Moving Forward on Substack
Changing where I write in public.
News this week was that Substacker Bari Weiss will be taking The Free Press to CBS, where she’ll become editor-in-chief of the news division. Ana Marie Cox had comments about this:
If the Free Press leave Substack, it would be an enormous hit to the platform. Their 10 percent vig generates $1 million a year, representing roughly 2.5% of Substack’s total annual revenue (estimated around $40–45 million).
As a reminder: Substack has never turned a profit, and yet it’s still valued at $1 billion based on VC rounds. I’ve argued before in this newsletter that Substack cannot make money if it stays true to its promise of being a home for independent journalists wanting to preserve their voices. It’s a high-minded and laudable goal—one I’ve been seduced by myself, and one that has drawn many writers I deeply respect—but the business pressures don’t align with that vision.
Sooner or later the gravitational pull of investors will drag the platform toward something else entirely: the “YouTube of newsletters,” with all the churn, AI slop, engagement bait, and radicalization that implies.
Losing The Free Press wouldn’t just be a big financial hit; it would accelerate the enshittification. (The Freed Press, by Ana Marie Cox on Buttondown).
In that context, I remain 75 percent sure I will move my public writing to Substack beginning in January 2026.
My issues with WordPress are two.
The main contractor through whom I got my WordPress blog printed went out of business. Replacement services are much more expensive. With Substack I get an email every time I post, so there would be hard copy backup by printing it out. Not ideal or fancy, yet it would work. I am old school and know how to operate a three ring binder.
Secondly, I get way more views on Substack than WordPress. This is a major factor behind my move. Partly, they track them differently and one viewer can make multiple “views” on a single post while reading it. Even with that, the numbers are too great to ignore. After all, the reason we write in public is to be read.
Yes I have read Cox’s multiple issues with Substack, including all about the Nazi sh*t there. I can live with that, I think. If I can’t, I’ll do something else. I looked at Buttondown, Cox’s current home, as an option. I am not famous with a large following as she is. I need the density of people I know on Substack. I have three months to get ready.
Changes will be coming for pauldeaton.com. I don’t want to lose the domain, so I plan to take the current content private and reassign the domain to one of the spare blogs I keep in the background and put that in public. I still need a place to post letters to the editor and cross post written work I do for other sites. Substack does not seem like that kind of place. While I have the paper archive, I use the blogs I’ve taken private to search easily. I have hidden posts from multiple platforms loaded on WordPress going back to 2007. That site will always be a resource.
My view of this may change once I finish my autobiography. If my eyesight deteriorates, that would be a factor and I would likely stop writing in public. Moving to Substack appears to have more rewards than risk. Now I need to get the rest of the way there. This week’s news did not help.
I’ve been thinking of simply making my Wordpress “monetized.” It doesn’t look professional though.