Substack Discoverability

I assume that, like many things in life, newsletter subscriptions follow the Pareto principle: about 20 percent of newsletters will have 80 percent of subscriptions.

How do the newsletters in the long tail get into the 20 percent?

Of course various factors could boost a newsletter’s subscription numbers: content; marketing; pricing; luck; etc. My focus in this post is discoverability.

If a newsletter is in a forest of newsletters but can’t be found, does it exist? I suppose it does, but not for many people.

Substack’s focus has been on popular newsletters. Currently its home and Discover pages point primarily to “Featured” and “Top Paid” publications. Popularity also seems to be significant to the order of results in Substack’s search engine.

I presume both Substack and Substackers would benefit from more long-tail discoverability on the Substack website and reader. And third-party tools for finding Substack newsletters and posts, such as stacksear.ch and Metastack, can supplement this discoverability.

But I imagine most discovery doesn’t and won't happen on Substack’s website or specialized tools, but from outside sources such as Google and social media. (Substack itself allows you to find newsletters from writers you follow on Twitter.)

I hope to see more links between Substack newsletters. Sure, many newsletters will link to Letters from an American and other top publications — again, it’s the Pareto principle. But it can be useful to look for and link to long-tail newsletters on your post topic. In collecting links on the storming of the Capitol and its aftermath, I discovered an illuminating variety of alternative perspectives.

Especially if a newsletter is or becomes popular, linking from it might help other newsletters become more popular too. Moreover, if the overall subscriber base grows significantly, even remaining in the 80 percent should be sufficient for more Substackers.