How Substack Stacks Up
In five short years Substack has morphed from a platform for little-known writers to a big media player luring marquee names from newspapers and magazines. With many Substackers now earning big bucks from the newsletter platform, could the humble newsletter present new opportunities for PR professionals. Christian Koch investigates.
The freeloading freelance hack is a trope nearly all PR professionals will be familiar with. They’re the canapé-thieves at your launch party, poised by the kitchen door ready to plunder the tray of satay skewers for their evening meals; the journalists rarely seen in clothes other than that promo T-shirt you sent them a few years back.
Journalism isn’t a well-paid profession, true. But if some of these skint scribes have been a little quiet lately, check whether they’ve got an email newsletter on Substack, the $650m/£478m-valued San Francisco-based newsletter platform that has amassed over one million paid subscribers since launching in 2017.
Instead of scrabbling for word rates that haven’t changed since 1997, these writers could now be delivering posts directly to readers’ inboxes, charging them £5-a-month to do so. They might be a long way off from earning the $1m/£740,000 figures reportedly pocketed by US political commentators Matt Taibbi and Matt Yglesias on the platform, but with only Substack’s 10% cut and a small credit card fee to deal with, the low overhead costs of running an email newsletter are clearly luring many journalists across from traditional media.
