Good morning everyone. I just went for a run in Park Slope and I felt like I had a sniper on me because of yesterday’s letter.
SCOOP: Substack wants to be YouTube ⏩
Over the weekend, the Substack comms team sent me an embargoed release introducing the “Substack Creator Studio.” This isn’t my first rodeo – I’ve worked at tech companies (Meta, Instagram, Shopify) who have incubated and invested in creators who then become the darling case studies for what success can look like on their platforms. It’s a format that works, which is why companies keep doing it. In this case, Substack is looking for 10 TikTok stars to bring their videos and community over to their platform – timely considering TikTok’s current fragility.
The real winner of this situation is Adam Faze, whose career I’ve covered quite closely in this letter. Even if the pivot to video flops, Faze and his production company still have a sweet deal. Substack is partnering with Faze’s production company Gymnasium, the short form television studio behind the viral show Boy Room, as part of this program. Each creator will receive consulting and production support from the Gymnasium team, which has a track record of developing innovative content, and in return… Gymnasium gets to produce ten shows under their brand new production company. Faze’s team is young enough and hungry enough that I think they’ll really be able to throw themselves into a project like this.
If you’re thinking “Wow, Substack is now going to be about writing and video and audio,” you’re right. That was concerning to me as well (as a writer), although based on my newsfeed of Substack employees, it wasn’t a total shock. They’ve been pushing audio and video for the last few months, and it’s ramped up recently. Last year, they set a high valuation of their company ($650mm) – if they want to be a social network, the best ones have a visual and audio component. If you look at the businesses who hold the most customer engagement, and people spend the most time on… it becomes very logical to conclude that video was the inevitable answer to make the most money.
I don’t want to pivot to video, for the record.
“On Substack, you can make money from subscriptions even if your audience is relatively small. If 1,000 people are willing to subscribe for $50 a year, that’s a livable income in most places in the world.” -
The Substack comms team gave me an opportunity to interview
, Substack’s co-founder and “Chief Writing Officer” (more on that below) about the business’s plans for the future in regards to video. And if you want to apply to be part of the studio, here ya go.EMILY: If I'm a creator and I already have a loyal audience on Instagram or YouTube, why would I make the jump and effort to move to Substack?
HAMISH: “There are lots of reasons, but the key ones are:
Own your relationship with your audience. On TikTok or Instagram, you don’t truly control your relationship with the people who care about your work: the platforms do. They can take away those audiences at any time, or change something in the algorithm that prevents you from reaching them, or put things in front of them that you would never want them to see. Those places are great for finding new audiences, but they ultimately make you more vulnerable than you should be. Owning your audience relationships, especially on a mailing list that you can take with you anywhere, gives you power.
Make money. It’s hard to make money on Instagram or YouTube even if you have a huge audience. Most people will do brand deals, or affiliate links, or hope for some share of the platform’s ad revenue—but all of those things are fickle and over-depend on outside forces (e.g. the state of the ad market). On Substack, you can make money from subscriptions even if your audience is relatively small, and the economics scale nicely. For example, if 1,000 people are willing to subscribe for $50 a year, that’s a livable income in most places in the world. While getting a thousand people into that kind of committed relationship isn’t easy, people who have audiences of hundreds of thousands, or more, on TikTok have a pretty good head start.
Stability. When you own all your content and your mailing list and you have steady money coming in from subscriptions, which are by definition relationship-based rather than content-based, then you have a strong foundation for your entire business. It doesn’t preclude bringing in other types of revenue, but for many creators of this type it will become their main source of income and one that’s not easily taken away by the whims of, say, an advertiser or a social media platform’s rule changes. \
Maybe this sounds like BS marketing talk, but we’ve seen these exact dynamics play out over the course of years with journalists, bloggers, analysts, academics, and podcasters. And we’re seeing it now with TikTokers and Instagrammers.”
EMILY: Why do you have the title “chief writing officer”? What does that mean to you?
HAMISH: “My previous title was COO and after a while it was getting absurd because I wasn’t doing anything like what a COO does. I’ve always worked with writers to bring them to Substack and help them succeed, and I’ve always written for the company (blog posts, manifestos, etc) in an attempt to communicate to the world what we care about and what we see is possible.
“We’ve seen from our data that writers who add audio or video to their Substacks grow 2.5 times faster than those who don’t.” -
Plus, I still just think of myself as a writer. So I made up the title Chief Writing Officer and gave it to myself because it better reflects what I actually do and care about. I’m a representative for writers inside the company, and I represent the company to writers. Writers are good and the work they do is valuable. I like that they have a place at the highest level of this company. (I actually wrote about this title change at the time, so you can dive into greater detail here.)”
EMILY: Who do you view as the Substack "customer"?
HAMISH: “Writers, podcasters, video makers, influencers, community leaders… the word people mostly use is creators, which is not perfect but it does capture the broad range of “People who make stuff and put it on the internet.” We also focus just as much on consumers: readers, listeners, viewers, community members, and such like. Put simply, though, it’s just “people who value good culture.” “
EMILY: Do you think writers with existing audiences on Substack should be dabbling in video and audio? If so, how does Substack plan to support them as they dabble / diversify?
HAMISH: “Yes, absolutely. At the very least, it’s always fun to try—different media are great for different types of expression. But also, we’ve seen from our data that writers who add audio or video to their Substacks grow 2.5 times faster than those who don’t. We’re going to keep supporting them by building first-class tools that make it simple for them to publish, distribute, and market their work. We also publish educational materials at on.substack.com/s/resources and run workshops and the likes.”
SOME NEWS:
It should come as no surprise that Equinox launched a $40k/year membership. “Optimize by Equinox” is a personalized health program that includes everything from personal training and nutrition plans to sleep coaching and massage therapy. People will absolutely pay for this.
From the East Hampton police logs, my favorite unhinged corner of the internet. A 17-year-old girl fell victim to an online scam when she attempted to sell a prom dress on Poshmark. She ultimately sent more than $1,000 in Apple gift cards, thinking there was an error with her account after receiving an email from the company that turned out to be fake. If I had Poshmark or a credit card when I was in high school, this totally would’ve been me.
Kelly Slater is launching sunscreen. I like the packaging. “I’ve always been about mineral sunscreens,” he told BoF.
The lengths kids (and their parents) take to play sports in college include:
Gaining weight their senior year of high school. “After a steady diet of protein shakes larded with chunky peanut butter, creatine monohydrate, and a few squirts of honey, Andy had gained 90 pounds.”
Paying for expensive private gyms. Once again, in HIGH SCHOOL. Did you hear that, “Optimize by Equinox”?
Being overly-aggressive on the field, just to make for good showreels. “Nowadays it’s entirely possible that when you watch a high school basketball game, players may be thinking as much about their reels as they are about winning the game.”
Starting the process sophomore year!
And networking like hell.
Sweetgreen officially launched steak on their menu.
“Carbone Beach” was an interesting social experiment. The restaurant was a collab between Carbone and American Express, and was built for F1 weekend. Elon Musk, Ken Griffin, and LeBron James all snagged tables. Odds one of these pop-ups appears in The Hamptons this summer…?
Big cop M+A.Taser and police body cam maker Axon is acquiring air defense startup Dedrone. Founded in 2014, Dedrone has been venture funded with $127 million in total from existing investors, including Axon, which co-led a round of financing with VC firms in July 2022, and has had a seat on the Dedrone board.
Do “rats have rights”? New York Magazine has a little chat about rat birth control.
See you tomorrow!
27 year old millionaire with boomer ass rhetoric suggesting $50k is a livable wage (in the US, where substack is HQed, it most certainly is not). not to mention, writing a substack ≠ health insurance. i can't imagine being this out of touch with reality.
as always, a huge fan of you Emily, zero criticisms.
This move would have been more authentic to Substack's mission if they had incubated and supported *existing* writers on the platform who want to explore video as a format vs. luring TikTok creators and YouTubers. Substack has realized that the way to make gobs of money is to expand the platform's network of users/non-creators exponentially. And Tiktokers and YouTubers arguably have the largest audiences right now, not writers.
It's a smart business move, but it does annoy me as a writer on the platform. Will written content still receive the same support and visibility? Where does control over my own audience and content start and end here? Substack likes to tout that you "own" your audience—yet they're still using your email list to send automated emails to get your subscribers to follow and subscribe to other publications (or channels? (Or whatever it is they will call it now.) It feels so weird to me that the hundreds of thousands of my readers who I brought onto Substack are getting automated emails that are not sent by me... Will they now be asked to subscribe to video creators' channels? Anyway - interesting move and will be following how this unfolds...