| Well, the counterexample is all those writers trying to setup some open source system for their blog, or move to some competing service. This leaves two possibilities 1. They are financial idiots 2. The competing services are also priced/costed at a similar amount to substack, such that the writers can afford to pay the difference for ideological reasons. That competition exists for substack is telling enough, that there's still money to be made here. As for whether $100m is enough, substack is an very cheap platform to run. It can be run by a craiglist sized team if must. It is cheaper than any major publication, by virtue of not having either writers nor editors on staff. All the additional cost and VC requirement for substack came from it paying big dollars to attract famous writers, which it is no longer doing (And fired the teams managing those relations). There's also nothing stopping substack from adding ads to the free-users, much like how netflix does it. There's plenty of ways to monetize 50m users without infringing on the core experience. Also this wouldn't turn substack into medium, as the core issue with medium was the membership was site-wide, whereas substack is writer-level. |