Why Cord Cutter Weekly is (also) on Substack
For nearly seven years, Cord Cutter Weekly has helped thousands of people navigate the post-cable world, with money-saving advice on streaming and over-the-air TV. Now, I’m bringing it to Substack—sort of.
I’m also going to charge money for it—sort of.
The short explanation for readers
If you’re already a Cord Cutter Weekly subscriber and somehow found your way here, there’s no need to do anything. You’ll continue to get the full newsletter every Friday for free.
If you’re not a Cord Cutter Weekly subscriber, you can also sign up for free on my website. You’ll get the same newsletter that more than 30,000 readers do every Friday, with no ads, at no charge.
Alternatively, you can sign up for the Substack edition and get excerpts from the newsletter along with the occasional full issue. To unlock every new issue inside of Substack, you’ll be able to subscribe for $5 per month or $50 per year. If you prefer reading all your Substack newsletters in one place—for instance, via the mobile app or Notes feature—or just want to support my work, this is the option for you.
The long, inside baseball explanation for newsletter nerds
As I’ve written before, I’m proud to have built a self-hosted publication that doesn’t depend on VC-backed companies for survival. While Substack provides excellent tools for writers, it also does some things I don’t love. For instance:
The obnoxious subscription pop-ups that prevent you from reading a newsletter until you either dismiss them or sign up.
The inability to avoid tracking who opens and clicks on your newsletters.
The Substack branding that creeps into various places, reminding you that you’re reading a Substack rather than an independent publication.
Substack slings around a lot of rhetoric about being on the side of writers, but I’ve been covering tech companies long enough to know that you can’t trust them to protect any interests other than their own. I’ll continue to build and promote my self-hosted newsletters for that reason.
Even so, I’ve grown a bit jealous of Substack’s network effects, which accrue only to writers who build their publications on Substack. Not being able to easily recommend—and be recommended by—other writers whose work I admire is a bummer, especially as the company branches out into full-blown social networking with Notes.
Inspired by Ernie Smith’s Lesser Tedium experiment, I’m going to try having it both ways. Cord Cutter Weekly will be available here for those who want it in exchange for a small subscription fee, but I won’t hide the fact that it’s also available for free on my website.
Does this violate Substack’s rules? I don’t think so. Substack’s publisher agreement only forbids writers from using their newsletter to solicit payments outside of Substack. Encouraging people to sign up for a free newsletter on another platform seems to be in bounds. (To be safe, though, the Substack edition won’t have any links to my “buy me a coffee” page or to the paid edition of Advisorator, my other newsletter.)
We’ll see how it goes, but I’ve already found that importing Cord Cutter Weekly posts into Substack is a simple copy-and-paste job, so republishing here shouldn’t be a time-consuming affair. (Whatever you think of Substack as a company, their publishing tools are slick.)
Thanks for hearing me out, and consider subscribing to Cord Cutter Weekly on my website or the incredibly frictionless sign-up box below: