Substack's Secret
"Substack's One Weird Marketing Trick was leveraging the economic interests of traditional media employees against their publishers to get positive "earned media"."
I enjoyed this dig into Substack's economics in light of it attempting to raise another round:
"If I were an investor, the first thing I'd ask about is Substack's "enterprise" offering. If an individual publisher is (supposedly) responsible for more than 1% of Substack's nominal revenue, it becomes really important what deal that publisher is actually on. And there are many ways to rebate to a publisher, for a platform that is willing to do so."
Right now the company is telling its potential investors that it's generating $450 in annual recurring revenue for its publisher network, which nets out at $45 million for the company itself because of its default 10% take. But that take is likely to be wildly different for the big names that bring in other publishers. I would be very interesting to learn what the real numbers are.
Of course, it is obligatory for me to mention that Substack has a Nazi problem.
[Link]
