By offering a seamlessly integrated email, payment integration (Stripe is a big part of all these revolutions), and no-design-needed opinionated web presentation, Substack managed to basically resurrect a zombie category of text media that hadn’t really existed in this kind of pure form since the 90s.
In its early days, Substack primarily catered to a certain set of internet-savvy writers and journalists, lured by the promise of monetizing a direct relationship with their readers. But as it morphs from a niche publishing concern into a heavyweight start-up mentioned in the same breath as Twitter and Facebook, its user base is proliferating accor... See more