Em Hermann-Johnson had been following Anne Helen Petersen’s writing for years when, in 2020, Ms. Petersen quit her job at BuzzFeed News to write her newsletter, Culture Study, full time.
“I didn’t hesitate to support her,” Ms. Hermann-Johnson, a 52-year-old substitute teacher in Minneapolis, said. She paid $5 a month for a Culture Study subscription. It would be the first of many.
“I don’t even know how many I pay for right now,” she said. “Five, maybe? Six?”
When she sat down to determine the actual number, it turned out to be 11. She pays between $5 and $10 a month for some and between $38 and $60 annually for others, totaling about $600 a year, she said.
In the last few years, more people are spending a significant amount of money on email newsletters from their favorite writers. As a result, some have also fallen into a familiar budgeting trap: It can be difficult to keep track of how many newsletters they’ve signed up for and how much they’re paying for them.
Despite the surprise, Ms. Hermann-Johnson didn’t consider culling her list. As she read through her paid newsletters — among them from Nora McInerny, a grief writer; Laura McKowen, a sobriety writer; and Catherine Newman, a memoirist and novelist — there were no surprises. All were writers she read, loved and felt good about giving money to.
“I just want to support them and their work, and that’s how I feel like I can do it,” she said.
A Relatively New Spending Category
Hamish McKenzie, one of Substack’s founders, wrote in a Substack post last year that Ben Thompson, a tech analyst who writes the blog Stratechery, had inspired an early version of his company. Mr. Thompson added a paid membership option to his blog in 2014, and within six months, 1,000 subscribers were paying him at least $100 a year for premium content. (Mr. Thompson refers to his own publication as a “subscription-based blog, newsletter and podcast.”)
When Mr. McKenzie founded Substack with his colleagues Chris Best and Jairaj Sethi in 2017, their first recruit to the platform was Bill Bishop, whose free newsletter, Sinocism, had 30,000 subscribers. On his first day publishing it on Substack, he brought in $100,000 in subscriptions. Substack, then as now, took 10 percent.
Today, many platforms and products, including Beehiiv, Kit, Memberful, Ghost, Lede and Patreon, help writers create paid publications. But Substack is widely considered to be the largest, with over 50,000 revenue-earning publications. The company reports that it has tens of millions of active subscribers and five million paid subscriptions. It declined to share concrete subscriber numbers, including the number of paid subscribers.
Because the category is relatively new, there isn’t enough public data yet on who is paying for newsletters, or how many they are paying for.
Dan Oshinsky, founder of Inbox Collective, a newsletter consultancy, said the desire to support a particular person’s work sets the newsletter category apart from more traditional media subscriptions, where access to the content itself is the primary driver to subscribe.
“When there is a person behind it or a small team behind it, readers will go, ‘I really like you, I like your mission, I like your work, and I want to make sure that I support you in some way,’” Mr. Oshinsky said.
Jill Krupnik, a 42-year-old writer in Brooklyn who said she paid for five newsletters, described her own primary driver as a desire to help “the people I’m in a parasocial relationship with.”
Not Keeping Track
In conversations with over 40 readers who pay for at least one subscription to an independent email newsletter or blog, many said they did not know exactly how many newsletters they were paying for or even how to check, save some tedious bank statement forensics. On Substack, for example, subscribers can see a list of publications they pay for, but not a full count. They also must click through individual invoices to see how much they are paying — a total is not available.
Of those subscribers who did check, many discovered that the total was more than they had thought.
Sari Botton, who lives in Kingston, N.Y., makes her living from two publications on Substack: Oldster Magazine and Memoir Land. She keeps her core content free, inviting readers who can to subscribe for $50 to $55 each year. “I’m really uncomfortable asking for money,” she said.
But she has no such qualms paying other writers. “I just want to help everybody,” Ms. Botton, 59, said. “I definitely subscribe to more than I can read on a regular basis.”
When she counted them, she found she was paying for 127 newsletters — all on Substack.
“I was stunned,” she said. “In my mind, it was more like 35 or maybe even 50. I’m really bad at keeping track of expenses and my credit card charges.”
Ms. Botton settled in to make some hard decisions to cull her list. The easiest unsubscribes: writers who charged her despite not publishing on a regular basis.
She estimates she now pays about $3,000 a year for about 60 newsletters.
“I want to help people who are writers, who are going through what we’re all going through: the decimation of our entire field,” she said.
Paying Attention
Some subscribers know exactly whom they are paying for, and even develop systems to spread their dollars around.
Phyllis Unterschuetz, 76, is a retiree in Atlanta. “My husband and I are living on Social Security, which does not reach,” she said.
She answers paid online surveys to fund her newsletter subscriptions and can earn enough to afford three to five at a time. When she feels it’s time to rotate to another publication, she sends a note to explain that she is canceling not because of the content but because she needs to free up dollars to support other writers.
Brian Keaney, a teacher in Worcester, Mass., said he had paid for three publications from independent journalists on Substack for several years, including How Things Work, by Hamilton Nolan ($50 a year), and Worcester Sucks and I Love It, by Bill Shaner ($69 a year). In the last month, he added three paid subscriptions with funds he redistributed after adjusting his longtime Boston Globe subscription from print to digital.
“If I had unlimited funds, I’d pay for all the Substacks I read,” Mr. Keaney, 61, said. “I’m a firm believer that if you’re putting in quality work, you deserve to get paid.”
For her 50th birthday two years ago, Bianca Spence, an arts administrator in Toronto, bought herself a $50 annual subscription to Culture Study after a few years as a free subscriber. It was her first time paying for a newsletter, and her next two weren’t such slow burns. She began paying $5 a month for That Shakespearean Rag, by the literary critic Steven W. Beattie, “the second he started charging,” she said, since she had read him for free for so long. When Jane Pratt, founder of the cult teen magazine Sassy, started a newsletter called Another Jane Pratt Thing, Ms. Spence immediately paid $80 a year for it.
“I still have all my old Sassy magazines and Jane magazines in a box in my closet,” Ms. Spence, 52, said. “I would follow Jane to the end of the earth.”
Conducting an Audit
Aminatou Sow, author of the Crème de la Crème newsletter, recently did an audit of the ones she was paying for.
“I am trying to be a financially responsible person,” Ms. Sow, 40, said. Part of that work: whittling down her paid subscriptions. “I feel bad saying that out loud, because I feel like I should say that I pay for all of them,” she said. “But I don’t.”
One way she cut back: bartering with other writers. “I think, in general, artists should do that with each other,” she said. “And people can say no, and that’s fine.”
Comped swaps have drastically lowered the number of newsletters she pays for to a single digit.
For subscribers who can’t barter, Ms. Sow recommends the hard audit.
“People are hoarding digital products, drinking from a fire hose of this content,” she said. “Do you really need to subscribe to 100 newsletters? I don’t think so. Do you need to subscribe to 20 of them? I’m not even sure.”
Ms. Sow puts about half of her content behind a paywall and charges paid subscribers $50 a year. “I think that’s a good barrier of entry for everybody,” she said.
A few weeks after our initial discussion, Ms. Hermann-Johnson’s 11 paid subscriptions had increased to 15.
Here’s how it happened. First, one of her favorite writers joined Substack, and it took just three clicks for her to become a paid subscriber using her credit card on file. Then, during the subscription flow, she received an offer to take 20 percent off the monthly price of several subscriptions for one year. All she had to do was click the button next to the ones she wanted. to pay for. The list included publications she already subscribed to for free that had opted in to the offer.
For Ms. Hermann-Johnson, finally upgrading them to a paid subscription was a relief. “But I am also like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I’m starting to pay a lot for these newsletters,’” she said.
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