I've Got Plenty To Be Thankful For

State-of-the-Blog on Our 4th Substackiversary (Plus: an AI Reassurance)

I always intended to write those cute annual “state of the blog” posts. They’re kinda inside-baseball to many readers, but I think sharing information is really valuable to other writers, especially other writers on Substack. It’s like an office team that shares salary information before negotiating raises with management: it’s a little uncomfortable for everyone, but it also strengthens everyone during the actual negotiation.

Somehow, though, I never got around to actually writing a “state of the blog”…until now! This Thanksgiving weekend is De Civ’s fourth anniversary on Substack, and, since we passed a subscription milestone yesterday, it’s as good a time as any to pop open the hood and show you, the readers, what I see when I wake up to De Civitate every morning.

The Wordpress Era

De Civitate launched on 30 January 2012 on Wordpress. I was fresh out of college, not yet engaged to my now-wife. My goal, as I now remember it, was twofold:

1. I had a lot of commentary bursting out of me, and I wanted to have an outlet for it other than Facebook. Even in 2012, we all knew Facebook was bad. I wrote things to be read, and I wanted it read by more than a handful of friends. I also wanted to stop poisoning my apolitical friends’ feeds with my political nonsense.

2. I wanted my new blog to earn $1,200 over four years. I wanted this for personal validation, because I believed a writer is not a writer if he isn’t being paid for his words. I had just purchased an $1,200 gaming PC, and I assumed I would want to replace it in a few years, and I thought this was a realistic revenue target using Google Ad Services and some tasteful banner placements. Of course, I was young and rich. I earned $54,000/year¹ and had no dependents, so I was planning to buy the new computer in four years regardless of how my blog performed.

My first post was a statement of principles. It took itself much too seriously,² but I don’t hate rereading it, either. I published 311 articles over the next decade, many of them quite short, for a total of 485,169 words—approximately the same length as David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. The vast majority of my audience was still Facebook friends. A few found their way to De Civ organically, but there was no way to know how many. (Perhaps two dozen?) Of course, a big thanks to the O.G. De Civvers who’ve followed me since Wordpress!

Wordpress was a hacker’s paradise, but, over time, it became an obstacle to writing. It had no built-in comments system, and adding a comment system (without giving free rein to spambots) turned out to be a part-time job I didn’t have time to do. Offloading to Disqus worked sort of okay for a little while, then a software update broke it completely, and we spent the last year on Wordpress with no functioning comment system. This was miserable. Even when I can’t find the time to respond to every comment, I read all of them, and treasure the fact that someone read something I wrote and took the time to reply to it. Now I had no comments at all.

Meanwhile, my customizations to the Wordpress template started to show their age, Wordpress couldn’t really handle subscriptions or an email list, and I didn’t have time to deal with any of it. Google ad revenue remained stubbornly at $0. Technically, I earned $50.56 over a decade, largely on the strength of my two viral articles, but Google raised its payout threshold every time I got close to it, so I never saw a dime. When Wordpress’s default editor got dramatically worse, forcing me to add a new “block” to a page every time I wanted to add a paragraph (and forget about captioned images), it pushed me over the edge. I will always love Wordpress (it’s free and open source!), but I couldn’t live with it anymore.

Then I found out that Substack had a footnote tool,³ and my fate was sealed.

The Substack Era

On December 1, 2021, I announced that De Civitate had moved to Substack. I set my sights downward this time. Instead of $1,200 in four years, I aimed for $1,200 in ten years... but I still didn’t really expect to get there. I was just going to use my goal as a measuring stick in Playing PredictIt. Ten years blogging had taught me to expect neither audience nor money.

So what a pleasant surprise this has actually been:

We hit 400 total subscribers on Thanksgiving morning, a milestone by any measure!

We’ve had some terrific comment threads here, beyond the dreams of my Wordpress. “Take-ing on the New Administration,” from this spring, wins the prize, with 58 comments, but I’ve really enjoyed getting to know the regulars across many posts. This alone made the move worthwhile.

Fueled by the knowledge that several people are actually reading what I’m writing (and some of them are even paying me for it!), I’ve been writing a whole lot more, too!

I’ve posted 168 new articles to De Civ in the last four years, and I have not spared the keyboard: they added up to 982,219 words. That is roughly the same length as all seven Harry Potter books combined. (Yes, even Order of the Phoenix.) It’s also twice as many words as I wrote on Wordpress… and I wrote ‘em in less than half the time!

It was easy to find the motivation to type so much, because I reached my original financial goal on the second day of this Substack:

This is an incredible chart.⁴ It ticked over $2k this weekend,⁵ which is what got me to take a close look at it for the first time in months.⁶

Every time I see that “Gross annualized revenue” number go up, I feel an immediate, urgent need to drop whatever I’m doing and write something for the good people of the paylist. My writing output has quadrupled since the move to Substack, even as my actual free time has shrunk an awful lot. I think that’s entirely thanks to the good people of the paylist, and the obligation I feel toward each of them. Give them some love when you get the chance.

Of course, it’s been a long time since I was young and rich. None of this money has gone to my gaming rig.⁷ In fact, my rig is the same machine I bought way back in 2011 (although it has ship-of-Theseused its way into continuing value). Instead of buying coolers and mobos, De Civ’s Substack revenues mostly go to groceries and parochial school tuition, though it also helps a lot with my family’s annual trip to our favorite Minnesota cabin resort. We are all very grateful for that.

The other reason this chart is incredible is because it shows the loyalty and generosity of the De Civitate readership. Most Substacks that “go paid” expect to “convert” 2-4% of their subscribers to the paylist. This is a well-known figure in wide circulation, and I have frequently confirmed it by anecdote. Yet fully 10% of De Civitate’s readers pay for it?! I’ve never heard of this, except in tiny blogs read only by the writer’s family. You are a nifty bunch of people. You are, in fact, so nifty that your niftiness is statistically anomalous.

What Does the Future Hold?

Will I still be here in ten years? I hope so. The rise of LLMs is already sandblasting this field. People at the New York Times and whatnot are still honestly asking one another, “In a few years, are people going to be willing to read articles written by an LLM?” but, gurl, there’s a healthy number of Substacks much larger than mine that are already written largely or entirely by AI. I’m not going to do that. If the only way to keep my blog from falling into irrelevance and extinction is handing the keys to ChatGPT, guess I’ll die.

I’m not against LLMs in general. I use them often. LLMs translate documents for me, both for publication at De Civ and casually. They scan documentation for me. They solve trivial to moderate code problems for me… which, yes, does make me nervous about my day job as a programmer! LLMs perform complicated web searches for me (better than Google!), and an LLM recommended the last roast beef cut I purchased (to accolades from my tongue). Their environmental impact is wildly exaggerated. For De Civ, I sometimes use LLMs for proofreading⁸ and for image generation (always with credit). Also, because LLMs are, fundamentally, conventional-wisdom generators, sometimes I run ideas by an LLM to find out what the conventional wisdom would say about them. (LLM necessary because Ezra Klein no longer accepts my calls.)

But the actual thinking and writing? If I outsource that to an LLM, what am I doing here? What would be the point of me? If I ever go there, cut out the middleman! Unsub from De Civ, put that money toward a GPT+ subscription, feed it my entire corpus, and instruct it to write a post in my voice once every twelve hours for the rest of your life. Fortunately, my voice is so far distinctive enough (and obscure enough) that the robots’ attempts at replicating it are boring and shopworn.⁹ If I ever do use an LLM to generate text in a post, I’ll mark it clearly… and I’d better have a good reason for it!

So, will De Civ survive what is coming? Maybe, maybe not. But, as Captain Picard once said:

Assuming no AI singularity/extinction event, though, I’ll probably still be here. I’m pessimistic about the future of the United States, but, even if things go very fast and the country falls apart by 2035, the Internet will almost certainly survive. So, therefore, will this blog. It will probably always be a part-time endeavor, even if it gets large enough to replace my day job,¹⁰ because I have noticed lately that part-time opinion writers who transition to full-timers tend to undergo audience capture and completely lose their minds. Many such cases.

I admit that I’ve been a little bit bothered by Substack’s direction over the past few years. They’ve really been re-gearing toward being another social media company, rather than supporting my newsletter. They’ve also cut a lot of human support. (When I started out, you could just file a bug report and get a response in a few days! Impossible now.) However, the people jumping ship for Beehiiv and whatnot are invariably the most annoying people alive, and the new services don’t seem to be actually better than Substack at anything, so I don’t see a switch anywhere on the horizon. My biggest long-term worry is that Substack could collapse or become censorious, like so many other web hosting businesses. However, if that day ever comes, I’ve got copies of all my posts (and all your email addresses) and can easily migrate back to Wordpress. I also wonder whether the current Substack pricing model is sustainable. It may be that, in a few years, we’ll all be trying to find other Substack writers to “bundle up” with (in order to deliver lower subscription costs to readers), and I’m not sure I’m up to that brave new world, should it ever come.

All in all, though, I am very happy with how things are going here, far happier than I expected to be four years ago, and so I intend to continue more or less as I have been: some politics, some Catholicism, some pro-liferism,¹¹ some miscellaneous other stuff, and, when a legal case catches me in just the right way (happens about once a year), a pathological fixation on it to the exclusion of all else.

I hope you’re happy with the state of this blogletter (I’d like to hear about it if you’re not!), but I’m having a blast, and a critical mass of you seem to be having a great time, too. Party on!

De Civ Next Voyage: My next—hopefully last :)—article on amending the Constitution to fix the Senate is already written and queued for next week. I'm not counting this navel-gazing post toward my word count quota!

1. That’s $76,000/year in today’s dollars, and beat the crap out of what my many ex-seminarian friends were finding in the post-Recession wasteland.

2. There’s a lot of cringe in early De Civ, at least for me.

3. For an example of the maddening lengths I went to for footnotes on Wordpress, see the footnotes to “Civil Marriage is Dead (and It Deserved to Die).” Every one of those footnotes was lovingly—and slowly—hand-coded to pair with hand-inserted anchor tags. It sucked, often broke, and so a lot of things that appear today in De Civ footnotes would either appear in lengthy parentheticals (a large portion of the opening of “And The War Came” should have been a footnote) or I just deleted them because there was nowhere to put them. Substack, your footnote tool is golden.

4. I knew that Worthy Reads drove subscriptions, because you notice these things when they happen, but I didn’t realize how much certain editions drove subscriptions until I sat down with this chart tonight. I wonder why? “Small Apocalypses” was good, but so was “Wake Up and Smell the Ashes,” which moved bupkis. These are the little mysteries I ponder sometimes, until I remember I don’t understand anything about marketing and just go back to writing whatever I want—which seems to be working!

5. Jake, I don’t think we’ve ever spoken, and I’m not tagging you because I sense you value your privacy. However, if you’re wondering why you just got a free three month subscription extension for no reason, this is the reason. Thanks for pushing the blog over the top!

6. Three caveats on the annual revenue estimate:

• Substack counts free trials, gift subscriptions, and “comps” as paid subscriptions and (at least sometimes) seems to assume future revenue from those subscriptions. This is sometimes true, but often isn’t. The annual revenue is thus more of a guess, and a fairly generous one. In reality, I expect De Civ to clear about $1800 over the next twelve months. That’s still marvelous by any measure.

• Take note, aspiring Substackers: the fees do sting! Substack takes 10%, and Stripe (the mandatory payments processor) takes an additional 5-10%. This varies because Stripe takes a flat $0.30 per transaction rather than per subscription. Thus, with an annual subscriber, you lose $0.30 per year, but, with a monthly subscriber, you lose $3.60 per year. That is before Stripe’s additional 2.9% fee. I’m thinking about making the annual subscription less expensive relative to the monthly subscription to account for this. But don’t worry, subscribers: according to Substack’s pricing policy, if De Civitate’s prices rise, you get “grandfathered in” at the lower rate and won’t have to pay the price hike. If they fall, though, you automatically get the new, better price.

• This is all taxed as ordinary income by the U.S. federal government, and Stripe does not do withholding by default. So, if you join Substack, figure out what state and federal tax brackets you’re in, then set aside that much of your Substack revenue to pay for it!

When all’s said and done, I expect that incredible $2,000 figure to net out to about $1,200 in my bank account. Since that’s still ten times my original goal and infinity times what I saw on Wordpress, I am nevertheless incredibly happy about this.

7. YET.

8. They do an okay job catching spelling errors and typos. Their editorial recommendations are consistently terrible: flatten the voice, soften the claim, equivocate harder. LLMs are conventional-wisdom machines, and anything that smacking of individuality gives them hives, no matter how they glaze you on the way to beating it all out of you.

9. I admit that this line, generated by the LLM, threw me:

When I was a boy they asked us to explain, in a couple of paragraphs, why we wanted to be confirmed. In a fit of adolescent cleverness I wrote that it was good to belong to a Church that “had all the answers and had already done the thinking for you.”

This runs rather close to a half-remembered incident from my actual childhood, and now I’m trying to remember whether I ever wrote about it online, or what the exact details were. I was a very smug middle schooler.

10. The “magic number” for this is around 4,000 subscriptions. (If I quit my day job, I not only have to replace salary, but family medical insurance, retirement benefits, and tuition remission benefits, so my “magic number” is roughly double my actual salary.) It is therefore exceedingly unlikely that this ever will even arise as a question.

11. There’s been a shortage of pro-liferism this year, which needs correcting.