About These Little Flowers for Paid Subscribers...

Substack has made the distinction between paying and non-paying users plain for all to see. I share my thoughts on this as both a publisher and paid subscriber to other publications.

On September 24th, Substack added a feature to its platform that automatically displays a little flower icon next to the usernames of members who pay to support at least one Substack publication. The appearance of the flower will also change to indicate how many different publications the user supports: 1-4, 5-9, or 10+. This change has ruffled a few feathers in the community, raising concerns about privacy and even classism.

The change was announced in a note by Chris Best, CEO and co-founder of Substack, in which he gave his explanation for the change. It’s not a long note, so I can just quote the entirety of the relevant part here:

Part of why Substack is good is that it’s full of wonderful people who take out paid subscriptions to support work they value, and the people who produce it.

It also has other positive effects in the ecosystem. When people see you subscribe, you are creating a valuable signal that you are a real human and not a bot, and aiding in the fight against spam, trolls, and other problems that plague internet platforms. When you see someone who subscribes to the same thing as you, you have an instant connection.

That’s not a whole lot of explanation for what amounts to a fairly significant change, so Substack’s motivation for adding the badges needs to be extrapolated from what little official documentation there has been. One need not look much further than Substack’s business model, though - its sole revenue source is a 10% cut from paid subscriptions. (I think you can make the logical leap from there.)

I can’t speak to the validity of the “real human and not a bot” motivation, as I haven’t personally had any experience with bot troubles on Substack. It seems reasonable to assume, however, that Substack will not escape the proliferation of bots on its platform that is plaguing places like X (née Twitter), so perhaps it is useful to have a reliable visual cue that an account is not a bot. Of course, if this were the main goal, it could be accomplished without overtly referencing a user’s paid subscription status, so that’s clearly an ancillary benefit of the change at best.

The actual point of the badges, obviously, is to normalize paying for content on Substack. Less charitable commentators might say it’s to guilt, shame, or otherwise coerce people to pay for content, but I think this is a distinction without a difference. The platform can’t exist without paid users; this is how Substack avoids the well-established (and well-hated) ad-supported and algorithmic models of other large platforms.

And paid users are a tiny minority on Substack. To wit: according to SEO consultation firm AtOnce, only about 5% of the approximately 35 million active subscriptions on the platform are paid. Substack doesn’t release data at the level of individual users, but it’s reasonable to assume that the percentage of people who pay for at least one subscription is within shouting distance of that 5% figure.

What do I think about all of this?

Firstly, I am sympathetic to the privacy concerns. At the moment, there’s no way for users to control the display of the flower icon - if you have paid subscriptions, the icon will appear and indicate how many paid subscriptions you have. You can hide the names of your paid subscriptions from public view, but there is currently no option for users to hide the fact that they pay for content on the platform. (I don’t know why anyone would want to do that, but I’m generally for giving users more control over their public-facing information rather than less.)

I also think it’s obvious that the change is meant to reward paid subscribers and shame those who don’t pay. I don’t know why this one little detail bothers me so much, but when you click on the profile of a paying subscriber, it says [username] subscribes. In italics. That italicization strikes me as a weirdly aggressive design choice, one that does more than declare something factually true about the user. I can easily see a non-paying subscriber reading it as, “[username] subscribes, why don’t you?”

This brings us to the accusations of classism, which I have to admit I have a hard time sympathizing with completely. It’s true that this new system deliberately creates an in-group/out-group dichotomy, and that’s always going to bother the people who get out-grouped. It’s also true that you need to pay to be a member of the in-group, and that will certainly make some people uncomfortable ipsō factō. (You can sense there’s a but coming…)

BUT!

To get the little flower next to your name, to be in the vaunted, celebrated, coveted in-group, all you have to do is be a paid subscriber to one Substack publication. The most common asking price for a paid Substack subscription at the time of writing is around $5 per month. Five American dollars. That’s about 1.3 gallons of gas (30-40 miles’ worth), or one fancy Starbucks drink. It’s less than a McDonald’s cheeseburger meal, or a month of Spotify Premium, or the cheapest Netflix subscription. Most of my readers are accessing Substack via the mobile app, which means they have a smartphone. The average monthly cell service bill in the US is around $70, so five bucks is about two days’ worth of service for the device you’re using to read this.

So what’s really going on?

Surely there are some people in America (where most of Substack’s audience resides) who legitimately do not have $5 in disposable income a month for discretionary spending. Thankfully, most Americans’ financial situation is not that dire; I suspect that many (most?) of the people denouncing the badge system (on the grounds that it discriminates against people who do not have $5 to spend on Substack every month) absolutely do have $5 a month to spend here, even if they say that they don’t.

While I do think that many people are being disingenuous and distorting the picture of Substack readers’ financial health, I also suspect that there is a legitimate cause underlying the backlash, even if it’s not being articulated: subscription fatigue. People have to pay monthly for too many things that they want to have access to, and there’s a tipping point for everyone, beyond which it becomes too much to add yet another monthly charge. I can absolutely see individual Substack subscriptions falling into that category. Most people could not afford to pay for all, or even most, of the content they subscribe to and read regularly on Substack.

If I may, the actual problem…

At the heart of this little tempest in a teacup, I believe, is a profound misunderstanding (and concomitant misuse) of Substack as a platform. For Substack is not a social media platform.

I’ll say it again for the ones who fell asleep (fair enough!) six paragraphs ago: Substack is not a social media platform. Nor is it a blogging site.

Many users, however, treat it like one, and that is a recipe for having a bad time on Substack. I have plenty of sympathy for people who make this error; after all, Substack sure looks like a social media platform sometimes. It has a ‘follow’ feature (à la X), a ‘subscribe’ button (à la YouTube), a personalized content feed, ‘like’ hearts, ‘restacking’ (i.e. retweeting), et cetera. “If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck…”

But Substack is designed to be fundamentally different from social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok in one very important way - monetization. Substack’s business model circumscribes the most basic aspects of the platform, from how users get paid to who the platform is for. The creators of the site could not be more clear about this: Substack is a marketplace for creators who are encouraged to treat their work as a business and create content that their audience is willing to pay for. Paid subscriptions are the point. When you create a Substack publication, it is very clear from the beginning that the site expects you to turn on paid subscriptions at some point, because the site simply cannot exist without them.

Explicit comparisons to ad-supported models like Instagram and TikTok are important to hammer this point home. Instagram and TikTok need your eyeballs on their apps so that they can put targeted ads in front of them. This is why simple engagement with the app is currency on those platforms - they make money by selling your attention to advertisers. Individual creators can get paid based on how much of this engagement - likes, shares, comments - their content drives on the site. This incentivizes creators to post regularly, keep up with the algorithm, and make content that can go viral.

On Substack, the only currency is currency. As in fiat - you know, that $5 we spoke about earlier. Publishers do not get paid a penny from the platform for likes, restacks, comments, or reading time. A Substack publication with 100,000 free subscribers and millions of views would earn precisely zero dollars for the publisher and Substack. The only source of revenue for publishers through Substack is you, the person reading this. I hope you understand just how different that makes the place you’re hanging out in right now.

When I get a new free subscriber (which is all of my subscribers at the moment, since I haven’t yet enabled paid subscriptions - it’s coming!), I do smile and feel grateful, but I also worry a bit. Substack shows me what other publications each new subscriber also subscribes to, and in some cases it’s not just dozens, but over 100. If you’re subscribed to over 100 publications on here and not paying for any of them, dear reader, you have mistaken Substack for Instagram!

While we’re at it - we’re also not blogging here

Substack is also very much not a blogging platform like Medium or BlogSpot. Again, understandable confusion, since many publications here are individual people writing, but this ignores the fact that Substack is only actively courting people who want to curate an audience of loyal, directly-paying customers. Medium does not offer direct payments between readers and writers, and BlogSpot doesn’t have a payment system at all.

Adding to the mass confusion on both this point and the one above, I think, is the fact that many publishers are also guilty of misunderstanding and therefore misusing the platform. I want to be careful how I word this, because I can already sense some discontent with the charge of misuse. I think it’s perfectly defensible, nevertheless, to declare that writers who set up shop on Substack without any designs on the shop part have, like the readers I mentioned above, mistaken Substack for something else.

There are tangible negative impacts of misusing the platform in this way (i.e. treating it like a free blogging site). First of all, Substack foots the bill for hosting publications and delivering content via email, to say nothing of the operational and marketing costs of running the company. They pay for all of this (as far as I know) by taking 10% from paid subscription fees. If you have no paid subscribers (and have no intention of ever having any, for whatever reason), your publication generates zero revenue and is being subsidized by people (like me) who are paying for other people’s content.

Secondly, giving away all of your content for free reinforces the misconception that Substack is the place to go for unlimited free content (like Instagram), which, as I think I’ve mentioned fourteen times by now, it very much is not. This is why so many Substack users react with surprise (and consternation!) when they’re reminded by a little icon that it’s a place for paying customers.

Thirdly, and perhaps most nefariously, publishers who give all of their content away for free make it harder for others to sell their own. Readers will (fairly) ask why they should pay publisher B for her writing when publisher A writes in the same genre and offers up all of her work for free. To be clear, the lesson here is not that free content is morally reprehensible, it’s that Substack was expressly designed for people who want to sell their content. If you don’t ever want to sell your content, that’s great too - you can distribute it through other platforms that have different business models.

Substack allows free subscribers and publishers, and that’s ok too, paradoxically

One way that Substack is different from platforms like Patreon or OnlyFans is that it doesn’t ever require that anyone sell or buy content. At the risk of contradicting myself, or at least undercutting my previous points, I should point out that free subscribers and publishers are still welcome in the Substack model. It’s a good thing that publishers can decide what content they want to offer for free and what is only for paying customers. Free content is the obvious way to begin for new creators who are trying to build an audience - readers won’t be willing to pay for content that they can’t sample first.

This is precisely how I’ve been running my Substack publication since I launched it, so I completely understand and support this use of the site. I am also scheming in the background to enable paid content for those who want more, and that’s why I’ve chosen to spend most of my time here on Substack rather than trying to make money on the ad-supported social media sites.

Wow I wrote too much, sorry

In sum!

• Substack’s business model requires paid subscribers for the site to exist.

• Substack is always going to prioritize and promote its paying customers.

• Some people are pretending to be mad about the paid badges because they don’t have $5, when actually they’re mad for different (but also perfectly understandable) reasons.

• Many readers (and even publishers) treat Substack like an ad-supported social media site or blog, which leads to confusion and misuse of the platform.

• I am not good at expressing myself concisely.

After all that, would you believe that I even left some stuff out? I’ll fill in those blanks when I finally launch a paid tier for Naked Prose. As always, thank you for reading - please feel free to yell at me in the comments if something I’ve said is completely stupid or offensive to you.