The subscription-based news industry, the founders speculated, could someday “be much larger than the newspaper business ever was, much like the ride-hailing industry in San Francisco is bigger than the taxi industry was before Lyft and Uber.” These days, Substack’s founders, investors, and marketing materials all have different ways of describing the startup’s mission. Depending on which source you consult, Substack might be “reinventing publishing,” “pioneering a new ‘business model for culture,’ ” or “attempting to build an alternative media economy that gives journalists autonomy.” It is “writers firing their old business model” or “a better future for news.” Substack’s C.E.O., Chris Best, has said that the company’s intention is “to make it so that you could type into this box, and if the things you type are good, you’re going to get rich.” Hamish McKenzie, one of Substack’s co-founders, told me that he sees the company as an alternative to social-media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. “We started Substack because we were fed up about the effects of the social-media diet,” McKenzie said. Substack’s home page now reads, “Take back your mind.”
Substack, like Facebook, insists that it is not a media company; it is, instead, “a platform that enables writers and readers.” But other newsletter platforms, such as Revue, Lede, or TinyLetter (a service owned by Mailchimp, the e-mail-marketing company), have never offered incentives to attract writers. By piloting programs, like the legal-defense fund, that “re-create some of the value provided by newsrooms,” as McKenzie put it, Substack has made itself difficult to categorize: it’s a software company with the trappings of a digital-media concern. The company, which currently has twenty employees, has a lightweight content-moderation policy, which prohibits harassment, threats, spam, pornography, and calls for violence; moderation decisions are made by the founders, and, McKenzie told me, the company does not comment on them. Best has suggested that Substack contains a built-in moderation mechanism in the form of the Unsubscribe button.
It’s an interesting time for such a hands-off, free-market approach. The Internet is flooded with disinformation and conspiracy theories. Amazon’s self-publishing arm has become a haven for extremist content. The flattening effect of digital platforms has led to confusion among readers about what is reporting and what is opinion. Newsrooms at the Times and the Wall Street Journal have taken pains to distinguish their work from that found in the op-ed sections. Substack has advertised itself as a friendly home for journalism, but few of its newsletters publish original reporting; the majority offer personal writing, opinion pieces, research, and analysis.
A Substack newsletter is both a product and a portfolio: a way to make money, but also a venue for displaying personality, intelligence, and taste. Read enough of them and certain patterns begin to emerge. Newsletters in the business and tech categories tend to adopt para-LinkedIn tics. They are often studded with Twitter screenshots and lists of links. Single-sentence paragraphs appear frequently, as do uplifting rhetorical devices. (“Imagine a world where you had a personal board of advisors—the people you most admire and respect—and you gave them upside in your future earnings in exchange for helping you. . . . Imagine if you could diversify by pooling 1% of your future income with your ten smartest friends.”) Just as there is “podcast voice”—that inquisitive, staccato bedtime-story cadence—there is Substack tone, a semi-professional quality suited to mass e-mail. Some newsletters convey intimacy, in the language of psychotherapy and self-help, but their style is more polished and structured than that of the looser, rangier blogs of the early two-thousands. “Maybe Baby,” for all its vulnerability, is also aware of itself as a commodity, dialled in to its audience. Still, it’s nice, from time to time, to receive a chatty, engaging, personable e-mail from someone who doesn’t expect a response.
Newsletters have existed since time immemorial. As Silicon Valley came into being, newsletters were among the earliest trade publications. In 1983, Esther Dyson, a former business reporter and Wall Street securities analyst in her thirties, purchased a nine-year-old newsletter about semiconductors and personal computing, the “Rosen Electronics Letter,” from her boss, Ben Rosen, who was selling it to focus on his work at a venture-capital firm. Dyson, who wrote for the newsletter and had a reputation as a confident, quotable technology expert, renamed the publication “Release 1.0.” The design was unadorned, formatted in a single column, and printed on white paper; an early issue, published that November, offered twenty-nine pages of her research and opinions on hot topics of the day, from end-user training to newly public tech companies. “Normally we don’t like to be nasty: we’d rather simply be silent,” she wrote, in a section on vaporware. “But the current rash of purported revolutions, breakthroughs and new generations requires some comment.” The subscriber base included two thousand people, most of whom paid three hundred and ninety-five dollars a year to receive the newsletter monthly, through the mail. This readership was modest by mass-media standards, but it included an enviable A-list of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and executives, bolstering Dyson’s nascent image as one of the most powerful women in computing.
In 1985, Aldus, a small startup in Seattle, began working on a software program called PageMaker, to design and organize newspaper layouts. (Paul Brainerd, an Aldus co-founder, who coined the term “desktop publishing,” had previously worked as a journalist.) The company caught the attention of Steve Jobs, who encouraged the founders to adapt the software for a broader business environment. That year, Apple released its first mass-market laser printer, the LaserWriter—a seven-thousand-dollar beige machine that produced professional-grade text and images—and promoted it alongside PageMaker, an early desktop-publishing program for Macintosh. A corporate office or a carpeted den could now become a bespoke printshop. PageMaker’s layout elements mimicked those of a newspaper. The software, with its suggestive columns, seemed to say: Circulate!
Almost immediately, newsletters—on personal finance, high-end travel, U.F.O.s, carnivorous plants, surfing, bluegrass, numismatics, farming, and, of course, computing—proliferated. Independent publications had long circulated in the finance and technology sectors, offering data and analysis not easily found elsewhere. (Charles Schwab, the financial-services company, began as “Investment Indicator,” a newsletter first published in 1963.) But, for the most part, newsletters had been the province of civic groups, religious congregations, cultural and educational institutions, and corporations—as well as some restaurant enthusiasts, including Tim and Nina Zagat, who began printing “The Zagat Survey,” a collection of crowdsourced restaurant reviews, in 1979. “Desktop Publishing,” a guidebook released in 1986, included a chapter on newsletters’ “golden opportunity,” and emphasized the value of a unique, voice-driven editorial style. A small galaxy of adjacent companies, such as digital-font foundries and clip-art production outfits, emerged to satisfy the desire for customization. “One of the unfortunate side effects of the desktop publishing craze is that we are being flooded with publications that look as if they had been created by a drunken committee under a full moon,” a 1987 Times article read. “The ease of cutting, pasting and assembling a publication in no way guarantees the merit of the end product in either content or visual appeal.”
In the nineties, as desktop computers and printers became more affordable, some subscription newsletters began serving groups whose needs were unmet by larger media outlets, in a sort of professionalized parallel to zine culture. “Out & About,” a newsletter founded in 1992, rated hotel chains and travel agencies on their “gay-friendliness,” and recommended companies such as Eco-Explorations, a lesbian-owned scuba-and-sea-kayak concern, and Gay’n’Gray Partners in Travel, for men over forty. “Bully Pulpit,” launched in 1998 by the Welfare Reform Network, published rebuttals to misinformation in the media about poverty and government assistance. Newsletters also provided a forum for fringe political views: the medium was popular among violent anti-abortion activists and members of militias. At the height of the nineties culture wars, figures like Rush Limbaugh (“The Limbaugh Letter”) and Paul Weyrich (“The Weyrich Report”) also found an additional revenue stream in newsletters.
The rise of the commercial Internet upended newsletters, along with everything else. Publications offering restaurant listings or information about frequent-flier deals were usurped by message boards, forums, search engines, and free public databases. Communities found blogs, and bloggers found new sources of income in advertisements, sponsors, and affiliate links. Some newsletters went digital, or folded; others morphed into more traditional enterprises. “The Hideaway Report,” a luxury-vacation newsletter launched in 1979, became a boutique travel agency; “Dr. Andrew Weil’s Self Healing Newsletter,” first published in 1995, spawned a small empire. (The newsletter was later purchased, together with Body & Soul Magazine, by Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, for six million dollars.) “In many ways, I see the example of how I work as representative of the way things are going for creators,” Dyson told the Times in 1996, in an article about PC Forum, a conference held for “Release 1.0” subscribers, which brought in $1.5 million a year. “The money-making part of my business is really an offshoot of the content production. Also, I do other things: consulting, speeches, which come to me because of my writing. In other words, I get paid for my activity rather than my products.”
Dyson was once again prescient: today’s “creators” often split their activity across a range of platforms. They use multiple social-media accounts to craft and maintain their personal brands; to monetize them, they offer exclusive content or privileges. In recent years, companies like Patreon and OnlyFans have made it easier for people to support, via subscriptions and micropayments, writers, artists, podcasters, comedians, fitness instructors, photographers, musicians, singers, sex workers, gamers, dancers, educators, and influencers. Substack allows writers to collect subscription income without leaving the Web site, through an integration with the payment processor Stripe. (Stripe takes about three per cent of every subscription charge, as well as thirty cents per transaction; this comes out of the writer’s revenue share.)
In 2018, Substack raised fifteen million dollars in funding, primarily from the venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, whose portfolio companies also include Lyft, Caviar, and Instacart. Substack operates in what Andreessen Horowitz has taken to calling the “creator economy” or the “passion economy.” In 2019, in a blog post titled “The Passion Economy and the Future of Work,” Li Jin, a partner at the time, discussed the opportunity for “monetizing individuality.” Drawing on the example of the gig-work economy, Jin suggested that everyone could be an independent contractor. She pointed to Outschool—a Web site where teachers and coaches offer instruction on topics like playwriting, mindfulness, and English as a second language—and to Cameo, the surreal online marketplace where celebrities can be hired to record customized video messages. “Gig work isn’t going anywhere—but there are now more ways to capitalize on creativity,” she wrote. “This has huge implications for entrepreneurship and what we’ll think of as a ‘job’ in the future.” When I spoke to Dyson recently, she told me that she was intrigued by applications like OnlyFans, in which she saw a new business model for celebrities and influencers, one that did not depend on advertising: “People who receive attention, kind of for free, then give attention back to people and charge for it—the attention they’ve garnered has become a genuine commodity that they can sell.”
Nahman’s income from “Maybe Baby” well exceeds the full-time salary she made at Man Repeller; Yglesias’s newsletter, “Slow Boring,” has a readership that includes more than six thousand paid subscribers, and he is making twenty-seven thousand dollars a month. (Yglesias opted to receive a two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar advance from Substack, which, in return, will take eighty-five per cent of the subscription revenue from his first year. In his second year, Substack’s commission will revert to ten per cent.) But Substack’s founders have acknowledged that, for the majority of writers, a newsletter will be a side hustle. In most cases, subscription fees will generate not a salary but something closer to tips. In a recent blog post on Medium, Hunter Walk, a venture capitalist, compared a newsletter to a stock-keeping unit, or SKU, a term of art in inventory management. “The biggest impact of someone like Casey [Newton] unbundling himself” from the Verge, Walk wrote, “is that he is now an entrepreneur with a product called Casey. His beachhead may very well be a paid newsletter . . . but the newsletter is just one SKU. . . . There could be a podcast SKU. A speaking fee SKU. A book deal SKU. A consulting SKU. A guest columnist SKU. And so on.” Lisa Gitelman, a media historian and professor at New York University, said, of Substack, “They obviously want to call it a democratizing gesture, which I find a little bit specious. It’s the democracy of neoliberal self-empowerment. The message to users is that you can empower yourself by creating.”
The “passion economy” thesis assumes that an audience will want everything a creator brings to market, the way viewers of the “Rachael Ray” show will often buy Rachael Ray cookbooks and cookware. But starting a newsletter does not immediately lead to speaking engagements, and not all writers can generate multiple distinct products. Yglesias told me that he considered Twitter to be “an incredible acquisition funnel for customers,” but said that “the interplay between Twitter, which is obviously free, and the newsletter, which is mostly paid, is the trickiest thing to get right in the business.”
