“Tom, how do I grow on Substack?”
“Tom, how do I make money on Substack?”
“Tom, why should I choose Substack over Medium?”
I get these questions a ton, and while I’m happy to receive them, they point to a huge problem with online writing:
The obsession with making money writing.
This is the part where you say “Tom, you sold a course for years about how to make money on Medium, you’re part of the problem!”
Sure, I’ll take all the blame in the world for this.
But that doesn’t eliminate the problem.
The truth is, the opportunity to make money writing online destroyed good writing.
On Medium, it’s easy to make money writing. It’s not easy to make GREAT money writing there, but at least you can make an account and start making money pretty much immediately.
On a platform like Substack, it’s NOT about the money at all because you won’t make good money for YEARS here.
I’m an established writer with over 1,200 subscribers to this newsletter, and I’m only making like $75 per month so far. Do I expect that number to increase with time? Absolutely! And I’m getting new paid subscribers every week..
But it’s a grind, plain and simple.
And so many writers are NOT ready for that grind BY ANY STRETCH OF THE IMAGINATION.
I get emails all the time from people asking me how to make money on Substack now.
I don’t know, man. I really don’t. It seems to me there is no “easy way out” here like there is on Medium where you’re one viral post away from making an extra $1,000+.
Here you have to get paid subscribers, which takes time. Even for me, a guy with 60,000 Medium followers and an established email list, it’s hard to get paid subscribers.
My point is, maybe it’s a good thing that it’s hard.
Maybe the quality is so much better here on Substack than it is on Medium precisely for this reason. It’s HARD to make money here.
So instead of a bunch of money-hungry writers trying to make a quick buck writing the latest self-help listicle, you get thoughtful writers who are in this game for another reason entirely:
Because they love it.
And that makes for MUCH better content and reads.
Sometimes I wonder whether the “ease” of writing makes it easy for bullshit content to flood our feeds.
Think about it for a second…
On Youtube, people make videos. If you’ve made videos in your life, you know it’s DIFFICULT. I spend at least 5X more time making one video compared to one article. It’s a true labor of love for me. I made 30 Youtube videos for my new film analysis channel, sinking in hundreds of hours making them, and I haven’t made a single penny from any of it (so far).
That’s how intense making videos is.
And I wonder whether the sheer difficulty of making money with videos drives away all the gold diggers who are just in this to make a quick buck.
They get bored. They move on. Which is good, because they were making crappy content anyway.
The only way to make good money with videos is by making incredible videos. And to make incredible videos, you have to love this shit.
To make good money writing, you need to know what other people love and give that to them.
A lot of Medium writers are VERY skeptical of Substack and they question why, when it’s so hard to make money here, they should even stay.
That question in and of itself IS the problem.
That is, in part, the mindset that turned Medium into a cesspool of sub-par content and allowed Substack to thrive in its wake.
Everyone’s more worried about making great money rather than making great writing.
Here you get better content—plain and simple—because writers actually care about making something worthwhile.
They’ll show up tomorrow whether they make $500 per month or $5 per month. I think we need to talk about that a little more often.
100% on point. It is fun for me. I wasn't even aware they made money on substack. It's just my personal space to share what's on my mind.
When I first came to Substack I was wowed by the intense quality of the content. I kept thinking to myself, oh, so this is what content creation is REALLY supposed to be. It's so exciting to have an inside experience into the minds of soo much talent. 💙💙