If I want to fully support myself from my blog, is substack basically the only reasonable game in town? I'd like that to not be the case, but it seems like it might be?
From numbers people have posted, substack has a much higher conversion rate for writing than patreon, GH, etc.
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If your "work product" really is writing, then I think you'll get much better performance using a product designed for that. Patreon's do-it-all product model induces a lot of compromises. The most important thing, though, is to own the billing tokens:
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I've had success with Patreon, and I'm grateful to them—particularly as trailblazers in this space—but I really can't recommend them to anyone starting out now. I've been disappointed in their product execution; I suspect their billing lock-in creates less pressure to improve.
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Because Substack doesn't (yet) add any meaningful platform-level distribution, I don't think there's a strong argument to use it instead of Ghost, which is OSS and doesn't take a cut.
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I'm not sure how that 10% conversion rate is calculated (the % of unique viewers of a single article subscribing for $$$?) but it seems quite optimistic! Quantum Country alone has had order 100k readers; I have 600 patrons, total.
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I see, yeah. Using that model (and my own free mailing list), my conversion rate is 15-20%, but I don't advertise my own mailing list much (compared to Substacks), so that's a bit distorted.
That is a superb conversion rate, particularly given your model.
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Just looked, and only ~1/4 of patrons are on my public mailing list (with the same email address, anyway, so probably undercounting by 10-20%). So "conversions" is not really the right model, I guess!