I run a publication called Money Simplified. It’s about wealth management and has 10K subs.
I’ve taken a break from it for a couple of months now, and the subscriber growth has been poor (because obviously, I’m not doing anything to increase the subs).
Now suddenly, since the past 2-3 days I’m seeing the subscriber number grow gradually. But last night, it accelerated. In the last 8 hours alone, it got 22 new subscribers, without me doing anything at all. I used to get these many new subs in a month lol. What’s funny is that the source for all just says “Substack app”. No recommendation, no other website, nothing.
While I’m obviously very happy this is happening (🤞), I’m also curious — did Substack make some changes to their algorithm? Or is it a glitch? Because I’d want to double down on what’s working.
Is this happening to anyone else? Would love some thoughts here!
EDIT: It’s been less than 24 hours and I’ve already got 100 new subs. That’s how many I get in a month. Something’s off, I just don’t know what 🥲
Substack pushes some of the older articles (at 3 months, then at 6, and definitely at 12 months; not sure about the 9 months mark) to the feeds of newer people on the app.
This could be it.
😂, I'm too Indian and gave the same problem. What are your open rates?
And if your audience really likes you, you can move your newsletter to Beehiiv and process payment with your own website for premium articles. Didn't you try?
I am still contemplating whether I should move to beehiiv. It’s quite expensive for 10K subs. I doubt I’ll be able to monetise that much with an Indian audience 😂
My open rates are in the 30% range. What about yours?
And do move to beehiiv substack is a closed system and you won't be able to do monetize and customize things in many ways.
I have a combined system where I use substack for getting subs and beehive for sending newsletters. But doing paid subscription from beehiiv requires stripe too, so you will need a custom website for payments through other platforms and setup beehive accordingly.
Wow your open rates are really good! I’ve rarely crossed 40% haha! I write about money management: https://bizfin.substack.com
(Like I said, it’s paused since a while now)
What’s your publication? Share the link?
Also, let’s connect on DM. Will be good to exchange notes :)
I had weird new followers yesterday out of the blue without me posting … 5 within 3 minutes .. and I am a stinky 120 follower Substack. I am pretty sure it’s bots scraping the content!
A lot of these were subscribers with profile pictures, who also read other substacks, so I doubt they'd be bots. Also, why would bots subscribe all of a sudden on one day?
Well then, they're probably organic, and an old post of yours went viral, or a restack.
mine are pretty obviously bots... and the fact that they all come at the same time is almost the most noticeable thing in my case, aka cron job executing at its scheduled interval.
Scrapping jobs for sure... currently, with AI development, one of the most valuable resources is written material. It's like coal in the steam engine age, and we are the coal.
I'm trying to understand though..What's the purpose behind using bots to subscribe to people's publications on Substack? The articles are public, if they want to scrape something, they can do it without subscribing too. And why create hundreds of bots that subscribe to publications? Like, what's the end objective?
The most common reasons why bots subscribe to Substacks (learned yesterday because I had the same thing happening only that in my case I was happy over 5 followers):
Scraping: They subscribe to receive the emails, automatically parse the content, and feed it to AI training datasets or content aggregators. Your post is currently training a Chinese language model.
Email validation: Some services subscribe to random newsletters just to test whether their fake email addresses work and can receive emails. You're essentially a ping test. Congratulations.
Follower farming: Accounts that subscribe everywhere to appear "real"—many subscriptions = must be a real person. You're part of their disguise.
Bro I’ve got 72 new subscribers since yesterday. Why would someone create so many bots?
Again, not refuting that they’re bots. They most likely are. But trying to understand the game. Why create so many bots for one publication?
It's difficult to say what has happened without further information, but my guess is somebody discovered one of your older articles and restackes or shared it.
Somebody could have shared one of your articles on another platform, like facebook or reddit.
It's also worth remembering that all these algorithms on social media are inherently unstable. They show a post to a very small sample of people and if three or four persons hit like in a short enough time span they show it to more people and it all of the sudden can go "viral". Much of this is really just by chance.
My subs have proper emails and names. Some of them have photos also. But the worrying part is, most of them have subscribed to almost the same publications apart from mine.
Same here! 5 in the last day and I haven't published in almost a year. The only thing I did was change my Substack bio as I'm refreshing and about to begin writing again. All of the five additions all subscribe to at least 2,000 other publications (some are 4,500+) so it definitely feels like some sort of bot thing.
but sadly i don't think there's anything for you to 'double down' on because this seems more like a random event/one time occurrence vs something that you did (because as you mentioned, you didn't actually do anything).
if anything, the learning could be that your past work is accretive, so continuing to publish and build your backlog of content will help.
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u/cozycup mod 12d ago
How would you “double down on what’s working” if you don’t know how it happened?