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What business relationship, if any, exists between Mr. Taibbi and Substack?

Matt is a publisher on the Substack platform. We take a 10% cut of his subscription revenue.

Because he is an established author, and we're really excited about this new format of serialized fiction, we have also been putting extra product development and publicity effort behind his publication. We think of this as Doing a Thing that Doesn't scale, as in http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

Thanks for answering! Does Substack compensate him in any other way besides tailoring features to his work?

On Substack, readers pay writers directly. The writers are independent. We take a cut of the subscription revenue, which is the same in this case as for others.

We think this aligns our interest with the writers interest, the same way that the subscription model aligns the writer with the reader.

Ok, so he's not a partner or advisor or anything like that? I guess I'm just curious about the level of the endorsement you're getting here. Thanks again for answering these questions!

Nope, just an awesome writer using our tools.

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