Why Am I Losing Subscribers?

Is it Me or is it The Platform?

Since early August—when I reached the zenith of my subscriber count—I have lost around 55 free subscribers. Up until that point I’d always been generally growing upwards. But over the past two months I’ve either consistently flatlined or gone down.

I wish I knew what was going on. Polls never yield results for me: I think the most votes I’ve ever had on a poll is still under 20; the poll I did asking this very question a week ago resulted in eight votes.

It’s a conundrum. Every writer wants to grow. My followers are still growing; I have just under 8,000. But my actual (free) subscribers are falling fairly precipitously. (My paid subscribers have gone up and down consistently and so have remained about the same for the past year, overall neither rising nor falling generally-speaking.)

It could be me, for sure. Anyone who has followed me knows I am strongly opinionated, especially around edgy, controversial political topics. My wife (and Chat GPT) tell me my “passion” has waned in my writing over the past six months. Perhaps it’s the sometimes angry, belligerent Notes I often post. Or maybe it’s the fact that I don’t have a “niche” and therefore write too broadly: In writing everything for everyone I end up pleasing very few. Also, some thoughts I had were: Posting too often (guilty); posts being too long (guilty; my average essay is about 2,500 words); and having pretty much 100% stopped engaging directly with other writers’ posts/work. (Due largely to overwhelm.) Perhaps some don’t like the fact that my stack has shifted much more towards travel essays, life as an expat in Madrid, and the new podcast.

My personality on Substack can, I am certain, sometimes probably come off as angry, bitter, needy, demanding, intense and childish. And no doubt I do possess some of these qualities some of the time (more often than I care to admit). And hell: I even admit that I’ve been less passionate in an immediate sense with my Substack writing overall, I guess because it’s been 3.2 years now and I’ve covered a lot of material and I also haven’t been growing much the past half-year. I also know that much of my autobiographical writing becomes fucking repetitive. (“I was born in Ojai, 90 miles northeast of Los Angeles…sober since 2010….wild hitchhiking past in my lurid twenties….blah blah blah blah blah.) Even EYE am sick of my own damn story at this point. Ergo: I need fresh, original material. I need to go deeper. I need to try harder. I need to mix it up. I have to challenge myself.

There’s always been a part of me that is steeped in idealism and denial, the side that thinks life “owes me” something, the side that actually believes that if I write my stuff things will just “happen” and the audience will magically appear and I’ll be a Substack bestseller and I’ll make $100K/year and be The Substack GOAT.

Thankfully, I live in enough of reality to know this is…a fantasy which doesn’t actually exist and never has and never will. The truth for 99.999% of us is that it’s a hard, slow build. Austin Kleon talked with Sarah Fay about how it took him nearly a decade to get his first 100K subscribers. (He has 300K now.) And that was a guy who already had a traditional platform when he started, and who’d been publicly blogging since 2005. Some writers get lucky, of course. It happens. But it’s rare. And usually they come to Substack with a substantial following already, like Glennon Doyle.

But also, I wonder: Is this just Reality? Aka: The reality of contemporary online writing in 2025? Meaning: Since Substack has finally “made it” and become cool and popular, does that mean the mad influx of famous people, celebrities, authors, journalists, etc, is necessarily heating up the water and boiling it in a way which is costing most of we smaller stacks to suffer? Millions of people are writing on the platform now. Substack is no longer the evil little weirdo brother of Twitter, Slack, Facebook, etc. It has come into its own. And that means a lot more competition for attention, readers, interest. Maybe all platforms in essence “fail” for the vast majority of people once they explode and become The It Thing.

I also wonder, of course, about the (other) elephant in the room: Chat GPT and AI. How many posts are currently being written with or fully by AI? AI uses key words and language to hook readers in. It has tools we humans alone don’t always have. Three years ago—even two—Substack felt like it generally leaned more in the direction of Art. I’m not naïve: It’s always been a business. Of course. We live in the world (in America) and that means capitalism, competition, corporate bottom-lines. The Art community stuff was probably largely due to Substack’s early lack of general popularity. Now that it’s taken off the Art suffers and The Stickiest, Easiest to Read, Dumbed Down material will win. Is it that simple? Are we entering a new online Idiocracy? (Perhaps we’ve already been here for a while?)

Perhaps it’s none of this. Or perhaps it’s all and more. Maybe this is just the end-of-summer malaise that some readers fall into and the kids are back in school, the holidays are approaching, and people are cleaning out their subscriptions, cutting back on clutter, emails and costs, etc.

Who knows. I can only speculate. I also think my stack generally skews older and female, broadly speaking. The above 50 crowd. That’s great. I love that. no complaints here. But: How do I retain the younger demographic? Maybe I could start by mocking Gen Z less. Or work on significantly shortening my posts for fast, breezy scanning? (Someone told me people no longer “read” online, they scan.) But this all brings me back to the Art Versus Commerce Debate once more. What does it mean to have artistic integrity? Should I not care about the money aspect at all? Have I, in essence, “already sold out?” Should it all be done “just for the Art?” Where are the examples of writers on Substack who, like me, legitimately started with zero subscribers and no prior platform…and have gained a strong following? What did they do?

*For fun—if you want to—here’s some polls for ya. Enjoy.