95 Comments

I also think this is great; I'm glad you're doing it, and I'm glad you laid out the reasons why. However, I thought I'd point something out. You keep mentioning Hollywood, along with music and writing. Fair enough. However, Hollywood directors did this in 1919! D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin formed United Artists. You probably know this, but I thought I'd mention it. The Wikipedia page on United Artists gives its history, and if I'm reading it correctly, it doesn't seem that the artists (directors and actors/actresses) stayed in control all that long - and MGM bought it in 1981. I hope the internet provides a different way for artists of all types to stay in control, just as you say. It just worries me that it will be very difficult in the long run. The mindsets and skillsets for business and art are extremely different, and the Bandcamp example doesn't inspire confidence, you know?

Expand full comment

We are on the same cap table now, comrade. Let one thousand Substacks bloom! Empowering writers and protecting free speech will help us counter the cultural revolution: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/counter-the-cultural-revolution

Expand full comment

Great idea, Ted...owners treat things better than non owners...the old saying, nobody washes a rental car

Expand full comment

I voted a strong "No" at the would-be "shareholders" meeting, Ted. I respect you and your work a great deal. You know why they visited you in Austin? Because you're a big revenue source, Ted. All your charts and pie-charts and whatever should not distract that this is a money grab. It's very hierarchal: You're a star here and get their attention; I am a worker bee from the factory floor. They already receive revenue from my meager earnings from every paid subscription I get: That's supposed to be their business model, which it appears is not working. So they want to claw back some of my earnings? I have many charities I'd rather support with my $100. And that's what it is: asking for charity, because chance of ROI is almost nil, and you must know that.

Expand full comment

Ted, you’re not a shareholder. Shareholders own stock, or shares in the company. What we would be buying into here is a class B bond series. Class B bond is venture capital. At least my understanding/read.

Should Substack need to liquidate, investors with this offering will not get 1 penny of their investment returned until the liquidation would exceed the 585 million dollars.

I’m going to wait for the IPO and buy real stock shares in Substack.

Expand full comment

What's that Marxist line about workers owning the memes of production? I'm not a Marxist, but this always made fundamental sense to me. The guild structure of the Middle Ages, in which professionals controlled their own professional lives, is desirable on the face of it.

Apply this elsewhere.

If the universities were owned by scholars, would we have administrative tyranny and wokeness?

If the hospitals were owned by doctors and nurses, would we have the sick care system?

If agribusiness was owned by farmers, would we have glyphosate?

The point is simple. Each sector of the economy exists for a purpose, and should be operated by those for whom that purpose - and not some other motive, such as rent extraction or ideological influence - is their primary motivator.

Expand full comment
Mar 28, 2023·edited Mar 28, 2023

Are you certain you don’t want to move back to Palo Alto, buy a printing press, crank out 500 to 1,000 copies per week or month, hand them out or sell them at Lytton Plaza or Mac’s Smoke Shop, wheat paste them to walls by moonlight? I would invest $500 (five hundred — not five hundred thousand, five hundred million or five hundred billion — we actually have many billionaires here, but I’m not one of them — I mean, I know where they live, one of them seems to follow me with the eye of Sauron as my dog and I walk by and pee on his shrubs…). Stay indie, Ted.

Expand full comment

“Why shouldn’t writers—or musicians or photographers or workers on a film crew, etc.—also be owners of their creative enterprises? Wouldn’t that be a good thing?”

They have been, and with very mixed results:

United Artists, founded in 1919 by Charlie Chaplin and friends, floundered by the mid-1920s.

Apple Records, founded in 1968 by the Beatles, imploded by the mid-1970s.

Magnum Photos, founded in 1947 by Robert Capa and other famous photographers, is a thriving co-op but is very picky about who it allows to join.

I.F. Stone’s Weekly, 1953-1971, was an influential newspaper written, edited, and published by one man. Circulation peaked at 70,000. (How many Substackers would be happy with that many paid subscription?)

If you want to include underground newspapers, obscure poetry magazines, Web radio, and so forth the list of outlets owned and run by “creatives” would get exhaustive and exhausting.

My point is that writers owning the publishing platform is not by itself either a good or a bad thing.

As another commenter already noted, most of Substack’s capital already comes from writers. Unless writers-as-investors get enough voting shares to elect directors and to steer the company, then what’s the point in them putting money into it? As Boss Hogg might have said, “I don’t care who does the investin’ as long as I do the spending.”

Expand full comment

Best wishes for a successful investment!

My only concern is that the World is going to be sucked up by ChatGPT!

Expand full comment

This is another potentially game-changing move by Substack and certainly what a contrast to what is happening with verification check-marks on Twitter. I had the pleasure of meeting a few Substack staffers at a meet-up in Toronto last fall (sadly, Ontarians are precluded from joining this venture at this time) and was very impressed with their dedication and belief in the mission of Substack.

Expand full comment

Thank you for this! I believe in the model, too.

Expand full comment

I mean, my main issue with this is that Substack is a bad platform, by which I mean that it’s detrimental to the well-being of the United States. I love your column (because I love jazz music) and you’re a star here but anti-trans campaigns are prolific on this platform. You may get a lot of engagement but I doubt you get as much as LibsOfTikTok or Christopher Rufo -- both of whom utilize Substack to push discriminatory ideologies against trans people. Those blogs have shaped legislation as states ban drag shows and gender care. Also, your blog may be big but it’s probably not as big as Gray Mirror, the pseudo-intellectual anti-democracy Substack run by Curtis Yarvin which has followers at the highest levels of public life. Billionaires like Peter Thiel. Substack is a bad platform. It normalizes anti-American ideals like acceptance and democracy. If you invest you should put pressure on the owners to fix this thing.

Expand full comment

Taken as a whole, this is an astonishing effect of the change we are all experiencing with modern realities of our economic conditions and cultural and political change. I am proud to be one of the subscribers to have pushed the graph up so high which clearly presents an undeniable trend of strong interest by the public in the integrity of authorship. I agree there needs to be creator ownership of a work product more than at any time in history. A trend in that direction can help our economic woes. Bravo and Onward!

Expand full comment

My biggest issue with INVESTING in Substack is it’s really just a donation and nothing more. How do I know this? Because almost 90% of the business’s revenue goes back to the writer. That’s great for us as writers, but terrible for us as an investor. Nope.

Expand full comment

I mentioned on the main announcement, but I think most people will view investing in Substack as an endorsement of the platform’s direction & stated principles more than anything else. I would, anyway.

It’s not the same analysis you’d apply to,say, buying stock in Chevron.

Expand full comment

I like your dream. But I trust no one with money. Money should not be the way. Money is a short cut. For some a huge short cut. For others a very long way around and into the wilderness. You are simply suggesting a pyramid game. Another one. There will be no solution to payment of creatives in the present order of things. DRIP is the model of any pyramid.

Expand full comment