30% off The Intrinsic Perspective this summer
Or, is Substacking getting harder over time?
tldr; TIP is offering a 30% discount this summer.
If you’re interested, here’s why: we’re at a weird time in the online writing economy. It’s gone under the radar but newer Substack writers are no longer making the gobs of cash earlier ones did. Freddie deBoer, now with a newsletter of 40,000 total subscribers and over 4,000 paid subscribers, has only generated about 500 paid subscribers over the last year—even as he’s grown his free list by tens of thousands. The last time Scott Alexander posted his stats (earlier this year), the graph showed he had been losing paid subscribers since 2021.
This shouldn’t make you feel bad—a lot of people on Substack, including those two writers, make a lot of money. But a substantial portion of Substack income is reserved for traditional journalism. Writing in the literary/scientific/experimental vein makes far less; always has, always will. Personally, I only care about a livable wage. I’m good with money and live cheaply (and I still make money from books—like the one coming out next month). My ultimate goal is to get TIP to $100,000 a year. Anything above that is gravy, and will allow me to do things like put together a research team for more original data analysis, deeper dives, etc. But as much as I’d like to imagine it, TIP is nowhere near that, at least not yet.
I’m confident we’ll get there, even if the ossification of the online writing economy makes it a bit harder. There’s enough people who care about intellectual depth, and who also care about prose, to form a substantial overlap in a cultural Venn diagram that’s usually assumed to be just two separate circles. This newsletter is for people in the overlap.
And a lot of the overlap is just for paid subscribers. In the past few months, paid-only articles at TIP have included how The Guardian started to quietly use AI to write its posts, how I owe my career to the SAT, why classic writers don’t do well on Substack, and how SSRIs might work perturbationally (and paradoxically).
You get more than just the posts: I’ve started an entire podcast (The Intrinsic Podcast) that’s solely for paid subscribers as well. If you want to hear my dulcet tones, and think marginally less of me for hearing me talk instead of write, you can. The third episode, all about how intellectual life is shifting online, drops tomorrow. Look as well for an upcoming announcement about sharing links to subscriber writing (along with my reactions to each piece), as well as a planned essay contest, all only for paid subscribers.
Don’t feel you have to sign up! You’ll still get a lot of the bigger blockbuster posts. But if you want to support what I do, and perhaps help make sure this whole “Substack thing” wasn’t just a weird boom-bust over a few years, please really do consider it.