News publishers on Substack find the platform’s limitations

Local news startup Mill Media is the latest high-profile publisher to leave Substack. It plans to migrate its publications off the platform to build its own technology “stack” using the open-source content management system Ghost.

Mill Media founder Joshi Herrmann told Press Gazette that the company’s new titles covering Glasgow and London will soon launch on dedicated sites powered by Ghost and that its other four properties will follow.

Mill Media isn’t the only media company to feel it’s outgrown Substack. Politics publisher The Dispatch also left Substack in 2022 and moved to a new site powered by WordPress and Memberful in a move driven by its desire for greater flexibility, freedom, and control – as well as its desire to retain a greater portion of the subscription revenue it generates.

I also met with a senior exec at another high-profile Substack-based publication earlier this month who expressed similar frustrations with the limitations of Substack’s current platform and tools. The company is currently exploring options to stitch together its own technology stack instead – likely built on WordPress.

The power and appeal of Substack for individual creators and small publications is now evident, but it’s also becoming increasingly clear that those with aspirations to build more multifaceted media brands and companies are skeptical of its long-term suitability for several key reasons:

Fees

Substack’s 10% cut of subscription revenue may be deemed good value by individual creators and small publishers, but for those with scaled and/or rapidly growing audiences, it effectively becomes more expensive with each new subscriber added. Herrmann said Substack’s revenue cut “would represent more than £100,000” for Mill Media next year”, suggesting it expects revenues of £1m in 2025.

“We are going to save a lot of money by publishing on Ghost and using custom websites rather than Substack, and that’s important for us because we’re not a media giant, we need to spend our income carefully,” Herrmann said.

Flexibility & customization

Substack’s largest publishers say its team has been extremely responsive to their needs over the years, in many instances building custom features and functionality for specific publications. Still, some publishers say they would like greater customization and flexibility than Substack can provide. Its platform cannot currently power relatively established and common digital publishing and subscription marketing tactics, for example, such as metered paywalls, flexible registration walls, and the ability to control how and when first-party data is collected. “We increasingly want to plug in more custom tools… That will all be easier when we have a more custom stack,” Herrmann said.

More robust analytics and segmentation capabilities are features many Substack publishers say they crave, alongside more basic ways to differentiate their brands and properties from competitors’. “At a certain point, everybody’s website kind of looks like your website, and we wanted to be more flexible,” said The Dispatch CEO, Steve Hayes. “We wanted to place a heavier emphasis on getting eyeballs on what we’re putting on the website… That was harder, I think, working in the confines of Substack.”

Diversified revenue opportunities

Substack remains committed to powering subscription-first publications and continues to pin its company vision around the concept of audiences compensating creators directly for their work. While many modern publishers are now building their businesses around direct audience revenue at their core, however, the need for diversified revenue is becoming increasingly pronounced.

Many Substack publishers manually bake advertising and sponsorships into the content they publish to the platform, but some say they crave more robust tools to help them plan, sell, transact, and report on those campaigns. Selling advertising into Substack content remains a case of manual “workarounds” rather than a core competency of the platform, and that appears unlikely to change any time soon.

Substack’s ongoing “platformification”

Perhaps the biggest challenge facing Substack’s efforts to retain publishers is its ongoing efforts to become a fully-fledged “platform” rather than a simple publishing tool. There’s little doubt that network effects across its platform have helped some publishers amass large audiences and subscriber bases, but Substack’s apparent ambition to become the “YouTube for text” is increasingly at odds with how some publishers think philosophically about their goals.

Herrmann said the Mill wants to have “a direct relationship with users rather than being mediated by a platform”, for example. As Substack continues to promote the uptake of its own app and introduces features commonly associated with social media platforms, some publishers worry that their interests and priorities are beginning to diverge from Substack’s.

“People who are followers… they’re not people who we can take with us when we leave,” Herrmann said. “I 100% understand why Substack wants its users to embrace the app, but it doesn’t align with our ambition to be an independent media company where we have a direct relationship with our users”.

Hayes expressed similar sentiments about the widening gap between Substack’s path and The Dispatch’s ambitions and the role that played in its decision to leave the platform.

“I think as Substack grew, [its founders] saw the opportunity to turn Substack into a destination of its own. At the outset, we certainly felt like [Substack] was just building the architecture where other people could come and build their thing and then grow their thing there. But it got to the point where we were sort of one page in the Substack app, and it’s just not how we imagined ourselves. We’re growing, we’re now sort of newly ambitious, and we think we’ve got room to grow on our own,” he said.