Four years of Read Max on Substack

Our annual report

Greetings from Read Max HQ! Four years ago this Saturday I launched Read Max. Every year I like to do a kind of annual report on the previous year (you can read reports from Year One, Year Two, and Year Three), and this year is no exception.

The TL;DR:

• We published some good stuff this year that people liked.

• Growth has been steady but a bit strange.

• We’re going to expand in a more purposeful way next year.

The first sign of that promised expansion comes next Wednesday 10/22 at 2 p.m. ET, when

John Ganz

and I kick off what will be a regular biweekly “Substack Live” on topics familiar to people who’ve watched us do these before--tech, politics, and the sexual peccadilloes of prominent men (or whatever). Here’s a link to the event; you can watch on your desktop computer or the Substack app. A recording of that conversation, and all “live” conversations going forward, will be made available as a video and a podcast to paying Read Max subscribers, a status to which you can upgrade now:

Before I get into it, let me do a weepy little toast. I started this Substack in a very weird place in both my career and my life. I’d quit a great job the year before to pursue a dream in Hollywood that very quickly crashed and burned around the same time that my kid was born. A career that seemed both financially responsible, intellectually challenging, and flexible enough to give me time with my family seemed impossible to put together.

And then Read Max happened. Four years on I’m in a very stable financial position, writing about the things I want to write about, for an audience that cares about the same things, and I still have time to see my son every night and tell him: “No, we can’t listen to ‘Takedown’ again, we’ve listened to it eight times already tonight.”

This is possible for me thanks to the paying subscribers of this newsletter. I know that most of you subscribe because you, for whatever reason, value the Read Max brand of independent tech criticism and ethnography, or because you accidentally pressed a button and don’t check your credit card statements very often. But the fact of your subscriptions is quite meaningful to me on a human level, and it’s still hard for me to communicate how satisfying (and confidence-inspiring) it is as a writer to have this kind of steady, predictable validation machine humming in the background as I work. (Compared to the extremely volatile validation machine that is a social-media platform.) Whether you’re a new or longtime subscriber, genuinely: Thank you.

Read Max year four in review

The top ten posts of the past year, as ranked by total new subscribers brought in from each post:

1. “The Zizians and the Rationalist death cults,” 682 new subscribers

2. “Soy Right ascendant,” 572 new subscribers

3. “The TikTok electorate,” 304 new subscribers

4. “People prefer A.I. art because people prefer bad art,” 270 new subscribers

5. “What Type of Guy is the alleged UHC shooter?,” 238 new subscribers

6. “FYPcore and the Benson Boone-iverse,” 203 new subscribers

7. “Why is Mark Zuckerberg vice-signaling?,” 159 new subscribers

8. “Studio Ghibli in the age of A.I. reproduction,” 140 new subscribers

9. “A.I. as normal technology (derogatory),” 120 new subscribers

10. “Who is Elara Voss?,” 102 new subscribers

This is the kind of thing, for better or worth, your subscriptions are supporting!

In some sense, the political, technological, cultural and psychosexual developments of the past 12 months have been exactly what Read Max was built to cover. The convergence of an increasingly reactionary software-industry executive class and an influencer-led Republican party at the helm of the U.S. government, their alliance buoyed by a mystical A.I. bubble and legitimized by a flood of slop, backgrounded by mounting nihilistic violence and a debased and decaying aesthetic culture, feels a bit like like this newsletter’s version of GameMasterAnthony’s birthday: The gang’s all here! And I have been very pleased to try to synthesize some of these developments in posts like the above and others that didn’t quite make the cut, like “The A.I. backlash backlash,” “What Type of Guy was the alleged Charlie Kirk shooter?,” and “Admin is crashing out.”

I hope that those posts (and others) have helped readers make sense of the world, and I feel quite proud of most of this work. But, speaking as the guy writing all this, it’s been rough going. It’s not so much that the news is so consistently depressing (though it is) as that it’s become so consistently dull. The “convergence” between all the many spheres of Read Max coverage--tech, politics, culture, media, etc.--has turned so much of what interests me into undifferentiated aspects of a single, awful omni-story. The early days of both the A.I. bubble and the second Trump administration had, at least, the frisson of novelty--new conjunctures to explore! Now, both grind on together toward what feels like a cruel and inevitable collapse, absorbing all light and oxygen, shrilly demanding full attention even as their capacity to surprise disappears entirely. I don’t want to invoke “burnout” here so much as boredom, or maybe both at once; this newsletter is at its most fun when the things I’m writing about truly interest or challenge me, and it’s increasingly hard to force any kind of real interest in (or feel any kind of real challenge from) in “A.I.” or “Trump.”

The good news is that there is, for now, plenty of other stuff to write about. Among my favorite posts this year are those about “Stomp Clap Hey!,” the Nissan Sentra in One Battle After Another, and shock streamers on Kick--none of which were wildly successful, as these things go, but to which readers responded warmly and which didn’t make me want to die. But the reality is that the news environment is oppressive, and I think reader exhaustion is showing up a little bit in my growth figures.

Growth

It’s been a somewhat strange year for growth. Since I started Read Max I’ve enjoyed relatively consistent linear growth on Substack on a year-over-year basis, and this past year has largely passed in line with expectations: 809 new paid subscribers (compared to 850 for the prior year); 18,500 new total subscribers (compared to 13,000 for the prior year); and a roughly $45,000 bump in revenue (identical to the prior year).

But the precise nature of the growth has been notable: Read Max grew twice as fast as usual from October through February (netting around 600 new paid subscribers) only to then enter a long flat period of very slow growth (roughly 200 new paid subscribers over the past eight months):

N.b. the “gross annualized revenue” figure above is Substack’s forecast for what I can expect to make over the next 12 months. According to Stripe, I netted about $153,000 over the last year from Read Max, up from $108,000 the year before.

My longstanding belief, elaborated many times in these yearly reports, is that “year over year” is the only proper way to judge the growth of a digital-media business, and that spending time obsessing over month-to-month volatility is a good way to drive yourself crazy, become obsessed with “the algorithm,” start whispering conspiratorially about “shadow bans,” and generally act in the undignified and unbecoming manner of a professional X.com poster. Throughout my time on Substack I’ve seen growth accelerate and taper off for occult and unknowable reasons, and as long as the numbers look good compared to last year there’s no reason to panic. But this is the longest plateau I’ve experienced on the platform, and the deceleration is stark and unavoidable. Even if it’s not time to panic, it’s worth confronting.

So what’s caused the growth rate to change to dramatically? I think there are contributing extrinsic factors: Substack the platform seems to have experienced a kind of “Trump bump” that probably disproportionately favored those of us well-positioned to write about the role of Elon Musk in the administration’s shocking early days; people may be feeling newsletter or news fatigue or canceling subscriptions because of the effects of Trump’s trade regime or in anticipation of a recession; summer is almost always a slow period. But a shift as direct and immediate as the one visible on the chart above suggests to me something specific changed toward the end of February about how I grow on Substack, most likely in the platform’s recommendations algorithm that drives quite a bit of my growth.

This is the danger of working on a platform. While I am lucky enough to own a direct relationship to my subscribers (unlike many other content creators), and could download my email list and walk away from Substack at any time, I (like most Substackers) have become reliant on the company to take care of a lot of the “dirty work” of subscription-newsletter promotion. I earn new subscribers through platform features and network effects simply from being on Substack itself, without needing to do any of the various kinds of self-promotion and marketing that people from my micro-generation find distasteful and debasing, and that are also “a lot of extra work.” (Growing steadily and absolutely has also allowed me to keep Read Max’s prices steady for its entire existence, rather than trying to squeeze more blood from the poor suckers who subscribe to this dreck in the first place.)

Because I’ve grown at rates much higher than 10 percent every year, the effects of Substack’s platform promotion (alongside the other services it offers) have been worth the 10 percent cut that Substack takes from my gross. But if the current growth rate (about 25 net new paid subscribers every month) represents the new normal, and I can only expect around 300 new paid subscribers every year instead of 800 (or more), my calculation changes: Maybe I should switch to Ghost or Beehiiv, and internalize and own the newsletter’s promotional and marketing efforts.

I’m not anywhere near ready to leave Substack yet; eight months isn’t quite long enough to make a call, and, as I said, the year-over-year numbers still look good (if soft). Plus, it seems clear that the problem here is not wholly the arcane movements of Substack’s recommendations algorithm and the volatile news and media environment: In addition to a (potential) “growth” problem I have a (potential) “conversion” problem.

Conversion

Substack suggests that that conversion rate in the 5-10 percent range is average; most Substackers I have talked to about this say 7 or 8 percent is more realistic. (“Conversion rate” here refers to the portion of free readers who become paid subscribers.) Read Max clocks in at a 5.6 percent conversion rate, which is very low for a twice-weekly paywalled newsletter.

I suspect this relatively low conversion rate is, at least in part, built in to the structure of the newsletter. In some ways Read Max is actually two newsletters in one: One, a free weekly essay about tech and digital culture and, sometimes, Stomp Clap Hey music; and, two, a paywalled weekly newsletter featuring book and movie recommendations. While there’s obviously significant audience overlap between those two newsletters (to the tune of 3,400 paid subscribers), it’s also very easy to imagine a reader who enjoys the free tech criticism and has no real interest in the book recommendations.

Nevertheless, there a number of ways I could still push my conversion rate up that figure, to varying degrees of annoyance and ickiness: I could start paywalling some (or all) of the weekly columns, forcing the hypothetical essay-only reader to pony up--but my guess is that this would have a significant negative impact on my overall growth, which relies on widely shared free-to-read newsletters as marketing and promotion. On a more immediate level I could increase the number of touts and subscription links I put in each newsletter; increase the shrillness and anxiety of the tone in those touts; start emailing free subscribers directly begging them to pay; etc. (And, indeed, as annoying as this is, I think I owe it to my business to be a little bit more direct and aggressive about converting free readers.)

But I would like to think there are other ways to increase my conversion rate (and my growth rate as well) that feel a little more in keeping with the newsletter’s voice and my personality.

The future

One of those things, I think, is calculated expansion. More content is not always a good thing, but additional editorial, if done well, can make the subscription more valuable to tempted readers, as well as expanding our total possible audience. Right now I’m working on three new projects that will become part of the overall Read Max subscription package and will hopefully start appearing on this feed in the next few months:

1. Starting next Wednesday, 10/22, at 2 pm. I’m going to do a biweekly Substack live with John Ganz of

   Unpopular Front
   . The live (which we’ll do every other Wednesday) will be available to anyone on Substack, while recordings will be available (as video and podcast) only to subscribers.

2. I’m developing a (non-news) podcast that will appear with more consistency and professionalism than the previous Read Max Audio Product. More on this soon, but we’re hopefully debuting it in December.

3. We’re going to add a new, additional recommendations newsletter, the scope, timing, and authorship of which is still being worked out.

If any of that sounds interesting--or if you’re already interested in Read Max--please stay tuned. And if you’re not already a paid subscriber, click the button below: