The company still isn’t profitable on an annual basis, and declined to say how much revenue has grown since it was reported to be a modest $9 million in 2022. But Substack has added more than a million paid subscribers over the last year. News content continues to account for the company’s largest segment of subscribers, and it has more in the pipeline.
To avoid fizzling the way competitors like Medium have, Substack is trying to become less a journalism platform and more a payment system for creators.
In recent months, the company has been reaching out to influencers, video creators and podcasters to convince them to join the platform. It doesn’t need beauty influencers, say, to all of a sudden become bloggers. But it does want to be the primary vehicle for paying creators regardless of medium.
Unless there’s a way to secure public funding for them, this seems like a reasonable middle road.
Like a Patreon, which while having its own unique set of problems, enables a paid content distribution ecosystem for independent creators unlike anything else available.
So, absent inserting invasive advertising, and lacking public funds, I can’t see how else they’re supposed to maintain infrastructure and development costs.
i mean my first layer of contention is that Substack is even a “journalism platform” for “independent creators” and not just a gentrified blogging platform like Medium, with a corresponding lack of vision in who it exists for and what it should be good at doing.
like, there are some actual journalists on there, yeah, but a lot of them are literally paid to use the platform/overlook the fact that it won’t do basic moderation like “banning fascists” (because the owners believe in the same technolibertarian nonsense as every other major platform). they wouldn’t be there at all without monetary incentives, which induce network effect and lock people into the infrastructure. and the scope creep is already real with Substack’s features, just like with whatever the hell Medium was doing 5-6 years ago. it’s trying to be an Everything App―even though nobody asked for that―and still the only things it does well are things that are basic functionality it can lift from elsewhere.