I’m going back to Substack with my website, and I will explain why. But first, one thing: Helena is keeping her Ghost site. She has far more time to develop it than I do, and that changes the whole calculation. This move is mine, made for my own reasons.
The first reason is simple arithmetic. I will be running three, maybe even four Substacks, and Use More Paper will be just one of them. When you publish that much, it makes sense to have everything on one platform instead of scattering it across the internet.
The second reason is growth, or rather the lack of it. The website I'm running now is not growing organically. I was kind of expecting that, but the growth is so sluggish that if I want to build a business around it, I will have to make it grow somehow. And if growing means posting on X or LinkedIn, that would be torture. LinkedIn especially is so cringe. If I have to choose a platform to post on, I prefer Substack Notes by far.
Video, Podcasts, and the One-Gigabyte Wall
Then there is the practical side. I make videos and podcasts, and on Ghost each needs its own home: a separate podcast host, and YouTube for the video, because Ghost caps uploads at under one gigabyte and my vlogs are usually over a gigabyte. On Substack it all lives in one place. I had my publication there before; it’s comfortable; and lots of people already use it, which is an added bonus.
Here is the funny part. I ditched the Ghost website, and I’m going all in on Substack for the same reason I didn’t want a Substack some months ago: it leans towards social media. That used to put me off. Now it’s pretty much why I’m taking this decision. As I’ve said many times, I want an online business out of this website, this publication, this podcast; and a business has to have an audience. There is no audience without discovery.
Because the reality of running a Ghost website - or any independent website - today is that nobody visits it. And it’s normal: nobody knows it exists. Fewer and fewer people go to a search engine, type a query, and click through to somebody’s site. The Pew Research Center tracked the real browsing of 900 American adults in 2025 and found that when Google shows an AI summary, people click a traditional result link in only 8 percent of visits, against 15 percent when there is no summary; the links inside the summary itself get clicked about 1 percent of the time. The summary is often where the search ends.
Where the Readers Actually Went
I even tried to make my Ghost site more visible to the language models, editing the robots.txt file to let their crawlers in. But who will ever search for digital minimalist or paper productivity content on ChatGPT? Probably nobody. Nobody really came from there. Maybe in ten years it will be different; today, no traffic.
So the discovery has to be community-based, and Substack is a far better community discovery engine than a lonely website waiting for Google. The wider numbers point the same way. The Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2025, built on nearly 100,000 respondents across 48 markets, found that in the United States, for the first time, more people reach news through social and video networks (54 percent) than through television (50 percent) or news websites and apps (48 percent). Audiences follow people and feeds now, not destinations. Researchers who study this “platformization” of culture, like Duffy, Poell and Nieborg in Social Media + Society, describe how platforms have been reshaping the way creative work gets made, distributed and paid for. I don’t have to like every part of that picture; I do have to publish inside it.
And sorry for all the changes. If you are triggered by them, just unsubscribe, unfollow me, go your way. I’m not doing it to trigger you; I’m doing it because my thinking and my goals shift, and I am solving my problems. A recent peer-reviewed study of cultural journalists found the same pattern: when the old routes stop working, writers move to platforms like Substack, Ghost or Patreon, where they can build and keep their own communities. I’m in reasonable company.
Seasons for Cameras, Seasons for Platforms
I see the same seasonality in my use of cameras. Right now I’m filming with the Insta360 Ace Pro 2 - a very difficult name; the product manager should be fired - and I suppose it will work pretty well until winter. Then I will probably prefer the Pocket 4, because it’s better in low light, and there is less light in the winter. At least this time I will not make the error of selling the camera. I will keep it safely until it’s needed, and then use it. That is way wiser than the endless violence of sell and buy, buy and sell.
So that’s the move: the articles, the podcast, the video, all in one place, where readers can actually find them. If you publish anything online, look honestly at where your readers already gather and how they discover things today; then choose the platform that solves the problems you have right now. That’s what I’m doing. Come and see how it goes.
Do Your Own Research
On what happens to clicks when search engines answer for you, the Pew Research Center’s 2025 analysis of real browsing data, Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results, is short and sobering. On where audiences have moved, the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2025 charts the drift toward social platforms, video and personality-driven media across 48 countries.
For the academic view of how platforms reshape creative work, see Duffy, Poell and Nieborg, Platform Practices in the Cultural Industries: Creativity, Labor, and Citizenship, open access in Social Media + Society. For writers doing exactly what I’m doing, the peer-reviewed case study Substack, the New “Home” for Cultural Journalism in Journalism and Media examines journalists who moved to newsletter platforms to build communities independent of social media, and the Tow Center’s report Digital Platforms and Journalistic Careers does the same through fifty-two interviews.
