Publisher of @thebrowser newsletter, recommending the best articles. Creator of Person Do Thing. Author of Thinking Statistically and The Business Of Big Data
Apr 8, 2021 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
people have asked me about Substack's business model. Obviously it's impossible to know, but my best current guess is:
1) they only make ~$4.2mil a year from their 10% cut of publisher revenues
2) they'll soon make the majority of their money from "Pro"
First: Substack self-reported "more than 500,000" paid subscriptions (not subscribers!) in February. Obviously "more than" could really mean "more than", but from experience Substack also counts comped subscriptions as "paid", so it might also be way less. I think =500k is fair
Mar 28, 2021 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
As a very happy publisher on Ghost, I talk to people every day these days who want to move their newsletter from another platform. So I figured I'd put together a thread of FAQs
(I have no affiliation with Ghost, just a happy customer + believer in independent publishing)
First, I want to say generally that Ghost's Ghost(Pro) product is just implausibly good, and takes care of everything you need out the box -- email-sending (included in the price), payments (via your own Stripe account, they take 0% fees), website, everything
