I pay attention when a blogger is talking about their subscribers. As best I can tell from this highly unscientific anecdotal survey, so far it looks like around 5-10% of all subscribers to a blog will become paid subscribers. If you can verify or dispute that, please do so. Thanks!
Here's a popular fellow that has 6,000 paid subscribers at around $10/month. That's in the neighborhood of $720,000 per year. Roughly 8% of his subscribers have upgraded to paid accounts. He talks about his subscriptions and income a bit on this page:
And don't forget, the big shot bloggers were mostly already big shots before they came to Substack. Starting from scratch on Substack, or anywhere else, is typically going to be a long grinding uphill climb, and most people will give up before they become big shot bloggers.
American culture is the culture of TV. Most of the names you have listed are the names of people who were famost on the Tube. Or there are people with the names in journalism. Unless we see people in the top ten who made the name for themselves on substack, this is not an art form, not even a business.
As a quick followup....
I pay attention when a blogger is talking about their subscribers. As best I can tell from this highly unscientific anecdotal survey, so far it looks like around 5-10% of all subscribers to a blog will become paid subscribers. If you can verify or dispute that, please do so. Thanks!
As it happens, I just got a newsletter from Substack the company which reports this....
"Today, there are more than 20 million monthly active subscribers and 2 million paid subscriptions to writers on Substack."
Here's a popular fellow that has 6,000 paid subscribers at around $10/month. That's in the neighborhood of $720,000 per year. Roughly 8% of his subscribers have upgraded to paid accounts. He talks about his subscriptions and income a bit on this page:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/2023-subscription-drive-free-unlocked
And don't forget, the big shot bloggers were mostly already big shots before they came to Substack. Starting from scratch on Substack, or anywhere else, is typically going to be a long grinding uphill climb, and most people will give up before they become big shot bloggers.
American culture is the culture of TV. Most of the names you have listed are the names of people who were famost on the Tube. Or there are people with the names in journalism. Unless we see people in the top ten who made the name for themselves on substack, this is not an art form, not even a business.