[1123581321]

They have a paid ratio of around 6% (around 35M subscribers, 2M paid.) Some correlating of past subscription and revenue figures suggests each subscribed user nets Substack $11 revenue. So perhaps 130 million total subscriptions to hit 100M revenue.

If that's compared to a mediocre social network like Twitter, which supposedly can show ~$45/year/user of ads, if Substack can get a quarter of its non-paid subscribers to view ads that are a quarter as effective (smaller economies of scale, weak ad partner etc.), they would still quadruple their total top line revenue.

And it's all upside from there because they can get better at selling ads at scale and they can grow unpaid followers by diluting their brand once they're confident it'll pay off.

That, unfortunately, explains the VC case to me. I'd much rather them be a smaller company that focuses on taking real money.

[anonylizard]

Why is selling ads unfortunate? The newspaper industry was ad-sustained for a century. Credible journalism only persists in a handful of newspapers, because only they can be subscription supported, the rest depended on ad-revenue that got dominated by google and meta, which meant gutting the journalism quality.

The problem with google ads, is google gets all the cut. If substack can produce an ad system, where the writer can take a bigger cut and exercise control (or choose not to), then it returns the ad-revenue to the writer, which'll make the space boom.

Youtube is half-ad revenue, and it clearly sustains a large ecosystem of thriving video creators. Why can't substack do the same.

The ads can take two forms.

1. Generic ads, which substack just providess silently, and takes a large cut.

2. Writer-sponsored ads. Essentially like youtube sponsorship segments. Except substack provides a nice interface to put the ads (That doesn't piss off the users), and a centralized payment/bidding platform to lower the transaction friction, and take a small cut out of it.

[1123581321]

Selling ads per se is fine, but in Substack's case it would detract from their focus on helping writers be good enough to sell subscriptions. I think that is special. Helping writers be good enough to draw the attention of free users has affected the writing the users produce at other platforms/publications.

I actually believe Substack is sincere when they said this week that the free following product is in service of driving subscriptions, when if/when revenue from free users is introduced, that's going to change no matter how hard they try to protect the original mission.