Are some subscribers who are dropping this newsletter really bots?

My free subscriber numbers recently went 15 steps forward and 12 steps back, which made me think a little more about what might now be happening at Substack.

None of the text that follows would matter if I didn’t think Substack was such an important platform for the “Good Guys” who are trying to debunk the lies of the “Bad Guys” depicted above.

Author’s note: With this dispatch, I get into the weeds of curious Substack trends and take a while to get to my speculation on what I think might really be happening at Substack. I appreciate readers who hang with me until I describe a juicy conspiracy theory. I’m also interested in theories or feedback from readers and other Substack authors.

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As my readers no doubt know by now, I take a close look at my Substack metrics to try to figure out if any nefarious programs are possibly being utilized to suppress my reach or thwart my subscriber growth.

In looking at my total subscriber figures for the past few days, something odd jumped out to me.

On January 26, I added 15 free subscribers, which is encouraging.

However, my net gain in total subscribers was only three because 12 free subscribers apparently unsubscribed on the same day.

I’m trying to figure out what might best explain this.

One scenario that might explain my 15 new subscribers makes sense to me. In layman’s terms, I might conclude:

“Hey, look, 15 people in the world discovered my recent Substack articles and they must have liked what they read because they decided to get a free subscription.”

This doesn’t seem odd to me at all.

I know many “contrarian” readers might already have too many subscriptions to read even a fraction of these newsletters, but 15 people still said:

“I’m going to give this Bill Rice guy a chance. I might want to read some of his future articles. Plus, it’s not like I’m spending any money. I’m getting his content for free so I’m not losing any money by subscribing to his site.”

This, per my previous thinking, is how Substack works … and describes how an author grows his subscriber base.

What doesn’t make as much sense is a plausible (?) explanation for 12 previous (free) subscribers suddenly deciding - on the same day - to cancel their subscriptions.

Again, I’ll use common vernacular to take a stab at one possible explanation:

“I once subscribed to this Rice guy (because, presumably, this reader thought my writing was interesting), but I don’t like him any more and I don’t want to get his stuff in my email any more. I’m going to cancel that subscription.”

One question I ask myself: What did I write that was so different or off-putting that made a dozen of the 2,341 subscribers who open my emails want to cull my newsletter from their subscriber list?

(Aside: My “open rate” - the number of subscribers who open one of my emails - has recently been about 33 percent, when it used to be 45 to 50 percent. This means while I have 7,093 subscribers, only 2,341 of my subscribers read or skim my articles. On average, my articles are actually being read by about 4,500 people, which means approximately half of my readers aren’t current subscribers … which explains why I always highlight the “share button.”)

That is, I can better understand why 15 people would “sign up” for my newsletter, but I can’t understand why almost as many people, in unison, would say, “That’s it; enough of that guy.”

At one time, I thought more readers and subscribers would beget … more readers and more subscribers.

In fact, from studying my metrics in the fist 12 or so months of my newsletter, this is exactly what happened.

I’d write and publish an article, a good number of people must have liked it and decided to become subscribers. (Almost all of these new subscribers would be free subscribers, although back then - but not anymore - about 4.7 percent of these subscribers would eventually convert to “paid subscribers.”)

I like the novel Substack metric I created all on my own …

I actually created my own Substack metric which allowed me to quantify how many “story reads” my articles needed to generate to produce one new subscriber.

At one time, the more people who read my articles, the more subscribers I got.

Alas, this metric/ratio experienced a massive change about a year ago.

While my articles were being read by more people, many articles didn’t produce any new subscribers (or just a handful).

Previously, I might get 20, 30 or 50 new subscribers with every 2,000 “page views” I generated. Now, I often get zero or 1 or 2.

Back to my friends Robert Reich and Paul Krugman …

I’ve recently been taking a close look at Substack’s liberal authors and monitoring their rapid and eye-opening subscriber growth.

For example, in about 3 weeks, Robert Reich has gone from 518K to 608K+ subscribers.

Paul Krugman, who started his Substack newsletter on December 11, already has 138,000 subscribers.

In a recent story, I noted Krugman was adding almost 3,500 subscribers every day. But, Krugman has now added 8,000 subscribers in the past two days so he is now netting 4,000 new subscribers every day.

In other words, the subscriber trend that once applied to my own newsletter is definitely applying to these Substack newsletters.

That is, more subscribers begets … more subscribers.

Per my guess, thinking like this must be happening across the world:

“Man, I really like the writing of Reich and Krugman. I definitely want to get their pieces in my email in-box. It’s free. I’m going to subscribe!”

Apparently, however, an equal number of subscribers aren’t reaching the same conclusion my subscribers are apparently reaching these days. As in …

“I’ve had enough of Reich; I’m unsubscribing.”

Quick take-away: The unsubscribe phenomena is probably unique to the “Covid contrarians.”

One oft-cited explanation that might explain why the growth rate of my genre of Substack authors has fallen off a cliff is that Substack’s “contrarian market” of readers has become massively over-saturated.

Basically, throngs of “our” market of readers decided they now have far too many subscriptions to actually read and some kind of Great Culling Project commenced about a year ago, a culling process that’s on-going.

I don’t doubt this dynamic is at play here.

However, I still don’t think this explanation fully explains what’s happening at Substack newsletters like my own.

One reason this explanation strikes me as unconvincing is my assumption the universe of “contrarian” readers seeking alternative journalism must be … expanding.

That is, the number of “contrarian” readers who have discovered Substack in the last couple of years or months surely hasn’t remained constant. My assumption is that more people who think like I do must now be Substack subscribers.

If this is true, the more established “dissident’ authors would probably be more likely to benefit from this expanding market.

Expressed differently:

Yes, many people are obviously culling the number of newsletters they subscribe to. However, this number should, largely, be offset by the number of citizens who have recently discovered this writers’ platform.

If I’m in the fortunate class of Substack “contrarians” who now has a growing brand or is fairly established on this platform, it might seem that I’d get my “unfair share” of all the new readers who have recently discovered Substack.

But, obviously, this has NOT occurred.

You know what they say about assumptions …

Which makes me want to “check my assumptions.” (We all know that spurious assumptions can make an ass out of u and me.)

My new assumption is that the world’s liberal, brain-dead market of news consumers has now flocked to Substack … which, presumably, explains the rapid growth of newsletters like Reich’s, Krugman’s and many other “ascendant” Statist writers.

The opposite assumption is that there has been no “reinforcements” for “our” side - conservative and intelligent readers who have also discovered Substack in the last year or two.

One can almost state this as a New Normal Substack fact:

The once rapid growth of “Contrarian” writers on Substack has already peaked and is never going to approach the subscriber growth rates many authors experienced in 2020-2023.

However, growth of liberal newsletter authors is surging and, apparently, will continue to surge.

The Anti-MAGA Fear Factor might be at work …

In one sense this phenomena might be explained by a “fear reaction” to the election of Donald J. Trump.

This might be the “logic” or authorized narrative that explains what’s happening on Substack:

“Trump’s going to send us all to concentration camps. We have to fight Trump; we must all support the brave wordsmiths who are fighting Trump,” blah, blah, blah.

While this might be a partially valid explanation, it still doesn’t ring entirely true to me.

For example, why do all these liberals need to suddenly flock to Substack when they can read the anti-Trump screeds in every mainstream news and commentary website?

Also, per my reading of “public sentiment,” the ascendant view in America is that the mainstream media should NOT be trusted and more and more civically-engaged citizens are now aware that they have to go somewhere else to get honest news or find writers who will “speak truth to power.”

If this is true, Substack should be “blowing up” for this segment of the population … and the Substack contrarians should be experiencing “boom” times.

But, again (bizarrely or counter-intuitively), the opposite is happening.

What do I think is really happening …

Circling back to my 15-steps-forward, 12-steps-back starting place …

I do think “newsletter saturation” is a factor in the slowed or stagnant subscription growth rates of my contrarian colleagues. However, I don’t think this phenomena by itself explains these obvious trend-reversals.

We already know that manipulative algorithms and fake bots or AI were used to inflate user numbers at many other social media platforms (like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.)

We also know that “suppressing the reach” of dissident voices has become, arguably, THE priority of would-be totalitarians. This is why The Censorship Industrial Complex and the “Trusted News Initiative” became major coordinated (and proven) conspiracies.

If the rapidly-growing reach and influence of the Substack Contrarians is/was viewed as a “threat” to the Powers that Be, it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to conclude the same people and organizations might have created programs to neutralize this threat.

The trick or challenge would be to create mechanisms that would slow or reverse the growth and reach of dissident authors without our cohort of dissident writers knowing this was happening.

One Substacker thinks he’s cracked the new code …

Recently, I found a Substacker (Len Ber MD) who claims to have evidence something like this is occurring. (Even if Dr. Ber’s claim, for now, lacks definitive proof or evidence, I think this author’s speculation warrants more attention).

If I understand this theory, the accounts of some number of legitimate subscribers have, for lack of better term, been captured.

It’s possible unknown numbers of subscribers who previously received dispatches no longer received these articles.

However, the subscriber numbers of an author didn’t noticeably decline because these accounts were “replaced” by artificial or stolen accounts. (Ber calls these “dummy” subscribers).

Substack authors like myself might have noticed that our growth rates had dramatically decreased, but we were still adding a few subscribers.

Our ratio of paid subscribers also began to experience a notable decline (my paid ratio has gone from more than 4.7 percent to, now, 4.0 percent). This declining paid ratio might be explained by the fact free “bot” or “dummy” subscribers aren’t as likely to become “paid” subscribers as real human beings.

The growth in the number of free subscribers authors used to see has perhaps declined because bots (that don’t like us) are not going to share an article or recommend an author to anyone else.

This might explain how someone like myself could suddenly and inexplicably lose 12 subscribers in one day. (The theory being that at least some of these lost subscribers weren’t real people).

If this theory is true, it seems likely my subscriber growth is never going be allowed to return to where it once was.

While I have days where I manage to boost my subscriber numbers by a decent number (15 on January 26th), my net increase is barely positive (and, in many recent days or weeks, is often negative).

I don’t know WHY these free subscribers are unsubscribing

Here I should note that Substack provides a list of paid subscribers who “unsubscribe” but the company doesn’t (at least that I’m aware of) provide a similar list of free subscribers who unsubscribe.

The link that shows paid subscribers who unsubscribe also provides reasons why these paid subscribers cancelled their paid subscriptions.

Normally, for me (and probably most contrarian writers) the cited reason is the newsletter “doesn’t fit my budget.”

That is, I’m now losing a significant number of paid subscribers because of a common-sense work-around to “real inflation.” (In the past several months, my paid subscriber numbers have decreased from a peak of 304 to 285 - a decline of 6.25 percent).

Another reason people cite when they unsubscribe as a paid subscriber is “content,” meaning these subscribers must no longer like the type articles they are receiving from this author.

However, I don’t know why my FREE subscribers are apparently culling my newsletter (apparently in significant numbers).

I can’t help but wonder if many or some of these lost free subscribers were never real people in the first place and someone or some software algorithm - perhaps to keep my “growth rate” from increasing by notable margins - zaps my free subscriber numbers.

Is this the “something” that changed?

When I opine “something” seems to have “changed” on Substack, that something might be explained by some version of the hypothetical program I just tried to describe.

All I know is that it took me six months to reach 3,500 subscribers and it took me 22 months to equal this number.

In those 22 months, I became a much better-known Substack author and my writing didn’t suddenly change. In fact, I think I’m connecting more dots and have become better informed than I was when I started posting articles on Substack.

FWIW, I also, somehow, grew my Substack subscriber numbers when I had far fewer readers.

Again, for me, adding more subscribers didn’t beget more subscribers. Or, if I did add impressive numbers of subscribers (which I did for a while), this rate of growth - for some reason - dropped off a cliff.

What I think “changed” is that my early subscribers were probably all human beings, which I’m not sure is the case today.

For the record, I also wonder if the Robert Reich’s of the Substack world have subscription numbers that are being inflated by the same bots (who, perhaps, do “like” these authors.)

In my view, it’s possible “someone” wants to see the subscriber numbers of Substack’s Anti-MAGA or narrative-defending authors grow rapidly and impressively.

Of course, it’s also possible I’m being paranoid and I’m seeing sinister conspiracies where they don’t exist.

But, as I recently wrote, I now firmly believe just about every troubling or ominous thing that’s happening in the world is happening because of conspiracies - conspiracies that worked.

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(I used to include this button to grow my subscriber numbers. I now include it in the hopes it will counter the “subscriber attrition” I know is coming).

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