This looks awesome, congrats on announcing this! I would be extremely tempted myself were it not for a bunch of other likely obligations. Approximately how large do you expect this fellowship to be?
Also, structuring Inkhaven as a paid program was interesting; most fellowships (eg Asterisk, FLF, MATS) instead pay their participants. I wonder if this introduces minor adverse selection, in that only writers who are otherwise financially stable can afford to participate. Famously, startup incubators that charge (like OnDeck) are much worse than incubators that pay for equity (like YC or hf0).
I imagine you’ve thought about this a lot already, and you do offer need-based scholarships which is great; also things like LessOnline and Manifest have proven some amount of success for charging for events. But maybe there’s some other way of finding sponsors or funders for these writers? For example, I think Manifund would be quite happy to sponsor 1-3 “full rides” at $5k+ each, for a few bloggers who are interested in topics like AI safety funding, impact evaluations, and new opportunities, which we could occasionally crosspost to the Manifund newsletter. And I imagine other orgs like GGI might be too!
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.
This looks awesome, congrats on announcing this! I would be extremely tempted myself were it not for a bunch of other likely obligations.
Thank you Austin. I would certainly want to read a blog of yours after a month of daily writing :)
Approximately how large do you expect this fellowship to be?
I have so far been thinking of this as for 30-50 people. That’s what I’m aiming for.
Also, structuring Inkhaven as a paid program was interesting; most fellowships (eg Asterisk, FLF, MATS) instead pay their participants. I wonder if this introduces minor adverse selection, in that only writers who are otherwise financially stable can afford to participate. Famously, startup incubators that charge (like OnDeck) are much worse than incubators that pay for equity (like YC or hf0).
Requiring people to pay for things is minor adverse selection on wealth. It is also has a much more direct feedback loop of the client being the person who uses the service, in contrast with being paid to use the service, and that feels broadly healthy to me.
(If there were a good analogue for equity in the blogging world I would definitely take that option; so far I have been involved in one serious trade for impact equity and I have not felt very keen to try it again.)
I imagine you’ve thought about this a lot already, and you do offer need-based scholarships which is great; also things like LessOnline and Manifest have proven some amount of success for charging for events. But maybe there’s some other way of finding sponsors or funders for these writers? For example, I think Manifund would be quite happy to sponsor 1-3 “full rides” at $5k+ each, for a few bloggers who are interested in topics like AI safety funding, impact evaluations, and new opportunities, which we could occasionally crosspost to the Manifund newsletter. And I imagine other orgs like GGI might be too!
Yes, I’d love to explore sponsorships! We have just now added a question to the application for potential residents to let us know if they’re happy for us to share their applications with potential sponsors, and I’d love to share applications with you guys at Manifund as they start to come in (we’ve already got one that I think could be a good fit for your interests). If anyone else reading this is interested in helping cover the costs of a potential next great internet writer like the advisors, please just drop me a line at inkhaven@lightconeinfrastructure.com (or any channel that’s easy for you) and I’ll get back to you about options.
(As to why not: the bottleneck so far has been time. Since I’ve been working on this I’ve prioritized launching so that people can plan for their whole November to be free, which is just 3 months away, and so haven’t yet reached out to potential sponsors, but I’d like to do this after we’ve made sure to get the word out that the event even exists.)
This looks awesome, congrats on announcing this! I would be extremely tempted myself were it not for a bunch of other likely obligations. Approximately how large do you expect this fellowship to be?
Also, structuring Inkhaven as a paid program was interesting; most fellowships (eg Asterisk, FLF, MATS) instead pay their participants. I wonder if this introduces minor adverse selection, in that only writers who are otherwise financially stable can afford to participate. Famously, startup incubators that charge (like OnDeck) are much worse than incubators that pay for equity (like YC or hf0).
I imagine you’ve thought about this a lot already, and you do offer need-based scholarships which is great; also things like LessOnline and Manifest have proven some amount of success for charging for events. But maybe there’s some other way of finding sponsors or funders for these writers? For example, I think Manifund would be quite happy to sponsor 1-3 “full rides” at $5k+ each, for a few bloggers who are interested in topics like AI safety funding, impact evaluations, and new opportunities, which we could occasionally crosspost to the Manifund newsletter. And I imagine other orgs like GGI might be too!
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.
Thank you Austin. I would certainly want to read a blog of yours after a month of daily writing :)
I have so far been thinking of this as for 30-50 people. That’s what I’m aiming for.
Requiring people to pay for things is minor adverse selection on wealth. It is also has a much more direct feedback loop of the client being the person who uses the service, in contrast with being paid to use the service, and that feels broadly healthy to me.
(If there were a good analogue for equity in the blogging world I would definitely take that option; so far I have been involved in one serious trade for impact equity and I have not felt very keen to try it again.)
Yes, I’d love to explore sponsorships! We have just now added a question to the application for potential residents to let us know if they’re happy for us to share their applications with potential sponsors, and I’d love to share applications with you guys at Manifund as they start to come in (we’ve already got one that I think could be a good fit for your interests). If anyone else reading this is interested in helping cover the costs of a potential next great internet writer like the advisors, please just drop me a line at inkhaven@lightconeinfrastructure.com (or any channel that’s easy for you) and I’ll get back to you about options.
(As to why not: the bottleneck so far has been time. Since I’ve been working on this I’ve prioritized launching so that people can plan for their whole November to be free, which is just 3 months away, and so haven’t yet reached out to potential sponsors, but I’d like to do this after we’ve made sure to get the word out that the event even exists.)