The Future of Substack

 Substack needs some network effects to keep authors tied to the platform, even if they can leave at any moment.  The best way to achieve that is through cross-promotion tools that allow authors to constantly gain new readers that they wouldn’t gain otherwise. That makes their presence on Substack truly valuable.

Another thing I would try is an exchange, which gives authors as much value as they bring to the network. Other companies have already figured this out. For example, in videogames. Companies like Chartboost appeared as exchanges between videogames. You’d plug Chartboost as an ad in your game that would promote other games. A good exchange shows how... See more

If I were Substack, I would end up doing a standard recommendation feed. I would use recommendations from authors, but I would also use recommendations based on AI: Substack has much more data on readers’ favorite types of authors and articles than writers do. If somebody reads the same five authors as you, it’s likely you’ll be interested in a 6th... See more

All of this brings us to the only way Substack can become a high-growth platform with network effects that attracts and retains all types of authors: it needs a way to cross-promote readers from one author to the other, while maintaining the authors’ independence, so that authors need to come to grow their audience.

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

What Substack is doing is taking the power away from readers and themselves, and giving it to authors. What does that mean? They are betting that in the market of long-form articles, the player with the most power is the author, not the reader. It’s the supply that matters, not the demand.

The main difference between Medium and Spotify is that Spotify is public about the share it gives to musicians (about 70%), because at least in the music industry, most of the rights are owned by a handful of labels who can pressure Spotify. Medium doesn’t face that pressure, because there are millions of writers who don’t coordinate. So Medium’s o... See more

In other words, Medium tries to be the Spotify of articles: you can have an audience, but you can’t control it. Pool your content with the rest, and we’ll expose it to readers (listeners) we control, and give you a share of the money we make.

My first 23 articles on Medium were read on average 5k times each. The 24th one, How to Become the Best in the World at Something, got nearly 300k views. It earned me less than $5k. That’s a dollar for every 60 readers.