What Substack is doing is taking the power away from readers and themselves, and giving it to authors. What does that mean? They are betting that in the market of long-form articles, the player with the most power is the author, not the reader. It’s the supply that matters, not the demand.

Bring Your Own Audience (BYOA) platforms focus on enabling value generation for creators who lead an existing fan base there.  BYOA’s core value is not top of funnel discovery, there is no algorithm creators have to dance around to get eyeballs. With BYOA, the creator’s job is to drive traffic to the BYOA platform, and the platform’s job is to... See more

-Low discoverability (platforms don’t help creators find/connect with new subscribers).