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Substack reported 11,000 paid subscribers as of 2018, rising to 50,000 in 2019. In February 2019, the platform began allowing creators to monetize podcasts. Advertising to users plays no role in revenue generation. As of 2020, the minimum fee for a subscription was $5/month or $30/year, and Substack usually takes a 10% fee from subscription payments.
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Finances Īuthors can decide to make subscription to their newsletter free or paid, and to make specific posts publicly available to non-subscribers. The launch of Substack Notes resulted in criticism by Musk, and Twitter began censoring links to Substack on its platform. This microblogging feature was compared to Twitter, and many outlets considered it to be a response to changes at Twitter under the ownership of Elon Musk. In April 2023, Substack implemented a Notes feature which allows users to publish and repost short-form content. Substack announced in January 2022 that it would begin private Beta testing video on its platform. Īs of November 2021, the platform said it had more than 500,000 paying subscribers, representing over one million subscriptions. Lavery, George Saunders, Blake Nelson, Chuck Palahniuk, Marianne Williamson, and Salman Rushdie. Major writers on Substack include historian Heather Cox Richardson, tech journalists Casey Newton and Eric Newcomer, journalist Matthew Yglesias, economist Emily Oster, journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss, and authors Daniel M. In 2019, Substack added support for podcasts and discussion threads among newsletter subscribers.
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Around that time, The New Yorker said that while "Substack has advertised itself as a friendly home for journalism, few of its newsletters publish original reporting the majority offer personal writing, opinion pieces, research, and analysis." It described Substack's content moderation policy as "lightweight," with rules against "harassment, threats, spam, pornography, and calls for violence moderation decisions are made by the founders."
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As of late 2020, large numbers of journalists and reporters were coming to the platform, driven in part by the long-term decline in traditional media (there were half as many newsroom jobs in 2019 as in 2004). In 2020, The New Republic said there was an absence of local news newsletters, especially in contrast to the large number of national-level political newsletters. The New York Times columnist Mike Isaac argued in 2019 that companies like Substack see newsletters as a more stable means to maintain readers through a more direct connection with writers. Among the high-profile writers to have used the platform are Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist and author Glenn Greenwald and Seymour Hersh, culture critic Anne Helen Petersen, music essayist Robert Christgau, and food writer Alison Roman. Substack users include journalists, subject-matter experts, and media platforms. Christopher Best operates as chief executive as of March 2019. Best and McKenzie describe Ben Thompson's Stratechery, a subscription-based tech and media newsletter, as a major inspiration for their platform. Substack was founded in 2017 by Chris Best, the co-founder of Kik Messenger Jairaj Sethi, a head of platform and principal developer at Kik Messenger and Hamish McKenzie, a former PandoDaily tech reporter.
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Founded in 2017, Substack is headquartered in San Francisco. It allows writers to send digital newsletters directly to subscribers. Substack is an American online platform that provides publishing, payment, analytics, and design infrastructure to support subscription newsletters.
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