Ana Marie Cox on the Shaky Foundation of Substack as a Business

Post by add-sub-mul-div » Sat, Aug 02, 2025, 4:58 PM UTC

karaterobot wrote: post #12

Here's how little I understand business: $45 million in revenue, earned by taking a totally fair 10% of subscriptions that other people do all the work to get, seems like it ought to be enough. If leadership is trying to scale up to be thousands of employees, or to go public, they are lunatics and deserve to fail. Why not just run a successful newsletter platform?

Post by hiddencost » Sat, Aug 02, 2025, 5:02 PM UTC

randallsquared wrote: post #15

jeswin wrote: post #3

> It’s as unstable as a SpaceX launch Hate makes people blind. Starship is failing by design - that's just how they're choosing to develop it. The chopsticks video that we saw earlier was very nearly science fiction. And as far as regular launches go, SpaceX has done more successful launches than any company or nation ever. But more generally, this idea of abandoning an app (or product) the moment you encounter peopl…

Abandoning a community the moment you encounter people who disagree with you is how one builds a bubble strong enough to say things like the bit you quoted.

Post by danpalmer » Sat, Aug 02, 2025, 5:15 PM UTC

karaterobot wrote: post #12

Here's how little I understand business: $45 million in revenue, earned by taking a totally fair 10% of subscriptions that other people do all the work to get, seems like it ought to be enough. If leadership is trying to scale up to be thousands of employees, or to go public, they are lunatics and deserve to fail. Why not just run a successful newsletter platform?

Post by SilverElfin » Sat, Aug 02, 2025, 5:23 PM UTC

hiddencost wrote: post #23

barrrrald wrote: post #16

This post didn't age well – 3 weeks later Substack announced a $100m fundraise at $1.1b valuation. [1] Ana's contention that Substack is "rickety" seems motivated by her conviction that they should adopt a more assertive, aggressive censorship regime, and that "we need a world where a social safety net protects risky writing". There are certainly many interesting questions about the future of media and Substack's bus…

[flagged]

Post by socalgal2 » Sat, Aug 02, 2025, 5:34 PM UTC

kubectl_h wrote: post #19

scyzoryk_xyz wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always struggled to understand this part: what is it that Substack came up with that we did not have earlier? Aren't there a hundred examples out there of medium-sized websites providing a similar infrastructure mix?

Substack had a few things that worked for it * Patreon kind of sucks for writing / newsletters or else they could have captured part of this market. Medium was supposed to fix this but they had an epic collapse. * Single point where subscribers can manage their subscriptions and preserve a common identity across subscriptions in the comments etc. Again, Medium/collapse. * A rapid adoption of substack by well known on…