I'm going (more) independent (again)

About a year ago, the esports journalist and podcaster Jacob Wolf and I launched a Patreon together, bringing our newsletters and Jacob’s video and audio content under one umbrella. Jacob had been publishing work independently on Substack and other platforms for over a year, founding a production company, Overcome, in the process. I had been laid off from The Washington Post’s video game and esports vertical, Launcher, a few months earlier. We thought it would be smart to pool our resources; maybe, if the numbers trended in the right direction, we could think about building something new.

If you were wondering how that went: We’re shutting down the Patreon! It’s not all bad news though.

Before we get into that, let me quickly explain what this means for you: For the vast majority of you, nothing changes. The newsletter isn’t ending. I’m going to keep writing, and if you stay subscribed to ReaderGrev, you’re going to keep getting it in your inbox. If you were a paid subscriber, you won’t be charged anymore, as we’ve suspended billing on the Patreon. The posts hosted on this website currently marked as Exclusive to Patreons will slowly be moved out from under the paywall and under a registration wall. There won’t be any more updates to the Patreon, and I’m going to stop using it.

Aaaaand that’s about it.

If you don’t care about media startup nonsense or LinkedIn-style lessons about failed ventures, you can stop reading, because what’s written above is probably all you need to know. Again, this change won’t mean much for most readers — though a handful of you will enjoy a fancy coffee’s worth more spending money each month.

Why are we doing this? Jacob has largely stepped back from journalism. (I’ll let him speak for himself in a separate post, but I think it’s great that he’s found new passions and feels happier and healthier these days. As a general disclaimer, the rest of this post is about my experience, and shouldn’t be interpreted as some kind of Word of God, final-stamp-on-the-matter report.) For months, I also felt quite badly that the Patreon was running at barely half-strength, a shame that, at times, discouraged me from writing. With all that in mind, I figured a reset might be in order.

But also, I’ve realized that my primary interest is writing, full stop. I have almost no interest in the auxiliary “stuff” of content creation: managing a community on Discord¹ , haranguing people to pay² , scrounging for exclusive content for certain subscribers, writing news roundups, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. I do not want to feel as though I am fulfilling obligations. I do not want to stay abreast of “risks and opportunities in the media landscape.” I just want to write.

When Jacob and I announced that we’d be joining forces, I said in our announcement video that I saw our joint effort as “an experiment” — a talking point I returned to again and again.

• “Do people want to pay for our content? What number of readers would be sustainable? Will independence enable us to chase those bucket list stories that clog every writer’s mental to-do list?” I asked in the video. “At this stage, we just don’t know — but with our readers in our corner, we hope to find out.”

• “This is like a trial balloon for something bigger,” I told Alex Lee over at Digiday. “We did these two things separately; we had a kind of overlapping vision. What if we brought this together? Would people pay for this? Can we build something here? And if we see that we can, that might send the message that we should bring more people on. The line from two journalists working together under one umbrella to four journalists and an editor and a video producer — you can draw that line pretty easily. But we have to test the case first.”

Candidly, I think this was a kind of crutch — a rip cord, an escape hatch, whatever you want to call it — a way to dress up uncertainty as thoughtfulness. If I didn’t overcommit it wouldn’t matter if it didn’t work, right? Here’s 💡 LinkedIn Insight #1: This is a bad attitude to adopt when you are launching a new thing!!!

Then there was the problem of output. In our initial discussions, Jacob and I talked about putting out at least one piece of content every day between the two of us. The phrase “one stop shop” was thrown around. But when the Patreon went live, suddenly it felt as though every idea I had was insubstantial. I worried that frequent but minor works would annoy people, driving them away instead of drawing them in. In the months following our launch, I published at a pace of roughly… two articles per month. I didn’t publish anything in October. (I had a good excuse³ , but still).

I’m proud of all that early work — especially this zany interview that really would not have found a home anywhere else. Still, my pace fell inexcusably short of what was required for a new venture seeking financial contributions from readers. And as soon as I failed to hit that unrealistic daily goal, it opened the door (for me, at least) to a “no rules, just right” publishing cadence. If we had started strong and then slowed down, I think our readers would trust us to bounce back. But I offered very little to paid subscribers early on, so even when I regained my footing, I understood that a major window of opportunity had already closed.

In terms of the business of newslettering, I also learned the hard way that it is not always a line-goes-up growth product. In late June and early July, I published two of my biggest stories since starting this newsletter (a piece of reported opinion about Dr Disrespect and the press, and a scoop about Riot Games’s canceled platform fighter, respectively). Both pieces did traffic that would have been respectable for a Launcher article. I gained roughly 50 (free) subscribers in total from both. In that same span, I lost more subscribers than I gained.⁴

I think some of this has to do with moving away from Substack, in part because I’ve seen other newsletter writers observe this trend, too. Here’s Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day:

“Between August 2020 and January 2024, Garbage Day grew from around 2,000 readers to around 70,000 readers,” Broderick wrote in May. “Users were excited about newsletters, pandemic-era Twitter was converting a lot of readers, and Substack was launching extremely sticky community features that really super-charged things. But that also means, I decamped to Beehiiv with a subscriber list that was full of junk.”

“I can’t speak for other platforms like Ghost or Buttondown, but based on my own experience, if you do ever move email platforms, I’d say you need to prepare for a churn period of about one month per 10,000 readers,” he added, noting that Substack subscribers boast an unsubscribe rate “three times higher than folks who subscribe via Beehiiv.”

This obviously isn’t true for everyone and every newsletter, but in retrospect, the idea that Jacob’s and my newsletter would necessarily scale — and at the speed we wanted — was far from the inevitable outcome.

Now, there’s a twist: Our Patreon was not unsuccessful! We drew in roughly $500 each month. This number fluctuated — and it isn’t exactly accurate because of how monthly versus yearly subscriptions were paid out — but several hundred dollars per month is nothing to sneeze at. For the purposes of starting a media company, it’s nothing. But for two guys publishing a few newsletters each month, that sum feels like a huge success. Given what we produced, I am shocked (touched? overwhelmed?) by people’s faith in us.

Improbably, though, there’s another twist: I never actually received any of this money. The money went into an Overcome account to cover certain hosting and service costs. It was also used, in part, to reimburse two former Overcome employees who were owed back pay.⁵ (Jacob has written about some of Overcome’s financial struggles here). I don’t have a great accounting of the rest of it. At some point early on I was promised a contract with Overcome that would have put some kind of compensation in writing, but it never materialized.

I don’t feel any kind of way about this. I wasn’t making money writing this newsletter before, so continuing to not make money didn’t really wound me. I was employed for the entire time the Patreon was running, and as I’ve already acknowledged, I produced very little content over several crucial months. The subject of payment came up a few times, but I never really made a concerted push for it and was never outright refused it. I’ve interrogated my need to write this here and I think it comes down to the fact that it feels exculpatory in some way, though I haven’t done anything wrong. Mostly, I want to be able to say: “Hey, if you paid for this, you should know more about where the money did (or did not) go.”

After all of this, I feel a bit uneasy about monetization. My ideal version is a “pay what you want if you’d like to support my work, but no pressure” type of model, or maybe a minor paywall for some more off-the-cuff writing, like this piece, which was previously exclusive to Patrons. Still, I think it’ll be some time before I seriously consider implementing anything like that.

It is probably a bit messy of me to share this, but it feels essential to what this experience was, and I’m just happy to purge it from my system here and move on.

Ok, back to the positives: Not to toot my own horn, but I’m really pleased with the work I’ve published this past year!

Aside from ordinary reviews and breaking news and interviews and reported opinion, I also wrote an esports travel diary, an eisegesis of a 60-year-old essay, a blind-item-ish profile of a failing esports team, an (e)sportswashing reading list, and an advice column, among other things.⁶ (I also loved making the art for each post 👨‍🎨).

I’m going to keep producing this kind of work — and hopefully more of it. I want to get weirder, and play with format and style and maybe even travel again.

I’m exceedingly grateful to everyone in ReaderGrev’s orbit: Friends and mentors who read my stories before and after they publish to offer advice; Strangers who send supportive DMs and emails; Folks who share and engage thoughtfully with the work; Sources, Discord chatters, Patrons, the guys I play video games with who keep me interested in video games, and many others.⁷ It’s a gift to be able to do this!

Anyway, this has been way too many words about a really minor video game newsletter. If you’re still here, thank you for sticking around. If all goes as planned, my next newsletter (maybe as soon as tomorrow) will be about the Deadlock-The Verge snafu. In the longer term, I’m working on a report about (yet another) failed esports organization. It’s about a year overdue. Sometimes, that’s how long it takes to get a source to open up.

Cheers.

Thanks for reading ReaderGrev! Consider sharing it with a friend, on Discord, Twitter, LinkedIn, or even a subreddit where folks might appreciate it. Word of mouth helps this newsletter grow!

If you have a tip, I can be reached on Twitter at @LeaderGrev, or via email at mikhail (at) readergrev (dot) com.

1. Though I think the people in our Discord are lovely and I’d love to stay in touch! I’m not sure what we’re doing with the Discord; we may keep it open, just scaled down, for ad hoc conversations.

2. The writer Hamilton Nolan wrote the following on his Substack recently, which is roughly how I feel about paywalls (even though I very much like the idea of making money as a writer!)

   • “You may have noticed that most subscription-based sites have paywalls, but this one does not,” Nolan wrote. “Because I am a little bit of a dreamy-eyed socialist, I made the decision to keep this publication free for all to read. (There is actually a very real social problem of good writing increasingly being locked behind paywalls with the collapse of the traditional journalism model, resulting in a situation where wealthier people have access to high quality information and less wealthy people only get crap.) As a philosophical matter I am very happy to keep this site open to all.”

3. In my day job, I work as an editor on the International desk at The Washington Post. After Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, and during the first weeks of Israel’s war in Gaza, it became increasingly difficult to find the time and will to write. I just didn’t have the energy.

4. I think this trend is starting to slow down, or even reverse. (Knock on wood). The last newsletter I published was the first in a very long time that resulted in a net positive subscriber count. Putting certain stories behind a wall that demands a subscription to keep reading has been a huge boon. Let’s hope this issue sticks to that trend. 😅 

5. I consented to this. I also loaned Overcome several thousand dollars to help pay those former employees. Please do not feel the need to mobilize on my behalf. I am not worried whatsoever about getting the loaned money back, and have already been partly reimbursed.

6. Click rate go brrrr.

7. One major exclusion: People who copy-paste my articles into subreddit comments.