One of the positive aspects of using a publishing platform is that the author has ownership of their content. It also has 1,000,000 subscribers as of November 2021, each paying subscription fees to access content from their preferred authors. The email build aspect of the platform is a familiar process to many. The best way to describe Substack is MailChimp x Patroen. As well as words, you can add images, sounds, link out to social media posts and more.įor as little as $5 per month, a user can subscribe to written work and podcasts from the likes of rockstar Jeff Tweedy esteemed food writer, Emily Nunn former NSA agent turned scandal-soaked whistleblower, Edward Snowden, DC comic writer Scott Snyder, literary legend Salman Rushdie, and even the most notorious man in British politics… Dominic Cummings. There’s a paid option so content can monetised. It’s a publication platform that allows its users to publish newsletters direct to subscribers. But one of the big things about Substack is who exactly has signed up to use it.įirst things first, how does Substack work? It’s taking the world by storm, quietly and subtly, as users choose to disseminate information using their own personal newsletters. Best said Substack’s reliance on email - rather than social media or search engines - promoted a one-on-one relationship between writers and readers, something that should be prized at a time of online noise.Substack has dominated the mentions on social media platforms, especially Twitter, in recent months. “People don’t want to do this a la carte, paying for six subscriptions,” Ms.
She wondered aloud if some of Substack’s soloists would eventually join forces, to make it easier on subscribers. She has roughly 23,000 subscribers, more than 2,000 paid, she said. And instead of giving Substack a 10 percent cut, she accepted upfront money, along with an agreement to take 15 percent of subscription revenue, for one year. Petersen, who left BuzzFeed News this summer to focus on Culture Study at Substack, said she would have an editor for longer features. Its competitors include the open-source Ghost, TinyLetter and Lede, which combines WordPress, the design agency Alley and the payments service Pico.Īs it matures, Substack has started behaving more like a publisher, offering editing help, health insurance and access to Getty Images photographs to some writers. With financial backing from Andreessen Horowitz, Y Combinator and other investors, Substack is not the only platform of its kind. Newton said that, before he decided to make the leap, he checked in with sources at companies he covers - which include Facebook and Google - to make sure they would return his reporting calls after his departure from The Verge, an established institution. Without the backing of an institution and the audience that goes with it, Substackers may find it a challenge to get their reporting calls returned.
#Substack newsletters free#
(Note: Since March, I have published a free Substack for a movie-watching club.) “They make it so a child could do it, and that’s what I need,” she said. Samantha Irby, a humorist whose newsletter recaps the reality-TV court show “Judge Mathis,” had a newsletter on TinyLetter before moving to Substack, where she has over 1,000 paid subscribers. “People were creating these spaces for themselves to be goofy and a little protected from the turbulence of just throwing yourself at the entire internet.” “They seemed to be having fun in a way I hadn’t seen in a while,” she said. It reminds me of the wonderful old days of the blogosphere.”Įdith Zimmerman, a former editor of The Hairpin, whose Substack newsletter, Drawing Links, features slice-of-life comics, also noted the similarity between Substack writers and bloggers of yore. “Because your people are there, you have to be accountable, but it’s a very pure relationship.
“There’s something wonderful about writing just for readers,” he said. That is fine with Andrew Sullivan, who joined Substack in the summer after years at New York magazine, where his contrarian essays led to criticism from its liberal readers and a tense relationship with its editors.
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