I think the kind of work you're doing deserves to be a substantial share of culture. I would love to be in a world where we are paying creators, we're helping creators make more than YouTube is helping them make. This week on the show we've got Chris Best, CEO of Substack, who joined us for a recent Access Live show and launch party in San Francisco. Are you managing up to your boss right now?
I am. Can you tell that I'm glazing? I'm going full GPT-4.0 right now. Is it working?
We get into Substack's growth, break some news about its AI plans, and get Chris's perspective on where media is headed.
To me, slop is not a thing that was made by AI. It was a thing that was made without intention. It's something that you're sort of tricked into consuming that nobody believes in.
We also pressed him on the hardest questions facing the company, from ads to moderation and the charged free speech debate.
If you're the subject of kind of bogus defamation claims, we're going to come and kind of like put a lot of legal weight behind that and make that very costly for the people who are bringing those things. So, if Elon sues me, you got me.
Yeah. Sick. If you care about the future of media and where the internet is headed, this one is for you. Welcome to Access.
We're 33 episodes in with this one today. We launched in September. A lot of the faces down in the atrium are previous guests, and we feel really blessed to be able to do this and have such great guests, including the star of the show today, Chris Best, the CEO of Substack. He doesn't do a ton of these. Really glad that he agreed to do it. When I was going independent, he and I had a conversation and we were talking through the tradeoffs of different platforms and what I was debating. We got to a point where I was like, 'Okay, I'm going to do Substack, but if I do it, will you please just do an interview with me at some point?' And he said yes. So, he's a man of his word as well. But yeah, let's welcome Chris.
You don't have an iPad, Chris. It's all right. You know, if I knew you were both bad cops, I never would have done this.
Well, but we give good cop and then we reel you in. And then we ask the tough questions and you actually answer them.
Don't spill the secret, Alex.
Well, we're here to talk about Substack and about you, but you know, Alex is on Substack. And so I was thinking we could do a quick 360 review. How's Alex's performance on Substack lately? How's the open rate?
Oh, you think I'm Alex's boss. Yeah. I'm about to blow your mind. No, no, you are. I've done my research. Alex pays my salary. He can fire me anytime he wants. I'm pretty sure he's my boss.
Will you shadow ban him for AI-assisted writing?
Is it good or not? I don't know.
How many of Alex's subscribers are like performative subscribers who don't actually open?
Okay, Alex, we're done with this.
Uncomfortable for me. And for Chris.
It's all good. I've one more funny one. How is it to have one of your main competitors be run by a dude named Tyler Denk?
Do you compete with that?
But seriously, Chris, I think we're very interested and everyone here is very interested in the state of Substack. I haven't heard from you recently on the scale. You're private and obviously you don't share metrics, but what can you tell us about the size of the platform and how it's grown in the last year or so?
What can I tell you? It's growing steadily. Probably the big thing for us is the Substack app is really working. And the principle of the Substack app is it's this place people can come and experience all of their subscriptions and discover new things. Each Substack kind of has its own world, its own space. We're working to do more and more to make each thing its own, your corner of the internet that you own. But our aspiration is kind of having Substack become sort of the intellectual and cultural capital of the internet. And it feels like we're on track for that to me.
It's probably one of the only good apps these days.
That's the nicest thing you could have possibly said to me. Yeah. You're reeling me in. I'm going to fall for whatever comes next.
Among us writers, it's nice. Yeah, when I was thinking about going independent, I was looking at the different platforms and my wife who's an interior designer, she was starting to use the Substack app a lot and we'd be laying in bed on our iPads and I'd see her over on it and she was like, 'This reminds me of early Tumblr.' That has a very fond spot in my heart for people who remember early Tumblr, and also it's a very specific thing. And I'm curious to hear you react to that.
Yeah, I mean the way we designed the URLs for Substack was specifically inspired by Tumblr. The easy thing to do technically is to make it substack.com/sources. But I was like, 'No, no, no, no, no. It needs to be sources.substack.com or your custom domain.' Pretty much inspired by Tumblr. And people often say these things to me in like an accusatory tone. They'll be like, 'Substack is just blogging but with a business model.' Or 'Substack is just like Tumblr.' And I'm like, 'Those things sound awesome to me. That sounds great.'
I heard you recently, I think it was on Rick Rubin's podcast, say that and this is also an Ellis thing because Ellis names companies for a living, but the original name was also maybe going to be Monograph. We had it down to two names and I'm sure glad we went with Substack. How do you feel about Monograph versus Substack, Ellis?
Mm, really on the spot here. I think they're both solid, honestly. Yeah. Substack, I think since I don't really know what it is, it intrigues me.
That is one of the best things I think for a name to have when you have something like Sonos or something like that.
Right. It versus something like I feel like a lot of tech founders, sorry to anybody in this room, name their products very literally.
Oh, name like a Netflix movie where they're just like they just say whatever it is. It's like bad people do things.
The movie. Yep, exactly. So, Chris, my former employer just wrote that people are leaving Substack again. This is a new wave of stories that's happening. Feel like it happens every, whatever, 6 to 9 months. And I'm wondering if that's true. Are people leaving Substack en masse right now?
Definitely not en masse. I mean, this is the great thing about Substack, right? When I said before that you can fire me, I wasn't joking about that. Right? On Substack, you own your email list. You own your payment relationship. It's your business. It's your thing. And when we started, you know, I think people looked at me, they're like, 'Oh, you're crazy for doing this. Like, don't you want to lock in your customers? Don't you want people to be trapped on your platform?' And the obvious thing is like, 'No, we want... First of all, just in principle, we want people to own these things. We want you to be able to... It's your thing. It's your list. It's your audience.' But also, it creates this like, you know, proof that we are trustworthy. Right? If we turn around and become evil Substack and try to screw you, you can leave anytime. And the fact that that is true means that we're always incentivized to make the platform actually serve the people who are using it. And so, we do have, you know, there are people who leave. And, you know, that is sad sometimes, and we wish that everybody would stay. On the other hand, it also means that lots of people can come. Right? We have lots of people who are coming to Substack from other platforms. We've had Sam Harris join. We've had Prof G Media join. We've had a bunch of people. My favorite though, my personal favorite, is when people... The only thing better than never leaving Substack is the people who leave Substack and then later come back to Substack. Those are my favorite.
That has happened recently, I've noticed. There have been many cases of that. Dylan Patel sent me analysis, came back. Joe Posnanski came back. Glenn Greenwald came back from Rumble. That was a one for the ages for me. I think the thing I hear in independent media world is that when you get big enough and Substack's network effects no longer really matter as much to your growth and your business, then it makes sense to leave. And then you don't need to give 10% anymore.
People say that and then they leave and then they're like, 'Oh, the network effect was doing a lot for me.' And then they come back.
It's about 20% of my list growth is Substack.
So 20%... I mean that's enough. And for other people it's even more than that.
One of the things about the network effects, people usually talked about that in the context of like social where there's kind of an infinite appetite, I would say, for a lot of different types of content. Do you feel like there is a cap to those network effects with like how many Substacks someone can actually read, how many podcasts they can actually consume on a regular basis?
Yeah. I think there probably is some cap. I think... What is it? It's a lot higher than you'd expect. Maybe this is the thing that I've found. And in the world of media, in the world of like how people are spending their attention, we're like, you know, we're here and the cap is like here in terms of like the overall audience, I think.
For audio listeners, he's making a large gesture with his hands.
I got to remember we're a podcast. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, it is interesting to look at the habit for all of the articles and studies about the decline of reading. It seems like maybe the form factor just wasn't quite right. I mean, certainly when you go on a lot of publisher mobile web websites, you feel like you're under attack. Like constantly. And maybe that was the problem. Like you alluded to earlier with the economics of it as well.
I think that's definitely part of it. I mean, I used to pitch Substack this way. People would be like, why do I need a different place to read long-form things? And I was like, I would go to anywhere. Even your former employers. I'd be like, look at this website. How is this? And you'd be like, attacked by horrible CSS videos leaping out at you.
I also think like, you know, these things the internet pushes things to the barbell. Some people are not reading. Some people are just zooming into TikToks and like losing their mind. And some people are reading more than ever. And some people are diving into long-form things and deep things and learning things that they never would have been able to before.
Yeah, what is working on Substack? Is it mostly politics? Is that the most engaged content? What are the most engaged sectors?
There are a lot of different categories. The I would say the thing that works on Substack is perspective. Right? If you just want to know some facts, you can ask Claude for that these days. And maybe he'll get it right sometimes. But if you like the thing that's valuable is like, hey, I'm trying to figure out what matters. I'm trying to figure out what I should pay attention to. I'm trying to figure out what I should care about. That's why people are coming to your Substack. And that works in politics, it works in tech, it works in finance, it also works in fashion. It also works in food, it also works in like, you know, lifestyle and culture and like literary analysis and like a whole bunch of other places you might not expect.
Can you tell us about the reading habits? I'm just so curious. I remember when I was a reporter back at The Verge, there was this just cursed technology called chartbeat.com. And you could look at how many people clicked on your article, but then also how far they made it down the article.
And in all likelihood, it was like less than 25% and then maybe they read like the kicker at the end. But it also tell you who like how you compare to your peers at your employer?
Oh yeah, these were little... I mean yeah, we worked at BI back in the day and there was a TV with and it would move up and down throughout the day. Yeah. Yeah, I mean what can you tell us about those habits? I mean I think one would think that when you are in long form mode, you know, in iPad mode with one's partner as one is at the end of the day, you know, maybe you're in a longer session as opposed to like when you're scrolling let's say Instagram you see a link in bio. Like you're not going to do that. Like maybe when you're in reading mode you read longer. I mean what are you seeing with the behavioral trends?
Yeah, well I think you know, one of the things when we shipped our feed, we have sort of a short form feed that links out to longer content, right? So our thing is like hey, we've got some things you can check out what's going on, it's fun, it's fast, but we're going to help kind of like help you find something you can actually sink your teeth into. That really works and when you goal on hey, we want to find you something you actually love and value, that is still possible and people do still absolutely read. The other thing we did that I'm really proud of just referencing the chartbeat thing is of course on Substack if you're a publisher you can see all your stats. You can see the cause and effect, you can see hey, I published this, how many people saw it, how much money did I make, who unsubscribed, who subscribed. But we recently shipped a feature where if you want you can just turn all that off and hide it. So you can be in a mode where if you just want to kind of like ply your trade and write your thing and just not have to be confronted with the numbers, not have to be like so closely tied to the feedback, we give you that option as well.
How the hell is the feed ranked Chris? Because it makes no sense to me. It really doesn't. Like I see stuff from 2014 in there next to something from yesterday.
Yeah, but then I see the date and I'm like what? Obsolete, irrelevant information. Yeah, how are you guys ranking that thing cuz it is so like mystifying to me.
I'll tell you what, you know, we're constantly tweaking it and figuring it out. The spirit of the thing is the feed is not designed to keep you scrolling. The feed is designed to find you something you love.
How do you algorithmically quantify something I love?
Well, herein lies the hard part. And you can look at a lot of signals. You can look at like, hey, do I sit down and read it, right? Do I read it and do I like it? Do I go into subscribe? Do I go into read something else? Right? Am I kind of like am I following down the path of like deeply engaging with something? And the other thing that is one of our ambitions for the feed is, you know, if you write a really great piece, wouldn't it be great if people could keep finding it 2 years later? And it's hard to get that balance right, right? Like sometimes if you serve something that's from 2014 and it's stale, that sucks. But you know what? Some of the things that people wrote in 2014... We keep saying 2014. That's probably too early, but maybe it was like 2016, 2017.
Substack started in 2017. So if it's 2014 they could have imported something, I guess. Do you backdate on Substack?
We do. We have like a from the archives section in the feed because sometimes something old is still great. Or sometimes something old is like newly relevant. And I kind of think that's cool. I think it's great if you have something that can like, you know, keep coming people keep coming back to you cuz it like has some lasting value.
I'm interested in how you guys are talking about the company lately and what your focus has been because I think there was a moment, if you're studying how Substack has been, that you were really focused on audience growth, the app, and there was that TikTok moment where TikTok was briefly banned and the app got a lot of downloads. And lately I feel like you guys are talking more about the creators. I hear things like, we're the platform where if you're a media founder, we want you on Substack. You've got the new podcast with Emily Sundberg and all those folks, Sriram Rapalli. So have you shifted the focus of what you guys are trying to push lately or is that just me?
I would say that like both of those things are kind of like core missions for us. Right? Like the grand theory of Substack is sort of like, you know, what you read matters, the media you consume matters. It's not just the way that you spend your time, it kind of shapes how you think, it shapes how you see the world, shapes how you become. And so great writers, great podcasters, great journalists in our like worldview are heroes. Right? You're the ones shaping the culture, you're the ones like deciding what matters. And so, you know, we have this kind of like grandiose idea of creating this intellectual and cultural capital of the internet, helping kind of like spark a renaissance. And the only thing that saves that from being kind of like pure messianic tech bro shit is that, you know, we're not the heroes of the story in our telling, kind of you are.
Are you managing up to your boss right now?
I am. Can you tell that I'm glazing? I'm going full GPT-4.0 right now. Is it working?
I'm going to ask you some hard questions in a minute. We'll see if it works.
Turn it on us, yeah. Yeah. So here's the... so this is the thing. And then, you know, we want to give you everything you need to like have a fighting chance to like take over the world, to matter in the culture. And we think that, you know, we have to build an incredible set of tools and technology and platform and service that kind of like lets you make the thing you believe in and make real money doing it and takes all of the fiddly stuff out of your hands as much as it can and lets you maximally, you know, use your editorial judgment. And we have to build this network that gives you the kind of growth boost that you're getting honestly less and less from everywhere else on the internet. There's got to be one place on the internet that actually wants you to discover something deep, that actually wants you to make a connection. You know, not every independent creator can make that for themselves, and not every platform is hospitable to that. And so we at Substack see that we have to do both those things.
I read in a very good newsletter called sources.news that... What's the URL for that again? How do you subscribe? Was it the Condé Nast CEO who was saying that they should assume that their publications are going to have zero search traffic?
That's just insane. I mean, yeah, I don't think about search traffic at all.
Traffic for how many years? I mean, it has been since the internet started. I mean, I don't think about it at all.
It's why I wrote 10 articles per day at Business Insider. Yeah. The long tail.
No, it is true. You guys are driving traffic and I think that I can see the product evolving faster, especially lately. I think the thing that I've experienced very viscerally in the last 7 months is that when I launched, I thought most of my income would be subscription. And right now it's like maybe 5%. So it's vast majority working with brands. And what I think is like a tasteful way, hopefully, but doing partnerships and running, you know, like little banners and all of that stuff. So that's been my experience. Obviously, people have gone on Substack and they've had incredible subscription growth out of the gate, right? I think that happens more in politics is what I've noticed, but maybe that's just me. So I'm wondering... You guys have been talking about ads for the last few months. I really haven't heard you talk about it. I'd like to know what your POV on ads are and when they're coming to Substack.
One thing I will say is I do think that I believe you. I do think that experience is a little bit outside the norm. In my experience, a lot of people tend to overrate ads and underrate subscriptions, which is not to say that ads can't make money and subscriptions are everything. But I always try to like... I do think that people underestimate what's possible with their subscription revenue. And that having that like core subscription base is this really deeply powerful thing. It's this connection to your audience. It's also by the way, the advertising business is super cyclical. And you know, both on just like a day-to-day, you know, you'll often have this kind of feast and famine effect. You'll get a whole bunch of things and then the next day you won't and you'll have this longer cycle where you'll go through like a year or two because if the market ever turns for a second, you know, everybody's discretionary ads are kind of the first thing that goes off. So I do think having like both of those sources is really good. And then, you know, our thing is like look, we want to reward, we want to put you in control. We want to have creator independence. We want to reward depth and quality. We think subscriptions do that really well and we do think there are some types of sponsorships that also do that. And we have seen a lot of the best and deepest creators on Substack very successfully having sponsorships, having ads. And you know, we've sort of come to the viewpoint that's like hey, this is something that we can and should help with. And we want to do it not in a way that's going to like put us on a treadmill to become the like CSS like ads flying in. To me the question is like how do we do this in a way that deepens the value of the subscription, that deepens the value of the relationship, that kind of like reinforces the high caliber brand thing you're trying to make. And yeah, we've got a program where we're building the stuff out.
Well, in the way you've talked about the company from the beginning is that the model is aligned with the creator. Ads introduce another constituent which is the advertisers. Can you do advertising and keep that model that you've set as the foundation of the company? I think that's the crux of this, right?
Yeah, I think we can. I think and it's not going to be... I actually think it's not even... subscriptions are not magical, right? Like so, you know, Spotify has a subscription, YouTube has a subscription. But when you're subscribing to the platform and then handing out the money to the creator, you're kind of like breaking that relationship. So, I don't even think of it as like it's purely subscriptions versus ads. It's kind of like who has the ownership? That's the question. So, for me the question is like if we're going to get into this business, which we are, how do we do it in a way that supports creator ownership?
I mean, do you worry that it might have some aggregate effects when people flip on ads and people start to associate that potentially with your brand? Cuz I feel like it's, you know, there aren't that many places where there aren't ads these days. And I mean, if you're turning on ads, I think Alex's ads would probably be very different if they were programmatic in some way. And that would be probably the kind that would be turned on. You know, the reason they're I think so profitable for you is cuz they're brand deals. Yeah, I don't think you would do like a programmatic ad server. That doesn't seem like the Substack way.
No. Okay. Well, at least know that.
So, one of my favorite trends I've been seeing on Substack and just subscriptions in general is a space that has just been like so sorely empty forever cuz it couldn't be monetized properly, which is local news. And you recently talked about with Emily Sundberg on the open tab series about the Bowery Boys Bulletin and also the East Side Rag, which is one I'm personally a subscriber to that is just lovely gossip and news and inside scoops on the East Side of LA. Are you seeing like a broader shift toward that or are those just kind of like a few bright spots?
No, we've seen a bunch of local things spinning up. And, you know, we're always looking for more that we can do. One thing that we've done on this front that I'm really proud of is this program we have called Substack Defender because one of the things we found when we first started having local news publications come on is there's this real problem where people would get sued. Like you'd be like a local news journalist and you piss off the local businessman or politician. And you're doing something totally legitimate, but they figure they can like send you kind of a nastygram on legal letterhead and shut you up. And so, we started this program called Substack Defender that basically is like, if you're the subject of kind of bogus defamation claims, we're going to come and kind of like put a lot of legal weight behind that and make that very costly for the people who are bringing those things. And that was inspired by some of the people who are starting these local news programs, cuz that's where we found that problem was the worst. So, if Elon sues me, you got me.
Potentially. Asterisk, depending on exactly what you did. No, but seriously, like if you ever have a problem like that, you should check out Defender.
So, why do you think local news wasn't working before? Cuz I feel like part of it is a product thing, part of it is an economics thing.
I mean, my story here is it's not just local news, right? Like the internet came along and massively democratized access to publishing, access to information, and just like smashed a lot of the business models that used to support media. Like, what used to support local news? It'd be like the classifieds, right? It's like, you know, ads for local businesses. Well, we've got Google and Craigslist and Meta now. I don't think it's like any one thing. I just think it's like the sort of economic landscape that used to exist that supports these things, and by the way, supports a lot of other media, isn't here anymore.
What about video? You guys are leaning a lot into video, and I've heard you say that you think of YouTube as your main competition. That's a big one. You've got all the video podcast stuff. I know you've got more live video support coming. Is video overtaking text on Substack? Is that how you look at it?
I wouldn't say overtaking. I mean, I think of Substack, it's about kind of like depth. It's about being able to go deep. It's about having long-form, it's about having something that you could, you know, might not fit in the short thing that you can get anywhere else. And I think, you know, long-form text very much fits that mode. It's been very successful. I kind of think Substack right now is the place on the internet for long-form text. But I think long-form video fits that really well, as well. Like the kind of work you do on the podcast, I think having like a thoughtful conversation that you can have the space to go deep, that fits very well with the Substack model. A lot of the top writers on the platform have started podcasts, have successful podcasts that are making lots of money. And so we're kind of taking this approach of like, how could we bring the same benefits that we've brought to writers to podcasters? And I think of a podcast in 2026 is basically it's a video podcast, it's on YouTube, it's also on Apple and Spotify, you're also doing the clips. Like you're kind of doing that whole that nascent format.
What about AI? How are you thinking about AI?
Um, there's a lot. There's how people on... AI? What is... I haven't heard of that. Can you explain it?
I think a lot of Substackers creators have strong feelings about AI. And you've got, you know, your position on scraping as a platform that and, you know, the creators can toggle that, right? So I understand that. But then there's also just like Substack integrating itself with AI, right? Which is my way of saying like when is the MCP thing coming, right? Like I think there's a moment where Substack becomes a node that AIs can work into and how are you thinking about that?
We're building the MCP. You're on the beta list. It's happening. This is the weird thing where like you talk to a platform and you know things and then you're interviewing the CEO and you have to kind of pretend that you don't that you want him to talk about it.
Talk about that. Talk about opening up Substack to AI that way.
Well, I'll tell you I mean, so I had this experience with Notion where I was a Notion user for a long time and I kind of felt... No offense to our host. I did for a while fall off the Notion bandwagon a little bit. But recently I've been trying to work with agents, my AI agents and work with documents. And all of the other places kind of did like a half-assed version of this. And the Notion MCP, the Notion, I know there's new command line tools that are incredible, works amazingly. And it's been enough that I have personally switched back to Notion. And to me that's like so if you're somebody if we're sitting here saying, 'Hey, we're supporting creators, we want you to be able to use the tools you want to use.' Like we have to integrate with these things. We're going to make like the best possible version of this. But it seems to me like you're maybe asking not just about can I use the MCP, but like where is this all going if we live in a world where AI is kind of doing more and more stuff.
Yeah, I am asking that. Also Notion did not pay any of us for you to say that, but that's very nice of you saying that. I'm just very interested in when Substack is a thing I can talk to through Claude like the existing MCPs that you can use in Claude. That I think that really changes the platform for creators. And it could be pretty profound, but there could also be a backlash cuz I think there's a lot of creators on Substack who do not want AI. They think it's bad.
