u/Ryanopoly

My personal opinion on Substack Sponsorships is that enshittification comes for all platforms, and Substack is by no means exempt from this rule. Andreessen Horowitz is an investment powerhouse for slop generating platforms.

Facebook comes to mind as one of their investments that is now purely slop, and Substack will be no different. Eventually the boys at the top will want this thing to produce massive financial gains, and the measly 10% cut from subscriptions is and was never going to cut it.

I just unsubscribe and click the “do not recommend channel” option these days for YouTubers who have sold their souls to these crap sponsorships like Incogni or insert any virtual private network here, and especially any of them pushing gambling or prediction crap. One that comes to mind is the biggest YouTuber PewDiePie… how anyone can sit through his no-effort sponsorship laden dribble these days is beyond me.

How do you feel about Substack Sponsorships... will they aid or destroy the long-term survivability of Substack?

I think this is something personally, and frankly a lot of folks forget about Substack once they start using it, which in reality may be its biggest benefit. Using it to amass an unlimited number of subscribers to e-mail whenever you want is not only a reality... it's also freaking free to do so!

I just finished reading an article about this topic, and it was very enlightening. If you want to read it for yourself, feel free to Google:

How to Use Substack for Email Marketing (2026 Coach’s Guide) by Paperbell

I'm not sure how many of you have ever used an e-mail marketing campaign platform before, but I have, and from what I remember about them… they are very expensive!

They limit you on how many subscribers you can have for their free tiers if they offer one, and a lot of the time many of the normal features you would expect an e-mail marketing tool to have are locked behind a paywall. One of the worst discoveries I had the unfortune to figure out was that with one of the e-mail campaign providers I was using, if you have tons of inactive or bounce folks on your list, and they are pretty much dead subscribers, those count towards your tier membership subscriber numbers.

So, what does this mean... let me explain it in an exaggerated example below:

Say you're using the free tier of an e-mail marketing tool, and they let you have up to 500 subscribers right. Well, say 300 of those subscribers are dead accounts and haven't opened up your e-mails in over a year. Well, the platform in question doesn't care about that. Those 300 subscribers still count towards your total subscriber count, so before you know it, you'll be forced to upgrade if you want more subscribers. I hope this makes sense, because it messed me up really good once I found this out.

Please, don’t get me wrong, these are businesses, and they need to make money, I get it, but some of them can start to become very expensive once you start to grow your subscriber list(s).

With all that being said, please note that although you can easily use Substack for free as your e-mail marketing campaign tool forever with no ceiling to the amount of subscribers you may send to, it does not have nearly the amount of features as the platforms specifically dedicated to e-mail marketing, so this is something you will have to look into for yourself.

The point of this post was just to highlight how Substack is such a game changer in this respect. The ability to have a million Substack subscribers and reach them all with a single e-mail for free is absolutely mind-boggling!

Just out of curiosity, how many subscribers do you get to e-mail for free whenever you push out your new post on Substack?

I’d really love to know how many folks are taking advantage of this Substack perk.

I found an interesting post this morning chocked-full of hard truths about Substack that I think some of you on here should read.

Here's a clip from the post:

“In reality, in 2026, getting free Substack subscribers is achievable. Getting enough paid subscribers to generate meaningful income is difficult and unrealistic.”

If you want to read the whole thing I just posted it on my Reddit profile.

If you're achieving financial success on Substack though I'd love to hear about it.

I think the majority of us still classify cryptocurrency cycles as bullish and bearish over the past 4 years, when in fact, the cycles are more comparative to bearish and more bearish in my opinion.

I personally think the whole cryptocurrency thing is over, but I think Bitcoin still has a few 500% plus pumps left in it before it finally stays flat or goes down slowly for the next 20 years or so.

My next bet is not if, but when MicroStrategy now Strategy collapses once Bitcoin goes down to a certain threshold, and they can no longer pay the bills they promised to investors. Think FTX, but a 2026 or 2027 version of it.

Once this transpires, expect Bitcoin to go down to around $15,000 to possibly even $10,000 per coin.

When it does happen, I think buying here and riding it back up to $100,000 over the next 3 to 4 years and then selling would be the optimal move in my unprofessional opinion.

What do you think will happen?

Yes, you are right, Substack is garbage just like every other social media platform out there, or any platform that will be created in the future. They all succumb to enshittification once the startup capital injections and the so called "growth stage" is over.

Sadly, you used to be able to go build your own thing and maybe get noticed via search engines, but in a few years, Google is going to change all of that, and you'll only get seen if you pay to play. If you don't, some Google artificial overview will steal all your websites content, give it to whoever is searching for it, and won't pay you a single red penny for it.