Covfefe!
Greenwald, Taibbi, and Yglesias are all making a million bucks a year or close to it. None of it subsidized by substack. Actually yglesias and taibbi took an advance from substack for like 200k or something and it’s costing them lots of money because then substack gets like 60% of what they make for the first year instead of like 5-10%.
I would bet that the pool of people who want to pay for a substack is pretty small, and that those people aren’t going to be paying for 20 substacks. So this feels like one of those first mover things to me that work for a few writers when substack is new. Not a pathway to riches for 1000s of independent pundits.
But I’ve been spectacularly wrong before. I thought texting would never take hold in the US.
Iglesias is making money from these spicy takes somehow, right? Surely he’s not doing this trolling shtick purely for attention.
I think you’re right but I think the big substack guys are going to start doing substack bundles where you pay ten bucks and get taibbi, greenwald, then five or ten smaller names. Stuff like that.
Five or ten smaller names who are actually paying substack for every subscription and suck ass.
Like the Crackle button next to the Netflix and Pandora buttons on my Roku remote.
Also I’ve been waiting over 20 years for a NY Times/Wapo/LA Times/Boston Globe/whatever bundle. Also WSJ/Economist/etc. And you could do one for sports. For some reason no one ever wanted to do that. I assume because they all want your precious precious data so they can market you with banner ads and emails. The pipe dream that never dies.
No, five or ten guys who greenwald and taibbi hire and pay to write on their substack masthead. Basically starting a substack newsmagazine.
Right I know you hate those guys but lots of people don’t.
It is truly sickening that Glenn fucking Greenwald is getting rich off of this shit.
greenwald cost himself a lot of money by going to substack. he misread the market pretty badly. not feeling sorry for him or gloating, but his “change of tone” or whatever isn’t really working, so it doesn’t bother me.
When a white male is successful/wealthy we should all feel indebted to him for gracing us with his brilliance.
Simone Biles is black and therefore whatever success or wealth she has only increases the debt she owes America for what we’ve done for her.
See also: people who don’t pay federal income tax shouldn’t have a say in policy alongside black NFL players are rich and therefore shouldn’t be a voice against injustice.
where are you reading this
idk, “tens of thousands of subscribers” isn’t very informative, don’t most of those have both paid and free? it would be very on-brand to conflate those in a vague stat like that.
I can’t figure out why major newspapers haven’t switched to a business model where you can pay like a buck for access to a specific article rather than forcing everyone to sign up for a subscription if you see one article you are curious about. I don’t care how interesting the article potentially nor how cheap the subscription is, I don’t want to get flooded with more emails I don’t give a shit about nor have to put up with some kind of bullshit annoying process to cancel my subscription. But I sure as hell would pay 1.50 to read an article if it was just that transaction only.
But muh BIG DATA!
At least one German newspaper/magazine has tried that approach but they stopped doing it. My guess is because it failed.
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That’s at least an order of magnitude off imo - a couple of cents and maybe 10c for a long read.
(Web still needs some form of micropayment system somewhere)
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You would think a model where they put up a bunch of headlines and then figure out which ones people will pay to read would supply lots of useful information. Or not useful information (oh look if you put Jason Momoa in the article 90% of women and 10% of men like it, huh).