SubStack or Patreon?
The wrong platform choice could be a disaster of delivering hundreds of video tutorials on Patreon, then discovering it really is done better elsewhere
SubStack is becoming very popular, but I don’t know if it fits well for me or not. It seems more essay-oriented from everything I’ve seen, and I’ve been thinking more about the video side. Still, they just did a major upgrade for videos, or so I thought I read somewhere.
But I hear that X is blocking outgoing links to SubStack, a huge negative. Is that true?
Yet if this writer’s take has even partial legitimacy, then I have to take a hard look at SubStack before I commit too much to Patreon. And already I’ve found that Patreon moves very slowly on improvements, and does ultra-stupid things like not being able to gift a subscription, so I can’t even give my own family or friends.
As a writer, I spent six years slogging away on Patreon, only to move to Substack and quadruple my subscriber number in under four months. I’m no mathematician, but I like those numbers.
Te editing interface of SubStack is similar to WordPress, general-purpose stuff, but Patreon seemingly has no facilities for essay-style posts along with videos. Unless I’ve missed it.
A *huge* advantage of Patreon is that a video can be uploaded to YouTube as Unlisted, then linked as a video in Patreon. Which can then be used on YouTube in the future, as well as viewed at full resolution eg 4K over on YouTube. SubStack seemingly has no such option, so no 2-for-1 deal there.
A video is included below, let’s see how it works in terms of quality and presentation. Ooops, I uploaded a video, but cannot figure out how to embed it—it finished and processed the upload, then it is gone with no trace… WTF?
Already, I find it irritating that email headers have to be low-quality PNG—JPEG not allowed. What?
Confusing. Where is that video that I uploaded? What exactly did Substack do after the 10 minutes it took to upload it?
Oh, here it is— you have to upload after uploading it, re-selecting it in the file open ddialog—makes NO sense, it’s some very confusing bug.