Subscriptions are good because you only get paid if your readers believe you’re doing good work. You don’t have to worry about reaching a mass audience, so you can focus on maximizing trust instead of pageviews.
Email isn’t owned by any one company, so you can reach your readers reliably without intervention by an aggregator. It also comes to you, so you don’t have to remember to keep checking a website.
We are attempting to build a product that is so good that you will make money from your writing even if you have no clue about business, technology, or link-coloring. Just type into a box, hit “publish,” and wait for the cash to fling itself at you.
We wasted the first thirty years of the internet futzing around with ad optimizations and trying to game capricious aggregators for scraps from their table.