Hello, Insight Monitor subscribers! This month marks the five-year anniversary of my newsletter here on Substack. Join me for a little reflection, and stay until the end for a nice surprise….
It’s been quite the journey. What started with a few hardcore illicit finance nerds has grown to a community of over 8,000, with new subscribers every day. I’m always excited when someone else agrees to receive the newsletter or follows me on this platform, because I think we’re collectively one step closer to illicit finance being taken more seriously. And as regular readers of this newsletter know, countering the illicit finance threat is something I take very seriously.
This newsletter started as something I wanted to do to capture my thinking on illicit finance and security, share insights through something more enduring than the odd thread on Twitter (I refuse to use the new name because I think it’s dumb), and promote the courses and other activities that I do as part of Insight Threat Intelligence. It’s grown well beyond that and has actually become a revenue line for the business; it’s also become a source of some expenses, because I usually have at least one researcher working on the Global Terrorist Financing Report (our monthly roundup of terrorist financing news), as well as research for other newsletters.
When I first started out, I migrated old content from a blog I was running to help populate the back catalogue – a lot of that is still available on the site if you go way, way back. As with most Substackers, I started publishing free articles, but quickly added a paywall because, frankly, those news roundups are an annoying amount of work. Artificial intelligence has helped a bit, but we still need to check every story, verify details, and make sure it’s accurately represented, and I have yet to find an AI tool that does that to my satisfaction. All that to say: this newsletter remains labour-intensive, and I’m happy about that. The writing is the work.
Somewhere along the way, I started trying to write twice per week. That turned out to be too much — for both my readers and me. So now we focus on one article per week, and sometimes add a second if things are particularly newsy. I’m increasingly trying to take things slowly: reading, writing, and publishing with intention. In our information ecosystem, I think we can all use a bit of a break, and a focus on more signal, less noise.
Growth on this platform hasn’t been exponential for me. I feel like I’ve earned every one of my followers or subscribers; while Substack touts a network effect, I have yet to really experience it, and I haven’t had any posts go truly viral as I have elsewhere. But there’s something more organic and sustainable about this – I feel like every person is here because they want to be, not because they feel like they should be, or because the algorithm told them to be.
I think one of the things that I like the most about writing a regular newsletter is that it keeps the writing muscles sharp, even during long periods where I’m mostly researching, travelling, or giving talks, like right now, when over the period of three months I’m scheduled to be in three different countries and eight cities, some twice. It forces me to write, for better or for worse. Yes, this is pressure, but I also give myself grace, and if I really need to miss some weeks, that’s okay.
In recent years, I’ve experimented with publishing series. I’m not sure that these really work, but I like them because they give me a way to break up longer pieces of analysis and share them with readers, without overwhelming people with details, links, or forty-page documents. Feel free to let me know what you think about these series in the comments, by email, or however we communicate.
This platform itself isn’t without flaws. There are way too many Nazis on the platform, although I’d argue this is true of most social platforms these days. Substack also takes a pretty big cut of my profits, particularly compared to other platforms. Finally, Substack has started a Polymarket integration, which I think is criminal. (Note: it is not technically criminal now, but I’m willing to bet (haha) that it will become criminal within ten years when we see the full effects of the gaming and gambling epidemic. Maybe sooner, although policy change takes time.) This is all driven, of course, by Substack’s need to become profitable. It has no alternative viable path to profitability. Which, in my view, raises questions about the platform’s long-term viability.
To that end, I’ve migrated my content to a blog hosted on my website, which you can access at www.insightthreatintel.com. It has both a free and a paid section, and one of my wonderful team members maintains it, keeping it up to date with the latest news and analysis, pretty much at the same time as we release articles on Substack. This also gives some readers the chance to subscribe without supporting the Substack platform, which is an absolutely valid choice.
That’s not to say I’ll be disappearing from here anytime soon, but it is to say that I’m making plans (and maintaining newsletter lists!) so that if Substack disappears, I can still keep doing this work. Because that’s what matters, not the way it lands in your inbox.
That’s enough reflection for one day. On to the good stuff. To celebrate my five years on this platform, I’m offering a huge discount for new subscribers: 50% off an annual membership. This is a rare sale (we almost never have them), and this is by far the largest discount I’ve ever given. It’ll be available for the full month of April, so if you want to take advantage, be sure to lock it in before the end of the month. And you know the drill: like, share, and subscribe to help us grow our community!
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Good call on building a dedicated home for your work. Every indie journo and writer on here needs to think about at least making “home base” their primary location, then using Substack to promote it, do lives, videos, even duplicate it if necessary. And PLEASE make your RSS feed easy to find on your website so we can follow you in our RSS readers (you can do paywall and free RSS feeds like with podcasts). That’s what I do with 404 Media (they’re not on here at all - just Ghost).
Congratulations Jessica! Thanks for all the insight and look forward to comparing notes again soon.
And many thanks for being one of a small subset of people who showed me what this platform could be.