Conversation

Damn. So many newsletter. How will it all end? A typical New Yorker/Economist grade magazine bundling a variety of writers costs $100-$200/year. Typical substack is $50-$150 for a single writer. With the same budget you’re replacing a magazine with 1-3 individual writers.
10
86
Replying to
Macro view, what’s happening is simply that readers are doing all the work of bundling and curation as shadow labor and writers are getting a bigger share of pie of actual $ changing hands. I think overall pie is shrinking by about 50% at least.
3
29
If there are 1000 writers with 1000 subscribers each making 45k, market is worth 50 million (assuming 10% for substack type platforms). If there is zero overlap, that’s a million unique readers. A magazine of that would probably be 100m, maybe 20m from readers 80m from ads?
1
11
Basically ads are getting cut out of the equation for now, and that’s the big change in unit economics. Writers make more, readers pay more, but overall pie shrinks. Ads will come back in somewhere somehow.
2
32