Should I leave Substack?

“Which platform should I use?” is the most common thing I get asked.

Immediately followed by “Should I switch platforms?”

I’ve come to be very biased against Substack, in particular, because I think they’re screwing over most of their writers and peddling a false promise of growth on autopilot.

There are still reasons to start your publication on Substack.

There are definitely reasons to keep your publication there.

But there are also reasons to leave.

This week, we’re pitting Substack, Ghost and beehiiv against each other.

The rest of the platforms didn’t make the playoffs, but if you’ve got feelings about that, weigh in!

Tell me why you love your platform. Why you hate it. Why you left it. Just smash that reply button. I’m right on the other side.

Substack vs Ghost vs beehiiv

Why these three? They’re the ones I hear about the most from journalists.

Check out my running list of reader-funded publications and you’ll see for yourself.

Lede and MailChimp also made appearances but they didn’t have the stats to play with the superstars. They dropped the ball in every growth and monetization category.

Sorry boys, back to training camp with you! Onward with our contenders!

Our criteria

As the name of this newsletter suggests, I’m most interested in you getting paid.

Getting paid for your newsletter or blog comes down to two things:

1) How your platform helps grow your audience
2) How your platform helps convert that audience into money

There’s TONS of comparisons out there that go beyond this because there’s probably a lot of other things you care about.

Dan Oshinsky wrote this very thorough post on Picking The Right Email Platform for Your Indie Newsletter. I also recommend Reddit as a great place to vet your tools.

But when it came to growth, monetization and marketing, here’s how the tools stacked up:

Platforms that help you grow your audience

Only Substack and beehiiv made the cut here.

How do they help you grow your audience?

• Recommendations: that screen that appears after you subscribe to a newsletter that recommends other publications. Example from beehiiv

• Referral program: unique trackers and rewards to encourage your readers to share.

• SEO-friendly web archive: your articles can be published to the web and newsletter at the same time and are searchable by Google (Ghost does this too.)

Substack’s gotten pretty popular because of their “writers network” which make their recommendations stronger than beehiiv’s for many journalists.

That’s because Substack also has:

• A social network/searchable feed: Substack makes it easy to discover writers and be discovered as a new publication. See it in action.

💡 This is the feature I hear about the most from writers who love Substack.

Nika Talbot who writes The Shift told me “I’m in it for connection, collaboration and community. It’s a genuine, intelligent community of diverse writers and creatives of all ages, locations, subjects.”

beehiiv doesn’t have a discoverability mechanism yet and that’s their main drawback right now.

Most Substackers are leaning heavy into those recommendations to grow their newsletter list, and while the same feature is available on beehiiv, you just won’t find the same caliber of journalists and writers to trade promotion with, though that’s changing rapidly.

Platforms that help you monetize your audience

Now, we’re adding Ghost into the mix. Ghost, Substack and beehiiv all help you monetize.

If you’re using Ghost, you also have to use Outpost for monetization. I covered that last week so I’m not going to rehash it but you can catch up on why Outpost is critical for all Ghost publishers.

How do these three platforms help you monetize?

• Low friction upgrades: You deserve well designed paywalls and upgrade screens that include no extra fields or steps beyond name, email, credit card and tier. You’ll notice how similar the upgrade flows look between Ghost, beehiiv and Substack. That’s because it’s taken us a lot of testing to get to this place as an industry. Benefit from that! Accept nothing less!

• One click upgrade: Only available on Substack because they retain your credit card for use across publications. A super nice feature indeed.

• Segments: Not available in Substack. Only Ghost/Outpost and beehiiv allow you to segment your audience by behavior, date joined, tags and more so that you can send different promotions to targeted sets of readers. Extremely useful for converting loyal fans into paying fans.

• Automations: Same story. Huge miss on Substack’s part. This is a critical feature, a major part of Outpost’s offering, and built into beehiiv in smart ways. You can use these to automate upselling and churn prevention in the background year round as your audience grows.

• Analytics that show you when/why people upgrade: Only Outpost and beehiiv offer this. It’s not as big a concern for brand new publications but as you get into years two and three, you’re going to want way better info on what’s working. beehiiv does a really beautiful job with analytics, down to showing you which post converted the most paying subscribers at a dashboard glance.

• Easy to integrate ads: Only Ghost/Outpost and beehiiv support ads.

beehiiv offers built-in ads where you can choose from CPM or CPC (different ad revenue models). You select an ad, then load it into your email in just a couple clicks.

The beehiiv Ad Network is one of their most impressive features and it makes ad revenue extremely low lift for publishers. Ad partners will vary based on your audience type, list size and engagement quality but in the past, I’ve run ads for HoneyBook and PodPitch.

Ghost supports ads gracefully with a bit of custom development (either manually or programmatically with an ad partner—for example, 404 Media uses BuySellAds.)

Outpost is bulking up support for 1st party ads (meaning ads you sell yourself, like sponsorships). You’ll be able to set those up and distribute them from a central place rather than having to manually add them everywhere.

Substack has no support for ads or sponsorships, though you can sell and integrate them on your own and many publishers do.

💡 Ad features generate income but sports journalist Matt Brown, who runs Extra Points on beehiiv, rightly pointed out that:

“You can usually make substantially more money from smaller audiences by selling premium subscriptions rather than ads...but only if you're capable of writing stuff people will pay for.”

Matt makes 90% of his revenue from subscriptions.

💡 That said, having multiple revenue streams available is a benefit to publishers. Kaitlyn Arford who produces Freelance Opportunities, also on beehiiv, prefers to balance ads, sponsorships and subscriptions. Kaitlyn told me:

“I run a purpose-driven business where I can't put all the monetization burden on my audience because they often come to me after a layoff or because they need clients.”

She also said the ad network and paid recommendations cover the cost of her beehiiv subscription for her audience of over 10k readers.

So should you leave Substack?

Honestly, probably yes.

Reasons to stay: your recommendation partners are strong, you like the social feed engagement with your audience or you believe one click upgrades is important.

Reasons to go to Ghost: you want full control over your site design, you care about open source publishing and you want more say in how your tools are built.

Reasons to go to beehiiv: you already have a good audience size or know how to build your newsletter list but you aren’t making enough money.

Reasons to start on Substack: you don’t have content/market fit yet, you don’t have any existing distribution channels for your work, or you want to find those recommendation partners.

The process of leaving Substack has been documented by several popular journalists like Ty Burr, Casey Newton, Nathan Tankus and Ryan Broderick.

The most common reason was (you guessed it) Substack’s nazi controversy and before, that, their transphobic controversy, and soon it’s gonna be that they’re hanging out with Kevin Spacey and Peter Thiel—but for me, the main reason to leave is that they suck at monetization.

Substackers I spoke with are happy with the platform but it’s never because it’s helping them make money. It’s helping them find their audience, similar to Twitter or LinkedIn, but with long form content and a far more delightful feed.

Take this email with a grain of salt, please, and run your own comparison to decide if switching is right for you.