Why We’re Freaking Out About Substack (Published 2021)
A company that makes it easy to charge for newsletters has captivated an anxious industry because it embodies larger forces and contradictions.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/11/business/media/substack-newsletter-competition.html
So the biggest threat to Substack is unlikely to be the Twitter-centric political battles among some of its writers. The real threat is competing platforms with a different model. The most technically powerful of those is probably Ghost, which allows writers to send and charge for newsletters, with monthly fees starting at $9. While Substack is backed by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Ghost has Wikipedia vibes: It is open-source software developed by a nonprofit.