Disintermediating the media with… Substack?

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

If Medium were built on open data, Substack wouldn't have to build an editor, interface, and CMS from scratch. They'd build a subscription module that operates on top of the Medium editor and content. You could continue writing in Medium (or elsewhere) and publishing there while using Substack's subscription feature to build an audience and deliver... See more

You probably want to keep discovering new articles from new authors all the time. You want new learning experiences by matching with new authors. But once you discover a good one, you want to read more—or maybe even everything—from them. Since there are a lot of long-term relationships, there’s a big risk of disintermediation. This is the insight t... See more

Substack’s tagline— “a new economic engine for culture”—hides a paradox: high-brow and high-growth rarely coexist.