Here’s the part where I should mention that I too have been using Substack, albeit more casually than the aforementioned folks, some of whom rely on Substack for their livelihood. You just need people to know where to find you.” So much news these days is mediated by social and Google SEO, but you don’t even need a home page anymore. “Substack is quite easy to use, and I like the idea of cross-posting and reading other people’s Substacks and them reading mine. “I was reading a lot of Substacks and I kind of felt like, you know, it’s a critical mass of thinkers in the same place,” she said on the phone, speaking from the French Riviera, where she was lingering after last week’s Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. Jean Carroll, which debuted to a splashy New York Times story. (This past weekend included a peak inside the Wagner military group that stoked rebellion in Russia.) And let’s not forget the new collaborative romance novel being serialized by Jen Taub, Mary Trump, and E. Curbed cofounder Lockhart Steele is back with Found NY, filled with “recommendations and intel for people who earn and spend well in and around New York City.” After being laid off from NPR in March, breakout Ukraine correspondent Tim Mak returned to the front lines with The Counteroffensive, the first Substack dedicated exclusively to war correspondence.
In addition to Substack’s existing bench of heavy hitters-the Matt Taibbis and Heather Cox Richardsons and Bari Weisses of the world-there’s been a flurry of notable additions in the past two months alone: Margaret Sullivan (whom Substack recruited to do a podcast as part of its push into audio), Jake Tapper, Elif Batuman, Richard Dawkins, Kevin Kruse, Alisha Ramos, and Hamilton Nolan, to name a few. Is it just me or, despite the repeated threats to its prominence in the media ecosystem, does Substack seem more popular than ever? Anecdotally, at least, the long list of standout writers, journalists, and public intellectuals shacking up with the platform only appears to be growing. (Those issues were only partially resolved, and Substack believes Twitter is still trying to screw with its accessibility by imposing a four-and-a-half-second delay on links to Substack posts.) More recently, after Substack introduced its Twitter-esque Notes feature in April, Elon Musk dropped a bomb on his Silicon Valley counterparts by preventing Substack writers from embedding tweets in their newsletters and stifling the circulation of Substack newsletter links on Twitter. Meanwhile, mainstream publications like the Times and The Atlantic have taken aim with their own subscription-oriented newsletter offerings, hoping to bite off a piece of the Substack pie.
(A revelation in The New York Times that Substack’s 2021 revenue was a mere $9 million, per sources who spoke to the paper, didn’t exactly instill bullishness about the company’s prospects.) There was last year’s not-insignificant company retrenchment- layoffs, the suspensions of marketing spend and writer advances, the decision not to seek an additional $75 million to $100 million in venture capital-as Substack reckoned with various market pressures coming to bear. There was the brand-damaging, culture-wars-and-free-speech-fueled outrage over Substack’s platforming of both anti-vaxxers and enemies of the trans community, the latter of which contributed to at least a small exodus of users.
#Substack company series#
Over the past couple of years, Substack has contended with a series of setbacks, antagonists, and straight-up flaming arrows fired in the direction of the six-year-old self-publishing service’s San Francisco headquarters.
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