MoviePass, Substack

the future is an increasingly ominous portmanteau

It’s 2024. I know I ended 2023 on a bummer note, and believe you me, 2024 got off to a start that I wouldn’t wish on anyone. But, here we are. You, me, the rest of the internet, gamboling into an election year that also contains a Summer Olympics.¹

As I said. Here we are. Time for a trip down memory lane for a circuitous and hopefully entertaining explanation of Where That Is.

Let’s go to the movies! … in 2018!

Remember MoviePass? A bunch of tech-bros (were they former Uber guys? Do I remember that right?) got a lot of investors really excited about the idea of charging a flat fee per month for unlimited movie tickets. I think my initial subscription cost $9. This at a time when a ticket was up to $25-30 in the city/tristate area and around $10-16 upstate. And I went to the movies four or five times a month. That subscription might be the only fiscally responsible decision I have ever made.

They must have imagined it would function like gym memberships generally do. People would buy in, forget to use the service, and MoviePass would rake in a base rate of monthly money without having to pay it all back out in subsidized ticket costs. Profit! This is the holy grail of subscription model pricing. There was just one tiny problem that seemed to escape the best minds of a generation. Going to the gym and going to the movies are not the same. Plus, a gym’s overhead is reasonably low (it’s one of the reasons why gyms are such fertile ground for money laundering), and a movie theater’s overhead is the entire Hollywood industrial complex. I am egregiously oversimplifying. But so did they. It’s fine.  

If you finished first-grade math and are not haunted by the ghost of Milton Friedman, you can see where this is going. Subscribers did not conveniently forget that movie tickets were functionally free now. I didn’t go to the movies more often, but at that time, I couldn’t. I was already seeing literally everything I might possibly want to. But now I was doing it for nine dollars in total for the entire month instead of $20 a trip. I was their nightmare customer, and there were plenty more like me. And as for the great masses of people who only went once a month or less? They now had incentive to see more movies. People like going to the movies. The barrier to entry was only how expensive the tickets were, and now that barrier was swept away.

In response to the chilling realization that the service they had introduced was absurdly good for the consumer and even more absurdly easy to abuse, MoviePass introduced optional upcharges, peak pricing, a ticket verification system, and a cap of three tickets a month per account with $2-5-dollar discounts for any tickets purchased thereafter. It only took about a month once the VC money started drying up. Within a year the whole idea collapsed, as anyone with a calculator could have predicted. I canceled my account with a smile on my face and a song in my heart. Sure, it was all over now, baby blue, but from January through August 2018, I had won.

Anyway, why am I talking about this?

Substack 2: Electric Yawnaloo

In my last post, I talked about leaving Substack. I was very upset when I wrote that piece. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with writing—or posting—in the grip of strong emotion. December was extremely hard for me for reasons that had nothing to do with what newsletter platform I use, and the situation with alt-right ghouls and self-described Nazis on this stupid website was the final deck chair on my own personal Titanic.

The founders of Substack aspire to the mansion in Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery without understanding the film’s central premise: that men like them are overbearing weenies, padded by money and their own faux intellectualism. They think tolerating conspiracy theory-laden, counterfactual, histrionic, vacuous, anti-trans, antisemitic, fascist drivel is a measure of their commitment to free speech, something that—as they are not the fourth branch of the Federal Government—they have no responsibility to maintain. They believe that it is necessary for the “marketplace of ideas” (typing those words, I just felt a portion of my brain shut down to protect itself) to be well-stocked with a wide variety of deranged garbage. They have further spouted and supported the position that anyone who disagrees with them is advocating censorship, actually, and censorship is bad, actually. Except for the censorship of sex workers, which is fine, actually.

Basically, if it makes them money and won’t get them in trouble with the Feds they seem to believe they are, it’s fine, and the conspiracy theorizing, counterfact-spouting, histrionic, vacuous, anti-trans, antisemitic fascists aren’t breaking any laws. But Substack might get in trouble with the other three branches of government if they’re found to be in violation of FOSTA-SESTA, so no sex workers allowed. They’re extremely risk-averse for self-proclaimed custodians of the future of media. Maybe it’s because they’re starting to have trouble raising yet more VC money to prop up a business model that isn’t—oh, what’s the technical term?—succeeding.

Substack isn’t profitable. Their model of a 10% flat fee on every paid subscription, with processing costs likewise passed on to the writer/publisher, absorbs most of the risk in creating and providing services for this nascent, fluctuating newsletter landscape. As long as some writers, somewhere, are making money on Substack, so do they. But how much can that scale? How many Substack publications can a person afford? The average Substack costs $50 a year for the opinions and available efforts of one person. Can you absorb $500 in paid subscriptions? $600? I know I can’t. The entire New York Times costs $174.² The Washington Post, $60. And they’re gasping for air and subscribers right now. Obviously, there are massive problems with both the Times and the Post, and they currently operate in a different ecosystem, but—and this is key—not necessarily in the minds of Substack’s fearless leaders. The future they envision is one of endless growth, unfettered capitalism in word and payment structure.

As the previous media and the current media are hollowed out, laid off, and sent up—in many cases with their entire archives—in digital smoke, what hope does this risk-averse, conservative-soothing, “future” have? They have already introduced one MoviePass-style flail: Notes, a semi-functional Twitter clone decanted from its vat far too soon. They’re adding DMs now. What’s next? Are they going to introduce publication bundling? A credit system? Peak Pricing for popular publications so that the backend is completely opaque to the readers and increasingly shitty for writers?³

Structurally, this website is a con. As authors, we are encouraged by Substack’s communications to charge for our precious words, to create more and more and more, to raise our subscriber numbers. Growth mindset is a huge deal on Notes. Substack makes money when writers make money, so of course they would want as many writers to succeed as possible, right? Well, only sort of. Substack gets paid per subscription, not per subscription per newsletter. The five dollars of the person subscribing to their favorite conspiracy theorist is worth the same fifty cents to Substack as the fifty cents of the person subscribing to their favorite movie reviewer. And honestly, conspiracy theorists are way better at getting their readers to upgrade to paid.  

And now for something completely the same.

I don’t really care about Substack for its own sake. I stand by my previous assertion that it is not a country. It is not the future of media, as its founders bleat to whoever will listen. It’s that unbuilt, extremely skeevy tax shelter/floating city, Freedom Ship, staring at the sucking whirlpool where the Kraken of Completely Predictable Consequences resides.

The current viable publication alternatives—Ghost, BeeHiiv, Buttondown, etc.— charge money for their products and services, which is appallingly reasonable of them. Those fees are very reasonable. In order to afford it, though, I would need to institute a paid tier. I don’t think I have a deep enough subscriber base, or any real way of acquiring one. My post frequency, tone, and topics are and always will be wildly inconsistent, and that’s okay with me. It does impede that all important growth, though. (Yet more of my brain has fled in self-defense.)

Substack was foolish enough to offer me the opportunity to use their platform for free, and I’ll take advantage of that for at least a little while longer. When their panicked flailing starts making my life difficult, or injury results from how hard my eyes roll at their antics, I’ll sigh and find the money for a paid alternative, and might even ask you all to help with that. I won’t ever ask you to give Substack a dime on my account. I still pay for subscriptions here to people I like, because I like those people, and think they’re doing good work. I certainly like myself, but this isn’t something I want to be paid for right now. I’m sure whatever I do here is being counted in some massive database somewhere as proof that Substack has a robust number of publications.⁴[4] But I’m probably costing them a fraction of a fraction of a penny every time I post. Which—great! Take that, weenies.

I had a MoviePass subscription for as long as I could ride that innumerate train. And, like MoviePass, anyone with a calculator could have told the Substack leadership their model is wildly flawed and unsustainable. But they haven’t done the math yet, apparently. Or maybe they want to be a writing MLM. Time will tell.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this presentation of Dr. Strangelove: Or, How I Stopped Worrying About the Welfare of Corporations Run By VC-Poisoned Weenies and Learned to Love My Own Self-Interest.

See you next time,

Miranda

1. Ellis thinks the Russians may try some shenanigans in gymnastics. I think the Chinese will. Where’s the Tom Lehrer song for this one?

2. $200 for the version without Bret Stephens. I’m joking. But maybe they should think about it.

3. Oh, I bet they can’t wait to do that. Hamish just got a funny feeling and doesn’t know why. I’m so sorry I wrote that. Content!

4. I hope it’s a database and not just a spreadsheet, but my hopes are not high.