A Good Newsletter Exit Strategy Is Hard to Find

Every innovation—technological, sociological, or otherwise—begins as a crusade, organizes itself into a practical business, and then, over time, degrades into common exploitation. This is simply the life cycle of how human ingenuity manifests in the material world. What goes forgotten, though, is that those who partake in this system undergo a simi

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When the blogger Andrew Sullivan switched his site to a subscription model a few years ago, his analysis of the situation was striking. He called subscription the “purest, simplest model for online journalism: you, us, and a meter. Period. No corporate ownership, no advertising demands, no pressure for pageviews . . . just a concept designed to mak

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Silicon Valley accelerates its investment in products and services for individual creators. Platforms explore new ways to let creators monetize their audiences directly, while taking a cut for themselves. Still, a gulf begins to appear between those who pay for content and those who do not. Subscription fatigue will turn out to be real. And perhaps... See more

But whether Substack is good for writers is one question; another is whether a world in which subscription newsletters rival magazines and newspapers is a world that people want.