Stats for the first year

A year has passed with various levels of success

What a month, it was, November 2024!

I thought at the time that things would move forward from there, escalating into ever higher numbers of readers, and huge amounts of views of the individual articles.

That was what the let-me-tell-you-how people on Substack claimed, and they were good at posting similar graphs as mine, and various other types, showing how amazingly successful they were – “and you can become that too! (with some consistency)”.

Now, some of the people who started here at the same time as me has escalated way ahead of me. Some of those I have been following from when we both had 10 subscribers and no readers for our posts, they now have several times the subscribers as I have, and curves that beat mine in every respect.

So, I tend to claim that I can not show you how to become successful.

After that good month, it felt like I couldn’t catch the attention of people like in the beginning. Had it been on Facebook or another typical social medium, it would have been at that time that I should start paying for readers, to keep everything going and not get stuck on a plateau.

I made another Substack, the Turning Life, plus some business stacks, the latter meant to attract potential customers for my technical writing and data analyst services.

Turning Life never took off. You can see the curve for it here:

At most, it had something like 1/10 of the traffic from A Rich Life/All of Life (which changed name along the way).

Both stacks fell drastically in popularity in the beginning 2025, and as my life became difficult and I had to put my focus elsewhere, it was easy to run away from Substack for a while, not publishing anything there. And social media never fails on that point: going away for a while means that all is lost.

In June 2025, I was again very active, mostly with All of Life, but it was impossible to attract very much attention to anything I did.

And when I then announced that I would now close down, there were hardly anybody noticing it. Only the handful of hardcore supporters I had here, reacted to it at all.

Looking at the graphs, I realize that it hasn’t been a full year yet – one month is still missing. I think the tendency is clear, though: I have lost. If there ever was a competition about becoming popular on this platform, I wasn’t even in the room where the podium was. I guess you could say, i wasn’t even told when they would announce the winner on TV. That’s how far I was from winning.

And why do I care?

When I started, I had some thoughts about this being or becoming kind of a portfolio platform, to which I could direct anyone interested in hiring me for writing – then they could see for themselves what I was capable of, and decide if it was suitable for their business.

I lost that. Nobody ever looked at this place to see how I was writing. Nobody cared at all.

I also thought, like I had done previously with Medium, that there would be a chance, over time, to start earning a bit of money here. It is necessary to understand that I have a very small economy these days, trying to catch a few dollars here, a few euros there, all of it together now, for a long while, very far from what I need to pay the bills.

I lost that too. It turned out that anyone earning just a small amount of money have many more subscribers than I have, and also such subscribers who kind of adore them, see them as gurus or special talents. Often, the paying subscribers hope to get a little stardust on them by being near a successful Substack-owner.

And then, as it appeared to me that I couldn’t use this place as a reference of any kind, and I couldn’t earn money on it, I thought that I could, at least, use it as a social platform, since people here seem to be more reasonable, more normal, than many of those on other platforms.

But, again, even though I have had some great talks with some of the readers here, which I appreciate very much, there isn’t a broad set of people with whom I can talk – it is again the handful of supporters.

And that was, of course, my win on all this. Getting in touch with a handful of people with whom I could have meaningful conversations.

I have written and posted maybe 200 articles (or maybe more) on Substack, spread over the different stacks, and it means, in a way, that each of you have got 40 articles each. With an average length of 1,000 words per article, this means that I have written a short novel, 40,000 words, for each of you, exclusively :)

Isn’t that great?!

Which other platform could call for so much engagement that I would consider doing that? But here, it has been a pleasure.

The first post was a first. I had put several things into one post, believing that this was what was expected from a “newsletter”. It really was very new for me, even though I had had the first stack for a long while, maybe a year or more, just without using it.

It looked like this (but with a different logo back then):

Somehow, however, a platform like this one doesn’t enjoy having me here. 13 likes on the first post, that’s quite good, but it never got much higher than that, and the first readers quickly vanished again.

I tried to be active and read, like, comment, etc., on several articles for each of those who visited my posts, but very few seemed to appreciate it, so, after a while, the reciprocity-model died out for me.

I tried getting into sharing recommendations, but very few returned with one when I recommended them. However, some did, and also some recommendations appeared at the others’ initiatives, so it worked somewhat, but not as I had expected.

And then, when we reached 10 months and everything looked like it was in a decline from an already low level, I decided to call it a day (see previous posts on this).

Looking around on the platform, and trying to use Substack’s search mechanism for people and stacks, reveals that people have come and gone by large. Very many stacks have 5–10 posts, with increasing intervals between them, and the last one was several years ago.

I thought, when I first started here, that it was because some people didn’t really want to write after all, or they had other obligations that took their time. But now I’m not sure about that. I believe that at least some, probably many, have felt that this was a hostile place.

I can see from the zero, one, or more rarely, two likes they have on their articles, and the complete lack of comments, that they didn’t manage to catch any attention at all. Often, they had a few likes on the first post, and then nothing after that. Perhaps Substack’s recommender-algorithm in play here, to help new writers get started.

You may have seen from some of my other posts, what I consider could be part of the explanation for some people becoming successful here, and others not. And it is not always a matter of how well they write. Sometimes, probably it is, but even the best written article in the world will get no likes if nobody knows that it exists.

For this, there is Notes. But Notes obviously works only for some people, not for all. It should be possible to write something there, or send a link to an article, and then see a number of reactions. But, for some of us, this just doesn’t happen. When the new statistics feature was made for Notes, I could see why: most had 4 impressions, or whatever it’s called there. Out of those, perhaps one had clicked on like, if I was lucky.

Nobody sees my posts on Notes, so it doesn’t matter what I write there: they wouldn’t know.

I have also mentioned that American society that rules the top position of most categories – the big names on Substack, who all have been invited, have been promoted, and even paid by Substack for being here. The dream about becoming popular on this platform is not real, and in particular not for those of us who are not already popular outside the platform, as this is something that seems to be noticed here, having a major impact on whether people want to read your posts or not.

Every single one of those top names earn millions on their writings here, and every single one of them wants extra money, from you, if you should be able to write a comment on their posts, which they’ll never read. None of them will ever read anything you wrote, anywhere. In fact, I believe that none of them actually are on the platform at all – they are just names, brands, being used to sell subscriptions.

All the rest of us are – with the words of Jeremy Clarkson, former host of the TV show Top Gear – plankton (this snipped taken from The Mirror), and even though he refers to protests (about getting fired from the BBC), it is still a quite good way of seeing some details of how a society works, including Substack:

Clarkson said: "The simple truth of the matters is this: Protest never works. Because we are all plankton.

"And the world is run by whales. Oh, you can be a big and important plankton but that doesn't make a jot of difference if a whale has decided to eat you up.

"You can get a million other plankton to dress up and wave banners but Mr Whale won't even notice."

Well, that was a status.

Going forward, as I have mentioned in the previous post, with the little goose pictured, I am writing mostly within some specific topics, and I honestly don’t expect that anyone cares. I have become very negative toward the possibilities of this platform, so I am simply just publishing there, on the new stacks, instead of keeping the writing at home, on my own computer only.

I know that some of what I write will be blocked and banned by most Americans, who really do not seem to be able to handle anything that could rock their boat. But I write it anyway – not to insult or scare anyone, but because I find that it is important for people on this planet to be able to talk about certain topics, for instance such as the world, as we know it, being in the process of going under.

It may be unpleasant to think about, but it can end up becoming a lot more unpleasant if nobody thinks about it.

Many people prefer to be entertained by something they have already seen before in their life, many times. Perhaps the reason for TV-series being so popular? Or other kinds of repeated shows on TV. If there is nothing new, the world feels like it is still the same old world. That may be a comforting feeling, especially if you at the same time rule out any news sources, and make sure to block anyone on the Internet that potentially could say something that isn’t just the same as you always hear.

I cannot change that attitude to life. And I don’t think that I want to, either. Some people really need that abstraction from real life more than they need to know what is going on. And here, of course, the Matrix cliché fits in: some people really don’t want to know what the world really looks like, so they take that pill (I have forgotten which color) that keeps them in the illusion, rather than the one that will take them out of it.

But…

If there are any people out there, and it is possible, somehow, to get in touch with them, with whom I can talk about human rights, the environment, and some of the other topics I care about – some people who are ready to engage in at least gaining an understanding of some of the big questions of today – then I would like that. And I wouldn’t know, if I kept my articles at home without publishing them.

Hence, my new stacks.