I also think this is great; I'm glad you're doing it, and I'm glad you laid out the reasons why. However, I thought I'd point something out. You keep mentioning Hollywood, along with music and writing. Fair enough. However, Hollywood directors did this in 1919! D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin formed United Artists. You probably know this, but I thought I'd mention it. The Wikipedia page on United Artists gives its history, and if I'm reading it correctly, it doesn't seem that the artists (directors and actors/actresses) stayed in control all that long - and MGM bought it in 1981. I hope the internet provides a different way for artists of all types to stay in control, just as you say. It just worries me that it will be very difficult in the long run. The mindsets and skillsets for business and art are extremely different, and the Bandcamp example doesn't inspire confidence, you know?
I voted a strong "No" at the would-be "shareholders" meeting, Ted. I respect you and your work a great deal. You know why they visited you in Austin? Because you're a big revenue source, Ted. All your charts and pie-charts and whatever should not distract that this is a money grab. It's very hierarchal: You're a star here and get their attention; I am a worker bee from the factory floor. They already receive revenue from my meager earnings from every paid subscription I get: That's supposed to be their business model, which it appears is not working. So they want to claw back some of my earnings? I have many charities I'd rather support with my $100. And that's what it is: asking for charity, because chance of ROI is almost nil, and you must know that.
Hey Wayne - Bailey here from Substack. I know your name well from office hours, and am sad to see that you feel like a worker bee in our world. That’s not at all how I feel, and we don’t want writers feeling that way. (I’m all ears for feedback on how can we do better)
Regarding the investment, we said this quite a few times in our blog post, but we urge anyone who doesn’t think they want to do this or shouldn’t do it to **not** invest and we mean that. Investments in start ups are risky. That said, we have had writers ask us many times for the chance to own equity in the business, and I am excited that because of regulatory changes we now have a way to do that. Feedback is again very welcome on how we could have communicated better.
I'd rather share with you privately, Bailey, rather than hijack Ted's thread. I'll catch you on Twitter or something, or DM me with an email and I will contact you. You have indeed been supportive, and I appreciate that.
From what I can tell this is the trajectory of most start ups. They have a great idea, they put it out into the world. If they are lucky, it really is a good idea and lots of people come on board and start using it. Then they open the company up to shareholders. Once that happens the people who run the company become beholden to their shareholders not their users. They go one of two ways: they make the product shittier and shittier to bring in more profit or they sell the company to an internet behemoth which makes the product shittier and shittier for the user but more profitable for the shareholder. Cory Doctorow lays it all out in the excellent article: Pluralistic: Tik Tok's Enshittification. I sincerely hope that Substack does not follow this path, that the writers and the founders keep control of the company and don't allow rampant greed to ruin this wonderful platform.
Critical thinking, Wayne. I'm much too business ignorant to know if what you say has merit, but I appreciate your comments. And just to add to Bailey's comment...we are all 'worker bees'...that is our strength. Kia ora! Be well!
Ted, you’re not a shareholder. Shareholders own stock, or shares in the company. What we would be buying into here is a class B bond series. Class B bond is venture capital. At least my understanding/read.
Should Substack need to liquidate, investors with this offering will not get 1 penny of their investment returned until the liquidation would exceed the 585 million dollars.
I’m going to wait for the IPO and buy real stock shares in Substack.
What's that Marxist line about workers owning the memes of production? I'm not a Marxist, but this always made fundamental sense to me. The guild structure of the Middle Ages, in which professionals controlled their own professional lives, is desirable on the face of it.
Apply this elsewhere.
If the universities were owned by scholars, would we have administrative tyranny and wokeness?
If the hospitals were owned by doctors and nurses, would we have the sick care system?
If agribusiness was owned by farmers, would we have glyphosate?
The point is simple. Each sector of the economy exists for a purpose, and should be operated by those for whom that purpose - and not some other motive, such as rent extraction or ideological influence - is their primary motivator.
"Memes of" do not stand in well for "Actual" when the subject is "Production". But that's not why I'm responding here.
You wrote "If agribusiness was owned by farmers, would we have glyphosate?" I used to manage rural properties, many of them with farming, ranching and other extractive land uses. One of our tenants is among the most enlightened people I've ever known. When his organic row crop business finally got up and running he invited the United Farm Workers to unionize his operations. He did that to simplify his payroll management. It saved him lots of time, and made his employees happier. Then he offered up the business itself to his employees, because that strengthened the company's long-term prospects by giving the staff skin in the game.
So those couple hundred acres are now the basis for a modern employee-owned enterprise. Our tenant is now a well-respected expert on land use, community organizing and small business management.
I wish all farmers were so enlightened. The fact is, farmers love glyphosate and all the other chemicals they can get their hands on. It allows them to push production way beyond the limits of what the land can actually sustain. I know lots of farmers who "know better" but they continue down their old path because it is easy and change is hard. They also don't really care for the environment beyond what profits they can extract from it. Another, more enlightened farmer friend does things in a much more ecologically sound way. They are intergenerational farmers and draw a lot of criticism from the other members of the squattocracy in our area.
Dunno what you're on about there, but I'll chime in that all the farmers I knew were tenants, not landowners.
2 reasons:
1)owners just sit on the land and wait for developers to change the local zoning laws so they can plant the Last Crop, thereby stratosphering the land value
Squattocracy is a bastardisation of the terms "squatter" and "aristocracy". It is a name given to very large landowners in Australia who were basically given huge tracts of land simply because they were squatting there. These landowners became very rich and very powerful off their virtually free landholdings. Down the generations they remain very rich and very self-entitled.
I don't know about how cheap farmland is to rent, or whether that is actually the case in Australia. Most small farmers I know of actually own their land. There aren't that many of them these days. The smallish family farm has pretty much disappeared. What small farms there are tend to be value adding to the products they produce and selling them directly.
Are you certain you don’t want to move back to Palo Alto, buy a printing press, crank out 500 to 1,000 copies per week or month, hand them out or sell them at Lytton Plaza or Mac’s Smoke Shop, wheat paste them to walls by moonlight? I would invest $500 (five hundred — not five hundred thousand, five hundred million or five hundred billion — we actually have many billionaires here, but I’m not one of them — I mean, I know where they live, one of them seems to follow me with the eye of Sauron as my dog and I walk by and pee on his shrubs…). Stay indie, Ted.
There are three residences on my block with security cameras that can track me or Poochie as we pass or — excuse the expression— pass water — but only one that 99 percent likely is owned by a famous tech billionaire; despite my joke, I actually feel safer in front of his house because of the cameras.
If we actually pass 5 billionaires on our morning rounds, its a loose definition, and conflates residences and offices.
Actually I’m not that far off topic: we pass the former site of The Palo Alto Times which is redeveloped and has banks and money managers where there were for decades reporters. And as Palo Alto goes, so goes America….Capitalism….
“Why shouldn’t writers—or musicians or photographers or workers on a film crew, etc.—also be owners of their creative enterprises? Wouldn’t that be a good thing?”
They have been, and with very mixed results:
United Artists, founded in 1919 by Charlie Chaplin and friends, floundered by the mid-1920s.
Apple Records, founded in 1968 by the Beatles, imploded by the mid-1970s.
Magnum Photos, founded in 1947 by Robert Capa and other famous photographers, is a thriving co-op but is very picky about who it allows to join.
I.F. Stone’s Weekly, 1953-1971, was an influential newspaper written, edited, and published by one man. Circulation peaked at 70,000. (How many Substackers would be happy with that many paid subscription?)
If you want to include underground newspapers, obscure poetry magazines, Web radio, and so forth the list of outlets owned and run by “creatives” would get exhaustive and exhausting.
My point is that writers owning the publishing platform is not by itself either a good or a bad thing.
As another commenter already noted, most of Substack’s capital already comes from writers. Unless writers-as-investors get enough voting shares to elect directors and to steer the company, then what’s the point in them putting money into it? As Boss Hogg might have said, “I don’t care who does the investin’ as long as I do the spending.”
ChatGPT does not have the style or the excitement of a human writer. But I worry too. I've noticed some crap writing presented as articles come up as suggested reading on my phone feeds. You can tell it's not a human. But what if they get better at it?
I want to know that what makes me think and feel is written by another human being. 😊
This is another potentially game-changing move by Substack and certainly what a contrast to what is happening with verification check-marks on Twitter. I had the pleasure of meeting a few Substack staffers at a meet-up in Toronto last fall (sadly, Ontarians are precluded from joining this venture at this time) and was very impressed with their dedication and belief in the mission of Substack.
I mean, my main issue with this is that Substack is a bad platform, by which I mean that it’s detrimental to the well-being of the United States. I love your column (because I love jazz music) and you’re a star here but anti-trans campaigns are prolific on this platform. You may get a lot of engagement but I doubt you get as much as LibsOfTikTok or Christopher Rufo -- both of whom utilize Substack to push discriminatory ideologies against trans people. Those blogs have shaped legislation as states ban drag shows and gender care. Also, your blog may be big but it’s probably not as big as Gray Mirror, the pseudo-intellectual anti-democracy Substack run by Curtis Yarvin which has followers at the highest levels of public life. Billionaires like Peter Thiel. Substack is a bad platform. It normalizes anti-American ideals like acceptance and democracy. If you invest you should put pressure on the owners to fix this thing.
Um... that is a strange take to put here. Substack is beloved because it allows any and all view points to be expressed. Most all of us think that it is revolutionary because of that exact aspect. Corporate media is not serving democracy well right now. I see the writers questioning the trans movement and I feel new hope for the hard-won rights of women and girls who are called bigots if we request that Trans rights not infringe our own rights. If the mainstream press would cover this topic openly there wouldn't be backlash. We need more openness, not less.
Well if its not enough for you to associate women with protecting children, how about not wanting to be made fun of? If you can understand being offended by blackface, perhaps you can empathize with me taking offence with Woman-face. Again, not a problem if it isn't pushed at schools and libraries, and if kids aren't invited to bars to partake because I can just avoid it mostly.
Drag shows that involve kids are the problem, not drag shows as adult behavior. Women and children are the traditionally protected group and I'm not willing to give that up.
Taken as a whole, this is an astonishing effect of the change we are all experiencing with modern realities of our economic conditions and cultural and political change. I am proud to be one of the subscribers to have pushed the graph up so high which clearly presents an undeniable trend of strong interest by the public in the integrity of authorship. I agree there needs to be creator ownership of a work product more than at any time in history. A trend in that direction can help our economic woes. Bravo and Onward!
My biggest issue with INVESTING in Substack is it’s really just a donation and nothing more. How do I know this? Because almost 90% of the business’s revenue goes back to the writer. That’s great for us as writers, but terrible for us as an investor. Nope.
I mentioned on the main announcement, but I think most people will view investing in Substack as an endorsement of the platform’s direction & stated principles more than anything else. I would, anyway.
It’s not the same analysis you’d apply to,say, buying stock in Chevron.
I like your dream. But I trust no one with money. Money should not be the way. Money is a short cut. For some a huge short cut. For others a very long way around and into the wilderness. You are simply suggesting a pyramid game. Another one. There will be no solution to payment of creatives in the present order of things. DRIP is the model of any pyramid.
I also think this is great; I'm glad you're doing it, and I'm glad you laid out the reasons why. However, I thought I'd point something out. You keep mentioning Hollywood, along with music and writing. Fair enough. However, Hollywood directors did this in 1919! D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin formed United Artists. You probably know this, but I thought I'd mention it. The Wikipedia page on United Artists gives its history, and if I'm reading it correctly, it doesn't seem that the artists (directors and actors/actresses) stayed in control all that long - and MGM bought it in 1981. I hope the internet provides a different way for artists of all types to stay in control, just as you say. It just worries me that it will be very difficult in the long run. The mindsets and skillsets for business and art are extremely different, and the Bandcamp example doesn't inspire confidence, you know?
We are on the same cap table now, comrade. Let one thousand Substacks bloom! Empowering writers and protecting free speech will help us counter the cultural revolution: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/counter-the-cultural-revolution
👏❤️👌
Great idea, Ted...owners treat things better than non owners...the old saying, nobody washes a rental car
I voted a strong "No" at the would-be "shareholders" meeting, Ted. I respect you and your work a great deal. You know why they visited you in Austin? Because you're a big revenue source, Ted. All your charts and pie-charts and whatever should not distract that this is a money grab. It's very hierarchal: You're a star here and get their attention; I am a worker bee from the factory floor. They already receive revenue from my meager earnings from every paid subscription I get: That's supposed to be their business model, which it appears is not working. So they want to claw back some of my earnings? I have many charities I'd rather support with my $100. And that's what it is: asking for charity, because chance of ROI is almost nil, and you must know that.
Hey Wayne - Bailey here from Substack. I know your name well from office hours, and am sad to see that you feel like a worker bee in our world. That’s not at all how I feel, and we don’t want writers feeling that way. (I’m all ears for feedback on how can we do better)
Regarding the investment, we said this quite a few times in our blog post, but we urge anyone who doesn’t think they want to do this or shouldn’t do it to **not** invest and we mean that. Investments in start ups are risky. That said, we have had writers ask us many times for the chance to own equity in the business, and I am excited that because of regulatory changes we now have a way to do that. Feedback is again very welcome on how we could have communicated better.
I'd rather share with you privately, Bailey, rather than hijack Ted's thread. I'll catch you on Twitter or something, or DM me with an email and I will contact you. You have indeed been supportive, and I appreciate that.
From what I can tell this is the trajectory of most start ups. They have a great idea, they put it out into the world. If they are lucky, it really is a good idea and lots of people come on board and start using it. Then they open the company up to shareholders. Once that happens the people who run the company become beholden to their shareholders not their users. They go one of two ways: they make the product shittier and shittier to bring in more profit or they sell the company to an internet behemoth which makes the product shittier and shittier for the user but more profitable for the shareholder. Cory Doctorow lays it all out in the excellent article: Pluralistic: Tik Tok's Enshittification. I sincerely hope that Substack does not follow this path, that the writers and the founders keep control of the company and don't allow rampant greed to ruin this wonderful platform.
Critical thinking, Wayne. I'm much too business ignorant to know if what you say has merit, but I appreciate your comments. And just to add to Bailey's comment...we are all 'worker bees'...that is our strength. Kia ora! Be well!
Well said and thank you, Ken.
Ted, you’re not a shareholder. Shareholders own stock, or shares in the company. What we would be buying into here is a class B bond series. Class B bond is venture capital. At least my understanding/read.
Should Substack need to liquidate, investors with this offering will not get 1 penny of their investment returned until the liquidation would exceed the 585 million dollars.
I’m going to wait for the IPO and buy real stock shares in Substack.
What's that Marxist line about workers owning the memes of production? I'm not a Marxist, but this always made fundamental sense to me. The guild structure of the Middle Ages, in which professionals controlled their own professional lives, is desirable on the face of it.
Apply this elsewhere.
If the universities were owned by scholars, would we have administrative tyranny and wokeness?
If the hospitals were owned by doctors and nurses, would we have the sick care system?
If agribusiness was owned by farmers, would we have glyphosate?
The point is simple. Each sector of the economy exists for a purpose, and should be operated by those for whom that purpose - and not some other motive, such as rent extraction or ideological influence - is their primary motivator.
Memes of Production! Ha! That should BE a Substack!
I was waiting for someone to pick up on that.
"Memes of" do not stand in well for "Actual" when the subject is "Production". But that's not why I'm responding here.
You wrote "If agribusiness was owned by farmers, would we have glyphosate?" I used to manage rural properties, many of them with farming, ranching and other extractive land uses. One of our tenants is among the most enlightened people I've ever known. When his organic row crop business finally got up and running he invited the United Farm Workers to unionize his operations. He did that to simplify his payroll management. It saved him lots of time, and made his employees happier. Then he offered up the business itself to his employees, because that strengthened the company's long-term prospects by giving the staff skin in the game.
So those couple hundred acres are now the basis for a modern employee-owned enterprise. Our tenant is now a well-respected expert on land use, community organizing and small business management.
And no, they will never use glyphosate.
I wish all farmers were so enlightened. The fact is, farmers love glyphosate and all the other chemicals they can get their hands on. It allows them to push production way beyond the limits of what the land can actually sustain. I know lots of farmers who "know better" but they continue down their old path because it is easy and change is hard. They also don't really care for the environment beyond what profits they can extract from it. Another, more enlightened farmer friend does things in a much more ecologically sound way. They are intergenerational farmers and draw a lot of criticism from the other members of the squattocracy in our area.
squattocracy...
Dunno what you're on about there, but I'll chime in that all the farmers I knew were tenants, not landowners.
2 reasons:
1)owners just sit on the land and wait for developers to change the local zoning laws so they can plant the Last Crop, thereby stratosphering the land value
2)farmland is CHEAP to rent.
Squattocracy is a bastardisation of the terms "squatter" and "aristocracy". It is a name given to very large landowners in Australia who were basically given huge tracts of land simply because they were squatting there. These landowners became very rich and very powerful off their virtually free landholdings. Down the generations they remain very rich and very self-entitled.
I don't know about how cheap farmland is to rent, or whether that is actually the case in Australia. Most small farmers I know of actually own their land. There aren't that many of them these days. The smallish family farm has pretty much disappeared. What small farms there are tend to be value adding to the products they produce and selling them directly.
Are you certain you don’t want to move back to Palo Alto, buy a printing press, crank out 500 to 1,000 copies per week or month, hand them out or sell them at Lytton Plaza or Mac’s Smoke Shop, wheat paste them to walls by moonlight? I would invest $500 (five hundred — not five hundred thousand, five hundred million or five hundred billion — we actually have many billionaires here, but I’m not one of them — I mean, I know where they live, one of them seems to follow me with the eye of Sauron as my dog and I walk by and pee on his shrubs…). Stay indie, Ted.
Thanks for the reminders re: Palo Alto...
There are three residences on my block with security cameras that can track me or Poochie as we pass or — excuse the expression— pass water — but only one that 99 percent likely is owned by a famous tech billionaire; despite my joke, I actually feel safer in front of his house because of the cameras.
If we actually pass 5 billionaires on our morning rounds, its a loose definition, and conflates residences and offices.
Actually I’m not that far off topic: we pass the former site of The Palo Alto Times which is redeveloped and has banks and money managers where there were for decades reporters. And as Palo Alto goes, so goes America….Capitalism….
“Why shouldn’t writers—or musicians or photographers or workers on a film crew, etc.—also be owners of their creative enterprises? Wouldn’t that be a good thing?”
They have been, and with very mixed results:
United Artists, founded in 1919 by Charlie Chaplin and friends, floundered by the mid-1920s.
Apple Records, founded in 1968 by the Beatles, imploded by the mid-1970s.
Magnum Photos, founded in 1947 by Robert Capa and other famous photographers, is a thriving co-op but is very picky about who it allows to join.
I.F. Stone’s Weekly, 1953-1971, was an influential newspaper written, edited, and published by one man. Circulation peaked at 70,000. (How many Substackers would be happy with that many paid subscription?)
If you want to include underground newspapers, obscure poetry magazines, Web radio, and so forth the list of outlets owned and run by “creatives” would get exhaustive and exhausting.
My point is that writers owning the publishing platform is not by itself either a good or a bad thing.
As another commenter already noted, most of Substack’s capital already comes from writers. Unless writers-as-investors get enough voting shares to elect directors and to steer the company, then what’s the point in them putting money into it? As Boss Hogg might have said, “I don’t care who does the investin’ as long as I do the spending.”
Best wishes for a successful investment!
My only concern is that the World is going to be sucked up by ChatGPT!
ChatGPT does not have the style or the excitement of a human writer. But I worry too. I've noticed some crap writing presented as articles come up as suggested reading on my phone feeds. You can tell it's not a human. But what if they get better at it?
I want to know that what makes me think and feel is written by another human being. 😊
This is another potentially game-changing move by Substack and certainly what a contrast to what is happening with verification check-marks on Twitter. I had the pleasure of meeting a few Substack staffers at a meet-up in Toronto last fall (sadly, Ontarians are precluded from joining this venture at this time) and was very impressed with their dedication and belief in the mission of Substack.
👌
Thank you for this! I believe in the model, too.
I mean, my main issue with this is that Substack is a bad platform, by which I mean that it’s detrimental to the well-being of the United States. I love your column (because I love jazz music) and you’re a star here but anti-trans campaigns are prolific on this platform. You may get a lot of engagement but I doubt you get as much as LibsOfTikTok or Christopher Rufo -- both of whom utilize Substack to push discriminatory ideologies against trans people. Those blogs have shaped legislation as states ban drag shows and gender care. Also, your blog may be big but it’s probably not as big as Gray Mirror, the pseudo-intellectual anti-democracy Substack run by Curtis Yarvin which has followers at the highest levels of public life. Billionaires like Peter Thiel. Substack is a bad platform. It normalizes anti-American ideals like acceptance and democracy. If you invest you should put pressure on the owners to fix this thing.
Um... that is a strange take to put here. Substack is beloved because it allows any and all view points to be expressed. Most all of us think that it is revolutionary because of that exact aspect. Corporate media is not serving democracy well right now. I see the writers questioning the trans movement and I feel new hope for the hard-won rights of women and girls who are called bigots if we request that Trans rights not infringe our own rights. If the mainstream press would cover this topic openly there wouldn't be backlash. We need more openness, not less.
How do drag shows infringe on the rights of women?
again, how do drag shows infringe on the rights of women?
Well if its not enough for you to associate women with protecting children, how about not wanting to be made fun of? If you can understand being offended by blackface, perhaps you can empathize with me taking offence with Woman-face. Again, not a problem if it isn't pushed at schools and libraries, and if kids aren't invited to bars to partake because I can just avoid it mostly.
....you’re offended by the existence of drag shows?
Drag shows that involve kids are the problem, not drag shows as adult behavior. Women and children are the traditionally protected group and I'm not willing to give that up.
Taken as a whole, this is an astonishing effect of the change we are all experiencing with modern realities of our economic conditions and cultural and political change. I am proud to be one of the subscribers to have pushed the graph up so high which clearly presents an undeniable trend of strong interest by the public in the integrity of authorship. I agree there needs to be creator ownership of a work product more than at any time in history. A trend in that direction can help our economic woes. Bravo and Onward!
My biggest issue with INVESTING in Substack is it’s really just a donation and nothing more. How do I know this? Because almost 90% of the business’s revenue goes back to the writer. That’s great for us as writers, but terrible for us as an investor. Nope.
I mentioned on the main announcement, but I think most people will view investing in Substack as an endorsement of the platform’s direction & stated principles more than anything else. I would, anyway.
It’s not the same analysis you’d apply to,say, buying stock in Chevron.
I like your dream. But I trust no one with money. Money should not be the way. Money is a short cut. For some a huge short cut. For others a very long way around and into the wilderness. You are simply suggesting a pyramid game. Another one. There will be no solution to payment of creatives in the present order of things. DRIP is the model of any pyramid.