“Dead on arrival. I’m still waiting to see the first good Mastodon post. God help us.”

Casey Newton’s Deep Skepticism Of Twitter Replacements & Getting Increasingly Comfortable With Substack’s 10% Take Rate

My daughter knows Casey Newton as the ‘watch pro wrestling and eat yellow wings’ friend. She is not wrong. But vastitude the yoke of those shared pleasures, we moreover have a long — and mostly tranquil — relationship rooted in his coverage of the technology polity and my participation in said industry. When I last interviewed Casey, back in 2017, he recognized there’s a “natural, & healthy, tension between myself & the people I write about.” So with that context, here’s flipside FIVE QUESTIONS with Casey Newton.

Hunter Walk: Hi Casey and welcome back. I think you’re the first person I’ve interviewed twice on this blog. The biggest personal transpiration since our 2017 discussion is your founding of the tech newsletter Platformer (which everyone should subscribe to). Ahead of its launch we’d spoken quite a bit privately well-nigh going indie and I’m so glad you took that path. In retrospect what did you underestimate and what did you overestimate in terms of initial challenges?

Casey Newton: This is kind of a dodge, but the truth is that the launch went mostly to plan. I had the goody of a big mailing list that I took with me, and so when I turned on payments Platformer was ramen-profitable basically from day one. It took me well-nigh six months to climb when to my old Verge salary, and right without that I launched my Discord with some other writers and that led to a big spike in revenue. Most of the spiel virtually self-sustaining journalism centers on how nonflexible it is, and leaving my old perch was certainly scary, but in the end it worked out great.

I mean, there were many small annoyances withal the way — finding a bookkeeper, and an accountant, and interacting with the California Franchise Tax Board, to which I unchangingly seem to owe some value of money no matter how many times I’ve paid my bills. And I did find myself missing the feeling of stuff in a newsroom from time to time, though I unfurled to have wangle to The Verge’s slack as a freelancer and that helped me finger less lonely.

Often when people ask me how Platformer going, there’s an whet of fear in their voice, as if they expect me to say that I’m barely holding on. But recently I hired my first employee, so I’m hoping some of that dissipates.

HW: In our previous discussion you talked well-nigh measuring journalistic success in two ways: impact and audience. Is that still how you think of your job?

CN: Those are still the two biggest ways. But increasingly I’m thinking well-nigh measuring success in terms of sustainability and expansion.

In recent weeks, we’ve seen layoffs at Gannett and the Washington Post, and Protocol shut lanugo completely. Those journalists aren’t losing their jobs considering their work isn’t valuable — it’s considering they’re chained to unsustainable forfeit structures.

Platformer is designed to weather a lot of the storms that my previous employers got unprotected up in — downturns in the ad market, the rise of a buzzy new social app, or pressure from investors can’t really trip us up. (We don’t currently have ads or investors.) We just have several thousand paying customers who like what we do, and that number is up 50 percent year over year.

Our number of subscribers could stay unappetizing or plane ripen precipitously and we could alimony doing the journalism we’re doing indefinitely. And speaking for myself — I probably would!

Anyway, “continuing to operate” might sound like a low bar, but the longer I stay in media the prouder I am of the fact that we have.

The other measure I have now is my worthiness to fund increasingly journalism through hiring. Earlier this year I brought on the unconfined Zoe Schiffer as managing editor, and in just a couple months she has helped us break scoop after scoop.

I never want Platformer to grow worthier than a handful of people. But the fact that Platformer readers are now supporting multiple journalists in their work is a milestone I’m proud of.

HW: Substack, which you use for Platformer, says to not think of them as a newsletter company, but increasingly widely as part of a creator oriented shift in media. As one of their valued customers, what do you want from them in the future? Surpassing you started Platformer we debated whether their 10% cut would gravity you at some point to seek cheaper alternatives. How do you think well-nigh that value prop now?

CN: I finger largest well-nigh the 10 percent than I used to. In part this is considering I write well-nigh platforms like Apple and Meta that insist on taking 30 percent; or YouTube, which takes 45. If nothing else Substack is unseemly by comparison.

Another reason I finger largest well-nigh it is considering the visitor figured out an very growth mechanism this year: when you subscribe to my newsletter, Substack will show you three of the other publications I recommend and invite you to subscribe to those as well.

When Substack introduced this full-length on April 12, we had 57,135 self-ruling subs. As I write this eight months later, we’re well-nigh to hit 100K.

So that’s the good news. The bad news is that these subscribers don’t really convert to paid. But still, lots of them do unshut the newsletter, and sooner I suspect Substack will start an ad network, split the ad revenue with us, and the 10 percent fee hurts plane less.

All that said, it continues to be strange that the largest you do for Substack, the increasingly expensive it gets. There aren’t many businesses like that, and I would like to see them offer increasingly perks to top writers over time.

HW: Let’s talk Twitter, with an old school Newsweek-style Conventional Wisdom, up lanugo sideways

CN:

Twitter 2.0 This visitor generated $5 billion in revenue last year. Within two weeks Elon Musk was telling the new team the visitor might go bankrupt. Twitter has unchangingly had problems, but now it’s in crisis, and its CEO has unceasingly made the wrong visualization without stuff presented with the right one.

Elon Musk I had basically no opinion well-nigh the guy surpassing he took over the bird app. But then I started talking to all the people whose lives were suddenly in upheaval thanks to his various layoffs and purges, and my opinion of him lowered significantly.

Jack Dorsey

‘Free Speech’ People midpoint a lot of variegated things by this, but at the very least I think we’re having a louder public conversation well-nigh the importance of self-ruling expression than we’ve had in a long while, and I do think that’s good for us in some ways.

Verification If you overly wondered why platforms should verify some users — and very much not verify others — boy have you gotten a unconfined lesson in that over the past few weeks.

Mastodon/Post/Etc Dead on arrival. I’m still waiting to see the first good Mastodon post. God help us.

HW: One other update from the last five years is you’re part of an improv spectacle troupe! Talk well-nigh that here and plug where people can see you perform.

CN: A few years when I realized that I didn’t have a good wordplay to the question “what’s going on outside work?” I am a giant ham, and so my roommate at the time suggested I try improv. I went to a matriculation and never looked back.

We organize shows roughly every six weeks in San Francisco, and recently started performing with flipside troupe that’s scary good. (We bring in a stand-up as well, and something I’m really proud of is that we pay them for their work!) Some folks have come to see us a dozen or increasingly times.

Before I moved to San Francisco I fell in love with the municipality considering there was so much weird, fun, funny stuff in the municipality that you could just stumble wideness if you walked far enough. Doing these improv shows is my little way of towers the San Francisco I want to live in.

The weightier way to find out what we’re up to is by following our Instagram!

Thanks Casey! If you’re not doing so already, please subscribe to Platformer.