What CMS (or ESP) to use: WP, Licensed CMS, Medium or Substack

By Alisa Cromer

As a publisher and as a consultant, I have two biases. The first one is for building your own software, so I’m inclined towards WordPress. Death by CMS is the topic for another day, so I’ll just touch on it here.

Starting with platforms for small creators that publishers still use

“Free” software such as Substack isn’t always free. I do content marketing for a flat-fee-based software company that sells to the news industry and competes against a so-called “free” model.  The competitor’s model is actually a revenue share plus extra service fees. If the client succeeds, they wind up paying much more. Oh, and then they decided to bail on one category of customer, setting a big part of their customer base adrift on a short deadline to find a new tech partner.

The same is true for creators who want free turnkey software for a subscription model.

Substack still holds other significant value, however.

Press Gazette, the leading media outlet covering the media industry, uses Substack, but not to sell subscriptions, which they do on their own website. There is a certain amount of discovery and the halo effect of so many famous media personalities going out on their own on the platform, which makes it newsletter-attractive.

Plus, it is known for great deliverability. Medium, on the other hand, is more used for thought leadership and telling the story of a company, as the revenues, while they can add up, are driven by Medium’s pageview-based revenue model.

Here’s a real break down:

Substack – The free, but revenue share model

 If you already have a following and mainly want to build a subscription-based brand, Substack is both “free” and plug-and-play. 

But not so fast.

The definitive criticism of Substack was made in the article by Robb Hardy, who points out that “free” is actually a revenue-share model that penalizes success if you do, in fact sell subscriptions at scale, and it’s not well suited to an advertising model.

Let’s say you hit the ball out of the park and sell 200,000 subscriptions at $50 a year. Now, you are selling $1,000,000 in subscriptions and paying $50,000 to Substack. 

For $50,000, you can get a much better media-specific platform with more options. Heck, you can get a turnkey magazine or newspaper platform with lost of whistles and bells.

But as Hardy points out, if a writer wants to move to a new platform,  their very success makes it almost impossible.

How do they get credit card passwords and other customer data moved over? Can these customers be convinced to onboard a second time? Do the customers belong to the writer or Substack? What happens if Substack, a company that has taken on massive investment capital, is pressured from above to optimize for a more profitable category that has different needs than your own? 

Also, “you get what you get” in terms of things like the design of the check-out and so on.

Today it’s turnkey; tomorrow, you may want something that caters to an unanticipated audience request, save money on that $20,000 to $50,000 in commissions, or sells advertising in more sophisticated ways.

For example, Substack has no built in create courses, directories, or classifieds, and as soon as you create something like this, well, there goes the turnkey concept. 

The good news is the number of celebrity writers on the webiste. When Andy Borowitz, one of my favorite authors at the New Yorker, got laid off, he set up a Substack. 

So, I love this guy, but I already subscribe to the New Yorker, NYTimes, WSJ, WAPO, and FTimes, so I did not bite. 

If he turned the live events into a course on comedic writing, I would take it. Could he? Yes. But, he’d need another platform. 

So for niche media, it’s a good option for a newsletter, but not a replacement for a website that can develop new models. It’s also a great place to find niche writers, just type in your niche and Substack authors into GPT and you’ll ge the list.

Medium – Big discovery chops, uncertain revenues

Medium is also free and seems to be better at discovery – people sign up for Medium to get themed content. They subscribe as a news and voice discovery service, not to the specific author.

The partnership program is algorithmic. The authors get a split of something that can change at any moment based on pageviews and engagement signals. 

And I quote from Medium: 

“Earnings are based on member read and listen time, as well as member engagement signals like claps, highlights, replies, and new follows. You can earn between $10 and $100 per 1,000 views, but earnings depend on a number of factors.” 

Hmmm. The last thing I want today is a business tied to someone else’s algorithm. Been there, done that. 

But there is a place or Medium with break-out “thought leadership” area, when discovery is important.

 Kenny Katzgrau, one of my heroes, has a niche media company and a software business selling to media. He posts on LinkedIn, plus Medium. 

In this case, he’s not directly selling anything, but he is building a personal brand that indirectly helps sales, so Medium’s broader discovery reach is more important for promoting his brand.

WordPress – You can do anything, kind of

For niche publishers, I most often recommend WordPress.

WP has infinite options, and after paying the developer, the money belongs to you. If you want to change any aspect of your business model you can.

For example, let’s say you want to add a social media-style set of discussion threads for your community to add value to subscriptions. There’s a plug in and a developer on Upwork for that. 

I researched four or five o the best community apps that were already built (Slack, Circle, etc) but in the end, each was lacking some important feature. So I bought a WP plug-in for about $200 that was 90% there and hired a developer to customize it.

The downsides of building on WordPress are varied.

If you are not lucky enough to have some programming chops – and I am not – you’ll need to find development team. On Upwork, let’s say we’ve kissed a lot of frogs, but you can find an experienced developer overseas starting in the range of $30 and up. A fairly robust news site can go up for $500, and you can add revenue models as needed.

My developer charges $30 an hour and he is super, duper competent. He is in a somewhat inconvenient time zone, but in the U.S. top WP developers like XFive,  who are experienced in working with media, charge $100 to $200 an hour, and some want a retainer that guarantees $1000 a month.

For me, the ability to create what is valuable to members is worth the headaches involved with building WP sites, and these include managing the updates to all the plug-ins, security issues, and integrations so that membership levels can access things like courses and chat threads. 

Still, I have an IT person who works on the weekends, answers in 24 hours, and costs about $500 for a serious upgrade. Since I’m always building its always more than I want, but no code web dev tools like Lutra.ai and Replit are picking up a lot of the slack.

Licensing Magazine & Newspaper CMS software

For a flat fee, another option is to license media software. For companies publishing magazines, software companies have already figured out the web-first, then print model –  which is harder but not impossible – to find using WordPress.

Some of the software is so sophisticated  – such as Media OS – that it looks like a logical “next step” for a successful publishing company that has outgrown its version of WordPress, which tends to get slower and more entangled as the company grows. Priced at about $1000 a month it replaces a lot of licensed software such as the CRM, ESP, and Best of Contesting, has built in CDP, and best of all, everything is integrated.

EPublishing is another impressive company that seems to be keeping up with what entrepreneurial publishers want and need to build. One is a buyer’s guide with a tagging system that pulls directory listing into articles with related content. They also have a brand new AI chatbot that answers questions from the readers using the site’s owned content.

There are a variety of simpler, less expensive options. However, I have two caveats about using content management systems designed for media companies.

First, most CMS systems for media companies are designed with print in mind. For example the largest CMS serving newspapers studies the heck out of subscription sales, since that’s been a red hot growth area, but may now be leaning too far into that direction for media that want, say, more DIY upsells for directories, or an AI chatbot that accesses their archives.

In the “economics of easy” as Guy Tasaka puts it, anyone with a computer is going to compete, and media that are trapped by an “ads against content” model by their CMS may be at a disadvantage, basically hacking the CMS to get any new revenue model to work.

What about self-serve advertising that automatically feeds into a newsletter, or the next new thing you reallly need.  MediaOS and ePublisher may be exceptional, but they still iterates from and with customers, so they have to choose directions, which ones and how fast. With any third party CMS, the speed and choice of what to develop next is not actually up to the publisher.

What happens if the company your media runs on has a privacy breach while updating it’s credit cards – or worse, loses half of your subscribers?

If the company your media runs on is acquired by investors with different goals?

If their customer support simply stops returning phone calls and emails?

Call me a control freak, but all of these things have happened to me.

So for now, here’s what I recommend:

If you are a larger company, MediaOS has the best technology hands down. I’m liking what I see at eDirectory, too.

For small companies – not creators – I would stick with WordPress or Ghost.  Use Substack to improve deliverability, but not sell subscriptions, or Medium if discovery is most important and to add cache to your voice.