Audience-first publishing

* “The most powerful new group of publishing brands will be built around people, focused on direct connections and not pageviews, and increasingly community driven.”

It seems to me, then, that the only long-term solution is to acquire customers directly, and to monetize them directly. The Internet is an efficiency machine, which means that closely related objectives, a la publishers seeking to reach more readers and advertisers seeking to reach more customers, are not sufficient; content and business need to be... See more

Substack also seems to understand something that few other technology platforms have understood: that the atomic unit of media isn’t an article, nor a media brand, but instead is the creator themselves.

Independent internet-native creators leverage the internet’s frictionless content creation and distribution, but they’re still trapped by traditional business models like subscriptions and advertising.

A subscription model is based on the promise of the production of future gated content. A publication or creator is paid to continue production, not ... See more

That meant there were three strategies available to media companies looking to survive on the Internet. First, cater to Google. This meant a heavy emphasis on both speed and SEO, and an investment in anticipating and creating content to answer consumer questions. Or you could cater to Facebook, which meant a heavy emphasis on click-bait and human i... See more

...this is just a restatement of our favorite McLuhanism, "The medium is the message" suggesting that a distribution channel is more important than the content it carries. I would modify it slightly to "The medium and monetization are the message"