Was I too bullish on Substack Notes?

PLUS: Twitter strikes back with new creator monetization features.

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My latest: The products that Alastair Budge, founder of Leonardo English, can’t do without

In 2019, Alastair Budge launched Leonardo English, a media brand that helps people improve their English. It started out as a podcast that eventually grew to over 250,000 downloads per month, and it’s projected to generate six figures in 2023 through a mixture of memberships, course sales, sponsorships, and affiliate deals.

In the latest edition of The Entrepreneur’s Tech Stack, Alastair was kind enough to walk us through the products that are absolutely essential to running his business. Go here to check it out.

BTW, I’m looking for more media entrepreneurs to feature in this series. Go here to contact me and tell me a little more about your business. 

Do you live in Washington, DC?

About once a month, I organize a dinner with other media operators who live in the area. I keep these things pretty small and intimate — around six people max — and I’m looking for more people to add into the mix. I’ve already organized four of these things and the conversation has been incredible. Reach out if you want to receive a future invite.

Quick hits

Kudos to Bloomberg for leading the way in abandoning open programmatic advertising. More publishers need to recognize that programmatic adtech has triggered a race to the bottom in terms of both ad pricing and quality. [Marketing Brew]

A newsletter is a great MVP for any newly-launched media brand, but eventually you'll want to expand into other mediums as you scale. [Digiday]

The podcast company Luminary famously launched with a $100 million war chest with the aim of creating premium programming that's locked behind a paywall. This is the first major update on the company in a while, and unsurprisingly things aren't going well. [Bloomberg]

Twitter is now letting its creators lock their content behind a paywall. The question is whether creators will trust their monetization to a platform that doesn't let them own their audience. Also, it’s worth noting that Twitter still doesn’t really share ad revenue with creators, so it’s still hoarding most of the value generated through their content. [Bloomberg]

This is a more optimistic take on AI content creation that I mostly agree with -- that it'll take over the mindless copywriting that's meant solely for search engines and free up human writers to focus on more creatively-fulfilling work. [Slate]

Was I too bullish on Substack Notes?

Earlier this week I published a piece arguing that Substack Notes could actually be the Twitter killer that so many Musk-haters have been waiting for, mostly because it creates the right mix of incentives to lure high-profile creators onto the platform.

While plenty of people agreed with my assessment, I also got lots of pushback from people who thought I’d gone too far out over my skis. Let’s jump into some of the best responses:

Mark Little expresses skepticism that Substack Notes will attract non-creators

Definitely agree that Substack has got the creator side of the equation right. The piece that’s still out of reach for me in my admittedly early use of Notes is the role of curation by power users who are not creators. Twitter became the go-to platform for journalists because that it is where you could find “news in the noise”. Twitter was addictive to power-users not because of the original content you could post and profit from, but because it was a meta-layer of discovery of “the moment”. Tools like Tweetdeck became critical to the 1% of Twitter users who created the vital curation meta-layer. Twitter could have incubated a Substack-layer if it understood the true value of its creator power base (Twitter’s leadership always resisted the design of features for power-users which didn’t appeal to 100% of its user base). Substack can be even better than Twitter if it can lean into power-users engaged in the curation of the “archive of now” - that wonderful serendipity engine that connects people with great ideas to those who relish the discovery of great ideas. Early signs are promising (the stack quote is a great example of curator-friendliness). More please!

Adam Tinworth disagreed with my depiction of Mastodon as being too clunky for mainstream adoption: 

The problem with this argument is two-fold:

1. It assumes that these experiences can’t change. They can and will, especially because much of the recent migration there is from the techie types who are currently hammering on the rough edges of the platform. Everyone forgets the sea change in Twitter usage when the first apps arrived. Remember it was web and SMS only when it started.

2. From an audience point of view, there has never been only one major platform - and, outside a narrow band of media commentary and politics, Twitter has never been that big for traffic.

Mastodon has been great at slowly capturing communities of *interest*. Any audience team would do well to keep monitoring it, to see if their audience are there in any significant numbers.

worldweary also thought I was too harsh on Mastodon:

I think you overestimate how hard Mastodon is to use and underestimate its continued growth.

There's nice iOS, Mac, and Android clients (Ivory, Mona, Fedilab, in order, for just three), which take out the pain of following people on the web version and they feel very intuitive. There's still no native post quoting, but that'll happen soon and there are already workarounds in many of the apps.

Mastodon still has growing pains but there's lots of momentum, and far less drama. And depending on the instance you join, you are far less likely to ever come across the covid hucksters, the alt-right, the tankies, and the truly awful people like Grammm LineAHand that Substack thrives on.

Ben May expressed skepticism that Notes would appeal to anyone outside the newsletter space:

I can’t see that happening..

Last stat was almost half a billion active users on Twitter. There aren’t that many people reading newsletters

Terrell Johnson thinks Musk will use his infinite resources to fight back:

Because of who he is and whose money he has access to, it's likely Musk can keep Twitter going for years if he wants. But it's hard to imagine it'll be anything more than a zombie company, requiring periodic cash infusions to stay alive.

Several people, including Paul Guinnessy, don’t necessarily enjoy the synergies between Notes and newsletters:

I’m not so sure. Some of us want to write notes but not be subscribed to 1000 Substack newsletters. Plus it needs to be able to split stuff into lists. That was a handy feature on Twitter.

And finally, Vinny O'Hare thinks I live in a media bubble:

98% of the people that use Twitter have never heard of substack. I see no reason to leave Twitter. I don't care who owns it or who runs it. Everything else that tries to come along is an also ran and a waste of time signing up.