Five years ago, if you wanted to make a living writing opinion pieces, your options were limited. Get hired by a newspaper or magazine, hope your freelance pitches got accepted, or have another job that paid the bills while you wrote on the side.

Substack and platforms like it changed that equation. Now you can build a direct relationship with readers who pay you monthly subscriptions. No editor to pitch, no publication to get hired by, just you and your audience.

This has had profound effects on what gets written and who gets to write it. Not all of them good.

The Liberation Part

The most obvious benefit is freedom from editorial gatekeeping. If you can find a thousand people willing to pay you five dollars a month, you’ve got $60,000 a year. That’s enough to write full-time without anyone else’s permission.

This matters especially for writers covering niche topics or taking unconventional positions. A newspaper might not think there’s an audience for detailed analysis of industrial policy or deep dives into zoning law. But if you can find your audience directly, you don’t need the newspaper’s approval.

Some genuinely valuable writing has emerged this way. Specialist journalists who got laid off from shrinking newsrooms found they could sustain themselves by serving their core audience directly. Writers with expertise in specific areas built subscription bases around that knowledge.

The best Substacks are often better than their authors’ previous work because they’re not writing for the mass audience that newspapers require. They can go deep, use jargon, assume prior knowledge—all things that would get edited out of a newspaper column.

The Money Problem

But here’s where it gets complicated. The economics of subscription writing create specific incentives, and not all of them align with good writing.

First, you need to publish frequently to keep subscribers engaged. Most successful Substacks publish multiple times per week. This creates pressure for constant content production that’s hard to sustain at high quality.

Second, you can’t alienate your paying subscribers. If you’ve built an audience that agrees with you about Issue X, writing something they disagree with risks losing revenue. The incentive is to give your audience what they want, not necessarily what they need to hear.

Third, controversy drives subscriptions. Starting fights, taking provocative positions, and maintaining feuds with other writers all boost visibility and subscriber counts. Measured, nuanced analysis doesn’t go viral.

These pressures existed in traditional media too, but they’re more direct here. When you can track which posts drive subscriptions and which cause cancellations, you know exactly what your audience rewards.

The Echo Chamber Effect

This has created an archipelago of echo chambers. Readers subscribe to writers they already agree with, writers cater to those readers, and everyone gets their priors confirmed in well-written prose.

You see this clearly in political Substacks. Left-wing writers have left-wing subscribers who want sophisticated arguments for left-wing positions. Right-wing writers serve their audience. The centrists—to the extent they exist—serve people who like thinking of themselves as above the fray.

There’s less cross-pollination than in traditional media where different perspectives sometimes appeared in the same publication. If you subscribed to a newspaper, you’d occasionally encounter columnists you disagreed with. With Substack, you precisely curate your information diet.

This probably isn’t healthy for discourse, but it’s great for business. The more precisely you serve a particular audience, the more loyal they become.

Quality Is Variable

The barrier to entry is low, which is simultaneously democratising and problematic. Anyone can start a Substack. You don’t need credentials, experience, or demonstrated expertise. You just need an audience willing to pay.

This has enabled genuinely talented writers who never would’ve been hired by traditional media. It’s also unleashed a flood of mediocre-to-terrible opinion writing from people whose main qualification is confidence.

The market theoretically sorts this out—good writers attract subscribers, bad writers don’t. But the market rewards engagement and confirmation bias as much as quality. Some of the most successful Substacks are successful because they tell their audience what it wants to hear, not because the writing is particularly good.

The Newsletter Industrial Complex

Substack has also created a specific style of writing that’s become increasingly recognisable. The chatty tone, the personal anecdotes, the threads of analysis woven through memoir, the liberal use of “I think” and “here’s the thing.”

This isn’t necessarily bad—it’s more personal and accessible than traditional opinion writing. But it’s become formulaic. You can spot a Substack style piece instantly, regardless of topic or author.

The platform shapes the content. Newsletter writing is different from column writing is different from blog writing. The form has conventions that successful writers adopt, creating homogeneity even as the topics vary.

What About Editing?

Most Substacks don’t have editors, and it shows. The best writers can self-edit effectively, but they’re rare. Most writers benefit from someone challenging their arguments, catching their mistakes, and tightening their prose.

Without editorial oversight, you get more repetition, weaker arguments that haven’t been stress-tested, and occasional factual errors that would’ve been caught by fact-checkers. You also get more self-indulgence—the personal tangents that a good editor would’ve cut.

Some writers have started hiring editors from their subscription revenue. That’s smart, but it’s the exception. Most are operating without that feedback loop, and the quality suffers.

The Attention Economy

Substack operates in the same attention economy as everything else online. Writers are competing not just with other newsletters but with social media, streaming services, news sites, and everything else demanding audience attention.

This creates pressure for the attention-grabbing techniques that plague other media: provocative headlines, hot takes, engagement with trending topics regardless of the writer’s actual expertise. The quieter, more thoughtful pieces often get less engagement.

The irony is that subscription models were supposed to fix this—get away from advertising-driven clickbait toward content that serves readers. But when your revenue depends on attracting and retaining subscribers, you end up chasing attention anyway.

What It Reveals About Traditional Media

The success of Substack reveals something important about what traditional media wasn’t providing. Readers wanted direct relationships with writers they trusted. They wanted deeper analysis than newspapers could provide. They were willing to pay for it.

Traditional media’s failure to meet those needs created the opening that Substack filled. The lesson isn’t that Substack is perfect—it’s that the old model was leaving value on the table.

Some publications have learned this. The New York Times now promotes its columnists as subscription drivers. The Atlantic and other magazines emphasise individual writers more than they used to. They’re trying to recapture some of what Substack offers while maintaining editorial infrastructure.

The Long Term Question

Can subscription-based opinion writing sustain itself long-term? Or are we in a bubble that’ll burst when readers realise they’re spending hundreds of dollars a year on newsletters?

The answer probably varies by writer. The truly talented will keep their audiences. The mediocre ones riding the wave of the moment will fade. The ecosystem will stabilise at some level between the current boom and the previous status quo.

What seems clear is that direct reader support has permanently changed the landscape. Even if Substack specifically declines, the model of writers building direct relationships with paying audiences will persist in some form.

That’s probably good overall, despite the problems. More paths to sustainable opinion writing means more diversity of voices and perspectives. But it’s not the pure liberation from traditional media’s problems that early enthusiasts claimed. It’s just different problems.

As with most changes, we traded one set of constraints for another. The question is whether the new constraints produce better writing than the old ones. I’m not sure we know yet.