First of all, thank you for pointing me to Substack. It is exactly what I needed after leaving legacy print media after 35 (yes 35) years. Along with the many benefits you note is one that has been especially important to me – timeliness. I taste, I think up a topic, I do some research and I write and voilà it's posted, all within days. No lag time waiting for print. And beyond that - no editors! Don't get me wrong - I've had some great ones. But they were all tied to specific publication-related requirements, policies, advertising commitments etc. And all too often they whitewashed the personality out of my prose. Now it's just me - take it or leave it - honest, transparent and undiluted. I very much appreciate your own tireless work and of course the shout-out.
As an Australian I subscribe to some of the suggested substacks by Tom Wark. I'm unlikely to purchase American wine without a specific purpose. it's the same for French wines promoted by English writers. General interest topics are relevant to my continuing wine education, now into it's 50th year since my first trip with a couple of uni mates to South Australia. My home state, Victoria, caters well to my wine and touring needs but I do like to travel our vast country and taste all it has to offer, especially wine-wise.
Brilliant, Tom, thanks for the shoutout / kind words, and I am checking out all of these that I'm not already following! Love lists like these, especially coming from someone as knowledgeable as you!
Tom, you left out an important medium during a brief interregnum: the wine forums / bulletin boards at the early stage of the internet era, via the online services of Prodigy, Compuserve, and AOL. Many of us whose wine passions matured during that era learned much from from our peers, as well as the professionals (Robert Parker, Steve Edmunds) and future professionals (Russell Bevan, Steve Heimoff, Mark Squires) who also participated. The information exchanged in those venues (along with the inevitable misinformation, trolling and flame wars) was essential to my own wine education, along with that of many other passionate wine consumers. Their legacy continues today in places such as Wine Berserkers.
Good stuff, Tom. While Substack does offer a platform for content creators that ties together blogging and subscription functionality, I believe it's problematic as it's all under the guise of someone else's brand: Substack. This makes it easy to grow Substack's brand and to a lesser extent grow an individual's brand. However, I believe that it is considerably harder to create an actual brand where people know the name.
To wit, I follow a number of writers on Substack, including yourself and some others that you mentioned. I don't know the brand name of almost any of them. (I know yours because it was consistent with your prior site.) Instead, the brand is the person's name and Substack. To the extent someone's writing is noted elsewhere, Substack is always mentioned. One is, in essence, losing brand impressions to Substack.
I also believe that, as more content creators migrate to Substack, consumers will realize that they don't want to subscribe to dozens of Substacks. That will hurt people's ability to monetize as their slice of the pie gets smaller and smaller.
What I expect to happen next (it's already happening) is that people will aggregate together, either within Substack or elsewhere. This will likely leave things not too dissimilar to where it is today, with an on-line but print magazine-style top-down structure that is monetized through subscriptions. However, we'll still have consumer fatigue with numerous subscriptions.
This is all to say, Substack is a short-term BandAid for content creators. It's partly for these reasons that I've chosen to stick with my own site and monetize there. It keeps all of the brand impressions and also allows full control. Additionally, at present, if Substack were to go under (or be bought by, say, Elon Musk), a whole lot of writers are going to be left out in the cold AND lose their brand.
I think you are largely correct in just about everything you say. However, I should note that it is more than possible to create a site and newsletter on Substack that does not have the "substack" in the URL. I chose not to for a couple reasons. My brand (such as it is) is my name. Also, I'm lazy. I've thought about banding together with others of a similar ilk a la "The Free Press" has done via Bari Weiss. But that's more work than I want to put in at this point. The question is whether subscriber fatique does set in? I don't know. GREAT comments.
Excellent Tom, thank you.
Thanks for the mention. Much appreciated. I'm approaching the 40th anniversary of my first wine column.
First of all, thank you for pointing me to Substack. It is exactly what I needed after leaving legacy print media after 35 (yes 35) years. Along with the many benefits you note is one that has been especially important to me – timeliness. I taste, I think up a topic, I do some research and I write and voilà it's posted, all within days. No lag time waiting for print. And beyond that - no editors! Don't get me wrong - I've had some great ones. But they were all tied to specific publication-related requirements, policies, advertising commitments etc. And all too often they whitewashed the personality out of my prose. Now it's just me - take it or leave it - honest, transparent and undiluted. I very much appreciate your own tireless work and of course the shout-out.
You're the only wine writer I follow. Keep it up! You do great work as always!
Thanks for the credit, Tom!
As an Australian I subscribe to some of the suggested substacks by Tom Wark. I'm unlikely to purchase American wine without a specific purpose. it's the same for French wines promoted by English writers. General interest topics are relevant to my continuing wine education, now into it's 50th year since my first trip with a couple of uni mates to South Australia. My home state, Victoria, caters well to my wine and touring needs but I do like to travel our vast country and taste all it has to offer, especially wine-wise.
Brilliant, Tom, thanks for the shoutout / kind words, and I am checking out all of these that I'm not already following! Love lists like these, especially coming from someone as knowledgeable as you!
Tom, you left out an important medium during a brief interregnum: the wine forums / bulletin boards at the early stage of the internet era, via the online services of Prodigy, Compuserve, and AOL. Many of us whose wine passions matured during that era learned much from from our peers, as well as the professionals (Robert Parker, Steve Edmunds) and future professionals (Russell Bevan, Steve Heimoff, Mark Squires) who also participated. The information exchanged in those venues (along with the inevitable misinformation, trolling and flame wars) was essential to my own wine education, along with that of many other passionate wine consumers. Their legacy continues today in places such as Wine Berserkers.
I do think it’s great, it’s just hard to read all the content out there now and keep up with so many subscriptions.
Good stuff, Tom. While Substack does offer a platform for content creators that ties together blogging and subscription functionality, I believe it's problematic as it's all under the guise of someone else's brand: Substack. This makes it easy to grow Substack's brand and to a lesser extent grow an individual's brand. However, I believe that it is considerably harder to create an actual brand where people know the name.
To wit, I follow a number of writers on Substack, including yourself and some others that you mentioned. I don't know the brand name of almost any of them. (I know yours because it was consistent with your prior site.) Instead, the brand is the person's name and Substack. To the extent someone's writing is noted elsewhere, Substack is always mentioned. One is, in essence, losing brand impressions to Substack.
I also believe that, as more content creators migrate to Substack, consumers will realize that they don't want to subscribe to dozens of Substacks. That will hurt people's ability to monetize as their slice of the pie gets smaller and smaller.
What I expect to happen next (it's already happening) is that people will aggregate together, either within Substack or elsewhere. This will likely leave things not too dissimilar to where it is today, with an on-line but print magazine-style top-down structure that is monetized through subscriptions. However, we'll still have consumer fatigue with numerous subscriptions.
This is all to say, Substack is a short-term BandAid for content creators. It's partly for these reasons that I've chosen to stick with my own site and monetize there. It keeps all of the brand impressions and also allows full control. Additionally, at present, if Substack were to go under (or be bought by, say, Elon Musk), a whole lot of writers are going to be left out in the cold AND lose their brand.
Hi Sean.
I think you are largely correct in just about everything you say. However, I should note that it is more than possible to create a site and newsletter on Substack that does not have the "substack" in the URL. I chose not to for a couple reasons. My brand (such as it is) is my name. Also, I'm lazy. I've thought about banding together with others of a similar ilk a la "The Free Press" has done via Bari Weiss. But that's more work than I want to put in at this point. The question is whether subscriber fatique does set in? I don't know. GREAT comments.
Tom, good to know on removing "Substack." That definitely adds to its appeal in my book.
A lovely list!