The editor of the popular tech newsletter talks about leaving Substack and where he’s seeing successful business models in media.
Today, I’m talking with Casey Newton, the founder and editor of the Platformer newsletter and co-host of the Hard Fork podcast. Casey is also a former editor here at The Verge and was my co-host at the Code Conference last year. Most importantly, Casey and I are also very close friends, so this episode is a little looser than usual.
I wanted to talk to Casey for a few reasons. One, the media industry overall is falling apart, with huge layoffs at almost every media organization you can think of happening weekly, but small newsletters seem to be a bright spot. So I wanted to talk about how Platformer started, how Casey got it to where it is, and how much farther he thinks it can go. In particular, I wanted to talk about whether newsletters can replace the journalism that’s going away and where Casey thinks the limits of his kind of business are after running it so successfully for several years.
And then, I wanted to talk about Substack, which started out by promising a newsletter revolution that would create a new kind of journalism. Instead, the company seems beset by financial problems inherent to its business model and has faced an ever-increasing number of content moderation problems — including most recently, when the company’s decision to allow Nazis to monetize on its platform pushed a number of its customers away, including Casey and Platformer.
Casey was in the middle of this particular controversy — he covered it in Platformer as he was deciding to switch from Substack, and you’ll hear him make a convincing argument that Substack’s founders actually relish the fights they’ve gotten into over moderation and that the company is more ideologically driven than he expected.
And you’ll hear him talk about the economics of leaving Substack — switching to rival email platform Ghost actually saved Platformer quite a bit of money, and he’s run the numbers on how valuable Substack’s vaunted recommendation system really is. I think you’ll find them surprising.
This episode goes deep, but it’s fun — Casey is just one of my favorite people, and he is not shy about saying what he thinks.
Okay, Casey Newton of Platformer. Here we go.
This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Casey Newton. You are the founder and editor of Platformer, also one of the most notable Verge traitors of all time. Welcome to Decoder.
Hey, Nilay, thanks for having me.
I’m really excited to talk to you. I want to talk about Platformer. I feel like understanding how a successful small newsletter business works is very important in 2024 because the other thing I want to talk to you about is that the rest of the media industry is exploding, and it feels like there’s a real connection between those things. And I’m also curious for your thoughts on how on earth we can maintain a healthy media ecosystem because, right now, it doesn’t seem like any of the people in charge know what to do.
So true.
So if you and I can save the media by the end of this episode, I think we will have done the world a service.
Let’s take a crack at it.
Yeah, I think we should give it a shot. So let’s start with Platformer. I feel like I just need to [disclose that] Casey and I are very good friends. This episode is — I’m worried it’s going to be real loose. We’re going to do our best. But Casey used to work at The Verge. You had a newsletter at The Verge. I will just tell everyone this: I love it when I’m no longer responsible for managing my friends, and I’m very proud of Casey for starting Platformer, just on a personal selfish level. I don’t have to worry about Casey. Now, I can just send him DMs.
Very true. I’m out of your hair.
But you were at The Verge. You had a successful newsletter here called The Interface. It was about platforms and democracy. You saw this opportunity to go take that elsewhere. Talk about that decision really quickly, and then I want to check in on how Platformer is doing now.
I can talk about it a bunch of different ways, but one is in the way that I have always tried to manage my career defensively. I used to work for a newspaper, and then the web came along, and it disrupted newspapers, and I basically had to find a new job. Then the web was thriving. The early days of Vox Media, I was like, “Wow, there’s this huge, amazing new opportunity here.” And then the social networks came along, and they started to eat the web a little bit. And I thought, “Man, I love what I do so much. If I want to be able to do it forever, what is the way that I could have the maximum feeling of sustainability?” And I just started to think more about maybe going out on my own and, instead of asking the CEO of a media company to pay me, asking readers to pay me directly.
The second important thing was, it was 2020. It was basically the middle of that pandemic year. I had never been living more cheaply in my entire life. I was buying groceries twice a week, living in Kara Swisher’s cottage, and I truly was never going to spend less money. And I thought, “You know, I have a little bit of savings. I could try this thing, and if I fall super hard on my face, I can at least make it like six months, but if I’m ever going to start a company, now’s the moment.” So it was the combination of those two things that led me to jump.
I bought a pickup truck in that year. I had a very different reaction. I was like, “What’s the dumbest pickup truck?”
We all process that trauma in different ways.
So you leave, you start Platformer. A big part of the story is this is also the Substack moment, and we are going to end up talking about Substack and your reliance on them as a platform. That relationship has come to an end, but there was a big reliance on Substack as a platform in there. I feel like when you started, you understood that you were reliant on a little bit of Substack largesse, and you were on the rocket ride with them as a platform, and that relationship and that dynamic really changed, but what was it like at the beginning?
It was really exciting. Substack itself had been inspired by a couple of newsletters that I read religiously and inspired me: Ben Thompson’s Stratechery; Matt Levine’s Money Stuff in Bloomberg. Substack came along and said, “These folks writing newsletters seem to be really successful” — particularly Ben, also Bill Bishop, who writes a newsletter called Sinocism about China. They had clearly built pretty amazing businesses writing their newsletters, and Substack came along and said, “Well, what if we just made that easier for anybody?” So anybody who wanted to take a crack at this could plug into some simple-to-use infrastructure, have some great software that emails your reporting, your analysis, out to as many people who will subscribe, and Substack would take a 10 percent cut of that and build a business.
And as I was considering my options in 2020, Substack really was the best. It let me move very quickly. It basically took care of the entire design process. Around this time, Substack was also giving advances to writers to entice them to leave. I wound up not taking an advance, but it did help me financially with a couple of things. It paid for a designer to create the Platformer logo that we still use today; it gave me a healthcare subsidy; and more importantly, just helped me figure out how to get healthcare as a freelancer, something I had never had to do before. And probably the most important thing was, it said, “If you get sued by a litigious person, we will protect you for up to a million dollars in legal fees.” And I was like, “Wow, that is the thing that could just maybe sink me right away if I go independent.” The combination of those things made me say, “Hey, why don’t I go for this?” And like I said, it was pretty exciting.
I want to come back to those things because those are things that de-risk a small business, particularly healthcare, and then if you’re in the media, someone mad sues you out of existence — those are existential risks on a personal level and a media business level. I want to come back to them and how you’re thinking about them now that you’re more established and you went to the platform Ghost.
But you start with Substack. Substack is giving out these deals and with various terms to various writers. The idea is all these writers will start small businesses that will grow to big businesses. Substack will take 10 percent of those business’s revenues, and they’ll have a huge platform business. And you look at that from the outside and you say, “Okay, that’s a SaaS company.” You’re Mailchimp.
But even from the beginning, Substack thought of itself as something very different. And I think that self-image of Substack is what led to the current, “Oh, boy. There are a lot of Nazis” controversy here. I feel like I’ve talked to Chris Best a lot. Famously, on the show, I asked him, “Why aren’t you going to moderate the racists away?” He did a horrible job of answering that question by basically saying, “I’m not going to.” You could see it early. “Oh, you’re going to have to deal with this.” How did it get from there to, “Oh, it boiled all the way over, and now a lot of prominent people are leaving our platform”?
I think, at first, I considered the way they would talk about the company as mostly marketing and branding. They did talk about it from very nearly the beginning as a corrective to the world created by social networks, that they were going to do less moderation. They wanted to be a place for the free exchange of ideas. They were going to take a really light touch with moderation.
And because at the time, they really were just a SaaS company, like you say, it didn’t stress me out too much. I use a lot of infrastructure that is also used by horrible people, and so I just wasn’t too pressed about it. I also assumed that if they had a problem that got worse and worse and started to threaten their business, they would grow up. Because what have we seen over and over again, Nilay? These companies often start in this similar position of, “Well, we don’t want to get involved.” Eventually, they have to get involved, and they start to do content moderation.
I want to come back to that coming to a head and them choosing to grow up or not grow up and you leaving. But I feel like no one ever talks about act two. There’s act one, which is “We started a band in a garage,” and there’s act three, “I’m Casey Newton, the founder and editor of Platformer, and I host Hard Fork.” Act two is the hard part. No one ever talks about it. How did that first year go? How did that second year go? You hired Zoe Schiffer, you have a third person on staff now. What was that ramp like for you?
Mostly, it has gone great — although, in basically every way, it did not go totally according to my expectations. As you mentioned, I had been doing a newsletter at The Verge. I had been writing it five days a week. Vox Media was incredible to me. I was able to take my mailing list with me when I left. That gave me a huge head start. That’s something a lot of other folks who start newsletters don’t have. I was convinced that I would basically flip a switch after I started Platformer, 10 percent of my readers would subscribe, and I would be thriving. And it is true that enough people subscribed basically right away that I could breathe a sigh of relief and feel like, “Okay, this is just my job now.” But it’s also true I was not making as much money as I had been at The Verge, and so that meant I had to go and figure out what the business was.
I would say what I learned over that first year in particular was, the business really is scoops, and this cuts both ways. The good thing about it and that I want every journalist in the world to take into their heart is, if you break news, people will pay you money. And if you’re doing it in a newsletter that you own, there is no limit to the amount of money that you can make. That is basically the single most empowering thing that I’ve learned about journalism since I started Platformer.
The way that it cuts both ways, though, is there are a lot of days when I don’t have scoops. In fact, most days, I don’t have a scoop. And when it has been a bit of a dry spell and you’re just not getting anything, it can be scary because something else you learn in this business is that your customers will churn. There is somebody who will pay you $10 to say, “Hey, great scoop.” And then they will unsubscribe from you once they realize that they don’t actually want to spend three or four days a week with you in their inbox.
The part of you that had to be entrepreneurial, and you have always been very entrepreneurial, you’ve always been driven to be like, “What is the future of the business I’m in?” — that seems like the thing that keeps most people from going and starting a newsletter business. You want to write a newsletter, you want an audience, you want to be a reporter, you want to get scoops. That is one type of very focused work. You need to figure out what your audience wants and grow a business and do email marketing and all the rest of it is a very different kind of work. How are you balancing the two?
I overestimated for a long time how many other people were going to want to do this because, to me, it felt very simple. It was like, “Well, if you love journalism and want to do it forever, and you want to live the life that you want financially, you now have more tools to be able to do that than you have ever had before.” Everything I’m doing today, I could not have done in 2002 when I left college. Or if I was doing some version of it, it would look radically different.
I think what I underestimated, though, and I say this with true love and affection and empathy, is most people just want a job. Most people want to go to an office or stay at home, and they want to do their work, and they want to not think about it, and they want to be able to buy a house and raise a family, and I want that for everyone who wants it. I truly do. I just became convinced that there was not going to be the world that I lived in anytime soon, and so I was just going to have to approach it differently.
Yeah, I often say that my ideal job is being an overpriced features writer at The Verge. That would be great if I could just do that, but I need The Verge to exist to do that. And so management it is. And if The Verge is stable, then at least a lot of other people can be features writers at The Verge.
The piece of the puzzle where you had to balance your time, it led to you writing a little less, and then you hired some people and you were able to write more. I guess that comes to the classic Decoder question here, and it’s very funny that I’m asking you this question. I don’t know if the audience can tell, I’m very amused by the fact that I’m interviewing my friend on my own podcast here.
I’m excited about it. I feel very flattered.
It’s just very funny to me. How is Platformer structured? How does it work between the three of you?
I own Platformer. A couple of years ago, I did hire Zoe Schiffer. She has the title of managing editor, and because we are so small, like many very small companies, people wear a lot of hats, where, in any given day, I’m doing a little bit of reporting, I’m probably writing a column, I’m probably responding to some reader emails, maybe doing a little bit of customer support. Zoe is doing the same thing.
The work balance and load just changes as the problems change. We’re in the middle of this platform transition that I’m sure we’ll get into. That has created a lot of customer support issues, and Zoe has been amazing at just grabbing that problem with both of her hands and wading into it. But the nice thing about being two full-time employees is that everything is just a conversation between two people who have a lot of trust in each other.
I don’t have to do a lot of culture building and rallying around the vision because we both have a pretty good sense of what the vision is. We could just wake up each day and say, “Okay, well, what do we tackle?”
I think that’s the ideal way to work. You have a tiny group of people, maybe not more than three or four even, who all intimately know each other’s strengths and weaknesses and what we’re trying to do, and we’re just going to go off and build it. But to do anything more ambitious, you need more scale. Is that on your mind? “Oh, I should scale to 10 people or 15 or 50.”
I go back and forth on this all the time because I have had moments in my career when I was at The Verge of being a manager and taking a step back from reporting and writing and working with people. And as you remember, I really didn’t like that. And in fact, there was a moment where I considered leaving The Verge and going to work for a tech company because an offer came out of nowhere. And fortunately, after I sat with it, I realized, “I don’t want to go work for a tech company. I just don’t want to manage people anymore.” And you were wonderful to me, as you always were as my boss, and created a role for me where I could report and write again. At Platformer, there is that similar tension of, “Well, the business is doing well enough that we think we could hire another person.”
As somebody who’s very nervous about the state of media, I would like to get a lot more money in the bank. I don’t think most media businesses work by wanting to have someone’s entire salary in the bank before they hire them, but that’s basically how I think about it. I do think that we could get there with Platformer this year, but I’m trying to spend a lot of time thinking about, “Okay, well, what does it mean when that person shows up? What do I actually want them to contribute to the business?” One of the amazing things about hiring Zoe was that she joined right when Elon [Musk] was buying Twitter. She broke and helped me to break a bunch of stories about that takeover, and that generated hundreds and hundreds of new subscriptions for us at Platformer. And for a very tiny media company, that is important that the people that you are hiring are creating the conditions for you to be able to continue paying them.
I understand why a lot of reporters don’t want to be in that position. I think you and I both wanted to live in a world where reporters could just roam free, write whatever they wanted, and it would all just work out in the end. And I think for a long time, it did. I think we’re now in this worse world, where, in order for the media businesses to work, whatever you’re reporting and writing, somebody has to want to pay you $10 a month or $100 a year to read it. So I’m happy with the state of things for us, but I also acknowledge this is not the ideal state of tech medi
