Will Substack Go Beyond Newsletters? A Company Weighs Its Future.

Emily Oster, an author and economics professor at Brown University who has offered divisive advice on handling the pandemic with children, joined Substack in 2020 after Mr. McKenzie recruited her. Her newsletter, ParentData, has more than 100,000 subscribers, including more than 1,000 paying readers.

“Substack has become certainly a bigger part of the media landscape than I had ever thought it would be,” she said.

But Dr. Oster’s primary sources of income remain her teaching and her books; much of her newsletter revenue goes toward editing and support services. Most users have struggled to support themselves by writing exclusively on the platform and instead use their earnings to supplement other paychecks.

Elizabeth Spiers, a Democratic digital strategist and journalist, said she gave up her Substack last year because she did not have enough time or paying readers to justify her long weekly essays.

“Also, I started getting more paid assignments elsewhere, and it didn’t make a lot of sense to keep putting stuff on Substack,” she said.

But Substack’s biggest conflict has been over content moderation.

Mr. McKenzie, a former journalist, describes Substack as an antidote to the attention economy, a “nicer place” where writers are “rewarded for different things, not throwing tomatoes at their opponents.”

Critics say the platform recruits (and therefore endorses) culture war provocateurs and is a hotbed for hate speech and misinformation. Last year, many writers abandoned Substack over its inaction on transphobic content. This year, The Center for Countering Digital Hate said anti-vaccine newsletters on Substack generate at least $2.5 million in annual revenue. The technology writer Charlie Warzel, who left a job at The New York Times to write a Substack newsletter, described the platform as a place for “internecine internet beefs.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/13/business/media/substack-growth-newsletters.html