The Missive special edition: no, I don't want your money and I never will
I promise I didn't mean to hit you all up for cash
Hello, Missive readers! I’ve been writing this thing for more than 8 years (give or take) and I’ve tried hard not to bother you more than one or maybe twice a month in that time.
However, there’s something I need to clear up.
I was reading an email reply to Sunday’s Missive from my old mate Dougie when I saw the text of the email that had been sent to him:
I thought, “Hmm… that’s not what it looked like yesterday when I sent a test to myself before hitting publish? What does ‘pledge your support’ mean?” I took a look at my test, and here’s what I saw:
I clicked on Dougie’s “pledge your support” button, and it took me to a checkout where users could send me money, starting at USD$8 a month and going up to USD$150 a year. That’s quite a bit of cash in Australian dollars for my monthly word vomit and link drop.
After a bit of detective work, I found out that Substack had auto-turned on a “payments” setting in the author panel, including automatically selecting the amounts in USD that they thought I should nudge my readers to pay. I’ve never connected my Stripe account to Substack, so I had no idea how that transaction was ever going to go through.
Let me be clear: I don’t want your money, but Substack needs it.
Substack is free for people to use, but like most startups, it’s been paying its bills using venture capital. The VCs who gave Substack that money want to see a return on their investment, so Substack is focused on monetization. From TechCrunch:
“Substack told Axios late last year that the top 10 writers on the platform collectively generate $20 million in annual revenue. According to the Times, Substack separately told investors that it saw revenue of just $9 million last year. (It told the Times directly in a story last month that it has hundreds of thousands of paid newsletters now on the platform.)
That’s not a lot of revenue for a company boasting a $650 million valuation. Substack also faces churn, with some writers leaving the platform owing to Substack’s hands-off content moderation policy or for competing platforms that take a smaller cut. Other writers discover the economics aren’t compelling or simply burn out.”
I don’t object to companies trying to make money, and I don’t object to paid Substacks. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with them, and I pay for a few because Paid Substacks = Paid Writers. I don’t love that it was automatically enabled, but I understand why it happened.
I think being able to pledge to writers you like is a great option, but it’s not something I need for The Missive. It’s a passion project mixed with a journal. After years of monetizing my writing in various forms, The Missive is free! Enjoy it, and I’ll be keeping a closer eye on this stuff in the future.
Soph xx