The Substack Branding and Faux Prestige Trap

Saturday, 2 August 2025

Among the handful of oft-discussed problems with Substack:

  • Their 90/10 subscription revenue split isn’t usurious, but it’s high compared to competing platforms — especially once you reach an even mid-tier level of popularity.
  • The only way this independent publishing game works, by any credible definition of “the long run”, is to build your own audience. Substack has indies convinced that they build an audience for you through some sort of secret-sauce network effects, but I’ve seen no evidence that’s true. Writers with established reputations and readerships joining Substack are helping build Substack’s brand, not their own.
  • The whole, you know, Nazi thing.

Less commented upon but just as bad is the branding trap. Substack is a damn good name. It looks good, it sounds good. It’s short and crisp and unique. But now they’ve gotten people to call publications on Substack not “blogs” or “newsletters” but “substacks”. Don’t call them that. And as I griped back in December, even the way almost all Substack publications look is deliberately, if subtly, Substack-branded, not per-publication or per-writer branded.

Consider Paul Krugman. Krugman was an op-ed columnist for The New York Times from 2000–2024. But last year the Times wanted to cut him back from writing two columns a week plus his Times-hosted blog/newsletter to writing just one column per week and killing the blog. In an interview with Columbia Journalism Review early this year, Krugman also revealed that after over two decades, he’d started butting heads with his editors over style, tone, and even subject matter:

“I’ve always been very, very lightly edited on the column,” he said. “And that stopped being the case. The editing became extremely intrusive. It was very much toning down of my voice, toning down of the feel, and a lot of pressure for what I considered false equivalence.” And, increasingly, attempts “to dictate the subject.”

So Krugman rightfully and righteously told the Times, politely, to fuck off and struck out on his own. Reading Krugman this year, on his own site, has been like rediscovering cane sugar Coca-Cola after drinking the cheaper-to-produce corn syrup variant for a few years. This is The Real Thing — the unadulterated tart-tongued and sharp-elbowed Krugman I remember devouring during both the Bush and Obama administrations. The only hitch: Krugman hung out his independent shingle at Substack — which makes it a shingle under a shingle.

My suspicion is that for a certain class of writers and media commentators who, heretofore, have spent their careers at big-name publications — newspapers and magazines dating back to the print era, TV networks from the cable-is-king era — they actually find comfort writing under the auspices of Substack. See also: Terry Moran, who bounced to Substack after ABC News declined to renew his contract — despite 28 years at the network, including this recent classic — because of a tweet decrying Donald Trump and White House ghoul Stephen Miller. I suspect Moran, and perhaps even Krugman, perceive Substack as conveying a sort of badge of legitimacy. Self-published books, for example, used to be the refuge of kooks and no-talent hacks. I think some who spent their careers working at prestige outlets — especially those like Krugman and Moran, who are a bit older (than me) — feel a bit naked without one. But there’s no real prestige at Substack and never will be. I, for one, am fine with Substack’s liberal philosophy of letting anyone write there, but that means, well, anyone can write there.

Here’s a recent example of the Substack branding trap that irks me — grating like fingernails on a chalkboard — and which I think proves my point. Krugman last month was interviewed by Steve Inskeep at NPR, regarding Trump’s “grotesquely illegal” tariffs levied on Brazil. Introducing Krugman, Inskeep describes Krugman’s current work thus:

The people watching the tariff debate include Paul Krugman. He is a writer and economist, formerly for The New York Times, now writing independently on Substack, which is where I often find him. And since he’s in the United States, I pay no tariff. Mr. Krugman, welcome to the program.

So far, so good. That’s a fair description. But, concluding the five-minute interview, Inskeep goes with this:

Paul Krugman writes for Substack, formerly with The New York Times. Thanks so much.

Paul Krugman does not “write for Substack”. No one would say that Jason Snell “writes for WordPress”, or that Jason Kottke or yours truly “writes for Movable Type”. No one says Molly White, Casey Newton, or Craig Calcaterra “writes for Ghost”, or that Oliver Darcy “writes for Beehiiv”. Only with Substack does anyone perceive creator branding as being subservient to the platform — something that ought to be seen merely as an interchangeable CMS — like that.

That is not by happenstance. It’s a trap and it is by design. It’s exactly what Substack wants, and exactly what independent writers and content producers should not.