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In today’s issue, I’m answering questions submitted from my audience. If you want to submit questions for this series, you have to become a paid subscriber. Use the link below and get 20% off for your first year:

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Ok, let’s jump into it…

Revenue diversification is (sometimes) overrated

The first question comes from Liv

As a solo creator, we are often told to diversify revenue streams, which is generally sound guidance for anyone in any career. However, when it comes to managing both a sponsorship arm and a product/service arm (such as online courses, memberships, premium content subscriptions, even coaching etc.) in a creator business, do you think they impede each other when operating concurrently? It often feels like chasing two rabbits and catching none.

If you had asked me this question in 2022, I might have given you a completely different answer, since back then I was all about revenue diversification. And to be fair, I still do think that some of the world’s most successful media companies achieved their success by developing multiple business models. 

But when it comes to solo creators and media startups, I think diversification can sometimes be overrated. I came to this conclusion partly through my own experience; as I wrote about in my recent piece on how I retooled my subscription product, I spent much of 2022 and 2023 distracted by my effort to grow my sponsorship revenue, so much so that I neglected to build out a great offering for my paid subscribers. It wasn’t until we were well into the global advertising recession before I finally acknowledged to myself that I was bad at ad sales. By that point, my revenue growth had completely stalled out, and I found myself wishing that I’d stayed more focused on the subscription product from the very beginning.

When you’re a solo creator, you have to juggle so many tasks at once — your free content creation, your marketing, your revenue generation. With that many plates spinning in the air, I think you run a real risk of diluting the quality of your output whenever you try to do too many things at once. To put it another way, I think there’s more value in doing one thing really well than putting out multiple half-assed products.

That’s not to say you should never diversify — just that you should focus on building one solid business before branching out into new areas.

Content consolidation vs verticalization

The next question comes from Alexandre Durand-Chabert

What's your opinion on consolidating multiple newsletters and podcasts under a single platform versus creating a separate newsletter or podcast for each topic and recommending those individually? 

In general, I think publishers should always err toward vertical consolidation when appropriate. 

Part of the reason that we saw such a big crash in the podcast market was because publishers were spending huge gobs of cash producing narrative shows, launching them on standalone podcast feeds, and then acting surprised when they failed to recoup their costs. These days, a publisher is much more likely to brand a narrative series as a new season to an ongoing show; that way, they can capitalize on the momentum and already-existing audience of the prior season.

The same rule applies to virtually any content vertical. It’s such a heavy lift to build audience momentum on an individual newsletter or podcast, and you’re just shooting yourself in the foot if you spread your content across too many verticals. Don’t make the job of building a loyal audience more difficult than it needs to be. 

You can’t copy and paste a media business model

The final question comes from Aaron M. Renn

I'd be interested in hearing if there's good data on how posting frequency affects subscriptions levels on Substack.

I don’t think Substack’s released any data on this, but even if it did I’d still advise you to take it with a huge grain of salt.

I’ve interviewed hundreds of media operators for my newsletter and podcast, and one of my biggest takeaways from that experience is that no two media outlets are the same. If that were the case, everyone would simply copy The New York Times’s strategy and live happily ever after.

There are so many variables at play in driving the success of your media business — including niche, originality, revenue model, and marketing strategy — and you need to take all of them into account when optimizing for posting frequency.

The general approach I recommend is to figure out the maximum number of content pieces you can produce each week without sacrificing quality or inducing burnout. To calculate this number, you have to break down your production process and assign weekly time slots to every level of that process.

In my particular case, I typically produce three major pieces of content per week: a free podcast, a paid podcast, and a longform newsletter. I also have to block out a good amount of time each week for things like phone calls, answering emails, reading industry news, and conducting interviews. So my content production process looks like this:

Monday: Editing the video and audio for the interview portion of my paid podcast

Tuesday: Writing a script and recording the intro for my paid podcast, then finalizing the editing, then uploading it to all the various platforms, and finally sending out a newsletter alerting subscribers to the new episode

Wednesday: Writing and sending my longform newsletter (like the one you’re reading now)

Thursday: Writing a script and recording the intro for my free podcast, then finalizing the editing, then uploading it to all the various platforms

Friday: Sending out a short newsletter alerting my audience to this week’s free podcast episode, then editing the interview portion of next week’s free podcast episode 

I’ve been optimizing my content production for the past four years, and I pretty much have it down to a science at this point. Could I squeeze out an extra longform newsletter each week if I really tried? Probably, but it would add a huge amount of stress to my workload and eventually lead to burnout.

The other week, I had lunch with a political pundit who writes three newsletters a day and also records a daily YouTube video. If I tried to do that, I’d quickly have a nervous breakdown, but content production can vary widely from person to person. Which is a long way of saying that you shouldn’t stress too much about your content posting frequency and instead focus on keeping the quality high while maintaining your own sanity.  

What do you think?

Quick hits

Substack is improving its community features, making it easier for writers to host subscriber-only discussions. "Our data shows that active chat participants are 12% more likely to retain their subscription after a year." [Substack]

WashPo profiles a real estate influencer whose popularity landed him a show on HGTV. [WashPo]

"The traffic era of publishing has ended. Nobody brags about their ComScore uniques anymore; engagement is the new North Star." [The Rebooting]

A niche publisher that specializes in reviewing outdoors products complains that Google is now favoring larger publishers in search results, despite their lack of specialization. "How are you to know or trust a brand like USA Today for snowboard reviews, or Good Housekeeping?  Are they actually snowboarders or simply writing articles to make money without ever testing any products on snow?" [Mountain Weekly]

A few years ago, The Atlantic made a big announcement that it was building newsletter brands around several of its individual writers, but the strategy seems to have fizzled out. “I don’t know whether we got the incentives wrong, modelled out the audience wrong or executed it slightly wrong. But it was a moderate success, not a smashing success.” [Media Voices]

"[Beehiiv] claims that in an average month its customers collectively make around $1.2 million monthly in revenues on its platform." According to my back-of-the-envelope calculations, Substack writers are collectively generating around $15 million a month on that platform. [TechCrunch]

"I think anybody who’s mass-producing commoditized, replicable content right now, which is a lot of general media — that’s going to go away because I do think AI will be able to do that or be able to synthesize it better." [New York]

I know this feeling: "If you buy 10 ad placements, I can predict what the open rates will be for each newsletter, what the click rates will be for your ad. But if you just buy one slot, I can't promise you it's going to knock it out of the park. And I don't like that feeling, because I can't promise you I can deliver value." [Creator Spotlight]

"Let’s say a Big Five [book publishing] house puts out 75 books in a year ... 50 don’t sell at all and are a clear financial loss; 15 sell enough to recoup the advance and maybe the overhead for all the work that went in; 5 are profitable but max out at modestly-to-moderately so; 5 are big hits that, along with all the ancillaries and back catalog, make the house’s nut for that year." [Freddie deBoer]

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