Unbundling Journalism | Chris Best on Venture Stories

On Substack, you own your email list. You have the autonomy to transfer to other sites.

The conversion rate for paid subscribers is about 10% so if you have 10,000 readers, about 1,000 will pay for your work

When your readers pay for your writing, they are the only ones who can fire you

“I think that there’s a future we could build that would be better than anything we’ve seen in the past”

It’s possible to build a structure that aligns incentives for readers and writers and doesn’t depend on click-bait or outrage articles

The internet both helped and hurt journalism

News companies lost a ton of revenue because platforms such as Facebook could deliver more targeted ads and consequently companies shifted their ad money towards social media platforms

The business model for writers is dead. Writers write to please social media algorithms and advertisers instead of their audience.

On Substack, writers can directly email their audience. Medium is still figuring out their business models; they initially tried ads but now use a subscription model