Does Substack need to cater to larger publishers?

PLUS: Programmatic advertising is hurting your subscription strategy.

Welcome! I’m Simon Owens and this is my media industry newsletter. If you’ve received it, then you either subscribed or someone forwarded it to you.

If you fit into the latter camp and want to subscribe, then you can click on this handy little button:

Let’s jump into it…

Does Substack need to cater to larger publishers?

From Business Insider:

Substack wants to keep big media companies from outgrowing its platform.

The Ankler, one of Substack’s top publications, recently defected, citing the need for more control and flexibility. The Hollywood-focused media company left for Passport, a new platform created by WordPress.com owner Automattic and Stratechery founder Ben Thompson …

“We’re generalizing those tools now so that more people who want to start fully-fledged media businesses with multiple editors and writers, and video and community features, can take advantage of them and we can support them,” [cofounder Hamish McKenzie] said. “It doesn’t mean that 100% of the people are always going to be completely satisfied with the existing feature set, but we’re making really fast progress on it.”

A lot of people made a big deal about The Ankler and a handful of other large publishers leaving Substack, but I don’t think it poses an existential threat to the company’s business model.

The analogy I often use is the difference between a smartphone camera and a DSLR. Billions of people are perfectly satisfied using the camera on their phone, which is why smartphones have become a multi-trillion-dollar market. At the same time, there’s still a healthy—if much smaller—market for professional photographers and filmmakers who need more specialized equipment.

The same dynamic applies to publishing platforms. Tens of millions of creators would benefit from Substack’s simple, streamlined technology stack, and most of them will never need a more sophisticated platform with features like programmatic advertising integrations or metered paywalls. A small subset will eventually grow large enough that they require those capabilities to keep scaling, and some of them will leave as a result.

I also don’t think Substack and traditional CMS platforms are mutually exclusive. We’ve already seen several legacy publishers launch paid newsletters on Substack while continuing to run their core subscription businesses on their own websites. They view Substack as a way to develop new revenue streams and reach audiences that already spend time on the platform.

Consider how major publishers approach YouTube. Companies like Conde Nast and the New York Times have built substantial video operations there and likely generate tens of millions of dollars through YouTube’s revenue-sharing program. Yet they haven’t moved their entire publishing businesses onto the platform.

Substack doesn’t need to become every publisher’s home base to succeed. It simply needs to generate enough audience and network effects to convince publishers that it’s worth building complementary businesses there.

ICYMI: How a professional voice actor built a hit indie game studio

Robbie Daymond explained how he makes most of his income from attending fan conventions.

That case study actually sits behind a paywall, but if you’re not ready to subscribe, I also included it in an ebook that you can download over here.

Quick hits

The Wall Street Journal profiled Las Culturistas, the podcast started by Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers before either became TV regulars. It’s now spawned its own televised awards show and has gone from being a side hustle to the central foundation for each of their careers. [WSJ] (BTW, I used a gift link so you can access that article for free.)

“Trevor Noah, the former host of The Daily Show, commands a much bigger total audience on his podcast What Now? With Trevor Noah, than he did on television. His podcast has attracted nearly 4.6 million subscribers on YouTube, more than 10 times higher than his Comedy Central show audience, which averaged a reported 372,000 viewers in his last year hosting the show.” [Reuters] Not sure that’s really an apples-to-apples comparison. I checked his YouTube channel and many of his podcast clips have fewer than 50,000 views, but I think the larger point still stands that many former TV stars have flourished in their post-broadcast careers by building a direct relationship with the audience.

Another interesting stat from that Reuters article: “Ad dollars have followed the audience. At least $30 million in spending has shifted from TV comedy shows to podcasting over the last quarter, according to ad tracking firm Guideline.”

TikTok has long been a discovery platform for new music; now it’s trying to cut out the middleman, developing services that will allow up-and-coming artists to avoid signing with labels and distribute their songs directly into all the major streaming platforms. [Bloomberg] (BTW, I used a gift link so you can access that article for free.)

Five years ago, Ken Doctor launched a local news outlet in Santa Cruz, and it’s not only won a Pulitzer but is now approaching profitability. He expanded it to a second city in 2025 and hopes to be operating five news sites by 2028. [A Media Operator]

Want to support my work without becoming a subscriber?

I get it. We’re all succumbing to subscription fatigue, and not everyone is eager to take out their credit card and sign up for yet another monthly payment.

Luckily, there’s another way for you to financially support all the free content I publish in the newsletter and podcast.

I packaged 25 of my media entrepreneur case studies into an ebook spanning 182 pages and over 53,000 words. I’m pretty confident there isn’t another book on the market that’s packed with this many insights for how to build a successful content business.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a YouTuber, podcaster, newsletter writer, or traditional news publisher — you’re going to find strategies here that you can incorporate into your own business.

You can purchase the ebook over here.

Programmatic advertising is hurting your subscription strategy

CJR reports that the American Prospect did away with programmatic ads and saw immediate improvement across several metrics:

In the month since moving away from programmatic ads, the amount of time people spend on the Prospect site has nearly doubled …

Not only have users spent more time on the site, a recent membership drive added almost five hundred new recurring donors to the Prospect.

This is a theme I’ve returned to again and again: programmatic advertising creates a terrible user experience and, over time, can erode readers’ perception of your brand. Both outcomes run directly counter to the goals of a paid subscription business.

The user journey from free reader to paid subscriber is pretty complicated; we think it’s just about wanting to access a piece of content behind a paywall, but there are all sorts of calculations, both conscious and unconscious, that go into the decision. If a user has a consistently bad experience when visiting your website, they’re less likely to convert, regardless of how good your content is.

And yet publishers are reluctant to let go of programmatic because they feel like it’s free money — a way to squeeze out revenue from every pageview. This short term thinking is holding many back from longterm growth.