A Note About The Future Of This Blog
The NHL season is a month away and my previews will continue Tuesday (September 9) as normal, but I want to give a bit of an update about this blog.
The ‘10 Interesting (To Me) Stats’ column will return for the 2025-26 season, so don’t worry about that. But I will be moving this column off of Substack and onto a platform named Ghost. This isn’t done lightly because I hate having to move my work anywhere. It is a pain in the ass for both me and you, and doing something that annoys everyone is generally a bad idea, but there are three reasons why this is happening.
The first is that Substack has changed its payment rules for users outside of the United States. It is explained in detail in this post from journalist Isabelle Roughol, but the long-and-short of it is that Substack added Apple Payments to its system, and while there are laws allowing users in America to avoid Apple Pay, that is now the default payment system for users outside of America. For anyone unfamiliar with Apple’s business here, they take a 30% cut of all payments. That means users outside the United States will see a 30% price increase in their Substack subscriptions, or the Substack writer will see a 30% decrease in payments from non-American readers. I don’t know about you, but as a general rule, I try to limit how much money multi-billion-dollar corporations can gouge from me for basically no reason. It has been hard recently due to *gestures broadly* but it’s still a general rule. That matters a lot for me because roughly 40% of my subscriber base is from outside of the USA. Also, because non-US payments are through Apple Pay, they have control over payments, and not me. Which means if, at some point in the future, I want to add a paid tier for additional posts, I cannot do things like offer a free trial run, or a sale, or anything like that. Whatever the price is for non-US users is what the price will always be (plus 30%), and I can’t offer discounts.
The second reason is the infiltration of bot accounts. It is a problem almost everywhere, but it’s becoming more prevalent on Substack. There have been articles about it but just check the Substack sub-Reddit to see writers seeing a huge boost in bot subscriptions. I haven’t personally had that issue yet (I don’t think), but I prefer not to guess whether a comment from or chat with a reader is a real person.
The third reason is I get to keep all my data. Right now, everything I upload goes to the Substack server. With Ghost, everything I upload goes to a server that I rent. That means I have more control over the blog and (if I have to), I can migrate everything elsewhere more easily down the road.
Again, I know having to move to a new spot sucks, and moving away from Substack isn’t happening right away. But it will happen before the regular season starts, and I’ll give notice, share links, and all that to try to get as many of you over to the new blog when it opens. The good news is that because this is just a newsletter, I can (likely) move my subscriber list from here to Ghost without much interruption. But I will still be giving notice and sharing the new links in future ‘10 Stats’ posts, and the move will still come before the NHL season starts.
Thanks for understanding, everyone. Let’s get excited for some hockey.
Cliffy
