The reason I find this company so interesting is it doesn’t seem like a venture-backable business at first glance. In order to get $100M in revenue, they would have to have $1.0B in gross subscription volume. When they went through YC, they had an average revenue / subscriber of $70. If that stays the same, Substack will need about 14.3M paid... See more

Journalists might want to be under a brand instead of on independent platforms

There may be fewer niche communities online and lower intent to pay for a subscription

Ad networks, most notably Facebook and Google, provided solutions to advertisers’ buying problems. The main thing they provided was more data on consumers.

The current unbundling phase is unsustainable and the long-term media business could look more like the past newspaper model than expected

Ads can be placed on any web page and web pages can be created ad infinitum. there is no supply constraint.

High-performing creators may churn from Substack to build their own cheaper backend

Another problem with this advertiser relationship with websites was logistics. Not only was it hard to decide which websites to buy ads on, but it was hard to coordinate. Each website often had their own ad sales team and there wasn’t enough time and resources as a buyer to deal with all these sales teams.

Companies like Memberful, Patreon, Ghost or others could become the platform that Substack is aiming to build