mentioning this? I’ve been putting in several hours a day on this blog for a few months now. That is not something that I can maintain especially as I’ve taken on some extra responsibilities. I don’t have an academic or regular journalist’s job which may allow me to do this as a side hustle. So I’m moving to less frequent, maybe weekly, posts from now.
And as on Twitter with some Twitterers putting in at least 8 hour days without any sign of how they’re getting paid, you may also like to conjecture on how some of those on here do get paid. Likes seem to be in the region of 8-10% of subscribers. So that should give you an indication of how many subscribers someone has. You need at least a 1,000 paying subscribers on here to survive in the Western World. And as it’s very difficult to do this from a Thailand beach anymore that’s the model for most of us.
I may come back to it in November. In the meantime expect fewer posts here.
I love your work Rich. I wish I could pay for every sub that I follow here, but unfortunately, I just can't at this time. As for my little Substack... I totally went into it as a hobby and a way to stay sane. I think the value we get as a community right now is probably more lucrative than any kind of money we might make. Regardless of whether you post once a day or once a week, I will continue to look forward to your updates.
Methinks that you won't be able to not do posts Rich.
An idea will come to you in the middle of the night and you will have to sound the alarm in order to get some sleep.