Anu Atluru on Substack

If our primary urge when we go online is to avoid remaining static, why should our content be siloed within the enclosed walls of a proprietary platform?

Substack isn’t the only player that has sought to figure out small-scale publishing in the platform dominance era. Medium, for instance, has been home to a rotating roster of small publications, but has pivoted often and failed to emerge as the media force many once hoped it would be. Best said Substack’s main focus is the connection between an ind... See more

A more pessimistic prediction is that the current True Fan revolution will eventually go the way of the original Web 2.0 revolution, with creators increasingly ground in the gears of monetization. The Substack of today makes it easy for a writer to charge fans for a newsletter. The Substack of tomorrow might move toward a flat-fee subscription mode... See more

Enter Substack. Substack, by eschewing the marketing communications (MarCom) market entirely, and focusing on writers people actually wanted to read, reversed the perceptions of the technology. Instead of trying to scam people into giving you “permission” to send them emails, Substack said, why not charge them to subscribe.

By launching reading apps for web and mobile, Substack is attempting to carve out a space in readers lives that is separate from administrivia and spam. A quieter, more sacred space. 

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.