Why the Substack hype is much ado about very little
Yeah, this is basically correct. The key issue is that people don&#x27;t want to pay $2&#x2F;month to twenty different writers. They want to pay $20&#x2F;month to a single organization which has a hundred writers, also known as a &quot;newspaper&quot;.<p>The logic is simple: an individual writer is always relatively niche. Niche means small audience. Small audience means you have to charge more per person to cover your costs.<p>Maybe Substack will go the Medium way and try to aggregate, or encourage its writers to aggregate. If so, then it could succeed, but it&#x27;ll succeed by becoming a newspaper. The problem is that the NYT, Guardian, Mail etc. have a lot of experience at doing aggregation well. (Each day has an appropriate mix of home, foreign, finance, and sports. The day&#x27;s editorial chimes with what the front page journalists wrote about. Long run investigations are funded in the hope of big payoffs. Et cetera.) Medium hasn&#x27;t really broken through, I think Substack would struggle.<p>An alternative is the status quo: Substack is a perfectly viable blogging tool, where aspiring journalists and writers like me [1] give away content for free, in the hope of breaking through to the next level, and where a few people make a good living. But if so Substack will fit into the existing landscape, rather than disrupting it.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wyclif.substack.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wyclif.substack.com</a>