Journalism

What I learned in year four of Platformer

Everything that happened after we left Substack

Casey Newton

Sep 23, 2024 — 12 min read

Programming note: Platformer will be off Tuesday and back for a rare Wednesday edition with the news from Meta Connect.

Ever since Platformer left Substack in January, readers have been asking us how it’s been going. Today, in keeping with our annual tradition of anniversary posts (here are one, two, and three), I’ll answer that question — and share some other observations on the state of independent media over the past year.

The first thing to say to all of you reading is thank you. Throughout the tumult of the past year, Platformer readers have given us incredible support. When we announced our move, hundreds of you stepped up to buy annual subscriptions. And when the inevitable hiccups that come with switching platforms arrived, you were patient and generous with us as we smoothed things out.

In basically every way, 2024 was Platformer’s most difficult year — but it was made much easier every time one of you sent us a supportive note, shared our stories on social media, and bought a subscription for a friend or co-worker. For all that, I’m profoundly grateful.

So how’s it going since Platformer left Substack?

Let’s get into some specifics. As I write this, Platformer now has 190,196 subscribers — up about 35,000 from last year. That’s a much slower growth rate than year three, when in the midst of Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, our audience doubled. But it also feels like more honest, durable growth than we saw in 2023. Unplugged from the dark pattern of Substack’s growth hacks, we still managed to grow significantly.

What about our finances? I’m proud to report that despite leaving Substack, revenue was up about 11 percent year over year. Part of that reflects the fact that we no longer pay Substack 10 percent of revenue. But leaving incurred new expenses.

We pay our new provider, Ghost Pro, substantial fees for hosting and distributing Platformer. We pay Outpost for services we once got through Substack, such as sending welcome emails to new subscribers and reminders when your subscription is about to renew. We sprung for a nifty redesign. And we now handle our own customer service, sharing responsibilities between our managing editor Zoë Schiffer, our editorial assistant Lindsey Choo, and me.

It all amounts to less than we used to pay Substack. But it is also more work.

A bright spot for us this year was the launch of a single paid advertisement in our free weekly newsletter. Under Zoë’s leadership, we nearly brought in six figures worth of advertising revenue in our first year, and we hope to build on that in the year ahead. Readers received the ads politely, advertisers renewed their campaigns, and we added a new pillar of revenue that we hope will make Platformer sustainable long into the future. (If you’d like to sponsor a newsletter this year, get in touch!)

What did you lose when you left Substack?

The main thing, aside from the dubious hypergrowth of our mailing list, was new paid monthly subscribers. On Substack last year, we saw substantially more readers willing to pay us $10 to try out Platformer for a month. This is likely for a mix of editorial reasons and platform dynamics. On the editorial side, we broke more news last year than we have so far in 2024. That means that last year we were getting in front of more readers, and more of those readers were happy to pay us for our scoops.

On the platform side, my leading theory is that Substack already has lots of credit cards on file, and makes it frictionless for people to upgrade their subscriptions. Whereas today, potential Platformer readers have to get their credit cards out of their wallet. That friction results in fewer subscriptions.

The flip side of this is that monthly readers on Substack churn much more aggressively than the readers who joined us this year. And while we have fewer of them than we did a year ago, our churn rate is also now much lower: it dropped more than a third, from 4.19 percent in 2023 to 2.7 percent today.

So yes, there were there costs to leaving Substack. In addition to the ones enumerated above, we also pushed back plans to hire another reporter while we waited to see what impact the move would have on our revenue.

Did any other platform dynamics hurt you this year?

We also stopped posting to X. It felt bad contributing to a site that had actively dismantled its own content moderation operation and predictably soon filled up with hate speech of all sorts. Posting to it made us feel complicit in both in Elon Musk's war against journalism and his own right-wing political project, which included a policy to label "cisgender" a slur.

I feel great about no longer posting to X, but it did cost us whatever opportunity we might have had to reach new readers there. Instead, I've been rebuilding primarily on Threads, where I increasingly find the kind of smart, timely conversations about the news that I once had on Twitter.

My long-term bet is that Threads will win out over X, and all the reporters who are still posting to X will eventually wish they had built their audiences on Threads when it was still easier to do so. We'll see how it pans out, but the early returns are promising.

Were there any notable benefits to leaving Substack?

For sure. First and foremost, we have an honest-to-goodness website now. One where we can easily modify the design, add new features, and grow our offering over time. One reason why I write so often about the decline of the web is that I love websites as products. And our new setup gives us almost unlimited flexibility as Platformer evolves.

One way I hope it will evolve is to become part of the fediverse: the network of federated sites and apps that are built with interoperability in mind. The fediverse is built on top of protocols, not platforms, which offers us a chance to decentralize power on the internet and built a more stable foundation for media and social apps.

While these plans are mostly still in the drawing-board stage, Ghost has already committed to federating publications on the platform. My hope is that someday soon you’ll be able to follow Platformer and its writers directly from your fediverse reader app of choice, enabling a whole new set of reader interactions and business possibilities.

Another key benefit of leaving: We’re much less vulnerable to platform shifts than we were before. I had long worried that Substack’s unprofitable business would eventually lead it to make decisions that were not in the best interest of our readers or our business. (Besides not removing literal 1930s Nazi content, I mean.) I still have that worry for my friends who choose to build their businesses on Substack anyway. But whatever happens, it will no longer affect Platformer, and that gives me me real peace of mind.

Eight months later, what other reflections do you have about the decision to leave?

It’s a decision I’m proud of — because it’s a decision we made as a community.

When we learned about the extent of far-right extremism, Hitler worship and Holocaust denial on Substack, you pressed us to investigate. And when we published our findings, you overwhelmingly encouraged us to find a new home on the web.

During this time, I talked to several high-profile writers who collectively make millions of dollars writing on Substack. Their readers were also asking them to leave, too. In the end, almost none of them did. They bet that they could simply put their heads down and wait for the controversy to pass. And it worked!

Substack’s Nazi problem continues, but the news cycle has moved on. I suspect it will swing back around eventually. But in the meantime, I’m proud that when Platformer was asked to actually live its values — to stand up for the idea that basic content moderation is good and necessary — we did.

Having principles can be annoying and expensive. (And make you insufferable to talk to at parties.) But it beats the alternative.

Where does Platformer go from here?

Four years in, my main goal remains the same: to bring the best news and analysis of tech platforms to your inbox, and to do it in a way that is sustainable over the long term. Through all the tumult of the media industry over the past few years, the model we've been proving out at Platformer has been quite resilient. Email, the web, and paid subscriptions remain a powerful combination, and it makes me happy to see it working for a growing number of my colleagues across lots of different verticals.

At the same time, I'll admit to some uncertainty about the next year for Platformer editorially. And that's because here as in so many other things, the future depends on the results of the US presidential election.

Platformer was founded amid the backlash to tech that began when Donald Trump was elected, and we began to scrutinize the relationship between Big Tech and democracy. Trump spent the next several years smashing norms and committing crimes, and a huge part of the story was in seeing how tech platforms reacted. Would they label his obvious lies as such? Would they promote accurate information about COVID-19? When he led an insurrection, would they ban his accounts?

If Trump wins again, I predict a jarring return to these and related questions. Platforms will once again become, entirely against their will, bulwarks against the further tattering of democracy. And if so, that will once again become subject No. 1 here at Platformer.

If Kamala Harris wins, though, all the air rushes out of the content moderation story. Harris is a normal politician with conventional views about tech. She is not going to be spreading lies about mail-in ballots or vaccines on her X account. And so the attention of the tech world will turn elsewhere.

In particular, it will turn to the development of artificial intelligence. The rise of AI has already been the story during the relatively calm administration of Joe Biden. But with Trump likely offstage for good, reporters like us will have more room to explore the race to build super-intelligence. Should that world come to pass, expect much more coverage of AI as it relates to content moderation and tech policy more broadly.

I still have more to think through, particularly as it relates to what I can do to involve readers more in our day-to-day operations. (Would any of you read an occasional mailbag column for example?) And I'm going to continue thinking about what a third full-time reporter could add to our operation.

But I've probably said enough for now. Let me know what other questions you have about the past year, and perhaps I can answer them in a future edition.

In the meantime, despite the struggles we had this year, the future looks bright. Thanks for reading Platformer this year, and here's to a big year five.