Have Finally Enabled Paid Subscriptions. Distinctly Unimpressed.
I finally got around to enabling reader payments on my Substack, which involved creating a Stripe account (Hobson’s Choice apparently) and linking it to my bank account. Five of the 8 pledges were converted to actual payments, 1 was blocked and two are in limbo marked ‘incomplete’. The fee for receiving these payments is something like 12% of the gross payment. Nice work if you can get it Stripe/Substack. The Stripe dashboard is a nightmare to navigate and very confusing; numbers all over the place which are difficult to understand where they come from.
Then there’s Substack itself. They are telling me that I got 9 subscribers from my post on the Newquay beached fin whale, 6 of them paid, with an estimated gross annual income of $580. Wow. How did that happen? Turns out that five of those paid subscribers which that single post apparently generated are the pledges made from ages ago which have been converted to paid subscriptions! So they’re double-counting payments. Isn’t that what you call ‘creative accounting’ Substack?
Anyway, not impressed. Hopefully, the experience of researching, writing, publishing articles and then very gratefully receiving welcome donations from appreciate readers gets better as time goes on. And I’m not in the best of moods anyway today because the globalist shill lies in the media are really getting to me and try as hard as I might, I can never compete with those lies by exposing the truth here in my own little corner of Substack, banned even from Twitter/X and thus the possibility of promoting my work there to a wider audience.
Here’s something that might cheer you up, a home monologue by Neil Oliver on conspiracy theories which turn out to be true, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-vMk4d5QX0&t=10s.
His opening chimes with my own thoughts, pointing out how obvious the machinations of our politicians are and lamenting that so many people still don’t see through them and let them get away with murder (quite literally):
“I honestly don't know how much more ridiculously, hysterically inept our would-be totalitarian overlords have to get, how much more obvious their playbook has to be, how blatantly one-dimensionally predictable their behaviour must become before finally enough of us, of the general population, just guffaws into the faces of our supposed oppressors and spins them around and whips down their trousers and drives them out of town with a succession of swift kicks up the bahookie. It's the textbook definition of "farcical". Do they have to put on white face, red noses and giant shoes ... before everyone recognises them as the clowns, the malevolent clowns that they are. ... It's truly, truly beyond absurd to me now, what they keep getting away with. I've seen what they are up to for a long time now and it's frustrating when you see something that other people don't, or refuse to see”.
Ps Gosh does Substack really take 12%?? That is criminal!