My prediction: bundling. Most of the good content (excluding self-hosted) is now arguably on Substack, but the subscription model is still one-to-one and doesn’t allow them to take advantage of the network effects. There’s a limited number of subscriptions I’m willing to pay for. Bundling economics, if done right, could extract a higher monthly fee from me into the platform. After all, the marginal cost of providing content to me is negligible, so anything I’d be willing to pay for but not enough for to justify another subscription is money left on the table.
You know the joke that tech just rediscovers the pre-tech economy?
Like a rideshare company will pick up groups of passengers from a location and drop them to the same location in the direction you're going - oh, you just discovered buses. That kind of thing?
This is heading towards a you just discovered online magazines/newspapers jokes.
Ha, that’s fair, but a magazine-style model is only one way to go. Something like diminishing cost for adding additional subscriptions (with the discount split between the newsletters I subscribe to) would be effective in making me spend more there. (And probably abandon an off-substack paid subscription)