To Fuel the Feast: The Rise of Influencer Substack and On Not Saving Substack from Itself

Like this post?

Please give her a little heart!

Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash

---

When bestselling author Glennon Doyle joined Substack this week, she wore a messy ponytail in a live video with Elizabeth Gilbert. Then, in one fell swoop, she brought over her community — a newsletter list of more than 200,000.

Many people were excited. Some were not.

As the hours and then days went by, that latter group started to become more and more vocal.

There were different takes.

She’s coming in too strong. She should listen to other writers before starting to talk. She should comment on other writers’ posts. She should not have put up a paywall from the start. She should allow everyone to comment. She’s already privileged — why does she need thousands of paid subscribers?!

The overwhelming thread of the messages seemed to be: She is taking up more of the pie.

Many years ago, I was an early employee at Twitter, where my job was to get famous people on the platform. I did it well, and I once spent a whole year working with the Vatican to become, as Wired magazine called me, “The Woman Who Got the Pope on Twitter.” In the picture of Pope Benedict sending his first tweet, I am standing next to him, also in a ponytail.

When the Pope joined Twitter, some people were mad. The night of the televised launch, I was in a tiny car with thumping music when the Bishop in the driver’s seat explained to me that similar critiques were made in the 1950s when Vatican Radio started broadcasting the Pope’s voice. It was a sense of sacrilege.

Notably, the anger about the Pope joining the platform never came from the people who actually used the platform.

That’s because Twitter users generally loved it when new, famous people came on. Barack Obama. Ben Affleck. Hilary Clinton. Warren Buffet.

This was a good thing for those of us working at the company, since our theory of growth was that when you brought the most famous person in a given niche – sports, religion, music, politics, film – their followers would come as well.

A rising tide will lift all boats.

We said this, again and again and again, and we were happy to see it worked. After all, we had to grow. As a company built with venture capital dollars, growth was the cost of being alive.

Substack is not very different.

It required a lot of money to build Substack.

Initially $2M, and by now, just over $100M. That it because it requires a ton of money to start the platforms you use on a daily basis. And that money comes from venture capitalists.

As background, venture capitalist investors raise their money from other investors, and they only get that money if they can show how they reliably turn the money they raise into a lot more of it by investing in good startups.

It’s not easy. (I know; I used to be one.) For every 10 investments a venture capitalist makes, 6 will fail, 2 or 3 will break even, and 1 will hit it out of the park. This means that the one that succeeds needs to do reallllllly well, or the venture capitalist is out of business. As an example, if a VC invests in 10 companies at $1M dollars each, given the failures and the break-evens, the one company that does succeed needs to return at least 10 times the initial $1 million investment – $10 million dollars – for the venture capitalist just to break even. (These numbers are clearly simplified.) That math is why venture capitalists need to believe that every single investment they make has the ability to hit it out of the park, and this is why they can’t invest in stuff that doesn’t ever have the potential to return many, many times that initial investment.

When it comes to the discussion about Glennon Doyle, this is important to understand.

That’s because much of the anger and frustration from Substack users that led to Glennon Doyle deciding to leave Substack was rooted in a deep-seated idea that the pie is a fixed pie, and that Glennon is now taking too much of it.

In fact, the entire reason these social networks are started and funded in the first place is based on the precedent of network effects, which is that adding people of greater and greater influencer to the platform will make the pie larger.

Which is why, of course, the platform exists. To get bigger!

Here’s how it works:

When someone with a large following joins Substack, many of their followers join as well. This grows the platform, and does so more significantly than when someone with a smaller following does. In Glennon’s case, when she transferred her email list of 200,000+ people to Substack, it is likely that tens of thousands of those people were not using Substack beforehand. A percentage of Glennon’s future followers who would not normally have used Substack will also now be users of the platform. And, depending on the fame of the influencer, press will also cover the event and give brand awareness to Substack. Finally, by the very fact of the famous person being here, some of her famous friends will also be convinced. (We can see this, in that Elizabeth Gilbert, in fact, is the reason Glennon came on.) These are the nature of the network effects in the growth of a social platform.

When an influencer like Glennon Doyle joins Substack, she is fueling the feast.

Clearly, some people do not like this idea.

There is a saying I think about often, “the game is the game.” And after being on Substack for a year, it is clear to me that a lot of people on Substack fundamentally do not like the game Substack is in. A lot of people came here, in fact, because they actually thought Substack was not in the game at all.

This misunderstanding is what leads to the widespread frustration I see around the introduction of Notes or Video or some other feature aimed to increase engagement, yes, but even more importantly for Substack: users.

In essence, everyone who is complaining about Substack changing does not realize that what they are actually saying is that they do not want Substack to grow.

There are subtleties to this argument. Many people say that their Notes timeline, for example, is ruining their user experience. This is a fair critique, and I don’t know the future of the Notes experiment. That said, at its core, Notes, like Videos and other experiment, is an experiment in growth. Some with work, and some will not.

But there is a fundamental misunderstanding in the idea that we can “go back” to when Substack was a gentler place and we only read articles from unknown writers posting soothing Scottish pictures and no one dared to say anything about monetization.

That misunderstanding is this: Substack is a social network, and a social network has to grow.

That is the nature of network effects. Because the opposite of growth in the game of network effects is shrinkage. And shrinkage, over time, always leads to death.

TLDR?

Substack was always in the game.

And, surprisingly to many users, so were all of us.

The current existence of this platform at all is because someone at Substack made sure you found out about it. Unless you were courted by a Substack staffer wanting to bring in a great writer like you, you were probably part of the vast majority of new users who came over as a way to read something from a writer you followed or wanted to follow. You were not, for example, clicking on a big yellow ad saying SIGN UP and doing so without any reason to do so. You came here because of a writer. And the writer you came to read likely did the same.

You came in via network effects, and it’s the way these platforms grow.

Over time, the small writers that drew in the first cohort of Substack users led to medium-sized writers and then big writers, aka “influencers”. The bigger the writer, the bigger the draw, and the stronger the network effect. If Substack continues to succeed, this is going to keep happening.

The game is the game.

Now, there is a lot about the game not to like.

But, there are options.

First, you can keep complaining. That’s actually fine. Over on Twitter, half the people I follow are still complaining about the place. I’ve done it several times on live television. Twitter is a sliver of its formal self, and I’m there, and we joke about it. HAHA isn’t this hell? You get the picture. Since algorithms are algorithms, your complaining will be likely to bring you more complaining, and then you’ll be in a swimming pool of other people with the same complaints.

Second, you can leave. That is also an option. The other half of the people I follow on Twitter are not even there anymore.

Third, you can just keep doing your thing. Keep your head down. Type the hell out of your little fingers.

If you choose this last option, you may to remind yourself to look up from time to time. Yes, this place and growing and changing. More people are here and dynamics will shift.

Is it still a place you want to be?

It is always up to you.