I am the Niche. I am the Platform.

ByJason McBride

The thing I’m finally willing to embrace in my life & business

Every online platform will eventually betray you. This is a lesson I’ve been taught far too many times. I’m a bit of a slow learner, sometimes.

I recently wrote, “All of my biggest mistakes and regrets in life have happened because I failed to listen to my gut…”

What I didn’t say in that post was that I was in the middle of the fallout from being betrayed by another internet platform, even though I should’ve known better. Even though I did know better.

For the past fourteen years, I’ve made my living selling services, subscriptions, digital products, and physical goods online. Before that, I ran two brick-and-mortar service-based businesses for nine years and had several other side hustles.

Over the course of working for myself and building several businesses over the past twenty-five-plus years, I’ve failed a bunch (sometimes spectacularly), had some wild successes, and learned some foundational business principles.

Most importantly, I’ve learned some key things about me, my brain, and the way I work. I’m making some major changes in the way I conduct my online (and increasingly offline) business. If you follow me on places like Medium or Substack, you will only notice a subtle difference. My posts will all link back here to my website. I’m not leaving Medium or Substack, but I will be making sure that I’m using them to build something sustainable that I actually own.

Here is the bullet point version of what I’ve learned and how I’m transforming my business to enhance my creativity. You can click the links to learn more details about any specific bullet point, or read this entire post for all the dirty details.

What Happened? or Algorithmic Fuckery & the Creator-Platform Death Spiral

I turn fifty this year, and I’m tired of having to put up with other people’s bullshit. When I was younger, I was much more likely to adapt when a platform changed the rules on me. While that adaptability and my high pain tolerance can be a strength, it also often works against me. In the past, it kept me from striking out on my own.

But this year, two platforms that I’ve proudly been a part of for the past six plus years pushed me too far. I’m talking about Medium and Substack.

Medium

I’ve actually been writing on Medium off and on since 2019. I took a long break from the platform but returned in 2024. Medium has a program where certain human readers are boost nominators. They nominate posts on the platform for a boost. A boosted post not only gets some extra-secret algorithmic sauce, but they earn at a higher rate. On Medium, writers are paid based on how many reads their story generates and how long humans spend reading their stories. Boost nominators can nominate up to 10 stories a month and get paid between $40 to $50 if a story they nominate is boosted.

When I came back in 2024, I started getting my work boosted. It was exciting! I was seeing real money from my illustrated essays. Each month, I would gain more followers, and my work would generate more reads. The effort I put into Medium began to feel scalable. I usually wrote one or two posts a week. Nothing crazy. From October 2024 until June 2025, 75% of my posts were boosted.

One of my boosted posts earned an average of 15 and 25 cents per read, while a non-boosted post earned between half a cent and two cents per read.

I never knew why a particular post wasn’t boosted, or if any post was even nominated, unless I received an email notifying me my post had been selected for a boost.

Starting in October 2024, I stopped almost all of my freelancing work and was making a living from a combination of Substack subscriptions, book royalties, and Medium royalties from my stories. Medium was steadily growing month to month.

In July 2025, I got lucky. A post I wrote got boosted, and it went viral. (You can now read the viral post here on my website!) A typical boosted post would earn me between $100 to $300 over the lifetime of the post, most of that money being earned within the first 30 days after publication. The viral post, “How to Create a Life You Love,” earned me over $3,000 within the first 30 days, and to date, has earned more than $7,000.

But even more important than the spike in income, I received a massive influx of followers and what Medium calls subscribers. On Medium, a reader can opt in to getting an email notification when a writer publishes a story. The writer does not have access to those emails.

One other interesting side effect of going viral, every post, every single post, I published from July 2025 through the end of January was boosted.

The influx of followers and subscribers meant that my subsequent posts did even better than my work before, even though nothing else went viral, because I had so many more readers. Before the viral article, I had about 11,000 followers and 1,000 subscribers. In the months after the viral post, I jumped to 25,000 followers and 10,000 subscribers. As of this writing, I have 33,000 followers and 18,000 subscribers.

Like every other algorithmic platform, just because someone follows me doesn’t guarantee that the platform will show them one of my posts, but it does increase the odds.

Then, in September 2025, Medium started making “small” changes each month to the Partner Program for the next six months. Every change cut my earnings.

By January 2026, I was making 25% as much per read as I was making in August 2025. I was making less money each month, even as my stories were being read by more people. My work was getting boosted, more readers were finding me, but the only way to earn more was to write and publish more. But I’m just a human, a human dead set against using AI in the creative process, and my illustrated essays take a lot of time to make.

To give you some context, I earned about the same amount of money on 6,700 reads in July of 2025 as I did on 25,000 reads in February 2026. I toyed with just pushing myself and publishing twice as often. Medium did make a Partner Program change in February that finally did go my way. It started giving writers whose stories converted non-paying Medium readers into paying Medium readers some kind of commission. Medium even highlighted my big, viral story as being one of the top stories to bring in new readers.

However, the small commission I started getting each month was dwarfed by the cut in earnings.

But something else happened in February. My stories stopped getting boosted. Remember, a boosted story earns way more than a non-boosted story. During their change binge from September 2025 to February 2026, they slightly lowered the payout for boosted stories to increase the payout for non-boosted stories. This meant the drop off when my stories stopped getting boosted was slightly less disastrous.

As best as I can tell, currently, I get about three cents a read for a non-boosted story and somewhere between 5 and 7.5 cents for a boosted story, on average.

I had several boost nominators reach out to me to tell me that they had no idea why my stories were not getting boosted anymore. A couple of honest souls apologized that they were no longer going to nominate my stories because they were losing money. Medium completely lacks transparency to boost decisions. I get it. I would stop nominating my stories, too.

However, the lack of my storied being accepted for boosts has led to a kind of death spiral. People aren’t going to nominate my stories, fewer people will see my work, and my growth will slow to a crawl.

I’m not mad at Medium. They don’t owe me anything, and they gave me a wonderful 18-month ride. It’s not like I was singled out. I’ve known several writers who have gone through the same or a similar experience. My big mistake was not doing more to use Medium to build something more sustainable before now.

But I cannot keep posting at the same rate there. I need to pay my bills.

Substack

I started my Weirdo Poetry Substack newsletter in September 2020. It was a pandemic baby. On Substack, I’ve found a wonderful community, the courage to charge directly for my work, and my artistic voice.

Substack was where my poetry comics first saw the light of day.

But I’ve never made much money there. At the height of my Medium success, each month I made two or three times what I make in a year on Substack. Now, each month on Medium, I make about half of what I make a year on Substack.

The truth is that what I do is not a great fit for Substack. I refuse to do a lot of what that platform considers best practices. Again, that’s my choice. But the thing that Substack keeps doing that has pushed me to build my own platform is that it keeps giving the worst people in the world a platform.

They take a percentage of the money my readers pay and go out and boost hateful voices.

I’m also not comfortable with the venture capitalists who are investing in the platform. To me, it’s clear that Substack doesn’t care about small creators; they want to attract celebrities and big stars. They don’t want to grow slowly and empower independent writers anymore.

As I mentioned above, there is still a lot that I love about Medium and Substack. I’m not leaving these platforms. But I no longer trust them as core pillars of my business. From now on they are places where I find new readers, where I syndicate my work, and places where I can direct people interested in learning more about what I do to this humble website.

Many of the issues plaguing me on Medium and Substack are really just echoes of issues I’ve found on many other platforms over the past two decades.

It’s time I finally learned to stop building anywhere else but here.

Diagnosing the Issues with My Business

There’s an old aphorism, old at least as far as the internet goes, that riches are in the niches. The idea is that it’s easier for people to find you and trust you if you do one thing, if they know what label to hang on you.

I’m too weird to be nicheable. I’m neurodivergent, and making the same kind of art or writing the same kind of post week after week is torture.

Algorithms don’t really know what to do with me. They want consistency in terms of subject matter, content format, and posting schedule. Editorial calendars suck all the joy out of my life, and I cannot create without joy.

I do my best work when I’m persistent, not consistent.

I show up when I have something ready. Sometimes that’s every day for a week or two. Sometimes it’s once a week. But I don’t want to make and share something just for the sake of a schedule.

Instead of trying to conform to what a platform, or their investors and stakeholders, wants, I need to make something that fits with my life and delivers the kind of delightful experience my readers love.

The issue isn’t just that I don’t fit what platforms want; it’s that my readers deserve better than what a platform can deliver.

Creating on a platform like Medium or Substack doesn’t cost me anything, except it does. All platforms are middlemen. YouTube, TikTok, Medium, Substack, Patreon, and whatever new things emerge tomorrow, all enact a kind of creator tax. The platforms always get their cut.

That’s not a good business model. When I ran brick-and-mortar businesses, I paid a small fee for credit card processing. That pales in comparison to the 10%, 20%, or more that platforms are taking from the money my readers want to pay me for my work.

I need a much smaller audience to be financially viable and sustainable when I go to you directly.

Another weakness of many platforms is the comment system. While I love the comment section on Substack, I hate the Medium comments. I get so many spam comments with links and AI-generated summaries of what I’ve written that I rarely reply to any comments. This robs you and me of the chance to better connect.

Here, I have much more control over the comments. Right now, I, or my unpaid interns (thanks, kids!), have to manually approve each comment. These allow me to meaningfully reply to each comment and to delete hateful or spammy comments before they are ever published.

Like any media business, I do need a stream of new eyeballs. But I need far fewer new readers when I have more control over the reader experience. I get to keep more of the money readers are paying for my work, and I get to be in charge of the customer service experience.

For years, I dealt with imposter syndrome. But after the past two years, I understand that there is a strong and loyal audience for my work. There are loads of people who want me to be more me, weirder, more experimental. They love the niche that is Jason McBride, and when I serve the needs of platforms, I hurt my creativity and stifle what readers like about my work.

In the early days of the internet, when compressed audio files of dubious legality were being passed around, there evolved a convention of tags that held metadata about files. Data included the artist’s name, the name of the song, the name of the album the song was from, and the genre of the artist. A set list of genres is auto-populated into a pulldown menu in many programs when listing the genre. You would see things like Rock, Rap, Country, and so forth. But my favorite genre was Primus. If you don’t know, Primus is a band led by singer and lead bass player Les Claypool. In those heady early days, there was a consensus that Primus was a genre unto itself.

I like to think of myself like that. Jason McBride and Weirdo Poetry may not be as legendary or talented as Les Claypool and Primus, but we are just as strange.

What I’m Building and How I’m Building It

I’m building a blog that harkens back to the delightfully weird early days of the internet. I’m going to be slowly creating in parallel with my Substack newsletter, but with a store attached.

First, I’m gradually copying my old Medium and Substack posts and reposting them here so that Weirdo Poetry is an archive of all my online work. I’m posting all my new work here on this site and syndicating some posts to Substack, others to Medium, and some to other platforms.

If you are a paying subscriber to my Substack, you can stay there forever and not see much of any difference. You will still get all your benefits and enjoy exclusive member posts. If you’re a paid Medium member, all my posts there will still be paywalled.

But I will also have an option here on this site to become a paid subscriber. It will be a pay-what-you-want system, with a minimum price of $1 per month. Most of the posts will always be free on the website, but I will paywall some posts. You will be able to unlock a single post for a nominal fee if you don’t want a recurring subscription. I will also have links to leave me a tip on most posts. Paying subscribers will also get other benefits like store discount codes and free ebook versions of my books and zines.

One thing I struggled with on Medium and Substack is the number of topics I want to write about. I don’t want to overwhelm readers with posts they are not interested it. Some of you might enjoy my thoughts on poetry, while others care more about my creative business insights. Once I finish this transition, when you subscribe for free or as a paying member, you can opt in or out of the different categories I write about. There will be around ten topics that range from politics and technology to haiku.

These changes will be coming in the next several months. I don’t want to burn myself out, and I also need to make up the sudden income shortfall from the Medium fuckery with freelancing and some brand-new services I’ll describe further down.

I want you to enjoy my work in whatever way works best for you. If you want to stick with Medium or Substack, great! But if you want to switch your subscription to me directly, I want to make that super easy and worth your hard-earned money.

Another thing I will be doing is separating the physical mail versions of what I offer from the digital experience here. On Substack, paid subscribers get postcards, or at the higher tier, monthly letters and poetry comics.

Because anything I send through the mail has set costs, a pay-what-you-want model doesn’t work. Plus, costs keep going up. I’m going to make the pay-what-you-want tier digital only on this site. Then, through my store, you can instead join my Weirdo Poetry Snail Mail Club to get both the digital benefits and the physical letters. I will create something similar for the quarterly postcards, priced appropriately.

I will also be experimenting with other ideas. I’m going to offer a Brainstorming service where you can book an hour call and have me help you work through creative blocks, creative business issues, or so you can pick my brain about indie publishing or poetry.

Right now, I’m toying with designing some correspondence courses. Instead of a boring video course that every online entrepreneur offers, I want to send you workbooks I designed with letters each week for four, six, or twelve weeks that have lessons.

I already sell physical and ebook versions of all my books and zines directly through my website. I will be adding services, t-shirts, and art prints there, too, over the coming months.

The real purpose of all of these changes and additions is to allow me to have enough financial stability to make more weird stuff.

Currently, I’m working on my next book. It’s called Quit. Pivot. Grit: A three-step dance for living a happy, creative life. But instead of a normal book, this will be interactive. Did you ever read those Choose Your Own Adventure books as a kid? This will be kind of like that, but non-fiction and filled with poetry comics as well as helpful advice.

Will Quit. Pivot. Grit. sell? Who knows. But I want the freedom to take huge creative risks, and this site will help me get there.

Being my own niche and my own platform gives me more creative and business control. I may even experiment with more audio and video formats. As I embrace being the niche and the platform, I allow myself the freedom to grow and evolve in ways that were impossible when I was trying to please the unseen algorithmic gods of other platforms.

I will be writing about my journey of building out this website here on the blog under the category, To Sell is Human, to Art is Divine. You can also sign up at the end of this post to get email updates about my progress and to be the first to hear about new features as they roll out.

I sign every one of my Substack newsletters with the phrase, “Be the weird you want to see in the world.”

This website and blog are my way of taking my own advice.

To Sell is Human, To art is divine

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    Jason McBride is a poet-cartoonist and best-selling author. His most recent book is “How to Create a Life You Love.”

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