For a number of years, a lot of people have said that “newsletters are the new blogs” — and to a certain extent that’s true. During TinyLetter’s heyday, it was often easier for someone to create a newsletter and send it to people that wanted to read it than it is to setup a website and deal with what the entails (which sadly, in 2019 is more complicated than it was in 2006).
But setting up a newsletter isn’t without its own costs and considerations. What platform do you use, how much does it cost to send emails (something that’s hard to ascertain if you don’t know how many subscribers you have), checking formatting for various mail clients and services, avoiding being marked as a spammer, etc. And that’s before you get into the aspect of creating the newsletter — which again, TinyLetter aside, is often difficult because most newsletter services are geared towards marketing/customer acquisition, rather than something akin to a blog.
And if you want to charge for your newsletter, that’s another challenge. You have to figure out a payment processor, a membership signup system, deal with account issues, etc.
For the Ben Thompsons’s of the world who were early/pioneered the game of paid subscription newsletters, the investment costs of infrastructure and technology is probably worth it. But for many others, it’s not.
So Substack has the potential to be that defacto place/platform. I see it as trying to be the Blogger or WordPress.com for content-based newsletters, subscription or not.
I’ve almost started a newsletter about 18 times and I even signed up with Substack a few years ago (but haven’t set it up yet because I had a few concerns about how to migrate away from Substack), because of all the options — it’s the one that seems to have the least-amount of friction.
Now, in a perfect world, there would be an open-source way to do all of this with the option for both hosted and self-hosted options. Owen Williams’ newsletter/website Char.gd [1] has a great setup (he showed it to me at XOXO last year) and I know Ernie Smith from Tedium [2] has a really cool custom setup as well. I’ve been wanting to convince either or both of them to go in on a platform for this concept with me, because although I think Substack is definitely the easier way to do things for lots of users — there’s also a market (albeit smaller) for people who might want to have more control over the platform/ecosystem, but don’t want to have to cobble the whole thing together.
[1]: https://char.gd/
[2]: https://tedium.co/