I always enjoy reading Creator Spotlight, a twice-weekly newsletter about the “creator” business. (Though man, I still wish we’d settled on some other term.) Led by Francis Zierer, it features lengthy interviews with creators of all sorts, some of them journalists.
Today’s interview is worth a look. It’s with Stephen Totilo, a long-time video games journalist who is two years into running his own solo operation, Game File. (He spent nine years as editor-in-chief of Kotaku.) There’s a lot of interesting detail about the realities of running a solo Substack — both in Zierer’s write-up and the full interview on YouTube. Here are a few that stood out to me.
- Totilo has accumulated 27,000 total subscribers and — most importantly — 1,400 paying readers who spend $10/month or $100/year for access to two more full newsletters per week. (Free subscribers get one, plus teasers of the other two so they know what they’re missing.) That’s a healthy $140,000 in annual revenue — but Substack’s cut and Stripe fees eat into that.
- When Totilo gets an important exclusive interview, they usually get put behind the paywall. But he wasn’t prepared for how many free readers would use the free trial he offers to subscribe, read the article, and then cancel within an hour: “Just wait out the trial! Maybe there’s going to be other good stuff for you here!”
- One thing he misses from his pre-newsletter days: the community of readers who’d live in the comment section. Since most readers see his pieces in their inbox, there’s an extra bit of friction required to get them commenting on the website: “Everything feels a little quiet compared to the Kotaku experience.”
- Loved this excerpt from one of Totilo’s interviews, with game developer Nick Kamen, on how his company thinks about pricing and consumer price sensitivity:
“We had this joke of, like, how much is a game really?” Kaman told me, as we chatted last month.
“In a player’s mind, what does it mean to spend five bucks? Well, that’s five bucks. But six bucks? Well, that’s still five bucks.
“Four bucks is also kind of five bucks,” he continued. “Three bucks is two bucks. And two bucks is basically free.
“So we’ve got these tiers: You know, twelve bucks… that’s ten bucks. But thirteen bucks is fifteen bucks.
“And we found that eight bucks is still five bucks. It doesn’t become ten bucks. Seven ninety nine, that’s five bucks, right?
“So, eight bucks going to five bucks is the biggest differential we could find in pricing, so we found it very optimal.”
Check out Zierer’s write-up or watch the whole thing on YouTube or below.
