Here’s My Brutally Honest Thoughts On Vocal, Newsbreak, Quora+, And Substack

Four years ago when Medium created the “Partner Program” for writers, the entire game changed.

I don’t think we know just how groundbreaking it was.

People could now get paid, directly, for writing words on the internet.

Before Medium’s Partner Program, the only way for writers to get paid for their words was if somebody paid them. Hello freelancing!

Now Joe Blow could talk about his divorce and get paid (possibly) thousands of dollars for it.

The Partner Program started off slow. Nobody was making big bucks until a year after it rolled out. Then we started seeing reports from Medium that some writers were making $10,000 per month with the Partner Program.

That’s bananas.

Ever since then, there’s been copycat companies who’ve tried to capture the same magic Medium did, by paying their writers in conjunction with some sort of statistic — like views.

Vocal and Newsbreak come to mind first.

Vocal, quite shortly, pays writers for the views they generate. Newsbreak did too, but they also gave out contracts to writers that paid them X amount of dollars if they published Y articles per month.

This is good news, right?

I should be jumping for joy. There’s so much opportunity for writers online, isn’t there?

No.

I don’t see it that way.

I see all these other platforms like Substack, Vocal, Newsbreak, and Quora+ as a not-so-great place to make money.

Whether they’re good places to get views is another topic entirely.

I’ve seen people be successful with Substack. I’ve seen people be successful with Newsbreak. Matt Lillywhite apparently made $17,000 in one month writing there.

To be honest, though, none of these platforms have the same magic as Medium.

What about Vocal?

I tried Vocal out last year and basically got nowhere. I collected a stunning seven views on one post. I published a few. Sure, I might not have spent enough time there, but you should typically see SOMETHING promising if a platform is worth it, right?

I could tell in my second week that Medium was worth it.

So Vocal, for me, was a dud. It might’ve changed since then, but I don’t see many articles from writers talking about all the money they made on Vocal. Trust me, if they were, we’d be swimming in articles about it.

I’m not saying you can’t make money writing there. What I AM saying is that the amount of money you can make, in my view, is kind of negligible.

What about Newsbreak?

Newsbreak is the only platform for me that actually gave me pretty legit views. One of my republished posts got tens of thousands of views there. The problem for me is that this platform, like Medium, clearly wants a certain kind of post. They want you to play by their rules. They want local stories instead of posts about how to 10x your productivity.

I already learned my lesson about what happens when platforms start to tell you, clearly, what kind of posts they want, and what happens to writers when they don’t follow directions.

AHEM S-H-A-D-O-W-B-A-N-N-E-D.

I’m not so high on Newsbreak UNLESS you like to write local news stories, which is clearly what they want.

What about Substack?

Oh, Substack. I have a weird feeling about this platform. First off, the discoverability is a major problem. There’s no real way to discover new and interesting newsletters to subscribe to here.

The problem, also, is that Substack and email are joined at the freaking hip.

On Medium I follow a couple hundred writers. I don’t subscribe to their email newsletters. I just login to Medium to read whenever I want to.

On Substack you kinda have to subscribe to the newsletter to see what’s inside, and that sucks because I don’t want more email in my inbox. I kind of just want to get what content I want from my favorite writers on my own time, and not get 10–15 emails per day with their latest post.

That simple fact, for me, will limit Substack’s growth (along with the fact that discoverability sucks there).

I’ve heard rumblings that they may try to improve discoverability. If that’s the case, I’ll feel better about what they’re doing. For now, though, I largely see that platform as a waste of time if you already have a newsletter through a solution like ConvertKit or Mailchimp.

Also, they take high percentages of any revenue you make from paid newsletters. Convertkit has lower commissions. If I ever made a paid newsletter, I’d do so with ConvertKit.

What about Quora+ ?

Quora+ has a lot going for it. A great community of writers, a great community of people seeking answers to questions, a bustling platform, and tons of organic reach.

The problem is, who’s going to pay the subscription fee to get one question answered when they can just search online for it and get an answer for free?

I like pretty much everything about Quora+. I admit I could very well be wrong with this take.

At first I wasn’t sure how many people would buy a Medium subscription, but look at what happened.

Maybe Quora’s community of readers is super strong. Maybe they want to see the platform succeed. Maybe they want to pay the fee to support their favorite writers.

I hope it does succeed. I hope all these platforms succeed. If they do, it will put a ton of pressure on Medium to improve their own platform.

Unfortunately, I think we may be a year away from seeing anybody seriously challenge Medium.

The only platform I’m pretty high on is Bitclout, which I’ve written about on many occasions. Time will tell, but these are my thoughts for now.

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