Substack is an online platform that provides publishing, payment, analytics, and design infrastructure to support subscription newsletters.
Content
Many different types of users produce content on the platform, ranging from journalists to experts to large media sites. Major newsletters on the service included The Skimm, started by two former NBC producers and having millions of readers. Corporate newsletters started by large media companies include those by Axios, Vox, BuzzFeed, and CNN. New York Times columnist Mike Isaac argues that some of these companies see newsletters as a more stable means to maintain readers through a more direct connection with writers. The New Republic noted that, as of 2020, Substack lacked a presence of local news newsletters.
Finance
Substack usually takes a 10 percent fee out of subscription payments. In February 2019, the platform began allowing creators to monetize podcasts. Substack reported that 11,000 newsletters paid for the service as of 2018, rising to 50,000 in 2019. Substack has provided some content creators with advances to start working on their platform. In 2019, the site provided a fellowship to some writers which included a $3000 stipend and a one-day workshop in San Francisco. In 2020, following the onset of the Coronavirus pandemic, Substack extended grants of $1000–3000 to over 40 writers to begin working on the platform. The decline of sports-oriented publications such as Sports Illustrated, Deadspin, and SB Nation, coupled with the onset of coronavirus, led to a surge in sports journalists moving write on Substack in 2019 and 2020. However, Substack competes with subscription site The Athletic in this submarket, so McKenzie says the company does not recruit as heavily in that market. The Substack founders reached out to a small pool of writers in 2017 to acquire their first creators. Bill Bishop was among the first to put his newsletter, Sinocism, on Substack, providing his newsletter for $11 a month or $118 a year with daily content. As of 2019, Bishop's Sinocism was the top paid newsletter on the service.
Leadership
Substack was founded in 2017 by Chris Best, the co-founder of Kik Messenger, Jairaj Sethi, a developer, and Hamish McKenzie, a former PandoDaily tech reporter. Best and McKenzie describe Ben Thompson's Stratechery, a subscription-based tech and media newsletter, as a major inspiration for their platform. Christopher Best operated as chief executive as of March 2019.
Privacy Incident
On July 28th, 2020, Substack had a security and privacy incident when it sent out email notifications to all its users about changing privacy policies and notification about CCPA compliance. However, in this notification email, email addresses of all recipients were inadvertently included in the email 'cc' field rather than in the 'bcc' field. Per an acknowledgement post on the social media siteTwitter, the company indicated that the issue was remediated post the initial batch of emails, but, did not disclose the number of users impacted.
