Why do scientists flow into subsack

Like many epidemics during the Covid-19s, Katelyn Jetlina has turned into social media to help keep people in knowledge. This was in the spring of 2020, and Jetelina, then at the University of Texas University in Houston, often published content on the transmission of the virus and vaccines to its Facebook and Instagram pages. This is, until it was penetrated.

In February 2021, a group of anti -vaccine activists found a way to both calculations, using its platform to spread and promote various rhetoric. They even asked her followers to download Covid-19 vaccination cards for a chance to win $ 1,000, trying to get personal information. At this stage, Jetelina decided that she had to make a change. “It was a snare for me: I lost all my tubes, and all the blood, sweat and tears that I put in it,” you remember. “I decided to move to a platform where I had more property.”

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The most obvious option for her was Substack, a platform for independent writing and email. Its news features are praised – sending posts to the incoming boxes to subscribers – but the content is also available on the site, as with the standard blog. One of the features that I admired in particular, given its previous experiences, is that its data was convertable: if you decide to leave, or have to leave, you can take a list with an email subscribed to you. On February 8, 2021, Jetelina began to put more energy in its alternative publication, which is called by a local epidemic specialist.

Although she ultimately regained control of her social media accounts, and her team still publishes charts and videos there, Jetelina says Rumpck enables her to communicate with followers in a different way. As explains, the e -mail newsletter platform is more convenient for long and more intense discussions, which are not always possible on other forms of social media. Readers exactly share it, and the content is transmitted directly to their incoming box, which enhances more intimate and accumulated reactions. She says she got to know the readers well. “I can now have a two -way relationship with the audience, and share with them through comment and chat sections.”

Over the past few years, the newsletter has obtained strong followers and now has more than 400,000 subscribers. What was previously an offer from a single woman managed by a team of copies editors, social media creators, administrative assistants and other shareholders. It is also the main Jetelina function, she says. Since the general health emergency of the epidemic was “fading in the rear vision mirror”, its content had to change. Jetelina now aims to show society that public health goes beyond friendly diseases and infectious diseases, and writes about topics such as reproductive health, armed violence and mental health. “I really try to focus on how to provide people with the tools needed to live in a life -based life,” she says.

It was founded in 2017, and it is intended to give a platform for independent writers, and provides them with a way to achieve income from their works through walls and donations. She has grown quickly and now has tens of millions of subscribers, and more than five million paid subscribers. The platform also raised $ 100 million to expand operations, giving the company a value of $ 1.1 billion. It is not exclusive to scientists: many other academics, as well as journalists and even novelists, built a community on the platform.

A spokesman for “STIMBAD spokesman is home to an increasing number of academics and respected researchers who use the platform to exchange evidence -based work with the public.” nature. “For many, it is a way to reach people more quickly and open, while maintaining depth and accuracy.”

Every scientist who follows a great deal of a local epidemic specialist, who is currently ranked first in the list of scientific newsletters paid on Subsacks. But academics and other scientists in various disciplines have been attracted towards the platform as a way to enhance research and communication with the public.

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However, the site has its faults. It may take some time to build the following, and the profit may be a hard work. Not only that, but many of the best newsletters for science and health policy on the platform enhance the ideology of the fight against the erasing or false science. “It is the wild West, and it is running on a substitute, but this is now the same on any kind of social media platform,” says Gitellina. (A SUBSACK spokesman said it would be inaccurate describing the “majority” of the great science book as anti -fighting.)

accumulation

Shop other subscription content services-such as Ghost, MailChimp, Patreon, Beehiiv and Medium-as more effective in reaching people more than traditional social media. This is partially supported by marketing data. According to MailChimp, an email marketing platform in the United States, about 35 % of users open emails from companies in the education and training sector; For other industries, 30 to 40 %. In a series of recent messages on STIMBAD, the book shared the rates in which the subscribers opened their news messages, and the proportions ranged between 30 % to 70 %.

“With the facts, feelings and work,” says Kimberly Nicholas, a sustainability researcher at Lund University, in which we can reform the climate crisis “with facts, feelings and action,” says newsletters for email and opening them more than social media.

The site also helps to enhance the community participation environment. For Jonathan Tonkin, an environmental scientist at Canterbury University in New Zealand, the X social media platform was “a truly useful tool for scientists to communicate with other scientists, but with regard to reaching the audience that did not happen, to be honest.” Tonkin is now alternative publications called the introduction. He says: “It is good, I think, to reach people interested in science and not scholars.”

According to Thanpweb, a website for traffic analysis, STIMBAC’s audience is equally divided between men and women. It tends a little to the younger readers: the largest group consists of between the ages of 25 and 34. Users also tend to be in the United States, where there are about 62 % of traffic from there in July 2025.

“Scientific topics are accurate, and try to distil them into 140 characters that do not work very well, or leave people confused,” says Hana Richie, a data scientist at Oxford University. Ricci’s alternative and sustainability publication views the potential ways of sustainability through a lens based on evidence. “An email gathering,” she says.

Then there is a possibility of liquidation. Most scholars nature I spoke to confirm that its content is free, but the site gives the book the ability to prepare the walls. According to Jetelina, 7 % of its subscribers pay its content. Although the platform exceeds, it has managed to achieve sufficient revenues to end its full -time function and focus mainly on the newsletter. (Jetelina did not want to share its profits natureBut in 2022, the monthly magazine Vanity Fair She stated that she had achieved about $ 300,000 in the first nine months in the post).

Scientists also highlight that STIMBACK provides greater freedom from other publishing means – in magazines, for example, or through guest contributions to online posts such as conversation. As Ritchie explains, there is often a lengthy editorial process in these more perceived systems, and the book can be restricted with the requirements of the post. “The schedule has been greatly expanded compared to what you can do on substack, where you can get your own audience: you can say what you want, when you want to say that.”