Last February, I was toying with creating an online persona for my gaming tag. I did some futzing around on other platforms, but what I was beginning to tire of was the weekly (or more often) maintenance I needed to do on the platform and the underlying OS of the virtual private server.
Substack was free (as long as I don’t monetize my audience,) it had scale, a lot of people had found success there, and it was pretty polished.
But, there were limitations. You can’t use independent analytics code injection. The theme is pretty blah, and apart from colors and choice of one of five online fonts (yawn), and if you wanted to do something like create a sidebar where you insert things like your Strava progress, Twitter feed, or anything else, you’re shit outta luck.
So, I created it and started writing. I had no audience, but I didn’t care.
Then, a couple people followed (or subscribed). Mostly I think the early ones were people who had seen me commenting on posts at The Bulwark. Yet slowly, I have been building an actual audience.
Then Substack released an app, and that began to grow views daily, then when Twitter started fucking with their URLs being posted to Twitter, Substack bolted on this clunky social component, Notes, that added a second (and confusing) class of follower. Followers are not subscribers, but who you follow affects the algorithm1 that drives your “feed” in the app.
And this is all to help drive the network effect and grow audiences.
And it works. Below is the growth of my subscribers:
Clearly, something started in October/November time frame. I started tossing in nuggets of observations on politics. I also started clicking on the “Also share to Notes” when I commented on places I was reading and also made it a note, I started getting more traffic, but then some of these people were pressing the button to subscribe.
Final thoughts
A year on I am happy. I like my little gaming, shitposting, fun page, and I have FABULOUS readers who interact, comment and engage.
I am beginning to see less of the offensive items in my feed on the app, so hopefully I can reduce the on-hand eye bleach.
I did move my professional site off of Substack and I have gone to Ghost for that. Gotta practice my ethics that I like to write about.
But here, I am still having fun. I hope you enjoy the stay!
True story: while I was agonizing whether to move my “professional” Substack to a place that doesn’t contort themselves to justify the sweet rake they get from the growing cohort of Nazi’s and White Nationalist pages. Now, I get a lot of ugly stuff interspersed into my timeline. Ick.
Big mistake