Pressure on Substack ⇥ newsletter.anamariecox.com
Rebecca Falconer, Axios:
Veteran journalist Terry Moran, who abruptly left ABC News after calling President Trump and top aide Stephen Miller “world-class” haters, announced Wednesday that he’s moving to the newsletter platform Substack.
Jessica Testa, New York Times:
In January, the start-up best known for email newsletters gave all users the ability to publish live video. Now it is home to a handful of cable stars marooned from their mainstream media jobs amid reshuffled lineups, salary cuts and other controversies. On Substack, where politics is the most popular and lucrative category, anti-Trump publishers have been performing particularly well.
Nina Jankowicz, the American Sunlight Project:
Substack has gone even further, arguing that they’re not a social media platform, just a newsletter service, so they don’t need to do content moderation in the traditional sense. This may have been true in Substack’s early days when it was truly just a tech stack that sent emails out, but couldn’t be farther from the truth today. Algorithmic recommendations abound. Substack’s “Notes,” was, for about a millisecond, seen as an heir of Twitter. Writers can interact with specific communities they build in “Chats,” similar to Facebook Groups. It’s a social network.
Right now, Substack is independent of the political pressures that might have pushed ABC to let Terry Moran go. But it’s utterly dependent on the whims of its investors. Every round of capital deepens the expectation of a big payoff. Substack doesn’t need to be sustainable to survive. It just needs to be buyable.
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The problem isn’t just that Substack makes money off Nazis, it’s that they don’t seem to care who they make it from.
Substack has certainly faced pressure from different groups about — among other things — the extent of its moderation practices, but that is largely because it has made its presence prominent. It is not just another web host or utilitarian provider of paid bulk emails. It is a name brand — an increasingly complex platform. That makes it attractive to venture capitalists who have dumped nearly $100 million into building it up.
It would be odd if the economics of Substack — a collection of writers and publications with paying subscribers — are somehow better than those of, say, a magazine publisher today — also a collection of writers and publications with paying subscribers. It does have a tech sheen and the vibe of social networking, though, and there are no printing costs.
Yet it is still another platform hosted elsewhere. It simplifies the process for writers, podcasters, video creators, and others to publish their work for money. But their stuff is still made available at the mercy of software they do not control — and I bet there will be a time when Substack decides to make a controversial platform-wide change some publishers will want to back away from. The pressure is already there.