Somebody on Substack made the point that 2025 was the year that the whole world showed up on Substack, which probably diverges from truth only incrementally. There are so many good writers on Substack, but there's no way anyone can read all of them let alone pay for all of the ones one likes. One wishes they could be aggregated and curated into something like.... a magazine.
Given the times we live in, it's not too far-fetched to think that Substack might create an AI that customizes each of our feeds into things we might like, based on... an algorithm derived from our reading habits. Gollie, if only that were technologically possible. But of course it would need a pricing mechanism to figure out how to optimize and balance engagement vs. revenue production which might look something like... Google Adwords or the dynamic pricing models that change the prices of airline seats based on demand at a given moment. Really all Substack needs to do is throw all this together and let writers opt into it as opposed to demanding $75 from each reader annually.
I already subscribe to NYT, WaPo, WSJ, The Economist, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, the News & Observer, and Triangle Business Daily. Our household print media spend already is probably in the $2,000-$3,000 range and I can hardly scratch the surface of what I already subscribe to. How am I gonna pay $75 to one writer, however clever?
2 comments:
Happy New Year! Now you just need a Financial Times (physical) subscription!
Agree 100% re Substack pricing. My guess is that it's working out well for the most popular authors, but a price around $100-200 a year that allowed you to pick 3-5 substacks would really have been wonderful, have intuitively mapped to a good magazine or journal, and have spread the wealth a little
The main precursor to Substack I can think of is I.F. Stone's Weekly. . . which he authored when he wasn't explaining why the Athenians were, by their lights, maybe right to kill Socrates. . .
Again Happy New Year!
They can fix that shit. Eventually the model will drift back in the direction of aggregation, just as the streamers have embraced advertising.
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