Celebrating the Rise of Substack—and Pausing to Reflect on Where It May Be Headed

Investigative journalist James Ball—with experience at The Guardian, WikiLeaks, BuzzFeed, and The Washington Post, and a Pulitzer Prize winner as part of one of The Guardian’s investigative teams—offers an interesting perspective in The Observer on Sunday regarding Substack’s recent $100 million funding round, which has pushed the company’s valuation into the billion‑dollar range.

Ball looks at Substack shifting from content creation to focusing on user retention within its app ecosystem, aiming to become “the app for independent voices.”

No question, as Ball reports, Substack has enabled some substantial numbers for publishers.

• “Around 50,000 publishers make some form of income from Substack.”
• “More than 50 Substack publications make more than $1m (£740,000) a year.”
• “The top ten publishers on Substack bring in revenues of around $40m a year.”

The potential for high a value exit/acquisitions for a publisher is also there, per Ball. Bari Weiss’s Substack-native publication, The Free Press, acquisition by CBS for $200 million highlights the value that can be generated on the platform.

Clear evidence of the drive in people to write and publish–and society’s desire to still read legitimate publishing.

Ball looks at Substack’s diverse investor base as probably driving a clear evolution in Substack’s marketing language, reflecting its app-focused strategy:

• Three years ago: “a place for independent writing.”
• Last year: “the home for great writers and readers.”
• Today: “the app for independent voices.”

Despite Substack’s success – and it’s inspiring people to publish, things I see, Ball found Substack’s evolving model to raise concerns among some users regarding potential lock-in:

• Ecosystem Trapping: While creators retain control of their email lists, “now it encourages people to follow them in the app – trapping them in the Substack ecosystem and making it impossible to leave.”
• User Worries: A prominent UK Substacker expressed concern, stating, “I actually worry about this more than the occasional dalliance with nasty right-wing politics,” regarding the ecosystem lock-in.
• Inherent Tech Platform Tendency: The “walled-garden” impulse is a common characteristic in tech platforms. As one Substacker notes, “The walled-garden impulse is extremely strong in tech platforms – whether it’s inherent to the model, or just what the investors expect I don’t know, but there is clearly something that pushes them there.” This suggests a tension between user freedom and platform growth strategies.
• Accessibility Concerns: There are “concerns Substack may lose some of its accessibility” as it increasingly prioritizes its app ecosystem.

I am a long way from opining on where the Substack ecosystem is headed and anything I say is going to be viewed as only being expressed to champion legal publishing on LexBlog. I also laud where co-founder Hamish McKenzie, a jouranlist and writer at his core, has helped take Substack.

And note I am right there, as I wrote last week, with the views McKenzie has about real sharing, real engagement, and real publishing by real people. All driven by real care. All of which is happening on Substack.

As someone who as championed open legal publishing by caring and experienced legal professionals—driven by their desire to build a name and a sustaining and strong business (many of the legal publishers on LexBlog are doing seven figures a year, solely as a result of legal publishing)– and my belief that secondary law was going to come from this publishing, which it now is, I felt the need to at least share how Ball’s observations could be a long term concern for legal publishers and legal publishing in general.

Apps such as LinkedIn, Facebook and the like eventually tend to reward the loudest voices–and those knowledgeable on how to game the algorithms–not always the most helpful, authoritative, or nuanced ones or the best sources for legal insight.

Could Substack’s shift to an app-based internal discovery mirror platforms like Facebook—undermining the open, searchable web? From everything I can tell now, Substack publishing is being indexed by Google, and thus presumably is being used to train LLM’s, both of which are an advantage for legal publishers looking to be sourced, build a name and grow business.

If legal content were ever lost in a Substack acquisition or merger, it could be a profound loss—not just for the publishing lawyers, but for the legal system and the public.

Over the past thirty years, we’ve witnessed these losses many times over. Acquirers with goals other than legal publishing–including some in the legal industry–have absorbed platforms rich in legal commentary, only to shutter them, bury years of legal publishing or delete it altogether.

Preservation matters just as much as access to publish when we as a profession, including the large legal publishers, recognize the insight of practitioners as secondary law.

We’re also never going to have meaningful access to legal information for the public or access to justice, altogether, if we continue farming out the preservation of legal insight from caring legal practitioners in the know to entities not driven by similar goals.

I am bullish on Substack, but I was bullish about Typepad, a very popular web-based blog publishing platform which I once used and which I tried, about twenty years ago to get its owner, Movable Type, to license a large install of it to LexBlog for the legal publishing of lawyers.

Typepad, as it became less and less supported for a legal publisher’s needs, became a nightmare for some of the most influential legal publishers, putting some of their work at risk.

Substack has opened the door to lawyers new to writing and has atracted one of the law’s leading publishers in David Lat with his Original Jurisdiction–likely to become a big revenue generator as a publication.

And with Substack’s platform being RSS enabled, I see the publishing of lawyers on Substack being included in the LexBlog Network, giving legal practitioners and their publishing greater visibility, enhanced authority, leaving a legacy and a presence in the secondary law housed by large legal publishers.

All good, in large part, from Substack. Just my thoughts on James Ball’s article today.