The Substackerati

Newsletters go back at least as far as the Middle Ages, but these days, with full-time jobs at stable media companies evaporating—between the 2008 recession and 2019, newsroom employment dropped by 23 percent—Substack offers an appealing alternative.

What’s interesting about newsletters is that consumers are willing to pay for them. While blogs have never really figured out monetization (apart from ads), Substack alone claims more than 50,000 paying subscribers.

Newsletter businesses are by no means new: Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow’s wellness empire, started as a newsletter back in 2008; Morning Brew, which launched in 2015, now brings in more than $20million in revenue.Business analysts such as Ben Thompson of Stratechery and Bill Bishop of Sinocism have built substantial readerships around their insightful tak... See more