I’ve never fully understood the popularity of Substack. Why would you give a 10 percent cut of your revenue to a newsletter subscription service? It doesn’t make any sense to me. Now, I’m not saying Substack doesn’t provide value. Of course it does. It’s beginner friendly. It handles all of the technical side.
It’s an easy way for someone to monetize their writing. So whether it’s a newsletter or you look at it as a blog. It’s easy to put your content behind a paywall. So that definitely merits a monthly subscription, right? Whether it’s 49, 99 a month, et cetera. I can see that. I just can’t see the 10%. And one, there’s a few things I wanted to discuss.
One is. This is a scaling imbalance, right? Whereas sub stack is going to take 10 percent of your revenue in perpetuity. They’re offering what they provide is basically remaining the same. There are alternative platforms and so ghost and review come to mind. But people aren’t using them. They’re using sub stack sub stack became trendy, especially because they’re getting free advertising from the, the, the, the, the sub domains, right?
It’s. It’s x. subdomain. com. And so Substack has not only having people drive traffic to its platform and again, and gaining brand exposure that way, but they’re also taking that 10 percent cut and the value that they provide is not commiserate with that. So of course, if you’re starting a newsletter and you’re very small it does provide a way to quickly get started and be, and gain monetization.
But eventually the idea here is to get big. And so if you do grow, grow larger, why would you hand over 10%? But many, many journalists and other prominent figures have driven their audience substantial, but the substantial amount of followers, they’ve driven those followers to sub stack and converted them to paying customers, knowing that sub stack would take.
10%. Now, one problem for these for these figures, for these journalists, for whoever’s using subsec is the platform lock in, right? Once you get started, it’s going to be difficult to, to leave and to move to another platform. So there’s not only, there’s not only the fact that you’re paying out 10%, there’s also.
The difficulty in moving that audience over to a new platform. So those were the main points I wanted to cover. This has become something, the, the revenue share model, the revenue share as a service model has become more popular. It has become something that is becoming more commonplace. And so some other platforms that we see this happening on are.
Patreon Apple with the Apple store taking 30 percent commissions. Google Play also takes a percentage. Shopify taking a percentage. Etsy gets percentages. And I have all these written down, but I don’t want to go into all of the different percentages. Just that I’m surprised so many people are willingly paying 10 percent for this service.
But the reason this became, this came back to my attention was I recently found out about Beehive, which is another platform that is not only offering what Substack offers, but it’s taking email marketing to a whole new level and monetizing your audience to a whole new level. And what they’re doing is really, really cool and they are not taking.
That percentage of gross revenue. So that’s what I wanted to cover today. I think sub stack charges way too much and I’m surprised people go for it.