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There's two premises I disagree with in this article, one subjective, one objective. The subjective disagreement is that the trend/bubble towards more and more subscriptions is going to burst all of a sudden. From what I've seen in the mobile app world, it's now at least a 5-year trend towards more and more paid subscription apps being successful, more and more consumers willing to pay x$/month for things they wouldn't ever consider paying for before, etc. And yes, it's not billions of people, but you don't need billions of subscribers to run a successful business with subscriptions. And the same thing is happening with Patreon, Substack, even OnlyFans. And same as with mobile apps, so it is with creators, not all apps are worth the monthly fee, and not all creators are worth the monthly fee. The business model is not a revenue guarantee, it's a revenue possibility. And yes, as with any other solo business, it's extremely hard to stand out in blogging. You have to be a great writer, you have to know how to build an audience, and you have to consistently deliver that great writing to this audience. And there's about a few million other bloggers out there, with the same goal. There's no business model that's going to pay all of them well. But having the possibility of paying writers directly, simply and easily, is a very worthy evolution for the writer space. It's not going to save millions of bloggers/writers who believe the business model is the issue though. The objective disagreement is that Substack is only successful due to having VC cash to throw at writers to come to their platform. Yes, they have VC cash, and they have offered great upfront deals to writers. But Scott Alexander wrote a good post on this subject, revealing the details of his deal (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/adding-my-data-point-t...). Long story short, in basically all cases that he is aware of, his own and others, the deal that Substack offered was great, great enough to jump ship quickly, but in nearly all cases, the writer would have been better off not taking the deal, and just taking the usual Substack cut of the revenue offered to all writers, as the eventual subscriber revenue was bigger than the already big upfront deal. That makes me think that even once the VC cash dries out, subscriber revenue is going to be a pretty good driver of the business going forward. |