Something HAS changed with Substack

My deep dive into my own subscriber metrics tells me this might not be paranoia.

In my first seven months, my newsletter averaged 505 new subscribers/month. In the next 8 months, I averaged 168/month. My subscription growth rate declined by 67 percent.

My Spider Sense continues to tell me something disturbing has changed with how contrarian authors are being treated on Substack.

As I wrote in my last article, this subject is probably important only to citizens who happen to think the growth of Substack is important in society’s on-going battle between “truth-seekers” and “truth-concealers.” In my opinion, the most-important cohort of truth-seekers are found on Substack.

Since I’m trying to make a living from Substack - and am trying to debunk as many false narratives as I can - I’m very interested in identifying data that might suggest subscriber trends on Substack have changed in a significant way.

What I think could have changed is either “someone” is seeking to sabotage the growth and popularity of “freedom” Substack authors and/or Substack readers, for whatever reason, are not as likely to support Substack authors as they were, say, one or two years ago.

If either or both scenarios are true, this would not not bode well for “contrarian” Substack authors (and might not bode well for the company known as Substack).

In my last article, I highlighted how my Open Rate has changed significantly in recent months. However, the Open Rate is not the only Substack metric that convinces me something troubling has changed on Substack in recent months.

I created a new and better metric …

Indeed, with this article, I have created (and analyzed) my own Substack metric, one I think paints a clearer portrait of what might be happening to Substack writers like myself.

This metric attempts to quantify the number of article “reads” it takes to produce one subscription (free or paid). One might call this metric “reads-to-subscribers.” 

Substack tells authors how many new subscribers each article produces. By simply dividing the number of new subscribers into the total number of “reads” a given article produced, one can obtain this metric/ratio.

For example, if a story is read by 4,000 readers and it produces four new subscribers, this ratio/metric is 1,000. For every 1,000 readers, the author generated one new subscriber.

As you’ll see later, my read-to-subscriber ratio in the past four months has been 675, meaning it now takes, on average, 675 readers or “reads” to produce one new subscriber. 

However, 12 to 14 months ago - when my subscriber and readership levels were half of my current level, it took only 302 “reads” to produce one new subscriber. 

Other metrics I’ve analyzed are just as troubling.

Before I expound on my new metric, I’ll present two “case studies” I believe corroborate my suspicion that something has changed with Substack.

Case Study 1 - My most-recent article

on the Substack Open Rate

The key Substack-provided metrics for this article:

1,999 subscribers opened (and presumably read) my last article. The Open Rate for this article was 35 percent). Note: For the first, say, 13 months of my Substack, my “open rate” was between 42 and 43 percent.

5,650 subscribers received the article in their email or via their Substack app.

3,960 readers have viewed this column in the three days since I published it. Thus, the article “reads” for this piece was just under 4,000 people.

Note: 1,961 of my total readers (49.5 percent of the readers of this article) were not regular subscribers. From my perspective, this is a good thing as all 1,961 of these readers would be “prospective subscribers.” If X percent of these readers did subscribe to my newsletter, I would grow my subscriber base, which is what I want to do.

I LOST subscribers with this article …

Alas, this column (on net) produced zero (0) new free subscribers.  In fact, right before I published this column, Substack metrics told me I had 5,655 total subscribers. At this writing, I have 5,650 suscribers. That is, I lost five subscribers (net) by publishing this article.

(I received approximately 10 notifications from Substack telling me people had signed up as free subscribers after reading this article. However, 15 free subscribers must have cancelled their subscriptions after receiving this column, which explains the loss of five subscribers. Said differently, no non-subscriber readers (on a net basis) decided to become a subscriber after reading this article.

Aside: This article did produce three new paid subscribers, which is the metric that matters the most to my wife. However, all three new paid subscribers were already free subscribers; they simply “upgraded” from free to paid. Again, my total subscriber numbers actually declined by five people.

In recent months, this trend - where each new article causes me to lose net subscribers - has become very common at my Substack.

For most of the 17-plus month history of my Substack, I did NOT lose subscribers when I published a story. I gained subscribers with every article I published.

This trend is particularly troubling …

In the last four months (November 2023 through February of 2024), I published 51 articles on Substack. According to Substack metrics, 10 of those articles produced zero (net) subscribers. An additional 13 articles produced between only 1 and 3 new subscribers.

So 23 of my last 51 articles (45.1 percent of my most-recent articles), have produced between zero and three new net subscribers. Put simply, almost half of my articles are now producing either no new subscribers or a tiny number of new subscribers.

As I’ll show below, this is another big change in my Substack. For most of the history of my Substack, each article produced far more new subscribers than is currently happening. Also, for the first year of my Substack, it was very rare for an article to produce zero to three new subscribers.

Case study 2 - A re-boot of my Movie Column

As an experiment, I recently re-booted  a column I originally published on November 4, 2022 (“Movies for our Covid Times.”). This column was originally published just six weeks after I launched my Substack in late September 2022. 

I was interested in comparing the response the column received on February 27 of this year to the response it received in the very early days of my Substack. I was specifically interested in seeing if this column netted my newsletter any new subscribers. As you will see, it did not.

Here are the article metrics provided by Substack for the November 4, 2022 publication of this column. Note: The text and photos in the column are/were exactly the same.

November 4, 2022 version - Substack metrics:

350 subscribers opened the article (Open Rate of 42 percent) when I originally published it 15 months ago.

839 subscribers received the column in their email or via their Substack app.

1,790 readers have viewed this column in the last 15 months since I published it.

The early version of this column produced 15 new subscribers.

***

February 22, 2024 re-boot version of this column:

2,051 subscribers opened the article (Open Rate of 36 percent).

5,6540 subscribers received the column in their email or via their Substack app.

4,070 readers have viewed this column in the last 7 days.

The re-booted version of this column produced zero (0) new subscribers in the last week.

Conclusions/observations:

The number of people who opened the recent version of this article “re-boot” increased from 350 to 2,051, an increase of 5.86-fold.

The number of subscribers who received this “recycled” article increased from 839 subscribers to 5,640, a 6.7-fold increase.

Total readers of the second version of this article increased from 1,790 readers to 4,070 readers, an increase of 2.27 fold.

Bottom-line: Despite the article reaching more than two times as many readers and almost 7 times as many subscribers, it did not produce a single new subscriber for my newsletter.

Significantly, I know my newsletter had only 839 subscribers on November 4, 2022 (the number of people who received this column when I first published it). When I re-booted the column, I had 5,640 subscribers. This means approximately 4,801 of my current subscribers had never read or seen this column.

Questions: Why did the exact same column produce no new subscribers even though the column was read by 2.27 times more people? All things being equal, wouldn’t one expect a few readers - or actually more readers - to become subscribers after reading this column?

My Take-away from this case study: All things are NOT equal; something has apparently changed. Either some organization is meddling with certain Substack authors or Substack readers today are less likely to subscribe after reading an article. 

(The metrics of “Reader Comments”  and “likes” tell me a fair number of people enjoyed this column. One might also argue the article had been “pre-marketed” and - as the saying goes - had been proven to “sell in Peoria.”)

Whatever reason(s) best explains why so many of my new articles are, basically, flops in the “new subscriber” metric, my key take-away is that it’s now harder to grow one’s subscriber numbers than it previously was on Substack.

The Subscription Growth rate of my Substack

has slowed tremendously …

I also was interested in identifying when my positive subscription growth trends suddenly stalled. The month-by-month analysis that follows illustrates that my Substack newsletter got off to an excellent start.

(At one time, I falsely thought more subscribers every month would result in … significantly more subscribers in coming months. This was the case early on … but not in the last 10 months. That is, at least for me, more subscribers does not correlate to far more subscribers in the future.)

Here are my total subscribers on the 22nd of each of the following months. (I picked the 22nd because my first Substack article was published on Sept. 22, 2022):

Total Cumulative Subscribers (increase from prior month, percentage growth from prior month):

September 22, 2022: 0 subscribers

October 22, 2022: 700 (+ 700, 700 percent increase)

November 22, 2022: 1,062 (+ 362, +51.7 percent)

December 22, 2022: 1,961 (+ 899, +84.7 percent)

January 22, 2023: 2,558 (+597, +30.4 percent)

February 22, 2023: 2,713 (+ 155, +6.06 percent)

March 22, 2023: 3,143 (+430, +15.8 percent)

April 22, 2023: 3,538 (+395, +12.6 percent)

Summary of first 7 months: In seven months, my Substack went from zero subscribers to 3,538 total subscribers. 

On average, from October 22 through April 22, my Substack subscriber numbers were increasing by 505 subscribers per month or 33.5 percent/month.

May (or August) 2023 is when my Subscriber growth trends began to noticeably change …

May 2023: 3,666 (+128, increase of 3.6 percent)

June 2023: 3,988 (+322, increase of 8.8 percent)

July 2023: 4,263 (+275, increase of 6.9 percent)

August 2023: 4,450 (+187, increase of 4.4 percent)

September 2023: 4,558 (+108, increase of 2.4 percent)

October 2023: 4,701 (+143, increase of 3.1 percent)

November 2023: 4,822 (+121, increase of 2.6 percent)

December 2023: 4,882 (+60, increase of 1.2 percent)

From May 22, 2023 through December 22, 2023, my Substack averaged only 168 new subscribers/month. My average subscriber growth rate was 4.1 percent instead of 33.5 percent.

January 2024 is an outlier because

of one interesting article …

On January 5, I published a story, ironically enough questioning if Substack might now be under attack. That story was cross-posted by Substack all-star Dr. Robert Malone and 107 (!) other Substack authors. (I can’t remember any of my articles ever getting eight cross-posts, much less 107.)

The story was read by 11,200 people and by January 10th - six days later - had netted me 433 new subscribers, including 43 new paid subscribers. (At one time, my metrics said I’d netted 52 new “paid subscribers” but nine of those presumed paid subscriptions were not processed by my bank and/or Substack’s payment processor … more Spider Senses activated).

I thought this unprecedented spike in total and paid subscribers might be Divine Intervention. Now, I wonder if this might have been “somebody” saying, “Rice might be starting to question the dramatic decline in his Substack subscribers; let’s give him a big boost and maybe he’ll drop this line of inquiry.” 

While I greatly appreciate this major, out-of-the-blue boost, my Spider Sense - as you can tell - is still activated. With this context offered, here are January’s “outlier” numbers;

January 2024: 5,495 (+613, increase of 12.6 percent)

But now I'm apparently back to the same-old recent trends …

February 2024: 5,640 (+145, increase of 2.6 percent)

I’ve posted five articles since February 22. These articles have boosted my total subscribers to …

March 4, 2024: 5650 (+10, increase of 0.18 percent in last 11 days).

***

When I do a deep dive, I try to be thorough in my analysis, which means the other trends I found interesting (and unsettling) will be continued in Part 2. Part 2 of this article is here.

P.S. I appreciate any comments or data my fellow Substack colleagues might share in the Reader Comments. I also appreciate the eight colleagues who have already cross-posted this article. IMO the cross-post represents one of the “resistance’s” greatest weapons in our quest to get around the gatekeepers of the news.