Post While You Still Can

If citizens are engaged in a war of ideas, our side surrendering to the Bad Guys is not an option. Also, I strongly believe troops on our side will continue to need a strong presence on Substack.

Debra Winger is one of my favorite actresses so - for good luck with this essay - I wanted to run a photo from one of her famous roles. This photo also includes Richard Gere, who delivered the memorable line, “I have no where else to go!” in An Officer and a Gentleman. Substack Contrarians also have no where else to go.

It’s been a while since I published one of my Substack metric pieces, but a recent glance at one of these metrics made me decide to circle back to one of my favorite taboo and contrarian subjects.

According to my latest “paid subscriber” notifications, this newsletter has lost eight paid subscribers in the past 30 days.

I now have 254 paid subscribers, which is 57 lower than my peak of 311 (reached in August 2024).

It’s easy to see that the pace of my lost paid subscribers is accelerating. If I continue to lose eight paid subscribers every month, in 12 months I’ll be down to 158 paid subscribers. However, since this paid subscriber attrition is accelerating, it’s possible that a year from now I won’t even have 120 paid subscribers.

(Feel free to skip down to the Grand Finale. As I always say, “I’ve got ‘No’ in my pocket.”)

An analysis of my first 20 months on Substack compared to my second 20 months …

Today also happens to be the 40-month anniversary of when I started this newsletter in early September 2022.

Because of this, I thought it would be interesting to divide my Substack tenure in half and show my subscriber growth the first 20 months of this independent journalism enterprise compared to the next 20 months.

Per Substack metrics, my newsletter grew from zero paid subscribers to 291 in my first 20 months.

For myself, this was great and encouraging progress as this metric showed that growing numbers of total strangers were not only reading my dispatches, approximately 4.5 percent of my subscribers were actually willing to pay money to support my work.

While I was a late arrival to Substack and missed the explosive growth many of my “Covid Contrarian” colleagues experienced from March 2020 to mid-2021, I wasn’t too late and, apparently, tapped into a rapidly-growing market of people who completely rejected the journalism content of the mainstream news organizations.

Today, I admit my early Substack growth might have made me cocky and fueled my erroneous belief that past results could be extrapolated into the future.

At one time, I thought more readers and subscribers would beget … more readers and subscribers, which is a formula or trend that did hold true for most of the early well-known Covid Contrarians.

However, about 16 months ago, this trend reversed and instead of growing paid subscribers every month, I started losing them.

• First 20 months = plus 291 paid subscribers

• Second 20 months = negative 37 paid subscribers

• Last 30 days = negative 8 subscribers.

Skies turned dark for some, but bright for others …

One oddity of my hard subscriber reversal is that I started losing paid subscribers at the same time Substack was setting subscriber records and reaching tens of millions of more readers.

However, as I’ve documented, almost all of the growth on Substack was among writers who I would label as liberal … or content providers who were much more inclined to support Status-Quo-protecting narratives my dispatches were railing against.

For example, while I was losing paid subscribers, Robert Reich’s Substack grew from a couple hundred thousand subscribers to more than a million. Paul Krugman left the New York Times and within about a year had more than 500,000 subscribers on Substack, including at least 20,000 paid.

I also noted that many authors who wrote pieces like I did and who experienced impressive growth in their first two years - authors like Alex Berenson and Steve Kirsch - were now losing net subscribers just like I was and am.

A simple and, I believe, fair observation would be that the market for “contrarian’ or “conservative” content peaked about 16 months ago, while at the same time the market for liberal content on Substack exploded.

Inflation work-arounds …

In my essays on “Curious Substack metrics,” I’ve always noted that economic realities dealing with real inflation could and probably do explain the subscriber woes of freelance authors like myself.

At least to me, it’s clear that real inflation is real, isn’t improving (nor will it improve) and, as I’ve pointed out in several articles, one of the simplest “inflation work-arounds” is to cancel paid subscriptions.

I myself have been forced to cancel (or pause) a dozen or so paid subscriptions from authors I’d like to support financially.

Yet another possible (and surprising) take-away from looking at Substack subscriber trends might be that liberal Americans are more inclined than conservative Americans to pay for journalism content. Or, conservatives aren’t as rich and are more likely to cancel paid subscriptions in order to make it to the end of the month with a positive balance in their checking accounts.

The valuation of Substack has never been higher …

Still, from what I read, if the founders of Substack ever decided to sell this journalism platform, they’d receive an eye-opening sum of money from someone.

While this is no doubt true, IMO the new owner isn’t going to be reaping windfalls tapping into the market of conservatives who’ve flocked to Substack. The growth and valuation of Substack seems to be tied almost entirely to authors who produce the same type articles the NY Times and Washington Post have produced for decades.

The only reason analysis of Substack metrics matters would be if the content of the “Substack Contrarians” actually matters.

Speaking for myself, I think these subscriber and readership trends do matter for the simple reason I don’t see any other major writing platform that’s replete with contrarian thinkers or independent “citizen journalists.”

If the proverbial “stock price” of contrarian, independent writers is stagnant or in steep decline while the symbolic “stock price” of narrative-protecting writers continues to ascend, none of the narratives that need to be debunked will ever happen.

This, one suspects, will make the Powers that Be sleep even better than they’re already sleeping. Indeed, speaking for myself, I think this is probably the desired result of a clandestine strategy to thwart or suppress the reach of citizens who actually threaten the world’s real leadership organizations.

At least as things currently stand, the Substack Contrarians have “no where else to go.”

Who else is going to challenge sacrosanct and bogus narratives?

I also believe the only journalists or thinkers who are advancing important and taboo storylines are the cohort I’ve labeled “Covid Contrarians,” a group that’s skeptical of almost all the world’s bogus and harmful narratives.

While members of this group occasionally squabble among ourselves, we are largely united in our conviction that the world is not being well served by following the dictates of the alleged experts and authorities - all of whom are supported by stenographers of the liberal orthodoxy on this writers’ platform. (The real would-be fascists).

For more than five years, millions of Substack readers looked at the world around them and decided they weren’t going to go down without a fight.

This explains why the first huge growth surge on Substack came from our ranks and not from the readers and admirers of Robert Reich or Your Local Epidemiologist.

***

If journalism - or the written word - is a “battle of ideas,” it will be very interesting to survey the battlefield of Substack on January 7, 2027.

Looking at my own subscriber trends as well as the trends of some of my contrarian colleagues, my guess is that these reconnaissance photos might be more bleak than they are today.

Still, surrendering to evil forces is never a good option and, see my headline, I’m going to keep posting stories as long as I can.

Maybe I’m naive, but I do think it’s possible a thermo-nuclear Truth Bomb could detonate and change the entire battle. I also know this Truth Bomb won’t detonate due to the “fearless’ journalism of CBS News or any of the statist Substack authors who are adding thousands of subscribers every month.

Let’s finish with a request …

When I started this dispatch, I wasn’t planning to turn this essay into a Subscription Drive, but I’ve now changed my mind.

Don’t laugh, but at one point two years ago, I really thought I might reach 1,000 paid subscribers by the end of next year.

Alas, things can change and, today, it looks like I might have fewer than 100 paid subscribers on Dec. 31, 2027.

As I view things, I have two options:

1) I can just passively accept I’m going to keep losing 8 to 10 paid subscribers every month and will eventually get to zero paid subscribers. Or 2) I can pro-actively fight these trends and ask anyone who might be reading this to help me reverse these trends.

IMO, “someone” wants contrarian writers like myself to fail and give up. It would tickle me and I’d consider it a very positive sign if, a year, from now, my Substack newsletter was alive and still stirring things up.

The 300 …

Monthly paid subs are still just $6 (and can be cancelled at any time). An annual subscription, which is my preference, is $60, which, to me, is a lot of money but maybe a few of my readers could afford this level of symbolic support.

(If you are in the family of Bill Gates or are among the most-giving people on the planet, Founder’s Level subscriptions are also available )

I don’t know how long it might take, but before I leave this world, I’d like to at least get back to 300 paid subscribers. If this happens, I could then say, “Take that, you sorry bleeps; our side ain’t’ dead yet.”

If I get 36 new paid subscribers in the next couple of days, I’m going to say “thank you very much” to people who I know don’t have to do this. If I net one new subscriber this week, I’ll still be be very grateful.

Even if I lose a couple of subscribers, I’m still going to keep hitting the send button on these dispatches, some of which I hope are important. That is, my New Year’s Resolution is simple. I’m going to keep posting while I still can.

This link, that my wife figured out how to add a while back, has been a year-long Christmas present to this independent writer:

Writer gratuities via Ko-Fi.