There's a natural book publishing model for Substack to mirror that of QQ Reading: Start with a free newsletter. Each edition is a chapter. Readers can consume X chapters for free (high start %). Once reader gets to chapter Y, they pay to unlock ending: https://a16z.com/2018/12/07/when-advertising-isnt-enough-multimodal-business-models-product-strategy/... See more

Subscription businesses allow you to distribute portions of your revenue to people who add value. This isn't rocket science this has been the business model for cable businesses for decades.

Let’s cut straight to the chase: advertising isn’t the right business model for Twitter. Twitter doesn’t have the scale for advertising (it has about 10% as many MAUs as Facebook) nor the ad chops (hence its low ARPU).

Twitter is one of the most dominant free networks, but it has only recently begun to offer payment capability. This provides one salient example of a creator platform that undersells the pitch. The company recently introduced the “Super Follows” feature, in which users can pay to receive bonus content from accounts they love. The service launched i... See more