Terry, I love your work. I don't care who you talk to or which crowd they belong to. We are at the point where left or right, liberal or conservative, democrat or republican no longer has any meaning. They are either authoritarian/dictatorial or they're not. All I want is common sense, decent sense and peace.
I appreciate you Terry. I have saved every one of your articles in a file, and told my son and my grandson, they must read every one of them when I am gone. In my mind you are incredibly brave when you step across the "line" and get to the nitty gritty, with no sugar coating.
I don't always agree with Jordan Peterson, and consider him quite brash, but, damn, he nails it too, more often than not. I don't always agree with you either.
How we can all unite in these times seems an impossible task, but in the end I have faith it will happen. Because of people like you....and Jordan Peterson.
Hope you have a wonderful Christmas, and please! Never stop writing.
Terry, I always appreciate reading your journalism however listening to your back and forth on Peterson’s channel was eye opening. You really should consider a podcast/youtube channel of your own! I could imagine your Rolodex would bring a lot of interesting people for you to introduce to your readers.
Merry Christmas and I’m looking forward to more of your efforts in 2025.
Reading these notes tells me I am far from being alone in the value I put on your work Terry. Despite loving to learn the stories that have led us to the present, I still have so very much to learn. Terry your work opens doors for the rest of us to see details our MSM, ignore. What I like most is that your information relieves the painful incongruence I feel when faced with the glaring contradictions our governments, national and global, and their prepaid voice boxes spout! Your details illuminate the shadows and lies. Thank you, and merry Christmas with your dear ones!
Looking forward to this conversation. Thank you for all your tenacity over the last year, Terry. Wishing you a merry Christmas and many blessings for 2025.
Did I see you at lunch at the Sylvia this past Thursday? If it was you I’m kicking myself for not stopping to say hello and commend you on your courage and insight and say Merry Christmas and all that in person, if it wasn’t you and just some other moustached grey haired handsome fella, maybe another time. But cheers anyway! Take your moments when you find them.
This is off topic Terry. I subscribe to you and Diane Francis. But like many on here I tap out on subscriptions. I can’t blame anyone for choosing professional journalists like you or her over a start up guy like me. (1.1k subscribers). The issue is that the hard subscriptions model makes it hard for upstarts to get traction, certainly beyond the free subscriptions (I’m at 25% paid). You would have more influence with SS than someone like me. I think they need to offer bundling offers, but ultimately properly index all content and allow people to pay for single reads. Substack could be a wonderful vehicle for aspiring writers to grow but the subscriber model works well for writers like you or Diane but hurts the little guy. If you would read the mother of all idea docs below I’d appreciate it. I teach social media marketing and ecomm at uni (I did until I was suspended/effectively fired for calling Hamas Nazis. Welcome to the U of Guelph)
A MARKETING LETTER TO SUBSTACK. - TAKE TWO
Please comment, tell me I am full of shit, and tell me what you agree with or hate, but for the love of all that is holy, pass on your message. This is not about me. I am a minnow on here.
And thank you to the lady who said, "Make points and number them! "
The Main Points.
__________________
1. Those subscription expenses add up. Everyone says just $5 a month, but first, if you’re Canadian, that’s $7, and some people want $11, so that’s about CAD 15. Those 5 dollars add up, and we get tapped out. The tendency is to subscribe to the big names. The big names have access to world leaders, write well, and have staff. I have Toby and Malibu. See below. People do not have an infinite capacity for “it’s only a cup of coffee a day” subscriptions; they add up.
2. It’s 2024. People are leaving mainstream digital media because they don’t want to be locked in, so does SS offer subscriptions, too?
Strangely enough, because people don’t even want to subscribe to MSM’s digital subscription offerings, why has SS gone with this? The consumer is the consumer. Brand loyalty is declining overall, and a pure subscriber model shows a lack of connection to the realities of the marketplace.
3. Sometimes, people don’t want a relationship; they want a hookup. Sometimes, we just want to read one essay or do something online. A pure subscription model asks consumers for loyalty they don’t want to give.
4. Promote the brand Substack. Put them on TikTok. Lack of familiarity breeds suspicion. The Rule of 7 asserts that a potential customer should encounter a brand's marketing messages at least seven times before making a purchase decision. If they see Freedom to Offend or Paul Finlayson in this strange Substack, they delete me; they think I am part of some phishing team from New Delhi.
5. Make it more phone friendly. It goes to refusing to accept that most people read on their phones, not their laptops. The sign-on is frustrating and opaque; you must check your email to get on it. Who does that? If I can purchase a pack of batteries on Amazon in three clicks with one hand, why can’t someone who has never used Substack do the same?
6. Promotion tools. Make it easier to prompt our work on all social media and integrate with a company that will turn essays into comic books. )I don’t know. Getting the brand out is hard if you don’t have many followers and don’t want to spend money on paid social media (waste). Integrate with our Spotify. I just listened to a beautiful song that captured my piece's tone.
7. Substack! Talk more to your writers to capture their ideas for promotion. Where are the surveys from Substack for readers and writers? There are brilliant people here, random sparks of wisdom, and much energy and strength. It is so freaking authentic; how many of us here write for the income?
8. Why is the indexing on Substack so poorly done? This means that so much Substack material is being lost in the digital ether because the search engines are not supplied with proper data. Substack doesn’t even have a proper internal search; the only up-to-date technical part is their chatbot, which is quite good. Discovery is only as good as the indexing.
9. Data, data, data, metrics—come on, Substack. Is trying to reach 2000 free subscribers and then switching to paid subscribers a good idea? What about sponsors? Why can’t Substack facilitate this? I see no value in a free subscriber who never reads my work. I need to know if they get to the end.
10. Allow single reads. Why can’t the paywalled essays (I consider my Substack a private editorial e-magazine, not a newsletter.) be available as single reading units, not only as part of a subscription? Why can’t Substack sell bundles of subscriptions, but more importantly, bundles of individual reads on singular essays, where you pay 40 reads per month, for example? Each credit could break down a paywall. I would love that. Substack would have to split the income among the individual writers, but they should be able to handle that. This would free up readers who don’t want to be tied down by the subscription model, and it would likely give more revenue to the writers who are frustrated at the difficulty of building a paying subscriber base.
11. Micro-payments - credit card companies lose money on payments less than $10. I have often told Substack that they should consider micropayments to create either an internal currency or to allow pure micropayments using some blockchain technology. If we look at Twitch (the social app that used to be only focused on gamers but has broadened), it uses a tipping system, but the tips can be very small. They encourage connections between writer and reader. So, if writers wanted, they could use this to supplement their paid subscriber base or post everything free and simply rely on small
13. Advertising. The problem with advertising on social media is a cart and horse issue. Social media sells our attention. Would advertising corrupt the Substack? Is there space for smart, consumer-driven, intelligent product design between TikTok and Substack?
14. Competition is coming, Substack. Being backward is not authentic. It’s stupid. If they don’t address the noted issues, Substack may find a competitor who can provide a similar, more user-friendly product to readers and new writers and end up eating SS’s lunch. I’m surprised that Meta or TikTok hasn’t put something out there.
15. I am a minnow. Please restack and throw your ideas in the chatbot on here and tell it to send them to the human marketing department.
16. As a group, we can be strong and create change. I am not looking for credit for ideas—I don’t think anyone is—but only readers and writers working together can convince Substack to modernise. I teach e-commerce, relationship marketing, and social media marketing at university. I’m not saying that makes me right, but I believe that my overall assessment is pretty accurate.
17. Work together—so many want to cross-post, I’m unsure why. I don’t get people. I can understand that people do not work against themselves, but some people have zero-sum thinking; they think pushing someone down pushes them down. Is that schadenfreude?
It’s not true. We can exposure by working together and sharing each other's work. There is a wonderful lady called Rivka on here. She writes beautifully; she sees into the soul of society, and if she were a painter, she would use the smallest brush and create such meaningful creations of great beauty. She reposts me; I repost her.
18. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. But I am perplexed sometimes. I give people shoutouts on notes! I am not a professor; I am a lecturer. I have been suspended for over a year because I called Hamas Nazis, and I have been defamed, banned, banished, shunned, and a mob has risen against me. But I know a couple of others who have gone through similar experiences on here or Twitter, and I would have thought they would be willing to give me a shout-out, but they don’t. They are afraid I will take the focus away from them. What goes around comes around. Here’s the link. Oh, by the way, Substack needs to incorporate a link shortener.
20. Keep writing. Let’s start a revolution. Like most of you, I will keep writing forever. Writing distils our thinking, and distillates are not just a summary; they are a different product—sweeter, better, full of the nuances and richness of a thousand thoughts.
21. Read-throughs. Substack should incorporate an AI reader ("use AI" is what you say when you have no idea how to do something) and set up a system so that if you start reading on Substack A, which you subscribe to, it automatically reads the texts sequentially so that people in their cars don’t crash, swear and have to apologise to their mothers.
Let me know. If it matters, I am quite small here. I have about 1.1K subscribers, with about 30% paid. It’s coffee money, not a job, and that’s okay.
Oh, yeah, subscribe to me. I write a satire called “News of the World. " It's not true, but it is pretty close. If you aren’t Canadian, you might not get the jokes. He mostly mocks Trudeau. If you want to cross-post some satire or anything, let me know.
—————
I have a 50% off subscription special for everyone. It's Black Friday. How creative. Haha. It was CAD 2.50, which is about USD 0.12. Okay, that’s an exaggeration.
If anything offended you here, look at the title for my Substack, Freedom to Offend. You should have seen it coming. But I couldn’t afford the domain. http://www.freedomtooffend.com, so I dropped an o to freedomtoffend.com
I saw that and wrote that even if the want to stop it half way through, I'll push through a pro-rated refund. I don't have a lot of annual subscriptions, but I would think that if you quit, you should refund people. For me, the money is money, so it's easier for me to say. But I think if they supplemented the subscription with single reads and tipping it would help the new guys and would not harm the big names. Bt I don't get the idea, Substack marketing are too interested in my opinion haha.
Ironically, the insufferable one provided Terry a platform that would never have appeared on Canadian MSM. Mr. Glavin was equally effective in conversation as with the written word. Perhaps, more so. Selective podcasting could be a valuable corollary to his articles. His succinct summation of the chronology of Chinese influence was a revelation.
Terry, I love your work. I don't care who you talk to or which crowd they belong to. We are at the point where left or right, liberal or conservative, democrat or republican no longer has any meaning. They are either authoritarian/dictatorial or they're not. All I want is common sense, decent sense and peace.
Me too.
Forgot which article you wrote. But I believe something which you grapple with is paid vs free articles.
As a paying subscriber, I don't care. I trust your judgment and support your decision. What I care is for you to continue your fearless reporting.
Thank you Terry! Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and a safe and healthy new year.
Finished the podcast. I do love Peterson and find him rambly at times but felt you two just hit the tip of the iceberg.
Hopefully many more podcasts to come!
I appreciate you Terry. I have saved every one of your articles in a file, and told my son and my grandson, they must read every one of them when I am gone. In my mind you are incredibly brave when you step across the "line" and get to the nitty gritty, with no sugar coating.
I don't always agree with Jordan Peterson, and consider him quite brash, but, damn, he nails it too, more often than not. I don't always agree with you either.
How we can all unite in these times seems an impossible task, but in the end I have faith it will happen. Because of people like you....and Jordan Peterson.
Hope you have a wonderful Christmas, and please! Never stop writing.
Gosh. What a lovely note.
Thank you so much for this. Cheers me right up.
Have a happy and blessed Christmas.
t
Terry, I always appreciate reading your journalism however listening to your back and forth on Peterson’s channel was eye opening. You really should consider a podcast/youtube channel of your own! I could imagine your Rolodex would bring a lot of interesting people for you to introduce to your readers.
Merry Christmas and I’m looking forward to more of your efforts in 2025.
Reading these notes tells me I am far from being alone in the value I put on your work Terry. Despite loving to learn the stories that have led us to the present, I still have so very much to learn. Terry your work opens doors for the rest of us to see details our MSM, ignore. What I like most is that your information relieves the painful incongruence I feel when faced with the glaring contradictions our governments, national and global, and their prepaid voice boxes spout! Your details illuminate the shadows and lies. Thank you, and merry Christmas with your dear ones!
Looking forward to this conversation. Thank you for all your tenacity over the last year, Terry. Wishing you a merry Christmas and many blessings for 2025.
Happy Christmas, and Hanukkah, and Yalda.
Wow! That conversation connected more dots for me than anything Ive seen or read in a few years. Well done.
We know you are a gifted writer but you're fast on your feet and verbally articulate as well.
This should be required listening.
Did I see you at lunch at the Sylvia this past Thursday? If it was you I’m kicking myself for not stopping to say hello and commend you on your courage and insight and say Merry Christmas and all that in person, if it wasn’t you and just some other moustached grey haired handsome fella, maybe another time. But cheers anyway! Take your moments when you find them.
Ha! No, some other fella.
Happy Christmas to you!
Loved your conversation with Jordan Peterson, and thank you for your great work! Merry Christmas to you and yours.
This is off topic Terry. I subscribe to you and Diane Francis. But like many on here I tap out on subscriptions. I can’t blame anyone for choosing professional journalists like you or her over a start up guy like me. (1.1k subscribers). The issue is that the hard subscriptions model makes it hard for upstarts to get traction, certainly beyond the free subscriptions (I’m at 25% paid). You would have more influence with SS than someone like me. I think they need to offer bundling offers, but ultimately properly index all content and allow people to pay for single reads. Substack could be a wonderful vehicle for aspiring writers to grow but the subscriber model works well for writers like you or Diane but hurts the little guy. If you would read the mother of all idea docs below I’d appreciate it. I teach social media marketing and ecomm at uni (I did until I was suspended/effectively fired for calling Hamas Nazis. Welcome to the U of Guelph)
A MARKETING LETTER TO SUBSTACK. - TAKE TWO
Please comment, tell me I am full of shit, and tell me what you agree with or hate, but for the love of all that is holy, pass on your message. This is not about me. I am a minnow on here.
And thank you to the lady who said, "Make points and number them! "
The Main Points.
__________________
1. Those subscription expenses add up. Everyone says just $5 a month, but first, if you’re Canadian, that’s $7, and some people want $11, so that’s about CAD 15. Those 5 dollars add up, and we get tapped out. The tendency is to subscribe to the big names. The big names have access to world leaders, write well, and have staff. I have Toby and Malibu. See below. People do not have an infinite capacity for “it’s only a cup of coffee a day” subscriptions; they add up.
2. It’s 2024. People are leaving mainstream digital media because they don’t want to be locked in, so does SS offer subscriptions, too?
Strangely enough, because people don’t even want to subscribe to MSM’s digital subscription offerings, why has SS gone with this? The consumer is the consumer. Brand loyalty is declining overall, and a pure subscriber model shows a lack of connection to the realities of the marketplace.
3. Sometimes, people don’t want a relationship; they want a hookup. Sometimes, we just want to read one essay or do something online. A pure subscription model asks consumers for loyalty they don’t want to give.
4. Promote the brand Substack. Put them on TikTok. Lack of familiarity breeds suspicion. The Rule of 7 asserts that a potential customer should encounter a brand's marketing messages at least seven times before making a purchase decision. If they see Freedom to Offend or Paul Finlayson in this strange Substack, they delete me; they think I am part of some phishing team from New Delhi.
5. Make it more phone friendly. It goes to refusing to accept that most people read on their phones, not their laptops. The sign-on is frustrating and opaque; you must check your email to get on it. Who does that? If I can purchase a pack of batteries on Amazon in three clicks with one hand, why can’t someone who has never used Substack do the same?
6. Promotion tools. Make it easier to prompt our work on all social media and integrate with a company that will turn essays into comic books. )I don’t know. Getting the brand out is hard if you don’t have many followers and don’t want to spend money on paid social media (waste). Integrate with our Spotify. I just listened to a beautiful song that captured my piece's tone.
7. Substack! Talk more to your writers to capture their ideas for promotion. Where are the surveys from Substack for readers and writers? There are brilliant people here, random sparks of wisdom, and much energy and strength. It is so freaking authentic; how many of us here write for the income?
8. Why is the indexing on Substack so poorly done? This means that so much Substack material is being lost in the digital ether because the search engines are not supplied with proper data. Substack doesn’t even have a proper internal search; the only up-to-date technical part is their chatbot, which is quite good. Discovery is only as good as the indexing.
9. Data, data, data, metrics—come on, Substack. Is trying to reach 2000 free subscribers and then switching to paid subscribers a good idea? What about sponsors? Why can’t Substack facilitate this? I see no value in a free subscriber who never reads my work. I need to know if they get to the end.
10. Allow single reads. Why can’t the paywalled essays (I consider my Substack a private editorial e-magazine, not a newsletter.) be available as single reading units, not only as part of a subscription? Why can’t Substack sell bundles of subscriptions, but more importantly, bundles of individual reads on singular essays, where you pay 40 reads per month, for example? Each credit could break down a paywall. I would love that. Substack would have to split the income among the individual writers, but they should be able to handle that. This would free up readers who don’t want to be tied down by the subscription model, and it would likely give more revenue to the writers who are frustrated at the difficulty of building a paying subscriber base.
11. Micro-payments - credit card companies lose money on payments less than $10. I have often told Substack that they should consider micropayments to create either an internal currency or to allow pure micropayments using some blockchain technology. If we look at Twitch (the social app that used to be only focused on gamers but has broadened), it uses a tipping system, but the tips can be very small. They encourage connections between writer and reader. So, if writers wanted, they could use this to supplement their paid subscriber base or post everything free and simply rely on small
13. Advertising. The problem with advertising on social media is a cart and horse issue. Social media sells our attention. Would advertising corrupt the Substack? Is there space for smart, consumer-driven, intelligent product design between TikTok and Substack?
14. Competition is coming, Substack. Being backward is not authentic. It’s stupid. If they don’t address the noted issues, Substack may find a competitor who can provide a similar, more user-friendly product to readers and new writers and end up eating SS’s lunch. I’m surprised that Meta or TikTok hasn’t put something out there.
15. I am a minnow. Please restack and throw your ideas in the chatbot on here and tell it to send them to the human marketing department.
16. As a group, we can be strong and create change. I am not looking for credit for ideas—I don’t think anyone is—but only readers and writers working together can convince Substack to modernise. I teach e-commerce, relationship marketing, and social media marketing at university. I’m not saying that makes me right, but I believe that my overall assessment is pretty accurate.
17. Work together—so many want to cross-post, I’m unsure why. I don’t get people. I can understand that people do not work against themselves, but some people have zero-sum thinking; they think pushing someone down pushes them down. Is that schadenfreude?
It’s not true. We can exposure by working together and sharing each other's work. There is a wonderful lady called Rivka on here. She writes beautifully; she sees into the soul of society, and if she were a painter, she would use the smallest brush and create such meaningful creations of great beauty. She reposts me; I repost her.
18. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. But I am perplexed sometimes. I give people shoutouts on notes! I am not a professor; I am a lecturer. I have been suspended for over a year because I called Hamas Nazis, and I have been defamed, banned, banished, shunned, and a mob has risen against me. But I know a couple of others who have gone through similar experiences on here or Twitter, and I would have thought they would be willing to give me a shout-out, but they don’t. They are afraid I will take the focus away from them. What goes around comes around. Here’s the link. Oh, by the way, Substack needs to incorporate a link shortener.
19. Here is a link to the story. I’m glad I own that one suit.https://nationalpost.com/opinion/teacher-fights-back-suspended-denouncing-hamas (link to my story in press)
20. Keep writing. Let’s start a revolution. Like most of you, I will keep writing forever. Writing distils our thinking, and distillates are not just a summary; they are a different product—sweeter, better, full of the nuances and richness of a thousand thoughts.
21. Read-throughs. Substack should incorporate an AI reader ("use AI" is what you say when you have no idea how to do something) and set up a system so that if you start reading on Substack A, which you subscribe to, it automatically reads the texts sequentially so that people in their cars don’t crash, swear and have to apologise to their mothers.
Let me know. If it matters, I am quite small here. I have about 1.1K subscribers, with about 30% paid. It’s coffee money, not a job, and that’s okay.
Oh, yeah, subscribe to me. I write a satire called “News of the World. " It's not true, but it is pretty close. If you aren’t Canadian, you might not get the jokes. He mostly mocks Trudeau. If you want to cross-post some satire or anything, let me know.
—————
I have a 50% off subscription special for everyone. It's Black Friday. How creative. Haha. It was CAD 2.50, which is about USD 0.12. Okay, that’s an exaggeration.
If anything offended you here, look at the title for my Substack, Freedom to Offend. You should have seen it coming. But I couldn’t afford the domain. http://www.freedomtooffend.com, so I dropped an o to freedomtoffend.com
Some good ideas here. I follow a number of Substacks. Quality and amount of writing varies greatly.
Substack also offers no refunds on an annual subscription if the writer quits (happened to me). I now warn others away from the annual option,
I saw that and wrote that even if the want to stop it half way through, I'll push through a pro-rated refund. I don't have a lot of annual subscriptions, but I would think that if you quit, you should refund people. For me, the money is money, so it's easier for me to say. But I think if they supplemented the subscription with single reads and tipping it would help the new guys and would not harm the big names. Bt I don't get the idea, Substack marketing are too interested in my opinion haha.
Excellent conversation. Good analysis and overview of the state of things.
Terry, a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you. So grateful for what you do.
DB
And to you!
Thanks Terry. Enjoyed your chat w JP. I find him almost insufferable to listen to at times, but you made it worthwhile.
Ironically, the insufferable one provided Terry a platform that would never have appeared on Canadian MSM. Mr. Glavin was equally effective in conversation as with the written word. Perhaps, more so. Selective podcasting could be a valuable corollary to his articles. His succinct summation of the chronology of Chinese influence was a revelation.