Is the Notes honeymoon over?

Substack’s Notes has generated a subscriber bump for some newsletters, but how long can it last?

If there were a strong signal here, I’d expect to see less of a noodly mess.

Like a lot of Substack writers, I was excited by the launch of Notes, not just because it was a good way to meet other writers, but because a lot of people were reporting big bumps in subscriber numbers. My other newsletter, Why Aren’t I Writing?, has nearly doubled its subscribers over the last month and, as I’d already started to look at the social media traffic stats to help me understand where to focus my promotional efforts, a deeper dive seemed sensible. 

I also wanted to act as my own case study. I’ve read a lot of Substack’s Grow posts and whilst they do cover a mix of newsletter sizes and types, I haven’t seen anything that’s representative of me and my newsletter. Plus their posts aren’t nearly nerdy enough for me. I want more stats, dammit! 

So I split out my traffic stats by week (each date is a week beginning), shoved them in a spreadsheet, and my good friend Kevin Marks hooked it all up to Observable HQ which spat out some shiny graphs. 

For context, you should know that my numbers are small. I started Why Aren’t I Writing? on 30 January with 0 subscribers and no pre-existing list to import, though I did announce it to the 156 Word Count subscribers I had on Mailterlite at that point. My Twitter following is about 7,000, but my tweets these days only get 50-200 views. I’m not famous and I don’t have an existing audience, so I think that my story probably mirrors that of a lot of new writers here. 

Now, I know that for a lot of people, Substack is about personal expression and they aren’t worried about subscriber numbers, which is a lovely situation to be in. But unless Ada Lovelace Day is somehow miraculously reincarnated, I have to find a new, stable income and I want as much of that income as possible to come from writing. Substack isn’t a hobby for me, it’s a nascent business, which means I have to treat it as such, and these stats analyses are part of that process. 

My aim with this post is to answer three questions: 

1. Is the Substack Notes effect durable, or are we seeing the end of the honeymoon? 

2. Which social media network is best for promoting Substack? 

3. Can I reach 10,000 free subscribers within a year? 

So, what do the numbers say? 

The Substack Notes honeymoon is over

Visits from Substack (purple) are trending downwards. You can ignore the orange (emails) and blue (direct traffic) lines.

The free subscriptions graph makes the trend much clearer.

For me, at least. Bummer. 

Both in terms of visits and new free subscribers, my Notes bump is done. Visits and free subs are still higher than they were, in general, but that graph is not looking good for me.

I have been fairly consistently active on Notes, posting my newsletters, posting quotes, replying to other people. But perhaps last week I was less engaged, so next week I will make a concerted effort and maybe I can make that little purple dot go back up. 

Substack is my biggest source of subscribers. Is that a problem?

What worries me the most is that Substack provides a huge percentage – 57 percent or thereabouts (see note about Substack’s stats at the bottom) – of my subscribers, which means that most of my subscribers are already reading other newsletters.

How many newsletters can the average Substack user really read? I know that I’ve subscribed to too many newsletters and am going to have to cull them, not just because I can’t read them all, but also because it feels unfair to subscribe to something if I’m not going to read it. 

You can really see the point at which Notes launched, but that peak is flattening right out.

Furthermore, how many newsletters can your average subscriber support financially? I support two, because that’s all I can afford right now, and I am sure there are many people who are in the same boat. Substack has previously said that on average, 5 to 10 per cent of subscribers pay, and I can’t help wondering if that has gone down since Notes as people spread their attention more widely. Suffice it to say, I do not have that many paying subscribers.

This imbalance in subscriber sources does make me feel like I need to bring in more subscribers from outside the network if I am to develop a large enough audience to produce a stable income, but Substack’s onboarding process sucks. I had to write out the instructions for subscribing to just one section of Word Count the other day, and there were eight steps. Eight. To be honest, I’m surprised that anyone at all bothers to complete that process. 

Which brings us to… 

Which social media network is best for promoting Substack?

I have to add come caveats to this section.  Obviously, the more active I am on social media, the more likely I am to reach interested people and higher the numbers of visitors and subscribers. But I know I’m not posting consistently, and I think that might be at least part of the reason why the social media traffic stats are messy. 

But whilst I expect some ups and downs in absolute numbers, I was still hoping to see a steady ratio of visits to subscribers if one platform really is better for promotion than another. And, well, that’s not what we see. 

Yeesh.

It’s also worth noting that Twitter became activity hostile towards Substack just before and after Notes launched, then rowed back some of their blocks, and then started refusing to properly unfurl Substack links, so Twitter’s numbers are obviously affected by that. 

When you look at overall numbers Twitter is the clear winner, providing 14 per cent of my subscribers, compared to 4 per cent from LinkedIn and 3 per cent from Facebook. 

When you look at week-by-week stats, there are no clear trends. Although Twitter started strong, it has become less effective since Musk took offence at Substack Notes existing and, given the current problems with unfurling and possible post throttling, Twitter might have permanently lost its usefulness as a promotional tool. 

The other thing about Twitter is that you have to feed the beast several times a day to get a consistent response, and I do worry that tweeting about my newsletters too much will just piss people off. 

LinkedIn and Facebook look about the same, though LinkedIn posts get a lot more response on LinkedIn itself, which is nice. Facebook posts get no engagement at all on Facebook, even thought I’m posting specifically in writers’ groups where you’d imagine they’d be interested in writer’s block. 

However, both LinkedIn and Facebook were soundly beaten out by an ad that I took out in the ILoveCreatives.com newsletter and website – that’s the burst of green ‘Other’ in the graphs, which pops up in early April. I spent $20 as an experiment, and although I got 68 visits and 19 free subscribers, I didn’t get any paid subscribers. I might try some other low-cost newsletter ads, just to see what happens, but unless a few people convert to paid, then the cost of acquisition per subscriber is too high for this to become a habit. 

I think I need more data to make sense of the trends with the different social media networks. So at some point in the coming weeks, I will plan and schedule a set number of posts per week for each network, so that I can hopefully see if any patterns emerge. 

Can I reach 10,000 free subscribers within a year?

Why 10,000? Because if I can convert just 5 per cent of my free subscribers into paid subscribers, that would give me a stable income that could support other creative work that results in more sporadic income. Given this whole endeavour is part of a larger pivot towards a sustainable writing career, this goals feel very important indeed. 

(At the moment I’m converting just a smidge over 2 per cent, but I also am still developing my paid offering, so I’m hoping I can increase that over coming months.)

During the first couple of weeks of the Notes bump, I felt pretty confident that I could, indeed, reach 10,000 by next May. That first week, I saw an 34 per cent increase in subscribers. The following week that fell to 14… then 7… then 3. Erk. 

If I’m to reach that magic number, I need to maintain a weekly increase of about 7 per cent. Over all 14 weeks, I’ve seen an average growth of 13 per cent and a median growth of 9 per cent, but again, the small numbers do distort things. 

With the influx from Notes slowing down dramatically, however, and social media proving unreliable as a source of new subscribers, it seems that the journey to 10,000 may well take longer than a year, unless new types of activity, such as launching more paid content and engaging with subscribers through online events, encourages new subscribers to join. 

It’s also likely that external factors will play an important part, such as having posts shared on Notes or other social media platforms by people with lots of followers, getting featured on one of Substack’s recommendations posts, or being profiled in the media or elsewhere. None of those things are under my control, and most seem very unlikely at the moment, so I just have to see what happens. 

Note on Substack’s stats

All my numbers come from Substack’s stats page, where the numbers quite literally do not add up. At the time of analysis, I had 309 subscribers, but when I sum the subscribers listed on the stats page, I only get 251. So 19 per cent of my stats are missing. I have no idea how these missing stats might change things, but I can only work with the data I’ve got. 

Conclusions

So how do we stand with those three questions? 

1. Is the Substack Notes effect durable? No, it’s pretty much over. 

2. Which social media network is best for promoting Substack? Who knows. It used to be Twitter, but now it seems that they’re all equally poor. 

3. Can I reach 10,000 free subscribers within a year? It’s possible, but perhaps unlikely unless I get lucky and get some attention from people with many more followers than me. 

What next? 

I’m going to work out a standard social media promotional plan and rigidly stick to it for a month. Then I’ll come back and take another look at my graphs to see if that has made any difference. Meantime, I’ll be working on more premium posts and activities to attract more subscribers.