What happens when you leave Substack?

Film critic Ty Burr announced that he was leaving Substack in February.

He started his newsletter Ty Burr’s Watch List there in 2021, after a nearly 20 year run at The Boston Globe, and since then, it has become his primary income stream.

So I wanted to know…how was it going over on Ghost?

I reached out to Ty to find out:

• How email list growth was impacted

• What changed about paid subscriptions

• Whether revenue went up or down

If you’ve been thinking of bailing on Substack too (or any platform actually), you’ll appreciate what Ty’s learned in this transition and his tips for keeping growth and revenue high without compromising your ethical standards.

Leaving Substack for Ghost after 3 years

Why did Ty Burr leave Substack? He wrote about it in his switch note.

“The reasons for the switch are numerous, but the obvious one is that I feel less than comfortable sharing a publishing site with newsletters that peddle and profit from hate speech and white supremacy.”

Ty was one of more than 200 journalists who signed the Substackers Against Nazis letter shared with Substack leadership at the end of 2023.

I didn’t go through all the publications on that list but in clicking through the top 15 signers, I found that half of them had left Substack as of this writing.

Ty also shared in his exit post and in our interview that:

1) He lost subscribers who didn’t want to use or pay Substack

2) His business model doesn’t benefit from the social network and chat features Substack is promoting now. Their increasingly closed structure ran counter to his goals.

3) He always felt the Substack team hovering in the background with their own agenda for his publication (though he did say that his contact there was helpful).

The main thing he misses? You guessed it. The writer recommendation network.

How list growth changed from Substack to Ghost

Losing the recommendation network is the top concern I hear from journalists considering the same move.

Ty echoed this sentiment:

“The only thing I do miss is that I got a lot of new subscribers from the Substack recommendations.”

But he also found a great solution to it. Keep getting those subscribers and port ‘em over!

Even though he has very clear announcements all over his former Substack publication, some readers still come in through recommendations. Ty downloads and uploads those subscribers to the Ghost backend every month.

You could also use Zapier to import them automatically if you have your new subscriber notifications turned on.

Ty noted that his own freelance work powers a lot of list growth too.

Ty writes a weekly movie review for the Washington Post right now and his bio links straight to the newsletter which drives a lot of new subscribers.

Back when he launched on Substack, he was also a regular on a national NPR program.

Re: Google traffic—Ty mentioned that it took several months for Google to reindex his new site above Substack but that’s happened now.

You could possibly hurry this along with a Google Search Console site map submission, though as Ty said, having a few years of search engagement on your Substack posts weighs heavily into Google’s search algorithm.

But what about the revenue

“I should have mentioned this first off, I make more money.”

Ty makes more income on Ghost than on Substack, but it’s not because he’s getting more paid subscribers.

It’s because Substack was taking a much bigger cut of the paid subscription pie.

Substack takes 10% of your total paid subscription revenue. Ghost takes a subscription fee based on your overall audience count which is more advantageous for…well…pretty much everyone running a paid publication.

[Related: Matt Brown noted this drawback too when talking about his move away from Substack]

In Ty’s case, paid subscribers have been holding steady this year with enough new paying subscribers coming in to cover churn but not as much growth in numbers as he was seeing on Substack.

“My free subscriptions and paid subscriptions were pretty much on a track upward [on Substack]. Since I've gone to Ghost, my free subscriptions continue to increase, but my paid subscriptions have kind of hit a wall.”

Interesting. What does Ty think is happening?

He’s got a few theories about it:

• Less posts: He’s been posting less since he made the switch due to taking on the Washington Post gig around the same time (1-2x/week down from 2-3x/week)

• Less promotion: He hasn’t been promoting or cultivating the paid subscription much outside of the regular newsletter editions. Ghost definitely doesn’t do any of this for you and Substack does have a couple features that do a little bit of this like their Boost feature (emphasis on a little bit).

• Different mix of free readers: The readers who come in from Substack’s recommendation engine are different than the readers coming in from WaPo.

Those theories make sense to me plus one thing you lose moving away from Substack is the one click upgrades they make possible by storing every Substack user’s credit card after first use.

All that said, Ty has a very healthy percentage of paid subscribers.

• It was 12-14% on Substack and it’s about 10% on Ghost.

• Paid subscriber count in the four figures.

• Free readership count in the five figures.

Worth mentioning that most of Ty’s posts are paywalled but that hasn’t changed platform to platform.

He told me that, even without freelancing, he’s making a living on his newsletter. And, like I already shared, he’s making more money this year than previous years.

With freelancing plus the newsletter, he’s “making as much, if not more, than I was at The Globe.”

Ty did point out that now he has to pay for his own healthcare and there aren’t any “cushy” perks, but it sounds like he’s going to be able to retire off this reader-funded business and that’s pretty damn rad if you ask me.

How he actually made the transition

Did you know you can migrate your paid subscribers without them doing anything?

I did not. But that’s exactly what Ty did.

He had the Ghost team migrate all of his posts, his free subscribers and, most importantly, his paid subscribers.

Since Stripe is the underlying payment processor for Substack and Ghost, the Ghost team remapped the already authorized Stripe subscriptions to their system.

Paying subscribers didn’t have to lift a finger. Their subscriptions continued uninterrupted.

This is by far the trickiest part and Ty said it took a few days and required the Stripe team to help but it did get done.

The posts all came over too under the new domain name: tyburrswatchlist.com.

The one thing that couldn’t be migrated? Reader comments.

That’s tougher to port over because the platform would have to act on behalf of your readers to repost the comments and frankly, that would be weird.

This is one reason Ty left the Substack publication and all back posts online instead of deleting them.

Oh, and you might be wondering why Ty chose Ghost.

The deciding factor came down to their dedicated support (offered at his subscription tier) though it’s table stakes for Ty that they don’t profit off hate speech. He also appreciates that Ghost doesn’t have “imperial motives” to become a mega-platform.

If your mind is buzzing, my takeaway from this interview was…

You’re not as beholden to your platform as you might think.

Ty demonstrated that it’s actually very possible—dare I say easy—to leave Substack, and even though you’ll notice some things shift in flight, those changes are probably not going to tank your publication. Plus, you can predict and recover from them. You might even make more money!

The publishing platforms need you more than you need them, especially when they’re building a social network off your reputation, your writing and your readers.

Find Ty Burr at tyburrswatchlist.com and follow him on Bluesky.

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