Let’s talk advertising and Substack

The quandary of to sell or not to sell

Photo by Julian Hochgesang on Unsplash

Substack at present, doesn’t have an advertising problem. Yet. By that, I mean it isn’t a swamp awash with people and servers trying to sell you things based on a murky network of gifted goods and websites you click on late at night. It is an eco-system that largely manages to resist selling its audience things – although one would argue that you might not know you’re being sold to. It’s up to a person’s code of ethics to declare whether the trip they are taking, and the products they are using, were provided by a PR company expecting favourable coverage.

The current stance on Substack around advertising (updated a month ago) is: “At Substack, we believe that direct relationships between readers and creators make for a healthier information ecosystem.”

As of yet, there are no targeted ads or garish banners, but there are posts starting to feature the services of brands and companies embedded in them.

For me, the advertising conversation is gathering pace because brands are starting to switch onto Substack. In the last year, I’ve received several offers around this. I initially said no to the first few, and laughed at one of them -a major website building platform - who were asking for a year-long partnership in which they didn’t want to pay me, but would provide their services to me for free as a barter deal.

However, recently when I brand I like and have worked with before, asked if I would use my Substack to write a one-off piece, I have to admit – I paused. Previously, the answer had always been a straight no – but this was something I would probably want to write anyway. Would it really be that bad if I was transparent about it? Or would I be contributing to the death of an eco-system I love and want to protect because it seems to be the last bastion of respite around reading things and not constantly being sold to?

You’ll have to scroll to the end for what I decided – but I wanted to use this as an opportunity to unravel a tricky conversation. Opinions are welcome, if they can be articulated respectfully as opposed to yelling. I also wanted to use my experience as a senior newsroom editor who had to work with commercial teams and manage that editorial line, to provide context that others who may not know how certain things work. I’ll break this down from the ground up.

Church and state

My last corporate role was as the Executive Editor for HuffPost in the UK, which was number two to the Editor-In-Chief. Part of any senior editor’s job isn’t just managing editorial (my remit included all the lifestyle channels and the blogging platform), but also managing a relationship with the commercial team, and the requests/demands needed in order to generate profit and fund the organisation.

A big part of this was filtering the requests and protecting what we referred to as the ‘editorial integrity’ of the site. A large part of that involved trying to handle some of the requests from commercial which often risked infringing this line, or working with brands who would not be the right fit. The business pressure to create profit was enormous – so you can imagine how difficult this part was.

I’ve worked for various organisations where this line is very blurred. I did consultancy for one, where the commercial team rode roughshod over the editorial team and led to some very questionable editorial decisions. The line therefore, depends on how much power is given to the people who wield it, and how strongly they hold it.

At HuffPost, we used a phrase called ‘church and state’ to describe the clear delineation between editorial and commercial. We couldn’t go on press trips funded by PR companies (I’ll explain more about how those work), and we couldn’t accept free products on the condition that they would be written about. (There were the occasional loopholes, but by and large, this was the policy). The site had a number of ways of monetising content including specially written commercially branded editorial posts (written by a different team and clearly marked up), and serving ads around content among others.

The church and state part was very important because it was about transparency, which wasn’t always a given in journalism especially in the lifestyle sector. I’ll explain for anyone who doesn’t know.

Before my time at HuffPost, I worked as a travel editor. The organisation I worked for didn’t have the budget to pay out of pocket for these trips to ensure journalistic integrity, nor did they even have the budget to allow me time for these trips. (Often, I had to take my own paid leave). The deal was that you would have to write about the trip and recommend it as a place to go, regardless of whether that’s how you actually felt about it.

Taking goods in exchange for a write-up is a decades-old, well-known practice in journalism. The job is poorly paid, and with a few exceptions where the organisation will pay in order to ensure editorial fairness, it is considered standard practice to take free sh*t. The beauty and fashion industries are also similar. I genuinely think the reason beauty influencers get so much hate in online forums is because of the free stuff they get. Freebie culture-for-content is also hugely problematic.

The average reader who doesn’t work in journalism will not know of the conditions around these goods. They think they’re reading a story about someone who decided to travel to a particular destination or use a certain product. The idea is for the PR company who gave you the free stuff, to get people to book that holiday for themselves or use their hard-earned cash on expensive face cream, which they might do without knowing the truth. I’d challenge any journalist on a 30K salary who would say they would willingly pay for La Mer beauty products if they were paying out of pocket.

There is also little to no transparency. You don’t have to declare in an article that a PR has gifted you with something. In some ways, platforms such as Instagram have actually been better for this. You have to tag and mark up paid partnerships, and declare when something is gifted. One might say that this is because the grifting for free things and/or being paid to endorse a product without disclosure reached crazy, unregulated levels on social media in a way that feels marginally more controlled within journalism. After all, any piece published on a news site or paper that is subject to regulatory bodies such as IPSO will have gone through at least two or three sets of eyeballs.

But it still happens. Therefore for me, the mantra is always church and state. Editorial cannot be influenced by commercial, and the moment it is, it has to be declared. But how does that apply to Substack?

Monetising on Substack

The beauty of Substack is in its diversity. You can engage with the news or not. Unlike platforms such as Instagram, there is little virtue-signalling around what you post and share. I would like to believe that most of us have a baseline level understanding of the news, without the need to repost it as if no one else has access to a news outlet and in order to let people know we have seen the news, so that we see the same traumatising images over and over again.

The content I love most on Substack are the little meanderings into people’s lives, essays about something that seems unremarkable but makes me snort with laughter. Philosophy, insights into ways of thinking that I don’t have access to in my limited social circle. I don’t come here to get angry, I come here to learn, to read, to be soothed, to figure out life and be reminded of the circular nature of it. I could spend a day lost in the living rooms and gardens of other people.

Some people on Substack use it to trial out their writing. Some of them don’t want to add a paid subscription component to it because it feels like pressure. Some people do - and I am one of them. While I would love to say that Substack is a hobby, it isn’t. It is a way for me to publish essays in a way that isn’t shaped by a gatekeeper (another editor) and/or risks a typical awful click-bait headline on it. There’s no point having a judgement about it - criticising someone for wanting to get paid for the time and skill they used creating something would be inconceivable in any other arena.

But it’s tricky territory. Running paid subscriptions doesn’t mean you can make a living from it. I plateaued about two years ago and nothing seems to budge my paid subs above the 300 mark. The grand visions I had of being able to drop other work and focus mainly on Substack have yet to materialise.

I have considered raising subscription fees but I’ll be honest - I don’t want to. Currently mine sit around £5.50/USD $7.50 and I just can’t see how the average person could afford to pay for mine and a couple of others without it inching into painful money territory. I do think there could be some flexibility in the pricing structure (eg someone pays a one-off rate to read a feature but not have to sign up to a whole sub) but working with what exists, there’s the rub.

Monetising posts could allow people to make up the deficit they are seeing in paid subscriptions in order to allow them to spend more time on Substack, but the more I think about it, the more I think this will make the overall reading experience on here worse. It’s one thing to write a monetised post that would be something I would write anyway (for instance, a women’s only holiday), and another thing to take money to write something I wouldn’t normally have done but feel incentivised by commercial gain. There is simply no process that exists to make this a seamless, smooth experience for the reader. And the integrity of it would rely wholly on the person creating the content, and as we have already seen on other social media platforms, people will talk up a literal turd, if it means they are getting paid to do so.

The problem with embedded commercial-editorial posts is that Substack lacks any regulation around such posts, but perhaps the biggest thing is what it will do to the reading experience.

The writer-reader pipeline

The arena I don’t mind selling in, and being sold to, is books. It feels like a natural, organic extension of a person’s writing, and it follows that if I like reading their work on here, I’d probably like their books. It also feels wholesome - like someone selling your their wares at a farmer’s market. I’ve had to consider how much promotion I do of my own books on here, but I’d like to think that whoever finds it too much, will naturally tap out anyway, and the people who are interested will want to know more.

The future

An article on Emarketer.com published last year indicates perhaps a conflict of ideologies between Substack employees and investors - with some believing the social media ad model to be terrible and likely to damage the ecosystem, while others thinking that ‘creator demand’ for advertising avenues could lead to changes around the current ad model.

I’m not sure what the future holds - and there is already grumbling on the platform about the influx of celebrities on here, alongside other high profile personalities who already make a lot of money in other areas, who then paywall their content.

Although the prospect of potentially being able to make more money through writing is appealing given the dire state of the economy for freelancers especially in the UK, I can’t see how this is possible to do this as standard practice without diluting and harming the eco-system on here which does first and foremost is about reading and good writing of all varieties.

In terms of my own approach, I will continue to keep my Substack ad-free and if maintaining my newsletter ends up being unsustainable, then I’ll meet that problem when it arises. It might be something that I revisit again depending on the opportunity and how healthy my bank balance is. For now, I must remind myself of why I started writing on here in the first place - to connect with people and to use this as a space to be as experimental and creative as I like, in a way that isn’t beholden to anyone else’s agenda.

I’d love to know your thoughts in the comments below - please do try to keep it respectful.