How Substack Has Spawned a New Class of Newsletter Entrepreneurs

This is all very good news, for writers and for readers. Filtering news and adding useful commentary is a nontrivial task, it’s hard to scale, and scaling it in one domain doesn’t imply skill in doing it somewhere else (if I switched places with someone who wrote a sports newsletter, we’d both lose all our readers). But the subscription newsletter ... See more

The “passion economy” thesis assumes that an audience will want everything a creator brings to market, the way viewers of the “Rachael Ray” show will often buy Rachael Ray cookbooks and cookware. But starting a newsletter does not immediately lead to speaking engagements, and not all writers can generate multiple distinct products. Yglesias told me... See more

What’s interesting about newsletters is that consumers are willing to pay for them. While blogs have never really figured out monetization (apart from ads), Substack alone claims more than 50,000 paying subscribers.

Twitch and Substack unbundled the cable TV package and the mainstream news publication in two ways. First, they made it possible for a single creator to publish content and find an audience without being part of an organization. Second, they made it easy for fans to support their favorite creators without having to pay for a "bundle" of many creato... See more