Some Tentative Thoughts on Substack

I launched my original blog on WordPress back in September 2009, shortly after I graduated law school. At the time, I was also very active on the nascent Twitter to promote my posts. Over the past seventeen years, the landscape has changed quite a bit. Podcasts have surged in popularity. Advisory Opinions, Strict Scrutiny, and others command massive audiences, and their hosts write best-selling books. Social media has shifted from long-ish threads to bite-sized POV videos. And Substack has emerged as a popular platform that authors can monetize.

The Volokh Conspiracy has moved from place-to-place, but has remained largely the same: posts by a host of authors are sorted chronologically. Indeed, I think it is a testament to Eugene’s vision that this platform has endured for more than a quarter century. True enough, some bloggers have come and gone. I joined in late 2019. Others have left the site to publish on their own platforms. Still, the Volokh Conspiracy has had remarkable stability in this field.

Many readers frequently ask if I would set up a Substack. My usual response is that all of my posts are freely available on the Volokh Conspiracy. They reply that Substack makes it easier to read content in newsletter form, delivered right to their inboxes. That point is fair enough, but there is some extra amount of work that goes into preparing newsletters. As regular readers know, my posts are usually a form of stream of consciousness that could benefit from more proof-reading. I can justify this approach because, as I often say, readers get what they paid for. To be sure, Reason.com does provide some advertising revenue, which is split among the bloggers, but the amount is not sufficient to align incentives.

At least for me, the primary reason I write is to reach as broad an audience as possible to disseminate my ideas. That goal runs headlong with the entire notion of a paywall. At some level, it irks me that law professor charge people for their work. Our job is to diffuse information to the world. Law professors are fortunate that law reviews publish their articles online without fee. In other disciplines, peer reviewed journals are extremely expensive to access. From time-to-time, professors publish Op-Eds in major outlets like the New York Times or Wall Street Journal. On someone else’s platform, the paywall cannot be avoided. But why should a professor erect his own paywall?

The simple answer is money. Do the math. Look at what some law professors charge for subscriptions to their Substacks, and multiple that figure by the number of paid subscribers. And that fee increases every month as more subscribers join. I suppose subscribers can quit if the content is not up-to-snuff, but my impression is that once a subscription starts, it is hard to break. (I have far too many streaming and other subscription fees each month.)

I would like to think that, at the margins, a predictable revenue from subscriptions would create at least some incentives to more properly format a weekly or daily newsletter. That cost might also allow for greater interaction with audiences that is not really possible on a blog. There also might be greater incentives to self-publish some of the essays that I might otherwise submit to other platforms. Those works could be published right away, and avoid the several-day lead time for the editorial process to proceed.  Indeed, that subscription revenue could take the place of one or more speaking honorariums each month, requiring less time for traveling, to provide more time to write. As I get older (and yes, I age), the appeal of regular travel diminishes.

Still, the thought of paywalling my own content bothers me. The best solution that I worked out would be to make my posts available right away on Substack behind a partial paywall–that is, the first few paragraphs would be freely available, but the rest would require a subscription. And then some interval of time later–maybe 24 hours–the post would appear on the Volokh Conspiracy without charge. That way, all of the material will be freely available to the world, and would be indexed by search engines and AI, albeit with a slight delay. Some of the items I write are not at all timely, so the delay would not have much of an impact on readership. But some of my items are quite topical and drive conversations. These are the sorts of items where a 24-hour or longer delay might be too tough to resist.

My thoughts here are still tentative. (Surely tentative thoughts are not binding, right?) I would welcome any suggestions by email.