I think the main disanalogy with startup incubators is that we’re not necessarily betting for successful bloggers to increase their earning power; probably the modal respondent (given the community skews tech) can currently make as much money as a top 1% blogger already (though to be clear not necessarily a top .1% blogger).
I think the analogy that’s better is to a meditation retreat or athletic conditioning program, or something, which afaict do pretty often charge (or at least have a strongly suggested donation in the meditation case); part of the point of charging (other than the obvious reason of just paying for stuff) is to make sure people are really bought-in/personally motivated to get the most out of it possible.
(I am helping with this event, but I don’t speak for Ben here)
Tangent: I was curious about your estimates of the top 1% and top 0.1% figures—so I looked into it. Somewhat also thinking about Erik Hoel’s essay about successful authors being about as rare as billionaires. [link]
Some estimate ~45 Substacks at >$1M/y [link] - that roughly fits with Substack’s reported total subscription revenue at ~$450M/y. (Officially reported at 30 in 2024 [link])
Reasonable to estimate 100-1000 Substacks at >$100k/y
How many “bloggers” exist?
Substack reports 50,000 Substacks w/ at least one paid sub [link]
Very closely supports your 0.1% and 1% estimates TBH!
There are about ~500M wordpress blogs on the Internet (???)
I’m not sure what the right vibe is here: I could buy anything from 50,000 to 5M.
There’s good numbers from Substack: this probably gets a lot weirder off-Substack.
It does seem reasonable to say that “of Substackers that get to their first paid subscription, 1% get to ~$100k/y, and 0.1% get to ~$1M/y”
There might still be some other weirdness here ~ top Substacks often look not that much like blogs.
30 people is the aim!
I think the main disanalogy with startup incubators is that we’re not necessarily betting for successful bloggers to increase their earning power; probably the modal respondent (given the community skews tech) can currently make as much money as a top 1% blogger already (though to be clear not necessarily a top .1% blogger).
I think the analogy that’s better is to a meditation retreat or athletic conditioning program, or something, which afaict do pretty often charge (or at least have a strongly suggested donation in the meditation case); part of the point of charging (other than the obvious reason of just paying for stuff) is to make sure people are really bought-in/personally motivated to get the most out of it possible.
(I am helping with this event, but I don’t speak for Ben here)
Tangent: I was curious about your estimates of the top 1% and top 0.1% figures—so I looked into it. Somewhat also thinking about Erik Hoel’s essay about successful authors being about as rare as billionaires. [link]
Some estimate ~45 Substacks at >$1M/y [link] - that roughly fits with Substack’s reported total subscription revenue at ~$450M/y. (Officially reported at 30 in 2024 [link])
Reasonable to estimate 100-1000 Substacks at >$100k/y
How many “bloggers” exist?
Substack reports 50,000 Substacks w/ at least one paid sub [link]
Very closely supports your 0.1% and 1% estimates TBH!
There are about ~500M wordpress blogs on the Internet (???)
I’m not sure what the right vibe is here: I could buy anything from 50,000 to 5M.
There’s good numbers from Substack: this probably gets a lot weirder off-Substack.
It does seem reasonable to say that “of Substackers that get to their first paid subscription, 1% get to ~$100k/y, and 0.1% get to ~$1M/y”
There might still be some other weirdness here ~ top Substacks often look not that much like blogs.