I Ran a Survey for My Subscribers. Here’s What They Actually Want (and What They Don’t)
Zero Votes for Longform, and Other Reader Truths
I recently ran a survey with Crudecast subscribers to better understand what readers value, how they engage with the newsletter, and what aspects of the platform get in the way. This post shares the main findings, including which topics resonate most, common frustrations with the Substack platform itself, and what actually motivates people to respond. I’m sharing these results in detail for other Substack writers who are curious about real audience behavior and the challenges of building engagement, especially in niche technical fields.
To get a candid snapshot of my Substack audience, I put together a short, anonymous survey. Only 20% of my subscribers responded in total. The survey included a mix of multiple choice and open-ended questions covering reading habits, preferred topics, article length, and feedback on features like the audio voice-over. It also offered space for any additional comments. To encourage participation, I included a few $50 Amazon gift card raffle at the end.
“Engagement” is a word every newsletter writer throws around, but it rarely gets defined from the reader’s point of view. My posts are at the intersection of energy, technology, and geopolitics. The audience isn’t huge, but it’s specialized. To go beyond open rates and click counts, I put the question directly to readers: what do you actually value, and what do you want more of?
It’s worth noting that the most consistent feedback I get from subscribers isn’t about the content itself, it’s about the platform. Many readers are overwhelmed by constant notification emails from Substack, often to the point of muting or filtering them out entirely. Several have mentioned confusion over the difference between Notes, Posts, Profiles, and Channels. Only a handful of subscribers actually use the Substack app. The vast majority interact with content through email.
Even when I offered $50 Amazon gift cards raffle as an incentive, only about a dozen readers took the time to fill out the feedback survey. It’s a good reminder for anyone running a newsletter that breaking through platform fatigue and digital overload is a bigger challenge than coming up with the next post idea. The lesson is to keep things clear, concise, and email-friendly, and never assume a flashy incentive will overcome notification fatigue. One surprise for me was that only half of my paid subscribers participated in the survey.
I categorized the topics into five main themes as seen in the chart below. Industrial AI & Digital Transformation leads the pack with more than one third of readers picked it as the most engaging or valuable topic. That’s a clear vote for applied, real-world technology stories over theory or policy alone. Both Energy Policy and Geopolitics and Historical & Book Analysis followed with less than 29%, each reinforcing that context and systems thinking still matter to the reader. Resource & Commodity Markets at around 7% is the fourth popular topic and to be fair I only had a few posts covering this topic.
Critical Technology Assessments remains at zero votes. No one sees standalone tech assessments as top-tier content. This says something about how the audience digests complexity. Applied technology is front and center. Readers are less interested in abstract or purely retrospective content, and more drawn to where AI and digital change collide with industry realities. Policy, history, and geopolitics came secondary as they frame the story, but readers want to see how those forces show up in the real day-to-day world. History is a value-add, not a core driver. The appetite is there, but only when it serves as a backdrop to today’s problems. I was a bit disappointed that not a single respondent selected "Critical Technology Assessments" as their most engaging topic, because I actually spent way more time researching and drafting those posts. What this tells me is that deep dives into technology transfer or university-industry partnerships only matter when they’re tightly connected to real-world application or industry transformation, not as standalone critiques or abstract frameworks.
The survey had interesting results about attention spans and reader priorities. Not a single respondent chose “longform posts” as their preferred article length. The overwhelming majority (64%) want content that’s digestible in 5–10 minutes, while nearly a third prefer pieces they can finish in under 5 minutes. Only 7% are interested in something approaching 10–15 minutes, and none want anything longer.
I have not tried video yet, but based on my survey, audio is divisive. Voice-overs have a niche following. For most, they’re optional, not essential.
The main lesson for me is to keep the focus on practical intersections like technology in action, policy as context, and history as supporting evidence. Readers desire content that translates big shifts in AI and digital into consequences they can see and question. The challenge is to make every piece an example of this intersection, not a lecture or a news brief. I am thankful that many praised the depth and thoroughness, encouraging more of the same. I have summarized some of the more common themes in the general comments:
Geopolitics & Energy Paradox: More discussion on geopolitics, specifically in the age of AI, and the contradiction between major powers' sustainability talk and increased oil and gas production.
AI & Technology: Interest in autonomous future vehicles, AI tools for enhancing productivity, and general AI topics.
Markets & Finance: Desire for more discussion on markets directly and indirectly tied to energy, including public and private equity, electricity, ammonia, carbon, bonds, and crypto.
Content Preferences: A wish for content that offers different perspectives or thought processes, with some enjoyment of historical context related to the energy industry.
Content Frequency: A respondent pointed out the abundance of content and suggested reducing the frequency of posts to make each feel more valuable.
Crime & Fantasy: A respondent expressed interest in crime and another in sci-fi fantasy topics.
If you write in any domain with technical complexity, ask yourself: does each post deliver a “so what?” that a practitioner or operator would care about?
I was once told by a marketing expert that surveying your readers is like tuning a radio, so you can cut out static and find the real frequency. The message from my readers is shorter context-rich analysis that lives in the real world. Every once in a while, a direct answer from your readers tells you more than a hundred open rate or click rate graphs. I hope sharing my survey results helps some of the other readers on this platform.