[sebastiennight]

Hi Simon, I'm not sure I get it completely.

If I get it, you're basically using Substack as an email platform. So the blog (the "original") can use Wordpress, Ghost, whatever ; and this is the canonical place that all articles go to. But then you duplicate the content onto Substack so it gets pushed out as emails.

My understanding of what it means:

- the blog doesn't have its own subscription system ; you link out to Substack for that. So you must be massively losing out on blog-driven subscriptions because of the much higher friction (vs having the pop-ups directly on the blog)?

- all of your content is duplicated between the real blog and the Substack copy. How do you avoid Substack cannibalizing all of your blog's traffic, given that they are a bigger domain possibly better optimized for SEO?

[simonw]

I don't like subscription popups - see recent John Gruber rants on the subject: https://daringfireball.net/2026/05/what_is_a_dickover

I'm willing to take the hit to subscriber numbers for not having that kind of thing on my own site.

From an SEO perspective, I think I might be beating Substack comfortably.

My blog has a different page for each item, plus it ties them together with tags.

The Substack email is a full week of content in one go. I don't think that's particularly SEO-optimal.

Again though, I'm willing to take the risk. So far I've not seen any obvious downsides to this model, and I've been dual publishing in this way for a few years now.