Is Substack’s ascent in Australia a tipping point for traditional media?
Legacy media outlets are ‘too predictable, risk-averse, talking-pointy’, says a former ABC radio broadcaster.
Substack, the widely used publishing and social media platform, recently surpassed 5 million paid subscriptions globally, with tens of millions of total active subscribers.
You might recognise some writers and journalists on it, such as Rick Morton, John Birmingham, Bec Shaw, Tim Burrowes, Dan Barrett, Jonathan Green, Joel Jenkins, Mia Freedman, Clare Stephens, Jess Hill, Bri Lee, Cameron Wilson, Gideon Haigh, Peter Lalor, Sam Perry, Nick Feik and Malcolm Turnbull. Some are Crikey contributors. At the start of April, even the Australian Labor Party joined.
The platform has well and truly taken off in countries around the world, and Australia is no exception. So why has this new home for journalism become so popular? And what are the trade-offs?
Launched in 2017, Substack has no advertising-based algorithms designed to promote viral content. Instead, its discovery algorithm is built to support the direct relationship between publishers and readers. More than half of subscriptions and 30% of paid subscriptions come from within the platform.
Uncomfortable Conversations, by former ABC radio broadcaster Josh Szeps, has more than 29,500 free and paid subscribers. A few weeks ago, he posted that it was the globe’s 17th best-selling Substack in the World Politics category.
Szeps told Crikey that legacy media outlets “remain indispensable for investigative journalism”, but that “in terms of commentary, analysis and interviews, they’re too predictable, risk-averse, talking-pointy”. He credited some of his success to this. But Szeps said Substack wasn’t perfect as far as fact-checking and editing are concerned. Traditional outlets, however, were guilty of “groupthink” and Instagram and TikTok had an “algorithmic dystopia”, he said.
Journalist, bestselling author and climate activist Sarah Wilson, one of the other most popular Australians on the site, has more than 59,000 free and paid subscribers. Wilson wrote for Murdoch publications for years and said she was “never censored” but that things were “extremely different” now.
“I essentially use my Substack as a way to build community at a time when people are really needing community,” Wilson told Crikey from Paris, where she’s now based, adding that “there aren’t algorithms dialling up outrage” on it. Last year, she held a real-life London meetup for some subscribers and has events planned for Australia.
For the past nine months, Wilson’s also used Substack to write her upcoming book on civilisational collapse, serialising it chapter by chapter. It attracted interest on the platform from journalists and publishers, leading to Penguin US buying the rights.
Fremantle-based writer, comedian and Crikey contributor Patrick Marlborough is also using the site to hopefully find a publisher for their novel, A Horse Held at Gunpoint. Marlborough launched their weekly culture and politics newsletter The Yeah Nah Review in 2023, and stated that Israel’s genocide in Gaza and frustration with a “very conservative Australian media landscape” were motivations in starting it.
“(The media) have made decades worth of really boring and quite cowardly decisions that have scared the readers away and scared a generation of writers away, really locked us out. Financially, it’s just not a feasible career anymore,” Marlborough said.
Also infuriated with the inadequacy of mainstream reporting on Palestine, independent journalist Alex McKinnon launched Everything is Fine last January — where he has 3,000 followers — on the Substack-alternative Beehiiv.
Press about Substack’s owners supposedly not caring about white supremacists on the site had put him off it. But he says that he feels a “responsibility to try and get my work out to as many as possible”, meaning that Substack might be his only option.
Patrick Lenton and Rebecca Shaw’s Nonsense received a Public Interest Journalism grant from The Walkley Foundation and Meta for a specific project called The LGBTQIA+ Media Watch. “There’s not a lot of publications in Australia that prioritise publishing LGBTQIA+ writers and championing their perspectives,” Lenton told Crikey.
He is the former editor of pop-culture and entertainment publication Junkee. Three of its former journalists, Merryana Salem, Reena Gupta and Rachel Choy, are behind the Substack The Offcut. “As people of colour, we wanted a space to publish thoughtful intersectional pop culture takes without the challenge of racist management,” Gupta told Crikey.
James Check, co-founder and lead analyst at Bitcoin newsletter Checkonchain, told Crikey that he and Alec Dejanovic were “very proud” that it was Australia’s most profitable Substack. Since launching last April, it now has about 18,000 free subscribers, with about 12% having converted to paid subscribers; they boast a retention rate of ~90%.
Check said that Substack’s infrastructure for preparing posts, emails and built-in subscriber management “makes it much easier and less costly to spin something like our newsletter up, so in many ways it makes it feasible from ground zero”.
Substack has also allowed many others to niche down with their newsletter. From home in Mildura, regional Victoria, Jarrod Partridge started what he believes is the largest following of F1 creators on the platform. And every weekday for two hours from 4.30am, Sam Shedden spends two hours on Melbourne Snap. Featuring local business openings, a “community noticeboards”, citizen campaigns and good news, he hopes that it’s addressing news avoidance.
Former Nationals MP and One Nation Senate candidate George Christensen has more than 136,000 free and paid subscribers. Those happy to fork out $15 a month can receive an “exclusive” Monday-to-Thursday version of his Nation First newsletter, plus weekly free editions for at least 50 weeks a year.
Christensen has a handy note towards the bottom for the “Australian Communications & Media Authority and other government agencies”, explaining why the newsletter is exempt from censorship law. He did not respond to requests from Crikey for comment.
Substack co-founder and CEO Chris Best has said that he wanted users to “imagine how your view of the world might change if you spent your time online in a place optimised for reading what you care most about, rather than just endless scrolling”.
“What would it feel like to check a feed that’s trying to catch you up on what you deeply value rather than keeping you feeling anxious, angry, and alone?” he said. “We intend to find out”.
Which Substacks are part of your essential reading?
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