Gillmor Gang: Snack Pack

Remaking the media around creator economy constructs has been a favorite element of speculation by both incumbent and aspirational folks. The pandemic and now the Ukraine invasion are dominating the news networks and even 100,000 plus audio chats on Twitter Spaces, though Twitter is not offering real numbers. According to a paywalled newsletter by Wired’s Steven Levy, Clubhouse appears to be losing momentum. Tellingly, I couldn’t finish the post without subscribing to a bundle of Levy’s Plaintext newsletter column plus all access to the Wired site — sort of Levy+. I already get Wired content via the Apple News bundle, but not Steven’s newsletter. The subscription offer is seductive, a year for $5.

Meanwhile, the newsletter business is heating up with Substack’s new Reader app for iOS and soon Android. It signals Substack’s move to a mobile native client in addition to its initial email and Web strategy. I’ve just downloaded the app, but the docs suggest the startup is extending newsletters and web sites into a platform play. We are using the Substack beta that supports video content behind or in front of the paywall, and it’s clear the reader app will absorb that and a podcast feature as well as comments. In our experiments we’re using the competing Twitter Revue tool to assemble related content and integrating it with the column you’re reading and the latest Gillmor Gang Snack Pack above.

An interesting aspect of the Reader app is bypassing email notifications of new posts in favor of mobile notifications. The app defaults to both, but you can turn off email and soon select directly from the Settings page. The docs say if you delete the app or stop using it, the email flow will be restored. The net effect is to encourage a new inbox for Substack newsletters and user-configurable RSS feeds, a sort of Inbox+. I’m not sure this is a value proposition for the average reader yet, but for the writer it’s a way of harnessing enhanced analytics and an architecture for digital production and distribution. Accordingly, the iOS reader app and the Substack Web app I use to write this may well be integrated into a studio feel - sort of Substack+

After a few days of living with the Substack Reader, I’ve gleaned a surprising amount of insight into the I’ll call it Paywall Economy. Surprising in that my initial goal was to check out a proprietary strategy to bundle subscription writing with new media content AKA live audio sessions and podcasts. Surprising in that I ended up actually subscribing to a newsletter in order to discover what if anything was there other than a shift from publisher-based branding to personal entrepreneurial ownership of a writer’s transferable email list. I’ve resisted Ben Thompson’s paywall updates on his Stratechery newsletter for more than a year, but recently he’s been writing about Substack to the point I calculated it would be cost-effective ($12 a month) to let Ben do the thinking while I did the reading.

I was not wrong in expecting methodical analysis of this desperate moment globally paired with the emotional crisis of what is value as tech meets media. But what I discovered was a qualitative difference in the underlying feel of the product, going well beyond the economics or the apparent merging of streaming video, or whatever I thought I was interested in going in. Here was a feeling of intuition meeting action, narration becoming impactful, living in the moment of transformation. I bought a ticket to one proposition, that the global network and interlinked services can add up to a transfer of power from the diminishing returns of cable news and AVOD v. SVOD, to Another Shitty Day in Paradise that I grew up with in Woodstock, the Summer of Love, and the Winter of What Came Next. Unlimited possibilities and the not-so-vague intimations of mortality. Yet for a few brief moments, suspended disbelief adds up to a bargain at 12 divided by 30, or forty cents a day.

To begin with, the paywall is a fiction of convenience. It’s really there to provide a sense of drama, like the guy at the door of Studio 54. When my lead dog (Dave Barry homage) Rufus is presented with a fabulous dog treat, he immediately runs to his lead hiding spot and deposits it, then returns for the possibility of more. He’s assigning value to it far beyond the actual rarity of some dogworld NFT. If you engage him in a tugging match with a rubber toy, the more you resist the more he wants it. I know, using dog metaphors does not pay off in enhanced credibility. But the way dogs seem to understand complex emotions and attitudes based on our description of their inner thoughts — such a good boy, or your sister seems to feel left out, or any attribution whatsoever to what our cat thinks — something is happening but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones.

Then there’s the immediacy of the thing. Contrast behind and in front of the paywall. The apparent motivation of the blockbuster free post is to evangelize the rest of what you don’t get because writers have got to eat. I say apparent because that is what I’ve been led to believe by not subscribing to any pay posts, podcasts, or all-access deals for Wired. I’m more likely to subscribe to Steven Levy’s newsletter than because of the All-Wired bundle because Wired is basically telling me what I already know, which is Steven Levy has been right there at the cusp of the greatest transformations in tech history, with books to show for it. If Substack is right, that $5 deal for one year is really a negotiation between Levy and Wired, and the numbers are TBD. This is akin to the advent of Free Agency in baseball.

If the apparent motivation is not what it seems, then what is? Something has changed. In the case of Stratechery, it’s the subject matter of the Daily Updates that has shifted from a writer’s ambition to a reader’s. Putting the subject matter (Substack) in the free attractor post says that the payoff behind the paywall is for the potential subscriber, who will learn why they need to subscribe. The Wired bundle says you need this to get access to Steven Levy. But there is some additional friction in the Wired deal, because if the $5 deal was pitched as what Steven has to say about Substack, I’m in. But Wired doesn’t want to negotiate with its future self, so they’re going the promotional route. Maybe I’m wrong, but the numbers will tell. Newsletters are not additional, they’re the primary product. In this next step, the paywall is free.

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