Ben Thompson’s Stratechery should be crossing 3 Million in Profits this Year

In Substack’s case, life in the “paid publishing platform” market was rough, because very few people thought they wanted it, and the people who did were locked up by switching costs from the complex systems they rigged together. But competing in the “newsletter platform” market was a dream in comparison. Hamish could email writers on Mailchimp and ... 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

In the language of Ben Thompson, Substack has two choices. It can become a full fledged aggregator, build network effects and community, personalized content and so forth, but risk the moral purity of being one of the last ad-free algorithm-free corners of the internet, or it can become a platform, provide valuable infrastructure and flexible prici... See more