“Nick had the audience before he had the Minnesota story. I had some of the stories before I had the audience.”
First, thank you.
A number of people have stepped up lately. I have had new paid subscribers, including a new yearly subscriber, and I have had some new contributions come in too. I appreciate every one of them.
I want to say that up front because I do not want this to sound like some “nobody is helping me” complaint. People are helping. The problem is that I keep seeing a lot of the same names.
Someone already has a yearly subscription and then sends money through Buy Me a Coffee. Somebody in Resistance Core sends something extra. Someone who donated before sees another appeal and does it again.
That means a lot to me. It also bothers me a little.
Not because I do not want the help. I do. But I do not think the same small group of people should have to keep making up the difference for everybody else.
Over the last 30 days, the total audience grew from 2,346 subscribers to 2,375. Paid subscribers slipped from 227 to 221.
So yes, the audience is still growing. But the paying base is not growing fast enough.
That shows up in the individual posts too.
Message to Islam: We Will Bury You reached nearly 1,900 views. More than 800 people opened the email. It brought in several new free subscribers.
Substack is not perfect about telling me exactly where every new paid subscriber came from, so I am not going to pretend the attribution is more precise than it is. But according to the post-level numbers, that essay produced zero directly attributed new paid subscribers.
Maybe one came in through some other path. Maybe not. The bigger pattern is what concerns me.
I do not need one good month followed by a flat month. I do not need a viral essay every six months followed by another rescue drive. I need a steady stream of new paid subscribers coming in all the time.
That is really the only way this becomes durable.
Substack changes things. Recommendation systems change. Discovery feeds change. A writer can be visible for a while and then suddenly much harder to find.
I am not saying somebody at Substack has a giant red Bury Chris button sitting next to the coffee machine.
But depending on an algorithm to keep delivering new readers is a lousy business model. Especially when your work does not exactly blend into the prevailing political culture on the platform.
The answer is to build enough audience, and enough distribution outside the platform, that the algorithm matters less.
That is what I am trying to do.
This publication was never supposed to become a little club where the same 2,375 people read everything every month and mostly agree with me.
I have been trying to build something closer to a reference library. A kind of wiki of arguments, statistics, history, documents, examples and subjects that people can come back to months later and send to somebody else.
A lot of these essays are meant to have a shelf life.
But a library is not much use if nobody new ever walks through the door.
I want these pieces getting in front of people who do not already think exactly like we do. People who disagree with me. People who have never seriously looked at some of these issues. Somebody who reads one essay, thinks I am full of shit on three points, but still walks away knowing something he did not know before.
That is a win too.
I push the work everywhere I reasonably can. I post here. I share it through Substack Notes. I put it on Twitter. I put it on Facebook, which horrifies a fair number of my friends. I put it on Truth Social. The site gets a decent amount of traffic through Google and the other search engines too.
All of that helps.
It is not moving fast enough.
And this is where Nick Shirley comes in.
Most Americans probably had no idea who Nick Shirley was before his Minnesota daycare investigation blew up after Christmas 2025.
But Nick was not starting from zero.
Right before that video went viral, his YouTube channel was sitting at roughly 1.1 million subscribers. Nineteen months earlier he had been around 100,000.
That is one hell of a difference.
He was not yet a household name, but he had already built the machinery. He had the audience. He had distribution. He had people waiting for the next thing he published.
The table was set and ready.
Then Minnesota landed on it.
Nick went there, put cameras on what was happening, asked questions people wanted answered, and published the result. The video did not have to claw its way out of obscurity first. It already had a huge audience waiting for it, and then the rest of the internet took over.
That does not diminish what Nick did. Quite the opposite. His work was outstanding.
But it does make me wonder something.
What if I had Nick Shirley’s exposure?
Months before Nick’s Minnesota investigation, I had already published From Somalia to Simoleons: The Ilhan Omar Machine on September 26, 2025.
https://mrchrisarnell.com/p/somalia-to-simoleons-ilhan-omar
I had also been digging into ActBlue and suspicious small-dollar political donations. I had written about Bernie Sanders’ famous $27 fundraising machine. I had written about Karmelo Anthony before that story got much broader attention.
I am not claiming I discovered everything first. I am not asking for a medal because I noticed something before it became fashionable to notice it.
That is not the point.
The point is that being early does not do much good if hardly anybody sees the work.
You can have the documents. You can have the numbers. You can spend three days researching the thing. You can write 6,000 words and be dead right about most of it, and directionally right about the rest.
If 2,000 people see it and the country only starts talking about it six months later, the information did not fail.
The distribution did.
That is the part I keep coming back to.
Nick had the audience before he had the Minnesota story.
I had some of the stories before I had the audience.
That is the gap.
I have already spent a lot of time setting the table with the work. What I do not have yet is enough people sitting around it.
And I am not interested in just adding another 500 people who already agree with me so we can all sit here and nod at each other.
I need the work reaching the next 2,000. Then the next 20,000. Eventually the next 200,000.
That takes more than writing.
It takes distribution. It takes video. It takes time. It takes help. It takes a bigger base of people paying enough to make those things possible.
That is why paid growth is so important.
A paid subscriber is not just eight dollars. Enough of them give me more time to research, more time to write, more ability to experiment with video, more ability to push the work farther, and eventually the ability to bring in help instead of trying to do every damn thing myself.
Right now, that flywheel is moving too slowly.
Thousands of people read this publication. Hundreds open the essays regularly. Many tell me the work is important.
A much smaller number pays for it.
And an even smaller number keeps paying again.
This post is really not for those people.
It is for the people standing behind them.
If you already subscribe yearly, belong to Resistance Core, or have contributed repeatedly, thank you. Seriously. You have already stepped up.
I need more people standing beside you.
If money is genuinely tight, this is not aimed at you either. Read. Share the essays. Send them to somebody. Help the work travel.
But there are also people who have been reading me for months. Some have read twenty essays. Some fifty. Some probably a hundred. They open the emails. They tell me the work should reach more people.
And they can afford eight dollars.
They just have not done it.
I am asking those people to do it now.
A regular paid subscription gives this publication a dependable base and buys more time for research, writing and distribution.
Resistance Core is for readers who want to help build something larger: deeper research, video, distribution, outside help, and eventually a small operation around the writing instead of one guy trying to do all of it.
If you would rather make a one-time contribution:
Venmo:
https://account.venmo.com/u/mrchrisarnell
I am going to keep writing either way.
The question is whether this stays a publication financed disproportionately by a small group of unusually generous people, or whether enough readers help build something that can actually travel.
Eight dollars from one reader is eight dollars. Eight dollars from a thousand readers is an operation.
But the thousand does not show up in one day.
It shows up one new paid subscriber at a time.
The goal is not to keep preaching to the same choir. The goal is to keep making the choir bigger, and occasionally get the guy standing outside the church to come in and listen.
Chris
I suggest you target placing a version of your articles in mass market publications like The Atlantic or Politico or The Free Press. Or newspapers. That will grow your audience, expand your name recognition and in turn draw more eyeballs to your substack and more revenue to your business. Substack articles are much less effective, in my opinion, in bringing in new readers.